In Bloom
By Randa S. Awres.
The Martyrs High School, standing amidst mud and dust a few feet away from a busy construction site, had been beleaguered by a daily nerve-racking clamour since late September. Now it was mid-February. Winter-resident birds on aloof trees sang, unheard. Teachers by late-afternoons, too drained to raise their voices, taught, hardly listened to. The situation was particularly irksome for Mr. Belarus, the policeman-like teacher of Arabic, who had a dark high-end hillbilly moustache and a low tolerance for noise and demonstrated, whenever stimulated _that is, every so often_, misophonic tendencies inside the classroom, the wrathful outcome of which was a strained relationship with a good number of his students.
Among these was Adam Gabel, a sixteen years old Science freshman, sitting now at his shared desk, with his thoughts, vaguely aware of his surroundings. Thinking did not guarantee understanding. This wasn’t something he learned in school, but a realization he came to and couldn’t accept yet, which shouldn’t surprise anyone, for it is not uncommon for the adolescent brain to flout its own limitations, to believe it can grow wings and use them at will. Would that bother anyone? Adam still cared. He was not an out-of-the-box thinker. Being in his light blue, buttoned uniform in the pale white classroom, he was right in the box. But there must be a way out of it, he thought, secretly, and overheard a murmur. Was it a promise? Was it real? The promise of certitude, wagging its head like a tail, at the bottom end of the seemingly infinite range of possible answers that present themselves one after the other, in an unsettling wavelike motion, when one is confronted with existential questions; that was what the school should have prepared him to grab hold of.
For Adam was never sure about anything, not even his identity. He remembered when he asked his father about their ancestors, as the two sauntered deeper into the underground, through the Martyr’s National Museum. Mr. Gabel had a ready answer. “Our grandfathers are not Arabs, but Berbers with obscure origins, about which no native anthropologist had ever written a good book”, he said resolutely. He was a self-assured, middle-aged engineer who had in his youth more interest in history books than in daily newspapers. Adam trusted him, but felt often unready to immediately agree with his opinions, which he nonetheless liked to hear. They ranged from thought-provoking to ridiculous and made him sometimes laugh without understanding why. The reply Mr. Gabel gave when his son asked him what the Algerian writers of previous generations had written about was somewhere in the middle. “Oh boy”, he said, “the truth is what they should’ve told, but writers are liars, and our history knew a few good liars _very good ones, at times, indeed_, the best of whom wrote in French, and made everyone believe that they did so to prove to the French that we are not French; that that was part of their noble self-prescribed mission. Why, you should read their books yourself”, he added, which made Adam look at him. He looked like a man who expected no answers; a man for whom life had no mystery, and the boy wondered whether he would look like him once a grownup. Thoughts about the future came behind a disquieting blur that he believed only time could clear up. Some index finger, too big and impressive not to be followed, would point him in the right direction at the right time, he used to believe. He was fourteen back then.
Now, two years older, quiet and still, waiting for the Arabic teacher to come, Adam felt mislead already. He was aware of a discrepancy, aware that many Algerian people disagreed with his father, that is, regarded themselves as indubitably Arabs; a belief that the Algerian School reinforced by teaching Classical Arabic as a mother tongue. But there he was, a voiceless pupil, promising himself, “I will never speak Fus’ha [1]outside this classroom”. No sane Algerian ever seriously had, except for some media workers and professors, and, on some occasions, politicians, whose jobs or agendas required them to use it.
What about serious writers who could master and write in their first language? If any, excerpts from and references to their most significant works must have been included in Adam’s textbook of Arabic, which however revealed, once examined, that Algerian writers made no major contribution to the world of Arabic Literature. Andalusia, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon; these were the nations that gave birth to some of the leading figures in the field, the examiner could easily conclude. Of course, one could also find a genuine text by Reda Houhou, and two others by the two Maleks, Haddad and Bennabi, offered to the reader translated; originally written in French. A couple of pages were filled with the words of some local professor, and another page had on it an antiquated, riddle-packed poem by a sultan from another age. How was the learner supposed to feel about these? If, apart from serving as reading materials, the purpose behind their selection was to make him feel inspired or nostalgic or proud of his origins, then it would be fair enough to say, considering the expression of ultimate boredom and obtuseness that is almost always visible on the learner’s face while going through any of these texts, that they greatly failed. In Adam’s case, Arabic _which Arabs oft and so proudly referred to as the language of God; seldom as the language of Science_ was simply not the lens through which he felt hardwired to clearly see and understand the world in all its complexity and wonder.
