The bus stopped at its stop as usual. The passengers who got off were an elderly couple. The man was dressed in a suit and patent leather shoes, and wore a fedora on his head. He walked slowly and leaned on a cane, while the woman was beautifully dressed in a dark dress with a camel-hair sweater worn over it.

It was obvious they were outsiders. They cast a glance at the road, and once they made sure there were no cars, they crossed it and stepped onto the other side, heading toward the school. I was about twenty meters ahead of them when the old man addressed me:

“Excuse me, sir, do you have a minute?”

“Of course, go ahead.”

“Are you a local here?”

“Yes, for many generations.”

“Is this the new village school?”

“Yes, it is.”

“We must be too late,” he said with a sense of sorrow.

“What do you mean, is there a problem?”

“We are husband and wife, and in our youth we were teachers here, but it seems the old school has been torn down.”

“The new one is much nicer, the number of students has grown significantly, and it’s a high school now,” I went on.

“We can see that, and it’s been done very well, but we have an unforgettable memory at the old school.”

“Maybe I can help you?”

“But it’s no longer there,” the former teacher said to me. “A new one has been built.”

“It’s not on the foundations of the old one,” I said, relieved that I could somehow free them from the dismay that had gripped them.

“We left something as a keepsake at that school. On the sill of one of the windows, up there above the window frame, we left a comb...”

“A comb?” I expressed my surprise. “And for a comb you made the journey from that distant northern city at your age?!”

I saw in their eyes the upset my surprise had caused them.

“Yes, we came for that comb. With that comb we combed the students’ hair, with that comb we even removed lice from some of the students. It was the very beginning of the school after the liberation, and hygiene was not what it should have been.”

I was stunned. “Please forgive me, but this business of yours has two good sides. The first is that you will find your comb, and the second is that a family lives in that building now, and they might renovate it any day. If they found the comb before you did, that family would think someone had put a hex on them.”

They laughed until they cried.

“We never thought of that,” the teacher said.

We went to the former school that had been turned into a residential house. There we found only the lady of the house. As a local, I introduced who the guests were and why they had come. She laughed and invited them into the former classroom where the “treasure” was located. The window was just as it had been, even though the classroom had become a bedroom.

The teacher took a knitting needle that the lady of the house used to knit socks, slipped it between the wall and the frame, sliding it along, and to our surprise and their delight, out came a wooden comb with teeth on both sides.

The teacher took it in his hand, pulled a clean handkerchief from his jacket pocket, and with it wiped away the dust that had covered the comb for decades. I watched him in amazement. In his eyes, I saw both tenderness and joy.

“I have memories I can never forget. With this comb, I combed dozens of students in the years I was a teacher here. This comb is an unforgettable keepsake.”

I watched him as he spoke, full of emotion. I was moved too, but the lady of the house, an elderly woman, shook us from this reverie in the depths of memories over the years by inviting us to sit on folding chairs near a handcrafted wooden table to drink coffees and glasses of raki.