Now I was sitting in the classroom, suddenly at peace, as though I had arrived from a long journey. At peace with my peace, even as the lady who was supposed to be taking the lesson seemed to be at peace in a different way, moving about in the woods beyond the window. She moved between the sunbeams deliberately, as if she were pretending to avoid them, but they discovered her all the same, where her skin was pale and grey, the way I imagined the underside of a pig would look. I opened the window and asked if she was coming in. She turned to me and shook her head.

"Not today," she said.

"Why not today?"

"Not today," she repeated.

"Can I come and be with you in that place?" I asked on impulse.

But it was more like a web - the place she was in. Now I could see it clearly - the way her wanderings had become confined to the thinnest part of the woods, so that she could find out a pool of light with every step. About her feet the shadow and the light played together, intertwined and inseperable. It was not clear that the one dissipated the other, nor that the one constrained the path of the other. They meant nothing, and they passed no comment; they knew nothing; they connototed nothing; they judged no one; and, wherever they found themselves together, they had a kind of aimless vitality, as something completely different from life, but something lively, all the same. Above them, I realised that the forest as a whole was constantly petering out in every direction, as if it had only been conceived as an afterthought in the first place, and hadn't had time to sew its seams together properly. For the schoolmistress, though, I knew that the forest went on forever, and that even while I had been watching her from behind the dusty windows of the classroom, both I and the classroom had in fact been forest to her, and the space we occupied there always would be. She held my hand absent-mindedly, vaguely remembering that in our normative roles I was subject to her, but her mind was on something else, and I watched as the sun began to set, unsure whether the dimming and lengthening of the variegated paths we trod would end in deliverance or defeat. Not knowing where the lesson was to take place, I had no option but to follow in silence; and so, presently, we came to a small house on the outskirts of the forest.

Opening the door, she bade me bow my head - whether out of reverence or to avoid the low jamb, I wasn’t sure. It was musty and dark inside, but already she was busy with something; I heard a string being pulled, and suddenly there were three sunlit windows in the wall, and, blinking in the light, four wizened men and women sitting on what appeared the only things to hand. The one on the Persian rug was shuffling his feet and constantly flashed a toothy smile, while, across the room, a woman was jabbing with a pen, as if trying to stab a fly. A fishing rod had detached itself from the wall and now lay beside a man in a deck chair, while on the hearth rug, curled up like a cat, two sad yellow eyes had fallen into a face and gently bobbed above and below its surface. But despite the fact each vied to distract my attention in a different way, there was something oddly similar about the various faces congregated here, even if I could not quite put my finger on the resemblance. Then I looked again at the schoolmistress, who, with a certain delicacy, was re-rigging some strings which had fallen from a beam, and suddenly I realised that all of them must have been family members from one generation or another. Now she was fussing with each of them in turn, muttering something about "potential", and straightening the tartan blanket on the one in the deck chair, placing fresh paper beneath the one pursuing the fly, pouring a glass of wine for the one whose feet had become disturbed. For the woman on the hearthrug though she reserved a strange expression of compassionate horror, then looked down, as if ashamed at herself. And I realised that one was angling, one waltzing a girl, one finishing her magnum opus to critical applause, one swallowing little white pills, one after another, with an anguish which bent the fender bars in the hearth. And I saw, as she danced the puppet strings, an involuntary flicker of loneliness in my schoolmistress's eyes, and realised that beyond all the reading and misreading with which she presented me, there remained one tight-clasped book which had never been read, although its pages span out like a star, and its covers closed backward about its spine each time she turned, in a kind of pirouette, followed first by her dress, and then by the light on her dress, and then by the dozen curious eyes - for there was a mirror included - that beheld her through that light.