The Indian Clerk (29 page)

She can't say what's come over her, only that, under the circumstances, the codes of propriety that governed her youth no
longer seem to bind her. It's all very simple. He doesn't visit her. So she will visit him. She is curiously unfrightened.
As in a dream, she climbs the stairs and knocks on the door she knows to be his.

When he answers, the look of bewilderment on his face shakes her out of the dream. Good heavens, what is she doing? But it's
too late now.

"Mrs. Neville," he says.

"Hello," she says. "I hope I'm not disturbing you."

"No. Please come in."

"I hope I'm not interrupting."

"No, not at all. May I offer you some tea?"

"Yes, that would be lovely. Indian tea?"

He waggles his head, then disappears into the gyp room in which, she sees, he has set up his makeshift kitchen. The room is
clean and spartan. There is his trunk, in the corner. Other than that, there is little furniture: a desk, a chair, and an
old armchair from Alice's own attic. Through a half-open door, she sees the bed, tightly made. No pictures on the walls. Indeed,
the only decorative object she can discern is the statue of Ganesha that she first happened upon when she rummaged through
his trunk. Now it sits on the mantel over the hearth.

"Your rooms are very nice," she says.

"Thank you."

"I understand you moved recently."

"Yes. In Whewell's Court I was on the ground floor. Here I am on the second floor."

"And you prefer that?"

"There is less noise."

She inspects the book on the armchair, which is in Tamil. "What are you reading, Mr. Ramanujan?"

He darts out of the gyp room. "It is nothing."

"Some mathematical text?"

"How fascinating." She picks up the book, leafs through it. "And what do you use it for?"

"Such as?"

"Weddings. Funerals."

"But we're not having any weddings or funerals here, are we?"

"No, not just that. Also travel. Which are the most auspicious days to travel, and which days not to travel, and so on."

"You mean, there are certain days when you would and when you wouldn't want to go to London?"

He waggles his head.

"Or change your rooms?"

He is silent.

"Oh, I must sound horrible," Alice says. "As if I'm interrogating you. I don't mean to. You see, I'm not like the others,
Mr. Ramanujan. I really want to know."

She looks him in the eye. He meets her gaze; his eyelids flutter but he doesn't turn away.

Then the kettle sings. "Excuse me," he says, and returns to the gyp room, from which he emerges, a few minutes later, bearing
two cups on a tray.

"Please sit."

"Where will you sit?"

"Here."

So she sits in the armchair, and he sits, not far from her, on the floor. Cross-legged. At her knees, more or less. He hands
her the tea.

"Not when I am expecting visitors."

"Then it's fortuitous that I didn't tell you I was coming."

He smiles and tries to hide his smile.

"Oh, no. Of course not."

"Why not?"

"It would not be correct."

"You are welcome to wear it when you visit me."

"I'm sorry I haven't been to visit you lately. I've been very busy with my work."

"Of course. And that's why you're here. To work." She puts down her cup. "You know, Mr. Ramanujan, I meant it when I said
I wasn't like the others. Like Hardy and even—my husband. The others, they don't believe in your religion. And they think
you don't believe in it, either. That you simply practice your . . . rituals . . . out of habit, or to please your people.
But I do believe that you believe. And I'm interested. Genuinely interested. What a pity I can't understand your language!
Then you could teach me to read the stars."

"I am not an expert."

"I hope I'm not offending you by asking. And it's not just out of idle curiosity. You see, Mr. Ramanujan, I want so much something
to believe . . . Especially these days, with the war. It seems that all the old guarantees, that if you lived right and ate
your vegetables . . . but that doesn't guarantee anything anymore, does it? Because all those young men, most of those young
men . . . But if you could read the stars, if you could read the future—"

"It's not something you can teach."

She leans in toward him. "Tell me about the first time you had the dream."

"What dream?"

"When Namagiri wrote on your tongue."

"But the first time it was not Namagiri in the dream. It was Narasimha."