What if his father was right? If literature, through which the learner was supposedly introduced to the language at its finest, could never be free from beguiling falsehoods, then why would the Algerian School make of it a compulsory part of the Science program? The lies and the rhymes, the feelings and the guesses, these were what the brains of keen Humanities students must have been most happy to feed on, but Adam and his classmates were meant to become seekers of facts, seekers of exactitude.
Adam had indeed a preference for numbers over words, was above average at Math and almost convinced he could do better, yet unwilling, for he had no clear idea of what the point of delving into complex Geometry and solving perplexing Algebra equations was, nor had anyone ever explained to him how these could be of practical significance in his everyday life. A life that went on mostly misspent, like precious paint wasted by an untrained artist, poor and devoid of vision, who’d had to make the first unerasable brush strokes on the daunting emptiness of the only available canvas that had been staring back at him for years, pale and unprepared, with no prior sketch on its loosely woven threads nor any hint of how the final painting ought to look like.
Adam looked all around him and saw nothing, nada. The pallid whiteness of the classroom began to fade and in a matter of seconds only its shape remained, square, within a squalor-filled world where only God was believed to be capable of creating masterpieces.
There lived no practicing painters, no craftsmen of any craft, and no strikingly beautiful women, who may have served as muses, under the roofs of the uninviting houses that were stuffed together in the most haphazard fashion, along with a number of markets around the school and a nearby unfinished mosque to form the neighbourhood where Adam grew; a place where people never seemed consciously concerned with the severe lack of art in themselves and their surroundings. The greatest majority deemed art unnecessary, a luxury. The boy, therefore, inevitably influenced by a belief that his own household held without it ever becoming the subject matter of a serious or controversial discussion, never wondered why the Algerian School did not consider providing arts education as a part of its duty.
Thinking of duties, the word rights popped up on the opposite wall, writing itself in red chalk, followed by an ellipsis, indicative of incompletion; indicative of suppression, in reaction to which a question launched its revolt, imposed and repeated itself so distinctly in spite of the unpropitious background where the meaningless echo of idle chatter blended with the tumult-filled air that crept through the open classroom window. Why did he have to learn things that were of little use and little interest to him? That was the question. Flirting with it from a distance, Adam noticed that it didn’t come alone. It had sisters that came together uninvited and had high-pitched voices that sounded teasingly feminine as they crossed his mind, giggling like little haughty brainteasers at his cluelessness. He looked all around, again, as their chuckles grew louder, but no one but himself seemed to hear them. He had no immediate answers to hush them, knew not what to do with them. He would’ve considered grabbing them by the throat and choking them to death, one after the other, had they been tangible, touchable, skin-covered and soft, like real women. Oh, how he shivered at the thought of touching the naked neck of a real woman! It made him nervous.
There were nineteen girls in the classroom, fourteen of whom were headscaved. But he could see the necks of the other five, who wore their hair in a ponytail, in accordance with the school regulations, which, in addition to making of wearing plain, long-sleeved uniforms an obligation that could instigate punishment for both sexes if violated, dedicated a couple of chapters to dictating what girls must not wear. Leggings, tight jeans, short dresses, mini-skirts, sleeveless tops, makeup, hats, earrings, necklaces and all types of wearable accessories. Any female student, if allowed entrance to the establishment while wearing any of these, was sure to face scornful glares and humiliating diatribes that anyone from the gate guardian to the principal believed they had the right to give her.
It was amazing, Adam thought, and at the same time very strange, how none of the school girls who were glared at and humiliated before, because of letting their hair fall loose on their shoulders on some Sundays or having clumps of mascara on their eyelashes or simply trying to look pretty, never dared protesting formally neither against the freedom-stifling school rules nor the improper treatment received as a consequence of girlishly breaching them.
