9
Nativity
Rating: T
Summary:
College AU. Popular, easygoing Lawrence Daley of the athletic team finds himself getting paired up for an upcoming project with the enigmatic, privileged new student Ahkmenrah Hasani. The strange pair have to find a way to connect with each other and build a friendship.
Disclaimer: Night at the Museum and its characters are courtesy of their rightful owners.
Nativity
The new student entered the classroom with a grace unsual for most. When he presented himself, he looked at everyone with an affective gaze which intensity sprung out of a mixture of melancholy and disdain. And that was also the manner in which he pronounced his name, Ahkmenrah Hasani. His accent was at once strange and exquisite, melodic and imposing. Needless to say, most of the students were baffled: some boys at the bottom of the class blurted out stiffled chuckles at his preciousness, but no one except Mrs. Alderson, the professor, had thought that the accent seemed to come from a far-off, fictional land. The girls, on the other hand, were too enchanted by his beauty that none actually cared about his accent nor his preciousness, in the same way they failed to notice his interesting gaze because they were too amazed by the beauty of his olive skin, tousled dark hair, and large brown eyes.
"Isn't that a Gucci leather jacket?" one of the girls asked her friend. The other one nodded.
Then, in the same way he entered the classroom, the new student took a seat, extracted his notebook, pencil case, and glasses case from his genuine-leather messenger bag, took the Tag Heuer glasses out of it, put them on. A while later he was as calm as if he had always belonged there, listening to Mrs. Alderson's explanations on More's Utopia with his torso lightly perched forward.
A few while later, the new student was the only person who pointed out that the textual allusion to Terentius actually establishes a parallel between Hythloday and Erasmus' Folly. Mrs. Alderson was very impressed with the statement that she actually talked to the new student after class.
Anyhow, even after months, little was known of Ahkmenrah Hasani. He did not talk much, leave alone bluff, and he rarely showed up in social events. He had no friend that they knew of, not because he was a distasteful person, but because somehow people always saw him as intimidating. Sure, his smile and gestures were cordial, elegant, but at the same time they were distant, detached. He was often seen at the corner of the library, poring over a book whose title they never knew of, except the librarians. Until then, what remained of him were rumors and conjectures, none of which was ever clarified.
One day, a group project brought him together with a certain Lawrence Daley. When the name of his partner was pronounced, the latter had fallen silent all of a sudden, as his friend chuckled in the background. He had thought, what in the fucking hell is this, and had even asked Mr. Michaels whether it would be possible to replace his partner.
"Why, Larry? You should be thankful. Mr. Hasani is a very sharp, diligent student. I am sure he will influence you in a good way."
Except he did not know Mr. Hasani.
He never even talked to him.
…and would probably get a permanent ego damage from working with him.
Larry shuddered with terror.
"He is a very nice person, too."
Yep, surely he is. Larry nodded ironically, left the classroom with a lopsided smile.
He shook it off, then went straight to the library to meet Mr. Hasani—Ahkmenrah. That's the new guy's name, isn't it? Ahkmenrah.
As always, Ahkmenrah was in his corner, sitting calmly, poring over a book with dog-eared and yellowed pages, nodding lightly from time to time to the music playing through his earphones. Larry had stared at him for a while, this little prince, he laughed in his heart as he stared at the new guy, because for Larry he would always be that: the new guy. He said hi. The other one did not hear. He tapped lightly on Ahkmenrah's shoulder. Then there was a respond: Ahkmenrah took off his earphones then turned to look at Larry, with his usual cordial, distant smile.
"Daley."
"Yep."
Larry pulled a chair next to Ahkmenrah, sat down, said:
"Just so you know, man, I had asked Mr. Michaels to… be replaced," Ahkmenrah frowned. Shit, Larry thought, preparing his words, he does have the gaze of a serial killer, "you know, just in case you'd rather work with someone smarter. No sarcasm intended. I mean…"
"I don't get it, Larry—can I call you Larry?" replied Ahkmenrah, still with a frown, "I would be happy to work with you, or anyone else, it's not like I judge people or anything," he pushed the book in front of him away with the side of his right hand. Larry took a quick glance of it then realized that the text was in Latin, "listen, would you let me arrange my things, then we can go grab some coffee, alright?"
Larry nodded. In fact, he did not actually wanted to, but something about Ahkmenrah just made him nod.
"You're reading Latin?"
"Yes, but it's nothing special, really…" Ahkmenrah said calmly, slightly uneasy, shoving the book into his bag.
"What's it about?"
"Dracontius."
