We’ve been working at this school for fifteen years. We love the smell of the hallways in the early morning, when we open the doors to our orderly classrooms with no one around and the clean blackboard, the gleaming floor, all those faithful, persevering things quietly waiting, all that tranquil constancy rushing forward to meet us, in a way tenderly reminding us who we are.
We’ve been working here for fifteen years, first as colleagues, then married, by which I mean that Ange is my husband and I, Nadia, am his wife.
We teach in neighboring classrooms, and we very naturally came together, not rushing into it but never pretending to forestall what would have happened anyway. We love our school with a passion that only a handful of our fellow teachers can understand. Is there perhaps a little too much pride in that passion, I ask myself, beneath its veneer of devotion? Isn’t that a thing to be chastened, stifled, and then shrunk down to a more ordinary fondness for our jobs?
This, I tell myself, not quite convinced, this might be what’s causing the violent aversion Ange and I inspire in our students, in their parents, in the principal, in our neighbors. We weren’t sufficiently humble. Our own good intentions had blinded us.
But is that really so terrible?