THE LAME HISTORIAN
He arrived sometime in the evening,
when the first street lights came on in the city, and, with crutches under
his arms, entered his small one-story house, not far from the two rows of
poplars. He entered the room that he used both as a kitchen and a bedroom,
his eyes fixed on the door. He immediately pulled the string on the
pear-shaped night lamp soiled by flies, which immediately lit his entire
face. Both eyebrows were not revealed at once, but one of them was
sufficient to disclose all his bile. He tossed his hat (he had worn it
summer and winter for the last ten years) carelessly on the couch, and he
put on his thick-framed glasses, after cleaning them with a soft, thin
piece of cloth. He eventually sat in the corner covered in dust from the
couch, where he used to sit all the time--a place between the light-orange
night lamp and the open drawer. Burdened with the many headaches that
troubled him constantly, he turned his back to the window in spite. He
sighed loudly through his nose as if to expel the rage from his chest, and
with his enfeebled hand he removed a stack of papers from the drawer:
documents, manuscripts, and other thick piles, pale from the hands of the
sun. He scattered them on the carpet just as the light of the night lamp
was scattered. He himself did not know why the hell he had so mercilessly
strewn the papers that had consumed most of his life. It seems that he did
it when the cigarette between his lips went out. Perhaps that is why both
his heart and brain now started working together.
Suddenly, he placed his mangled fingers on the spilt papers
with sharp angles. He turned them over and jumbled them up as though he
were kneading the dough of his mind, then he poked his short pencil into
one of the papers with bent ends, whose back had been stained by coffee
long ago. He remembered immediately that it was on this very table that he
had spilt coffee when his wife was collecting her clothes from the house,
to move in with her parents, never to return. Although they were married
five years, he never felt happy. They fought each other over nothing, they
did not talk to each other over nothing, they threatened each other over
nothing. When they argued they forgot why they poured out such anger, which
had steamed between them with their spite, which grew like donkey hooves,
why, why… Their life continued in this unacceptable way until that dismal
afternoon the professor lost his left leg in a traffic accident. That same
day she found out about her husband’s bad fortune she vanished without a
trace, forever. She married a second man, but it seemed to her that there
would be a third. She argued with each of them as she had with the first,
and any who came afterwards were told about the value of the abandoned one.
This coffee stain reminded him of the day she first threw her
shoes out onto the street, together with the clothes, then her husband as
well, while his leg was still bleeding. It reminded him of the time she
grabbed her bundle and, slamming the doors, disappeared like a storm along
the road lined by the two rows of poplars. Now, after four years of utter
loneliness and non-stop intellectual work in peace, he wanted to scratch
around in this scribbling, like a mole picks over husks with its paws.
Perhaps it is only to forget certain things, and to call up memories of the
one who fled. He felt as if it were happening over again today, the cup
filled with freshly ground coffee was spilt at the very moment, when she,
out of rage and hatred for him, decided to burn his only white shirt. And
with his shirt she also threw into the stove his notebook with his
manuscript on ancient history, on which he had worked diligently for four
years. In further vengeance she splashed his ink bottle against his
forehead in an attempt to blind him. This happened as if today, in front of
the same mirror, in the same room, among the walnut furniture.
Then his unfinished coffee cup spilled on his bleeding leg
and on the front side of the paper. His coffee spilt out, but the anger
remained in his heart. He clenched his jaws in pain as he plucked a hair
from his mustache. That is all he remembered.
The professor focused a ray of light onto the
manuscript--notes in two, even three colors on the crumpled documents,
here, between the two pages of heavy cardboard the color of dried figs,
where he kept her letters without any particular care, sent from time to
time after their separation. He left the envelopes unopened after he
received them from the postman. One boring night he read the last letter
only, the one she had sent registered. He opened it in some kind of rage,
when he received the two reviews from the publishing house, which rejected
his manuscript, with a remark that both the facts and the process were
wrong. He placed this letter, and the other unopened ones, under his head,
quite crumpled. He placed them there to remind him of his former wife with
her carelessness and psychological disorder. The professor at this moment
of complete loneliness remembered the new line, which instead of starting
with Beloved or Detested One, started with "Hey, you trained horse, you
lame dog…if only your other leg were broken too, you stupid ass!"
