Kampus
Page 31
“Who are you?” the man repeated. He was only a young fellow, younger than Gavin, but he seemed older because he loomed above him.
“What are you doing up there?” Gavin asked. “Where is everybody?”
“Really,” the young man asked, “we must get straight immediately who is asking the questions here. The question is: ‘Who are you?"’
“I'm just a student,” Gavin said.
“You don't look like a student,” the man on top of the kiosk said, “and certainly not like ‘just a student.'”
“That's what I am anyway—a transfer student,” Gavin said. “I'm new.”
“Why aren't you dressed properly?” The man on top of the kiosk was dressed in an old army jacket over a ragged shirt and a pair of cutoff jeans.
“Now, wait a minute,” Gavin said impatiently. “I've answered two of your questions; now answer one of mine.”
“Well,” the other said sulkily, “if that's the only way we're going to get anywhere.”
“Where is everybody?” Gavin asked.
“They'll be along,” the young man said quickly. “Now, why aren't you dressed properly?”
Gavin looked down. His student workman's shirt and peasant trousers had been lost along the way. Now he wore a pair of trousers, shoes and socks, a shirt, and a sweater for warmth. It all was neat and improper, and Gavin didn't know why he had been so careless. “This is the way people dress where I come from.”
“Where do you come from?”
“Unfair,” Gavin said. “I get to ask a question. What are you doing up there?”
“Looking down,” the young man said. “Now, where do you come from?”
“Oh, east,” Gavin said.
“Everything's east of here. Where in the east?”
“It isn't any of your business, but I was enrolled in a university in Kansas. I was expelled. And I've been making my way here ever since.”
“You're not dressed right.”
“That's not a question.”
“That's true. And you're still not dressed like a student.”
“What do clothes matter?” Gavin asked. Once he might have felt the way the fellow did who sat on a kiosk and smoked a marijuana cigarette and asked stupid questions, but now it all seemed silly and unimportant.
“We've had a lot of undercover kops around,” the young man said defensively. “You know—infiltrators, agents provocateur. Are you one?”
“If I were one, wouldn't I do a better job of disguise?” Gavin asked impatiently.
“Maybe that's what they'd like us to think,” the man on the kiosk said half-shrewdly.
“Nonsense,” Gavin said. “The basic principle of infiltration is not to call attention to yourself.”
“That may be,” the other said, taking a drag on his cigarette. “You want a hit?”
“No, thanks.” Gavin was turning away again. He thought he heard sounds in the distance.
“I've got other stuff,” the man on the kiosk said eagerly. “Listen: what I got in my right hand will make you feel so tall you'll have snow in your ears.”
“Forget it,” Gavin said.
“Listen: what I got in my left hand will make you feel so small you can play billiards with molecules.”
“Shove it,” Gavin said.
“And you say you're a student!” the man on the kiosk said scornfully.
Gavin heard a quiet rumble. When he looked back at the kiosk, the man was gone. That was it, he thought; the fellow was a pusher, and there was some kind of elevator inside the kiosk leading to underground tunnels. The whole campus probably was a burrow for underground activity.
The distant sounds had turned into voices and musical instruments. He couldn't make out what kind of instruments or what the voices were saying.
He moved forward and looked back the way he had come, through the Sather Gate and down the plaza past Ludwig's Fountain toward the gates in the outer wall. They were wide open now, and beyond them he could see a glimmer of movement against the distant background of weary shacks.
Something poked Gavin in the middle of the back.
He turned around slowly. A Kampuskop was standing behind him, an electric nightstick in his hand still extended toward Gavin. The kop was dressed in midnight black with silver starbursts on his breast pockets and on the epaulets of his shirt. He was a big man, muscular in the shoulders and the jaw; he had a big nose, mean little eyes, and a machine pistol in a black holster at his hip. He poked Gavin in the stomach with the nightstick. It had enough of a charge to make Gavin's skin prickle. It was a warning.
“You a student?” the Kampuskop said in a hard, negligent voice that told Gavin whatever he replied didn't matter. He had rubber shoes on his feet; Gavin didn't know whether that was for insulation or so he could sneak up on people.
“Yes,” Gavin said.
“You don't look like a student,” the kop said. “You're older. You ain't dressed right. Where's your ID?”
“I just arrived,” Gavin said. “I haven't had a chance to enroll.”
The nightstick prodded Gavin's stomach again. The charge had been turned up. It hurt now. “Outside,” the kop said. “You can enroll tomorrow.”
“I don't have anywhere to go,” Gavin protested.
Again the nightstick thrust at him. Gavin backed up to avoid it. “You people always got someplace to go. You can't stay here. Not without a ID. This is the chief's wedding day, and nobody stays around without he's a student.”
The nightstick poked at him again. Gavin yielded. “Okay. I'm going.”
He moved reluctantly toward the open gates through which he had come. He glanced back once. The kop still was standing on the other side of Sather Gate. He still was watching him.
The music was louder now. The instruments he had heard faintly now clearly were guitars. The voices were singing something about Jesus. In the gathering darkness Gavin could see the first row of marchers in a procession. They were carrying guitars. Farther back, Gavin could see signs and torches held aloft.
