And the World Changed (21 page)

“I thank all of you once again for being here. Please continue your sit-in in support of this campaign. United, we are a force to reckon with. We'll paralyze this institution, take over this campus, and run it ourselves if necessary!”

The clapping and cheering grew louder. A group of women in a corner had already started humming songs of resistance, spreading blankets and themselves out on the floor. Happy could hear the buzz of excitement and energy rise and waft through the room like a palpable force. Goose pimples bristled on her arms. Her stomach tightened with a strange feeling of embattled excitement.

She tried to catch a glimpse of the heroes at the center of the campaign but they were stretched out on mats on the floor of the stage, surrounded by admirers and sympathy. Was the angel of death standing by, too, to watch this contest, she wondered? Driven by a mildly morbid curiosity she decided to make her way toward the dais where they lay to have a closer look.

Both of them were fairly young men, almost boys, one white, the other a deeply tanned brown with strong African features and hair. She guessed he was Youseff, remembering the
story of the handsome Joseph from her grandmother's retelling of it. The smell of starvation hung about them already. Their eyes did not reflect the sparkling energy of their curly-haired leader. She wondered what filled their hearts and minds most at this moment: fear or hope?

As if she had spoken her question aloud, Youseff looked up and caught her glance. If, at any point, there had been fear in him his hunger had feasted on it, devoured it long since. His eyes smiled cheerfully, knowingly into hers.
Hope! Hope! Hope!
They sang a fearless song. She filled her lungs deeply with reassurance and turned around to leave. Her feet reluctant and heavy, she made her way slowly back to the Dean's office in the administration block thinking about what she would tell him.

“I tell you what I'll do, Sam, I'll fax this through to you now. I suggest that you read the piece carefully, think of what you'd like to say, make notes, then come around to the press office and we'll help you draft your response.”

Sam heaved a long sigh, wondering if there was an alternative. “Well, what do you say?” Caroline's voice, clear as a crystal bell, bore down on him again.

There was subtle pressure in the suggestion, an insistence that would brook no argument. Perhaps not all that subtle, come to think of it! No point in trying to fight it, he concluded. “They've blown this out of all proportion, you know.” His voice sounded like a whine even to himself.

“I absolutely agree with you. That's why it's important to deal with it as professionally as we can! Damage limitation, it's the only sensible thing to do.”

“Sure.” His voice was devoid of conviction although he would be the first to accept that he was no good at thinking on his feet. Caroline was right: The press office was trained to deal with problems like this. Perhaps he needed to put himself in their hands. He could always study the article and change his mind, if necessary.

He lit a cigarette and sat down to watch the fax machine as if it were a fiend from hell, programmed to exhale brimstone and fire on his head. Before his cigarette was out the telephone bell rang and the monster whirred, revving up dutifully to churn out the faxed story as told to the
Daily Mail
by the striking students. He pulled up each page as it rolled off the machine. Caroline had underlined the sections of the interview which referred to him.

Youseff al Saki—he remembered the name but realized with a shock that he could hardly recognize the face. The boy had lost three and a half stones in the two weeks of starvation, the article informed him. His eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, his plump dimpled cheeks were hollow pits, his lips scabbed. The sit-in and hunger strike had effectively disrupted classes in the humanities block this last fortnight, steadily gaining the support from more and more students. Prior to that the university had been able to ignore protests surrounding the Green Dragon Club and its infamous rag. Coverage in national dailies was bound to boost student morale.

“Fools! What a waste of time and energy!” His temper rose steadily as he read the article. It was an interview with Youseff who was still resisting pressure to give up the hunger strike. The Dean had taken a stand in favor of the Green Dragon Club. The student body was all up in arms now. Peter Gold had collapsed the day before and been admitted to the hospital.

Nowhere did the article expound his own position accurately. Instead all references to him had been made in the context of his “rigid views” on the origins of the Egyptian civilization. Youseff had identified him as one of the biased academics at the university who denied Africans their rightful Egyptian heritage by crediting its glory instead to the Aryans, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Mesopotamians,
anyone but black Africans!

A racist! So now I am to be branded a
racist!
The trouble with mud is . . . it sticks. He lit another cigarette and paced up and down the office, a part of him anxious that Caroline would ring
any minute now asking for his statement. She would not give him more than an hour to think his position through. “Damage limitation,” she had said. What does that mean, exactly? Accept a reduced charge, negotiate the degree of guilt? But why?

He remembered the boy's face the day he had challenged him on this issue in class. He kept repeating something about the Pharaohs' curly hair, he had gone on and on about it. “But sir, they've never found ‘bracelets of bright hair about the bone!'” he had smirked. “It's always been dark hair, black, wiry, and curly like mine, hasn't it?” He had perhaps read and investigated the subject in his own limited way, prepared his onslaught. He remembered feeling pushed into momentary silence by the boy's logic that day.

“It is easy to oversimplify these things,” Sam had begun, slightly defensively. Defiant little idiot. Why do people blow things out of all proportion? Curly hair or straight, dark or blond, does it really matter? Does it? And if it doesn't, then why have I been arguing about it?

He rummaged for an ashtray among the papers on the desk and fished it out of the chaos. A glazed blue porcelain sphinx held a shallow bowl in its paws with exaggerated solemnity. He stared at the creature: She seemed unperturbed by the crisis of the day. His eyes slid down its glazed throat to where the human breast turned into beast.

If only the meaning of events did not elude us as they unroll through our lives . . . he thought, desperate for some spark of wisdom or inspiration. Penny smiled at him, at his confusion perhaps, from across his desk, a calm sepia image in a silver frame.

