I walked home on wings. My teacher said that I could help him; that I had something to give to Americans. “But how could I teach him?” I wondered; “I who had never had a chance to learn anything except what he taught me. And what had I to give to the Americans, I who am nothing but dreams and longings and hunger for love?”
When school closed down for vacation, it seemed to me all life stopped in the world. I had no more class to look forward to, no more chance of seeing my teacher. As I faced the emptiness of my long vacation, all the light went out of my eyes, and all the strength out of my arms and fingers.
For nearly a week I was like without air. There was no school. One night I came home from the shop and threw myself down on the bed. I wanted to cry, to let out the heavy weight that pressed on my heart, but I couldn’t cry. My tears felt like hot, burning sand in my eyes.
“Oi-i-i! I can’t stand it no more, this emptiness,” I groaned. “Why don’t I kill myself? Why don’t something happen to me? No consumption, no fever, no plague or death ever comes to save me from this terrible world. I have to go on suffering and choking inside myself till I grow mad.”
I jumped up from the bed, threw open the window, and began fighting with the deaf-and-dumb air in the air-shaft.
“What is the matter with you?” I cried. “You are going out of your head. You are sinking back into the old ways from which you dragged yourself out with your studies. Studies! What did I get from all my studies? Nothing. Nothing. I am still in the same shop with the same shirt-waists. A lot my teacher cares for me once the class is over.”
A fire burned up in me that he was already forgetting me. And I shot out a letter to him:
“You call yourself a teacher? A friend? How can you go off in the country and drop me out of your heart and out of your head like a read-over book you left on the shelf of your shut-down classroom? How can you enjoy your vacation in the country while I’m in the sweatshop? You learned me nothing. You only broke my heart. What good are all the books you ever gave me? They don’t tell me how to be happy in a factory. They don’t tell me how to keep alive in emptiness, or how to find something beautiful in the dirt and ugliness in which I got to waste away. I want life. I want people. I can’t live inside my head as you do.”
I sent the letter off in the madness in which I wrote it, without stopping to think; but the minute after I dropped it in the mail-box my reason came again to my head. I went back tearing my hair. “What have I done? Meshugeneh!”
Walking up the stairs I saw my door open. I went in. The sky is falling to the earth! Am I dreaming? There was my teacher sitting on my trunk! My teacher come to see me? Me, in my dingy room? For a minute it got blind before my eyes, and I didn’t know where I was any more.