He moved toward the outer gates. “We are the Children of Jesus,” the procession sang. “He knows what you're thinking of. He saves us when he pleases. We are the Children of Love.”
Gavin stopped on the other side of the open gates, concealing himself behind the pillar that held one of the gates. He peered around the corner. The distant kop still was standing beyond Sather Gate, but he had been joined now by another kop, who stood on the opposite side of the bridge over Strawberry Creek. They were like two dark giants waiting for him. They were like no Kampuskops he had ever seen; there was nothing comic or ridiculous about them.
He stooped and removed his shoes and socks, stuffing them behind the pillar. He took off his sweater, even though the evening was cool, and put it on top of the shoes. He tore off his shirt sleeves at the elbow. He would have torn the trousers, too, but the cloth was too tough.
The parade had reached the gate. “Come join the Children of Jesus,” the marchers sang. “You'll find what you're dreaming of. He won't deny what will please us. Come join the Children of Love.”
The marchers all were young people, student types, dressed in blue jeans and little else. The men wore codpieces laced over their genitals, and the girls wore nothing above the waist. Their breasts bobbed and swung with the rhythm of their marching, and in some places along the parade people were making love as they marched.
The torches flared along the line, filling the air with the odor of pine resin and oil. Gavin could read a couple of the signs now. One said: “Make love, not frustrations.” Another said: “Sexual repression is the origin of all evil.” Another: “I am love,” signed “God.” And another, just behind it: “I am God,” signed “Love.”
Gavin started. “Jenny!” he shouted, and plunged into the middle of the procession. But when he reached the young woman he had thought he recognized, she bore only a superficial resemblance to his lost love. She was carrying a sign. He nodded and smiled. She smiled, and her br
easts nodded.
“We are the Children of Jesus,” he sang as the procession passed between Sproul and the Student Center. “He knows what you're thinking of,” he sang as he passed under Sather Gate. “He saves us when he pleases,” he sang as he passed the Kampuskops. He was crouching, and they didn't see him. “We are the Children of Love.”
They passed Wheeler on the right, and he thought of slipping out of the procession. But by the time he had made up his mind, they had reached the front of Doe Library and the procession was parting on either side of a dark mound. When Gavin reached the mound, he saw that it was made up of books, thousands of books. A hill of them was growing into a mountain as more books were brought by dark figures moving out of Doe Library.
As the Children of Jesus passed the heaping books, the torches were thrust into the hill or cast upon it. For a few moments, like wisdom battling ignorance, the books resisted the flames, and then someone brought forward a can and began tossing gouts of liquid on the pile. Wherever the fluid lit, fire burst upward. The smell of gasoline reached Gavin, and then burning paper and black smoke. In a minute or two the little mountain was burning briskly, and shadows like demons were dancing on the nearby facades of Doe and California.
Gavin edged away from the fire and its revealing light. As if by the same kind of mysterious signal that sends lemmings to the sea, students began arriving to join the Children of Jesus and those who had been at the scene accumulating books. They thronged into the plaza between Doe Library and California Hall, coming from the East Gate and the North Gate and the West Entrance, by all the walkways and streets that led to the center of the campus, and Gavin faded back into them, feeling secure again in their numbers. But even anonymous in the crowd, he still felt alone; he felt more alone than he had felt earlier when there had been no one around. He realized that he no longer felt like a student. He had grown old. He no longer belonged. He felt himself standing apart, holding himself away from them, judging them.
They were animals, he thought, led by their instincts, acting only in immediate response to their environments, doing whatever felt good. They were moths to the flame, bees to the mating dance, wolves to the kill, sharks to the scent of blood, vultures to the carrion. They were anarchists destroying their human heritage for the sport of it. The Professor would have called them barbarians and despised them.
He stood apart, in the midst of them, in the shadows of California, and watched students trundling carts full of books out of the entrance of the library. Other students appeared in tall windows above the entrance, pushing splintered sheets of plywood out of their way, and tossed armloads of books onto the steps below for others to gather and add to the fire.
Gavin saw a girl dressed in white tossing books, one by one, upon the flames, and he called out, “Jenny!” But no one heard, and before he could move, she was gone, and he realized that he was seeing Jenny everywhere.
Gavin was not immune to the excitement around him. He felt the raw edge of emotion exposed, like nerve endings flayed out; he felt the tumescent weight of events impending. Something vital and significant was about to happen, was happening, and he was there to share in it.
It was the old fever of campus life: youth and excitement and something always about to happen. There would never be anything like it, never again. For him, though he recognized it, it was all past, and he sensed it filtered through a dull concern for consequence and a philosophy of behavior. While he had not been watching, he had grown old and cautious; and he saw history now as a battleground between anarchy and tyranny, with reasonable people trapped always between them as one seemed victorious for a while and then yielded to the other.
The flames leaped high on the plaza. Students formed a giant circle and danced around the fire, first one way and then suddenly reversing directions, spilling laughing students to the ground.
