The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny

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СКАЧАТЬ They also lacked the walled-in courtyard and lawn. The school had three high, sharp-cornered chimneys, as if it contained a forge. There was a lot of hammering.

      ‘Correction Day’. There were two of them: rod day and cane day. Could a plant grow in freedom and become a cane? Strange, too, how many names there were when it came to punishment. The head was called a ‘turnip’ or ‘poet’s box’; the backside was called ‘register’; ears were ‘spoons’; hands ‘paws’ – those to be punished were malefactors. John had enough on his hands with current words. This additional vocabulary seemed to him a waste.

      Punishment itself he ignored. Mouth closed, his eyes turned to a faraway world – that was how one got over correction days. It was humiliating that the moderators held the delinquent as if he wanted to run away. John ignored them as well. There were also punishments outside the regular order. Being late for prayers, not having signed out before going to the tree, being caught at a game of dice: then one got it ad hoc. On the school’s seal was written ‘Qui parcit virgam, odit filium’ – ‘He who spares the rod hates the child’. Dr Orme remarked that this was pig Latin: parcere takes the dative.

      Dr Orme wore silk knee-breeches, lived in a house on Breakneck Lane, and, it was said, conducted experiments with clocks and plants – both of which he collected assiduously. An ancestor, they said, had been one of the ‘eight captains of Portsmouth’. Although John never found out what the captains were supposed to have done, the gentle schoolmaster assumed something navigational for him: often John even saw in him a secret ally.

      Dr Orme never shouted or thrashed anyone. Perhaps he was less interested in the children than in his clocks. He left it to his assistant master to enforce the necessary discipline and came over to the school only for lessons.

      John wanted to learn better how to behave with people like Stopford; they were not undangerous. On one of his first days at school he said in response to a question by Stopford: ‘Sir, I need a little time to find the answer.’ The assistant was irritated. There were crimes by pupils that didn’t give even him any satisfaction. Asking for more time, that was no discipline to speak of.

      Thomas Webb and Bob Cracroft kept thick notebooks in which they entered something every day in fine script. On one of the covers was written ‘Sayings and Thoughts’ or ‘Common Latin Phrases’. That made a good impression. So John started a voluminous copybook with the heading ‘Noteworthy Phrases and Constructions to Be Remembered’, which included quotations from Virgil and Cicero. When he wasn’t writing in it, the notebook was buried in his chest under his linen.

      Dinner. After long prayers, only bread, small beer, and cheese. Meat broth twice a week; vegetables never. Anyone who broke into the orchard and stole fruit got the cane. At Rugby, Atkinson told them, the pupils had locked up their rector in the school’s cellar two years ago. Since then they were given real meat three times a week and were thrashed only once a week. ‘Is he still in the cellar?’ asked John.

      In the navy, too, they had mutinied against admirals!

      The dormitory was large and cold. All around them they saw displays of names of former pupils who had accomplished something because they had studied diligently. The windows were barred. The beds jutted out into the room. Every sleeper was accessible on both sides. No one could turn to a protective wall to stare at it or cry. You made believe that you slept until you did sleep. The light burned incessantly. Stopford wandered up and down to see where the pupils had their hands. John Franklin’s travels under his covers were not noticeable; he withdrew them from sight with his slow, deliberate movements.

      Often he learned while falling asleep, repeating what he had been taught, or he talked to Sagals.

      He had once dreamed that name. Meanwhile, he imagined a tall man, quiet, clad in white, who looked down from above the dormitory ceiling and could listen to even complicated thoughts. One could talk to Sagals, for he never suddenly disappeared. He said hardly anything, only now and then a single word, which, however, made sense even if it was completely outside John’s own reflections. Sagals didn’t dispense advice, but John believed he could distinctly recognise what he thought by observing his face. At least he could tell whether it was more ‘yes’ or more ‘no’. Sagals could also smile in a friendly, enigmatic way. But the best part was that he had time. Sagals always hovered above John in the dormitory until he had fallen asleep. Matthew, too, would come back soon.

      He now understood navigation. He had started with Gower’s Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Seamanship. A miniature ship was attached to the cover. It had adjustable yards and a movable rudder. With them John practised turning and tacking. The book itself was the ocean; when he closed it he could cover up deep water. He had read Moore’s Practical Navigator and had tried Euclid. He found arithmetic easy, because nobody pushed him. Sometimes he confused plus and minus and he never entirely got rid of the feeling that it might be doubtful whether the difference between such small signs really mattered. Ships drifting off course, wrong compass bearings, taking noon sights – all that he could figure out. In the spring he spoke to the bright leaves of his tree more than a hundred times, repeating, ‘Spheric trigonometry, spheric trigonometry.’ He wanted to pronounce the name of his field of interest without a slip-up.

      A new teacher was expected, a young man named Burnaby. Perhaps he taught mathematics.

      Navigation: when they used that word in Louth, they thought of the inland canal from the Lud to the mouth of the Humber. So much for Louth. For all that, the sea was only half a day away. After another talk with Sagals, John resisted the temptation. He wanted to go on waiting for Matthew.

      He also wanted to persuade Tom Barker to join the navy with him.

      In his notebook John now entered only English sentences for his own use, as well as explanations of his obstinacy and of his sense of time which he could give easily if needed.

      Atkinson and Hopkinson had been to the seaside with their parents. No, he had never taken notice of the ships, said Hopkinson. Instead, he talked about bathing-machines – cabins on wheels pulled into the sea by a horse so that the bather could let himself slip into the water unseen. And the ladies bathed in flannel sacks! Those were the things that interested Hopkinson. Atkinson talked exclusively about the gallows on which the murderer Keal from Muckton had been hanged before being quartered and cast out to be devoured by the birds. ‘That figures,’ John answered, politely but a little disappointed. Atkinson and Hopkinson were no ornaments of a seafaring nation.

      Andrew Burnaby usually wore a gentle smile. He said right at the beginning that he was there for everybody, especially for the weaker pupils. So John saw his smile often. It usually looked a bit tense, for anyone who is always present for everybody has little time. He didn’t favour physical punishment, but he was ambitious in his use of time. The hours marked by the sand in the hourglass no longer mattered; it was now a question of minutes and seconds. For answers to his questions, he secretly or expressly set an appropriate time limit, and if responses didn’t come in time they had to be worked up later. John always went over the time limit and then answered one or two earlier questions unexpectedly, out of order, for nothing could keep him from solving a problem, even if it had already become inappropriate. That had to improve! He wrote in his copybook, ‘There are two points in time: a correct time and a missed time,’ and underneath, ‘Sagals, Book I, Chapter 3,’ so it would look like a genuine quotation. He also no longer hid the book under his linen, but put it openly on top. Let Tom read it if he wanted to! Did he anyway, perhaps?

      It was raining on Jubilate Sunday, the third Sunday after Easter. John went to the fair with Bob Cracroft. The water dripped from the tents. They splashed about in puddles. John wasn’t happy, because he thought about Tom Barker and himself. СКАЧАТЬ