The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  Afterward it was a little embarrassing, having to make his explanations. He had an urgent telegram from Bohr which he had to answer. Later Bohr laughed over it. And Littlewood, once he got over the initial shock, laughed too. Perhaps they were disappointed, perhaps relieved. Because at least the Riemann hypothesis remained unproven, which meant that either of them might be the man to prove it. It was still fair game.

  All of this, of course, happened long before Ramanujan. It is only an anecdote, and, like most anecdotes, it has lost its power through too much telling. Hardy no longer dined out on it.

  And then the vicar brought it up.

  What was troubling to Hardy was that the vicar seemed to think he'd gained an advantage over him; discovered a chink in the armature of his atheism. And who was to say he hadn't? For Hardy knew he would sound like an idiot if he pretended it was all just a joke. The anti-God battery—sweaters, papers, Gertrude's immense umbrella— he preserves still, and still puts to use from time to time, just as he still finds himself, sometimes half-consciously, offering up prayers for the opposite of what he wants.

  Back in Cranleigh, he watches Gertrude carefully. Far from embracing her newfound freedom, every day she roots herself deeper in the life of the village. Yes, she has entrenched herself, exactly like a soldier, joining the board of several charitable organizations and taking on, in addition to her regular teaching, some private pupils. One of these is with her when Hardy arrives one afternoon in the fall—a churlish, sour-faced girl of fourteen, to whom Gertrude is attempting to explain the conjugation of the French verb prendre. This time two fox terriers lie by the fire. Two?

  Yes, she has acquired another one, a male. Epée. She hopes that he and Daisy will breed.

  “Je prends, tu prends, il prend, vous prendez—”

  “Vous prenez.”

  “Vous prenez, nous prendons—”

  Hardy slinks to his bedroom. It is all very odd. When they have supper that night, she tells him that she has been working with the vicar on a plan to raise money for the restoration of some stained glass in the church. Working with the vicar! So perhaps Gertrude is the source of the leak. And is she planning to marry the vicar? It seems mad, impossible. In any case, she's playing her cards close to her chest. She cuts her meat furtively, and will not meet his eye. The dogs sit at her feet, hoping for scraps, never going anywhere near Hardy, as if they know better than to try, though in truth he would be more likely to give them his food than Gertrude. Indeed the prospect of undermining her efforts to instill discipline in them rather delights him.

  They do not talk about the house. As has been the case every time he's visited since their mother's death, he has arrived determined to bring the subject up, and then lost courage. The dogs themselves seem to bar mention of the subject, sitting as they do on either side of her, like sentries. They sleep in the kitchen, where Hardy, waking in the middle of the night, feeds them leftover slices of cold beef. With satisfaction that he is breaking one of Gertrude's rules, he watches them swallow the beef in single gulps, all the while gazing up at him, nervous tongues licking black lips.

  Before he returns to Cambridge, he pays a call on the vicar, who sits before him in his study with his hands clasped on his lap. For some reason the vicar's hands repel Hardy more than any other part of him: more than his clean-shaven jowls, or his smug lips, or his spreading breasts, over which the cross droops. The hands are fat and glossy. There is a ring on one of the fingers. He leans back and smiles at Hardy, content in his minor authority and the good lunch he has just eaten. When Hardy starts to speak, he burps. The fingers woven. “Excuse me,” he says.

  “I want to speak to you about that postcard,” Hardy says. “I am assuming, of course, that you're not at liberty to tell me who shared it with you?”

  The vicar says nothing; merely smiles.

  “In any case, I thought it important to explain to you my rationale.”

  “I understand your rationale. You assumed that God would save you out of spite. So that you would not die a famous man.”

  “I've thought it over very carefully. I believe it was a psychological tactic, a means of contending with the arbitrariness of nature and the universe. I call this arbitrariness God, and I make it into an adversary.”

  “You mean that this God whom you claim to be your enemy—you don't believe in Him?”

  “God is simply a name I give to something … without meaning.”

  “Then why choose the name God?”

  “To amuse myself.”

  “And are you amused?”

  Hardy looks away. “I am a rationalist. I told you years ago, when I was a child. A kite cannot fly in a fog.”

