On Spaniards and Indians
Roy and Albus headed for the hospital wing, silent at first. When they were walking through the house, Roy said softly: "A buddy like you is what I would have liked to have at the Muggle school." A pause. "I'm proud of you."
To Albus, these words from Roy, who was not generous with praise, seemed like an accolade. He immediately felt like two inches taller.
After a while he asked: "What ... what happened at the Muggle school?" He wasn't sure Roy wanted to talk about it, and indeed he was silent for a while before answering:
"Something of the kind you've just witnessed. With the difference that no one came to help me."
Albus was surprised: "Did they hate you so much?" This was something he couldn't imagine at all.
"Do they hate Bernie? When many are pouncing on you, they don't do so out of hatred. They do so because they are many and you are one. They do it just because they can."
Again, he was silent for a while before continuing:
"At this school, no one came from a so-called good family, they all had precarious backgrounds. But it is precisely those far down who look for someone who is even further down, and whom they can therefore look down on. You have no idea what you have to listen to when you don't have a father, but a mother working in a cheap bar every night. And when I fought back, I had to take sticks. Of course, never one on one, always many on one, that's on me."
His face had darkened. The memories were harrying him.
"You needn't tell me if you don't want to," Albus said cautiously, "I definitely won't feel offended."
"I want to tell you. I'm counting on you to keep it to yourself."
Nevertheless, it took him a while to resume his narrative:
"At some point I tried to help myself with magic. But you know how it is: As a child, you cannot really control it, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. It worked too rarely to be of any real use to me, but often enough for the others to notice that I could do something they couldn't and were afraid of. From then on it was hell. Whenever something unpleasant happened to one of my classmates, be it just a bad grade, I was the scapegoat because I was supposed to have used magic to harm them."
"How mean!" said Albus in disgust.
"They were afraid of me. Besides, it's always more convenient to blame someone else than oneself. They believed I was to blame for their little misfortunes and failures because they wanted to. Yet since I actually could do some magic, they even had a reason that was plausible enough to accuse me."
"You even seem to understand them," Albus said. "Well – I couldn't."
"I couldn't on my own, either. The old priest to whom I used to shelter when it was unbearable to stay at home or on the street explained it to me very gently." He smiled. "Just like he explained a lot of other things to me. It's from him that I know what I know about the world; he also taught me to love books."
Albus knew roughly what a priest was but was surprised for that very reason that Roy apparently had such intimate contact with one. The church was the last Muggle institution witches and wizards wanted to have anything to do with.
"As far as I know," he said hesitantly, "the priests have always been against us, even more and worse than any other Muggles."
"The Church assumes that magic must basically come from the devil. When I got my letter from Hogwarts and was preparing for, I had some trouble convincing my priest that this only applies to Dark Magic and that this is not taught at Hogwarts. But I had to promise him explicitly never to do Dark Magic, and I have kept that promise to this day."
"Was he some kind of father to you?"
"To me, he was and is what is closest to a father," Roy confirmed, "and I think, to him, I am also something like the son he doesn't have as a priest."
"Don't priests have children?"
"The Catholic don't," Roy replied curtly, moving on: "At some point I realised that what had happened to me at the Muggle School on a small scale was exactly what had happened to the wizarding community in the Middle Ages. You surely know that the Muggles tried to wipe us out back then, and for the same reasons that my classmates bullied me: They were afraid of us, that's why they wanted to do it, and they were a thousand times more than us, that's why they could. The only reason why the witches and wizards survived the persecutions was that, from about the eleventh century onwards, they withdrew more and more from the Muggle world into safe magical shelters to which the Muggles had no access. Hogwarts was the first of these shelters. In a centuries-long process, they continued to improve their magic skills, so that these shelters grew together to a network to form the magical world we know today. The Statute of Secrecy of 1689 only wrote finis to this process of separation. What happened to me at the Muggle school happened because, as a wizard, I didn't belong in the Muggle world, even though I came from it."
"And you think the same thing happened to Bernie because he doesn't belong in our world?"
"That's right."
"But he's not threatening anyone at all!"
"The Hufflepuffs, in fact, have fewer excuses than my Muggle classmates had. Bernie couldn't hurt a fly, but he is representing something. He is representing a world that is a threat to us."
"I don't understand."
They were now in front of the entrance to the hospital wing, but none of them made any move to enter it.
"When Columbus debarked on the first island he discovered ..." Roy said.
"Who?"
"Columbus, the Muggle who discovered America for the King of Spain."
"Sorry, I'm not familiar with Muggle history," Albus said, a little embarrassed.
"You don't need to apologize, very few wizards know about such things. Maybe Hermie is even right ..."
"Roy!" Albus cut in.
Roy started. "Yes?"
