2 Corinthians 3:3
/Tamas Dobozy
Our instructors were Maltese nuns. This was the 1970s, when corporal punishment was
still considered an instructional aid. A yank on the ear, a ruler to the hand, a slap across
the face—all part of the pedagogical toolbox. Not that anyone used the word pedagogy
back then. We were lucky if the nun in question had graduated from high school.
If you were really bad, your ass was paddled by the hockey stick the principal,
Sister Petronilla, kept behind her desk in the main office. She had a powerful slap shot.
Afterwards, while we cried, she assured us this type of teaching not only enhanced our
schooling, but also our chances of getting into heaven, because when we were afraid we
were good and only the good came into the presence of the Lord. (It was the same
reasoning, I would learn, behind the stake and the fire: being burnt alive inspires
repentance.)
We were allowed to use pencils and pencils only, not being schooled enough for
the permanence of ink. So we wrote and erased endlessly, like the passing days, trying to
copy the Zaner-Bloser letters on the green tablets set in a protective circle around the
classroom—not to keep the dangers out, but to keep them in—until the day came when
we'd been made safe enough to let loose on humanity.
Sister Tahima held there was a sacredness to proper cursive. It dwelt less in the
words—even if the words happened to be "saint" or "blessed" or "epiphany"—than in
their shapes, the way they unspooled across the page, in the loops and spurs and squiggles
that tried to ascend to the perfection of the Zaner-Bloser overhead.
Needless to say, cursive was a skill, like catching or kicking or striking a ball, I
was not good at. My handwriting didn't even have the elegance of illegibility, the abstract
expressionism of a doctor's signature, say, decipherable only to pharmacists, or the
efficient jerk of a movie star's autograph, finding the quickest route across a publicity
still. None of my letters went down in the same style. It was as if someone had reached
into a box full of rejected bits of font, and that's what I was given to write with.
For weeks, Sister Tahima examined my handwriting as if she sensed in it a
budding vocation for poison pen letters, done by hand rather than collage, a future career
in bombs and kidnappings and hostages, followed by written demands.
She warned me to make it right. Warned me weekly. Then daily. Then hourly.
Until one afternoon, fed up, she brought the full weight of her pedagogy to bear. Write an
upper-case H, she commanded. Slap. Write a lower-case R. Slap. Write an F, any F. Slap.
Each slap slammed another tear into my eyes. It took all my skill to keep them balanced
there. But we were practised in that, keeping it in, the small secret victory, in a place
where nuns bit your ears, or smacked you for reasons that went unexplained, or made you
watch as they washed a boy's mouth out with soap—that unforgettable animal panic in
his eyes—as they held the back of his neck and ground the bar in, macerating it against
his teeth, the child spraying foam as he sobbed.
Sister Tahima slapped me again, hoping this time it would work, since repetition
is, as we know, the key to learning. My letters drifted in the acid of tears, dissolved into
wisps, corroded to traces, despite my effort to nail them to the page with the point of the
pencil. Slap after slap until finally the tears spilled over and with nothing else for it I
began slashing the pencil back and forth across the page, tearing the point through the
sheets until I felt it crack against the desk.
The shock of my outburst made sister Tahima stand back, her hand to her cheek,
appalled at my violence. She'd never seen anything quite like it—the destruction, the
fury, the undoing of her teaching philosophy. It was as if she was finally seeing what I
saw: the way the Zaner-Bloser sealed off the glory of variations that made it irrelevant.
But Sister Tahima didn't stare at me for long. She jerked her head away, though I
wasn't sure what was harder for her to look at: the devil in her version of rigor, or the God
in my endless varieties of error. The God always in excess of our instruction.
Author’s Note: I’ve long been reflecting on the ills and evils of the institutions of Catholicism that defined so much of my childhood and early life, and the nuns and lay teachers smacking us around and washing mouths out with soap was definitely part of that. It’s amazing to me to think that there was anything of goodness, much less Christ as they liked to talk about him, in the methods they used, which then got me thinking about what another sort of God—one who’s actually worth worshipping—might have been, as a presence, in the midst of all that “education.” That’s basically the genesis of the story, though this kind of makes it all seem so consciously willed, when really I just started writing an anecdote and then realized where it had come from and where it was going on the cusp of the ending. I should also add that it’s very retrospective. Religion, much less worship, has played no role in my life for decades now, except as a queasy traumatic nostalgia, or as it’s allied itself to a toxic politics.
Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He has published four books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, Siege 13: Stories (which won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Governor General's Award: Fiction, and the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), and most recently, Ghost Geographies: Fictions. He has published over seventy short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, and won an O Henry Prize in 2011, and the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards in 2014.