Ashamed, he put his former wife’s open letter, a letter with
much tastelessness, many threats and slanders, among the negative reviews
of three double-spaced pages, sorry and feeling ridicule at the same time.
Immediately afterwards he got up wanting to crumple them all together: the
letters, manuscripts, and documents. He cursed his former wife, the
publishers and their two reviewers, and threw everything at once into the
fire. In the long tongues of the flames the daily newspaper filled with sad
news also burned, a captive of the stove. Massacred children in Vietnam,
the sale of some private villas on the Adriatic coast. In the room facing
south only the window remained, and the light of the lamp, and the sorrow
in his eyes.
There was complete silence. His coat hung on the rack, its
sleeves hanging down, the collar torn, and two buttons missing: an old coat
that barely reached his knees. Next to the coat, also in absolute silence,
lay the Pelican fountain pen on a new manuscript on ancient history. The
ink had dried, along with the type-400 flour bread, and the dish of beans,
three days old.
The middle-aged professor lived one day at a time in this
one-story house near the rows of poplars, because the house was scheduled
to be demolished the next afternoon, to be replaced by a transformer for
the new neighborhood. The next day at dawn, before the officials appeared
in their cubicles, the professor was in front of the community affairs
office, his hands in his pockets, his hat pulled down to his ears, and an
unshaved beard.
"I came!" he proclaimed briefly, as if a historical figure.
The person in charge draw a long red line, made some
calculations, finished with the row above the line, and when he looked at
his watch and saw it was not yet time to accommodate the public, he crossed
his arms. But seeing the professor’s persistence in breaking with custom,
claiming that he was breaking the rules and official ethical norms, he
rubbed the wrinkles on his forehead and addressed the professor.
"What do you want?" he asked curtly.
"A new two-bedroom apartment in exchange for my two-bedroom
house on Poplar Street," he answered as if from a rifle.
The man in charge lifted his eyes. He stared long at the
professor, looking above his shoulders where a transparent layer of dust
lay, as if he lived in a mill.
"What do you want?" he asked again to destroy his
self-confidence.
"A two bedroom apartment, because today they're knocking down
my house by the poplars," he answered, pressing his manuscript under his
arm and looking across the office at the new development where he hoped to
have his apartment.
The official rubbed his gold tooth, tightened his tie, combed
his black hair in front of a round mirror, and, after snorting as if he had
horse flies in his nose, took the register of the citizenry from the shelf
and with the tip of his pencil checked all the names that started with the
letter Q. He bit his lips in a show of surprise, and after putting his
pencil back in its place, he addressed the professor.
"I’m sorry, comrade, but according to us, here in our
carefully maintained documents, you are deceased," he said, and over his
name and surname underlined in red, he added another line—signifying
certainty of death.
The professor, as if hit by a bullet, took a step forward. He
carefully looked at himself to see whether he was really alive, dusted off
his shoulders, and spoke as if in front of a history class.
"Pharaohs, emperors, four social systems, and two world wars
are deceased. But the history professor Qazim Qella is still alive. Indeed,
he was mortally wounded by the reviewers' bullet, but he remained alive
within the Trojan Horse." When he remembered that he was not writing
history at this point, but looking for a roof over his head, he mopped up
the river of bitter sweat with his hat and took a deep breath, as if to
remind the clerk that there was still life within his chest.
"We can’t meet the needs of the living, much less extend a
hand of mercy to the dead," the person in charge said, blood boiling in his
head as he drew another red line of death under the name and surname, with
the same pencil--as if he were making sure the professor was buried.
"When did I die, then?" he said, trying to come up with the
name for a cannibal, as if in ancient history, because though he had a head
like a drum, he still reserved some empty space in it for understanding. "I
do consider myself dead in history, but not in life," he added loudly, just
to convince the respected gentleman that he had lived in just this way. He
lived near the poplars with one leg, like a widower, beaten with worries.
