Peekay closed his eyes and winced. None of this had been a part of what they'd discussed. He had never expected to witness his beloved friend being so blatantly opportunist. 'Peekay was befriended by a train conductor, who convinced the little boy that if he could learn to box, that big could beat small, that he would never again be beaten up, that he could even become the welterweight champion of the world if he believed hard enough, if he never gave up!' Peekay had had enough.
'I say, Hymie, that's not quite fair!' He was pale with anger and his voice, though low, carried around the room. Hymie looked at Peekay surprised. The power of his anger was palpable. His voice had been a growl, the sound of a wounded animal. Hymie's heart missed a beat. Jesus! He'd gone too far! Peekay was the most fiercely proud person he'd ever known and he'd used him. He'd done this to the person he loved the most in the world.
The room grew strangely quiet. They too had been brought up with a jolt, the spell of Hymie's rhetoric broken.
Some of them looked at Peekay, their eyes showing sympathy, whether for the story they'd just heard or for the invasion of his privacy was impossible to say. These were mostly young men who knew what it was like to be a loner, to be the odd man out at school, to be the swot, the sap, the drip and the school misfit. Either way they could identify. They knew what it was like to dream privately, never daring to reveal your dream lest you be ridiculed by your peers.
The first to stand up was a smallish man with big hornrimmed glasses named Elmer Milstein, an American from New York. He was simply known as Milstein; at Oxford, people even refused to use a name as silly as Elmer.
Milstein spoke directly to Peekay. 'Say! This thing is…well, it's between the two of you.' He looked around the room. 'Whaddaya say, you guys? We retire to the saloon bar until they've sorted it out?'
There was a scraping of chairs as the members of the newly formed Odd Bodleian Society rose and silently left the room, taking their half-downed pints with them.
Hymie looked up at his friend. There was nothing he could say. He had seated himself on the edge of a table and now he shrugged his shoulders. The look in Peekay's eyes was unbearable. 'Jesus! What a fuck-up,' he said helplessly. 'Why? Why, Hymie?' Peekay asked.
'Peekay, I swear to God, I'm sorry. You're right, it was vainglorious and contemptible.' Tears welled in Hymie's eyes.
'It's not that easy, Hymie. Your apology, even your tears are not enough. You were contemptuous of the people in this room. You betrayed the trust between us!' Peekay was still angry but his voice had become very calm.
Hymie looked slowly up at Peekay. His friend's eyes were cold. He could think of nothing to do but to attack. When he spoke his voice was bitter. 'It's because I'm a Jew, isn't it? Secretly you despise me. A fucking Judas! That's it, isn't it, Peekay?' The tears in Hymie's eyes brimmed, but he held his gaze steady. 'You're the only one who's allowed to lead. You with your blue eyes and the glorious two-fisted attack of the master fucking race!'
Peekay remained silent. He loved Hymie more than anyone in the world. He loved his quick mind, his generosity and even his cynicism. He knew Hymie loved him and he hated the thing he now saw in him, the fear, insecurity and guilt which made him say what he'd just said. Peekay could identify with it all and he knew how it could corrupt the soul.
They were both refugees but he was the stronger of the two. He had already been corrupted. He knew how the war had turned out. At the age of five he'd been beaten and tortured, even made to eat shit.
Hymie had never stood to fight, stood with his back to the wall. He'd always run. His fear was for the unknown and his guilt was for all the Jews who'd stayed behind to be rounded up and forced into the cattle trucks. It was time Hymie stopped running.
'Listen to me, you contemptible little bastard!' said Peekay. 'I'm going to go into that saloon bar and I'm going to call all those guys back in. Then you're going to tell them how we designed this seam. How we intended to ingratiate ourselves with the long-term plan to exploit their friendship. To use them!'
Hymie looked up alarmed. 'I couldn't do that. You can't make me do that!'
'No, that's true, I can't. You're going to have to do it for yourself!'
