For the unfortunate few who have given most of their love
or placed most of their reliance somewhere in school, or who know that the material
in the careers room is not for them, the end of their schooldays means exile
into cold, draughty solitude.
So
it was, in emotional terms, for Midax Rale. But not only for him. It was
likewise true of one other man, a very tall sour young man who, some years
later, was stalking up the road to a re-union at Ganeshan Secondary.
But
this man was no Midax-type, no cloudy dreamer.
On the contrary, he knew exactly what to do about the cold feeling of
post-school exile.
Play
life’s game – and accept the coldness.
Even
the trees lining the avenue had grown and changed, and the very sunlight of
late afternoon appeared altered from how it used to shine, now a pale dribble
through time-bent boughs onto the asphalt drive. No use trying to recapture the
life of yesterday.
Nevertheless
the tall man plodded on. Not for love of what could never be brought back, but
through a business-like care for his destiny, he wanted to find some
serviceable relics of his dead-and-gone schooldays, and wring what answers he
could from them.
At
first he had no luck. A small crowd of parents and ex-pupils gave him negative
replies as he circulated amongst them.
“Lantti
Trewiw? Sorry, don’t know what became of him…” “Davlr Braze? Sorry, don’t
remember anything about him…”
Continuing,
the tall man began to be recognized. Several had seen his picture in the news.
“Hey,
you see who that is?” “Who, that beanpole? Can’t say he rings any bells.” “Don’t
you follow politics at all?” “Well, if he’s a politician, he seems a
soft-treading one.”
Indeed
the tall man was not out to make friends of everyone in sight, not this evening
at any rate. He was simply concerned to blend in with the (to him) rather sad
atmosphere, while trying (and largely failing) to get news of the schoolmates
he had known.
“Maybe
you remember Jolld Tontrar?” he asked.
“No,
sorry,” replied a woman who looked almost middle-aged. She thought some more,
for she wanted to be helpful. Then her face lit up. “Ah, wait! He became a
lawyer and married Tarlpa Hemm, I think.”
“Ah.”
“But
you’ve missed him by a year. He turned up at last year’s do – the one and only
time I’ve seen him here. Now I think he’s moved away somewhere, he and Tarlpa…
or maybe I’m thinking of someone else…”
“And
Lantti Trewiw?”
“He’s
not here either. So, you knew Jolld? So did I, I now remember. He and I were in
the same year, but –” and now the woman sounded surprised – “we weren’t in your
year, were we? I remember you now, Waretik! You were in the year before us.”
“True,”
admitted the tall man, oddly pleased that she remembered him out of her own
life, rather than from seeing his picture in the papers. “I did actually turn
up at last year’s reunion, where I tried to track down my classmates, and
mostly failed. This time I’m on the trail of the people in the year after mine.
While at school I did get to know quite a few of them – Davlr, Jolld, Tarlpa,
Lantti… and then there was that dreamboat Midax Rale; what about him?”
“Oh,
he came a few times, then gave up. Maybe he lost interest after Pjerl Lhared
moved away to do her accountancy training. And when she married Lantti, maybe
he heard about that too, and lost heart… such a drip about her, Midax was. But
he’s still living somewhere nearby; I see him sometimes, in the shopping centre
or the library occasionally. We hardly exchange a word, though. Mooning Midax
was never a chum of mine. He always gave the impression of being hurt because
one wasn’t giving him something; goodness knows what.”
“And
Stid Orpen? Sennwa Axan?”
“Sennwa
moved to the west coast… Stid went into the Civil Service…”
“Interesting…”
and the conversation went on, flash-lighting shreds of the diaspora from the
classroom into the world.
Due
to that divergent spill, re-unions would get harder to arrange with every
passing year. In the minds of achievers, curiosity about one’s old classmates
is not a strong enough emotion to overcome pressure of work and the
inconveniences of time and distance. Easier not to bother. Those who do attend
re-unions are, increasingly, the lesser achievers, people who have remained
local, and even these tend to lose heart after a while.
