Among the letters Joel Bialystock found on his desk at the university¹ that Monday morning was a circular announcing a pay-raise, as follows:

From the University Council, University Offices Lecturers (all races): salary increase X£150 p.a. X£50 p.a.

Joel, who was a lecturer and a white one, responded to this information merely by scoring a heavy line under “whites only.” He evinced no satisfaction at his own liberal increase in salary, and felt none. His study, which he shared with Negraponti, lecturer in Italian, and Crouch, the only non-white junior lecturer in the university, was at that hour solely his domain. Noises through the wall to the left indicated that Swannepoel was in occupation, and through the wall to the right that one of its two inmates was likewise. Joel, inclining his ear to the right and ascertaining that it was Dorffman, shouted “Dave!” peremptorily through the wall. Dorffman, junior lecturer with Crouch in Joel's department, appeared immediately—chubby, sociable and truculent—saying, “You're going to enter that hundred-and-fifty on your tax returns as unearned income, I hope.”

Joel said, “I'm tabling a motion about this scum for the Faculty Meeting on Friday.”

“What scum?”

Joel stuck his index finger on the scored line.

“Oh,” Dorffman exhibited mild surprise, “I didn't notice.”

“It'll comprise a demand for a circularized apology from Council for the insult to every member of Faculty, and reimbursement pronto for any junior lecturer victimized by the discriminatory clause,” Joel said briskly. “I have to have two seconders.”

“I'll second,” Dorffman volunteered at once, “God knows, Crouch deserves a raise.”

“It isn't Crouch I'm lobbying for,” Joel snapped, “he'd never make a murmur himself.”

“He's a sensible lad,” Dorffman asserted emphatically.

“A sensible sycophant,” Joel corrected him with venom. “I'll get Negraponti as the other seconder.” He seized his books, “That's my class screaming downstairs,” and ran.

Negraponti had fully assimilated the contents of the circular, and accurately anticipated Joel's reaction before they met that morning. He said, before Joel had had time to emit one righteous curse, “This is a government bonus, comrade. It is not in the gift of the University Council.”

The devotion which Joel stealthily extended to Negraponti—otherwise exclusively the preserve of persons unambiguously committed to the revolution—had its source in their initial encounter two years earlier when, on his first day at the university, halfway across the threshhold of the study assigned to him, he had been stayed by sounds of groaning within.

“I was indulging in unquiet reminiscence,” the fat, sandy, stricken occupant explained apologetically, “excuse me.” Then he rose and took Joel's hand. “Negraponti,” he introduced himself, “welcome!” and he scrutinized his co-tenant through slits of eyes so tortured that Joel warmed to him immediately. “You extraordinarily resemble my daddy,” he said, still holding Joel's hand, “an exceedingly cruel man.”

“You don't resemble mine,” Joel withdrew his hand, “an exceedingly kind man.”

“He is a great hero nevertheless,” Negraponti assured Joel. “I respect his courage and his honesty. Politically he is a great man. The Fascists stripped him of everything, but bent him never. I despise him however as a human being.”

“Why?” Joel asked, momentarily shelving his newly-acquired dogma that as politics is the principal business of man, so the political being effectively characterizes the whole being.

“Because he despises me. He despises me as a poet and as a man. He has persecuted me since birth. In the war, you know, we had nothing, no shoes. My daddy sent me to school in my mother's shoes. They had high heels—not so high,” he qualified with a regard for justice that Joel was later to recognize as organic, “but high.”

“But once you were in the street, out of sight, why didn't you take them off?”

“I was not that sort of boy. I dared not. Besides, it is because of those shoes that I am a poet.” The slits beneath his eyebrows suddenly opened. The eyes were amazing—great hazel torches, and his whole lifetime was in them. His face now appeared very formidable. “And yours? You say yours is an exceedingly kind man.”

“He never ate me,” Joel answered with difficulty. “He's innocent,” he heard himself say, and was startled by the discovery of a truth simultaneously with its utterance. This, too, Joel was subsequently to note as characteristic of Negraponti—to elicit the accurate response, with the peculiar lightness of heart that wontedly accompanies it—his chief gift, born of his chief and abiding virtue of attention.

_____________

Joel Crumpled the offending circular. “This comes to us from Council though,” he said in answer to Negraponti. “Six months ago we were circularized by them with a fulsome protest against any racial discrimination imposed on the university by the government. Don't imagine that I'm suggesting we tell the government they can keep their pay-raise. All I'm maintaining is that Council should have protested automatically, and independently equalized the raise for all junior lecturers.”