It seemed as though the girls who disrespected the rules believed it to be fair to be disrespected in return, and Adam shuttered at the thought that whatever shy and troubled expression he’d ever glimpsed before on the face of a female classmate who came to school looking good and got scolded, was very likely the outcome, not of her vexation over undeserved mistreatment, but of a heartfelt guilt over misbehaving.
The sudden, nimble movement of Aya’s hands as they tugged on her curly auburn ponytail, upon which his eyes were pensively fixed, disrupted his train of thought. She was sitting up front in the middle row, some three feet ahead of him, with her school supplies neatly arranged on her desk. She turned and muttered some words to the two girls sitting behind her, which made them burst into titters similar in tone to the noise the questions were making inside his head; so similar, in fact, that he began to wonder whether what was trying to occupy his mind were the questions, or the girls themselves.
This wasn’t the first time Adam caught himself looking in Aya’s direction, yet not with dilated pupils or a sparkle of admiration crowding his irises. His half-denied curiosity was dim, and so were her dark-brown eyes whenever they accidentally met his. She had a peculiar-looking face, a beak-like nose and a jawline more chiselled than his; came across as inexplicably pretty when one first saw her.
The times, however, that they spent together as classmates in the box revealed how her nature differed from his, and from what the outfits underneath her school uniform suggested, for she had meekness in her character and demonstrated frequent and unforced readiness for obedience, which accommodated the school authority figures perfectly, but, for some strange reason, it annoyed Adam. It made her look unattractive and dull. The girl was observant and did sometimes ask questions that the teachers found challenging, and therefore she could not be described as bête et disciplinée, like most the other girls were. And yet one could never see her daydreaming in class or discern on her face any external expression of an inner state of deep thought, which Adam found himself immersed into whenever pondering over one of his big questions, which he believed Aya had what it took to ask too, yet misused it, wasted it on academically-designed matters, most of which were obsolete distractions. That annoyed Adam very much.
“Perhaps he won’t come”, cried an excited voice at the back of the classroom as the minute hand of the clock wall drew closer to two.
“No, he’s here”, said another, “I saw his car parked near the principal’s at eight and felt tired.”
“That creep is ill”, added a third, “I bet he spent the night at the school nursery, with that plump new nurse, doin’ poetry”, the voice blurted out, blithe, comical, provoking in the hearers a silly desire to laugh, which most of them gave in to; something they would’ve probably refrained from doing had a supervising figure been present, ready to rebuke.
Of course, compared to the girls’, the boys’ laughter was louder, uninhibited. They obviously did not care about how their spontaneous impulses came across to others, while their female counterparts, who were taught it was improper of them to chortle, only snickered, with most of their wide-open mouths covered with their hands, unsure whether they ought to feel amused by the joke or discomfited by an indecent allusion so brazenly made.
With his focus now on his classmates, whose reactions to different situations had grown predictable and familiar to him, Adam felt it was safe to assume that the girls’ behaviour was mostly the result of a nurtured desire to seem disciplined, while the boys’ was the consequence of an innate desire to be free.
Adam grew particularly conscious of the existence of the latter desire in himself whenever he was inside the classroom. It was a curious matter. He’d pondered over it before, overthought it even, intellectualizing the desire in an attempt to lessen its intensity, but that changed nothing. Overthinking it always led him to the same dead-end, on the walls of which was tagged a spine-chilling conclusion:
“School is a prison within a prison”.
The tag was black with silver highlights, on a light gray, skylike background, and all around it were three-dimensional sentences of a somehow similar length, yet their words were made of letters from different alphabets, strange, mesmerizing and perfect, as though inscribed by the hand of God Himself, who through a double revelation declared being, not Arab, but Multilingual.
