The Historian

"The thing that most haunted me that day, however, as I closed my notebook and put my coat on to go home, was not my ghostly image of Dracula, or the description of impalement, but the fact that these things had--apparently--actually occurred. If I listened too closely, I thought, I would hear the screams of the boys, of the "large family" dying together. For all his attention to historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understood now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth--really seen it--you can't look away.

I finished the Historian last night. My mother-in-law sent it to me. It was a fun read. I'm not much for popular fiction in general--the only other recent popular works of fiction I've read in the last five years are the DaVinci Code and Harry Potter--but it won me over. I was pretty worthless this past week while I was reading it. It's good my grad apps were in. Kostova's writing style seems straight out of the Memory Keeper's Daughter, which I didn't appreciate much. (a bit too wistfully descriptive for my tastes, I guess, though I shouldn't point fingers as I often write similarly) Still, I really enjoyed the trans-generational, trans-continental, trans-religious "mysteries of the past" plot. I felt a bit like I was reading the DaVinci Code, though I'm hoping Kostova isn't crazy like Dan Brown is in real life. When it was done I wanted to know how much information she fabricated and how much she found in research. I'm not up on my vampire lore, much to the shame of my husband and in-laws, I'm sure.
In all of this, the thing the struck me the most was a quote near the beginning of the book about how history is palatable until you realize it happened. As a historian I've wrestled with this for quite a while. It's so interesting to read stories from the past, but it's easy to allow them to remain much like fairy tales in my mind. I find it hard to believe that Ghengis Khan, George Washington, and even my great grandparents ever truly existed. Logic tells me that they did. There are pictoral and literary records to prove they lived and breathed and walked around, but they aren't real to me. I find it truly terrifying to realize a historical event actually happened, especially negative ones. The Holocaust is sick and repulsive as an idea. It's mind-numbingly sickening when that moment of clarity hits me, and I realize it happened. This sick feeling is only partly due to my realization of humans as flawed beings, capable of horrible things. I get that. It's just that much worse to see it in your mind's eye at that moment when you realize it's not just a story. Even happy stories are terrifying on some level strictly because they happened and that means the bad happened, too.
My grandpa once told me about being sent out to string phone lines during WWII and being pinned down and shot by a sniper in the back. He was paralyzed when he woke up. He went through months of grueling rehab and regained the use of his limbs. When I knew him, the only things that alluded to that story were a scar on his back, a purple heart, and his disinclination for watching fireworks. When he told it, the story was sort of exciting. I know very little about my grandpa, and it was a window into his life. But one day it hit me that that actually happened. I imagined the fear, the mud, the pain. I was paralyzed in that moment, not by a bullet, like grandpa, but by my own terror. That memory still haunts me. I wasn't even there, but every time I think about it, I feel sick and scared. It's even started to hang at the edges of every fireworks display I watch. I remember the hushed way my mom explained to me that grandpa didn't want to come watch the fireworks because they hurt his ears--and he'd seen "real" fireworks. The millions of people who died in situations like my grandpa experienced in war somehow don't add up to "fun" like the beautiful explosive displays are supposed to anymore.
You know, perhaps I simply struggle to comprehend time before or after me. Whatever the case, the idea that the farther one digs into history, the more likely history will reach up to hurt or leave its mark on that person is so compelling and disturbing. The farther one digs into something, the more real it becomes and the more one must come to terms with that story and one's own story. What if I research something someday and discover something awful? How will I face that? Will I treat it as a distant story, or will I try to understand it as something real? Will it so completely change my perspective that I have to change my life as well? Will I be able to change for it, or will I try to re-bury it? How brave am I? Sometimes it's all too clear that history is for the brave, and I'm not sure I'm capable of being one of them.