I met him while climbing the stairs to my room after the final tutorial for the day which, ironically enough, dealt with the filtering techniques used by astronomers to extract extra-terrestrial radio signals from electrical noise. Standing tall on the wooden landing above, wearing flowing Bedouin black robes that were to become his trademark, thin with an ascetic yet compassionate face, he beamed mystic energy like some kind of Bhagwan lighthouse.
He was the type of person that people would be drawn towards like moths to a flame. A few wise words from the guru and their blockages would clear and spirits would soar from their base chakras through to their crowns and then merge into some kind of sanctified spiritual purity.
But I am what you might call a contrarian and the hairs on the back of my neck rose like I visited the bathroom in the middle of the night and came face to face with a venomous spider malevating from the centre of its sticky web.
What was he doing here? This was sacred territory. This was our very own turret, being the north-western corner of the men’s residence, a football-sized building that covered fully half of the lower campus. Equally sacred was the women’s residence, an architectural mirror which covered the other half, the two grand old buildings modelled on the edifices of Oxbridge and completed by the great depression of the 1930’s. Their ivy-covered walls looked like from a Harry Potter movie. Three and four storeys high, their impregnable solidity batted away with impunity the frigid gales that swept up from the roaring forties of the Atlantic ocean tossing and heaving around the Cape. Each residence housed more than two hundred students, plus a doctor rector in our case who lived in a bats-in-the-belfry house at the far side of the northern quad, complete with a vast green copper roof that shone in the moonlight under the long wintry nights, the doctor available to hand out morning-after pills to any man under his charge who needed to protect a young woman from the consequences of a night of unrestrained passion.
Nearly one hundred windows, each with a vertical sash positioned according to the whim and climatic tolerance of the student housed within, looked out to the East, towards the distant penury of the Cape Flats. Students on the other side of the building had views of the mountain, if they were fortunate, or else the blank walls of the adjacent faculty building if – like me in my first year of residence – they were not.
The university campus was split up the middle by a cascade of granite stairs that conveyed a daily flux of less fortunate students from their comparatively tawdry digs in the adjacent suburbs of Mowbray and Rondebosch to the Greco-Roman columns of Jamieson Hall, the focal point of the university upper campus which is where dutiful learning and occasional inspiration took place and where the gaze of young men was drawn to the knees and parted skirts of young women sitting on the lawns at lunchtime while squirrels bobbed along the boughs of oak trees.
Who was this black-gowned mystic? How did he get past the watchful eyes of the two bulldog gatekeepers that kept guard at the entrance to the residence? What business did he have in the inner sanctum of our corner turret? Was he a Steerpike, come to sew mischief and mayhem, clambering across the walls and roofs in the moonlight like some giant spider with click-clacking knees?
He wasn’t one of us, that’s for sure. Not Tim with his room at the very top, red hair and beard, lean and fit, who led me on twice-weekly runs up the side of the mountain. Not the urbane and gentlemanly Christiaan, whose spoke Afrikaans throughout his childhood and who would have been naturally expected to attend the nearby Stellenbosch university but who decided to study at this outpost of Oxbridge instead. Not the impulsive Stuart with his heart of gold, who converted from rock to classical the very day he first heard Christiaan’s recording of the Chopin Etudes threading the air with beauty. Not Dave, our bedrock of tranquillity, memorising anatomy like crazy for his medicine degree. Not Lance who was good at nothing much except stroking his straggly beard and quoting Nietzsche. Not me, a newcomer straight out of two years of national service where I obeyed orders and quoted my number and saluted officers and marched up and down parade grounds and leopard-crawled through tear gas under barbed wire and jumped out of helicopters and practiced with five different weapons – but, unlike red-haired Dave, never had to shoot anyone or view the dismembered corpses of members of my platoon ambushed up on the border.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“I am the unknowable,” he replied.
His voice was slow, deep and melodious.
“What do you want?”
“I want for nothing.”
“Why are you here then?”
“I am a teacher.”
More like a blood-sucking parasite I swore to myself.
“No, not that.”
“Not what?”
“Not a blood-sucking parasite.”
Fuck this. I stopped in front of my door and turned to face him.
“I don’t care who you think you are. You don’t belong here. Get out.”
“It is you that does not belong. Your ineptness is an insult to the glorious potentiality of infinite accomplishment.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your engineering drawings for example.”
“What about my engineering drawings?”
I loathed engineering drawings. Despite spending endless hours with pencil, protractor and sliding ruler, the outcome was always subject to faint ridicule and I was only barely passing the subject.
“I can help you,” he said simply, having somehow materialised alongside me.
I twisted the brass knob to enter my room. Just fifteen minutes later, an entire semester’s worth of engineering drawings had been rendered complete. My pencil skidded across the paper, rendering in exquisite and perfect detail the morphing of a cubic into a tube, the threaded sections of nuts and bolts, the exploded view of an engine crankshaft complete with counterweights and journals and every other assignment set in the semester course book. I didn’t have to sharpen my pencil once. It was a miracle. Not only the act of accomplishment, but the feeling associated with it, the knowledge that I could from now on do any drawing, any time, in just a minute or two. As precisely and beautifully as Leonardo Da Vinci.
Now for my other university subjects, my piano playing, my squash, my mountain runs, my love life – but at what cost?
How was I to know back then how much I would grow to hate him!
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