T
HE
T
REE
As Eugen watched the coastline vanish, he lit up the first pipe of his life. It did not taste good, but apparently one could get used to it. He had a beard now and saw himself for the first time as no longer a child.
The morning following his arrest seemed to be far behind him. The commander of gendarmerie with the big mustaches had stormed into his cell and boxed him twice on the ears with such force that his jaw was put out of joint. Soon afterwards the interrogation began: a remarkably polite man in a morning coat asked him sadly why he'd done it. Resisting arrest had dropped him into the devil's cauldron, had it really been necessary?
But he hadn't resisted, cried Eugen.
The secret policeman asked if he was calling the Prussian police liars.
Eugen begged him to make contact with his father.
Sighing, the secret policeman asked if he really believed they hadn't already done that. He bent forward, took careful hold of Eugen by both ears, and slammed his head down against the tabletop.
When Eugen regained consciousness, he was lying in a bed with clean sheets along the wall of a hospital ward with barred windows. This was not one of the bad places, said an elderly sister, this was only for the aristocracy or people someone had intervened for, he should be happy.
Toward evening the polite secret policeman appeared. Everything had been sorted out, Eugen would leave the country. A journey overseas was in the air.
He wasn't sure, said Eugen, that was an awfully long way away.
It wasn't a recommendation, replied the secret policeman, the idea was not up for discussion, and if Eugen knew the fate he was escaping, he would weep for joy.
In the evening, his father came. He sat down on the edge of the bed and asked how he could have done such a thing to his mother.
He hadn't intended to, said Eugen, weeping, he didn't know about any of it, he didn't want to go away.
Done is done, said his father, patted him absentmindedly on the shoulder, and pushed some money under his pillow. The Baron had arranged everything, he was a fine man, even if somewhat mad.
Eugen asked what he was going to live on.
His father shrugged his shoulders. Had he ever thought about magnetic fields?
Fields?
Functions of the sphere, said his father reflectively. That must be how it was done. He twitched, and looked at Eugen as if he were coming out of a dream. Whatever, he would manage it! Then he hugged Eugen so tight that his shoulder knocked against Eugen's jaw; for a few seconds he was speechless with pain. When he could think clearly again, his father was gone. Only now did he understand that he would never see him again.
Three days later he reached the port. While waiting for the ferry to England he fell into conversation with three men traveling for business, amiable people, not very intelligent, working for new banking houses, and who invited him to join them in a game of cards. He won. A little at first, then more and more, and eventually so much that they took him for a swindler and he had to leave in a hurry. And all he had done was to use Giordano Bruno's method of taking note of the cards, which his father had taught him years before: one transformed every card in one's head into the figure of a man or an animal, the sillier the better, so that they made up a story. If one practiced, one could keep a game of thirty-two cards in one's head. He'd never succeeded back then, and his father had finally cursed and given up. But now he could do it without difficulty.
In another tavern he drank too much. The air in front of him seemed to flicker and all his limbs felt floppy. The urge to sleep was so powerful that he almost failed to notice the young woman who was suddenly sitting beside him. Not that young, as he realized from up close, and not that pretty either, but when he lied and said he had no money, she asked him, insulted, if he thought she was one of those, and just to show her that he didn't, he took her up with him to his room. On the way he wondered if it was appropriate to tell her that she was his first woman, and he only had the vaguest idea what he was supposed to do. But then it all turned out to be easy, and when he felt her hands on his cheeks in the semidarkness, he was so happy and so tired that he would almost have dropped off to sleep if she hadn't known how to keep him awake, and it no longer mattered how young she was or how she looked, and when it dawned on him next morning that she was gone along with all his winnings, he couldn't find it in himself to be angry. How easy everything was when you left home.
Then he reached England: strange people, a language made up of the oddest sounds, strange place signs, and strange food. Supposedly millions lived in London, but he couldn't imagine it; a million human beings, it made no sense. At the inn where he stayed, a letter reached him from Humboldt, recommending that he take one of the new steamships. He gave advice about how to deal with uncivilized peoples: one must appear to be friendly and interested and must neither conceal one's circumspection nor fail to impart lessons, complacency about the ignorance of others was a form of condescension. Eugen had to laugh. As if he were moving to live among uncivilized peoples! Not one word from his father. At night, he couldn't sleep for loneliness and homesickness. He took the first steamship on which there was an available berth.
There were few passengers aboard, steamships on the ocean passage were a new thing, too new for most people. The sky was low and cloudy, Eugen's pipe went out, he wanted to light it again but the wind was too strong. The captain, who had learned that he understood something of mathematics, invited him onto the bridge.
Was he interested in navigation?
Not in the slightest, said Eugen.
