sulphur

As the applause died down Professor Weismann made his way to the podium. Everybody had enjoyed a fine lunch from which he’d sneaked away citing his age, disability and the hope that he’d be able to find a toilet close enough to the dining room. Outside the sun beat down and students gambled on it staying warm by striping almost naked and lying sprawled on the newly cut grass around the pond. Professor Weisman was content to unknot his tie a little and undo the top button his crisp white shirt and sit in the shade with the statue of Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom for company. The microphone had been adjusted to just the right height and a wooden chair, more like a throne, was positioned in such a way to be hidden from the audience in the shadows outside the spotlights, but close enough if he should need it. He cleared his throat. That usually worked and ensured a gradual silence. His notes were in front of him. They’d been typed up by his secretary Marjory, but he liked to digest them more fully and he’d made adjustments, cramped annotations in black pen that no one but he could read and only sometimes. When he carefully arranged the folio sheets on the wooden stand he knew that he couldn’t use them He scanned his audience sitting in semi-circular tiers waiting to hear the same old baloney and turned briefly towards other members of the faculty, looking for a friend, or even an ally, but they looked as they always did mildly disgusted and waiting for him to finish before he'd started.

‘My friends,’ began Professor Weismann, ’everything you’ve been taught about counselling is nonsense.’ There was a collective intake of breath, a few chortles and shifting of feet in the auditorium. ‘Everything I have taught you is nonsense.’ Young faces looked up at him like shiny new pennies. ‘Let me tell you something you already know. People differ in idiosyncratic ways. It’s our job to say that it’s okay to be yourself as long as you are somebody else. The stories that we tell ourselves are the people we are. Let me take you way, way back.

When people said to me “William, what did you do during the war?” I always laughed and said simply, “Boring old munitions”. I am dead and dying and Terzin is another life. The truth is some setbacks cannot be resolved, marked out as positive, a good thing. When your father, mother, sisters and brothers are killed, yet you live that is not a good thing. Daily we paid in full for that mercy and the knowledge that it is better to be a coward. The chimneys were quick to make snowbroth of the brave. After the camps life is much simpler. It is a life without fear of annihilation. I want you to think about that for a minute—annihilation. Professor Weismann looked left and right out into the auditorium. A notebook fell from the ornate table behind him like a gunshot and he turned to look at the staff.

‘Let me tell you something a very wise man said: “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know”. Don’t dwell on things. That’s what I’d say to you. And for God sake don’t talk about them. These things will come to you soon enough in the smell of a railway station, the taste of cabbage, the cold wind that cuts through your bones as you wait for a bus. Yet my life is easy, blessed even and I’m blabbering on about things that are best left unsaid. Why is that you might ask yourself?’

‘The answer my friends is I’m asking you not to waste your life on a treatment that has little more than a placebo effect and at its worse makes the other person sick and you their jailer. Scores of studies prove just that point. Let me tell you what happens when your consciousness shuts down bit by bit. You can see the smallest thing, a bug, a bit of bread, a spoon, a piece of frayed string to keep up your trousers. Watch towers, barbed wire, the taste of blood and smell of death in your eyes and mouth and coating your skin go unnoticed. Memory is not neutral, perhaps not even neuronal, but the brain is the only intermediary we’ve got. It protects us from ourselves. What it doesn’t need is some jackass poking and prodding and thinking he knows best. Sometimes silence is not an option. Do something with your life, grow flowers, plant trees, and make the world a better place.

‘Of course I was sick and now I’m well. All good stories we tell ourselves begin with that kind of premise. I hope I’ve given you something to think about. We’re thinking beings. That’s what differentiates us from other animals. The soldier that liberated me wasn’t quite sure what I was. I for my part wasn’t quite sure what he was. I was weak, very weak, a discarded crumpled thing lying on the cold ground. I could only look at his shiny black boots. For the longest time I looked at those black boots. I couldn’t lift my head and even if I could I wouldn’t have. Fear does that to you. You cannot look a fellow human being in the face.

“What are you?” I tried to whisper, but I’d no saliva, could not speak, but in any case I was to learn he didn’t understand German. His knees creaked as he bent down and he smelt so clean. It’s difficult to describe how clean he smelt unless you’re nostrils have known only the smell of decay and death. He prodded me with his finger.

‘“Are you alive?” he asked.’

‘ “Ya,” I replied.

‘Somewhere between us we’d worked out the language of humanity.’

Professor Weismann’s head slumped. He fell heavily into the chair behind him as applause began to ring round the auditorium.