19

Wandering through the University Yard back to the Law School, there is a pinching in my throat. The trickle of tears had begun during the eulogy given by the Dean. Seeing Professor Young through the eyes of others only reminds me of how much I’d admired him, of how much he meant to me. He was more than just my supervisor. He had been a kind of guide, encouraging me to push myself and my ideas in a way that no one else had - apart from my father.

I’m too restless to go home and I find myself instead in the lecture hall where I’d taken my first class with Professor Young. I sit in the same seat I occupied during his classes. I can see him standing at the front. ‘I am a zealot among the cynics,’ he once exclaimed and laughter rippled through the room.

Since he passed away I’ve often had a chill of panic when I wonder what his loss means to my work. I’m halfway through my thesis and it’s difficult to change supervisors. The task of finding a replacement has been so daunting I don’t know where to start. I’ve thought of just giving up and going home.

Giving up. Just like Professor Young had decided to. I’ve been going over and over my last conversation with him trying to find a sign, some hint that could explain why he chose to end his life. I’ve found nothing. Nothing in his book of poems explains it either. And many times I’ve pondered the mystery of the note he sent with it:

… a loveless world is a dead world … there comes an hour when one is weary … of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is … the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.

It seems to speak of the desolation left by unrequited love, the same theme that runs through Professor Young’s book of poetry. The numbness I feel about Professor Young’s death is coupled with the despair of realising that Jamie does not care for me, no longer loves me, if he ever did. But Professor Young could not have known that. That’s not what he meant by the note.

In the last few days I have re-read The Plague, seeking anything that could shed light on the meaning of the phrase. With a title like that, it’s pretty obvious that it’s a book about death. A plague breaks out in the town of Oran. The gates are shut and it becomes a prison that no one can leave.

Trapped, people have to fight their individual battles against the plague, and also against the suffering and separation that has come with their isolation. People resort to smuggling and start to plan ways to escape so that they can reunite with their loved ones. The plague reaches its worst period in the brutal hot summer months. It kills so many people there is no space left to bury them and the crematorium is working overtime. Everyone suffers from being cut off from the outside world.

The plague ends as suddenly as it began. There is a celebration in the streets, the town gates are opened and families and loved ones return. The book ends with the haunting observation that although the plague bacteria can go into hiding for years, it never disappears for good.

I had discussed the novel with Professor Young, pulling out the themes. In the context of such great suffering, the importance of love to the human spirit becomes clear. The situation created by the plague requires everyone to ask the questions that we should ask ourselves every day. In a crisis that threatens your community, do you flee or do you stay to fight? Do you use the situation for your own advantage or do you volunteer to help? Do you seek others out or do you withdraw within yourself? Do you take action or do you become complacent?

These are the questions that face us all when we are confronted with any great crisis. They provoke us to think about who we are and what our values are. With the possibility of dying so real and so close, every character in the book comes to see themselves and their lives differently. By reflecting on death, they see life more clearly. Professor Young had looked at death and it must have given him more comfort than life. But why?

In re-reading The Plague I underlined one phrase that seemed to fit with the one Professor Young had chosen: If there is one thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love.

Students for the next class start to come into the lecture hall. When I had started law school back home in Australia I never felt I had the same confidence that other students seemed to naturally possess. Their sense of privilege seemed alien to me. That was, until I found my interest in legal philosophy and legal theory. It gave me a way to explore the bigger ideas that underpin law, a natural match for the passion for social justice that had made me want to study in the first place.

The class is about to start so I leave the lecture hall.

I find myself standing outside the closed office door. ‘Professor John Young’ is etched on the brass plate. I feel that if I knocked on the door I would hear Professor Young yell, ‘Come in.’ I put my fingers lightly on the brass doorknob but do not turn it. Nan often tells me that she can hear the voices of the old people who have passed. I used to think she was a bit batty but now I understand what she means.

I close my eyes. I can see him sitting in his chair, half turned away from me, bathed in the sunlight that pours through the window behind him.

‘I’m going to miss you, Professor Young,’ I whisper. ‘I wish you knew what a difference you made to me.’

As I walk home, I can’t get my conversation with Professor Baxter out of my mind. The look of recognition on her face when she saw the book, the instinctive touch, has been perturbing me. She told me the book was important to Professor Young. But she was adamant that his daughter would not want it. Was Professor Young’s relationship with his daughter strained? She had been there at the memorial service today, sitting beside her mother. She looked sullen, angry and withdrawn. Why wouldn’t she be, having just lost her father?

What would happen, I wonder, if my father passed away at this moment? I have struggled lately to reconcile his advocacy for justice with his failings as a person, his unfaithfulness to my mother.

But there’s another side to him. The first time I had flown to Boston Mum told me he had stayed at the gate until he could no longer see the plane from the window of the viewing area. He’s always provided for me. He didn’t complain about the cost of my going back to study - and at an Ivy League university. He didn’t have to support me but he did, uncomplaining, proudly. Despite my scholarships there was a large shortfall and he happily covered that, and he pays my flights home and back whenever I want.

And though it was Professor Young who I had come to talk to about literature and its underlying themes, it was my father who had fostered my love of reading. He would read to me before I went to sleep. He would ask me to bring him the dictionary and I would have to close my eyes and open it to a page. He would then pick a word out, explain its meaning, and I’d have to make a sentence using it. So much of who I am - my politics, my sense of social justice, my identity - comes from him.

‘How was the service?’ Mum asks when I phone her that night.

‘It was lovely. There were lots of people. But … I guess I don’t really feel that he has gone yet.’

‘That’s only natural. And in a way he hasn’t really. You’ll always carry a part of him in your memories.’

‘I suppose so. We did have lots of great conversations. Not just about my thesis but all kinds of stuff. Even now I find I remember things he said, little observations about life.’

‘Then he’ll always be there with you.’

I find her words comforting. ‘Can I speak to Dad?’

There is a pause. ‘He’s not home, sweetheart.’ I sense a note of false cheerfulness in her voice.

‘Isn’t it about six in the morning?’

‘He’s away. At a conference. Something for work.’

The sight of Dad’s hand up the shirt of the young lawyer in his office flashes through my mind and with it comes a white-hot bolt of anger. I also see the ashen face of Professor Young’s daughter at the funeral and I can hear Professor Baxter’s certainty that she would not want one of her father’s most treasured possessions.

‘Mum, I’m coming home.’

‘Again? Don’t you think you should try to get your study back on track?’

‘No. I need to sort out some things first.’