The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  What a place! Ever fearful of germs, he wipes his seat before sitting down; keeps his coat collar pulled up to his mouth. He wonders at the strange course his life has taken these last years: that a letter he might easily have ignored, that others ignored, should have led him from the safety of his rooms in Trinity to this place.

  He waits. An hour passes. No one calls his name. To make the time pass, he listens to the tart's monologue, which is oddly compelling: ornate and subtle and full of references to men and women with whom she assumes everyone else in the room is familiar. The ingredients are those of a novel: a jealous sister, a cheating husband, a married lover. “‘You keep it to yourself, Jack,’ I tell him, ‘I don't want nothing to do with it.’ But will he listen? No. He's just like Annie, always has been, has to have his own way …”

  The story is just reaching its climax when the female officer strides in and shouts out a name. “Hold your horses,” the tart says, and, having adjusted her various accoutrements—stockings, handbag, necklaces—she stumbles away on loud heels. And how quiet the room is suddenly! Aside from the coughing, all he can hear is the muttered monologue of the man who fidgets. And what is he saying? Hardy strains his ear, catches a single word—“butter”—then his own name. He looks up. “Please come with me,” the female officer says, and he stands and follows her down a long corridor into a windowless office where two chairs face a desk at which no one sits. “Please wait here,” she says. “The inspector will be with you shortly.”

  She shuts the door behind her. He looks around. The walls are bare except for a calendar and a clock with a loud tick. (Tick, tic.) Why didn't he bring something to read? Where is the toilet? It suddenly occurs to her that the officer might have locked the door, locked him in. He panics at the prospect. Dear God, let the door be locked so that the tart will not molest me. Then he gets up and walks to the door and tries the handle. To his great relief, it opens. He closes it again and sits down.

  Ten minutes later two policemen come into the office, both huge and mustached, one in his sixties and the other, at most, twenty-five. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” the older one says. “I'm Inspector Callahan. This is Officer Richards.” Hardy shakes their enormous hands. Then the inspector sits at the desk and the officer takes the third seat, the one next to Hardy's. “Tried to jump under a train,” the inspector says, opening a ledger.

  “What?”

  “The Indian. Tried to jump under a train at Marble Arch station.”

  “Oh my God.” Hardy shuts his mouth. God is not someone whose name he wants these men to hear him utter. “But why? Jumped? He didn't fall?”

  “There were witnesses. The station was crowded. A woman screamed, ‘Don't jump!’ and he jumped.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “He's all right,” the younger officer says, the one called Richards. “I was the officer called to the scene. From what the witnesses tell me, sir, the stationmaster, seeing him jump, turned off the switch, and the train came to a stop just a few feet in front of him. It was a miracle, was what one woman said. I had to climb down onto the tracks and help him up, which was difficult, as he'd done considerable injury to his legs.”

  “Where is he? Can I see him?”

  “He's in a holding cell,” the inspector says. “We had him bandaged up. Normally in a case like this he'd be kept under guard in a hospital. But there aren't enough beds. Bloody war.” The inspector lights a cigarette. “I'll be honest with you, I've no patience with these suicides. Attention's all they want. They're just like spoilt children. And when you consider all the young men dying at the front… It's a crime, you know, attempted suicide. No magistrate's going to look kindly on it, especially these days.”

  “But he's not well.”

  “Has his behavior been at all odd lately?” asks the younger officer.

  “I couldn't say. I haven't seen him. He's been at a sanatorium. He's very sick.”

  “What is he, a mathematics student?”

  “He's the greatest mathematician alive today. And an F.R.S.— Fellow of the Royal Society.”

  What, Hardy will wonder later, made him say that? It is a lie.