It was clearly not a good idea to share such a speculation with the teacher of Islamic Education, who was supposed to be the most knowledgeable about God, and who indeed spoke about Him with much unwaveringness and a tinge of haughtiness, yet never mentioned anything about the amount of languages He could understand and communicate in. She thought God was Arab, and taught the kids in an ineloquent, yet accessible Arabic, and said they ought to feel proud of their “Arab tongue”, and learn, most importantly, to hold it, for it led many to sin and to hell. Dja’hanam, how it petrified her! Even so, one could not be sure whether it was out of godly fear that she repeatedly protested that allocating only two hours per week to learning about a subject as crucial as religion was not enough. Considering the learners schedule, the greatest importance was given to the acquisition of basic science and languages, and that, she believed, was unwise and unfair. The decision-makers were blind, leading the kids astray. Given only two hours weekly, how many could she save? How many?
Adam also believed that he and Aya and all the boys and the girls around him were damned and needed saving, yet from something much less obvious than evil or the devil; something inscrutable and invisible, yet omnipresent. A concept, perhaps. But, he couldn’t name it, and everybody else seemed unaware of its existence. Entrenched, the enemy wasn’t thought of as an enemy; was as a result invincible. Parents gave their kids away to schools, and schools gave the kids education for free. It was not a privilege, but a right. “The corresponding duty for that would be to serve one’s country, once a wage slave”, Adam thought, “So education in Algeria is not really free, nor does it promise freedom, ultimately.”
Thinking and waiting amidst noise resulted in a headache. Thinking of how to stop thinking and failing at figuring out a way to do that, and then thinking of failure, induced a slight urge to vomit. Adam felt like an empty magma chamber of a volcano that needed to spew its ashy emptiness out. He looked at the door, at the windows. There was no way out. He couldn’t move, took a deep breath and then thought of the Algerian President in his wheelchair, and of his obscure government, and of all those government-paid teachers who spoon-fed insipid knowledge to students who often swallowed without digesting, without appetite, only to wound up nauseated on exam days, the best among them ready to throw it up on a double-sheet of paper.
The whole Algerian School was sick. Even during the weekly two-hour Gym class in which students could run and jump and play basketball and things looked good, Adam felt sick.
He knew that they were running in circles and that his friends who were taller and faster than he was and could double-dribble and perform the no-look bounce pass and score with a slam dunk were not destined to become international champions. The Algerian School never promised something that special, and life outside its walls wasn’t a fosterer of big dreams. He and the people around him were very small and the sky and the stars always looked faraway and unreachable, and life, when contemplated, seemed absurd and stupid.
“Hmar”, which in the Algerian dialect means donkey, and is widely used to describe someone as “stupid”, was one of the words that Mr. Belarus, who was now walking apathetically along the school corridor, had no problem using and misusing in the classroom. He knew it was mean and inappropriate, but that never made him feel any ounce of professional guilt. On the contrary, he believed the term was the most clear-cut and effective at giving a quick reality check to whoever deserved it. And the great majority, who weren’t great except in number, but swollen-headed, loose-lipped, ill-mannered and impetuous, deserved it, he thought, and made sure they knew what he thought of them whenever the occasion presented itself. As a natural consequence, they who exhibited such behavioural traits disliked him, and feeling the hate, he disliked them back with palpable and even greater intensity, to the extent that even those who had no reason to harbour dislike for him couldn’t feel at ease in his presence.
Strict was written all over his face, and that morning, having had another squabble with his wife _this time, over overthickening his coffee_, his mood was curmudgeonly and it showed, so much so that when he entered the Science students’ classroom at nine, a cold muteness fell upon them all.
“Sabaa-ho l’khayr ostaadh[2]!” they stood up to greet him a few seconds after what looked like a collective paralysis, halfhearted and ridiculous-sounding to the twenty-first century ear.
Only Adam’s chapped lips and a couple of others uttered no greeting, and the scrawny legs underneath his washed out jeans shivered with frustration for having to stand up and fake respect.
Adam believed he had better ideas of how teachers should treat students, but he never told anyone about that. His opinion didn’t matter. His hands, plunged into his white uniform’s pockets, were clenched into tight fists with his thumbs tucked-in as he watched Mr. Belarus place his old leather-like satchel on his empty desk then slog his way towards the back classroom window.
