Fadia arrived as one of the freshers in October the following year, but because of the way the undergraduate History degree is structured at Oxford and how the College organized its teaching, I had little to do with her until the year after that, by which time I had been promoted to a full professorship (although I had not been particularly confident about my application), and so returned to teaching with a renewed sense of purpose.
When I began seeing her in weekly tutorials, she reminded me, for the first time in what was then no more than our passing acquaintance, of an Egyptian boy I had known in my freshman year at Georgetown. Though I was not friends with him, we lived in the same dormitory and I often saw him at events since we were both in the School of Foreign Service, to which I had foolishly committed myself, thinking I might have a career in diplomacy or government. I have forgotten the boy’s name, perhaps it was Amir, but I remember being astonished that an Egyptian could be blond, as he was, and unsettled in my own mind by the curiosity I felt about him. I think we never spoke, but on several occasions I found excuses to sit next to him in classes and lectures, or behind him on the bus that ran from Georgetown to Dupont Circle, and on one occasion, in the middle of a warm spring day, I remember sitting next to him in a lecture and being conscious of his odor, which was not unpleasant, but rather a mix of cologne and the smell of his body, an aroma unlike anything I had sensed in the past and yet there was something curiously familiar about it, almost familial. When Fadia began appearing in my tutorials, I caught that same scent, a note that was recognizable without my being able to place the association.
At first, Fadia was a serious if unexceptional student. Her work was skillful and her arguments efficient rather than sparked with genius in a student body that often produced undergraduates with genuine intellectual fire. In the summer before her final undergraduate year, something happened, as it often does to young women and men as they push themselves over that last cusp of youth and into adulthood. When she returned to College in October she had become another person, as if at last her body had grown into its features. The occasional arrogance had vanished and in its place was a more attractive self-assurance, as though over the space of a few months she had become the noblewoman she always seemed to know she was. Alongside this I also noticed the emergence of a furtiveness or anxiety I had not observed in the past. In tutorials she always sat in the same chair and would glance out the window every time there was a flutter of movement, even if it was nothing more than a pigeon. When I saw her around College or in the libraries, or simply on the streets of Oxford, coming in and out of clothing stores on Cornmarket or standing in line for a sandwich in the Covered Market, she was often looking over her shoulder, as though she feared someone might be following her. I began to suspect she had suffered a trauma over the holidays but did not feel we were close enough for me to ask what might have happened. On occasion she came unprepared to class and called in sick more than once, although on those very days of illness I sometimes saw her in town, looking fine. So while she became physically more impressive her academic standing slipped. And yet, because of my history with Jayanti, or perhaps because of some finer quality I sensed in Fadia, I did not chivvy her to work harder.
Then, one dark November afternoon, she stayed behind after a group class to ask if I would support her application to read for a two-year MPhil.
‘I’m not convinced postgraduate studies are the right choice for you, Fadia. I don’t want to be patronizing, but you don’t seem like the graduate school type. It requires a huge amount of self-direction.’
‘You don’t understand, Professor. I have to do this.’
From her tone and the panicked expression on her face I understood there was more than learning at stake.
‘Is this a way of staying?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘I imagined you might go into a job immediately after finishing.’
She looked shocked, as though a ‘job’ were so pedestrian a proposition as to be unthinkable.
‘Is it so surprising I might be interested in the subject?’
‘You’ve not demonstrated much in the way of enthusiasm. Your work is competent, but I confess I have never been astonished by it.’
‘You’re saying I’m a bad student?’
‘Not at all. You’ve been a very good student up until the last few weeks, but you don’t make yourself noticed.’
‘Maybe I will make myself noticed from now on. Will you write me a reference?’
She reminded me what courses she had taken and explained that, in fact, her interests were in the area of my own research, Germany after the Second World War.
‘Your work on the Stasi has been very illuminating for me,’ she said, with an earnestness that kept it from sounding like empty flattery. ‘It makes me think about Egypt differently.’
‘That’s nice of you to say.’
‘But your book on East German cinema — that is what has inspired my own thinking. I have become fascinated by leftwing European terror movements. You know, Forças Populares, the Brigate Rosse, but especially Baader-Meinhof.’ Though her tone remained serious, almost static, I liked to think I saw a spark of passion — perhaps no more than intellectual inspiration. ‘I want to think about terror and media, or the relationship between the media and leftwing terror.’
‘Quite a lot of work has already been done in that field.’
‘But what do you think of Fassbinder’s films? Have you seen The Third Generation? It’s so absurd and yet there’s something about the alienating quality of its form that speaks directly to the concerns of the Red Army Faction. What were they trying to do if not make West German consumer society see the artifice of its own construction, just as Fassbinder tries to make his viewers experience the artifice of the otherwise realist film they are viewing by terrorizing their ears through his use of that horrible non-diegetic soundtrack?’
‘I haven’t seen it in a long time, but yes, what you say sounds sensible. You don’t have to settle on a topic right away, of course, there will be time for that, assuming you’re accepted for the MPhil. Are you thinking of a doctorate?’
‘If the Faculty will let me.’
‘And this is really what you want?’
‘You think because I’m a girl—’
‘I don’t think anything of the kind. But I hadn’t realized you were so eager.’
‘Does it surprise you so much? Did you think I was some lazy Muslim girl who was just going to marry a sheik and go live in a penthouse in Dubai?’
‘I would never think that. But neither did I want to presume to know.’
‘I’m an atheist, Professor O’Keefe. Culturally mixed up. Half-Muslim, half-Catholic.’