Hymie sniffed then reached for his handkerchief and wiped his eyes, then blew his nose. 'That's easy then, I can't do it.' He looked up at Peekay. 'Okay, I admit it, I'm a moral coward.' He looked down again, between his legs at the floor. 'It's all right for you, all I am is smart. I can't settle things with a pair of boxing gloves. I can't even remain silent the way you can. My silence means nothing. A silent Jew? What's that? That's an anachronism. It doesn't make me smart. It doesn't make me wise.' He looked up again, the pain showing in his eyes. 'It makes me nothing! I exist because of my fucking mouth and my head and my wit. Now you want to take the only defence I've got away from me. I'm sorry, you're asking too much, Peekay, I can't, I simply can't do it!'
Peekay shook his head. 'Hymie, none of the things you've just said about yourself are true. I wish to Christ you didn't have to carry around all this fucking emotional baggage. But if you can't face the mob, you'd better leave.' Hymie rose. 'What are you going to do?'
'Apologise.'
Hymie grinned weakly. 'Well that's different! I can do that with you.'
Peekay sighed. 'No way, Hymie, it's on your own or not at an.'
'Fuck you, Peekay!' Hymie grabbed up his duffel coat and student's gown which lay on a chair. Crossing the room, he unlatched the doorway leading to the lane and stormed out. Peekay sat very quietly, not even noticing the tears which ran down his cheeks. Christ, it wasn't such a bad thing. No worse than many of their scams at school. Hymie probably didn't even mean it. It had simply seemed like a good idea at the time!
But Peekay knew that somehow they'd come to a crossroads. They'd soon be returning to a country where the blacks were beginning to despair, one in which the dung beetle was demanding too much and returning too little to the worker ants. They were going to be severely tested, their integrity constantly challenged by both sides. Moral cowardice was the easiest way there was to destroy themselves.
Peekay was even beginning to have second thoughts about Oxford. He wasn't at all sure that the law he was being taught, the neat, concise rules laid out for the behaviour of a society was the intellectual ammunition he was going to need when he returned home. He sensed that to win in South Africa, even if it meant alienating both sides, the truth could not be compromised. It was going to require a strength and wisdom well beyond the careful intellectual paths of law taught at this venerable institution.
Oxford was giving him, and he felt sure would continue to give him, a great deal. But what it couldn't give him was what he'd come for. It couldn't teach him a set of rules which he could impose on his alienated society in the hope that it would make things better, like a suddenly discovered cure for a hitherto incurable disease. But he did know that the sort of compromise represented by the Odd-Bodleian fiasco, their scam, was just the way their ideals could be undermined and the aggression it would take to be a spiritual terrorist sapped and eventually dissipated.
The news from South Africa was bad. He'd already heard recently that Sophiatown, together with Cape Town's District Six, the two best-known examples of South Africa's many racially integrated communities, was going to be pulled down in the guise of slum clearance. District Six, which boasted more than a hundred years of mixed-race living, was to be converted into a whites-only community. The words 'terrorist' and 'treason' were increasingly being used by government spokesmen to prepare the whites for the police brutality and white supremacist legislation to come. Government propaganda, carried mainly through the Afrikaner press, was growing increasingly hysterical. The second dance had begun.
They were returning to this. The law he was learning, the sweetly practised ways of civilised men, were going to be useless. Here at Oxford he was learning to play a game, and what he needed to learn
was how to wage a war. It was strawberry mousse, not the diamond-hard intellectual and spiritual training they were going to need to stay alive and help to bring about change in South Africa.
It was this last point which caused Peekay to question his motives in helping to form the Odd Bodleian Society. If Hymie and he were to establish a law practice in which they hoped to win the trust of black people, they would need absolute integrity. The way in which they had gone about planning the Odd Bodleian Society demonstrated clearly that they were not yet to be trusted; it showed that they too had been infected by the virus of contempt, the white disease which was endemic in their homeland.
Peekay wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and walked towards the saloon bar. Pausing at the door he looked for Milstein. Finally he caught the American's eye. He indicated with a jerk of his head that they should all return and then went down the passage way back to the room to await their arrival.