"Who's that?"
"A fifth-century poet from Carthage."
"Okay."
Larry watched Ahkmenrah sorted out his things. Everything was done in an orderly, almost mechanical, and highly efficent manner. He then got up, closed the bag, shouldered it, pushed the chair discreetly towards the table. The precision of his movements was almost unsettling.
He gave a slight nod when he passed the librarian. Larry did the same, awkwardly. Come to think of it, it was probably his first time at the library… no, his second. But who gives a damn?
"So, nice to meet you, Larry."
"Really, man, you don't have to work with me if you don't want to," Larry said groggily. Outside the athletic club, he was practically… nonexistent, "I will mess things up."
"There's a nice café nearby—my treat," Ahkmenrah replied, as if he had heard nothing said by Larry a while ago, "we can start gathering ideas, constructing a nice line of argument. Sounds good?"
And it felt like years, for Larry, since he last said "line of argument".
What Ahkmenrah said "café"was an upscale bistro with the most expensive cup of coffee he ever ordered and the best strüdel he ever tasted his entire life. They were sat in a corner by the window, overlooking the streets filled with ants below, Larry sitting uneasily on the velvet chair as if its entire surface was covered in spikes, Ahkmenrah was as calm as he could be, scanning the pages of his notebook, following each lines intensely, as if decoding an ancient writing.
From time to time, he suggested a line of argument (Larry still felt strange saying it), the new one always sharper than the one before, and all Larry could say were praises. Right now, he felt so far from his friends, the diner where they always spent Saturday evenings, the Greek restaurant at the corner of the street where he "splurged". He felt so far from the bustles and the buildings that he used to see from down below, among the ants. All of a sudden he thought of a film he had seen as a child, his father's favorite, about a futuristic society in which the riches, like Ahkmenrah, are always above, bathed in sunlight, while the rest are stuck underground with the rustling sounds of machines and whatnot, and sometimes they are even sacrificed to a strange god (*1).
"You okay?" Ahkmenrah asked. And still he had that cordial, distant smile. Maybe a constant exposure to sunlight make people like him act that way. The height could be suffocating… Nonetheless, it looked like nothing that he, Larry, could understand. In his confusion, he blinked. Ahkmenrah closed the notebook, took off his glasses, said to Larry:
"Hey, let's take a break. Nothing goes into my head anymore."
Since then, Larry's opinion on Ahkmenrah changed. It was more neutral, so to say, that every time his friends mocked Ahkmenrah, he would hush them off by saying "he's nice, you know. Very withdrawn, but nice." And they mocked Larry for being gay. He laughed it off. Besides, what was the difference, really, between lusting over a woman and a man? If any, are we not always a bit fascinated by both? He smiled to himself, facing his newly-shaved face in the bathroom. There you are, man, start sounding like the new guy.
"Can I ask you something, man?" he asked Ahkmenrah one day.
"Yes," he replied, taking his gaze off the book, turning it over on the table, on the pages where he was reading.
"I don't want you to think of me as a racist or something, but you have the strangest accent."
Ahkmenrah smiled (yes, his usual smile: cordial yet distant).
"You're not the first person to tell me that."
Larry smiled in relieve.
"Where do you come from?—No, really man, I don't mean anything bad—just curiosity, really."
"I know, Larry.
I was born in Cairo, but spent most of my childhood in Sofia (and where is it, Larry wondered), then we moved to St. Petersburg, it wasn't long. Then Paris. Then here I am."
"Sounds like some kind of an adventure novel."
"Yeah, my father is a professor of Diachronical Linguistics of Latin Languages (and what the hell is that, Larry wondered), so we have to move quite a lot, of course according to the best offer from universities, since there are not many like him."
Larry had no idea which amazed him more: the amount of information that he had to grasp, or the fact that Ahkmenrah had said everything the way one would say "it will rain today" or "there'll be sun later in the afternoon".
"Uh...okay."
A while later:
"Do you like it here?"
"I'm getting used to." (Which was a short way to say that he won't be long here.)
They had finally found a nice line of argument. Surprisingly, Larry had contributed more than he had himself expected to. Ahkmenrah had even complimented him of being "intelligent", but it was spoken in his usual cordial, distant manner that Larry actually wondered if his working partner was just being nice.
In fact, what not to suspect behind such niceness? The entire being of Ahkmenrah, Larry thought, was like a screen behind which something is hidden. Just like his apartment, large, sophisticated, and very neat, but distant, like the owner, as if the slightest sign of life was ironed flat, the way a wrinkle on a shirt was straightened. The only time he was convinced that the apartment was actually occupied by real people was the moment where Ahkmenrah played the piano for him. Only then he was actually convinced that the apartment was not not some kind of decoy whose only purpose is to appear in lifestyle magazines.
