The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters

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      Iraq.

      ‘Uuuugh, aah, errr … oh dear!’ Simon blustered. ‘What is the point of this? I don’t understand pictures.’

      ‘It’s the origin of your subject. The purse had an inscription on it that said it was the property of Ziqarru, a shepherd, and contained forty-nine “counters representing small cattle”. Not that that impressed the Harvard excavators any more than it does you. They broke the seal, found the forty-nine clay pebbles inside, as promised – and lost them.’

      ‘Oh, dear.’

      ‘Exactly. But this French scholar realised that Ziqarru’s egg-shaped purse was a simple accounting device, from the dawn of writing. People had discovered other egg-shaped purses containing counters before, but none with symbols on the outside like this. It was the earliest known attempt to symbolise the contents of the purse with abstract marks. According to her, it was the need, by palace accountants, to keep track of animal numbers that led to the invention of writing and mathematics. If someone who understood the new marks thought Ziqarru had been stealing animals, all they had to do was check the writing on the outside. And if Ziqarru suspected that person of using the newfangled cuneiform to cheat him, he could break open the purse and prove he was innocent by counting the flock off against the pebbles inside. Lo! Symbolic writing had begun. Next thing you know, it’s algebra, calculus and Shakespeare. Writing comes from mathematics, in short, and it all comes from accountancy.’

      ‘Oh, DEAR!’

      ‘Why “Oh dear!” this time?’

      ‘No reason,’ sighed Simon morosely, and unbent his elbow.

      The handles of his holdall rippled down the forearm of his puffa jacket and the bag dropped to the pavement.

      ‘Excuse me!’ he gnashed. ‘I’d like to sit down. Can you remove all this paper?’ As he hit the seat he jolted into a better temper.

      Simon’s most famous ancestor was the Prophet Abraham, of Ur of the Chaldees. Then came Joseph, of the Coat of Many Colours. His son was Manasseh, first mentioned in Genesis, who led one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Next follows 3,000 years of forgetfulness before the family pops back into life on a rolled-up poster in the back room of Simon’s Excavation – two shelves along and one up from the television-that-might-have-broken-twenty-years-ago-but-possibly-it’s-only-a-fuse:

      ASLAN MANASSEH

       b. Bombay 1884 m KITTY MEYER b. Calcutta 1891

      The Manassehs are the leading family of the oldest settled community of people in recorded history: the Iraqi Jews of Babylon, 150 miles from Nuzi and Ziqarru’s purse.

      Congratulating myself on my willingness to be at the coalface of biographical reportage and, at a moment’s notice, drop everything and go to Woking, I walked with Simon from the café, across the park . ‘The Martian’ turned out to be a statue in honour of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. According to a tourist leaflet Simon eventually discovered in his coat pocket, it’s seven metres high. It looks like a beetle trying to curtsey with its legs stuck in vacuum tubes. There’s also a Woking Spaceship embedded in the pavement nearby, and Woking Bacteria, made out of splodges of coloured concrete brick.

      Battling a wallet from his trousers pocket, in the centre of Cambridge Simon boarded a bus to the railway station. He muttered out coins into the driver’s cash tray, seized the ticket, held it to the light to investigate it with narrowed eyes, then made for a free space at the back of the bus, bouncing his holdall from ear to ear of the seated passengers.

      The woman in front’s face was soured by watchfulness. Simon, though sexless as a nematode, is the fantasy image of a kiddy-fiddler, and this Bruiser Mum had spent her morning proudly dressing up her six-year-old daughter in lash-thickening mascara, gloss lipstick, Primark miniskirt and pink heels.

      Simon, blank-eyed, belly exposed, his ski jacket rucked halfway up to his chest, threw himself at the seat with a self-congratulatory sigh and let his face settle around his grin.

      I stood beside him, took out a notebook, and consulted a list of urgent biographical questions. It is important, with Simon, to select not just the correct wording for a query – one that doesn’t contain any banned nouns or adjectives, or lead to outbursts of correction because of a tiny factual error – but also the right context. PHILOSOPHICAL questions are best on a Tuesday night. This is because he has returned from his weekend jaunt to Scarborough, via Glasgow, the Isle of Man and Pratt’s Bottom, finished his week’s backlog of 347 emails: he is feeling expansive and post-prandial. Questions СКАЧАТЬ