The Last Samurai

by Helen Dewitt

  He said: Is it a first edition?

  I said: I don’t think so. It’s a paperback.

  He said: Then it won’t be worth a lot of money.

  I said: Well, I guess I’ll just have to keep it.

  He said: I guess you will. Come inside and I’ll sign it for you.

  I followed him down a corridor to a kitchen at the back of the house. He asked whether I would like anything. I said an orange juice.

  He poured two and handed me one. I handed him the book.

  He said:

  It’s always strange when they come back to you. It’s like sending children out into the world with no idea where they’ll end up. Look at this. Third printing, 1986. 1986! It could have been around the world. Some clapped-out hippy in Kathmandu could have carried it on a trek; passed it to a mate on his way to Australia; a tourist might have picked it up in an airport before meeting one of those cruise ships that go to the Antarctic. What shall I put?

  I felt cold. I could say To Ludo, with love from Dad. In ten seconds there would not be an object in the room that was not there now, and yet everything would be different.

  He had a pen in his hand and had been through this all before.

  The hand that had been now here now there held the pen. His mouth was slightly pursed. He was wearing a blue shirt and brown corduroys.

  He said: What’s your name?

  David.

  Is To David with best wishes all right? he asked.

  I nodded.

  He scrawled something in the book and handed it back.

  I wondered whether I would throw up.

  He asked me something about school.

  I said I didn’t go to school.

  He asked me about that.

  I said something about that.

  He said something else. He was being pleasant. There seemed to be a lot of grey in his hair; that wouldn’t have been there at the time of the Medley.

  I said: Can I see where you work?

  He said: Sure. He sounded surprised and pleased.

  I followed him up to the top of the house. This was not the same house, but they had gone to his study for the Medley, so some of the books and things would probably be here. I don’t know why I had to see this but I had to see it.

  He had the whole top of the house for a study. He showed me his computer. He said he used to have a lot of games on it but he had to take them off because he wasted too much time playing games. He gave me an engaging boyish grin. He showed me his database on different countries. He showed me boxes of record cards for different books.

  On a bookshelf I saw 10 books by the author of the magazine article Sibylla had shown me. I walked over and took one off the shelf. It was signed. I said:

  Are they all signed?

  He said:

  I’m a big fan.

  He said:

  I think he is one of the greatest writers in English this century.

  I did not laugh hysterically. I said:

  My mother says I will be able to appreciate him when I am older.

  He said:

  What other books do you like?

  I was about to say Other?

  I said:

  Do you mean in English?

  He said:

  In anything.

  I said:

  I like Kon Tiki.

  He said:

  Fair enough.

  I said I liked Amundsen and Scott and I liked King Solomon’s Mines and I liked everything by Dumas and I liked The Bad Seed and The Hound of the Baskervilles and I liked The Name of the Rose but the Italian was rather difficult.

  I said:

  I like Malory a lot. I like the Odyssey. I read the Iliad a long time ago but I was too young to appreciate it. I’m reading Njal’s Saga right now. My favourite part is where they go around the booths asking for help and Skarp-Hedin insults everybody.

  He had been making a thing of being wide-eyed and open mouthed. He said humorously: I don’t think I’ve come across it.

  I said: Do you want to see my Penguin translation? I’ve got it with me.

  He said: Sure.

  I opened my backpack and took out the Penguin translation by Magnus Magnusson. The Icelandic dictionary is about £140 & I had told Sibylla we could not afford it.

  I opened it to the page. I said: It’s only a couple of pages, and I handed it to him.

  He turned the pages, chuckling as he read. At last he handed it back to me.

  You’re right, it’s a scream, he said. I’ll have to get a copy. Thanks.

  I said: The translation isn’t very much like the Icelandic though. You can’t really imagine a Viking warrior saying don’t interfere in the conversation. The Icelandic is vil ek nú biðja ik, Skarpheðinn! at pú létir ekki til pín taka um mál várt. Though of course the Icelandic words don’t really have the same register as English words of Anglo-Saxon derivation because they’re not in opposition to a register of Latinate vocabulary.

  He said: You know Icelandic?

  I said: No, I’ve only just started. That’s why I need the Penguin.

  He said: Isn’t that cheating?

  I said: It’s harder than using a dictionary.

  He said: Then why don’t you use a dictionary?

  I said: It costs £140.

  He said: £140!

  I said: Well it stands to reason there’s not much of a market for it. People only study it at university if at all; the only way you can get anything in Icelandic is to order it specially from Iceland; who’s going to buy the dictionary? If there was a groundswell of interest in the population at large maybe the price would come down, or at least maybe libraries would get a copy, but obviously people aren’t going to develop an interest in something they’ve never heard of.

  He said: Well how did you develop an interest in it?