"Wow, you play it well," Larry blurted out spontaneously.
To which Ahkmenrah, as always, had replied with no allusion to the pleasure from the compliment. And Larry wondered if such thing called "compliment" actually existed for that guy.
"It's Thalberg."
"Who's that?"
"Sigismond Thalberg," he added, "a rival of Franz Liszt."
"I don't know them."
"It's okay. Most never heard of Thalberg anyway," and, as always, Ahkmenrah had said it as if it was something normal, and that Larry was not inferior nor stupid for not knowing it.
"And the other guy?"
"He was pretty much the Bowie of the Romantics."
"It was beautiful, though," Larry said a while later, "it's not like I understand the classics, though."
"Isn't it?"
Ahkmenrah smiled. For the first time, Larry had noticed a humanly glow in his eyes, as if a part of the veil had been lifted. There you go, man, he thought, you're a real, living human being, and today I'm convinced. You've always been cold and distant and such, but today I know I'm not talking to some mummy or an imaginary friend. Which is good to know.
"It's from the first movement of his piano concerto opus five."
"Whoa, whoa... wait."
Ahkmenrah returned to the piano then played another part, the coda of the third movement, gracious, serpentine, pristine, as if a ceiling of glass had just shattered, the dust hitting Larry's ears like a constellation of sound atoms. Larry did not know where to pay attention, Ahkmenrah's fingers on the keyboard, the constellation in his ears, or the weirdness of it all. The music was indeed beautiful. Too bad it was the only adjective he could think of (Ahkmenrah could probably come out with hundreds of other ones, more appropriate than "beautiful"). In the confusion, Larry watched the fingers on the piano, wondering how someone could actually do that. There was something almost ecstatic in the way Ahkmenrah played it, the way he nodded his head subtly during accentuated passages, as if he was entirely detached from the mundane reality, the everyday reality, the reality in which he, Lawrence Daley, lived. And to think there's maybe another world to it, in it!
"This passage is particularly interesting because of the… contagion," Ahkmenrah said during a pause, "the overlapping of minor and major tonalities, like two different memories overlapping together, before eventually reuniting in pride and despair."
Larry did not understand anything Ahkmenrah said. Nor did the latter intended to speak to Larry, or to himself. What would his friends think were they to find out that, instead of going to their Friday night meet-up, Larry was in Ahkmenrah's apartment, listening to—what's his name again—Sigmund something-berg. And he was thinking, as of during that the moment that the piano solo part continued playing, a chain of what to Larry seemed like detached notes eventually augmenting in loudness, that the vision through which we decide to see, to decide, was decidedly too narrow. Like how mocking some guys from the marching band seemed very interesting when seen by him and his friends, but to the same thing, Ahkmenrah may have a different view.
"What do you think?" Ahkmenrah asked when he finished the last chord.
"Eh, what?" Larry said absentmindedly, then quickly snapped back, "it's amazing. Unusual, but amazing, really…" A while later: "Hey, what do you think…"
"What do I think of… what?"
"You know," for the first time Larry decided to confront Ahkmenrah's gaze. For the first time, he stopped over-scrutinizing that slight frown, deep gaze—that as of now he was sure were the other guy's signature—and talked to him like a normal human being—of two different realities, of course, but two human beings nonetheless, "when people like me mock the ones in the marching band, or… the one like you."
For a while, Ahkmenrah was silent. But his gaze was reflecting some sort of… human warmth. Like a normal person's gaze. He lifted his hands from the keyboard then closed the lid of the piano.
"It's alright," Ahkmenrah finally responded, and it shocked Larry, "if that what you and your friends believe in, it's your reality, why not. But in the other side, me and the people of marching band would stand our lines, doing what we believe in," he smiled, "people think that something we called reality is singular, a straight flat line, but in fact it is a river. Maybe we're floating at the surface, maybe we're sunken underneath, torn away by the passing currents, maybe we're in the currents, moving to it, disappearing. So... it's alright. You and I have equal rights to perceive and live in a particular part of the river to our choice. Like languages, you know, or music. You can be a melodic legato, a chain of fragmented staccati… what matters is that we need every one of them, every layer. Because whatever is singular, is dead."