In earlier days, said the captain, such heavy cloud cover would have been a problem, but these days one navigated without the stars, there were exact clocks. Any amateur with a Harrison chronometer could circumnavigate the globe.
So, asked Eugen, was the era of the great navigators over? No more Bligh, no more Humboldt?
The captain thought. Eugen wondered why people always took so long to answer. It wasn't a difficult question! It was over, the captain said finally, and it would never return.
In the night, when Eugen couldn't sleep, more as a result of excitement than the noise of the engines and the snoring of his Irish cabinmate, a real storm blew up: waves pounded against the steel hull with incredible force, the engines howled, and when Eugen tumbled out on deck he was hit by such a blast of spray that he almost fell overboard. He fled back to the cabin dripping wet. The Irishman interrupted his prayers.
He had a large family, he said in poor French, he was responsible for them, he could not die. His father had been hardhearted and incapable of love, his mother had died young, now God was taking him too.
His mother was still alive, said Eugen, and his father had loved a great deal, just not him. And he didn't believe God already wanted his company.
Next morning the ocean was as flat as a lake again. The captain hunched over his charts, murmuring, looked through his sextant, and consulted the Harrison clock. They were way off course, now they would need to take on more fuel.
So they made a stop at Tenerife. The light was dazzlingly bright, a parrot watched them curiously from the balcony of a newly built customhouse. Eugen went ashore. Men were screaming orders, crates were being unloaded, and scantily dressed women were sauntering up and down with tiny steps. A beggar asked for alms, but Eugen had no more money. A cage came open and a horde of shrieking little monkeys exploded away from it in all directions. Eugen left the harbor behind and went toward the outline of the Teide, the big mountain. He wondered what it would be like to be up at the top. One must be able to see very far and the air would be so clear.
There was a monument by the side of the road. A relief showed the mountain, and next to it a man with a top hat, muffler, and morning coat. Eugen couldn't make anything of the inscription except for the name. He sat down on an outcropping of rock, blew little clouds of smoke into the air, and looked at the picture on the stone. A local wearing a poncho and a woolen cap stopped, pointed at it, said something in Spanish, pointed at the ground, then in the air, then at the ground again. A millipede with unusually long feelers climbed Eugen's trouser leg. He looked around. So many new plants. He wondered what they were all called. On the other hand— who cared! They were just names.
He came to a walled garden, with a door that was standing open. Orchids clambered around the trunks of palms, and the twittering of a hundred birds filled the air. A very thick tree grew near the wall, which was clearly of recent construction. Its bark was scarred and raw, and high above the trunk opened out into a bush of branches. Eugen hesitated, then moved into its shade, leaned against the trunk, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, a man with a rake was standing in front of him and began to curse. Eugen smiled appeasingly The tree must be very old? The gardener stamped his foot on the ground and pointed to the exit. Eugen asked to be excused, he had been resting, for a moment he had believed he was someone else, or perhaps nobody, it was such a pleasant place. The gardener raised the rake threateningly, and Eugen left in haste.
The steamship cast off early in the morning, and after a few hours the islands were out of sight. For days the ocean was so calm that Eugen had the impression they weren't moving at all. But again and again they overtook sailing ships with full rigging, and twice they passed other steamers. One night Eugen thought he saw a flickering in the distance, but the captain advised him to pay no attention, the sea sent mirages, sometimes it even seemed to dream like a human being.
Then the bigger waves came back, a ragged bird came out of the mist, screamed aggrievedly, and disappeared again. The Irishman asked Eugen if they should join together to start a business, a little company.
Why not, said Eugen.
He also had a sister, said the Irishman, she was unattached, she wasn't a beauty, but she could cook.
Cook, said Eugen, good.
He stuffed his pipe with the last tobacco, went to the bow, and stood there, eyes watering in the wind, until something began to delineate itself in the evening haze, at first transparent and not quite real, but then gradually becoming clearer, and the captain laughed as he replied that no, this time it was no chimera and no summer lightning, it was America.
Translation copyright © 2006 by Carol Brown Janeway
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published in Germany as
Die Vermessung der Welt
by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH,
Reinbek bei Hamburg, in 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Rowohlt Verlag GmbH, Reinbek bei
Hamburg.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of
the author's imagination or are used fictitiously Any resemblance to actual persons, living or
dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:
Kehlmann, Daniel, 1975–.
[Vermessung der Welt. English]
Measuring the world / Daniel Kehlmann; translated from the German by Carol Brown
Janeway
p. cm.
1. Humboldt, Alexander von, 1769-1859—Fiction. 2. Gauss, Carl Friedrich, 1777-1855—
Fiction. I. Janeway, Carol Brown. II. Title.
PT2671. E32V4713 2006
833'914—dc22
2006040480
eISBN: 978-0-307-49675-1
v3.0