The window was open onto a despair-generating urban landscape made of an indifferent blue-gray sky backgrounding an incongruous amalgamation of tightly crammed, plain, multi-storeyed residential buildings, many of which were not yet finished. The view was not unfamiliar in the City but its dwellers, most of them coming from the lower middle class and knowing too little about architectural aesthetics and the human right to beauty, did not feel they were in a position to protest against the grotesqueness surrounding them from everywhere. Instead, they themselves, _though the majority could not name the feeling_ felt ugly, which nevertheless made it easier for them to fit in.
For Mr. Belarus, it was the way his students looked at him that made him feel ugly. Their eyes when fixed on him always seemed to carry a never-diminishing amount of disinterest and candid antipathy that he felt incapable of doing anything about. That wasn’t his job, after all, he believed, but the feelings were always there, on both ends, of spitefulness and helplessness, reminding him that he wasn’t the heartless machine that he believed his wife and almost every other stranger thought him to be. It felt safe to act like and come across as a machine but his students’ eyes triggered in him human feelings, unwanted feelings, which he reexperienced whenever he looked at his flaccid face in the mirror. It always made him look away in silent terror after a few seconds of contemplative frowning.
And there it was, again, the reflection of his face, vague and austere, on the glass of the back classroom window. He closed it with a nervous hand and shut the navy-blue curtain firmly. He couldn’t stand his reflection and couldn’t stand the noise and couldn’t stand the light shining on a student or a student looking elsewhere with their focus absorbed into a cheeky sunlit reverie. Still, he tried not to feel anything but the disagreeable, yet more bearable sensation that a chilling winter breeze left on his bulbous nose.
“Close the door but not completely, Belhochet, keep it cracked”, he ordered the girl standing in the left front-row while he headed back to his desk, on which he emptied his satchel before greeting the students back, and finally giving them the head nod that meant, “You may sit down.”
They sat down on their stiff wooden chairs. Adam had a sudden urge to take his and throw it at the window, throw it to break the rules, throw it to break free, but he sat down too, quietly. There were two girls sitting near the window and he did not want to hurt them. He did not want to hurt anybody, not even the teacher. Poor sad little thing. Not a machine, but a cog! Mr. Belarus and all the teachers and all the students were cogs, put there for a purpose they were unaware of, put there to keep a rusty mechanism working. O, the horrible grinding noise, how did the School manage to keep it muffled? Lucky for the kids Mr. Belarus couldn’t hear it! It would have driven him to murder!
“Shhhh…Keep silent and open your textbook”, the teacher demanded, opening his, on some pages of which were some old coffee stains that reminded him of his wife’s awful morning blunder. It made him scowl. It made him look unprofessional to the God watching him; one shouldn’t think of one’s personal life in the workplace. But the scowl persisted.
What was more worthy of being frowned upon, should one ask a frank liberal educationist, would be the teacher’s dependency, even after over a decade of working experience, on that textbook, the contextual content of which the latter would’ve been very likely to find for the most part obsolete had his concern been sparkling the learners’ interest in the subject matter. But Mr. Belarus was himself a sufferer. He was never that much interested neither in the profession of teaching nor in the field of languages and literature. He did not choose to teach Arabic, he had to work for a living, and people said he ought to consider himself blessed for being one of the very few university degree-holders among his peers to get employed.
People called a blessing what was for him a gruelling chore. Nonetheless, he worked as righteously as he possibly could, most of the time. A part of doing the job properly, he believed, was sticking to the textbook. He followed it religiously, had two copies of it; one he kept in his bag, the other in his teacher cupboard, out of cautiousness. The thought of ever having to go without it sent quivers running through his spine, but he never had to, nor had any of his students ever asked him a question that required improvisation. He thanked God for that.
He also thanked God twice as much that the supervisor, an old-school fellow, did not insist on the necessity of using new teaching methods. There was little comfort in one’s comfort zone, let alone in the abyss of unfamiliarity, and the Algerian teacher was never professionally alert enough, always taken by surprise, caught between two worlds; the national and the international; one regressive, the other progressive, digitalized, alienating.
