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nodding, for these sixteen-year-olds were, after all, in the midst of their own hormonal upheavals against parental hypocrisy and pimpleless skin.
They fuck you up
,
your mum and dad.
Do they ever.
    Two months later, Mr Lewski opens his dog-eared
Of Mice and Men.
Fire burning in the centre of his circular spectacles.
    ‘What I want to know is, what was
right
with Lennie?’
    ‘He didn’t mean to kill Curley’s wife.’
    Martin Weinberg answers a question in English class!
That
was Mr Lewski. The other students couldn’t have been more surprised had Weinberg produced a prayer book from his jeans, along with the cigarettes, flick-knife and knuckledusters, then faced Jerusalem and
davvened
fluently as the Yeshivah boys in their black suits. Astonishing that under Mr Lewski’s guidance, Mount Scopus College’s worst-behaved kid had an opinion about literature. Not the odds at the dog track, nor the way to beat somebody with a rubber hose, but literature! And not the type you get wrapped in black plastic off the newsagent’s top shelf.
    ‘Lennie wanted to fit in at the ranch,’ Weinberg mumbled, stabbing his desk with a dry ballpoint. ‘He couldn’t change himself. Lennie was dumb but innocent.’
    The other kids will know you’ve read the book. Fuck them.
    ‘Lennie didn’t
mean
to kill Curly’s wife. But the other men didn’t care. They didn’t care that Lennie was, like, a big ignorant kid. If George hadn’t done it, they would’ve shot Lennie themselves.’
    The school’s bad egg analyses a novel as near perfect as a novel gets; even the heroic teacher is surprised. The reach of the well-written word reminds Lewski:
this is why you’re here.
To these sixteen-year-olds, Mr Lewski is the last upright pillar in civilization’s crumbling Acropolis of paper and ink, of meanings, of ideas beyond the brown-as-shit obvious. The last pillar standing in the grand decaying temple of words, of what words do, of imaginative genius spanning the Greek tragedies, the Mahabharata, the Talmud up to the volumes of Dickens in the bargain bin at your local bookstore. The invaluable temple of literature, buckling beneath all the Gameboys and mobile phones and pocket TVs amassing on its roof like a billion plastic diamonds raining from heaven.
    ‘Thank you, Martin, yours is a voice that we want to hear more of. Now, who can suggest why Steinbeck’s drifters play dumb when they arrive at the ranch? What mistake has Lennie
already
made at the book’s beginning?’
    Another student answered, but Mr Lewski stared at Weinberg, back at carving his desk with a drawing cornpass. Who’d have thought the kid gave a shit? And watching Mr Lewski watching Weinberg, Max Lamm recognized the unadulterated joy he’d observed in toddlers running headfirst into a sprinkler on a hot summer’s day, a good ten years before they grew up enough to stop being happy. Mr Lewski stood there staring at the most insolent, disagreeable kid he’d ever taught, enraptured the way the black-hatters at the Yeshiva, the bearded Orthodox with their nine kids in a Toyota van, would feel if they chanced upon the Messiah late one Friday afternoon at the deli while they waited for pickled herring.
    How, Max Lamm wondered that moment in the classroom and again eleven years later with the teacher’s ghost in Hyde Park, did Mr Lewski sustain his unforced love of learning? For thirty-four years, the enlightenment he experienced through enlightening others. The unartificial effervescence that Lewski applied not only to educating his students, but to life as a whole! A man whose existence, it was obvious now that Lamm’s had disintegrated, had been phenomenally charged with charity, selflessness, responsibility, common sense.
The right priorities.
    That’s
what invigorated your English teacher; an ordered life. Cohesion from chaos; the noble challenge of moulding critical young minds against the relentless flood of informationless info, of manufactured news, of