  Ramanujan is not a Fellow of the Royal Society. Nor, until that moment, had it occurred to Hardy that perhaps he ought to be; that Hardy ought to put him up for membership. Had Hardy thought before he spoke, he might later have claimed that he was making a gambit, hoping that the inspector would be sufficiently impressed by the idea that Ramanujan was an F.R.S. that he would let him go. And, as it turned out, the inspector was impressed, as was his lieutenant. But that was sheer luck. “An F.R.S.,” he said, and you could see it in his face: a stepping back, in deference to intellectual superiority as sanctioned by a respected body. “I didn't realize. All he told us was he was at Cambridge. Well, well.”

  “As I said, he's not been well lately. And geniuses do tend to be … temperamental.”

  “Of course, if he's put before a magistrate, charges will be brought.”

  “Is that absolutely necessary? It would be highly embarrassing … not just to him but to the college. And it could be disastrous for his future. A criminal record.” Hardy leans in confidentially. “I'll ask you to keep this between us, because it's not something we want to get round—the newspapers and such—but Mr. Ramanujan is on the brink of making what most would agree is the single most important breakthrough in the history of mathematics.”

  “Is he now? Well, let's see what's to be done. I'll need to speak to the chief, of course.”

  The inspector leaves, slamming the door behind him.

  “Would you care for a cup of tea?” Richards asks.

  “Thank you, yes,” Hardy says.

  “I'll just ask Florence to fetch some for us. Florence!” And he shouts through the open door for the female officer with whom Hardy first spoke. She slinks in, looking resentful in her bowlerish hat, her long black skirt and thin tie. An officer of the law, requisitioned for tea-making.

  “Fetch us some tea, will you, darling?”

  She says nothing; disappears down the corridor. Richards pushes the door half shut. It's the first time Hardy's had the chance to get a good look at him. The mustache is a pity, in that it conceals his lips, which are thin and wet. His brown eyes are open and curious beneath narrow brows and a block of dark, thick hair. Smiling, he takes his seat; says to Hardy, “This breakthrough you mentioned—I wouldn't half mind knowing what it is. I've always been keen on science. And you can trust me to keep quiet about it.”

  Hardy leans in for a confidence. And really, he thinks, Richards is young. So why isn't he in France? An injury? Good connections? Or is he just lucky—kept out of the war to patrol the streets of London?

  “Mr. Ramanujan is on the brink of proving the Riemann hypothesis,” Hardy says.

  “The Riemann …”

  “It has to do with the prime numbers. You see, for hundreds of years, mathematicians have wondered about the mystery of the primes and their distribution.” Like the lecture he gave to the girls at St. Catherine's. Only Richards listens more carefully than the girls did. He gets irritated when Florence interrupts with the tea, stops Hardy intermittently to ask questions, and seems just on the brink of grasping the essentials when the inspector's voice booms again in the corridor.

  Instantly, at the first click of the door handle, Richards pulls back, as if to put a safe distance between himself and Hardy. And how immense, ungainly, interruptive is the inspector's presence! His, Hardy recognizes dimly, was the barking voice on the telephone. “Well, I've had a talk with the chief,” he says, taking his place at the desk, “and he is of the opinion, as am I, that attempted suicide is a very serious offense. Mind you, if he did it once, he might do it again. There's a reason it's a crime in this country, you know, and that's to protect the public and protect a man from himself who's liable to off himself at any moment.” The inspector rubs his nose, so that his mustache quivers. “Still, the chief appreciates the delicacy of the situation, and so
, given the gentleman's reputation and his status as an F.R.S. and so forth, we are willing to forgo bringing criminal charges provided he enters a hospital straightaway and stays there for at least a year. You say he's not well, he's been in a sanatorium.”

  “Yes. Tuberculosis.”

  “Well, get him back to the sanatorium. And make sure he doesn't run off. Because if we catch him walking the streets of London or standing on the edge of platforms in tube stations, there'll be no leniency.”

  “I understand. May I see him now?”

  “Richards, go and fetch him.”

  “Yes, sir.” Richards hops up and leaves.

  “Cigar, Mr. Hardy?” the inspector asks. Hardy declines. “Well, I don't mind if I do myself.” And he lights the cigar, stretching his legs out in front of him under the desk. “So, a mathematician,” he says.