“Poor Crouch,” Negraponti sighed.

“It's got nothing to do with Crouch,” Joel's voice rose in irritation, “it doesn't matter if there isn't a solitary non-white teacher in the university, they've no business to let it pass.”

“Here he will never be upgraded,” Negraponti continued reflectively. “He refused the offer of a Chair at the Coloured university, did you know that?”

“Even Crouch has his pride,” Joel replied with deliberate intent to castigate Negraponti for his implicit commendation with his own contempt for the colleague in question. For in mutely rejecting identification with the non-white cause, in tacitly denying his oppression, Crouch—as a black man in South Africa—sinned irredeemably in Joel's sight, incomparably more deeply than a white man similarly indifferent to justice. “Better a little fish in a big pond. . . . Crouch cares about his academic prestige and that's all. All his expediency's concentrated in that. It's the one thing he takes seriously. There's nothing and nobody he wouldn't ditch to secure his academic rating—but his standards are the international ones.”

Negraponti said mildly, “He seems to have a great loyalty to his mother. Once he said there was nothing and nobody she would not sacrifice for him. Would he ditch her, do you think?”

“He shares his mother's single-mindedness,” Joel replied shamelessly, invulnerable now at times to the incandescent eyes, “and the same object of idolatry.”

At the outset of his acquaintance with Crouch, Joel, characteristically premature, had demanded his credentials. “What political organization do you belong to?”

“I've belonged to several in my time.”

“And now? Where do you stand now?”

“I sit. I'm a fence-sitter.”

“So you're content to be a non-citizen? You enjoy your subjection?”

“I don't go searching for it.”

Joel choked. “A normally-sighted non-white doesn't have to search.”

“You'd be surprised how many do.”

“I'm not talking about the non-white privileged.”

“They're all I know.”

“There are twelve million others.”

“I've no more access to them than you have.”

“I have no choice. You choose to isolate yourself.”

“That's right.”

“Comes the revolution you and your kind'll be the first to swing.”

“They'll be too busy hanging each other.”

Thereafter, from Joel's point of view, there was no possibility of any exchange between them but what civility necessitated, for it was not merely irrelevant politically to consider Crouch further: the irrelevance was absolute—there was no more of Crouch to consider. What was galling, however, was that Crouch, though manifestly a scab, behaved with authority and competence in his work, and without obsequiousness in his business with his colleagues, while the luck which alone had won him preferment simultaneously abetted his desertion.

No black man in South Africa more determinedly took the malevolence of the white population for granted than did Joel. The white man was guilty until proved innocent; the black man innocent until, like Crouch, proved guilty; but where there was any promise of extended social intercourse all candidates were subject to the one touchstone. Thus Joel interrogated Negraponti, as he did Crouch, on first acquaintance. “I have arrived at my position,” Negraponti replied, “I have been on a journey through the question. I will answer you in one month's time.”

“Why not now?”

“If Swannepoel next door were to ask me your question, I would reply at once unhesitatingly, since I know that all he wishes to establish is that I am or am not a Communist. I understand that for you this is a question of my soul, and you will assess my total worth on the basis of my answer. Swannepoel is not similarly concerned: he would as willingly seek to trap a student as he would me. It is filling the trap, not the quality of the trapped, he is interested in.” He regarded Joel with irresistibly candid and affectionate curiosity, “But perhaps it is not untimely for me to ask you so significant a question. What brings you to this country?” He added hurriedly, “I respect, of course, you understand, your formal ideological motive; but that is an effect. It is the cause I wish to discern.”

“That is the cause.” Joel's voice and face closed for the attack. But as none came, he added, “I'm investing. I'm under an obligation to invest. I owe a debt. I'm the man in the parable—the one with the five talents. I have to make them ten.”

“And of what are these five talents constituted?” Negraponti asked with enormous interest.

“Knowledge, of a kind. Knowledge of subjection. That's my capital. That's the legacy they've left me, my tribe.”

“So you invest it abroad. You make it viable. The international of subjection.”

“Yes, yes, exactly.” Joel was delighted.

“But this debt you owe your people, this debt of honor,” Negraponti visibly strained for accuracy, “you now seek to repay it in foreign currency.” His shoulders reared and he flung out his arms. “But your coin is not legal tender among them. They cannot use it.”

