Kurzweil - Whipping boy : the forty-year search for my twelve-year-old bully

In memory of my father, for the things he invented

With gratitude to my mother, for the things she preserved

This is a work of nonfiction.

No names have been changed.

In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

My youthful innocence suffered an injury. It was a slight scratch, which in the course of time grew into a gaping wound that cut deep into my flesh and did not close.

Hans Keilson, The Death of the Adversary

Youve been a menace and a muse. A beacon and a roadblock. My jailer and my travel agent.

You have this uncanny habit of popping up in the most unexpected places. During a walk through the Louvre. At the back of a bar. In the lyrics of a Broadway show tune.

If The Da Vinci Code shows up on TV or if Im playing foosball with my son, if I spot a certain kind of fountain pen or a particular brand of wristwatch, theres a good chance Ill find myself thinking of you.

The prompts arent always that subtle. A few years back, a credit card company website summoned the obsession directly with a password hint: Who was your archrival when you were growing up?

Without a second thought, I entered the name of the boy who entered my life when I was ten years oldentered my life and reshaped it forever: C-E-S-A-R A-U-G-U-S-T-U-S.

Even if I hadnt bunked with a kid named Cesar Augustus, memories of the Swiss boarding school that brought us together surely would have stuck. The eccentric imperatives of the institutions forward-thinking founder and the exotic backgrounds of the teachers he employed, the daily meditations promoting liberty and the thirty-six-page handbook that curtailed it, the lessons in swordsmanship and elocution, the alpine expeditions, cold showers and soybean steaks... all of it was way, way too strange to forget.

Established on a mountain plain high above Geneva in 1949, Aiglon (pronounced EGG-lawn) was the brainchild of John Corlette, a headstrong, asthmatic Englishman with a singular vision of what a boarding school should be: regimented yet free-spirited, full of fearless high-altitude adventure and moral enlightenment. JCyes, thats how the founder chose to be addressedbelieved physical fitness and spiritual reflection nurtured body and soul and that obedience was a prerequisite for independence.

Freedom, he declared, is an exceedingly difficult commodity to handle. To do so requires very strict training and discipline. At Aiglon such training and discipline are not only provided; they are enjoyed.

Well, not by me, they werent. As the schools youngest pupil, the runt of the litter, I found myself at the very bottom of a pseudo-military pyramid codified in the aforementioned handbook. I received a copy of Rules and Ranks the day I arrived, September 1, 1971, and was given a written test on its contents a few weeks later.

Every lower-schooler entered Aiglon a so-called no-rank, with promotion to junior green badge summarily awarded to all but the most noncompliant plebe. The appearance of hard work, academic achievement, physical prowess, or moral rectitude (translation: brownnosing) paved the way for further upgrades, first to junior red badge, then to silver eagle, and from there to the lofty rank of golden eagle. A new sweater pin accompanied each promotion, as did a correlative bump in the pocket money handed out each Wednesday afternoon.

Upper-schoolers could climb even higher through JCs Rank System by becoming standard-bearer candidates, then standard-bearers, then captains, and finally (for the two most even-keeled and charismatic pupils in the school) head girl and guardian, the latter honorific optimistically filched from Platos Republic.

Nuanced enough? Not for JC. He tweaked the protocol further by introducing stars. I recall this small refinement because the School Council promoted me to junior green badge star soon after I took first place at a regional track meet. (Two months later, I was stripped of the spangle when a dining-hall monitor caught me shirking my duties.) As a junior red badge star, the highest rank I achieved, my weekly pay was pegged at five Swiss francs, or roughly $1.25. Although the school took care of laundry, haircuts, postage, and paper, it was up to me to cover all miscellaneous expenses, and at Aiglon those expenses included fines.

{Courtesy of Aiglon College, Switzerland}

John Corlette (19111977), founder of Aiglon College, known as JC.

Say the house captain caught me flicking a towel or the dining-hall monitor noticed I was tilting backward in my chair. Suppose the outside tidiness captain found grease on my camping gear or his residential counterpart observed that Id left a light on during the day. Any one of those slipups could trigger a fine of twenty to fifty centimes. And dont for a second think a parent could cover those charges. External financial assistance was, at least in principle, banned from campus.

The moment a student is given extra sums of money over and above his earned income, the education value of the system is destroyed, JC noted in a brochure sent to my mother. The regulations tied to this apocalyptic premise were spelled out in the Money and Trade section of the Rules:

All and any currency exceeding five francs in total value must be handed to your housemaster at the beginning of each term. Any other money received by you during the term for birthdays, etc. must be handed in at once.

I was ten and terrified. I obeyed JCs monetary restrictions. Most older students did not. Aiglon sustained a robust black-market economy dependent on all sorts of unsanctioned revenue streams. (Cesar, for example, did a brisk business reselling movie posters and pocketknives.) But heaven help anyone who got caught with funds in excess of nine francs (about two dollars). One of the nicest and most respected seniors, nabbed in flagrante delicto with a Diners Club card, got the boot two weeks before he was to graduate.

The cover of the thirty-six-page student handbook, circa 1972.

Money wasnt the schools only mechanism of control. Public tally boards also instilled discipline. Red marksearned for feats of physical, spiritual, or academic virtuesignaled success and paved the way for promotions and bons, tissue-paper vouchers distributed by housemasters and accepted among local shopkeepers in lieu of cash. Black marks, on the other hand, could result in a pensum, a two-page assignment on a subject of a prefects choosing (The Virtues of Thrift, The Sex Life of the Sand Fly, etc.). Since I was too young to be saddled with written penalties, my waywardness usually resulted in lapspunishment runs requiring me to dash to a stone bridge and back, a hillside circuit of about a mile. Late for class? Laps. In the hallway after lights-out? Laps. Spotted crossing the invisible one-meter barrier surrounding the assistant housemasters VW Bug? Caught being slimy, exhibiting loutish behavior, or micturating on a football pitch? Laps, laps, and more laps.