Peekay entered the back room to find Hymie waiting. He was wearing his duffel coat and over it, his gown. He stood slightly hunched up, small and vulnerable. His unmistakably Hebraic nose, strong features and dark, swept-back hair made him look like the Rabbi in Marc Chagall's painting. Peekay's heart went out to his friend. Hymie hadn't looked up as he entered. Peekay remained silent, walking over and standing beside his friend. He nudged Hymie in the ribs. 'Welcome back, shithead!' he said, out of the corner of his mouth.
Hymie waited until they were all seated and then indicated to Peekay that he too should sit. Peekay seated himself at a table in the front of the room opposite him. The room fell silent and Hymie, clearing this throat, began.
'I owe you an apology. I have deceived you and, I believe, used you ungraciously.' Several of the students looked at each other and shrugged, their lips pursed, faces questioning. 'Ja, I can see you don't believe me,' Hymie said quickly. 'But it's true. I haven't harmed you or your reputations. Not yet anyway.-But nevertheless you were being set up.' Hymie ventured a look at Peekay, but his friend had his eyes fixed on the table in front of him and was unaware of his glance. For once in his life Hymie didn't quite know how to continue. If he told them about their intention to open a law practice designed to fight apartheid and explained how he'd hoped to manipulate. them through the Odd Bodleian Society to establish a basis whereby they could be called upon in the name of friendship to help in the years to come it would make him look honourable. They might even conclude that the end justified the means.
If he revealed the second reason, the marvellous 'brains trust' publicity campaign he'd devised for Peekay's world-title bid, they might equally conclude that it sounded like fun and once again he'd be off the hook. Hymie knew that he could probably talk his way out of the predicament he found himself in. But that would be running. He was tired of running. He'd been halfway down the lane when the utter weariness of running from himself had overtaken him. Peekay was right. He had to come clean. He had to stop being scared of the grey shadows which haunted his life.
'The point is, I couldn't give a fuck about any of you! I simply wanted to bind you all into a fraternity so in the years to come I could lean on you in the name of Oxford, the Odd Bodleian Society and the successful outcome of Peekay's world-title fight. What you see in me is a supreme opportunist, a user!'
It was almost as though an electric shock had passed through the room. Suddenly they all understood. A chap named Jamie Jardine whose great grandfather had helped pioneer the China opium trade, stood up, holding his pint high, almost under his chin, his stomach pushed out. He was a fat, ginger sort of chap practically custom designed to be persecuted at any boarding school he might have attended. He was reputed to be a brilliant mathematician and a superb violinist but looked as thick as an ox and at the moment appeared somewhat inebriated.
'I say, that's a bit sniffy, old chap! A bit on the nose!' He possessed a slight lisp and his remark was delivered in a plummy public-school accent which would have been comic anywhere else.
'You're quite right, Jardine. It was contemptible,' Hymie said softly.
Jardine, who had probably never in his life been allowed to be right, stuck his premature paunch out even further at the same time lifting his chin. 'You ought to be ffrashed!' he said pompously.
There was a murmur around the room, even some laughter. 'I say, steady on, Jam Jar!' somebody called. 'You're pissed again. Sit down old chap!'
Peekay rose and turned to face the others in the room. 'We apologise to all of you. I am as much to blame as Hymie.' Peekay lowered his head. 'It was a cynical thing to do. I am deeply ashamed.'
There was the scrape of a chair as Jardine sat heavily. The room became totally, embarrassingly still. Peekay looked up again. 'May I make a suggestion?' Several heads nodded, grateful that he had broken the silence. 'That you carry on with the idea of the Odd Bodleian Society?' He paused and grinned wryly. 'I guess we're all misfits. I want to become a barrister and the world welterweight boxing champion. Frankly, I don't blame people for thinking I'm a bit strange, a bit potty.' Peekay moved over and stood beside Hymie. 'Hymie and I will, of course, resign immediately and you will naturally choose some other cause.'