"Please stop calling her 'Hermie'!" he said forcefully. He just had to say it, even if Roy didn't like hearing it. "No matter what you think of her policy, she's not just my aunt, she's my best friend!" Except Rose, he almost said, but then swallowed it. "At least among the adults. And she is the most intelligent and lovable person I know!"
Albus looked Roy firmly in the face, even though he jittered a little bit about his reaction. If he doesn't understand THAT, he thought, it's not worth being friends with him.
Roy looked at him thoughtfully, then smiled. "Okay. I will no longer call her 'Hermie' in your presence, nor will I speak snidely of her."
"Thank you," Albus said, breathing a sigh of relief.
"By the way, I was just about to praise her, though under reserve. Maybe," he resumed his thought, "it's not such a bad idea to have Muggle Studies taught from the first year on. I just worry that with this kind of teaching, we're being taught exactly the wrong thing."
"Why?"
"Well, I don't think they will mention in class that the Indians received Columbus with the most generous hospitality. And why shouldn't they? He didn't seem to be threatening anyone. Ten years later, all the islanders who had welcomed him were dead or enslaved by the Spaniards, although this hadn't been Columbus' intention. And this is exactly what happened to all Indian peoples in the decades and centuries that followed. If they had simply massacred Columbus and his Spaniards, that would surely have been a crime, but not a single word about the discovery of America would ever have reached Europe, and they would have remained alive as peoples and masters of their own countries for centuries to come."
"You mean if they had murdered the Spaniards they would have been right in being wrong? – I overheard your conversation with Scorpius last Friday," he added, as Roy looked at him in surprise.
"Exactly," Roy confirmed, "that would have been a typical case of 'being right in being wrong.'"
"But what does any of this have to do with Bernie and the Hufflepuffs?"
"The Indians had their wizards, too. But the Spaniards had ships, cannons, muskets, in general better technology and organization. Did you notice what the Hufflepuffs destroyed first, even before they slashed at Bernie himself?"
"His smartphone."
Roy nodded. "The Muggles' communication technology alone is as superior to any magical communication as their planes are to our brooms. We couldn't master this technology on our own. Sure, we could use it, but then we would depend on the Muggles and would have to return to their world. Perhaps the Hufflepuffs instinctively felt this, or perhaps Bernie bragged a little about his smartphone in order to be able, given his lack of wizarding talent, to show off something where he is superior to the other Hufflepuffs, without realising that and why the smartphone in particular had to appear threatening to them. The Indians, to their misfortune, did not know that behind Columbus was a nation of millions. The Hufflepuffs, however, and even a pinhead like this McDowell, do know very well that Bernie is only one of sixty million Muggles in Britain alone. What if Bernie is just the first – in the sense that Columbus, too, was just the first?"
"You're not trying to defend them, are you?" asked Albus indignantly.
"I don't defend them any more than I defend my former Muggle schoolmates. I just want you to understand why each of the two worlds pushes away those who don't belong to them."
"That's what the Hufflepuffs tried to do, but they didn't get away with it. They will be expelled from school."
"They won't," Roy countered.
"No?" Albus marvelled. "But they did abuse their wizardry to harm another person, and Professor McGonagall said ..."
"Yes, in theory. In fact, Hogwarts is much milder than it pretends to be," Roy cut across him. "Expulsion from school is often warned of but rarely actually carried out. They will get away with a yellow card."
"What's a yellow card?" asked Albus.
"Oh dear," Roy said, looking embarrassed, "I'm sorry, I guess I never learn. 'Yellow card' is a Muggle term meaning 'warning'. Professor McGonagall will make them sweat for an hour and explain that she will have to expel them for their misdeeds. In their minds, they will imagine how to explain to their parents why they were kicked out after less than a week. Marietta Loughlin's role – that's why she's there – will be to implore the Headmistress to show mercy to her fellow Hufflepuffs. McGonagall will let her plead for a while, then graciously grant that mercy, in exchange, of course, for a harsh punishment for them – four weeks cleaning toilets instead of the house elves, I guess, something like that, maybe six weeks for McDowell."
"Serves him right!" said Albus with satisfaction, but then added gloomily: "But for Bernie, of course, it will then be all the more difficult."
"They won't dare beat him again."
"There are things," Albus said sorrowfully, "that hurt more than beatings."
An indignant harrumph interrupted their conversation. Madam Pomfrey, the very old but still very energetic matron, stood in the doorway. "May I ask you, gentlemen, what you are doing here and why you are not in class?"
"I beg your pardon," Roy said politely. "Professor McGonagall wants you to examine Albus Potter. There has been a brawl. Professor McGonagall herself already healed the superficial injuries, but ..."
"He can't be too damaged if both of you still have time for a chat," she cut across him disapprovingly. "It's all right, Mr MacAllister, I'll have a look at him. You, however, will now go where you belong." Madam Pomfrey, like McGonagall, had the gift of nipping any objection in the bud with her tone alone.
"Take care, Al," Roy said, "see you later."