He had a disability pension and not a single person who loved him…
"What you claim is true. You really were born the year you
say, but you died in nineteen sixty-five. You have been dead to this very
day. During this time no changes were carried out. Also, during these years
the municipality had no headaches with you," the official said to convince
the professor that he really had been buried four years ago.
"Between the dates your excellency has mentioned, professor
Qazim Qella indeed tried to write ancient history. He did this in his
house, among the two rows of poplars, in a room facing the sun, and not in
a grave. History is not written in a grave as much as it is forgotten." The
professor provided this explanation with his bones trembling, because out
of time, or before time, they had buried him.
"Can you show me part of this written history as proof that
you are still alive?" the clerk asked, stretching out his mottled hand to
take the text of the written history.
The professor kept quiet, but his eyes all at once filled
with tears and his hair stood up under his hat. He shuddered in fear. He
was afraid of the reviewers as if they were gravediggers. But he had
nothing else now to prove that he was alive, that he had worked in his own
house, that… he hoped to rewrite the rejected manuscript, to uncover new
historical evidence, to sow the seeds of a new plant before the gates of
life. Eh! A sigh formed deep in his chest, as if he were tearing facts from
the dead flesh of history. The professor stood in the office on two
petrified legs: one of them stuck in his shoe, the other of wood. He had
nothing, absolutely nothing as proof of his own existence. He had no
children; his wife had abandoned him; his friends had not visited since he
decided to rewrite his ancient history, because he had no time for small
talk; the neighbors had closed their shutters, because as a widower he had
no place among their families. For a year he wrote regularly to his only
brother, who had moved to Turkey, but after he received no answer, he
crossed him off too. Only one student, after he had given him part of his
pension, would deliver him bread, liver, fruit, a piece of cake. In this
way he spent four years—quite dead to his town.
For a moment, it seemed to him that the whole office buzzed
like a beehive. Three other clerks, after checking on the cause established
for his actual death, were left speechless. Then, one of them, who appeared
wisest, rose to his feet in attention as if taking an oath before his work
gloves, thought for a while, and said: the professor’s death is not
imaginary. I remember when his former wife came to us, her eyes flooded
with tears, and publicly announced the death of her legal spouse, the
result of a traffic accident. She received fifty thousand denars for
funeral expenses. After that day she left the city, and the professor was
never seen again. The signatures of his former wife and two witnesses
assuredly testify to the fulfillment of all obligations towards the
deceased. And we have fulfilled our obligation. Qazim Qella, a professor by
profession, has been transferred to the death registry, and consequently
all of his debts—two unpaid loans, some unpaid electric bills, have been
declared null and void. To this end...—he didn’t proceed. He scratched his
neck and placed a period at the end of his thoughts. He also placed a
period on the record against a well known seller of apartments who sold the
empty ones and switched them around without anyone’s approval.
The professor lost his patience. He slapped his forehead and
said: Listen, you blessed things! The dead Qazim Qella, the history
professor, here I am in person, God damn you! I’m right here, alive, thank
God, with two arms, one leg, here—he started thumping his chest.
"You need to verify that you are alive and are a professor by
profession," one of them said without lifting his head.
The professor was left with nothing to do but clutch his
crutches under his arms and go back where he came from. When he got home,
he saw clouds of dust rising above the roof of his house. The workers on
the municipal project had begun the demolition a half hour earlier. He felt
as if he had broken his other leg too, and he yelled as loud as he could:
"I’m alive, alive, but I need to convince others that a living man lived in
this house. Here, in a tiny two-bedroom house a professor has been giving
life to ancient history for quite a while."
"Ancient history needs nothing from a dead man, since it died
a long time ago itself," the clerk had said.
That night, on a bench of his former school, Qazim Qella sat
down to write an affidavit testifying that he still lived, despite the fact
that life took no account of him. He lived in hope, though life pointlessly
took his leg, snatched away his wife, leveled his house, rejected his
manuscript. Attempting to enter history, he had entered the grave. After he
convinced himself with indisputable facts that he was really alive, he
thought of something unusual. He leafed through the other manuscript and
wrote in its margins: "Ancient history also requires no grave, but it
requires a testimony—it is then that it lives its life, when people
consider it dead."