Objectivity is the cardinal principle of my trade, that's the principle I must follow. I know that more clearly than ever before. I must draw as far away as possible from the personal emotion attached to all this and . . . and try to read the article from beginning to end, without reference to myself. I need to honor my own integrity as a professional and not be driven by
the university's need for a politically correct image. My statement mustn't undermine my own professionalism, or my future here as a teacher. After all, I'm the one who faces this rabble in the classroom, eye to eye.

He decided to ignore the messenger of death hovering behind Youseff's image, visible even in the photograph as if through an x-ray machine. His raw statements had taken on a strange poignancy in the interview. Was it the power of the saint, the martyr, the mystic, that added layers to his message? Or was it the same wisdom that routinely pours out of the mouths of babes into deaf old ears unable to recognize it? The interview read extremely well. He came over convincingly as an idealist, a Utopian who remembered earlier blueprints in every detail.

He had quoted Thomas More—clearly he was a hero and a model for his own conduct in the dispute:

Now am I like to Plato's city,

Whose fame flieth the world thorough;

Yea, like, or rather more likely

Plato's plat to excel and pass.

Here was someone who dreamed of perfection though the dream had fallen out of fashion long ago. He was still dreaming of justice when almost the entire world had decided to concur in its acceptance of the failure of that dream. Here was someone who was willing to make the supreme sacrifice when sacrifice was no longer in currency, no longer a virtue. His idealism, his saintliness were so unblemished, so visceral that they hefted Sam toward an imperative he may otherwise have been able to constrain—at least in these circumstances. Instead, he too felt obliged to take a strong and absolute stand for what he believed in. He could not be less than honest in this situation. He could not compromise, not faced with this.

His telephone rang, a fraught screech of anxiety from the press office. He sounded vague speaking patiently, as if to a very slow child: He had to issue a denial, some kind of refutation. After all, he was not a racist!
Was he?

“I'm not so sure what I would be denying! As a scholar in my own discipline I know I cannot, in all honesty, change my stance. I have not been misquoted on the subject. I don't really know what I need to deny, Caroline! I wish I knew.” Sam felt curiously liberated by this uncertainty. “As I see it, there isn't enough evidence to support the position he wanted me to take about the ancestry of the Egyptians.”

“There's the broader issue, though. Let me write up something and send it to you.” Caroline could not believe the size of the problem on their hands.

“The fucking idiot!” she swore to her personal assistant as she put the phone down on him. “Bloody academics! So irresponsible! I wish they lived in the real bloody world! Do you think he realizes the meaning of what he's saying?”

“What's he saying then?” Wendy responded with minimal interest, filing away at a chip on her nail.

“Some mumbo jumbo about the truth of his discipline. In effect, that he's not really bothered about denying the charge of racism. Would you believe it? Honestly! This is the climate we live in!”

“Maybe it's more useful to be on the wrong side these days?”

“Oh, Wendy,” Caroline sighed, “you do have a way of hitting the nail on the head sometimes! Meanwhile, as they say in the business, this university has a bit of an image problem on its hands.”

Happy had never met the chaplain before. She looked up as he came to sit down beside her with their two cups of coffee and a plate of digestive biscuits. His parlor was predictably olde worlde, as were the bone china teacups (Minton? English country garden?) though his language was refreshingly unworthy of his role in the college.

“I don't know what else to suggest. Only the Vice Chancellor has the power to sort out this blasted mess. Real dog's dinner,
isn't it?” his biscuit crumbled untidily into his armchair.

“But there's no time to wait. Three days! He's sinking fast, I shudder to think what might happen in that time. Have you seen the hostility and anger that's getting pumped up in the students by the minute?”

“I know what you're saying, Happy. Here's a situation that doesn't make sense. Bloody meaningless confrontation, if you ask me!”

“I'm not one to believe in conspiracy theories, but the way events have shaped up on this campus is really strange. Both sides are so deeply entrenched, so dogmatic.”

“We'll know if someone at the top gets nominated for a knighthood next year, won't we?” he winked.

“Might be too late for some.” She put down the empty cup and rose. His unconditional sympathy for the students had been heartening. She had spent the last three days trying to push staff opinion in their favor, just to defuse the crisis. She was terrified lest something irrevocable like death bring them all to a point of no return. On a personal level the staff were all flexible, even sympathetic, but as a group, as a warring faction, they were as intransigent as the most hotheaded of students. The heads of faculties and the dean all sheltered behind the Vice Chancellor, and now that this young man's life was seriously at risk, he was away, out of reach on a week's holiday.

The Chaplain stood up to see her to the door. He had promised to try to contact the VC for her. She felt cold and numb as she stepped out of his cosy parlor into the dark winter evening. The students had mounted a candlelight vigil outside the Redgrave Theater. She stood near the heavy wooden entrance doors, watching. It was a moving spectacle, a fearful, breathless, hushed moment. She could feel the tension and bitterness in that subdued hum almost brushing against her skin.

Police had cordoned off two lanes on each side of the A class road, which ran between the blocks and buildings of the university. The quieter late-evening traffic, forced to slow down
through the bottleneck, was less noisy than usual. She wondered what to do next. A part of her wanted to light a candle and stay with them but she resisted the temptation.

The door opened gently and Sam Jennings appeared on the pavement beside her. She tried to avoid his eyes but he had seen her. Somehow, he had managed to put himself in the opposite camp. He noticed her anxiety and drew up closer to say hello, forcing her to respond.

To an extent he had been prepared for the ostracism: He was aware of her anger and that of some other staff members, but he wondered why. Perhaps because the world at large oversimplifies solutions to problems. Black and white. Far too simplistic when the real world is overwhelmingly gray.