  I said: I read some of the Penguin translations when I was younger. I said: The interesting thing is that according to Hainsworth’s classic article on Homer & the epic cycle the mark of Homer’s superiority to the cycle is supposed to be richness and expansiveness, & yet it seems as though bareness is the thing that is good in the Icelandic saga. You could say Well, Schoenberg is obviously wrong to dismiss the Japanese print as primitive and superficial, why is he wrong?

  He was giving me another humorous wide-eyed look. He said:

  Now I believe you read my book.

  I did not know what to say.

  I said:

  I’ve read all your books.

  And he said: Thanks.

  He said: I mean that. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

  I thought: I can’t stand this.

  I thought of the three Prisoners of Fate. I could walk out any time. I wanted to walk out and I wanted to drop hints. I wanted to mention the Rosetta Stone and watch realisation dawn. I don’t know what I was going to say.

  I was just about to say something when I saw Fraser’s Ptolemaic Alexandria on a shelf. I exclaimed artlessly:

  Oh, you’ve got Ptolemaic Alexandria!

  He said:

  I shouldn’t really have bought it but I couldn’t resist.

  I didn’t ask where he’d heard of it. Somebody had obviously told him it was a superb work of scholarship which no home should be without.

  I said:

  Well, it’s a brilliant book.

  He said:

  Not that it’s much use to me. Did you know there was a Greek tragedy about God and Moses? It’s got it at the back but it’s all in Greek.

  I said:

  Would you like me to read some for you?

  He said:

  Oh—

  and he said

  Well, why not?

  I got Volume II off the shelf and I started reading where God is saying Stretch out thy rod in iambic trimeters and I translated as I went along and after about three lines I could see he was looking bored and amazed.

  I said:

  Well, you get the drift.

  He s
aid:

  How old are you?

  I said I was 11. I said there was nothing very difficult about the passage and anyone who had studied the language for a few months would be able to read it and I had known it for years.

  He said: Christ.

  I said it was not such a big deal and that J. S. Mill had started Greek at the age of 3.

  He said: How old were you when you started?

  I said: 4.

  He said: Christ.

  Then he said:

  Sorry, I don’t mean to make you self-conscious, it’s just that I’ve got kids of my own.

  I was looking down at Ptolemaic Alexandria thinking I’ve got to say something. I said What did he try to teach them and he said nothing in a formal way but the point was they had watched Sesame Street and it was about the right level. There was a piece of paper at the front of the book. I said: What’s this?

  He said: Don’t you recognise it?

  and I thought: So he knows

  and I thought: How did he know?

  I said: Recognise it?

  He said: It’s from the Iliad. I thought you’d recognise it. Somebody gave it to me.

  I said: Oh, of course.

  I said: Have you read it then?

  He said: I keep meaning to get around to it.

  He said: I think subconsciously it reminds me of Latin.

  I said: Of Latin?

  He said: I took a year at school and I spent most of it smoking behind the bike shed.

  I said I had heard the things worth reading in Latin were things you couldn’t appreciate until you were 15 so maybe it was just the texts.

  He said: I don’t think we made it as far as texts, I just remember on the first day the teacher writing some noun on the board with nominative genitive bla bla bla. It all seemed so fucking pointless. I mean, look at the Romance languages. As far as I know every single one got rid of the case endings because the people actually speaking the language thought they were a complete waste of time. I kept thinking why do I have to sit here learning this evolutionary failure of a language?

  He was grinning broadly as he said it and he said he thought whatever it was that had made him get out of the class and smoke behind the bike shed instead of sitting in the class learning case endings was probably the thing that had helped most to make him successful if you could call it success.

  I was looking at a piece of paper that ended hope you like it Must dash S[illegible scrawl].

  I thought: My father is Val Peters.

  He said: But I really should read it one of these days, she obviously went to a lot of trouble.

  He said: I’m kind of glad mine weren’t put under any pressure to start early, they grow up so fast and they spend so much time in school anyway, but I think it’s amazing what you’ve done I really do and it really does mean a lot that you like my books, I wasn’t just saying that, because at the end of the day it’s not just how many people buy them.

  I thought I should say something.

  He said: Look, let me give you something else, something that’ll be worth something some day. I mean I don’t know what you think, but maybe you’d like one of these, it’s not as if I’m ever going to read them, they get translated into about 17 languages and you don’t necessarily do signings every time so if I signed one it would be unique,

  and he went to another bookcase that was full of books and he said why didn’t I take one of his books in Czech or Finnish or something and he would sign it and it would be unique.

  I said You don’t have to do that and he said No I insist, and he asked me which language I would like and I said Well how about Finnish?

  He said Don’t tell me you know Finnish and I said Do you want me to lie about something like that and he said Gordon Bennett.

  He said Just out of curiosity is there any language here you don’t know? I looked at the books and I said No but there are a lot I don’t know very well and he said Sorry I asked and gave me another humorous look.