"Who is Narasimha?"

"He is the lion-faced avatar of Vishnu." Ramanujan puts his cup down next to him, on the floor. "I'm sorry. I must explain.
In the Hindu religion a God can manifest himself in many forms. And Narasimha is one of those forms that Vishnu takes. The
fourth form. The angry form. Well, there was a demon king called Hiranyakashipu who despised Vishnu. He performed many acts
of penance to obtain a boon of immortality from Brahma, but Brahma only granted him the chance to choose the condition of
his death. So Hiranyakashipu replied that his condition was to be killed neither by animal nor man, not during the night nor
during the day, not inside or outside his house, not on earth or in space, neither by an animate nor an inanimate weapon.
He thought he had tricked Vishnu, and was now immortal, and he declared himself king of the three worlds. But what he did
not know was that his son, Prahlada, was devoted to Vishnu. So when he learned it, Hiranyakashipu tried to kill the little
boy. He tried to have him boiled and set on fire and thrown away. But Prahlada was protected by his devotion to Vishnu. And
then one afternoon at dusk in his palace, Hiranyakashipu smashed a pillar in a rage, and from the pillar Narasimha jumped
out. Because he was half-man and half-lion, he was neither animal nor human. Because it was twilight, it was neither night
nor day. They battled, and then, on the threshold of the palace, which was neither inside nor outside, Narasimha laid the
demon on his knees, which was neither on earth nor in space, and using his nails, which were neither animate nor inanimate
weapons, he tore Hiranyakashipu to shreds."

"What an extraordinary story."

"My grandmother told me this story many times when I was a child. She told me that the sign of Narasimha's grace is drops
of blood seen in dreams. That was the first time. The drops of blood fell, and then it was as if . . . as if scrolls were
unfolding before me, containing the most beautiful and complex mathematics. Endless scrolls. Endless formulae. And then, when
I woke, I hurried to write down what I had seen."

"How old were you?"

"I was ten."

"And since then?"

"It is always like that. What I see in the dreams is boundless. The scrolls never cease."

"It must be beautiful," she says. "The scrolls unfolding."

"Oh, no, it is terrible."

"Terrible? Why?"

"Because what I can bring into the world is only the smallest fragment of what I read on the scrolls. There is always so much
more that I cannot bring! And each time, leaving it behind, it is like being torn to shreds. Yes, it is a terrible dreaming."

He looks down as he says this. He is not weeping. He has his hands crossed placidly over his lap.

"You suffer, don't you?" Alice asks.

He doesn't answer.

Then she stands up. And Ramanujan, perhaps because he assumes that she is intending to leave, stands up too, and looks at
her. "You're not much taller than I am," she says. "An inch at most." And, just as earlier she reached out and pushed the
puzzle to the floor, so now she reaches out across the little distance to touch his cheek.

He flinches. He does not move.

She steps closer. Still he does not move.

She puts her hand on the back of his neck, as earlier that morning Eric put his hand on the back of her neck. She feels moisture
and heat and small, sharp prickles of stubble. She pulls him closer and he does not resist when she puts his lips against
hers. Neither, though, does he kiss her back. He is absolutely still. Their lips are touching. But it's not a kiss.

His breath is warm and tastes of the tea. His lips are dry. Still they do not open.

Finally she steps away. He seems about to speak, and she puts her finger to her mouth—a universal gesture, she hopes. And
he doesn't speak. He doesn't even move.

She walks away from him slowly, as if there's nothing left to hurry for. Then she opens the door and lets herself out.

Now it sits in the second drawer from the top, left side, of a walnut chest I've had since I first arrived at Trinity, back
in the last century. In the same drawer, there's a pair of Gaye's five-gloves, and a cricket ball, and some tennis balls with
which we used to play indoor cricket, using a walking stick as a bat. Also our collection of train tickets. Gaye and I shared
a passion for railwaydom. We used to make a game of planning routes between outrageous places—Wolverhampton and Leipzig, say—and
seeing which of us could come up with the one that required the most changes. We loved the Underground, and when the Bakerloo
line opened in 1906, we went into London just to ride it.