  “Did the boat that day encounter fog? Or only wind?”

  “Rain. Heavy wind.”

  “You feared for your life.”

  “Yes. Though I felt protected because of the postcards.”

  “So God protected you.”

  “No, not God …”

  “Then what?”

  “A talisman. A means to avert fear until we reached England.”

  “God protected you. He saved you. Perhaps He intends for you to solve the Raymond hypothesis.”

  “Riemann.”

  “Excuse me. I am no mathematician.”

  Hardy leans forward in his chair. “Who told you? It can't have been Mother. She wouldn't have understood so much. It must have been Gertrude.”

  Again, the vicar does not answer. His smile widens.

  “Why would she tell you?”

  “Why have you come here?”

  “To make sure you know that you haven't won. I still don't believe in God.”

  “Whether or not you believe in God is one question,” the vicar says. “The other is whether God believes in you.”

  8

  AT FIRST, climbing out of the tube station onto Queensway with her bag of foreign newspapers, she isn't sure it's him: a haggard figure, too small for his clothes, and thinner than she remembers. He is standing outside the station, peering, with a kind of studious fascination, at the map posted there. Then he turns, and it's too late to decide whether she wants to flee, much less to flee. “Mr. Ramanujan,” she says.

  “Mrs. Neville,” he answers. And smiles. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  She takes his hand. She doesn't want to give away that over the course of a few seconds, all the convictions on which she has depended to survive, these last months, have collapsed. No longer is the past a novel finished and put back on the shelf; no longer is she a different woman than she was, a Londoner, impervious to the pleas of beggars and the banshee-echo of underground trains. For he has returned, and now she is the same Alice who lived on Chesterton Road. She never stopped being in love with him.

  What's happened, she realizes as they walk together down Queens-way, is that this chance meeting has carried her past the moment she dreaded, the moment at which she would have to acknowledge that awful visit to his rooms. It's as if a wind has picked her up and carried her across that border she would not let herself cross by choice, and now she's here, on the other side. They're walking together toward her flat. She's asked him up for coffee.

  Up the stairs to the door. Although the flat is only on the second floor, the climb leaves him winded. “Miss Hardy told me you haven't been well,” she says, letting him in. “I'm so sorry.”

  “I was in the nursing hostel for several months,” he says. “But I'm better now. I'm back at Bishop's Hostel.” He follows her into the small, square sitting room, into which most of the Cambridge furniture—the piano, the Voysey settee, the two spinsterish chairs—has been stuffed.

  “Forgive the crowdedness. The flat is so much smaller than our house.”

  “It's fine,” he says, sitting down on one of the chairs. “Rather like seeing old friends.” And he rubs the upholstered arm with what seems to her genuine fondness.

  “I'll just get the coffee. I'm afraid we don't have any milk, and only a little sugar, so it can't
be a proper Madrasi coffee. The shortages.”

  “I understand. And how is Mr. Neville?”

  “As to be expected,” she says from the kitchen. “He's away today, in Reading.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “The university there may offer him a position.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Yes, I suppose I do, too. Though it will mean leaving London, and I've only just got used to London.” Having put the coffee on, she returns to the sitting room; sits in the second chair. There is so much more she could say—to him, to anybody—about what she has learned in these last months! In a marriage, it is the repetition that kills: the repetition of meals; of conversations; of bickering (“How did you sleep?” “I told you never to ask me that again”); of sex or no sex; of habits (his dribbling urine on the toilet seat, her flatulence); of grief (the long afternoon naps of sorrow); of laundry; of repetition itself (totting up the accounts twice, because Eric's arithmetic, amazingly, is worse than hers); of his obliviousness and her hardness; of his calling her “darling”; of the knowledge that there will always be things in him that she will never understand and things in her that he will never understand; of the knowledge, always, that no matter how far he goes or for how long, he will come back.

  Yes, she thinks, in a marriage, it is the repetition that kills. And it is the repetition that saves.

