Original Prin

by Randy Boyagoda

  “We are pleased to provide all residents of The New U building with access to highly accomplished university teachers and scholars from the Greater Toronto Area. One of these teachers is here to give you preview of the classes you can take after you buy a unit, Rae said.

  Prin went to the barren-faced podium and smiled as he arranged his notes. He surveyed the white-headed crowd, wondering if he could interest them enough to want to buy a condominium. Teaching persecuted Middle-Eastern Christian millennials online might be more rewarding. His first Skype session with the staff from Dragomans was to happen the following week, a few days before Easter. As for his present audience, many were already squinting and leaning forward, even though he hadn’t started lecturing yet.

  When Prin noticed two dark heads bobbing at the back he also squinted, leaned forward, and yes, there it was, that unmistakable sound, one he’d known since childhood. His proud mother was shaking her many, many bangles as she waved at him. Her new Muslim husband was seated beside her, filming him with a shiny silver phone the size of an oven mitt. Why were they here? Were they planning to buy a condo? And did that mean his mother knew about the situation at UFU?

  “Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, and welcome. I am here today to propose to you that beyond the famous seahorses of Michael Ondaatje’s English Patient, marine life more generally is an under-appreciated feature of Canadian literature, just as late-life learning is an under-appreciated feature of modern condominium living…”

  After he finished, Lizzie rushed the podium, Kareem taking pictures of everything as he followed her. He braced for his mother to burst into tears but she had no idea about the circumstances of his talk. She had been simply happy, joyed, over the moon, to have seen a notice about it on her aromatherapist’s Facebook. Not nearly softly enough, save for the fact that most of the people around them were basically deaf, Lizzie asked Prin how he was doing “down there,” gesturing and wincing accordingly. Kareem ally-winced and continued taking pictures.

  Prin said he was fine and then she asked, again very loudly, whether he had been wearing the ultra-slim premium adult diapers she’d been sending him by the case since his surgery. With unprecedented restraint, she did not check his pants. Instead, mindful she had a certain decorum to maintain as Mother of the Professor, she had Kareem squat down and study Prin for evidence. No lines! Praise God! Praise all religions! As he shifted and danced around Kareem’s bobbing head, Prin saw that Wende saw.

  Should he explain?

  Maybe she already knew.

  Did she care?

  He didn’t.

  Did he?

  He didn’t.

  15

  On the Monday of Holy Week, Prin came to campus to have his first Skype conversation with his counterparts in Dragomans. He wasn’t especially keen about this. Lecturing old people involved neither occasional travel to the Middle East nor grading, which was pretty good. He also wanted Rae to have a chance to bring her family over from China. In the days since the lecture, Prin had heard from Wende that the presentation had gone over very well, something she conveyed as much in a series of supremely businesslike notes sent through a secure messaging app called VaultTok. She told Prin that he and Rae would do more of these events between May and November, when the committee was required to make its recommendation about the future of the school. Prin had also heard directly from an older woman who attended his talk in pearls and yoga pants. She was especially taken with Prin’s reflections on the seahorse-shaped penis in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. In fact, she thought the atrium should feature an aquarium filled with them (seahorses).

  The UFU meeting room filled with a happy, tinny melody and the flat-screen on the far wall swirled and stuttered into the image of three light brown people sitting around a small table in a bright, bland room. They were all smiling and waving. Prin smiled and waved back. Wende was supposed to join them but she texted that she was running late, so they began the meeting without her.

  Prin learned that the professors who would be working at the future UFU international campus —known as both FUFU and UFU2—were all Dragoman natives who’d been living in the US, teaching at assorted small, precarious places, and returned home to help found the new institution after the civil war ended. Some had brought their American-born children with them.

  And that snowy rhinoceros at the Toronto Zoo thought her parents were crazy!

  Wende slipped into the room just as they were discussing what kinds of connections students might make between Kafka’s stories and their lives.

  “It’s an interesting question,” Prin said.

