Mr Paintbrush was a substitute for his father. What a terrible thing to say. He had a father, a real father, only no longer with us. Between teacher and student, however, there was the same non-being. That is why he never had the right to call him his father. That is why he bore a different name. Physically alive, but non-existent, he did not clothe or feed him, did not support or protect him. He was a teacher, a mentor. It was quite simple: he taught them. He filled them full of apple. He appeared from nowhere, burst in, changed everything. Some of them he sculpted brilliantly, making men out of clay. Re-fashioning them.
He dissolved them in himself with his talking and the way he looked at them. He crushed them, inspiring in them a sense of their unimportance, a new, oppressive fear for
