You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [50]
We passed a group of kids sitting in a circle on the grass, notebooks open.
When we were out of earshot, Colin began, “She—”
But I interrupted him. “I know. She can be difficult and she makes you angry, but at the very least you have to tolerate her. Ignore her if you can.”
He nodded. “It’s not that, sir. She’s, look, you have to understand. I think you should know. I mean you were good to me. You gave me the time. You did what you said. I kept expecting to be called into the office. But, you know, nothing happened, no one came. I liked it, I liked coming to class because I wanted to. It made a difference.”
“I’m glad for that. You were brave to challenge me, to walk out.”
He nodded, “Thanks for the chance. Seriously, Mr. Silver.” He paused. “The thing is that you should know she hates you.”
I laughed. “I’m used to students hating me. It’s part of being a teacher.”
He shook his head, “No, but I think this is different maybe. She really hates you. She says things about you.”
“Things like what?”
“You really want to know? You want me to tell you? I think you should maybe just know that she says them. Know that she’s a . . . she’s mean.”
She’s mean. It was an uncharacteristically innocent thing for him to say. I stopped walking and turned to him. It was the first time I didn’t trust Marie.
“If you don’t want to tell me, don’t. But I appreciate your being concerned.”
In class, Ariel had lost some of her bravado, spoke less, seemed frightened by Colin. She never dared to look in his direction. Instead, she brooded, ignored everyone, even Aldo, abandoning him to a hostile majority. He had nowhere to turn. He’d been too long Ariel’s loyal ally, muttering and smirking his way through the semester. And Aldo didn’t dare solicit Abdul Al Mady’s company, for Abdul moved in a social world far beneath his own.
So at the beginning of November it was among those kids, during that seminar, that I felt a familiar sense of strength, a faint sense of the future. Most of them were with me. The other three were hamstrung. They’d have to sit silent or come around, and really I didn’t need them. The rest of us, we were making something, we were alive in there. It was all I had, and I suppose I imagined then, foolishly, that it was all they had too, and that it would be enough.
GILAD
Silver had tried to continue the discussion, end it with some kind of normalcy, but when the bell rang we were for once all grateful. Ariel had gone quiet. The rest of us too. On the métro home that afternoon I tried to understand what it was that made her fight him so hard. It made no sense to me. All her friends were doing their best to have him notice them.
As far as I knew there’d been no repercussions after Colin’s explosion. Since then we’d begun saying hello to each other in the halls.
“What’s up, man?” he’d say.
It made me feel stronger. I found intimacy in those exchanges. I looked forward to them.
And now, weeks later, a cold Friday afternoon, the poplar trees across the field waving in long, slow gestures, their yellow leaves full of sunlight, I listened to Silver read the week to an end:
“‘Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought that transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, quickened with an irresistible charm. Living like this, in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisite proximity to a danger whose name we do not know, is this the same as rushing to your doom? Once again, without respite, let us race to our destruction. I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.’”
He looked up.
“Don’t follow along. Look out the window. Close your eyes. But listen.” I did and it felt to me that I wasn’t alone.
“From Albert Camus’s ‘The Sea Close By’” he told us and then repeated a line obviously memorized, “‘I have always felt I lived on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness.’”
And then uncharacteristically he used the first person: