The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘Your books and your notebook were delivered to me,’ he said. ‘Tell me, who is Sagals?’

       4

       The Voyage to Lisbon

      Now he was on a ship in the middle of the ocean! ‘And I’m not too late for this!’ he whispered, and he smiled at the horizon. He joyfully hit the rail with his fist, again and again, as though he wanted to prescribe a rhythm for the ship in which to pitch her way to Lisbon.

      The Channel coast was out of sight; the fog was only a thin strip of mist. The rigging stood up straight or ran crosswise from side to side. At some point it always led to the top, making the viewer bend his head and neck back to follow it. It wasn’t the ship that bore the masts but the sails that pulled and lifted the ship, which seemed to hold on only with a thousand lines. What ships he had seen in the Channel, elaborately rigged ships with names like Leviathan and Agamemnon. Since the gravestones of St James’s, he had not found so worthy a place for letters as the bow or stern of a ship. In the end, a gigantic ship of the line had emerged from the fog; they had almost been rammed in spite of bells and foghorns.

      Before him lay the sea, the good skin, the true surface of the entire planet. John had seen a globe in the library at Louth: the continents were furry and jagged; they locked into each other and spread out to try to cover as much of the globe as they could. In the harbour at Hull he had observed that pyramids of wooden planks were built in the water to prove the land’s dominance over the sea. ‘Dolphins,’ they called them, to cause even more confusion. The Dutch sailor said: ‘That’s no dolphin, that’s a Duckdalbe – a breakwater.’ And since he didn’t grin or wink but only spat as usual, it had to be right. John asked him to repeat it and learned the word. He also discovered that the French enjoyed having a long reach and that since the Revolution the concave mirrors of their lighthouses had been made of pure silver. John felt fine. Perhaps all this was already the longed-for freedom.

      In Hull, over a dish of jellied meat, he had mused about freedom. One had it if one didn’t have to tell others in advance what one planned to do. Or if one kept quiet about it.

      Half a freedom: if one had to announce one’s plans in advance. Slavery: if others could foretell what one would do.

      All reflections led back to the conclusion that it would be better to come to some understanding with Father than simply to stay away. One could become a midshipman only through connections. Since Matthew had not returned, only Father remained.

      Soon they crossed longitude 3 degrees west. The town of Louth was situated at zero; the meridian ran straight through the middle of the market square. Without Dr Orme – John knew that – he’d still sit there and look not upon the sea but into the defensively poised curves of the ear of Hopkinson, who had just been thinking about flannel.

      Dr Orme had changed things at school. They now had a piece of meat twice a week and a new assistant master who kept the moderators in line.

      Dr Orme! John was grateful to him and knew he always would be. Dr Orme had not maintained that he lived only for him, nor had he talked of love or education, but he had been interested in John’s special case, out of curiosity and without a trace of pity. He had tested John’s eyes and ears, his comprehension and memory. With Dr Orme, John felt on safe ground. He wasn’t usually concerned about the pupils, but when he did show interest it was worth something. He never let on what he thought. If an idea occurred to him, he only laughed. He showed his small, crooked teeth and took a breath as though he had just come up from a dive into deep water.

      The wind rose and John started to freeze. He went below and stretched out on his bunk.

      After a long, rapid talk with Dr Orme, Father had nodded and said something under his breath that started like this: ‘The first storm will …’ John knew what they thought. Dr Orme believed he wouldn’t be able to stand the rolling waves and would end up in the clergy; at least, that was his recommendation. Father hoped he’d be swept overboard. Mother wanted him to succeed in everything but wasn’t allowed to say so.

      John’s look began to penetrate the black plank above his bunk, and soon he was the lost Matthew roaming through Terra Australis in the company of a lion. Later he became John Franklin again and told the people of Spilsby how to make their fields rise up so as to allow the land to sail away. But the wind pushed the land very hard, and along the road fissures opened with a creaking noise; everything burst asunder; everything was shaken up and turned topsy-turvy. John sat up, greatly concerned, and his head hit the black plank. Sweat covered his forehead. Next to his bunk stood a wooden bucket with iron strips round it, built like a small keg but twice as wide at the bottom as at the top. John was on a ship in the middle of the Bay of Biscay, in a storm.

      Seasickness was out of the question. He was now set to solve a couple of arithmetical problems.

      ‘What’s the true time in Greenwich,’ he whispered, ‘when …’ For a moment he imagined those solid piers and imperturbable buildings with their firmly fastened, comfortable benches from which one could watch the ship traffic. He pushed the thought quickly out of his brain. ‘… when at thirty-four degrees, forty minutes eastern longitude …’ He bent over the side of his bunk and held on to himself with one hand, to the bucket with the other. ‘… the true time is 8:24 p.m.?’ Groaning, he tried to work out the angles in his head. Now whatever was inside him came up. So spheric trigonometry didn’t help, either. The brain couldn’t outsmart the belly, that woeful traveller. A little later John lay as straight as a rod, head and feet propped up, wanting to find out what made him sick.

      First was the pitching round the imagined transverse axis of the ship, lasting for half a minute, up or down in a very irregular rhythm. That seemed to have most to do with the weakness in his stomach but also with that paralysis in his head, which by and by became as numb as the bucket under him. Whatever fitted together effortlessly on land here became differentiated by the degree of inertia with which it reacted to the ship’s movements: the head sooner than the body, the belly sooner than the stomach, and the latter more quickly than its contents. Then there were swayings round the ship’s longitudinal axis, a listing and rolling that merged with the up-and-down movements in ever-new combinations. John’s brain skidded back and forth like a pat of butter in a frying-pan and seemed to melt altogether. With his last strength he tried to discern any regularity, anything to which head, stomach, heart, lungs and all the rest could cling as a common denominator. ‘What’s the use if I can calculate a ship’s position but can’t stand its motions?’ He sighed and went on calculating, the bucket in front of his eyes. ‘Answer: 6:05 p.m. and twenty seconds,’ he whispered. Nothing could keep him from completing a problem.

      It seemed to him as if the forefoot plunged in too deeply. Perhaps the bow had sprung a leak. The lower the leak’s position, the greater the water pressure. Water flowed into a ship at the rate of the square root of its height. So if a ship sank, she sank more and more inevitably from second to second. He’d better go above.

      He got through the door after taking careful aim. On deck a fight started between his two poor hands and the rough elements, which, without further ado, put him here, threw him there, and jammed him between the wood and the rigging as it pleased. Each time he found himself again in a new situation, and the heavy seas fed him one huge mouthful of water after another. Now and then he saw people clinging to ropes or spars, looking where to dash for another hold at a precisely chosen moment. That was the only way they could move. It was as if they were trying to trick the storm into thinking they were a fixed part of the ship. They dared to move like humans only behind its back. From the direction of the СКАЧАТЬ