I'll have to pay for the beer, W. says at the pub. He no longer carries money, he says. He's like the queen.
W. ponders why I always make my lips – my great fat lips – into a funnel before I take a sip. No doubt it's all the better to pour it down, pint after pint: a funnel for the two pints I always neck at the bar before I sit down, and for the dregs of pints other people leave …
Anyway, he has his story, W. tells me. He has a story so good that to tell it is to betray it. He pauses for effect. 'I got my job back', he says. He got it back! I gasp. How is that possible? How, when the college had taken such measures to sack him? A legal technicality, W. says. That's what saved him, which is ironic, because it was through a legal technicality that they tried to get rid of him.
But hadn't the college managment had him marched off campus? Didn't the college police enter his classroom and lead him away? He'd been seditious, they'd told him. He'd been stirring up the students with all that Marx. It wasn't on the syllabus. He was in breach of contract. But he'd said nothing directly about staff cuts and course cuts, W. told them. He'd said nothing at all about managerial incompetence.
But they suspected him regardless of leading the students on their protests. The students led themselves he told them. They festooned a banner across the humanities building and sat out on the lawn in peaceful protest, drinking wine and cooking lunch on disposable barbecues with no help from him.
Still, W. was becoming a folk hero, management worried. Hadn't he spoken up to management in the redundancy meetings? Hadn't others followed his example? Colleagues shook his hand in office corridors. They thanked him for his courage, which had in turn stoked their courage. And meanwhile, outside, the sky open above them, the students drank wine on the lawn.
It was a glorious time, W. says. Management had been quiet for a few days, holding meetings off campus. Rumours were the College president was close to resignation. But then the order came, and W. was led away from his classroom and banned from the campus. Life went back to normal. It was as if nothing happened. Students went to their lectures. Sacked staff stuffed their books and pot plants into their cars and drove away.
And then? He was permitted to appeal, W. says. He came along to the appeals meeting with the mightiest of documents. His defence was Talmudic, he thought. He'd gone through the college laws like holy writ. He'd gone through its financies. And then he'd made graphs, he says. He'd made charts and diagrams to expose the real reason for staff redundancies. But none of that impressed them.
The Union, meanwhile, had seized upon some technicality in their attempt to dismiss him, W. says. They explained their case to management, who then disappeared into a huddle. And then? Full reinstatement, W. says. It was to be as if nothing happened. And that's how it was, as if nothing happened.
It's a marvellous story, I agree. Marvellous and terrible, W. says. Still, W. wonders whether he wouldn't have been better off sacked. Whether he shouldn't have been forced to leave it all behind, the whole system.
We need to leave, W. says. We need to depart. What's that line Appelfeld has his characters say? 'After all, I'm not an insect'. We're not insects, W. says.
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