A spy! Vikram Griffiths repeats, clearing his gravelly throat.
But Georg, to my left, is wry. Georg has an immense capacity to be composed and to be wry, about which much, very much could be said. On the other hand, who would want to take this quality away from him? Who would not envy him? To Vikram’s Welsh-English, Georg replies in German-Italian. How does Vikram know there is a spy? he asks. Has he found a cigarette packet with a radio transmitter inside? A bug taped under the collar of his dog? Or a false moustache? Has some top-secret document gone missing?
But at this point both Colin and Dimitra come down the aisle to join us, for with the kind of postures Vikram has been assuming, bending down, loudly whispering, scratching in his sideburns, adjusting his cheaply framed glasses always askew on a somehow exotic stubbornness, a nervous intellectual charm, set off and thus enhanced by this shaggy, nondescript outdoors sort of dog he has, and smells of — with all this posturing it is perfectly obvious that the trip’s first serious confabulation has begun, the first council of war. So now there are three people plus the animal crowded into the aisle where it meets the big back seat and of course the girl on the seat in front of me turns round again, kneeling, and she smiles, and noticing her Vikram Griffiths ruffles her jet-dark hair with great familiarity, much as he does with his dog, and calls her Sneaky and asks her how she’s doin', without a 'g', because it ought to be said in Vikram’s defence that he knows the names of all the students, whereas I can never remember any of them, and if he can’t remember their names, he gives them nicknames like Sneaky, or Sly, or Boris, so it’s as if he knew their names, and understandably this makes him popular, the way clowns are popular, and renowned for finishing sadly and badly.
I’m all right, thank you, Dottor Griffiths, the girl says, in English. Her strong chin dimples in embarrassment when she speaks, but with his fingers scratching at the back of his neck, Vikram has already turned away. He is saying excitedly: Dimitra, Dimitra, come here then, you tell them.
Dimitra is a Greek woman. She begins to explain. In her role of presidente of our union it was obviously her task to inform the head of the language faculty that we had voted to abstain from our duties for a period of three days in order to take our case to Europe. Right?
Dimitra has this manner of interrupting herself to demand consent, as if always ready to hear an unvoiced chorus of bloody-minded rejection. Her most characteristic gesture in our long, tedious and above all contentious meetings is to offer her resignation so that she can then be begged to withdraw it, arid she invariably is begged to withdraw it, not because any of us loves her or wants her to stay or even remotely likes her, but because none of us is sufficiently dedicated to the notions of justice and solidarity we all talk about to take upon ourselves the onerous job of president, excepting of course Vikram Griffiths, who cannot be president, because too conflictual and too crazy, but who nevertheless, despite holding no official position in the union at all, is effectively our leader anyway. Or at least, the only person who does anything.
Right? Dimitra demands.
Georg quickly agrees that of course Dimitra had to go and see Professor Ermani.
It was my job, she adds, never satisfied with mere consent. I had to go and see him. Otherwise we might have put ourselves in a position of illegality
Quite, Vikram says, rubbing his sideburns. God save us from illegality. And having been to prison twice and proud of it, he winks, which Dimitra chooses not to notice.
So, while waiting for Professor Ermani, she says, to finish a phone-call in his office, she, Dimitra, noticed a memorandum on his desk on which she managed to read, albeit upside down and in her second language, the results of the vote taken only the previous day and only after a long and fraught debate (in which Dimitra herself had actually opposed Griffiths” plan, or at least its timing, had said that it would be provocative and dangerous and all in all sheer folly to go to Europe during term-time). Crucially, she had been able to see on Professor Ermani’s memorandum that the names of those who had voted for and against were clearly indicated.
Which can only mean, Vikram Griffiths butts in, that some shit at the meeting went straight to Gauleiter Ermani afterwards to report. There is clearly a traitor among us, a spy.
Who is it? He covers both nostrils with thumb and forefinger and sucks hard to clear his sinuses.
Who was at the meeting? Colin asks in what is a Brummie Italian now, and he gives me a little wink of hello from above a facile moustache, too neatly trimmed, because Colin is “the person with whom I occasionally indulge in tottie-talk, or pork-talk as he calls it, a supremely blokish recounting of our various amorous adventures.
Everybody was at the meeting, Dimitra says, and even anybody who wasn’t could have found out who voted for what, within a name or two, from the others.
The point is, Vikram Griffiths announces — and it’s not hard to imagine, I tell myself, that he is actually quite happy to be away from the difficult separation proceedings with his second wife, the acrimonious child-custody battle with his first, and above all happy, I reflect, to find himself involved in a drama — our struggle with the University of Milan — where he is inconfutably on the side of justice and morality, since in the end this is what all of us long for, is it not, to be engaged in a drama where we know what we want and what we’re doing, and are quite sure we are in the right and can feel a strong sense of purpose and identity and self-esteem and heroism even. How else explain, I ask myself, all the religious crusades and wars pursued up to and far beyond the point of madness, the environmental movements and concern for animal welfare, not to mention all the novels about the same? How else explain this enthusiasm for Europe? — The point is, Vikram says, that from now on we will have to behave as if they knew everything we are doing and saying. And well have to find out who it is. He grins determinedly, digging his fingers into his dog’s fur: It’s going to be a witch hunt.