There are no letters in the drawer. We never wrote letters to each other. Nor are there cats' collars, or empty jars that
once contained worm medicine. The things that you save—you save them, I suppose, so that when you're old, you can fondle and
caress them and feel the breeze of nostalgia brushing your face.

What no one tells you is that by the time you're old, remembering is the last thing you want to do. That is, assuming you
can remember where you put all that stuff.

I attested on the very last day that attestation was possible, the day before the Derby Scheme closed. This was in the middle
of December, 1915.1 did it in London, so that none of my Cambridge friends would see me. By mid-December, conscription seemed
a certainty, and though no one in the government said so in so many words, most of us were convinced (wrongly, as it turned
out) that if we attested, we would receive preferential treatment when the time came. Besides, Littlewood had of late written
to tell me that, allowances having been made for his mathematical talents, he was being excused from artillery training and
put to work improving the accuracy of anti-aircraft range tables. He would not leave England. I suppose I hoped that, if worse
came to worst, I, too, would be put in a position of that sort—which raised the dilemma of whether I should agree, for the
sake of my own safety, to apply my abilities to the prosecution of a war in which I did not believe. This was assuming, of
course, that I was asked to do so. For all I knew, I might be sent to France as punishment for having attested so late.

I remember that the afternoon I went, I waited five hours in a queue, in wet, sleety weather. By the time I got to the recruiting
office, it was well past midnight, and the women volunteers had run out of forms. So I had to come back the next morning and
wait another five hours. Although medical exams were supposed to be given on the spot, the rush was by then so frantic that
these had to be dispensed with. Instead we were told that we would be examined when we were called up, or summoned before
the tribunals that would decide whether to grant us exemptions.

Of course, others refused. Pointedly. Neville, James Strachey, Lytton Strachey. I could have refused, too. Somehow, though,
I couldn't see myself spending the next years, as some of the Bloomsberries would, doing "agricultural labor" and bickering
with one another on Ottoline Morrell's farm. Nor could I stomach, as Lytton seemly calmly prepared to, the prospect of going
to prison. Given the choice between prison and the trenches, I preferred the trenches.

Why? I suppose it came down to that romance of battle that I was spoon-fed from so early in my childhood. There was no equivalent
romance of Wormwood Scrubs. Few of you here tonight, I would guess, can imagine what it was like to grow up in a world that
had not yet known the Great War. Yet this was the world of my youth, in which war belonged to the distant past, or a distant
realm: Africa or India. What notions we had of war came from books we read as children, in which boys scarcely older than
we were wore armor, and rode steeds, and fought with swords. And the ministers of the government, because they had read the
same books that we had, took advantage of this shared heritage to vilify the Germans. The Germans, they told us, routinely
gathered up the bodies of dead Englishmen and used their fat for tallow. They had crucified two Canadian soldiers. They kept
French women in their trenches as white slaves. They were descendants of ogres, just as we were descendants of knights.

Odd . . . today I have so few specific memories of those months! No doubt I was busy—I know this from looking at my diaries—and
yet, when I recall them, I see myself, always and only, standing before my window at Trinity, staring out at the rain. This
isn't, of course, possible. My diary for 1916, for instance, tells me that from January on, I spent a part of each week in
London. Diaries are useful only as signposts to memory. And now, lo and behold, I find myself once running into Ramanujan,
purely by chance, at Kensington Gardens, where the government, as part of its strenuous campaign to persuade the people at
home that the war was going marvelously well and that the front was a sort of rustic, robust holiday camp, had dug "exhibition
trenches" for the public to inspect and even climb down into. These trenches were a joke. They were tidy and dry, cut in a
zigzag, with fortified walls and clean duckboard flooring. They had bunk beds and chairs and little kitchens in them. That
day some soldiers were inspecting the exhibition trenches, home on leave from a world at once frighteningly remote and yet,
as the crow flies, so close that people in Devon could hear the artillery fire in their kitchens. And these soldiers were
laughing. They didn't even bother to say anything. They just looked down into the trenches and laughed.