The idea of integrating ICT[3] into the classroom in particular sounded the least appealing to Mr. Belarus, since its implementation would have been at odds with his well-rooted principle of loyalty to the old ways of doing things, not to mention costly _ for one had to sympathize with the government of a country amid financial crisis._ Not once had he exclaimed, in moments of exhaustion or exasperation, “Damn this country and damn this damn life”, without immediately repenting with an “Astaghfirullah[4]”. Why, he was a good man, loved his country and loved its past! Old was good, and good was enough; of that he was convinced, and it would have taken supernatural powers to make him change his mind.
But God the All-powerful, having received thankfulness from Mr. Belarus in all circumstances, for the good and for the bad, decided, it seemed, not to change a thing either, accepted the decent gratitude and gave a decent life in return.
Bism’illah al-Rahman al-Rahim[5], the teacher wrote on the top of the white board with a blue permanent marker, rejoicing silently in the fact that he could act in opposition to a superior figure, to the Algerian Minister of National Education herself, who decided that the name of God had to be omitted from textbooks. So he wrote it on top, where she could not erase it, could not even see it. Or did she have eyes in the classroom? Was there a spy nearby? Mr. Belarus turned back briskly and sent his wary gaze sweeping all around, scanning the faces.
Oh, those faces! They were too many; with two of them absent, they were thirty three, round, square, egglike, pale, reddish, light-brown, clear-skinned, pimple-plagued, freckled, strong-featured, characterless, childlike, shy, scared, unprepared, scary, criminal, horrible and memorable. All of them looked wicked, then, in a blink, all of them looked innocent, except for one face; Adam’s face. It looked guilty, guilty, guilty! For his textbook was closed; in disobedience, was it?
“Gabel!”
Adam, with his chin cupped in his hand and his eyes settled on the framed desert orchid flower painting on the opposite wall, which was the only quality piece of decoration in the classroom, was now visualising a plant dissection process in his head, thinking of how wonderful it would have been if he could study Botany instead of Arabic when the teacher yelled his name. He now looked at Mr. Belarus, startled.
“What are you doing?” the teacher asked, in a threatening tone, “Should I come to open your book for you, and cut your head open with it?”
Cut? Cut! Cut mentally the green succulent petals from the flower stem with a sharp scalpel, with curious delight, that’s what Adam was about to do. But, dear, dear, that cutting of one’s head! Ah, how awful, how hateful the teacher looked and sounded! Nevertheless, as disturbing and violent as it was, the word cut appealed to Adam. It rhymed perfectly with the imaginary operation that he was forced to suspend, and for a moment, for some reason, he thought that there might perhaps be some common interest between him and Mr. Belarus, who was standing still, waiting for his reply.
“What page, Sir?” the student asked with feigned composure. The teacher gave no reply and kept staring at him with budding anger sparking in his eyes. Half-stifled giggles coming out of unidentifiable mouths could be heard. Adam looked right and left, then at the open book of the boy sitting next to him.
“It’s one hundred and thirty”, he heard a gentle voice whispering. It was Aya’s voice, music to his ears. He opened his book with a side-loped smile and found a text by the German writer Sigrid Hunke, excerpted from her book “Allah’s Sun Shines over the West”. But Mr. Belarus was still staring at him, unmoving and livid like the statue of a predator ready to devour its prey.
Adam kept his eyes lowered; running them over the text lines, but was fully aware of the furry-filled vibes directed towards him. It made him feel uneasy and he hoped the teacher would look away.
A quick knock on the door made his hope come true. Before Mr. Belarus could give the door-knocker permission to get in, the guide counsellor, an overweight, middle-aged, conservatively-dressed and headscarved woman entered the classroom carrying a small pile of papers.
“Excuse me Mr. Belarus”, she said smilingly, “I’m afraid I have to take a few minutes of your session time”, and, moving closer to him to show him the papers, she added, “the headmaster said a…achoo!”