  She turns to Ramanujan. Only now does she see how much weight he has lost. His face, bereft of its pudginess, is lean and serious, and she takes in, as if for the first time, its beauty: the black, haunted eyes, the heavy brows, the flared, flat nose. Ramanujan has brilliantined his thick hair, combed it to the left. His collar is open. What firm fat once concealed—the ropy ligaments of his neck—illness has now exposed. Illness, and the open collar. She has never before seen him with an open collar, except that once, in his room.

  “I didn't think I'd see you again.” She says this without sentiment; a mere statement of fact. “Yet here you are.”

  “Yes.”

  “It's odd. So much has changed, yet everything is the same. The same furniture in a different flat.”

  “It is a pleasure to sit in this chair again. Your house was my first real taste of England.”

  “If only we could fit everything! But you see, this is only temporary, this flat. Until Eric gets a position. It's ridiculous, the dining table barely fits in the dining room. You can't even pull the chairs out without hitting the wall.”

  “And how is Ethel?”

  “I'm afraid she's not with us anymore. You know her son was killed.”

  “No, I didn't.”

  “He ran away from the front. He couldn't bear it. They shot him as a deserter.”

  “You mean the English?”

  Alice nods. “We tried to get her to come with us to London, but she didn't want to be so far from her daughter. I understand, of course. So now we just have a char who comes in twice a week.”

  “Please give her my regards if you write to her.”

  “I shall. The war is such a horror, Mr. Ramanujan. But at least I have found a place for myself.” And she tells him about her work, about Mrs. Buxton, about the house in Golders Green. She talks and talks—until she realizes that she is leaving him far behind, forgetting him. “I'm so sorry,” she says, “I've not even asked what's brought you to London.”

  “Just a doctor's visit.”

  “Of course, your illness. And what did the doctor say?”

  “So many doctors have said so many things. And now it seems I am to go to a sanatorium. Mendip Hills. Near Wells. The doctor who runs it is Indian. Most of the patients, too.”

  “But isn't that a sanatorium for tuberculosis?”

  “Yes. My symptoms fit no other diagnosis, so by process of elimination, it has been concluded that it must be tuberculosis.”

  “But you don't cough.”

  “No lung trouble. Just the pain and the fever. Nothing changes. Every day the same. Illness is really very boring, Mrs. Neville.”

  “Repetition,” Alice says faintly. And suddenly she remembers the coffee; hurries to the kitchen; pours it into cups and brings them back. “I have a little sugar here.”

  “No need, I shall drink it as it is.”

  Then they sit, in a small, square room in Bayswater, drinking their dark, bitter coffee. She is thinking that the room is like one of those stalls at the Paris flea market that are set up to look like rooms, but rooms in which no human being could live, because there is no space to move. So it is now: their lives up for sale. What will happen next? Only a few steps separate her from the settee, the table on which Ramanujan did the jigsaw puzzle, the piano. She looks at it, then looks at him.

  “Do you ever sing anymore?”

  He waggles his head.

  “‘I am the very model of a Modern Major General …’ Remember?”

  “‘I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral …’”

  “You do remember!”

  “Of course.”

  Then, together:

  “‘I know the Kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.’”

  They finish the song, laughing. “I wouldn't have thought you'd remember the lyrics,” she says.

  “I remember them all.”

  Once again, she turns toward the piano. “It needs to be tuned. I don't know how it will sound. It's been months since I've played.”

  “It doesn't matter.”

  They get up, and sit together on the bench. She feels the heat of his nearness—in her marrow she feels it. Still, she doesn't touch his arm. She doesn't touch his hand. She arranges the music on the desk.

  Late afternoon sun pours through the window. Elsewhere in London, a woman receives a telegram that her missing son is alive. Hardy tries to write a letter to his sister. Russell gives a speech. And on the train from Reading, Eric Neville adjusts his spectacles; opens up a battered copy of Alice in Wonderland. He is happy, because Reading will give him a fellowship, and his wife has just told him that she is pregnant.

  Fingers on the keys: the simple accompaniment is rendered strange by the out-of-tune piano. As they sing, the past embraces them, and the furniture bears witness.