“Oh, that's just what my father would say if he had the words,” Joel grimaced with frustration and disappointment. “They're not my people unless all the others are my people too,” he said flatly. “I won't live by exclusion.”

“Then no people are your people,” Negraponti abandoned all hope, palms up. “There is no group which will not demand your exclusive loyalty, including,” he paused portentously, “the political group which you now seek to enter. Ignore that, and you will be an outsider everywhere.”

“But not forever,” Joel assured him with total faith. “Eventually they'll change, all of them—they'll authorize my commerce.”

“And if you have children,” Negraponti continued as if Joel had not spoken.

“They'll inherit my cause,” Joel cut in.

“Yours and your daddy's,” Negraponti predicted gloomily. “You will suffocate them.”

_____________

In the meantime it became evident to Joel that Negraponti's moral zeal—even though he questioned Joel's preoccupation without ever betraying a lurking prejudice behind his enlightened front—did not make its major residence in the area of the politics of revolution. This Negraponti articulated a month later.

“Regarding political commitment,” he said, his eyes in slits, “I will not undertake to care more for an idea than for the persons in whose name the idea is celebrated. You call that a cliché” (the very second Joel opened his mouth to call it a cliché, “but you yourself have told me that no more than a year ago you called the class struggle a cliché. Now you understand the meaning of the words, the words live. Similarly what I say is no cliché I will not be engaged, here or elsewhere, because I will not betray my experience. Nothing I say to you, I know that, can make my reasons valid in your sight. It will be necessary for you to go through it yourself.”

“Some have, and stayed the pace.”

“The question is not whether you have the endurance—I already know you have—it is whether you are fitted for it.”

“I'm fitted for it,” Joel stated a fact.

“You are not fitted for it,” Negraponti also stated a fact. He turned his golden searchlights on Joel. “The liberatory politician—whether he loves men or hates them is of no political consequence—must know in his head and in his blood that the capacity of all groups for depravity and excellence is identical. You think you know this. You do not know it. It should be painful for you that the comrades of the revolution—excepting two, three whites—must inevitably here be blacks only. Nevertheless you prefer it. You declare war on exclusiveness. Hee-hee-hee-hee.” He laughed in the ridiculous way he had, suddenly, as if electrified with intemperate glee—a sound-effect of his which, whatever the cause, never failed to send Joel into deafening convulsions. The fit ceased, also characteristically, as suddenly as it had begun. “The emotion which animates your fraternal service, however, is exclusive in character. You have no detachment.” He paused minutely. “What is detachment? Detachment is an experience such as the Ancient Mariner's when he blessed the watersnakes and the albatross fell from his neck. Here is a concrete symbol of detachment.”

“I'll bless our snakes,” Joel retorted, “when we've drawn their fangs. Not before.”

He felt obliged to conclude that in the final analysis—the only analysis—Negraponti was potentially as much his enemy as Swannepoel or Crouch. But it was only after he had repeatedly caught himself out saving up, on his long, solitary evenings, points of discussion to share with Negraponti, when it first occurred to him that not only was he happier in Negraponti's company than anyone else's in South Africa, but that Negraponti's was indeed the only company there that he was happy in, that Joel sought to take precautions. So from time to time, to quell the unease that grew with his growing friendship with Negraponti, he would voluntarily represent him to his political confrères as an inconsequential acquaintance. Then he came to represent Negraponti to himself as an incidental pleasure only, and was pleased to believe it. In this way he blinded himself to his increasing dependence on Negraponti for the nourishment he received from no one else, yet continued daily to receive that nourishment.

_____________

The day following the circularized announcement of the pay-raise, Joel submitted his motion, dutifully seconded by Dorffman and Negraponti, to the Faculty Chairman; then he went campaigning for votes, beginning maliciously with Crouch. “With a resolution like that on the table,” Crouch assured Joel pleasantly, “I'll certainly be there.” But before the meeting on Friday, Council, tipped off by the Faculty Chairman, had hurriedly arranged for an increase in salary in accordance with his status to be paid to Crouch independently from university funds. “But that isn't the point,” Joel protested, furiously amending his motion at the meeting. “Council receives and circulates a discriminatory announcement without raising a murmur. It is quite evident that for all their intermittent expressions of outrage, Council is entirely unreliable.”