  “That's right.”

  “Myself, I was bloody awful at maths. As a lad I could barely add two and two. Still can't. My wife won't even let me near the accounts book.” He laughs. “Of course I suppose you could tot up fifty figures in your head in half a minute.”

  “No, like most professional mathematicians, I am abysmally bad at what you call ‘totting up.’ But Ramanujan could.”

  “Could he now?”

  “He's well known for his feats of mental arithmetic. We had a contest once, between him and a Major MacMahon, to see which one could break down a prime number in the shortest time.”

  “A what?”

  “A prime number. A number that—” But before Hardy can complete his explanation, the door opens, and Richards ushers in Ramanujan, who is limping badly. Both his legs are bandaged. Richards has his right arm around his waist.

  “Ramanujan!” Hardy says, leaping up from his chair. But Ramanujan doesn't answer. He won't meet Hardy's gaze. And suddenly Hardy understands that all this jollity—explaining the Riemann hypothesis to the good-looking Richards, talking about calculation contests with the less good-looking Inspector Callahan—has only been a caesura; a respite. For now Ramanujan is standing before him, and in his eyes there are no tears. There is no rage. No grief. Nothing. This is a man who just tried to die.

  “Here you are, Mr. Hardy,” Richards says. “That's right.” And he hands Ramanujan over like a package. An arm loosed, another arm put around the shoulders. Ramanujan can barely stand; for a moment Hardy staggers under the weight until his feet find purchase. He smells, very faintly, of blood; of sand; of the grit and exhaust that puffs up from Underground stations.

  “All right, my friend, you're safe now,” Hardy says. “We'll get you in a taxi and get you home.” And he leads Ramanujan toward the door, praying the whole while that Ramanujan will say or do something mad—cry out, “I want to die!” or hurl himself against a wall— something to jeopardize this tenuous probation that Hardy has negotiated. But Ramanujan says nothing.

  “Remember the terms,” the inspector calls from the door. And Hardy says that yes, he will remember the terms. Then he and Ramanujan leave, followed by Richards, who helps them down the steps and into a cab, and stands by as the cab pulls away.

  2

  IT'S ONLY ONCE they're in the taxi, moving the wrong way along Victoria Embankment, that Hardy realizes he has nowhere to take Ramanujan except to his own flat. It's too late to catch a train to Cambridge. Nor, under the circumstances, can Hardy quite imagine dropping Ramanujan off at Mrs. Peterson's boardinghouse.

  The whole journey, Ramanujan is silent. The snow has started to stick a little more. Hardy watches it as it falls on women in bus conductor's uniforms and macintoshes, on businessmen in bowler hats, on soldiers on leave and the tart who was in the waiting room at Scotland Yard, now sheltered by an umbrella held up by a shadowy keeper. These days London is especially frantic at dusk, its citizens scrambling to get home before the lights go out, and it becomes a different world. “Once I was in Venice,” he says, and Ramanujan turns; looks at him dimly. “Yes, and it was quite terrifying. You see, the city's so lively during the day, and then at night—not a soul. I got lost trying to get back to my hotel. It was like walking through a city of the dead.”

  Is this the wrong thing to say? Probably. For how is Ramanujan, who has never been to Venice, supposed to respond? And what is Hardy supposed to say to him next, as the cab ride attenuates, the traffic thickening and thinning, like soup that needs to be stirred? If only St. George's Square would arrive, then at least Hardy could busy himself with making arrangements for the night! And then he looks at Ramanujan, heaped in his corner of the cab, and he realizes that it makes no difference. Ramanujan is not requiring talk of him. On the contrary, he seems to want silence.

  At last the cab pulls up to the curb. Hardy helps Ramanujan out, and is mildly surprised that he makes no effort to run away, until he looks down and sees, once again, the bandaged legs, and realizes that, even if he wanted to, Ramanujan couldn't. Not now. “You've banged yourself up pretty well,” he says, as he eases Ramanujan through the door and up the stairs.