  He said:

  Why don’t I make this one more personal, is there something you’d like me to say?

  I thought: I’ve got to say something. I thought: Am I just going to go away without saying anything? I said: What did you have in mind?

  He said: How about, for David, I promise never to decrease the market value of this book by signing another Finnish edition, your friend in Mammon Val Peters? He was grinning at me and holding a pen.

  I said: Say whatever you want.

  He said: I’d like to say something more personal but everything you think of saying always sounds so wet.

  I said I probably wouldn’t sell it anyway so it didn’t have to be unique.

  He said: Well in that case why don’t I just put For David with best wishes Val but you’ll know it came from the heart. He did not really say this with another humorous smile because he was smiling humorously throughout. I said Fine, thanks, and he scrawled something in the book and handed it over.

  It was not hard to imagine a world where my body stood in this room with something else inside it. If I said something he would see that other world. I thought: Well am I going to go away?

  I said:

  Do you ever bury your books?

  He said: What?

  I said: You could bury your books in a plastic bag a few metres down, one on each continent. Then if there was a cataclysm they’d be preserved for posterity. They could dig them up again.

  He said he hadn’t tried it.

  I said: What they should really do is bury a book in the foundation of each house. Sealed in plastic. It would help archaeologists in a millennium or so.

  He smiled. He said: I hate to throw you out, but I’m gonna have to throw you out. I’ve got work to do.

  I thought again that I could say something and everything would be different, and seeing his casual slightly complimented look I wanted to say it.

  Then I thought:

  If we fought with real swords I would kill him.

  I thought:

  I can’t say I’m his son, because it’s true.

  v

  He obviously thinks he’s a samurai

  1

  A good samurai will parry the blow

  The night I met him I went outside to sleep on the ground. It was stupid, I wasn’t going anywhere. I rolled up my sleeping bag and brought it inside. I went upstairs and slept on the mattress, covered in blankets.

  I could sleep outside if I had to.

  I finished Njal’s Saga. I had planned to go back to Inuit when I had finished but now there did not seem to be any immediate point so I decided to go on with aerodynamics.

  I put the book on aerodynamics in my backpack as well as the two Schaum Outlines in case I needed Laplace transforms or Fourier analysis. I went to the National Gallery and sat on a bench in front of The Virgin & Child Enthroned between a Soldier Saint and St. John the Baptist.

  4.9 Bound Vortex

  It was shown in the last section that the force on a body is determined entirely by the circulation around it and by the free stream velocity.

  Now I believe you read my book, said my father.

  In an identical manner, it can be shown that the force on a vortex that is stationary relative to a uniform flow is given by the Kutta-Joukowski law.

  Thanks, said my father. I mean that. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

  The vortex that represents the circulation around the body

  Thanks, said my father. I mean that.

  departs in its characteristics from that of a vortex in the external flow

  Thanks, said my father.

  in that it does not remain attached to the same fluid particles

  I mean that, said my father. That’s the nicest thing

  I got up and went to the main wing and sat in front of A Young Man Holding a Skull by Frans Hals. My father didn’t say anything. I opened Kuethe & Chow on Foundations of Aerodynamics to page 85.

  4.10 Kutta Condition
/>   The Kutta-Joukowski theorem states that the force experienced by a body in a uniform stream is equal to the product of the fluid density, stream velocity, and circulation and has a direction perpendicular to the stream velocity.

  I think you’re going to have to wait a while, said my father.

  The Kutta-Joukowski theorem states that the force experienced by a body in a uniform stream is equal to the product of the fluid density, stream velocity, and circulation and has a direction perpendicular to the stream velocity.

  I think he’s one of the greatest writers this century, said my father.

  The Kutta-Joukowski theorem states that the force experienced by a body in a uniform stream

  Thanks, said my father.

  I stood up and left the room. I went this time to Room 34, and I took the corner seat by Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. Still no sign of Polyphemus. I couldn’t really remember the Kutta-Joukowski theorem but I wasn’t going back to it again. I opened the book to page 86 and I started reading down the page very fast

  The above discussion applies to an inviscid flow, but in a viscous fluid (however small the viscosity), the circulation is fixed by the imposition of an empirical observation. Experiments show that when a body with a sharp trailing edge is set in motion, the action of the fluid viscosity causes the flow over the upper and lower surfaces to merge smoothly at the trailing edge; this circumstance, which fixes the magnitude of the circulation around the body, is termed the Kutta condition, which may be stated as follows: A body with a sharp trailing edge in motion through a fluid creates about itself a circulation of sufficient strength to hold the rear stagnation point at the trailing edge.

  The flow around an airfoil at an angle of attack in an inviscid flow develops no circulation and the rear stagnation point occurs Thanks Sure Now I believe you read my book. Isn’t that cheating? Why don’t you use a dictionary?