  9

  New Lecture Hall, Harvard University

  THIS MORNING, walking along the streets of your fair city, this other Cambridge, I had the oddest hallucination. I was standing in Harvard Square, looking in the window of a bookshop, when I happened to notice the reflections of the men and women in the glass superimposed over the books, and suddenly it seemed to me—that is, I was sure I could see it—that one of the women had fish hooks hanging from her flesh. Fish hooks protruded from her cheeks, her arms, her legs and neck. Some of the wounds were fresh and bleeding, while in other places the flesh seemed to have toughened around the hooks; almost to have accepted them. And then, when I turned—as what I am describing is, admittedly, a waking dream, I shall resort to the locutions of Milton—when I turned, methought I saw a man passing by whose flesh was also pierced with fish hooks. And then, behind him, another man, and another woman, until it dawned on me that every passerby on the square this morning had fish hooks hanging from his flesh, some of them dragging shreds of line, while in other cases the line was not cut; the line was being tugged at, so that these men and women jerked in their efforts to escape their captors. Yes, some tried to escape, and still others seemed glad to follow, ran as if willfully with the lines. And then … methought I saw, there on Harvard Square, a cat's cradle of fishing line entangling these poor men and women, their feet and bodies. Everyone trapped, hooked, holding reels even as they were being reeled in.

  What has this vision to do with Ramanujan? It is true that, as I crossed Harvard Square this morning, I was thinking about my departed friend; rehearsing in my mind the speech I was to give in his memory. So perhaps the Goddess Namagiri supplied me with this vision, as a way of indicating the line (pardon the pun) that Rama-nujan, who is no do
ubt reincarnated today in some superior form, wishes me to take. Or perhaps the hallucination was merely the product of an increasingly elderly and diseased imagination. I don't know. All I can offer is an interpretation: we spend our lives, all of us, trying to hook each other. We hook, and are hooked. Sometimes we fight it, and sometimes we take the hooks gratefully, sink them into our own flesh, and sometimes we try to outwit those who have hooked us by hooking them, as I tried constantly, in my younger years, to hook God.

  Ramanujan, in the late months of 1917 and the early months of 1918, was a man from whose body many hooks dangled. Of these, at the time at least, I could only see some. There was the hook that connected him to me, to my ambition for him, which he felt obliged to meet, and to my fear of him, which he felt obliged to allay; and there was the hook of his illness, obliging him to rely on the care of doctors; and the hooks of duty and love connecting him to his three friends, Chatterjee, Rao, and Mahalanobis; and the predatory hook (this one particularly sharp and menacing) plunged into him at an early age by his mother; and the hook of responsibility and desire that linked him to his wife across the ocean; and the hook of the war, embedded in everyone's flesh in those years; and finally the hook of his own ambition, which of course he had driven into himself.

  Do you see, now, what it was like for him? Do you see in what a complication of duties, hopes, and terrors he was enmeshed? I hope you do, because I didn't, at least at the time. After all, there was so much of which I wasn't aware, and about which I didn't think to ask. By now he was out of the nursing hostel and living, once again, at Trinity. His health had improved only to the extent that he was no longer bedridden. He could once again dress and wash himself, and come to see me in the mornings, and on occasion he even felt well enough to travel up to London, where he stayed with his beloved Mrs. Peterson, whose heart he would soon break. And yet he was not in any sense recovered. The pain in his stomach persisted, as did the fever. Illness must have made him vulnerable, and perhaps this is why, in those months, he found himself thinking more than ever before of his wife, Janaki, the girl with whom, back in India, he had been able to spend so little time, as his mother (I learned this later) had kept them from sleeping in the same bed, using his surgery as an excuse. Yes, I can imagine that in his solitude and confusion—separated from his homeland by the war, deprived (again, by the war) of all but the most rudimentary foods, facing another gloomy, cold Cambridge winter— he might well have started dreaming of that young girl to whom he referred, in the Indian fashion, as his “house.” (It was during these weeks that he told Chatterjee, “My house has not written to me,” and that Chatterjee replied, “Houses don't write.”) And yet it would be a mistake to imagine that he dreamed of her with undiluted longing. There was great bitterness in Ramanujan, as I soon learned from an unlikely source.