Уолтер Мосли - John Woman

“There’s a world outside the university, Professor.”

“Don’t I know it.”

John’s tone had more effect than his words. Malik’s angry expression turned suddenly speculative.

“Where you from?” he asked.

“A very dark place, Mr. Malik,” John lamented. “A place from where you can’t take back a thing.”

“We didn’t deserve what happened to us,” Johann said, sensing a potential comrade in John.

“And if a young, white woman’s three-year-old daughter is kidnapped, raped, murdered... interred in an unmarked grave,” John replied, “if all that, did either mother or child deserve their fate?”

“That’s just two people. I’m talking about a whole race.”

“As am I,” John said. “Every human being faces tragedy. It’s coded into our blood. There’s no escape except through acceptance.”

“So I’m supposed to accept five hundred years of slavery?”

Nodding John said, “Then pick yourself up and battle for the future, not the past. The past is a battle you cannot win.”

“They stole our history,” Malik complained. “I’m just trying to get it back.”

“Not stole, Mr. Malik, but utterly destroyed. Where our people came from was ripped from the minds of our ancestors. We can rebuild but never retrieve. And there’s an even larger catastrophe intrinsic to that crime.”

“What’s that?”

John almost smiled then. The words passing between them were more or less meaningless. Malik was there to learn from him because of the common past that their skin implied. The student would trust his professor even if they never agreed on one thing.

“That in destroying our history,” John said, “they asphyxiated their own.”

Malik tried to come up with a rebuke but instead he shuddered. The hatred in his eyes could have easily been love.

“Are you German?” John asked.

“No.” It was a victim’s rote reply to the torturer’s question no matter what that question was.

“So your parents probably named you after Bach, one of the great geniuses of music. Your last name is Aramaic for king; the Genius King.”

“So what?”

“Those words propel you into the world.”

“Can you see any reason I shouldn’t drop your class, Professor Woman?”

“Because you are a sword and I a whetstone?”

Johann’s lip curled as Annette Eubanks’s had. He stood shaking his head.

“I’m outta here,” he said.

As he went through the doorway John called out, “If you want a permission slip to drop I’ll be unhappy but I’ll sign it.”

Johann Malik was the only student to visit him that day. John had hoped Carlinda would drop by. They’d reconnected talking about loving fate. It would have been nice to close the door and kiss her cheek.

But he didn’t need that kiss. Today there was a triumvirate that judged him: Pepperdine, Eubanks and Malik. He didn’t have to worry about the NYPD. His fate was laid out in front of him like a fall.

He’d fallen asleep early for the first time in years, lying there naked on top of the blankets with a window open to let the desert air in. His dreams were centered in a large room where people appeared in no particular order or context. His mother and father were on the periphery. Colette was there with France Bickman, Carlinda and President Luckfeld.

Strolling around John came upon a waitress who asked him, “Would you like to see my breasts?”

His erection was immediate and insistent but it wasn’t until he felt his sex enveloped by moist warmth that he opened his eyes.

Fully dressed, Carlinda straddled him, slowly rising and lowering on his erection.

“How did you get in?” he asked.

She smiled and shimmied.

“How?” he asked again.

“There’s some overgrown yuccas at the back wall. I climbed behind them. I turned the lock before leaving this morning. I figured you wouldn’t check it.”

“You wouldn’t even look at me when class started today.”

“That was before you said amor fati. ”

John woke up alone, nestled among the rumpled bedclothes.

The scent of Carlinda’s lavender perfume rose from the sheets. She hadn’t worn perfume the first night they were together.

He sat up feeling that there was something he should be concerned about, something important. After drinking from the bathroom sink spigot and splashing a little water on his face he remembered Chapman Lorraine’s body behind the secret door. But Lorraine was dead, gone... history. The police were looking for Cornelius Jones, also a thing of the past. No... he had to do some kind of presentation on a paper that only had a title. He had to defend himself without the help of a heavy lug-wrench.

Downstairs he took out a pad of flimsy airmail paper, a brand-new yellow number two pencil and a penknife — all from the drawer in his table. He made coffee, closed the window, used the blue-and-silver penknife to shave the wood away from a quarter inch of lead and started writing.

When he was finished John picked out a deep ocher two-piece suit and a spring green T-shirt. He decided on white tennis shoes with no socks.

The history department was located in the president’s compound. John approached the gate at 12:52.

“Professor Woman,” Lawrence Gustav greeted him from behind the metal bars.

“Sir,” John rejoined.

“They’re waiting for you.”

“The meeting isn’t scheduled until one,” John said as the gate rolled open.

“The bigwigs had a powwow at noon.”

Walking down a cobblestone path that snaked between the lodge-like buildings John came upon the compound’s gardener.

An inch shorter than John the elderly man moved spryly. He had a full mane of salt-and-pepper hair, sun-squinted brown eyes and skin deeply tanned by years of working outside. He wore dark green gardener’s pants, a shirt that was an oddly clashing blue, and walnut brown, cracked leather shoes. He was trimming one of eight dark-leaved rosebushes growing in front of the Psych Bungalow.

John stopped and said, “Hello.”

“Hi,” the elder replied with some surprise in his voice.

“You’re the one who takes care of all these bushes and cacti?”

“I certainly am.” He took off his gardener’s gloves and reached out.

As they shook John said, “I’m John Woman. I teach here.”

“Ron Underhill,” the man said, maybe grinning a little at the professor’s name. “I’ve worked on these plants since before the school even opened.”

“So I guess you’ve always been a gardener.”

“No. Before I came here I was a businessman.”

“What kind of business?”

“Doesn’t really matter,” Ron said. “Most everything people do in business is just a waste of time. Now I tend to the plants that need it and every other month water those that don’t.”

“The flowers are beautiful.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“John.”

“John.”

“It must be a very different experience to be outside all day working under the sun and against it at the same time,” John observed.

“Like I said, some plants need a lot of care,” the landscape gardener agreed. “But often your delicate breeds bring forth the most exquisite blossoms.”

There was wonder in the older man’s voice. As if he discovered this truth every time he knelt down to work.

“I’d like to talk to you about that sometime,” John said. “But right now I have to be raked over the coals.”

“Education’s a business too I guess.” The gardener was now peering directly into the professor’s eyes.

John was struck by the obvious and yet oblique truth of this notion. He wanted to say something but realized he couldn’t enhance the older man’s assertion.