The Professor’s History

The professor wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, and then took off his glasses and wiped them too, fussing over their wire arms and squinting in the vast light. The train spat clouds of grit and steam as it hauled itself back into motion and off, towards the naked mountains.

Around him, there was no station to speak of, just an empty shack with no door, and a jarring French railroad sign pinned to the wall, its fancy blue letters neatly, but dustily, announcing CASSAIGNE.

The professor–a slight, weathered man in his mid-forties, with a small forehead and a Gallic profile, carefully attired in a cream linen suit with a crisp straw hat–was not a man to look absurd: even alone, at the side of the endless ladder of the track, in the middle of the scrubby foothills, he managed to retain some of his composure. When he saw, in the distance, a man swaddled in a burnous, he did not call out. As befit a Frenchman, and especially a Frenchman so long in Algeria, he waited. The Arab made his way, unhurried, towards him.

Their exchange was terse, conducted in a pidgin that allowed each the room of his own language–for the words that mattered most. The professor was headed to Necmaria, a village in the foothills of the Dahra, midway between Algiers and Oran. He needed food, a couple of mules and a guide. It would be possible, said the local man, but would involve waiting, and leaving at dawn, aiming to traverse the fifty or so kilometres in a single, exhausting day. The man would not go himself, but his brother, who possessed two mules, could perhaps lead the expedition. They would take the man's son, a boy of about fifteen: there was strength in numbers. Tomorrow was possible. Tomorrow it would be. The professor could sleep the night with the brother's family–theirs was a larger house, the provision more adequate for a foreigner.

The Arab did not ask, then, by the train tracks, why the professor wanted to go to Necmaria. He thought he knew. It was an uncomfortable history between them, Arab and Frenchman, better not made explicit. Both were aware that the only reason for a Frenchman to travel to Necmaria was to see the caves of Dahra. A history better left buried.

In fact, the professor was working on a book. A strange thing to do, in the mountains of North Africa, in the middle of a war, when metropolitan France teetered (the line was so close to Paris that the troops were sent to the front in taxis), and all Europe was confusion and fear. The professor should not, for so many reasons, have been pursuing these stories, ugly and old as they were. If anything, he knew it was a time to be looking forward, beyond the war. He was driven, though, by something he had read, a sentence in the letters of a colonel. Bent over yellowing pages in the city library, intent upon his research, he had unearthed the letters of St Arnaud, and with them the promise, or threat, of historical discovery: an act, an immense act, had passed unrecorded. A glimmer in a dusty corner, it drew him back, and back, and then, eventually, out of the city library and out of the city itself. Silently, the professor had grown convinced that this history was relevant–or even, when the glimmer was at its most insistent, crucial–to the current conflict. He carried the leather-bound volume of letters with him at all times, like a prayer-book. But he knew enough not to discuss his work with anyone.

Mustafa, the local man's brother, was not as restrained as his sibling. That evening, as they sat down to supper by the quivering fire, beneath a candy-coloured mackerel dusk, Mustafa asked why. He was entitled: they were his mules, and he was to lead them. But the question brought, nonetheless, a silence in which only the bleating of goats and the sharp reports of the burning kindling gave answer.

'I have business with the caid,' answered the professor at last. He mopped at his stew with grave concentration and chewed on his bread. The firelight was reflected in his glasses, and the other men could not see his eyes.

'What business would that be?' asked Mustafa, playing his fingers in his beard. 'He is not–may Allah forgive me if I am mistaken–not a man of any importance to your government.'

'I am not a government official,' said the professor, suddenly weary. 'I am a historian. I record history.'

'The caves,' said Ibrahim, Mustafa's nephew, only now understanding. 'You wish to visit the caves of Dahra.'

The professor would neither confirm nor deny it, and Mustafa and Ibrahim knew it was so.

'Will you want us to stay, while you do your business?' asked Mustafa. 'Or will you not be coming back to Cassaigne?'

The professor looked up, seemingly surprised that the wash of night had closed in around them, carried on the waves of chill air. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I will decide tomorrow.'

The professor did not sleep well. He felt oppressed by the secret music of other people's slumber–these exhalations and whisperings somehow more alien for being Muslim–and the earthen floor of the house poked bony and cold into his spine. Although very tired, or perhaps because of it, he found his mind restless, his imagination conjuring scenarios he could not wish to contemplate. It occurred to him that he did not know what tribe his hosts belonged to; nor did he know how long they had been settled in Cassaigne or, indeed, been settled at all. He did not know what to expect of Necmaria; nor could he gauge the relationship between Mustafa's people and those of that village. And where might the allegiances of the people of Rabelais fall?

The professor, in following the account in the colonel's letter, proposed to move onwards from Necmaria to Rabelais, a distance of a further hundred kilometres. There were caves near Rabelais also, and although their name–the caves of Sbéhas–did not carry the same weight of dread as did that of Necmaria, it soon would, if the colonel had written truthfully, and if the professor was to convey that truth to the world. In both cases, Necmaria and Rabelais, the story of the caves was not only a tale of Europeans and the natives: there were tribal tales, too, of betrayal and unsavoury rewards. The professor did not know enough. As he sought to align his limbs to the ungenerous curve of the ground, as he drew his coarse blanket closer around him and inhaled its greasy stink, he recognized that he did not know the full meaning or consequences of his work, that he was a learned man who knew nothing outside the walls of the city library. For a long time he lay, cold and sweating in his papoose, eyes open to the blackness, watching without seeing and measuring the darkness.