  “Is it one you could explore for us sometime?” asked Shahad, one of the fledgling Dragomans professors.

  “Actually, my own area of expertise—”

  “Is very much in line with that,” Wende said.

  “Hi Wende, good to see you again. Are we still thinking of end of July? It’s the perfect time here, just when Ramadan is ending, only it’ll be hotter than Montana, sorry!” said Shahad.

  “Good to see you too, Shahad, and yes, that’s what we’re planning. It’s going to be great,” said Wende.

  “Sorry, what’s going to be great? And how do you know each other?” Prin asked.

  Smiling and nodding at the screen, Wende explained that she used to work with Shahad at her old college in Montana. Just then, Fr. Pat slipped into the room and took over the conversation, making a series of jokes about his golf game, the Middle East, and sand traps. He said he was very, very grateful for their initial support. Immensely grateful. Get-down-on-both-knees grateful.

  “That’s not us, that’s the Minister! Also, sorry, but Wende, is Prin the … Catholic one?” said Shahad.

  “Yes, Prin is one of our Catholic faculty members, but like UFU itself, he is extremely inclusive and diverse,” Fr. Pat said.

  “No reason to be nervous, Padre! Actually, we’ve had Catholics in Dragomans for centuries. Under one of the earlier dictators, it was the Catholics, I’m pretty sure, who took over the Jewish quarter in the capital after the Jews were—”

  “Oh, isn’t that fascinating!” Fr. Pat said.

  “Prin, can you see behind me?” Shahad asked.

  “Yes, why?” Prin asked.

  He could see great blue sky and square, washed-out limestone buildings and surprisingly close black mountains. But why was this Professor Shahad trying to distract him from whatever else was going on here? How did a Skype conversation about curriculum planning lead to, well, what, exactly?

  “Can we get back to curriculum planning?” Prin asked.

  “Of course, in a moment. But this is your Holy Week, yes? So, one of those mountains has a chapel that has something to do with the Passion of the Christ. Not Mel Gibson, the real thing, the, you know, what the Bible says happened. That mountain is said to be part of the story. Something happened there, at the time of the crucifixion,” she said.

  “Really? What’s it called?” Prin said.

  He wondered if the air was heavy and still in there. It must have been. Then what wind blew through? Did it still carry the saving breath of God or now only the smell of gasoline, gun-smoke, beard-sweat?

  “Sorry, I don’t know the details, I’m secular, what you call a ‘none,’ not a nun. Get it?” said Shahad.

  Fr. Pat roared and slapped his knees so hard he bruised his palms on the titanium.

  “Anyway, when you come here at the end of Ramadan to give your lecture on Kafka, we’ll make sure you visit. Totally safe!” Shahad said.

  Wende brushed past him to take control of the keyboard. She ended the call and smiled at Prin. Fr. Pat smiled at Prin, too. He was flanked by smiles.

  “I’m not going over there,” Prin said.

  “Oh, come on, Prin, we all believe in you,” Fr. Pat said.

  “You have to, and I know you want to,” Wende
said.

  Was she doing it on purpose? He remembered the last time she’d said that to him! But then suddenly all of it—the longing and the regret and the regret for the longing—all of it blew away. Prin looked around. He heard a rushing in his ears. He felt a sudden pulling at his chest, a reaching in, a telling he knew not how to tell.

  He looked around.

  Then he heard it. A voice. The Voice.

  Go.

  Go?

  Go.

  Was anyone else hearing this, feeling it? Were they noticing it, about him? But they were smiling the same way, Wende and Fr. Pat, and the screen where that great big black Biblical mountain had just flashed was now just a plain white blank. Something had happened there, long ago.

  Something had happened here, too, just now.

  16

  “I have to go, and you know I don’t want to,” Prin said.

  “Do I know that?” Molly asked.

