The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny

      

      Sten Nadolny is the author of four novels and two collections of essays. The Discovery of Slowness (1983) is regarded as his masterpiece. It has been translated into all major languages and has sold over one million copies worldwide, and was nominated for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. He lives in Berlin.

      This Canons edition published in 2019 by Canongate Books

      This digital edition first published in 2009

      by Canongate Books

      First published in 1983 in German as Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit by R. Piper GmbH. Published by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

      canongate.co.uk

      Copyright © Sten Nadolny, 1983

      English translation copyright © Viking Penguin, Inc. 1987, 2003

      Translated by Ralph Freedman; this British edition is translated in association with Joseph Cullen

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78689 166 2

      eISBN 978 1 84767 752 5

       To my father

       Burkhard Nadolny

       1905–68

      Contents

      PART I

       John Franklin’s Early Years

      1 THE VILLAGE

      2 THE TEN-YEAR-OLD AND THE SHORE

      3 DR ORME

      4 THE VOYAGE TO LISBON

      5 COPENHAGEN, 1801

      PART II

       John Franklin Masters His Craft

      6 TO THE CAPE OF GOOD HOPE

      7 TERRA AUSTRALIS

      8 THE LONG VOYAGE HOME

      9 TRAFALGAR

      10 END OF THE WAR

      PART III

       Franklin’s Domain

      11 HIS OWN MIND AND THE IDEAS OF OTHERS

      12 VOYAGE INTO THE ICE

      13 RIVER JOURNEY TO THE ARCTIC COAST

      14 HUNGER AND DYING

       15 FAME AND HONOUR

      16 THE PENAL COLONY

      17 THE MAN BY THE SEA

      18 EREBUS AND TERROR

      19 THE GREAT PASSAGE

       Author’s Note

       PART I

John Franklin’s Early Years

       1

       The Village

      John Franklin was ten years old, and he was still so slow that he couldn’t catch a ball. He held the rope for others. It reached from the lowest branch of the tree to his upraised hand. He held it as firmly as the tree, and he didn’t drop his arm until the end of the game. He was suited to be a rope-holder as no other child was in Spilsby, or even in all of Lincolnshire. The clerk looked over from the Town Hall. His glance seemed approving.

      Perhaps there was no one in the whole of England who could stand still for over an hour holding up the end of a rope. He stood without moving, like a cross on a grave, towering like a statue. ‘Like a scarecrow,’ said Tom Barker.

      John couldn’t keep up with the game, so he was no good as an umpire. He could never see exactly whether the ball hit the ground. He didn’t know if it was really the ball that one of them had caught just then, or if the player it landed next to had just held out his hands. He watched Tom Barker. How did catching work? When Tom no longer had the ball John knew he had missed the decisive moment once again. Catching – no one could do that better than Tom. He saw it all in a single second and moved faultlessly without the slightest hesitation.

      A blip streaked across John’s vision. If he looked up to the hotel chimney, it perched in the uppermost window. If he fixed on the window’s crossbars, it slithered down to the hotel sign. That’s how it jerked farther and farther down as he lowered his glance, but up it went again with a sneer when he looked at the sky.

      Tomorrow they’d go to Horncastle for the horse fair. He had already started to look forward to it. He knew that drive. When the coach left the village, the wall of the churchyard flickered past. Then came the cottages of Ing Ming, domain of the poor. Women stood outside, without hats, wearing only headscarves. The dogs there were scrawny. One couldn’t see the scrawniness on people; they had clothes on.

      Sherard would stand in the door and wave. After that came the farm with the rose-covered wall and the chained dog which dragged his own doghouse behind him. Then the long hedgerow with its two ends, the gentle and the sharp one. The gentle end was some distance from the road. It came up for a long time and took a long time to go. The sharp end, close to the roadside, sliced through the picture like the blade of an axe. That’s what was so astonishing: close by everything sparkled and danced – fence posts, flowers, twigs. Farther back there were cows, thatched roofs, and wooded hills, whose coming up and dropping behind had a solemn and quieting rhythm. The most distant mountains, like himself, just stood there and gazed.

      He looked forward to the horses less than to the people he knew, even to the host of the Red Lion in Baumber. They usually made a stop there. Father wanted to see the innkeeper at the bar. Then came something yellow in a tall glass. Poison for Father’s legs. The innkeeper passed it to him with his dreadful glance. The drink was called Luther and Calvin. John was not afraid of sinister faces if only they stayed put and didn’t change their features rapidly in some inexplicable way.

      Now John heard someone say the word ‘sleeping’, and he recognised Tom Barker before him. Sleeping? His arm hadn’t moved; the rope was taut. What was there for Tom to pick at? The game went on. John had understood nothing. Everything was too fast: the game, the others’ talk, the goings-on in the street in front of the Town Hall. It was indeed a restless day. Now Lord Willoughby’s hunting party whirled past – red coats, nervous horses, brown-speckled dogs with dancing tails – one big yapping. What did his lordship get out of so much commotion?

      Moreover, there were at least fifteen chickens in this place, and chickens weren’t pleasant. They played gross tricks on the eye. They stood about motionlessly, scratched, then pecked, froze again as though they had never pecked, brazenly pretended they had been standing there for minutes without moving. If he looked first at the chicken, then at the church clock, then again at the chicken, he’d see it standing there as rigid as before – like a warning sign. But meanwhile it had pecked and scratched, jerked its head and twisted its neck, its eyes staring in another direction – all of it a cheat. Also the confusing arrangement of the eyes! What did a chicken see? When it looked at John with one eye, what did the other one make out? With