The Professor’s History

In the morning, Menouira and the professor breakfasted with Menouira's relatives in the village. Under the clear sky, the professor could see the land dropping away on the far side of the caid's house, an immense, roseate plain dotted with trees, and sheep and goats, and the hillside nubbed by the early shoots of crops, patterns of green in the red earth. The glistening mirror of Oued Zerifa zigzagged its way across the land. The caid's triumph was glorious.

Mustafa and Ibrahim found him there.

'What of your business?' asked Mustafa in a voice that seemed to the Frenchman no longer friendly, but sneering. 'Will you go to the cave without the caid?'

'I intend to.'

'It is perhaps better that the caid is absent,' Mustafa continued. 'These, my brothers, are the people to whom the tragedy belongs. It is their place.' He smiled, and Menouira and the others smiled also, as if this were a happy fact. 'And will you return to Cassaigne? We shall wait.'

The professor hesitated. 'I would like to go on tomorrow,' he said. 'I hoped to go on to Rabelais.' He paused. 'Will you take me there?'

The group fell silent.

'I have important business in Rabelais,' he insisted. 'If you will not take me, perhaps someone else?'

'It is two days' journey. Why did you not tell me before?' asked Mustafa. 'We would need another mule. We would need food.'

'This could be arranged,' said another man. 'If you so wish it.'

'In Europe, there is a war,' said the professor, as if this were an explanation. 'I must get to Rabelais. It is important.'

'We will take you,' said Mustafa.

'I will rent you a mule,' said Menouira's cousin.

'I can provide food,' said another. And the deal was struck.

Menouira and the professor set off to the cave near noon. The entrance itself was invisible from Necmaria, hidden among a cluster of coppery boulders. The path Menouira took, along the ridge of the slight escarpment, snaked outwards in an 's' from the village, dipped only to the oued, which they crossed on stepping stones, and rose again to bring the pair to their destination from above, just as Pelissier had been brought. The descent to the mouth was awkward: twice the professor slid, the second time scraping his hands as he fell, knocking his glasses from his nose. Menouira retrieved them and attempted to brush the red earth from the professor's sullied suit, to no avail. The dirt clung in the creases of the fabric like streaks of dried blood.

The professor, in his research, had not been able to picture the cave. He had not realized that a small stream would trickle so carelessly into its mouth; nor that the overhanging rocks would reach so ominously downwards, their tentacles like pointing fingers; nor that the breadth of the coloured plain would lie, like an invitation and a promise, at his feet.

When they entered it, the cave was not what the professor had, till now, understood by the word: strictly speaking a riverbed, it was comprised of a single gallery through the rock, without branches or smaller tributaries, wavering only slightly in its downward course. The oued, once underground, became a floor of muck rather than a river. The walls sweated, dripped their moisture like irregular footfalls into the mud. As Menouira led the way, the professor realized that the cave did not open out into any chamber, and at times, his elbows, outstretched, measured its width. There were moments when the torch-smoke wavered upwards into the darkness without illuminating any ceiling, so high was the gallery; at other points, Menouira's arm would reach backwards to him, urging his body into a stoop, as the passage dwindled to less than a metre tall. Throughout, their little light cast fantastic shadows, as of contorted figures beckoning along the wet walls, made surprisingly pale and uneven by accretions of guano. Hollow recesses offered the only variation: some high, others at the level of the men's knees; some rounded, as if sanded by craftsmen, others jagged enough to cut.

The professor stopped, after a time, and watched Menouira's torch diminish in front of him. He turned a full circle, breathing deeply. He fought the pressure of his heart in the cave of his ribs, the force of history like a life around him. A thousand men, women and children, with their animals and belongings, peopled the space: hunched in crevices, pressed against the moist walls, their cheeks to the cold stone, their buttocks and arms and feet meeting in the subterranean night. The animals lowed, the young women nursed their infants, soothing them with rhythmic words, clucking at the children who clung to their legs, up to their ankles in mud. There was no place to lie, no square metre any of these ghosts could claim for their own, huddled against one another and their beasts, cramped and stinking, giving off a sour heat. He heard the still waiting; sensed the cramping of muscles, the wriggling, weary children; shuddered at the dim whine of the sick and injured. And then the smoke, filtering slowly, then more rapidly along the gallery, cloudy whorls spiralling up to the invisible ceiling and drifting slowly back downwards, great bowls of smoke wafting into the minute spaces between the living beings.

'Menouira,' the professor called sharply, focusing again on the now-distant button of light, 'Ça suffit. Enough.'

On the walk back, too, Menouira led the way. The distance which had seemed so great was now a matter of a hundred metres, the surprised O of the sky widening with each step.

Not far from the exit, the professor stumbled over something. He reached down and pulled up a long, narrow object, slimed with mud. Menouira held the torch beside him, and he did his best to wipe the thing clean, but he knew before he had exposed its ivory cast, before even it saw the light, that he held a bone.

'I believe,' he said, handing it to Menouira for inspection, 'that this is a human femur.'

Menouira took the bone and turned it in his hand. Without a word, he raised his arm and hurled it back into the darkness, where they heard its dull clatter against the wall of the cave, and the sucking thud as it settled back into the oued.

Only when the afternoon breeze swept upon his face and dried his tears did the professor realize that he had been crying.