“I only received it this morning,” said Midhat. “Oh,” he caught himself, “you are talking about Laurent. Oh yes! It is really terrible. We are in despair. Thank you, Samuel. I, I really appreciate it.”
“But there’s another thing, wait. Would you consider, I was wondering, would you like to study together?”
“Study together?”
“I enjoyed our time in the library when we were researching psychiatry. And I was impressed by your interest, your curiosity in these different areas of medical science. I think that you and I, we could make revision for the examinations rather pleasurable.”
Cogolati’s large nostrils spread open with his smile. Midhat hesitated. Then, he held out his hand, and as he shook Cogolati’s the thought warmed up in his brain that this man had been sent to save him, and Cogolati began to chortle at this eagerness, now shaking his entire arm, saying I’m so pleased, I’m so pleased.
The following day at eleven o’clock, armed with several sets of example papers, textbooks, and element tables they had drawn up themselves, the pair met in a recess behind the cathedral.
“Let’s start with botany, shall we?” said Cogolati.
That corner, in the shade of the cypress trees, became the place where they sat every day from eleven until two as June turned into July, and the summer heat struck the ashy stone of the anatomical theatre, bleaching their eyes so that when they turned away they discovered green and purple oblongs floating across the pages of their books. From the first it was apparent that, after a year of diligent study, any further revision of the material was for Cogolati merely a pleasant supplement. This caused Midhat even more anxiety, which he tried to disguise under his enthusiasm, asking questions and tutting at the responses as if to say, oh of course, yes I knew that. If Cogolati ever felt irritated by this he hid it well, for he only giggled and tipped his head back as Midhat asked, for the third time: “And catalysis? Remind me what that was again? Oh yes, oh yes, of course.”
They sat the examinations in the first week of July. Two hundred seats were arranged in the hall with metre-wide gaps between, and a dead space at the back where the examiners marched and congregated. Zoology and botany came first. Midhat thought both the written and the oral tests went well: there were questions on photosynthesis and the agents of seed dispersal, which he and Cogolati had studied thoroughly, and a section on vertebrates and invertebrates; in the zoology oral Midhat confidently identified the gill raker, the spiracle, proboscis, cilium, and tentacle, and outlined the history of a frog before a panel of two professors; in botany he sketched the life of an alga, a fungus, and a liverwort; he listed the characteristics of a gymnosperm, a monocotyledon, a dicotyledon; he defined respiration and triumphantly discussed the life of the deciduous.
Physics was also relatively straightforward. The key to it, Cogolati had explained, was to memorise the formulae and then recognise from the question which of them was needed. After that it was a simple matter of substituting numbers. “This is the problem with rudimentary science assessment,” said Cogolati. But if he wanted Midhat’s collusion in his disdain, he was met only with the astonished face of a man who felt he had just been saved. “Thank you,” said Midhat. “Thank you.”
The real trouble came with chemistry. It was not that Midhat didn’t know the material; he had spent the three days’ interval between the physics written test and the chemistry one beside Cogolati in the library, completing practice papers and discussing their answers, and on the day of the examination he entered the hall feeling prepared. The problem was rather that, looking down at his paper in the cool plaster-walled chamber, with the sound of two hundred pens scratching, and the hollow clop of the examiners’ strides between the desks, he was distracted. He read and reread each question without haste; he worked on one answer and then another, abandoning calculations mid-tally.
Today, on the day of the chemistry written test and the final day of the academic term, Sylvain Leclair was due to dine at the Molineus’. Since Laurent’s death, Midhat’s romance with Jeannette had been flowering of its own accord, and his theories about Ariane Molineu and the cause of her suicide had moved to the periphery. But though he had not consciously dwelled on them, something had