  The girls were well ahead of them as they walked home from church. It was Holy Thursday and a warm April night in Toronto. Most of the snow had melted into pocky grey-white ridges that lined the sidewalks. The leaves were but small black buds, shaking in the wind. Prin felt clammy all around. The weather was close, he’d been picked to have his feet washed by the priest and had done a poor job of drying off, the adult diaper he was wearing chafed, and also, oh yes, he was lying to his wife. He wanted to go to Dragomans. Or, he had been told.

  The need to go had been with him since the end of the meeting, and throughout Holy Week. Hearing the voice—somehow in his head and not in his head, loud and clear but only to him, Hebrew but he knew what was said—put his heart off-beat, his mind off-kilter. What had happened was … not what, but who. Who. Whom. The memory of it made him hold his breath, wait for someone to notice, someone to say something. He strained, but nothing else had happened since. There was only a ringing in his ears from straining to hear again. He didn’t know how to tell Molly why he wanted to go to Dragomans. How to explain it, without sounding like a madman or a conniving jackass?

  Had he really heard a voice? Really? A voice? No. Worse. Better. No, worse. He’d heard The Voice.

  Yours.

  But wait. That he had to go to Dragomans in July was also plainly true, mundanely true. After the Skype call, Fr. Pat and Wende together explained that the Minister had, unbidden, sent UFU an initial investment to demonstrate just how serious the government was in its desire to create a partnership. The investment reflected the government’s recently taking back control of the country’s oil refineries from a series of militias and Russians, and the initial money was enough, on its own, to pay the professors’ salaries for the summer.

  All that was asked for, in return, was a small show-of-good-faith: that a professor from Toronto come to Dragomans at the end of Ramadan to deliver a lecture and meet with prospective students. Prin was the obvious choice. Why is that? he’d asked. And then, before the ensuing compliments became outright lies, he interrupted Fr. Pat and said he thought faculty salaries were guaranteed for at least a year. Fr. Pat said they were guaranteed for the academic year, September to May. Prin complained that this distinction had never been made publicly and Fr. Pat said he couldn’t believe that in spite of the school’s dire situation, people still weren’t reading his blog.

  “Who else is going?” Molly asked.

  “Wende,” Prin said.

  “I see,” Molly said.

  “But there’s really nothing to worry about there, dear. She’s not why I want to go. Besides, you already told me you’re not concerned,” Prin said.

  “And I’m not,” Molly said.

  “Then what is it?” Prin asked.

  “It’s almost like you want me to be concerned. But we both know why I’m not. You’re a faithful husband, Prin. I know that’s true of your heart and your soul. Your trueness has never been in doubt for me,” Molly said.

  “I’m glad,” Prin said.

  “As for your body, well, because of the cancer—” Molly said.

  “So that’s what you and Wende talked about in the kitchen,” he said.

  “No! And it doesn’t matter what we talked about. She doesn’t matter. Even your not having a salary this summer doesn’t matter. We could make ends meet. We could skip swimming lessons and Gregorian chant camp. We could go to Milwaukee and stay with my family. Whatever. What matters is that you’re thinking of going to a Middle Eastern country that just had a civil war. What matters is that you’ve survived cancer and now you’re willing to risk your life for, for what? For who?”

  “Whom,” he said.

  She walked ahead, catching up with the girls. She didn’t turn back. Sometimes Molly didn’t enjoy being married to an English professor.

  But he wasn’t just being an English professor! He didn’t know how to tell her who, whom. Whom. He had to go there for work, and he wanted to go, yes, for far more than work. And not because he could tell Wende wanted this, for whatever technically-useless-but-still-kind-of-flattering reason, or to help UFU, or even to help Mariam and her fellow Christian orphan Kafka readers, or even, even to visit a chapel that had something to do with the crucifixion. Yes and yes and yes and yes, but he still wanted to go for more than all of that.

  Actually, no, that wasn’t it at all.

