(Audio version of this story is available on YouTube.)
“I read your book,” I said.
Which I immediately realized was a mistake to say, it would have been better to let the bastard figure it out for himself. They love figuring things out for themselves, it confirms their bias that they're smarter than you are.
But that's as may be, the line has its effect all the same. He swells up like a mushroom after the rain, all smiles and false modesty. He controls his voice though, saying, “It's really only a minor piece of work, but it showed me some lines of research that might prove fruitful in the future. I hope you got something of value out of it, at least.”
There's the opening. “ I learned a lot about the lives of independent women before the war. And you do have an eye for a striking anecdote.”
You might expect him to be a twitchy little weasel of a man, and to be fair, he does twitch if you're looking for it. Around the left corner of the mouth, I noticed at the first of his lectures. I noticed it when he got very excited going over the attendance policy in the syllabus. And it's not like he doesn't have any restraint at all–no, I watched him from the front row of the lecture hall and he never mentioned his book even once. Granted, it's just an introductory course on European history and undergraduates like me can't be expected to appreciate the subtlety of his biographical analysis, but it almost gave me a respect for the man. To see he could hold back.
And he wasn't horrible to look at either, I mean I'd never seen him before I walked into that first lecture. But from what Samantha had told me over the summer I'd expected the swamp monster. What I got was a perfectly ordinary man in early middle age, capable of cracking a slightly risque joke before an audience without cracking his voice in the process. Nothing remarkable, really, with his stubble, his pomaded hair, and his tweed jacket. But it was easy enough to see how he could pass as human.
Anyway, he swells at the compliment and even though he tries to hide it, it's a little disgusting to see how easy it is to have an effect on him. My heart sinks and I realize this won't be any challenge at all. But he's talking again: “Well, I chose what's in there pretty carefully. I think it's the little incidents of a life that really reveal a person's character.”
I widen my eyes just a tiny bit and tilt my head back, just slightly enough that I appear captivated. “I never really thought about it that way before, but you're so right. It's always the little details that give away what's really going on. It's just…”
“What is it?” he asks too quickly.
My eyes wander the room, taking in the shelves full of thick tomes with titles like Dreadnought, The Opium War, and The First Total War. Not dusty, or anything, and not exactly cluttered, but even though he puts a token effort into keeping the office presentable you can tell it's not exactly a priority. The desk looks like something he got from IKEA, the lamp was chosen purely to give light when he's writing. You can practically hear the man objecting that he's a man of ideas, why would he bother with the aesthetics of mere objects? And the worst part is that I halfway suspect he'd mean every word of it. A man like that would live in a cave without caring what he was missing out on. Except…
I draw my chin downward, raise my voice an octave so it takes on a girlish lilt. “I really don't think I should say, I mean we've never even talked before.”
He leans forward. “How bad can it be?”
Almost there. I dropped my chin even further, so from his point of view it must look just like a big fat finger pointing straight at the low neckline of my tank top. I suppress a cringe at the thought and go on in my lost little girl tone, “Are you sure?”
“There's nothing you can say that will surprise or shock me,” he says, leaning back in his spinning chair like Agamemnon on his seat of state.
“It's just…” I said, “Every once in a while as I was reading, I really got the feeling…”
Just the shadow of the shadow flickers in his eyes. He's starting to get the idea. “What feeling is that?”
“It's just… from some of the things you lingered on… I really got the feeling that you hated her.”
In terms of physical objects, the most prominent thing in the room–really the only decoration in the room–is a twelve-inch bust of Kaiser Wilhelm II in black with a sheen like obsidian. He sits on the desk, facing away from the window, so he's not looking at either of us directly, but rather staring at an abstract point midway between the two of us. Like a Greek statue, his blank eyes seem to take in everything and nothing. A lanyard, dusty, hangs from the Kaiser's pointed helmet.