  “I fell onto the rails,” Ramanujan says. “They tore the flesh of my legs.”

  “That must have hurt.”

  “There were no broken bones, though.” Is there disappointment in his voice?

  One landing, then another. “Here we are then.” And they step inside the flat. The light is still on from when Hardy left, the book he was reading flung open on the chair, the receiver of the telephone dangling to the floor of the corridor. He returns it to its cradle. “Do sit down.” Ramanujan sits gingerly, breathes out very loudly. “You've never been here before, have you? My flat.”

  “No.”

  “Or rather, I should say, the flat I share with my sister. Miss Hardy.”

  “Yes.”

  “So there's a spare room. My sister's room. You can sleep there tonight and tomorrow we'll take the train to Cambridge.”

  “What is to become of me? Am I to be sent back to Hill Grove?”

  “I don't see why not, assuming you were happy there.”

  “I was not happy there. I could not bear the place. I left four days ago.”

  “So you came to London?”

  Ramanujan nods. He has picked up English habits of certainty. “At first I stayed at Mrs. Peterson's but then there was … an incident. I left, and was caught up in the bombing raid. I could not get a train back to Cambridge so I found a hotel. I stayed there until I had no money left.” He grows suddenly quiet. And how is Hardy supposed to nudge him on? Is he supposed to nudge him on? So far as the human psyche is concerned—he would be the first to admit it—he is as inept a student as has ever been born. Mathematicians live in abstract realms for a reason. But Ramanujan, too, is a mathematician. That was what brought them together. So why shouldn't they be able to speak to each other?

  “Of course you don't have to talk about this if you don't want to,”

  Hardy says, “but … well, needless to say, I was very alarmed when the inspector told me … Is it true that you jumped?”

  Ramanujan gazes into his lap for several seconds. Then he says, “It does not matter.”

  “Why?”

  “I shall die soon anyway.”

  “You don't know that.”

  “At Hill Grove there was an old man in the next hut. They called it a chalet but it was a hut. This old man came from a village not far from my own. Not far from Kumbakonam. He had bathed in the river every day, as I did, before he came to England. For many years he had a restaurant in Notting Hill, and then his sons took over the restaurant. They quarreled, and it was sold. He was made sick from their quarreling, and they sent him to Hill Grove. And every day he coughed up blood, and in the end the noise coming from his hut was frightful.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “It does not matter. His fate is mine, only in my case it will come sooner. Since I was a child I have known I would die young. It doesn't matter how.”

  “But that's nonsense. There's no reason you can't live to be eighty. And you've so much left to ach
ieve! We've work to do, Ramanujan, the partitions theorem, the Riemann hypothesis still to prove.”

  He smiles thinly. “Yes, I have been thinking, a little, about the Riemann hypothesis.”

  “Have you? Tell me.”

  “But I am very tired.”

  “Of course you are. I'm sorry.” Hardy stands, then walks into the corridor off which the bedroom doors open. He opens the door to Gertrude's room. “You should find everything you need here,” he says. “I'm afraid the bed hasn't been slept in for a while, though. The sheets may be musty.”

  “I don't mind.”

  “Oh, but I haven't offered you anything. Wouldn't you like something to eat? Or to drink? Some tea?”

  “No. I only want sleep.”

  “Fine, then. You don't want to bathe?”

  Another distinct shake of the head: no. And then he shuffles through the door to Gertrude's room; pulls off his clothes until he is wearing just his drawers. Only then does Hardy see how badly he's been hurt. The bandages cover his legs from the ankles to just above the knees, and are bloody in places.

  “Those will have to be changed.”

  “Tomorrow.” Ramanujan climbs into the bed. “You see?” he says, pulling the blankets to his chin. “I've learned. When I first arrived, I didn't understand your beds. I slept on top of the covers, and piled myself with sweaters and overcoats to keep away cold. Then Chat-terjee explained … you had to get into the bed, like a letter into an envelope.” He laughs. “To think I was so ignorant!”