Mad Professor

It's a story about a mad professor but not quite in the Back To The Future Way.

Mad Professor

You thought it was the start of something beautiful.

Well, think again.

Porcupine Tree �" The Start of Something Beautiful

The first time I saw Sayid Masaad was in my lecture on John Steinbeck.

Sayid Masaad; I still find myself saying the name out aloud, like a prayer, or, more precisely, some enigmatic, far eastern mantra, Sayid Masaad.

The lecture on Steinbeck was my first one for Bielefeld University and my first one at all. I was thirty-three, a brown cord jacket with patches on the shoulders, blue jeans, still full hair, beard, and brimming with defiance and enthusiasm for the topic and my profession. I wasn't a professor back then, I was writing my dissertation on Stephen King.

I remember walking along the corridor to the small room where the seminar was to be held, coffee in hand, my eastpak casually dangling from one shoulder; I wanted to be one of them, at eye level, cool, not overly intellectual or behind the curve. After all, I really felt like one of them: Still feeling out of place among the docents, still not very comfortable with academic writing.

I was excited and jumpy, not wanting to give a dead end lecture but rather have a passionate discussion; unstructured and missing most academic points but concentrating on the stories themselves, a debate which makes you feel rather than think.

I was late. I'd had a serious discussion with a fellow docent about the literary merits of Stephen King (an opportunity which I've never been able to let pass) and I really had had to get a coffee.

It was a small room, dark (no one has bothered switching on the light, I did) and sticky. There was a humming in the air; about 30 students talking quietly to each other, paper rustling, the eternal clicking of laptops, someone was showing youtube videos. I felt painfully aware of my old-fashioned mobile in my pocket. Would they laugh if they found out? Was I already that old-fashioned?

I wiped the thoughts away and briskly opened a window.

Silence settled and I made myself look at the faces, most of them turned expectantly towards me.

Mostly girls. Women, I told myself, women. The first two rows were deserted as usual, nobody wants to sit in front, the last four rows were packed with students. It's strange that the segregation of the sexes still seems to work properly in universities: To my right the women, to my left the men. I recognized a few faces from encounters at the coffee take away or the cafeteria, I wondered if some of them had thought I was a student. There they were: business-like tough women wanting to work abroad, future teachers, disciplined and friendly, the artist´ types, beardy, pale, thin, looking at their folded hands.

The silence dragged on, a few students were becoming nervous.

“Hi,” I said.

“My name is...”

Dramatic pause.

“Tom.”

Anticlimax, people laughing. Yes, I thought, make them laugh and you have them.

“I´ll go through this fancy list and see who´s here. I´ll try to remember your names but since I´m not even able to remember my correct age (laughter, yes, again laughter) I´ll make no promises.”

I went through the names. Most of them were Germans, a few English sounding names, a few rather Arabic sounding. I had difficulties pronouncing one or the other Russian name which lead to sniggers.

“Sayid Masaad.”

A young man from the left corner of the room raised his hand. “I am here.”

It was the first time I heard his voice and there already had been the things which fascinated me: His unwillingness to use short forms and the soft rolling of the “r”, not the one used by Spanish people but more a soft allusion to a rolling. He had a strong accent I wasn't able to place exactly. I looked at him. Sayid was small and frail, sitting straight but effortlessly, his hands folded on the table, looking at me. He was slightly cross-eyed, which confused me all the more.

“Sayid Masaad. That´s a cool name,” I said without thinking much.

People were laughing, Sayid only looked at me and said gravely: “I thank you for this.”

I couldn't help but think of movies with the civilized Arab, maybe even the villain, but a villain with great manners. I felt guilty for the thought, but our brains seldom ask for permission, do they?

I proceeded with the list, but even in the first session I found my thoughts returning to Sayid Masaad, his cross eyed gaze, his clean beard and his long curly hair in a ponytail. When I looked at him, he was eyeing me attentively, he was laughing softly when someone said something funny and on his desk there was a paperback-edition of The Grapes of Wrath.

When the session was over, the students dripped out of the room. He was one of the last that left the room and he smiled at me openly and warmly and that was the moment I realized I might not be completely heterosexual.

I´d had three relationships. With women. All of them ended up pretty untidy; jealousy, rage, drama, accusations and heavy things thrown at each other, you name it. I'd never noticed any serious homosexual tendency, but then, I hadn't been paying close attention. I'd been single for about 2 years and was pretty satisfied with that. I was seeing a fellow (female) docent, Christine, at that time; nothing much to write home about, drinking a coffee here, visiting a concert there. My last relationship had been a pretty long one; more than four years. We'd been talking about children, about the future, making plans about living on the countryside, with animals. The end of that relationship must have shattered my belief in plans and schemes, I think when I met Sayid I was really willing to simply improvise, to roll with it; giddy as a boy in high school.

In the days following my first encounter with Sayid Masaad I found my thoughts returning to him, like pilgrims to a religious site. I was looking for him in the university corridors, hoping to catch a glimpse of him on the subway, listening out to hear his voice in classrooms I passed. I was in love, to put it quite simple, in love with a student that happened to be a man. I found that pretty hilarious.

I even did a bit of research on the internet, feeling guilty, as if I was browsing porn. The internet said, that there was nothing wrong with a student and a docent having a relationship. Except for maybe moral reasons. At that time, I was pretty sure I could handle those.

The week passed in a haze. Four other seminars I had to hold, eating in the mensa, grey, solid towers of Eastwestphalian clouds, a date with Christine, coffee, much of it, insecurity and sweaty fingers.

