5
Strategies
– 1 –
As soon as the examiner opens the door, the distinctly pale-skinned candidate slips through the crowd of other candidates who are clogging up the doorway. He walks with a spring in his step and takes the first empty chair he finds. The desks are made of light green formica with wooden sides. The tops are covered in pen-ink graffiti and scored by knives; two of the etched phrases are obscene. The din (made by the grating of desks and chairs and the chitchat) increases as the candidates walk in; the examiner asks them to please (it is a drawn-out, imperious “please”) sit down without making a sound. The candidates fleetingly pay him some attention; the noise dips for a few seconds, but soon returns to its previous intense level. The examiner turns his back on them: he erases the sentences that were left from the class before from the blackboard and turns around (the noise dips again), and when they are all seated, he walks down from the dais, goes over to the door, shuts it, wipes off the chalk-dust from his hands (a gesture that silences the last whisperers), and calls out two surnames. Two candidates get up from their desks and walk over to him. He gives each of them a pile of stapled sets of paper, which they begin to distribute. As they proceed to put a set on each desk, the pupils strain their eyes trying to read the questions (they are in very small print), but nobody attempts to pull the set of papers towards him or glance deviously at the top sheet. They don’t touch anything until they’re all given out and the examiner says that they can start. Almost fifty sets of paper rustle in unison around the room. The distinctly pale-skinned candidate takes a deep breath, pulls his set across his desktop so they’re right in front of him, and calmly starts to read. He has spent the weekend cramming, and now that the examination has finally begun, he feels a mixture of exhaustion and disinterest. He’s spent weeks preparing for this exam, which will determine whether he can progress or not. Years ago he’d have said it was a crucial exam, but over time he has learned that all exams are crucial, to the point that an exam that wasn’t crucial wouldn’t seem authentic. He has just read the five questions and is feeling relaxed. He knows four of the answers perfectly. Consequently, he can already conclude that he has passed, at the very least. He suddenly realizes he’s been tapping on his desktop for quite some time: ratatatat, ratatatat, ratatatat. He glances at the other candidates and sees how stressed they all seem. Most are writing in a rush, as if they were going to run out of time, filling one sheet after another, their faces blank. Two are thinking really intensely. That’s obvious because they’re frowning and staring at the ceiling; what’s more, one of them is chewing the end of his ballpoint. Another has lowered his head in order to drop out of the examiner’s field of vision and say something to the boy in the next desk: he moves his lips, slowly vocalizing a word, but the student can’t hear; he responds by putting his bottom lip over his top lip and shrugging his shoulders. The whisperer silently repeats the word time and again. They carry on like that until the examiner begins to walk up and down the aisles between the three rows of desks. The one stooping down straightens his back, reacting over-seriously and suspiciously. As if he too might be caught in the act, the distinctly pale-skinned candidate also straightens and finally decides to get started. He takes the top off his pen and writes his name. He begins to answer the first question, in clear, even writing, one word flowing after another, in straight, compact lines. When he’s finished the first, he starts on the second. But after writing a few lines he feels faint again and stops writing. He is tired. The last few days of intense studying can’t have tired him that much; perhaps he’s exhausted by the succession of exams he’s had to face, year after year, ever since he was a child . . . If only he could see an end to it all . . . But after this exam there will be another and then another. He knows that the preparation requires an effort, that one never knows enough, that one can never properly show how much one knows, whether it’s enough or not. However, this knowledge doesn’t stop him from wondering whether there will ever be a final exam. He starts to write again, reluctantly. He knows he will pass, as he always does. Everyone always does. Not because the examiners are generous. They are harsh; nevertheless, he hasn’t known (and nobody he has known has ever known) anyone to fail. Everyone passes, always: because everyone revises conscientiously. The fact everyone has always passed means that the panicking over possible failure is curious, at the very least. Has anyone ever failed? And what’s the point of sitting for the exams, if everyone always passes? Because if exams didn’t exist, people would stop revising as carefully as they currently do?
The question he’s been considering over the last few exams buzzes around his head again: What if he decided to fail on purpose? He’s increasingly sure that nothing really serious would happen. If he passed yet again, tomorrow he’d simply start the routine all over again: store away the books he’s just studied, open up a new set, and memorize thousands of pages. The walls of his house are covered in books. At first he put them on shelves. Then he ran out of walls and began to pile them up on tables, under his bed, on top of his bed. Now there were books everywhere. It would be a mistake to get rid of the oldest to make space for new ones, because the new exams often referred to explanations you could only find in books you had studied years earlier as a child preparing for the first exams. Four or five exams ago he realized that he couldn’t remember anything about his first exam; the first exam he remembers taking only took place one or two years ago.
Why continue sitting for exams? In fact, what use are they or will they ever be? Wouldn’t it be best to give them up now? Just as he can’t remember his first exams, he’s also forgotten their ultimate goal, beyond turning yourself into a short-lived examiner. He knows that the examiners (who have overcome the hurdle of the exams he’s now facing) also sit for exams, but doesn’t know why. In order to turn into an (also short-lived?) examiner of examiners? He’s not even sure he’ll know if he becomes an examiner. Just as he didn’t know, when he started as a child, that the first objective (the one he thinks he’s on the brink of now) is to become an examiner. He began, he thinks he can recall, because his parents (like absolutely all parents) wanted him to study. But his parents died years ago in a biplane accident, one afternoon when he was sitting for an exam. He tries to recompose the fragments of his childhood and adolescence that he remembers. Has anything he studied ever interested him?
He’s bored by the idea he might pass yet again. He’s been taking exams and passing without fail for years. Why does he need to show the examiner that he can answer four out of five questions? And how many exams has the examiner had to pass to become one? The very fact there are examiners must prove that there is a final exam. However, can that really be true? Perhaps things are rather more complicated (or more straightforward) than he imagines? Is he close to that final exam, or are there still years to go? And the only way he can challenge his string of passes is, in his opinion, by failing. During the last few exams he’s had a strong suspicion that his fellow candidates have or have had the idea that’s been buzzing around his head of late: give the wrong answers. He can’t possibly be the only one who finds passing one exam after another (eternally) to be quite stupid. Initially his pulse races, but soon he grows in confidence: He answers the questions one by one, in clear, even writing, one word flowing after the other, in straight, compact lines—incorrectly, on purpose. When he finishes, he will get up from his desk, hand his papers to the examiner, and (this is what he’s thinking to himself) will fail.