AEgypt by John Crowley Page A

She read cards, told fortunes. She was a Gypsy, my father said, and that's why people went to her. But why, I asked him, do people think Gypsies can tell fortunes? History could answer that. Give an account , you see.” He set down his finished drink; his grin had begun again to grow, his chuckle to rumble in his throat. “The only trouble would be that damn tendency to generalism. I suppose that the first question I tried to answer would lead me to others, and those to others, and so on; and there being no publish-or-perish sort of pressure, no impetus to stop asking and start answering, I might go on forever. End up with the History of the World. Or a history, anyway.” He took, with plump fingers, the olive from his glass, and chewed it thoughtfully. “Incomplete, probably, in the end. Unfinished. Oh, yes. But still I think I would consider myself to have been practicing history."
    A life of useful labor, a thousand relined overcoats, and yet all history in your heart, an endless dimension, a past as real as if it had been the case, and chock-full of answered questions; an account, added up but unpaid. A large dissatisfaction had sprung up in Pierce, or a nameless desire. He ordered a second drink.
    "In any case,” Barr said, spreading his hands on the table as Pierce always remembered him doing toward a lecture's end, “it's neither here nor there, is it? Teachers are what we are. Now who did you say you've been talking to?"
    The warmth in Pierce's cheeks heated to a blush. “Well,” he said. “Barnabas College. Here in the city.” As though it were one, an unimportant one, of many. “Looks possible."
    "Barnabas,” said Barr, mulling. “Barnabas. I know the dean there. A Dr. Sacrobosco. I could write."
    "Thank you,” Pierce said, only for the tiniest instant thinking that perhaps Barr would blackball him, queer his deal, would harry him now throughout Academe forever for not taking on those damn Nestorian churches. “Thank you."
    "We'll talk,” Barr said, looking at a large gold wristwatch. “You'll fill me in on what you've been doing. How that thesis is coming. Now.” He rose, short legs making him a smaller man standing than he seemed sitting.
    "So, by the way,” Pierce said, helping Barr into his crumpled mackintosh, “why do people think Gypsies can tell fortunes?"
    "Oh,” Barr said, “the answer's simple enough. Simple enough.” He glanced up at Pierce, twinkling donnishly, as he had used to do when he announced that blue books must now be closed, and passed to the front. “There's more than one History of the World, you know,” he said. “Isn't there? More than one. One for each of us, maybe. Wouldn't you say so?"
* * * *
    Why do people think that Gypsies can tell fortunes?
    The dissatisfaction, or the desire, or the puzzlement, that had awakened somehow in Pierce did not pass. He felt annoyed, nettled, continually; landing the Barnabas job did not end it, did not even seem relevant to it. He found himself waking at dawn with the sense that an answer to some question had to be found, a sense that would diffuse into the day's business and leave him restless at bedtime, a taste in his mind like the taste of too many anxious cigarettes.
    What, did Barr own his soul or something, that he could set him off like this? It was unfair, he was a grown-up, a Ph.D. or nearly, he had a job (Barr's doing, all right, Barr's doing), and the whole great city lay before him for his delight, bars, women, entertainments all laid on. He began spending the evenings when he was not grading papers in reading, a habit he had almost broken himself of at Noate. He looked for Barr's books, most of which he knew only by report or review; several of them were out of print, and had to be hunted for in libraries or secondhand bookstores. A simple answer: something to stopper up whatever it was that seemed to be coming unstoppered within him, a last trick question to be disposed of, clear the field finally and for