Now the statue moved, fidgeted, backed off. The sneezer covered her mouth with her hand apologetically. Some students mirrored her movement, not to burst into punishable laughter, but apparently freer than they were, she could laugh at herself, before she added, “Oh, excuse me, mister, I caught a cold, it seems! A…” — this time she could suppress it — “I was saying, the headmaster said the students’ schedule is so fully charged, so we have no other option but to steal of the teachers’ time, but it’s all for the kids, mister, to give them guidance for their studies orientation.”
Things were explained loudly. A buzz rose among the sitting listeners and Mr. Belarus began to feel nervous, was losing control. They had no other option, the headmaster said, and what could a teacher do? He retreated towards his desk, sat down and said, “No problem”. It came out unnatural, he had difficulty lying. He said Astaghfirullah inwardly. The intruder thanked him and began distributing the papers, which most students received with little enthusiasm. Adam looked at his teacher, felt curiously sorry for him. He then looked at the orientation options from which he had to choose, and felt terribly sorry for himself.
Four lacklustre options: Experimental Sciences, Management and Economy, Mathematics, or again, (Technical) Mathematics; that’s all there was. Looking at the paper, one failed to envision one’s future, could not think clearly, the lines between one’s truest ambitions and other people’s expectations were blurred. One had to take into account what one’s parents wish was, make sure to make them proud and avoid checking the box next to what the society considered a losers’ choice, and then pray God that the Algerian School would approve of the so called student’s first wish.
Adam sighed. He wished the School had had other options, newer horizons to offer; he felt restrained. He looked at Aya, then at the rest of his classmates. She and some of the others had already checked the box next to Experimental Sciences. Like their parents before them, they wanted to become doctors, if not doctors, pharmacists or pilots or bankers or architects or professors, or else obtain any other prestige-tainted title with which came the promise of a decent life; nothing special. There was something horribly wrong, not with these choices, but with their disharmony, existent in the majority of cases, with the learners’ childhood dreams, with their unnurtured talents, with their truest, unconditioned selves.
What were those kids’ brains fed that made them grow so compliant and influenciable and superficial? One could wonder in vain. Adam was half-awake; aware of the limitations, unsure of the way out. He thought of the future, had questions; thought of asking the guide counsellor whether there was an Algerian University where a Science baccalaureate degree holder could study Botany. But he didn’t. He could guess the answer: there wasn’t. There was a stifling negativity in the air; his breath grew heavy, louder. Could Mr. Belarus hear it? Jagged question marks popped into Adam’s head galore. Everybody became invisible. He took a black pen and began to draw question marks on the back of the orientation options’ paper. He drew them big, surrounded by flowers; by orchids and lilies, by jasmines and African violets.
The guide counsellor kept talking till the ten o’clock bell rang. Nothing of what she said caught Adam’s ear; the bell sound was a relief. He packed his things and ran with other kids to the schoolyard for their ten-minute morning break. She thanked the teacher and left. Mr. Belarus said nothing.
In the schoolyard, Adam sat alone on a timber bench, from where he could see a bird land by the flagpole base, behind which were two rose bushes, red and white on green, the same colours of the Algerian national flag. In and out of its still shadow, the bird hopped, and then closer to the blooming roses. Adam followed it with rapt eyes while the hubbub of youthful voices clashed with the cries of his inner confusion.
A group of serious-looking girls walked by the rose bushes and the little bird flew away, frightened. “Aya is prettier than them all”, Adam observed, surprising himself, as he rose and headed towards the school gate. One day she’ll become a doctor, get married and get deflowered. “One day”, he thought, “I’ll learn the names of all the flowers in the world, and perhaps breed some, before ever thinking of becoming a deflowerer.” And he walked away, mumbling:
“One day, one day,
O future doctors,
O future professors,
O future horrors.”
And he walked away, outside the Martyrs High School, where there were several kinds of exquisite, savage flowers, _other than roses_ enough to make a decay-doomed bouquet.
By Randa S. Awres
© 2018 Randa S. Awres All Rights Reserved
[1] Standard Arabic
[2] Good morning Sir, in Arabic.
[3] Information and Communications Technology
[4] What Muslims say to seek forgiveness from God
[5] ‘In the Name of Allah, the Most Beneficent, the Most Merciful
