His star pupil in the front row was shaking her head. She was disagreeing, which irritated the lecturer — to him, the young woman seemed ungrateful.
But the lecturer noticed the clock — it was time to conclude. ‘And that brings me to the end of my last lecture for this academic year,’ said the lecturer with a flourish. ‘Thank you for listening — if you did listen.’
There was a small ripple of laughter.
‘Good luck with your exams, and enjoy the summer,’ he concluded. ‘Thank you.’
A few students applauded, but mostly out of politeness. They all moved to leave while the lecturer went through some administrative points.
The lecturer wanted to catch the foreign woman before she left — she was one of the most gifted students he’d ever taught and was sure to have a brilliant future. But she was already at the door, walking with the boy who’d been sitting beside her. The lecturer would have to find her another time.
Outside, the boy tried to guide the young woman towards a café. She didn’t seem interested. ‘What do you mean “sometimes it’s wrong to do what’s right”?’ she snapped.
‘I’m just saying you have to think through what might happen,’ said the male student. ‘Think of what’s at stake. Think of the consequences, that’s all.’
The girl shook her head. ‘But they’ve been thinking about consequences — the authorities — which is why it’s got so bad…’ She listed off her complaints. The university authorities had invested in ‘evil companies’, like tobacco firms. They refused to cater for vegetarians. They squashed new ideas which proved they were wrong.
The boy accepted that one. ‘OK, yes,’ he said. ‘There are professors here who’ve built up their careers on a single idea, and they don’t like it when someone like you comes along and explains why they’re wrong.’
‘Especially when it’s a woman, and she’s foreign.’
‘I don’t think they’re doing it because you’re a foreign woman,’ replied the boy. ‘And you’re American, which is hardly foreign here.’
‘Half-American.’
The boy shrugged. Her nationality wasn’t the point. ‘Look, Placidia,’ he said. ‘They’ve given you this amazing chance…’
‘While they take chances away from other people?’
‘A chance to change the way people all over the world think about the Roman Empire.’
‘And what will that prove?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘If I do my doctorate here it just means they can control me.’
‘All bureaucracies do that,’ he said. ‘But Placidia, you’ve got a chance to beat the system. From the inside…’ The boy sat down on a limestone wall. He was inviting the girl to sit next to him, but she was too angry.
‘Myles, I’ve actually beaten the system already. I got them to recycle. It was a long campaign, but I managed to beat them.’
‘Yes, well done. But the consequences of what you’re planning now…’
‘Damn the consequences. I’ve got to.’
‘Placidia — they’ll expel you.’
She shrugged. ‘So?’
The young Myles paused before he answered. He said his words slowly: ‘It means we’ll be separated.’
Placidia calmly tipped her head to one side. She was squinting at Myles through the summer sunshine. ‘You could join me back in America.’
‘Do you think that would work?’
‘It’s better than me sucking up to these idiots,’ she said, flicking her head to the lecture halls. ‘I can’t stay here without trying to change them.’ After a few moments, Placidia became slightly calmer. ‘Myles, look. We can be together somehow. Oxford University must have an afterlife.’
Myles barely noticed her leave. He sat on that wall for more than an hour, trying to solve the puzzle: a puzzle about people — just one person. A puzzle that he couldn’t unlock. When he finally moved away, he walked much more slowly than before.
Placidia’s stunt was splashed across all the student papers the following week. It was even picked up by the local TV news. Burning an academic offer letter to protest against the university made good pictures. And Placidia chose to do it at Oxford’s Martyrs’ Memorial, the site where dissidents had once been burnt at the stake for refusing to accept a much earlier diktat relating to Rome. University bureaucrats faced tough questions, and hostile journalists. Placidia had shamed them perfectly.
But as Myles had warned her, she was expelled the same day — charged with obstructing traffic and causing a dangerous fire. Everybody knew the accusations were false, but it was enough for them to withdraw the offer Placidia had already burned.
The university didn’t change because of what she had done. Now, two decades later, Placidia’s dramatic gesture was forgotten by everyone — everybody except Myles. To the world, it meant nothing at all.
The only consequence was that they had been separated.
Damn the consequences.
Thirty-One
Safiq had been born on a farm in northern Chad. When the drought had struck, he had followed his family to Niger. When disease killed off his father’s goats, he moved to Algeria where he earned money by filling petrol cans. Then, as a teenager, he was drawn to Gaddafi’s Libya, to become one of the two million foreign workers doing menial jobs for menial money — although the wage was the highest Safiq had ever been paid. Over three years he managed to save eighty-two dollars. He hoped it would buy him an education, or maybe even a chance to travel to Europe.
Then the war came. The ‘Arab Spring’, people had called it. Safiq understood why the people rebelled against Gaddafi — the man had ruled like a cruel and ruthless emperor. But now everybody was missing the law and order Colonel Gaddafi had brought to the country. People had overthrown him for a better life, yet life was worse.
Seeking civilisation, the rebels had threatened civilisation itself.
The war had been very bad for Safiq. When the government bureaucrat who employed him lost his job, Safiq stopped being paid. Soon he was homeless, too. He sheltered with a family from Sudan he knew from the local vegetable store, who lived in a shack next to the old Roman wall. The wall had been built to keep barbarians out of the ancient empire. Safiq spent his eighty-two dollars as slowly as he could, but it soon dwindled.
With nothing for him in Libya, Safiq began to investigate how he could travel to a better life in Europe. He learned from the Sudanese how most of the unofficial passenger ferries were stopped and diverted to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where migrants were sent back to Africa. Many of these ships were overloaded. Some sank, usually drowning everybody aboard. The rumour was that navies from the rich countries didn’t even bother to rescue Africans from the sea. He wouldn’t go by passenger ferry.
But, by asking questions along the dockside, Safiq did learn of another plan — the ‘fast boat’, they called it. The boat’s captain claimed it had already crossed to Italy several times. Safiq decided it was worth the risk, and paid sixty dollars for a ‘ticket’ — which was just a scrap of paper.
Departing at night, Safiq found himself with thirty other Africans crammed onto a tiny skiff. His hopes rose as the craft sped out to sea, and the lights from the coast of Libya disappeared beneath the horizon. For at least two hours, the boat sped on, into the darkness. He dreamed he could see Europe ahead, in the distance. He was getting close…