Then it was Monday again and I saw Sayid Massad.

The room was only slightly emptier than in the first session, which I took as a compliment. He was there, same place, same clean and tidy appearances, following the lesson attentively.

I tried to focus on the content (the character of Tom Joad) and, from the outside, I hoped, I´d worked out well enough. But I had problems following what the people were saying, especially, of course, when Sayid made a contribution. I had to look away when he said something in order to be able to focus on the content. He was smart and sensitive and modest at the same time. He only raised his hand a handful of times but when he said something it made sense, his sentences were perfectly constructed and of an elegant simplicity.

When the session was over, he approached me.

The other students had left the room and we were alone. Five minutes later I had my first homosexual date.

I was ten minutes early and wandered through the main hall of Bielefeld University, a huge corridor that always makes me think of airports. It was ten to six am and there wasn't much going on; a few students were sitting on benches, a cleaning lady scrubbed the floor. We were to meet in the cafeteria. I had my best shirt on, well, I had a shirt on and I´d even used after-shave which I hoped wouldn't be too offensive.

I was having second thoughts about the whole business, of course I was: Was it too risky to meet in the cafeteria? What if other students saw us? In my paranoid state of mind, I imagined some secret office in the university (maybe somewhere in the basement �" in those catacombs where I´d never been) that was only entrusted with investigating cases of docents trying to seduce innocent students, people in unobtrusive suits trawling the university, approaching our table (Sir, would you please walk with us?) and interrogating me in some damp basement room.

I was so engaged in cultivating my own nonsense that I did not see him. I only noticed him when he was standing right in front of me, stretching out his hand and giving me a solid handshake.

“Tom, nice to see you.”

"Mr. Masaad, ehm, Sayid, nice to see you."

Strange, how social roles can be reverted, I thought.

We entered the cafeteria, with a quick, paranoid glance I tried to take in as much information as I could: One hour to go, there weren't many customers, a few lonely students reading books, the cashier´s mind clearly somewhere else. Good. I reminded myself that there wasn't anything wrong with what I was doing.

We sat down at a table looking outside. We talked a while about John Steinbeck; I felt on firm ground but tried not to fall into lecture-mode but to have his opinion as well. He had the confusing habit of looking straight at his opposite; something I've always been pretty bad at, so I found myself addressing a spot slightly above his head.

I was funny, I was witty, I was jumpy and over-coffined and jumped from topic to topic like a small child on Christmas evening. He listened attentively only interrupting from time to time. I tried to give the conversation a different spin.

“Where exactly are you from, Sayid?”

“I was born in Basra, Iraq. I was born in 1987, which makes me… not so young anymore.”

A crooked smile, charming.

“I am a Kurd and being a Kurd entailed some negative implications in Iraq in the late 80s and not only then. My father died in a mustard gas attack and I lived with my mother and two older sisters. We suffered from Saddam Hussein, we suffered from the Iran-Iraq War, we suffered from the Gulf War. We suffered from so many different wars that I sometimes fail to tell them apart. But…”

A look out of the window, he looked weary, troubled, I was moved, genuinely moved by his sudden pathos.

“I do not want to get into that too much.”

His eyes cleared up as he looked at me again.

I felt a subtle pinch of white man´s guilt that is often evoked by stories of war, terror and people carrying the weight of violent history on their shoulders. The most interesting thing about my childhood was that I happened to be in Berlin when the Berlin Wall fell.

“So, now you live with your family in Bielefeld?”

“With my mother, one of my sisters and my wife, yes.”

“Your wi…”

I choked.

“Can I help you?”

“No, I´m alright.”

He had a wife, and why not? Sometimes we are so entangled in our own tragedies, our own drama, fully believing that, after all, the world has to revolve around us and our own private bildungsroman; we become blind and selfish and are surprised when other people have plans, schemes, a fully elaborated past and fears and joys and problems. I was looking for salvation, looking for deliverance, I was looking like an idiot.

My face must have been an interesting sight to look at while I was having these thoughts.

“You know, Tom, in Iraq we have a saying. It can be roughly translated as “I would give twelve dozen pomegranates to know what is on your mind.”

“I see what you're aiming at, Sayid. What's on my mind? Well, nothing really. It's kind of complex. Let me. Well. I think that. No. Well, yes. Never mind. I think the coffee's great. What's on my mind? Nothing really.”

After that, I was sitting in the subway, smiling. Grinning actually, and being unable to keep from grinning. It'd gone wrong, hilariously wrong but what's wrong anyway? Sitting there, over-coffined and my thoughts spinning into a zillion different directions at the same time, I had an epiphany. We are free to embrace the random, free to embrace whatever may come. That might be hard at times, because whatever may come might be pretty fucked up, confusing and messy. But in this light, on this evening, sitting in a Bielefeldian subway, I felt able to do it.

Reviews

[Kaliope]

A great story about life and the strange surprises it occasionally holds for us. From time to time we all become victims of unbidden emotions, and I think it's important to acknowledge that they don't need justification. Our actions certainly do, but our feelings aren't controllable, nor should they be. Actually I think Tom handled the situation pretty darn well, his reactions were neither mad nor uncool and his sentiments 100% understandable. I especially loved the ending, when he embraced his experience as a valuable lesson and a future opportunity.

[Bobby Garfield]

Thanks for the review, I'm once again glad that you enjoyed it!

[Jordan Wilson]

I found this particularly interesting, the parallels in life that we can take, the simple randomness of it all
That sometimes isn't so random. It sll serves to teach us a lesson.
I feel you conveyed that very well here.