It was inside the pseudo-trench that I found Ramanujan, peering at the walls in that strange, spectral way of his. He was
by himself. I patted him on the back, surprising him, and he jumped. "Hardy," he said, and smiled. He seemed glad to see me.

After we climbed out, he asked me about the real trenches. "Is it true," he asked, "that the soldiers must stay in them all
day?"

"And much of the night as well."

"And that the trenches are continuous, from the Belgian coast to Switzerland? I heard that if he wanted to, a man could walk,
underground, the length of France."

"That may be possible in theory. I doubt it is possible in reality."

We strolled together, out of the park, Ramanujan with his hands shoved in his pockets for warmth. He was staying in Maida
Vale again, at the boarding house run by his beloved Mrs. Peterson. With relish he described the route by which he had traveled
to Kensington. He had begun his journey at the brand new tube station at Maida Vale, then changed at Paddington from the Bakerloo
line to the District. He told me that he had been studying the Underground, and now knew which was the deepest station, and
what was the longest distance between stations, and the shortest. He told me about a poster he had seen that day, a poster
I had seen myself. Below a picture of children frolicking in a dusk meadow were the words:

He asked me if this was supposed to be funny, and I said that I supposed it was—a sort of "gallows humor," a term I then had
to define for him.

One afternoon we went by tube to the zoo. The zoo was Ramanujan's other passion. He seemed to know all the animals personally,
and went so far as to apologize for the giraffes. "Their odor is offensive," he said, "though the zookeepers tell me that
we smell as bad to them as they do to us." Then he introduced me to Winnie, the bear cub from Canada of whom he had grown
so fond, and about whom he now seemed to know everything there was to know: that back in Quebec, her mother had been shot,
and she captured by her mother's killer, and subsequently sold to a member of the Canadian Mountain Rifles, a veterinarian
named Colebourn. When Colebourn joined up, Winnie crossed the Atlantic with him and then stayed with him at his brigade headquarters
on Salisbury Plain, where she followed the men around and ate out of their hands. Colebourn wanted to take Winnie to France
with him, but his commanding officer would not allow a bear at the front, and so she was sent to live at the London zoo until
her master returned from battle.

Every week I read the lists of the dead, and tried to keep clear in my head which of the men I knew at the front had been
blown up, which were missing, which were maimed. More names each week, most of them only remotely familiar, attached to faces
hurrying past in Great Court . . . Have you ever contemplated the curious fact that the population of the dead only ever gets
larger, while on earth our number remains more or less constant? I used to think that, with all the young men dying, purgatory
in those years must have been terribly crowded. It must have resembled a tube station into which, due to some cosmic signaling
error, no trains ever arrive, so that the platform just gets more and more mobbed. All on one platform: the weeping, the furious,
the suffering, waiting for the trains that will take them to judgment and, perhaps, rest. Here on earth, on the other hand,
there were fewer youths than there should have been. Everywhere there should have been a youth, there was a cross, and a mother
weeping, and offering up more sons, gladly, to the glory of England.

And what of that other society, the secret one, from which I had taken wing, and yet to the activities of which I remained,
sometimes reluctantly, attuned? It limped along, in its fashion. Every year we had a dinner in London: in 1915, at the dinner,
Rupert Brooke's memory was toasted. Yet the animosity that had arisen, for example, between Dickinson and Moore, on the one
hand, and McTaggart on the other could not be healed. Dickinson and Moore considered McTaggart a traitor to peace. McTaggart
considered Dickinson and Moore traitors to England. They remained at opposite ends of the table and would not speak.