The professor frowns, but there's a note almost of gloating in his voice as he says, “Well, a historian's attitude toward his subject is a complex thing.”
“So you do hate her?” I asked.
“I'm fascinated with her,” he said.
“Why?” I asked innocently.
Healing is back in his chair, hand twitching only slightly, glances at the big bust next to him. Cradles his chin and says, “Well, like I said, it's a complex thing. We never really know why the things that interest us have so much power over us. You might as well ask why I find history fascinating and something like–oh, I don't know, AI research, maybe–so boring.”
“Does that really answer the question?” I asked, leaning forward as much as I could without being obvious about it.
He bit his lip. “ No, not really. Part of it is that I wanted to know what the world looked like from her point of view. We all see the world from where we are, and her world was so different from mine. To be able to do so many things I could never get away with, to not be able to do so many things I take for granted… and that name she picked for herself. It had a pull on me, what can I say?”
A less repressed man would just do drag shows. I didn't say that though, I just said, “ so you wanted to know what it was like to be a dancer?”
He laughs, frowns, says, “That's part of it, maybe. But there were other things. Living in high society without really being part of it. Rubbing elbows with people who moved the levers of power and… entertaining them.”
“Rubbing a little more than elbows, to hear you tell it,” I say innocently.
“Yes,” he says. “Well, it's something I've always had an… intellectual fascination with. I can hardly imagine what it's like to have such a… such a pole on some people as soon as you meet them, almost without trying.”
“It almost sounds like you were in love with her,” I said.
He blinked. “I told you I was fascinated with her. That can mean a lot of different things.” (He shifts his weight.) “And anyway, what is it you want to know, just come in here to pick my brain for office hours?”
I set my elbows on his desk, cradling my chin in my hands–I've tried it out in the mirror with wide eyes, it's so cutesy it's sickening. And I asked him, “Do you think she really was a spy?”
He did a double take, cocked an eyebrow. Said, “ well, it's not something that's unheard of in history–high class courtesans and even more normal, everyday prostitutes being used to gather intelligence from their marks. Just the little things that slip out after…well, after the main event.”
“So you're saying spies are a real thing?” I asked, innocent as ever.
“Yes, but it's more than just that, it's that you have to look at the situation of the war at the time. There was a lot of paranoia in france, and when people are paranoid they're apt to–”
“You mean she didn't even get a fair trial. All they wanted was a scapegoat.”
“Yes, but that kind of thing happens all the time, people get nervous and they…” he shrugged. “It was the biggest war in history up to that point.”
“Doesn't mean it's right to shoot a woman on flimsy evidence just so you can blame her for the war going badly.”
“You are determined to read history through a moralistic lens, aren't you? And a peacetime lens, at that.”
“And you really enjoyed riding about how they sent her to the firing squad,” I said.
“It was a dramatic moment,” he said.
“Would it have killed you to at least pretend to be upset at the injustice of it all?”
“It's not my job to make moral judgments, it's my job to examine the historical record and report what happened as objectively as possible.”
“You really do hate her, don't you?”
“My personal feelings aren't relevant to the historical record,” he said, with an air of finality that let me know our discussion was at an end.
I stood up and excused myself, taking one parting glance at the bust of Wilhelm II. As I left the office and wandered to the student center with thoughts of Subway in my mind, I daydreamed about the German Kaiser. He hadn't been Hitler or anything, not even close, just a deeply insecure man with near absolute power over one of the strongest militaries on Earth. He'd been maimed at birth, I remembered, leading to his right arm being useless and totally stunted. You couldn't see it in the pictures because he hid it away, trying to keep up the image of Prussian power and authority. Funny how a tiny insecurity like that could mushroom into a war that changed the lives of millions. So much death to cover over a shriveled right arm.
Interesting choice of decoration for our little Professor to put on his desk. And that a man like that could be so very objective about the execution by firing squad of one Mata Hari.
I smiled and left a few texts on read. It was shaping up to be a good semester.
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