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Steban was sitting on the sofa in the apartment, near the window. The night was rainy and dark. The warm lights of the street were present, more than the stars. Those were hidden under the effects of constant light pollution as it was in a district like Jamrock. Steban was not alone. His students’ exams were waiting for him in the bag he carried to work. He let out a sigh just remembering them. A repressed, somewhat tedious sigh, that guided his face towards the cold window that received the pattering of the rain. From afar, Steban was able to dissipate a figure walking below the lights. A man, he wondered if it was Ulixes, under an umbrella. The shape was getting closer and closer. The man, which had a more pronounced beard, stopped when he saw Steban watching him from the window. He stood still under one of the night lights, under the shadow of the umbrella, until he slightly allowed it to illuminate his face. Ulixes’ round glasses were soaked, his face listless, and part of the charm about him had been eaten by the monsters of the academy, it seemed.
After a bit, the apartment door opened after Ulixes’ familiar footsteps were heard coming up the stairs. Steban didn’t say anything when he saw him. Ulixes left the closed umbrella near the entrance, took off his shoes and went to get a towel from the bathroom. He dried himself briefly and sat down on the sofa next to Steban.
“Again?” Steban asked.
And he broke Ulixes down. That stiffness left him in a big sigh, one that Ulixes seemed to have suppressed since he opened the umbrella that night. “It’s ridiculous,” he said, looking at the wall, at the posters that Steban once drew and that Ulixes praised in their young adulthoods. “All those universities are ruled by nepotism. Nepotism. Fucking nepotism. There isn’t *one*, not even the public ones, where we’re taken as professors, or to give seminars, or to guide research workshops, or to goddamn *anything*…”
The lenses of Ulixes’ glasses were still wet. He didn’t seem to care. “I know,” Steban replied and he got up from the sofa. “Do you want to help me correct my exams?” he asked, hoping to cheer him up a bit. “There will be many misspellings, surely.”
Ulixes looked up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Let’s correct for a bit.”
“Ah, alright.” And Ulixes got up from the sofa.
He took his bag and brought it to the kitchen. He left it in the centre of the empty table where he and Ulixes usually had their meals, and sat on his side of the table. Ulixes sat on the other side. The table was quite small, so they weren’t too far as they faced each other. “They’re twelve-grade philosophy exams,” Steban clarified with the exams in his hands, dividing half and half. Ulixes received his part, and then he saw that Uli was looking for something in his pockets. “Pen?” he asked, offering him an extra one from his pencil case.
“No,” he replied, an empty cigarette box in his hand. He sighed. “I ran out of them.”
“Oh.” And Steban got up to the couch, looking for where he put his. When he found it, he said, “Here I have mine,” and left his cigarette box on the table near Ulixes.
“Oh, thanks,” he said and held the box. “Do you want to share one?” Ulixes asked, already taking out a cigarette as he waited for Steban despite already knowing the answer. A sigh left Steban, he smiled slightly. Then Steban grabbed the matchbox from the top of the refrigerator, the one they always used to light the stove, and gave it to Ulixes as well. “My lighter didn’t run out,” Ulixes laughed tiredly.
“Just in case,” Steban replied mockingly and proceeded to sit back down. Ulixes lit the cigarette with his lighter, a cheap plastic one, and smoked first. A deep, rending breath that filled his lungs. The cigarette soon fell into Steban’s right hand and was smoked again. Not as intensely as Ulixes did, but enough to make Steban’s lungs feel a little better, too.
Ulixes took a pen from his own pocket, a red one that he often carried everywhere. Steban took out his pen from his pencil case, also a red one but of another brand, and they both began to correct under the poor kitchen’s light bulb. “Look at this answer,” Steban said after a while, showing him one of the tests. Ulixes smoked a bit before leaning over to read.
He laughed. “I don’t think you should've told them anything about dialectics.”
Steban snorted, amused. “I’m giving this kid points for originality,” he said, returning to the papers. He gave the kid some points even if the answer didn’t have much to do with the question. When he received the cigarette from Ulixes, he stopped for a little bit to smoke. He rested his face on his left hand, the one that held the pen, and stared at Ulixes. He saw him making his best judgment on those corrections. He seemed to be having fun. It was a fun activity despite being a liberal tactic to rule out individuals based on their ‘meritocracy’. Correcting was about marking what was wrong with something, writing on it violently, with a pornographic superiority of intellect. It was saying what things were in the world and what things were not. It was having some agency, even if it was as small as red-scratching a paper that was already written by someone else.