It was at that moment that Ahkmenrah's eyes looked human. Really human. Maybe because Larry had finally understood his reality, maybe because the veil was finally lifted. Either way, Larry smiled, said:
"We're going to impress the whole class tomorrow, you know."
Ahkmenrah replied with a smile. A warm, human smile.
The main door of the apartment opened. A very elegant middle-aged man walked in, clad in a Burberry coat, holding a suitcase and in the other hand, an umbrella. He placed the umbrella at the stand by the door, removed his hat, his scarf, then placed them on the hanger. He scanned the apartment, finding his son at the piano, as always—and he knew that he had done revising his Latin.
"You must be Lawrence," he said to Larry with a cordial, distant smile—what was Ahkmenrah's smile, "what a pleasure to welcome you here."
At the end of the presentation, Mr. Michaels looked at Larry with some kind of contentment in his eyes. Just as I thought, Lawrence, he's a good influence for you. At the end of the presentation, Larry exchanged a look, a smile with Ahkmenrah, what seemed to be the last one for after that they kind of returning to their natural courses: Larry with his friends, Ahkmenrah at the library, at the piano…
Sometimes, when they happened to pass by each other at the corridor, in front of the classroom, during pauses, they would exchange a look, a smile. Sometimes it happened that Larry thought of the smile Ahkmenrah had given him when he said "isn't it?" about the passage of the… what's the composer's name again? Of a friendly gesture, a kindness, always cordial, disillusioned… that flat manner in which he said things. Sometimes, the remembrance struck him like matches struck unexpectedly in the dark (*2). It was a hope of friendship fading too soon, a fading peak of a tower seen in an extreme upward angle, the way he would sometimes look up to see the upscale bistro where they had first discussed the "line of argument" (no, really, Larry thought, it still sounded strange spoken by him).
After some time, Ahkmenrah retreated back behind the white screen, the way he was always for everyone else, and for him, the prince whom they always addressed by "Hasani", because saying his first name never quite felt appropriate to everyone, the way you feel when you have to address your friend's parents by their first names the first time. And Larry, like the others, mentioned him as "Hasani". Before long, the exchange of look and smile stopped altogether. Both, from two different corners in the classroom, would observe each other from time to time, but nothing else followed afterwards.
One evening in September, upon walking the Times Square, passing by a music store, he heard something familiar. He stopped before the door for a while, trying to dig out the sediments from his memory. He asked the clerk, to which the old man responded after having thrown him an accusatory look:
"Sigismond Thalberg."
Thalberg. Yes, that's his name. Larry forced it into his memory, pronouncing it one more time: Thalberg. He even bought some CDs of Thalberg, the concerto and Les soirées de Pausilippe. Anyhow, he had no idea why he did that: maybe he would come to see Hasani tomorrow after class, at the library, then ask him about Thalberg. Or the Carthaginian poet…
He eventually did. But to his surprise, Ahkmenrah was nowhere to be found. Maybe, for once, Ahkmenrah finally decided to take a break. He pictured his former working partner in his apartment, facing the piano, playing Thalberg. But the following day, the following week, Ahkmenrah was still nowhere to be found, neither in the library nor in the classroom. The first day of the following month, he asked the librarian.
"Haven't you heard? Mr. Hasani moved recently."
"Where?"
"I have no idea, really. But then, with someone like Mr. Hasani's father, it must be big deal," his eyes wandered, "think of Sorbonne and Humboldt and God knows what others. Some people really are that blessed, don't you think, Larry?"
"I guess..." he said after some time.
Somehow, the librarian began mourning his fate. He had studied hard back then when he was in France, he said. The best of his class. He always got the bourse because he was that good. He graduated Master with a 19 on his mémoir, and got the agrégation at the first attempt. But a twist of fate required him to go back to America and resumed his career as a "poor-ass librarian". He went on and on, his voice struck Larry stifled, monotonous, like waves in the distance.
"But maybe he just wants a place to call home."
"What?"
"Ahkmenrah just wants a place to call home."
Having said that, he thought of Ahkmenrah's friendly gesture, his kindness which was always cordial, disillusioned… The remembrance struck him like matches struck unexpectedly in the dark, a sudden irruption of human warmth.
Notes
(*1) reference to Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). Ahkmenrah's character here is comparable to Freder Fredersen who "transgresses" the upper world to reach the other side.
(*2) a direct quotation from Woolf's To The Lighthouse (1927). The fragments of memories that Larry has of Ahkmenrah are directly compared to an epiphany.
Thanks for reading. Sequel anyone? ;-) Don't hesitate to post your ideas (and/or) comments in the review!