The Professor of Truth Read Free

approach.
    “You’re being a good citizen,” the man said.
    Even in those few words, the American accent was unmistakable, although I could not have identified the region to which it belonged. I was surprised, and then, almost immediately, not surprised. The voice of the man on the phone half an hour earlier, and that of this man standing in the snow, telling me I was a good citizen, were one and the same.
    “People don’t clear the sidewalks anymore,” the man said. “They don’t even consider it. ‘That’s somebody else’s job, what do I pay my taxes for?’ You know what I’m saying? But I come along here and I find not one but two of you, right alongside of one another.”
    I nodded in the direction of Brian’s house. “He beat me to it,” I said. Brian was retired, he had more time on his hands, theoretically.
    “Good citizens, all the same, both of you,” the American said.
    “It doesn’t take much.”
    “It takes more than some people are prepared to give.”
    I was not happy to be having this conversation. I felt it as an intrusion, that it in some way threatened my privacy, even though anybody looking at us would have assumed we were neighbours exchanging a few superficial words about the weather. The American, however, was not a neighbour. He was unknown to me, yet I was already sure that I was not unknown to him, and that our words carried some meaning to which I was not yet privy. A low anger began to simmer inside me.
    “Can I help you in some way?”
    “Yes, I think you can,” he said. “And maybe I can help you.”
    “Who are you?”
    Slowly he took his right hand from the pocket of his coat. It was as if his brain had consciously to instruct the arm to withdraw, bringing the hand with it. The hand was gloveless. It pointed behind me, at the house.
    “I think we should go inside.”
    Of course I could have said no. I could have said, not until you tell me who you are and what you want. But I saw that this would be pointless. There was an order in which things would happen, or they would not happen at all. For me to find out who this man was, I would have to allow him into my home. I did not want this, but it was necessary. Already I knew that it was essential to continue the conversation.
    “This is about the bombing, isn’t it?” I said.
    “Let’s go in,” the American said, and without waiting for a reply, because he knew that he was not going to be refused, he started to move, heading towards the back door, along the path that I had made for him through the snow.

2
    O MANY YEARS HAD PASSED, YET I WOULD STILL always try to reach the phone whenever it rang. Missing a call when I was out, that was one thing: it was what the answer-machine was for. But I never could get out of my head the notion that the one call I ignored when I was in would be the one that counted, the one that, if only I’d picked up the phone, I might later have thought of as “the breakthrough.” There
had
been breakthroughs of various sorts, but each one had only ever been from one locked room into another. The years had been like a succession of cells in a vast old prison that refused to release me. Time was my Château d’If. I would scratch away at one wall with the blunt knife of hope, the ragged nails of despair, and then one day the stone would crumble and there’d be enough space to scramble through, so through I’d go, only to be confronted by another wall. Yet still I clutched the blunt knife, and sucked the ragged nails. Even after all the disappointments, I refused to abandon the possibility that I might find out who had murdered my wife and daughter; who had
really
murdered them. This was why I followed the American inside.
    •  •  •
    He sat at the kitchen table. I made coffee, not because I was feeling hospitable but because some kind of preparatory ritual seemed necessary before we got down to whatever business it was that had brought him to me. After the nipping cold, the