Ulixes’ glasses were dry, but still dirty. They had the trail of raindrops that he hadn’t bothered to dry. Steban and Ulixes had lived like this for years. Crushed hearts and bowed heads. And even if Ulixes was in front of him helping him with those exams, both smoking the same cigarette, Steban felt like talking about something. “Ulixes,” Steban spoke, and Ulixes looked up over his glasses. “Can I ask you something?” And Steban extended his arm, handing him the cigarette.
He received it. “Yeah?”
“I was wondering… uh.” It was a difficult question. “Since you stopped being a high school teacher because you didn’t have the patience…” Ulixes interrupted him with a growl. The mere mention of it gave him a headache.
“I don’t know *how* you can tolerate them,” he said with his hands on his temple.
Steban smiled, somewhat compassionately. “Well, they are kids.”
Ulixes ran his hand under his glasses. “*Very* stupid and loud kids.” And he smoked a little of the cigarette. “Do you remember that time I told you that I had to separate two boys who wanted to kill each other with knives in the middle of class?”
It had happened a long time ago, but as soon as Ulixes arrived at the apartment, he locked himself in their room for the rest of the day. Steban had tried to enter to ask him what was wrong, but Ulixes was silent and he was truly unable to express or vocalise any sentences. Sometimes, what he really needed was to be alone. “I remember,” he told him.
Ulixes was going to say something about it but it seemed that the words *still* couldn’t come out. Steban understood in any case what he meant. Ulixes gently handed the cigarette to Steban, waiting for him to continue with what he was about to ask.
Steban received the cigarette and continued. “And well, despite your high academic qualification, you are not taken at any university or higher education institution either…”
Ulixes regretted having handed over the cigarette so quickly. Steban noticed and returned it to him. Ulixes’ hand accepted it. “One can be more qualified than the entire elected chair of a faculty, and still…” He smoked.
“I know... They don’t want me anywhere near despite all my PhDs either.” He tried to smile reassuringly, naively hoping that Ulixes would take some of his smile. “It is what it is to be a communard in these difficult times.”
“It is what it is.” Ulixes was still waiting for him, playing with the cigarette between his fingers anxious for what was supposed to be a question.
Steban dared to continue. “So… what are we going to do now?”
It was sour. Ulixes took the last breath that was left on the cigarette. “Honestly…” he sighed, tiredly looking away from Steban. “If I still can’t find anything in the academia… I think I’ll have to stick to high school.” Ulixes’ gaze left with the ashes of the cigarette. “I don’t think I can dedicate my life to a job other than education.”
Steban understood. As difficult as it could be to be a high school teacher, as underpaid as it could be, as exhausting and draining as it could be to talk to kids who had no intention of listening to you, it was something that personally, Steban couldn’t abandon. “Having a job on something other than that,” Steban decided to add, harshly but sincerely, “feels like we’ve wasted everything.”
“… Certainly.” Ulixes focused on the exams again, pretending to correct some more. Maybe not to open that window of vulnerability that he never liked to open. It always seemed like Ulixes wanted to suppress everything and react appropriately once he was alone. Once there was nobody else around, there were no outside looks and no objections of any kind. But Steban knew that this was his way to react to things, and whenever he was near him, he tried to help him and not make things harder for him.
“I know how difficult it can be to deal with those kids. Or well, teens actually. But you know, they’ll always be kids for me,” Steban continued talking. Ulixes seemed unmoved, still holding the pen, threatening to write, and eyes on the papers. “And I think… that’s why I’m patient with them. *Too* patient, indeed. Even when they ask the stupidest things in the world, or ask things from the purest bad faith… Even if they are naïve and malicious... They are, after all, agents of the world. They are as inserted in the world as you and I are.” Steban sighed, reaching for the cigarette box on the table. “I think I need another one. You?” he asked, taking out a new one.
Ulixes had stopped correcting. He looked down at his fingers, then looked up at Steban, tired. “Please.”
