Chapter 109
They met on Thursday mornings in Marcus's apartment and worked through the programme together Marcus's fifty years of accumulated knowledge in conversation with Thomas's fresh experience of the current classroom. It was the best collaboration he had had since working with Priya at university.
He turned eighty-eight. His mother had died at eighty-eight. He sat with this on the morning of his birthday in the garden, in the early light, with Nia's hand in his.
It meant: she had lived this long. She had made it here. He had always known, in the abstract, that he would someday be the age she was when she died. Now he was.
He was eighty-nine and had outlived his mother by a year. He had not expected this to feel significant and was surprised to find that it did not as an achievement but as a change of relationship with time.
Nia at eighty was still herself, which was everything, Still precise, Still curious, Still the person who said the true thing with more economy than anyone he knew.
He spent more time now in the chair by the window the good light Nia had chosen for him reading, writing, watching the garden. The body required more rest. He gave it more rest without drama.
Thomas brought his class to meet Marcus at ninety Thirty-two secondary school students, sixteen years old, came to the apartment and sat in the living room and the kitchen and the hallway while Marcus answered their questions.
They asked: what made you become a teacher? What is the hardest thing about teaching? What do you want us to know? What was Jamaica like when you were young? What did it feel like to leave? What did it feel like to come home?
He told them: the hardest thing about teaching is choosing, every day, to believe that every student in front of you is capable of full engagement especially when the evidence is complicated, The belief has to precede the evidence. That is the faith of it.
He told them: leaving was hard and necessary and it gave me things I could not have gotten here. Coming home was the thing that made the leaving make sense. You have to go somewhere to understand where you belong. But belonging is what you come back to.