Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

In our first meeting at that admissions interview her insights were workmanlike and she was bullish rather than receptive. She seemed too confident, almost arrogant, to be a natural choice for a College like ours — I would have sent her off to St. Hilda’s, or even Christ Church — and yet I remembered Stephen Jahn’s request, and so asked encouraging questions that I hoped would lead Fadia towards answers which would make it easier for me to persuade Bethan we should give her the kind of score — we scored all the candidates and then compared notes with the other interviewing team at the end of two days — that would make her, if not one of the top candidates, someone solidly in the middle of the pack, about whom there could be no doubts. Perhaps it was the nature of that year’s pool of applicants, a trick of dumb chance or mere coincidence, but without having to say anything to anyone, Fadia was offered an unconditional place, although Bethan thought her a potentially ‘difficult’ girl, while Stephen made a point of mentioning the wealth of the family and the prospect of a substantial donation to the College at some future date, the sort of donation that might, in fact, allow for another post in History or the provision of grants for female students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Even less flattering, there was an unspoken understanding that, from a public relations perspective, it would be no bad thing in the wake of the terrorist attacks in London over that summer for the College to demonstrate its commitment to educating Muslim students, as an indication of its longstanding investment in a liberal humanist tradition. At the time I thought no more about it. Fadia was one of a group of young people, no more than that, although I looked forward in a remote way to seeing how she evolved in the coming years, by which I mean my interest was pedagogical and observational rather than emotionally inflected.

Fadia arrived as one of the freshers in October the following year, but because of the way the undergraduate History degree is structured at Oxford and how the College organized its teaching, I had little to do with her until the year after that, by which time I had been promoted to a full professorship (although I had not been particularly confident about my application), and so returned to teaching with a renewed sense of purpose.

When I began seeing her in weekly tutorials, she reminded me, for the first time in what was then no more than our passing acquaintance, of an Egyptian boy I had known in my freshman year at Georgetown. Though I was not friends with him, we lived in the same dormitory and I often saw him at events since we were both in the School of Foreign Service, to which I had foolishly committed myself, thinking I might have a career in diplomacy or government. I have forgotten the boy’s name, perhaps it was Amir, but I remember being astonished that an Egyptian could be blond, as he was, and unsettled in my own mind by the curiosity I felt about him. I think we never spoke, but on several occasions I found excuses to sit next to him in classes and lectures, or behind him on the bus that ran from Georgetown to Dupont Circle, and on one occasion, in the middle of a warm spring day, I remember sitting next to him in a lecture and being conscious of his odor, which was not unpleasant, but rather a mix of cologne and the smell of his body, an aroma unlike anything I had sensed in the past and yet there was something curiously familiar about it, almost familial. When Fadia began appearing in my tutorials, I caught that same scent, a note that was recognizable without my being able to place the association.

At first, Fadia was a serious if unexceptional student. Her work was skillful and her arguments efficient rather than sparked with genius in a student body that often produced undergraduates with genuine intellectual fire. In the summer before her final undergraduate year, something happened, as it often does to young women and men as they push themselves over that last cusp of youth and into adulthood. When she returned to College in October she had become another person, as if at last her body had grown into its features. The occasional arrogance had vanished and in its place was a more attractive self-assurance, as though over the space of a few months she had become the noblewoman she always seemed to know she was. Alongside this I also noticed the emergence of a furtiveness or anxiety I had not observed in the past. In tutorials she always sat in the same chair and would glance out the window every time there was a flutter of movement, even if it was nothing more than a pigeon. When I saw her around College or in the libraries, or simply on the streets of Oxford, coming in and out of clothing stores on Cornmarket or standing in line for a sandwich in the Covered Market, she was often looking over her shoulder, as though she feared someone might be following her. I began to suspect she had suffered a trauma over the holidays but did not feel we were close enough for me to ask what might have happened. On occasion she came unprepared to class and called in sick more than once, although on those very days of illness I sometimes saw her in town, looking fine. So while she became physically more impressive her academic standing slipped. And yet, because of my history with Jayanti, or perhaps because of some finer quality I sensed in Fadia, I did not chivvy her to work harder.

Then, one dark November afternoon, she stayed behind after a group class to ask if I would support her application to read for a two-year MPhil.

‘I’m not convinced postgraduate studies are the right choice for you, Fadia. I don’t want to be patronizing, but you don’t seem like the graduate school type. It requires a huge amount of self-direction.’

‘You don’t understand, Professor. I have to do this.’

From her tone and the panicked expression on her face I understood there was more than learning at stake.

‘Is this a way of staying?’

‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

‘I imagined you might go into a job immediately after finishing.’

She looked shocked, as though a ‘job’ were so pedestrian a proposition as to be unthinkable.

‘Is it so surprising I might be interested in the subject?’

‘You’ve not demonstrated much in the way of enthusiasm. Your work is competent, but I confess I have never been astonished by it.’

‘You’re saying I’m a bad student?’

‘Not at all. You’ve been a very good student up until the last few weeks, but you don’t make yourself noticed.’

‘Maybe I will make myself noticed from now on. Will you write me a reference?’

She reminded me what courses she had taken and explained that, in fact, her interests were in the area of my own research, Germany after the Second World War.

‘Your work on the Stasi has been very illuminating for me,’ she said, with an earnestness that kept it from sounding like empty flattery. ‘It makes me think about Egypt differently.’

‘That’s nice of you to say.’

‘But your book on East German cinema — that is what has inspired my own thinking. I have become fascinated by leftwing European terror movements. You know, Forças Populares, the Brigate Rosse, but especially Baader-Meinhof.’ Though her tone remained serious, almost static, I liked to think I saw a spark of passion — perhaps no more than intellectual inspiration. ‘I want to think about terror and media, or the relationship between the media and leftwing terror.’

‘Quite a lot of work has already been done in that field.’

‘But what do you think of Fassbinder’s films? Have you seen The Third Generation ? It’s so absurd and yet there’s something about the alienating quality of its form that speaks directly to the concerns of the Red Army Faction. What were they trying to do if not make West German consumer society see the artifice of its own construction, just as Fassbinder tries to make his viewers experience the artifice of the otherwise realist film they are viewing by terrorizing their ears through his use of that horrible non-diegetic soundtrack?’