  Prin didn’t want to go. It was risky, even dangerous all around. Prin, alone by his own little lights, didn’t see any higher good in going. But that rushing in his ears, that pulling at his chest right after Wende had told him he had to go. That reaching in had left him with a sense of his life suddenly off-beat, off-kilter. And not thrown off by an enlarged and cancerous and then removed prostate or by the swishy spectre of an overseas trip with an ex-girlfriend, but thrown off because this something, this someone, wasn’t his to keep balanced; because deep down it was firm, full, real, and far more than mere candle-flicker and mountain view.

  He didn’t want to go.

  God wanted him to go.

  His phone rang.

  “Prin!” said Kingsley.

  “Yes, Dad?” said Prin.

  “Don’t be late! The tournament begins at 12 pm tomorrow,” said Kingsley.

  “Sorry, Dad, what tournament?” asked Prin.

  The phone was silent for a very long time. Or mostly silent: there was a great deal of bullish steam being blown through an angry old man’s flared nostrils.

  “Oh yes, right, the tournament! Wait, it’s happening on Good Friday?” Prin said.

  “NO! You need to be more ambitious in life, son! If we win the tournament it’s going to be a Great Friday!”

  17

  “Good game,” Prin said.

  “Good game,” his Dad said.

  They fist-bumped each other and their opponents and walked off the court.

  “But next time, when I call the shot—”

  “I let you call the shots, Dad,” Prin said.

  “Good son,” Kingsley said.

  For the last three hours, he’d been playing a game of over-sized ping pong with viciously competitive old men and their flabby sons. Kingsley and Prin were undefeated, so far.

  He was starving, dizzy, and looking for a theologically respectable reason for how he was spending his Good Friday. Elsewhere, right now, Filipinos were volunteering to be nailed to crosses. Italians were dragging crosses across cobblestone. Americans were setting up thick, polished veneration crosses made of hypoallergenic wood. Molly and the girls were baking hot-cross buns for the homeless. Egyptians were deciding whether to venture out and Dragomanians were thinking this was a Pretty Good Friday—they weren’t hiding in mountains or living in camps, at least. And Prin was wandering through a padded gymnasium, his eyes watering from all the antiphlogistine being applied around him.

  How could he make this Friday Good again?

  The only noise he could hear
was a constant tapping—a half-dozen whiffle balls knocking against wooden paddles at long intervals—and also the gasps of men in sudden pain, stretching and lunging, hammering shots and being hammered right back. Prin closed his eyes. Forget a priest tapping on his watchface. This was the sound of the soldiers hammering nails into Christ’s hands and feet as they hung Him on the cross. This day. This very day! Yes, and those gasps were the sound someone made from being hammered onto wood. And the sound of hammering someone onto wood.

  Because how could you do that to any man and not gasp, too?

  “Prin! What the hell! You’re just standing there dreaming,” Kingsley said.

  “Sorry, Dad, it’s just that it’s Good Friday and—”

  “Stop your Jimmy Swaggarting! Let’s get going! I want to watch Kiwi Ken and his son on the far court. If they win we’ll be playing against them in the final,” Kingsley said.

  Prin falls a second time.

  Actually, he just slipped on his own sweat, lunging for a nasty little drop shot, but when he went down, he stayed down. Kingsley lashed his son’s back with his racket. Then he stalked off the court. His mother came out of nowhere and kneeled beside him, pressing a perfumed cloth to his face. She was wearing a T-shirt that read

  DON’T WORRY, BEYONCÉ

  Lizzie shoved half a Snickers bar into his gasping mouth. He chewed and batted her concerned hands away from his gym shorts.

  “Shhh. Eat. I know it’s Good Friday, son, and I know you’re fasting. Molly texted me that she was worried, so I came to bring you food. You didn’t pull anything … down there … did you? Are you wearing a sport diaper? No one needs to know about this. Chew, chew, good boy. I told Kareem to stop filming when I came to you,” said Lizzie.

  “Hey! Kingsley! Mate, get junior’s nursey mumsy off the court! Tell her she can breast-feed him during the trophy presentation. To us. It’s still our serve. 11-4. Let’s go!” said Kiwi Ken.