Swannepoel jumped to his feet shouting, “Why this incongruous concern from Mr. Bialystock? When has he ever identified himself with us in our public condemnation of universities apartheid? Has he ever appeared in our processions? Has he ever signed his name on our list of signatories in statements to the press? I myself have implored him, but he invariably adamantly refuses. Why is he embarrassing himself in this way? There is not only no valid purpose in anyone's raising a matter already satisfactorily concluded, there is more significantly no validity whatever in Mr. Bialystock—of all people—raising it.”

Joel replied that he found it morally indefensible to associate himself with righteous indignation, devoid of active intent, on isolated issues affecting a bare handful of privileged non-whites, while the twelve million perished. “I am questioning only the logic and consistency of Council's and now Faculty's goodwill,” he persisted. “The Principal has condoned, Council has connived . . .”

“Are you impugning the Principal?” Swannepoel yelled.

Joel said he was.

The Chairman abruptly suggested that Joel was making a mountain out of a molehill, and asked for a show of hands for and against the motion. The show against was overwhelming.

Joel fumed briefly, then forgot it, except to make a point of asking Crouch the following Monday why he hadn't turned up. “I hadn't time,” Crouch explained, “I got married on Saturday.” He made no inquiry about the upshot: discretion was Crouch's major social virtue. The next day his classes were cancelled, and all that week, and the next. He was in the hospital, it was said, with a stomach ulcer. For six weeks, Crouch was absent. Joel didn't see him the day he returned, but general consternation reached him, first from Dorffman. “Crouch must have lost fifty pounds. He has to keep his hands in his pockets to hold his trousers up.”

“Crouch is not fit to be working,” Negraponti said. “He is too excessively conscientious.”

Joel, bumping into Crouch in the corridor the next day, greeted him with horror, for he saw immediately that he was dying.

“The hospital discharged me a week ago,” Crouch, unutterably ill and miserable, said as they entered their study together. “They couldn't find anything wrong. I throw up whatever I eat. In the hospital I had a stomach-drip.” He added wryly, “My wife's not having much of a married life. It was only three days after our wedding that I collapsed.”

“You shouldn't be at work,” Joel said helplessly, staring out of the window, not daring to look at Crouch for fear of what Crouch might see in his face.

“If I stay in bed any longer,” Crouch replied, “I feel I'll rot away altogether.” Then he said in a mumble, “I think what I need is a headshrinker.”

“You know Pitt?” Pitt was the only other revolutionary in Faculty, on which account, though his professional work was hailed with honor overseas, the Chair in Psychology was held by a lesser man. “He's reliable. I'll introduce you now, if you like.” Crouch was pathetically eager. They walked across to the Psychology block at a snail's pace: Crouch seemed to have gone lame too. Joel left him to Pitt.

“Crouch is dying,” he told Dorffman.

“He'll live,” Dorffman pooh-poohed the alarm, “he's tough.”

“That boy's dying,” he told Negraponti.

“Not so dramatic,” Negraponti replied. “I saw worse, far worse, in Italy in the war, and they survived.”

That evening Joel walked over to Pitt's house. The old man was huddled in an armchair in front of his gramaphone, delicate and rapt. Joel waited half-an-hour for the finale. “Do you think it is psychological, with Crouch?”

“Without a doubt,” Pitt replied in his mild, authoritative way. “I'm seeing him again tomorrow.” But Crouch did not appear the next day, nor the day after. On the Saturday he died, of cancer of the stomach.

_____________

Joel did not attend the funeral, nor did it remotely occur to him to do so. He was reading the newspaper, sitting with his back to the door, feet on the window-sill, when Negraponti entered that Monday afternoon. “Listen to this,” Joel said without turning round, “the government-elected chiefs are being given official license to murder rebellious peasants.”

“I have just attended Crouch's funeral,” Negraponti said in a strained voice, “I wished to pay some respect.”

Joel met the implicit censure by mingling curiosity with aggression in equal measure. “But why did you respect Crouch?” He swung round to look at Negraponti.

“Because he was worthy of it.” Negraponti's voice shook so violently that Joel, completely taken aback, put down his newspaper. “Crouch had as much dignity and honor at least as many of your political comrades you admire so greatly.”

As alarm and indignation now superseded his astonishment, Joel armed himself with all speed from his abundant resources of scorn. “But what signs of Crouch's alleged dignity and honor ever appeared? What has Crouch ever done, what ideas has he ever uttered that merited respect?”

“My God,” Negraponti said, then his wrath died. “Sometimes,” he replied with a cold disgust that was unnatural to him and that, like his anger, Joel had never seen in him till now, “you are contemptible.”

