Cruel Crazy Beautiful World
“JUST after dusk.
The professor is dozing on a deckchair under a sun-faded beach umbrella on the wall of the old harbour. He has guyed the umbrella down to stones with fraying string. The dog-eared paperback in his hands has lost its cover: either a short book or a torn-out sliver of a longer book.
Moonfleet’s barks wake him.
He scowls at me.
– You.
– Yes. That a novella you reading?
– Honed and bare-boned.
– Hemingway?
– Camus. The Outsider.
– I thought he wrote The Stranger.
– Same book.
– Tha...t’s a loophole in my reading.
– Gist is: white guy shoots an Arab.
I recall being sent to a fancy white school in Cape Town when we came from Amsterdam. On paper apartheid had been dead for two years (since Mandela was freed in 1990), but the other boys gawped at me. To them I was an alien. My name did not conform. They had no pigeonhole in their head for a half Jew, half Muslim. In the schoolyard they called me dirty Arab. On the athletics track I lapped them. I licked them hollow and mute.MoreLess
The professor is dozing on a deckchair under a sun-faded beach umbrella on the wall of the old harbour. He has guyed the umbrella down to stones with fraying string. The dog-eared paperback in his hands has lost its cover: either a short book or a torn-out sliver of a longer book.
Moonfleet’s barks wake him.
He scowls at me.
– You.
– Yes. That a novella you reading?
– Honed and bare-boned.
– Hemingway?
– Camus. The Outsider.
– I thought he wrote The Stranger.
– Same book.
– Tha...t’s a loophole in my reading.
– Gist is: white guy shoots an Arab.
I recall being sent to a fancy white school in Cape Town when we came from Amsterdam. On paper apartheid had been dead for two years (since Mandela was freed in 1990), but the other boys gawped at me. To them I was an alien. My name did not conform. They had no pigeonhole in their head for a half Jew, half Muslim. In the schoolyard they called me dirty Arab. On the athletics track I lapped them. I licked them hollow and mute.MoreLess
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