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.