Joel couldn't bear it. He changed his tack. “Listen,” he appealed to Negraponti now from the heart of his conviction, “Crouch didn't give a damn for anyone, including ultimately himself. It's that last I despise him for. He never gave a damn for his own liberty. What dignity are you talking about? The man was a voluntary slave. He'd tolerate every law designed to degrade him, every discriminatory measure outside and inside the university, for the sake of—not even his academic security—he never had any academic security—for nothing, he'd tolerate it for nothing. Crouch earmarked himself. You know the way the Hebrews used to mark those slaves who voluntarily opted for slavery?” Negraponti normally delighted in such allusions: Joel proceeded to woo him with chapter and verse: “‘Take an awl, and thrust it through his ear unto the door, and he shall be thy servant for ever.’”

But Negraponti responded adversely, “You need a very big political mouthful to chew, nothing else. This is your prestige, as you say Crouch's was the big academic pond.”

“There's a world of difference.” Joel was sick now because it had always hitherto seemed to him that Negraponti was with him in his heart, that indeed he had often defended Joel's allegiance better than Joel could himself. “Politics is inclusive.” His voice rose against the injustice. “There are twelve million people. . . .”

“The twelve million, the twelve million,” Negraponti, unprecedentedly for him, shouted Joel down. “How many millions of these twelve holy millions in whose name you damn Crouch . . .?” With both palms he made the gesture of an excruciated conductor silencing his orchestra. “There is nothing you vitally understand though you are concerned totally, I know that, with vital issues. You know nothing.”

“No!” Joel cried, and though Negraponti had a knack of pulling the words for him from his close-fisted center, this time they came without his aid. “I know one thing. There are things I think I know, but this I know I know. There's no plight as intolerable as subjection. I swear I'll have this in me till I die. There's no torture, no disgrace, nothing like that disgrace. Crouch wouldn't look. He was in the middle of it and he wouldn't reply to it. He went to his deathbed with nothing. If you accept your inferiority you're living the life of a beast.”

“More bestial than the life of the oppressor?”

“O yes, much more, much more.”

“Tell me,” Negraponti asked with interest but still without warmth, “when you saw that Crouch was dying—only you saw that—of what significance was it, the fact of his dying?”

“To me?” Joel shrugged. “None. It couldn't diminish me.” Then he saw Negraponti's face. “Crouch was a traitor!” he roared in panic, “I can't afford your eclectic humanity. When I've defeated my enemy I'll acknowledge it then, but not while he's got his foot on my neck.” He shut his eyes tight against an unexcised or unexcisable image in his mind. “I don't enjoy taking sides,” he mumbled, “I have to take sides and therefore have to exclude.”

“Do not suggest,” Negraponti replied evenly, “that you are thereby making a sacrifice, for in respect of your not enjoying taking sides, you enjoy it too much. I have noted with what pleasure and vitality you go forth to meet your enemy. But your battle is without honor. Your enemy wears a dog's face. You must always degrade him before you kill him.”

“I degrade him?” Joel stared at Negraponti, outrage momentarily displacing the misery of defeat and rejection that assailed him. “What do you want? A pious acknowledgement of our enemy's participation in human existence while he pulls down our pants and grins and shoots us in the back? A farewell tribute to the butcher's humanity from the cattle in the slaughterhouse?”

“We are not concerned with the doings of your enemies,” Negraponti roared above Joel, but dropped his voice instantly. “I am not questioning the necessity for taking sides. I perfectly understand that you must. It seems that you are not clear, however, whose side you are on or which is your enemy—the man with the neck or the man with the foot, the men who are cattle or the men who are butchers. If you are angry with your daddy you should let it stick with him, not fix it on anyone, anything else.”

“I don't do that,” Joel whispered, feeling suddenly bent double.

Negraponti didn't look at him. “It was also myself I was speaking of,” he said humbly. Then he moved purposefully to the door. “I prefer,” he said with shy formality, “not to discuss with you again.” Joel recovered sufficiently to incline his head slightly in mockery as Negraponti left the room. For a stricken moment the loss was piercing, and he was simultaneously aware of a multiplication of loss behind that one, so that his isolation swathed him like an ice-pack from head to toe. But it was only for a moment, before he consigned Negraponti with the rest to outer darkness. Some distress nevertheless persisted, and grew with his persisting unwillingness to diagnose its cause.

¹ In South Africa—Ed.