Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

These people could have been removed by the police, of course, on a charge of vagrancy or some such, but the Vice-Chancellor, the University Council and the Faculty Association had had too much experience of violence resulting from the presence of the police on campus to invite this again. The matter was referred back and forth. When we students returned after the Easter vacation the blond man known by his head of hair, the toothless ones, the black woman who always called out Hello lovey how’you and the neat queen who would buttonhole anyone to tell of his student days in Dublin, You kids don’t know what a real university is , were still there. Like the stray cats students (girls again) stooped to scratch behind the ears.

And then something really happened. One afternoon I thought I saw Professor Jepson in a little huddle of four or five comfortably under a tree on their fruit-box seats. Someone who looked the image of him; one of the older men, having been around the campus some months, now, was taking on some form of mimesis better suited to him than the kid-stuff garb the younger ones and the students aped from each other. Then I saw him again, and there was Dr Heimrath from Philosophy just in the act of taking a draw, next to him — if any social reject wanted a model for look-alike it would be from that department. And I was not alone, either; the friend I was with that day saw what I did. We were the only ones who believed a student who said he had almost stepped on Bell, Senior Lecturer from Maths, in the bushes with one of the three women; Bell’s bald head shone a warning signal just in time. Others said they’d seen Kort wrangling with one of the men, there were always fights when the gatherings ran out of wine and went on to meths. Of course Kort had every kind of pure alcohol available to him in his domain, the science laboratories; everybody saw him, again and again, down there, it was Kort, all right, no chance of simple resemblance, and the euphoria followed by aggression that a meths concoction produces markedly increased in the open-air coterie during the following weeks. The papers Maths students handed in were not returned when they were due; Bell’s secretary did not connect calls to his office, day after day, telling callers he had stepped out for a moment. Jepson, Professor Jepson who not only had an international reputation as a nuclear physicist but also was revered by the student body as the one member of faculty who was always to be trusted to defend students’ rights against authoritarianism, our old prof, everybody’s enlightened grandfather — he walked down a corridor unbuttoned, stained, with dilated pupils that were unaware of the students who shrank back, silent, to make way.

There had been sniggers and jokes about the other faculty members, but nobody found anything to say over Professor Jepson; nothing, nothing at all. As if to smother any comment about him, rumours about others got wilder; or facts did. It was said that the Vice-Chancellor himself was seen down there, sitting round one of their trash fires; but it could have been that he was there to reason with the trespassers, to flatter them with the respect of placing himself in their company so that he could deal with the situation. Heimrath was supposed to have been with him, and Bester from Religious Studies with Franklin-Turner from English — but Franklin-Turner was hanging around there a lot, anyway, that snobbish closet drinker come out into the cold, no more fastidious ideas about race keeping him out of that mixed company, eh?

And it was no rumour that Professor Russo was going down there, now. Minerva Russo, of Classics, young, untouchable as one of those lovely creatures who can’t be possessed by men, can be carried off only by a bull or penetrated only by the snowy penis-neck of a swan. We males all had understood, through her, what it means to feast with your eyes, but we never speculated about what we’d find under her clothes; further sexual awe, perhaps, a mother-of-pearl scaled tail. Russo was attracted. She sat down there and put their dirty bottle to her mouth and the black-rimmed fingernails of one of them fondled her neck. Russo heard their wheedling, brawling, booze-snagged voices calling and became a female along with the other unwashed three. We saw her scratching herself when she did still turn up — irregularly — to teach us Greek poetry. Did she share their body-lice too?

It was through her, perhaps, that real awareness of the people down there came. The revulsion and the pity; the old white woman with the suffering feet ganging up with the black ones when the men turned on the women in the paranoia of betrayal — by some mother, some string of wives or lovers half-drowned in the bottles of the past — and cursing her sisters when one of them took a last cigarette butt or hung on a man the white sister favoured; tended by the sisterhood or tending one of them when the horrors shook or a blow was received. The stink of the compost heaps they used drifted through the libraries with the reminder that higher functions might belong to us but we had to perform the lower ones just like the wretches who made us stop our noses. Shit wasn’t a meaningless expletive, it was part of the hazards of the human condition. They were ugly, down there at the grandstands and under the bushes, barnacled and scaled with disease and rejection, no one knows how you may pick it up, how it is transmitted, turning blacks grey and firing whites’ faces in a furnace of exposure, taking away shame so that you beg, but leaving painful pride so that you can still rebuff, I don’t eat rubbish , relying on violence because peace has to have shelter, but sticking together with those who threaten you because that is the only bond that’s left. The shudder at it, and the freedom of it — to let go of assignments, assessments, tests of knowledge, hopes of tenure, the joy and misery of responsibility for lovers and children, money, debts. No goals and no failures. It was enviable and frightening to see them down there — Bester, Franklin-Turner, Heimrath and the others, Russo pulling herself to rights to play the goddess when she caught sight of us but too bedraggled to bring it off. Jepson, our Jepson, all that we had to believe in of the Old Guard’s world, passing and not recognising us.

And then one day, they had simply disappeared. Gone. The groundsmen had swept away the broken bottles and discarded rags. The compost was doused with chemicals and spread on the campus’s floral display. The Vice-Chancellor had never joined the bent backs round the zol and the bottle down there and was in his panelled office. The lines caging Heimrath’s mouth in silence did not release him to ask why students gazed at him. Minerva sat before us in her special way with matched pale narrow hands placed as if one were the reflection of the other, its fingertips raised against a mirror. Jepson’s old bristly sow’s ear sagged patiently towards the discourse of the seminar’s show-off.

From under the bushes and behind the grandstands they had gone, or someone had found a way to get rid of them overnight. But they are always with us. Just somewhere else.

I’ll call her Tilla, you may call her by another name. You might think you knew her. You might have been the one: him. It’s not by some simple colloquial habit we ‘call’ someone instead of naming: call them up.

It was during the war, your war, the forties, that has sunk as far away into the century as the grandfathers’ nineteen-fourteen. He was blond, stocky in khaki, attractively short-sighted so that the eyes that were actually having difficulty with focus seemed to be concentrating attentively on her. The impression is emphasised by the lashes blond and curly as his hair. He is completely different from the men she knows in the life of films — the only men she knows apart from her father — and whom she expected to come along one day not too far off, Robert Taylor or even the foreigner, Charles Boyer. He is different because — at last — he is real; she is sixteen. He is no foreigner nor materialisation of projection from Hollywood. He’s the son of friends of a maternal grandmother, detailed to a military training camp in the province where the girl and her parents live. Some people even take in strangers from the camp for the respite of weekend leave; with a young daughter in the house this family would not go so far as to risk that but when the man of the family is beyond call-up age an easy way to fulfil patriotic duty is to offer hospitality to a man vouched for by connections. He’s almost to be thought of as an elective grandson of the old lady. In war these strangers, remember, are Our Boys.