Patrick Flanery - I Am No One

‘I haven’t seen it in a long time, but yes, what you say sounds sensible. You don’t have to settle on a topic right away, of course, there will be time for that, assuming you’re accepted for the MPhil. Are you thinking of a doctorate?’

‘If the Faculty will let me.’

‘And this is really what you want?’

‘You think because I’m a girl—’

‘I don’t think anything of the kind. But I hadn’t realized you were so eager.’

‘Does it surprise you so much? Did you think I was some lazy Muslim girl who was just going to marry a sheik and go live in a penthouse in Dubai?’

‘I would never think that. But neither did I want to presume to know.’

‘I’m an atheist, Professor O’Keefe. Culturally mixed up. Half-Muslim, half-Catholic.’

‘I didn’t imagine. .’ I said, and trailed off, feeling the precipitousness of the conversation we were having, the vertigo of knowing we had stopped talking about her studies or about history and had moved on to her life. I did not, as a rule, like to speak with students about their lives, not after the experience of Jayanti. It seemed too loaded with risk to know what they loved or believed, and perhaps as a result of this caution I failed in my pastoral duties, which are taken as seriously at Oxford as one’s intellectual work.

To get Fadia out of my rooms that day I agreed to write the reference, knowing she would almost certainly be admitted to the MPhil program if she had my support. Despite the recent blip during that term, her results had been strong and she was likely to do well in her final exams, which turned out ultimately to be the case.

When she was awarded a first-class degree, she came to thank me for my support. It was one of those peerless long afternoons Oxford delivers each summer, lingering with a carelessness as intoxicating as the perfume of linden blossoms.

‘I’m looking forward to the autumn,’ Fadia said, handing me a heavy parcel wrapped in thick silver paper and tied with a blue ribbon.

‘What’s this? What have I won?’

‘It’s just a small token of thanks, for your help with the reference, and for your teaching.’

Gifts from students were sufficiently rare that I was quite overcome by the gesture and moved to an almost childish excitement. When the paper came away there was still a box, and then another box within, and only on removing the inner box from the outer could I see it was a bottle of that thirty-year-old whisky Stephen Jahn had served me some years earlier, a whisky that had made me swoon with its magnificence such that I agreed to do what he asked — namely, whatever I could to ensure Fadia was admitted to our College. As I pulled the bottle from its inner box and held the liquid up to let the summer light break through and illuminate the color, I knew there could be no question of coincidence. Stephen himself might have paid for it, or perhaps merely made the suggestion and Fadia followed through on it.

I wondered about the transgression of a young Muslim woman from a good family giving a non-practicing but nonetheless Christian man of a certain age — an American no less — a bottle of expensive alcohol as a gift. It seemed somehow doubly wrong, and yet the transgression made the gift all the greater, as if Fadia were saying to me, ‘look what I am prepared to do to show you the extent of my gratitude. Imagine what my family would say if they saw me buying the bottle, or if they knew that, even worse than me drinking it myself, I was going to give it to you, my professor?’ Although perhaps it would have been judged far worse if she had meant it for herself; I knew so little of Islam I could only begin to guess at the weight and scope of any particular taboo and, apart from the occasional sliver of information Stephen had let drop over the years about Fadia’s brother, I knew nothing of the family, whether they were secular or devout, of ordinary or extraordinary wealth, if their money was earned or inherited, even what the parents did. I knew then that Saif had somehow been employed by Mubarak’s government (although I remained unsure, at the time, in precisely what capacity) but Fadia’s own politics were democratic, progressive — even, one might reasonably say, leftwing — and I knew that she was, by her own assertion, an atheist. Perhaps this was why she had been sent abroad in the first place, to protect her from the government in which her family was enmeshed, or perhaps to protect them from the embarrassment and risk of her political activity.

There was an evening that summer, just at the end of Trinity term, when Stephen Jahn and I again found ourselves alone after dinner in the Senior Common Room and he suggested returning to his flat. I declined the invitation because I had an early meeting the next day and no great desire to be alone with him.

‘Professor O’Keefe,’ he muttered, ‘so very busy now that you have a Chair. You see how you have been duly rewarded. .’

‘Duly rewarded? In what way do you mean?’

‘Rewarded for doing your duty. Rewarded for doing what was asked of you.’

‘I don’t think I understand, Stephen.’

‘You fulfilled what was required of you. You did it well. People are rewarded when they do what is asked.’

‘Are you talking about Fadia?’

Stephen, in his incomparable way, spluttered, eyes popping, apoplexy overtaking his whole wiry bald person, as if he might transform, by sheer force of outrage, from gristle and bone to a column of fire.

‘I am talking about doing one’s duty, Jeremy, and nothing more. Nothing more .’

He blinked several times and then, rising a little unsteadily, as though he might lose his footing at any moment, bid me goodnight. Was it possible, I wondered, that because I had, in my quite passive way, helped Fadia get her place in College, Stephen had stage-managed or finessed my promotion? What more might be given in reward if I continued to look after this young woman? And why, if this proved the case, was she so important? Could it be nothing more than because she was the sister of Saif, the man I believed Stephen loved in his peculiar way, whether or not that love was reciprocated? I had no answers and still, thinking it over now, I cannot entirely puzzle my way through the possibilities.

In the basement of my neighbors’ house north of Rhinebeck that cold Friday night the last weekend in November, Michael Ramsey stared at me, and in his appearance of torment and disbelief I saw the echo of expressions that had once exploded in Stephen’s face, his eyes growing larger and darker than they were, muscles between the eyebrows knitting together and drawing down into a V, mouth blistering as a wound.

‘You were my student, once.’

‘Yeah. You really don’t remember?’

‘No, only — yes. I can see your face now, in my memory I mean, as a young man.’ This was a lie, I could not, I had no way of imagining how he might have looked more than a decade earlier.

‘But other than that?’

‘No, I’m afraid not. I’m sorry.’

I watched as he turned and disappeared back up the stairs. It could not have been a case like Fadia. I have no interest in men, my fascination with Amir — or whatever he was called — aside, and in that instance it was interest in an otherness that felt inexplicably familiar. Perhaps, though, it occurred to me standing there, Michael Ramsey, like Stephen Jahn, does have such an interest, and perhaps, just maybe, I was the object of his obsession, a father figure, a daddy to a fatherless boy. Melodrama again, a campus intrigue, a gay romance. I was thinking in the wrong genre.

In the kitchen we stood some feet apart, not quite staring at each other.

‘Thank you for your help, Jeremy.’

‘I’m glad we found it. The house should heat up quite quickly.’ An apology seemed out of order, even excessive. For what did I have to apologize? Why be sorry for the failure of one’s memory? ‘I should be going, Michael. Have a good night. Perhaps I’ll see you again, at another of Peter and Meredith’s parties.’ I paused to let him speak but he said nothing. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t remember you at first.’