The History of History - By Ida Hattemer-Higgins Page 0,37
the white showing. And then his eyes shut, and his face is red, and the blood is everywhere. Hans breaks two ribs and his left ankle, and for the rest of his life he will bear scars on his face and chest where large pieces of skin were scraped away.
Not long after this incident, young Hans, still hardly more than a boy, sees that his only chance in life is to work with his mind. He ties his few belongings in a kerchief on the end of a stick, bids his family goodbye, and begins the several days’ journey by foot to the capital.
Many years pass. Through sheer determination and constancy, he manages to work his way into the civil service and eventually rises high. He becomes talented at placing bets on the market. The first gold coin he earns, he bids a barber plait it into the coarse hair of his beard, and the gold stays there. The weight of it tugs at the tender skin of his face every minute of every day, as if it would pull the hair out at the roots, reminding him of his early toil.
In time he is appointed magistrate to the provincial town of Naragir. The peasants there, a cantankerous people, outraged to learn they have been appointed a magistrate who is both a cripple and from their own class, decide to drive him out of town. Before his arrival, they take apart the manse that is reserved for the magistrate, and carry it onto swampland, brick by brick, where they rebuild it. When the magistrate alights from his carriage, the new home smells of rotten eggs and is already sinking into the ground. The magistrate, however, doesn’t make a complaint to the capital. He never says a word. Instead, he sets about taking apart the house again on his own. He carries the bricks on his back, load by load, and then every floorboard, every glass window he carries to a new spot far from the reeking swamp, to a high overlook—a spot even more well-chosen than the original location of the manse.
Time passes. He plays the markets in the capital. His coffers are enriched further. He manages to earn the aloof respect of the townspeople.
The one and only reward that eludes his grasp, finally, is a wife. The people of this country are a superstitious people who feel sure that the good and hardworking man will pass on his deformity to any issue he might have, and his scarred body and his gaze as intense as an iron tong do nothing to increase his appeal. The magistrate suffers many long years of loneliness and self-hatred, but he does not think to look far away for a wife. He is stubborn, and knows he will win the people only with a wife from among them. So he continues to labor and widen his influence, proving himself a faithful and wise friend to all comers.
Every year, the magistrate gives a small velvet bag containing two small rubies to each and every father who is willing to give his daughter the choice of marrying him—and in return the father must respect the girl’s choice, whatever it might be. The magistrate does not care whether they all laugh at him as a fool. He gives out the jewels nonetheless. In the first year, all the girls say no. In the second year, all the girls say no likewise, and so it goes. But finally, in the magistrate’s fifty-third year, a woman, a widow, thirty-two years of age, agrees to marry him. Her name is Minnebie, and she is very beautiful. Her first husband was cruel to her; no one knows how he died. She moves into the magistrate’s home with what appears to be relief, and, praise God, over the course of the next seventeen years, they have six children together and are very happy. And so it is that the Magistrate of Naragir is able to wake those fine mornings in his seventh decade, and greet his wife directing the servants preparing breakfast in the kitchen on the first floor of his mansion, or teaching the children (none of whom was malformed in the end) in the library on the second floor, singing in the conservatory on the third, or cultivating ferns and orchids in the glass winter garden at the top of the house. It is an unprecedented happiness he can hardly believe.