Steban lit a new cigar, this time with the matches. He sighed the smoke and handed the cigarette to Ulixes. “My point is… they have the same capacity for change as any other individual,” Steban spoke as Ulixes smoked. “And I think the only thing that keeps me going is that, even though it seems that all my efforts are useless when I teach high school kids, something I should feel is a waste, I feel other thing. There is a feeling in me that does not leave me, that says yes, I am doing something.”
The cigarette still had not returned to Steban. It seemed that Ulixes needed it a little more. "What are we even doing?" he asked. “The basis of change is the thought and this has the potential to take its purest expression in historical infra-materialism matter. Absolutely. I agree. But… Steban, even if what we do is try to stimulate said faculties in the students for a better future, we are not being better than the coercive forces of the State.” He smoked again, this time he did seem willing to give it up to Steban. “We continue to be contributors to the system that we so oppose by evaluating such individuals, wanting them to behave, needing them to fit into what is the rigorous educational system. We continue to reinforce what is a *type* of individuals, since we come from there and we cannot do anything against said imposition other than wanting to implement it back. Because where do we go if we want to reject all that? Ever since the emergence of a society as massive, as authoritarian, over the world as it is today, there is no options if the individual is not capable of adapting to what the individual should be and what the individual must comply with.” Steban had the cigarette back, as some kind of comfort for the next question. “So… are we *really* doing something?”
By itself, all the systems in society were moulded on the foundations of capitalism, and there was no way to run from them. Communism was formulated as a ‘there may be another way’ in the face of situations to which individuals have always been subjected to, such precarious situations in order to live and support their family somehow. And in the modern day, with the capitalist system reaching its most destructive and dominant stage, individuals were not even capable of doing that. The two of them searched for options their entire lives, but there they were. Both in some apartment, exploited and alienated from the world. They had no one. They had distanced themselves from any entity outside of themselves. Ulixes had got in a terrible fight with his dad a long time ago and hadn’t visited Gottwald since then. He always told Steban that it had happened because his dad was a stupid liberal who never supported him and, to a certain extent, it was true. Steban, on the other hand, lost everything when his mom left the world. Those were years in which he wanted to be one with the bed, to starve to death between the sheets, but it was necessary to sink all that if he wanted to continue living. Even if it was without his mother.
The knowledge that they had been storing in their internal libraries for years and years felt useless. They spent so much time discussing, collecting ideas and ways to make the world better, only to get stuck as an unemployed and underpaid high school teacher, both ridiculously overqualified. Steban hissed as the cigarette burned his hand, and Ulixes looked up at him, worriedly. “No one is better than the ones you mention, really,” Steban spoke, caressing his sore fingers. “Even the slightest contributor, which we all become, ends up perpetuating in favour of the same system over and over again.” Ulixes looked at him through his dirty glasses, listless once again. His hand reached out, politely asking for the cigarette. Steban gave it to him, and went on. “But it is impossible not to perpetuate the system in each act. Without any consent, we were already embedded in it and it is something that permanently and deeply crosses us. So… the hell with that.”
Ulixes smoked the cigarette. “The hell with that.”
Steban extended his arm towards Ulixes, asking for the cigarette back. Ulixes smiled slightly and handed it. “What we have left in this inopportune world is to provide opportunities,” said Steban. “Provide them within the system that is incapable of collapsing. Within the people who can’t give up their comfortable lives for something better, because something better is not certain. For them, it is just a hope that behind all that pollution there still is what was once there.”
“The pollution?”
“Yes, you know.” Steban heaved a deep breath after smoking the cigarette. “People without hope will always bow their heads.”
A small smile was painted on Ulixes’ face as he rested his head in one of his hands. “You still have your little nice touch with analogies.”
The smile got Steban. “Thank you, Uli.”
“Perhaps…” Ulixes spoke, somewhat doubtfully. “All we have left now is to lose it with them,” he said. “The hope.”
“Maybe,” Steban replied.
Ulixes smiled some more. “Mayhaps.” And Steban smiled back at that, too.
He extended his arm towards Ulixes with the cigar between his fingers. “Are you willing, then, to die with the people for the hopeless decisions they may make?”
Ulixes took the cigarette, gently brushing against Steban’s fingers as he did so. “We will die together for it.” It was, after all, the only thing left to die in their hearts to continue living.