The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny

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. If there is an ideal human being among us, and not just in Greece, he thought, he has long, shapely limbs, laughs softly, and can be as mean as Tom. Ever since he had started to admire Tom, he had looked at himself with displeasure. The way he came at you, for example: his legs wide apart, his round eyes, his head askew like a dog’s. His movements seemed glued to the air, and he talked like an axe thumping on a chopping-block. He didn’t find much to laugh at, and when he did he laughed too long. His voice had become hoarse, as though a rooster were crowing inside him. That wouldn’t matter at sea. But then there was something else new which kept happening unexpectedly, a swelling which disappeared only very slowly. Of all things, to be conspicuous in such a place! ‘That’s normal,’ Bob had remarked. ‘Revelations, Chapter 3, Verse 19: “Those whom I love I reprove and chasten.”’ Again proof of the Bible’s total unintelligibility. John regarded the bustle of the fair with his glassy fixed look, as if he were about to catch a ball. Spavens, the one-legged man who had written a book of seafaring memoirs, stood by the fence. ‘The money has croaked,’ he announced. ‘Everything’s twice as dear, and my publisher pretends to be deaf.’

      Not far from him was the booth with the miracle turntable. If it turned fast enough on its own axis, Harlequin and Columbine, who were painted on opposite sides, were united as a couple. It had to do with speed, but John thought that today he didn’t have a head for it. He went back to Spavens, who talked slowly, coming up with one word after another the way one puts pictures up on a wall. ‘Peace, that’s God,’ he shouted, his nose dripping. ‘But what does He send? War and want.’ He pushed out from under his coat the stump of his leg, with its well-turned wooden peg, polished with shoe wax. ‘He sends us those costly victories to test us even more.’ With each sentence he stabbed his peg more deeply into the lawn: he had already stamped so violently that he had scooped out a little ditch, and now muddy water spurted at the bystanders’ stockings each time he made a jab. Bob Cracroft whispered, ‘I believe he isn’t particularly objective,’ and then began to talk about himself.

      John had come to be well liked as a listener just because he asked when he hadn’t understood. Even Tom had said. ‘If you understand something, it must be right.’ John wondered what he meant by that and answered, ‘In any case, I understand nothing too soon.’

      This time John was not a good listener. At the other end of the fair he had noticed the model of a frigate as tall as a man: its hull was black and yellow, and it had all the guns, yards and rigging it was supposed to have. The model was in the navy’s recruiting-tent. John studied every inch closely and asked at least three questions about each detail. The officer asked to be relieved after an hour and dropped into his bunk.

      In the evening, John wrote in his notebook: ‘Two friends, one fast, the other slow, get through the entire world. Sagals, Book XII.’ He noted it and placed it on top of Tom’s linen.

      They sat on the bank of the Lud near the mill. Not a soul was near; only now and then a coach rattled across the bridge. Tom had his foot in the water, one of those extremely beautiful feet. He said, ‘They fought about you.’ John’s heart beat high up in his throat. Had Tom read his ‘Noteworthy Phrases’?