Milstein jumped up and walked over to where Hymie and Peekay were standing. He turned to address the room. 'Listen you guys, I don't know how you feel, but what I've been listening to is a crock of shit!' Several of the chaps in the room grinned, relieved that the tension had been eased. 'Peekay's right, it's a damn good idea and I, for one, don't want it modified. Friendship isn't something you buy! It's not an obligation obtained through a fraternal past. It's something you feel, something you give willingly, or not at all. I've known Hymie more than a year. If he doesn't give a shit about me then he's made a damn good job of hiding this fact. He's been kind, considerate and generous to me on a number of occasions.' He turned to Peekay. 'With the greatest respect, Peekay, I joined the Odd Bodleians because of him. Personally I find boxing repugnant. On the other hand, I find your determination to prevail an inspiration. I'm sure there are others here who feel the same way.' He paused to take a breath. 'I even think I understand why Hymie acted the way he did.'
He looked about the room. 'I don't suppose I'm the only other Jew here, but I do know what it's like. You can never quite believe a Gentile can possibly like and respect you for who you are. You spend your whole goddamn life compensating. What others seem to be given willingly in comradeship and trust you have to earn, sometimes even by scheming.'
Milstein turned to Peekay. 'You're absolutely right. I've been a misfit all my life, the clever kid nobody liked. A smart-ass with all the answers. In my high-school class book, under my name it said cryptically: "Will go far!" Somebody wrote on my personal copy: "Yes please!'"
The room broke into sudden laughter and Milstein grinned. 'Anyways, I reckon we change nothing. This is the best chance I've had in my whole life to make a few good friends.' Grinning suddenly, he added, 'Whom, by the way, I intend to exploit shamelessly in years to come!' He turned back to Hymie and Peekay, 'And included among my friends is the dynamic duo, The Tadpole Angel and Attila the Rabbi!'
The room erupted into laughter and applause, with a dozen or so enthusiastic 'Hear, hears!' added. Milstein waited until the applause had died before turning to Hymie.
'Well, Mr President, aren't you going to buy your fellow Odd Bodleians an inaugural pint?'
Jam Jar rose unsteadily to his feet. 'Bloody poor show! Ought to be flogged! I'll have a pint of Morrell's special please, Mr President.'
SEVENTEEN
Harriet seldom talked to others about her work although Hymie assured Peekay that it was considered very good.
She'd had an exhibition of her drawings at a small contemporary art gallery in Cambridge, and a critic from the Manchester Guardian had declared 'Miss Clive's charcoal sketches are both impressive and heroic with a surprising strength, which gives promise of good work to come.'
Extrovert in so many
things, Harriet considered it slightly vulgar to discuss her work. But on one occasion, late in the spring term, when Peekay had agreed to model for her as the rider of the larger of the two horses, she'd talked freely about sculpture and what it meant to her. It was almost as though she was prepared to state her philosophy once only, after which the evidence would either speak for itself or remain mute.
'My father builds bridges,' she explained. 'Bridges have to be structurally sound but they can also be beautiful. People don't need to be told when a bridge is beautiful. They don't gradually acquire a taste for the way a bridge looks. They simply know it's beautiful by the way it's a part of the river or ocean landscape, a part of the early morning light and the sunset, the mist and the rain and the water which flows beneath it. Bridges are pieces of sculpture with a purpose, but nonetheless sculpture - and, like bridges, all sculpture should have a purpose.'
Peekay was sitting astride a carpenter's horse over which Harriet had folded the patchwork quilt from her bed to simulate the rounded back of a horse. She'd worked from first light until it grew too dark to see for three weeks in her stable studio and she'd almost completed the shaping of the first horse in the setting of her two horses and a rider. Now she was working on the armature of the rider, bending and shaping the thin steel rods and threading them together with wire to make the beginnings of the torso. She worked with a small pair of bolt cutters and a pair of pliers and her movements were confident and skilful.
'What do you mean by a sculpture having a purpose? Do you mean to celebrate an event, such as a great battle or a general on his horse in the park, or Lord Nelson standing on that dirty great big doric column in Trafalgar Square, that sort of thing?' Peekay asked.
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