Gavin remembered another fire much like this, and he thought: It is not so far from Colorado to California, from child to youth. What binds them together is power: the power of fire, the first great invention of man, fire the great civilizer, fire the tenderizer, fire the protector, fire the god, fire the destroyer ... The destroyer was what men worshipped, the raw, brutal power of fire, the roaring, churning fury of flame that can turn wood and paper and wisdom and the world itself into heat and smoke and ashes...
The Professor might have said that, Gavin thought. But he hadn't. Gavin had thought it himself, and he realized at that moment how the Professor had changed him. He was not simply himself plus the Professor; the very act of learning, of imbibing the Professor's ideas, had changed Gavin. Ideas are not neutral; they are not tools to be used by any hand. First men shape tools, and then tools shape man. Ideas contain values, and a man absorbs one with the other.
Gavin knew then who had won. He thought he had been the victor, the man in control of the situation, but the Professor had won. Gavin wondered if the Professor had known it all along, if he had come willingly, if he had allowed himself to be kidnapped, if he had known what would happen.
Gavin shook his head. The important matter was that he had changed. He no longer belonged here with the barbarians, and he could not throw in with the tyrants. He turned to find a way out of the crowd, but at that moment someone shouted over a bullhorn, “On to the wedding! On to the Greek Theater!”
The cry was picked up elsewhere in the great crowd, and the ocean of humanity began to surge, with Gavin in the middle of it. Whirlpools and eddies formed, until the tide began to flow finally up the long beach of the campus toward the hill, shaped and controlled by the buildings that rose from the land like stone monuments to a long-forgotten race.
With the smell of burning books still acrid in his nose and thick upon his clothes, Gavin was swept along helplessly. He concentrated only on keeping his feet under him as the sea of students parted for Sather Tower and then reunited in front of Le Conte to flow irresistibly up University Drive past Campbell and Physical Sciences to the East Gate and Gayley Road. It poured into the Greek Theater.
Thrust despite himself onto a stone bench near the front of the vast, semicircular amphitheater, Gavin pondered escape and then settled back to enjoy the spectacle. He knew the place now. Here, on an anniversary of Pearl Harbor, President Kerr had ordered a special university meeting “to inaugurate a new era of freedom under law.” But they had been only words to disguise the old tyranny, and Mario Savio had immediately pierced the deception. Perhaps he had sat near where Gavin now sat. He had rushed to the microphone to announce a new revelation, and he had been dragged away by the fascist kops.
Like everything else on this fabulous campus, this place lived in legend; it had been blessed by the revelations of inspired prophets and sanctified by their blood.
The great crowd of students—some twenty thousand of them—had filled all the curved stone benches and the aisles and the hillside above the theater. The students waited impatiently in the darkness; they were packed in so tightly that no one could move, and the only light anywhere, except for the ruddy reflection from the low clouds of the blazing books in front of Doe, were the flickering of lighted matches and the glowing tips of cigarettes.
Behind him Gavin heard a girl say, “Are you sure this is where the wedding is going to be?”
Another girl said, “That's what I heard. But who's sure of anything these days?”
In front of Gavin a fellow said, “I don't know why I come to these things. I can't stand crowds.”
“You wouldn't want to miss all the excitement,” a girl said.
To his left a girl said, “My horoscope says that I shouldn't even be out tonight.”
A young man said, “My sign is in ascendance all month. I can't do anything wrong. Just stay with me.”
“Nothing wrong, eh?” the girl replied. “That's what you think! Take your hand off my leg!” But a moment later she laughed to show she was only joking.
Gavin turned to the student on his right. “What's the issue here these days?”
Gavin shrugged and let his speech fall into the old patterns of inarticulateness. “I mean,what's goin’ on?”
“What's the matter? You new or something?”
“Yeah,” Gavin said. “What's the routine? Who's in charge?”
“You talking about politics?”
“Yeah,” Gavin said.
“I don't know nothing about politics,” the young man said. He leaned over to talk to the person on his right, as if to put as much distance as possible between himself and Gavin.
Gavin turned to the brown-haired girl on his left. “How come there ain't no politics?” he asked.
The girl looked at him, then around at her neighbors, and then put her head close to Gavin's. “They expelled the student president and dissolved student government,” she said in a confidential voice.
“Who did?”
“The Kampuskops. Who else?” She looked at him as if deciding that appearances were deceptive. “Why are you asking questions all the time?”
“I'm new,” Gavin said apologetically.
“I'll bet you are,” she said suspiciously. She made a decision. “Anyway, who cares about campus politics? We're into more important things.”
“Like what?”
She turned away coldly. “Like telling strangers to shove it.”
Gavin turned to the girls behind him. “Isn't anybody going to protest the way student government was broken up?”
They stared at him. A brunette with stringy hair said, “Why should they? What has student government ever done for us?”
“But ... this is Berkeley!” Gavin protested. “This is the campus! Students run the campus!”
“Not any more,” the other girl said. She had dark hair and a distant look in her brown eyes. “Who cares? The stars are the only things that matter.”
“Yeah,” her companion agreed. “The stars.”
Gavin leaned forward and spoke to the young man in front of him. He had shaved his head and had painted it yellow. He was saying one syllable over and over again, like an incantation to ward off demons. “Om. Om.”