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SARAH 1998

On a sunny day in April, during French class, there’s a knock at the door. The girls look up from their old, thoroughly gouged wooden desks and dimly make out a female form through the milky glass.

Almost immediately there’s another knock at the door, this time more emphatic. Without waiting for an answer the door is opened onto the din of class 6B. All heads swivel automatically to the doorway at the front of the classroom. Antonia trips in. She’s a lanky, friendly, but rule-conscious lady from the secretarial office with reading glasses hanging from a gold chain on her bosom. According to stories, she’s been working here longer than anyone else, even longer than the headmaster. She peers into the classroom but doesn’t immediately see the pupil she’s looking for.

‘I’m interrupting you,’ she says to the teacher.

‘Say it in French or she won’t listen!’ someone shouts.

‘ … Sarah Vandersanden is to come with me.’

Sarah looks around at the rest of the class from which she is now being called forward. She stands up, only too happy that Antonia hasn’t come in with her mother in her wake carrying a lunchbox, as she did two years ago. Sarah got so angry back then that her mother more or less admitted for the first time that what she had done was excessive, although it was important that Sarah eat a healthy meal.

‘There’s a phone call for you.’ Sarah walks through the silent corridors at Antonia’s side. Who knows, maybe there’s some incredible news for The Lady Di’s. The bell in the distant tower strikes three as Sarah walks into the staff office behind Antonia. A pupil is not allowed to enter this room unaccompanied. Antonia’s desk is full of freshly made photocopies that she is collating in stacks and fastening with staples. Probably more guidelines for caring for the plants in the corridors or a repetition of the ban on playing volleyball in the school building. Antonia from the secretarial office is unceasing in her attempts to focus the pupils’ attention on trifles; that’s her job. Who in God’s name would want to speak with Sarah so urgently? MH, Suri, and Emily are all sitting at their desks. It can’t be her mother, because she would just come straight to the school. It must be some producer.

Lying on top of a stack of papers is the telephone receiver, an ivory-coloured thing that hundreds of people have spoken into.

Antonia says she can take the call. She turns away from Sarah ostentatiously, as if doing so puts her outside the room and certainly renders her incapable of listening in. Sarah can’t imagine why she was chosen to hear the news, but it’s a huge compliment in any case. She’ll limit the conversation to one-syllable answers to keep Antonia in the dark.

‘Hello?’ Her own voice sounds thin and jittery.

‘Sarah!’ She hears a voice that she doesn’t recognize right away because her guesses are so far off. She hasn’t even allowed for the possibility that it might be him, her father. One second later she’s disappointed because her daydream of a record contract and a flight to London—Now! Today!—has collapsed.

‘Sarah, is it you?’ her father asks.

She’s shocked to hear how loud her heart is pounding. Her father doesn’t call out of the blue for laughs, or to tell her a bit of news from Sri Lanka. Her father, like everyone who’s bad at small talk, is a disaster on the phone. Sarah can’t remember ever having had a real phone conversation with him. Once on a class trip she had spent two insuperably long minutes on the line with him because her mother had gone grocery shopping. They never got any further than how are you, fine, and how about you.

‘What is it, Papa?’

‘It’s important to me, I don’t say it enough: I’m proud of you.’

‘Papa, I’m at school, you know.’

This declaration of love from her father is so unusual that she’s forced to look somewhere else for a cause: in alcohol, for instance. She’s never seen her father under the influence before. Her mother always puts a stop to it. After two glasses of wine the cork goes back in the bottle. She supposes he’s been staring into his glass too long in Sri Lanka and is calling her for fun, not fully aware of the five-hour time difference.

‘I just wanted … Never mind. I’m sorry I disturbed you, honey.’

Sarah listens closely, since maybe there are background noises that might indicate where he is and why he’s calling her at school for the first time in her life. And who takes the phone number of his kid’s school on a business trip anyway?

‘Is that why you’re calling me?’ she asks. Behind her, Antonia from the secretarial office pricks up her ears.

She doesn’t understand what he wants. Her father is a mystery. There’s nobody on the face of the planet she understands less than him. She can easily come up with five qualities that characterize this Antonia of the secretarial office, but she knows next to nothing about her own father.

‘Looking forward to seeing you,’ he says. She imagines him standing in the corridor of a big hotel, in a phone booth near a conference hall. There was so much servility and confusion in his voice that it makes Sarah uneasy. What prompted him to think she could cheer him up on a boring business trip? Her father has already hung up. Sarah does the same.

‘I hope it was something important,’ says Antonia of the secretarial office. ‘Ask your father not to make a habit of it. You can go back to your class now.’ As if she were speaking to a kindergartener. The woman returns to her desk and begins stapling at high speed to make up for the delay. The phone call has kept her from her work.

Sarah goes to the playground and takes the longest possible detour to get to her class. Distant teachers’ voices can be heard from the classrooms. Out on the athletic fields a workman is climbing a ladder in order to fiddle with a loosely hanging basketball hoop.