Waretik
nevertheless continued to gather anecdotes during the course of the evening. It
was second nature to him to accumulate a dossier on as many schoolmates as he
could, to build up a life-picture of as many people as possible, especially
those who (like himself) had made
some use of the careers room. He lined them up in his formidable brain, drawing
their profiles, one by one, into cool, sardonic summaries.
Davlr Braze: This fellow, by the time he left
school, must have possessed a vision of how to get on in the world. A vision
which seemed to him to combine the administrative with the creative. Controls
of processes; phone-calls and memoranda; keeping track of initiatives and of
manufactures; the efficiency of movements, the changing of hands, variously
lifting, carrying, organizing to make sure that plenty of whatever it was
continued to happen – the name for it was business
studies, a kind of economic dance which could never seem boring to those
who looked at it as Davlr did. Accordingly he plunged into it and soon became
the youngest-ever assistant manager in the giant Larmonn Photo Company.
Jolld Tontrar: He, likewise, was inspired by a web
of such scope as to encompass all the doings of life. In his case it was
composed of the vast tangle of official do’s and don’t’s, can’s and can’t’s,
accumulated by society. It all beckoned him towards the infinite promise of a
brass nameplate – the revelation promised in a careers-room leaflet entitled
“Your Future as a Lawyer”. Primed with enthusiasm, he set to work. He chose the
relevant college, attended the relevant course and came out the other side with
his fingers curled triumphantly round the scroll which bore his ticket to
success. A scroll soon to be framed and hung on the wall inside his office: Jolld
Tontrar, Qualified Attorney, Dranl Law School.
Tarlpa Hemm: She found her own route to
fulfilment by way of those climatic and social factors which impel human beings
to wear clothes. Although the human body remained generally constant in shape,
designers could compensate for this limitation by endless disguises and
distortions of that shape. This activity was called “fashion”. Tarlpa’s one
idea became to land a job either as a model or as personal assistant to one of
the great fashion designers. Too normal in shape to achieve the first, she
managed, as a reward for her single-mindedness, to attain the second objective.
Ensconced in this position she was able to take a much firmer line with Jolld
Tontrar, who kept phoning her at work. “Look, Jolld, I’m busy! Until
five-thirty I don’t exist, right?” – and she would slam the receiver down. Jolld
had his uses, but if he got too far out of line there were plenty of other fish
in the sea. Life, indeed, was a glittering succession of stimuli, of rolls of
cash and streams of colour: new faces at each week-end fling, new swirls on the
night-club dance-floor scene. Tarlpa was quite ready to admit that she was not
able to consider existence in any other way. For - subtract all the lively
stuff and what was left? Slabs of silence; one might as well be dead.
Lantti Trewiw: He employed the most direct
approach of all. In his hunt for perfect bliss he went straight for the
substance which must provide it – the fluid organism, the protean prey, the
fascinating, amoeboid, tentacle-sprouting quarry called Money.
Once
you had caught and tamed that – it
didn’t much matter how – you could command it to turn itself into the key to
any lock.
Thus
you could grab the treasures of society. The small price you had to pay for
this great reward (Lantti knew) was that you must use up the golden years of
your twenties in a focussed manner. You must not digress in dreamy wonderment, not attend useless humane college-courses, not indulge time-consuming yens for learning useless languages, for
instance. Lantti had some natural curiosity, but he had to put it under
restraint. But so what? It was easy to pay the price, considering the luscious
reward! Besides, it’s obvious that you can’t have everything at once. Lantti
therefore had the sense to master the details of his uncle’s Agribusiness, a
high-tech farming enterprise which allowed its directors to be lounge-lizards
rather than tractor-drivers. It was a good bet, and it paid off. By the age of
thirty-five Lantti was rich, with a big house and two cars, a beautiful wife
and a capacity for trading-in any of these on favourable terms.
…By
the end of the evening Waretik Thanth had listened to a pile of tittle-tattle
and had “read between the lines” to glean enough about the small lives of his
former friends. Knowledge of any people, no matter how obscure, served his
purpose. Now a bigger school awaited him: the world and its pressures; the
interactions and merciless exposures of the public arena, in which obscurity
and a crushed ego were the penalties of failure, and the sky was the limit to
reward.
Politics
would be Waretik’s life.
>>>next chapter>>>