The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  And all through it—how busy I must have kept myself! Perusing the diaries, I discover that, at different points, I was secretary of: (a) the Cambridge branch of the Union for Democratic Control and (b) the London Mathematical Society (L.M.S.). That the first of these, while hardly as radical as the No Conscription Fellowship, should have been considered subversive will come as no surprise: during the war any group that advocated peace as a goal was considered subversive. The second might seem the least likely organization in the world to arouse the suspicion, much less the attention, of the government. Yet the London Mathematical Society had always worked for the free exchange of ideas across borders, and continued to do so once the war began. “Mathematics,” Hilbert would later famously declare, “knows no races. For mathematics, the whole cultural world is a single country.” This was an even more radical idea in 1917, viewed as likely to undermine the hatred of the Other on which the war's popularity depended. Had we been able to, we in the London Mathematical Society would have gladly published in German periodicals. Short of that, we made a point of publishing in as many non-English journals as we could. Now I see that between 1914 and 1919, I published in the vicinity of fifty papers, some with Ramanujan, some with Littlewood, and nearly all of them abroad: in Comptes Rendu, and the Journal of the Indian Mathematical Society, and the Tohoku Mathematical Journal, and the marvelously named Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo. More dangerously, from the point of view of the jingoists, I published frequently in Acta Mathematica, the Swedish editor of which had the audacity to include articles by Germans and Englishmen in the same issues. I even coauthored a short book with the Hungarian Marcel Riesz, written through correspondence. Our epigraph, in Latin, concluded: “Auctores Hostes Idemque Amici.” The authors, enemies and, at the same time, friends. This alone was probably enough to get my name put on some government list of internal agitators.

  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.

  All that united us was mourning. Of the three lost boys, Békássy was the second to die, a few months after Brooke, a year or so before Bliss. It was Norton who came to break the news to me and to tell me how bad I must feel. No matter that I had barely even met that poor lovelorn Hussar! Norton had a way, especially in those days, of assuming that his own grief, joy, distress, longing—choose whichever emotion you like—had of necessity to be everyone else's. He often began his sentences, “Don't you?” or “Aren't you … ?” Irritating enough when the sentence is: “Don't you think this lemon cake delicious?” (I despise lemon cake.) But when the sentence is “Aren't you just grief-stricken about poor Békássy?” I could have struck him. For what could I say? No, I'm not, and I'd thank you not to supply my reactions to me ready-made? The truth was, I considered Békássy's death a stupidity. Like so many others, he had the idea in his head that the war would ennoble him, that he should go because, as he told Norton, it was part of “the good life” to go. But while he was waiting to be sent to the front, he wrote that he did not want to think about why he had gone: “I want to be in it and forget what I think.” And of course, as he was an aristocrat, he joined the cavalry. According to Norton, he put three red roses on his horse's head because they were part of his family's coat of arms, and then he rode off to the Russian front, no doubt on some “trusted mount,” scion of generations of Békássy equine nobility, and there he died.

  And now the crisis (with Norton there was always a crisis) was whether to tell Bliss. No one knew exactly where Bliss was—in France, or still in England, training—or if breaking the news that his great love was dead was even a good idea, given that he was himself enlisted. I tried to help. I tried to find Bliss's brother—now, of course, renowned as a composer, though, given my equally famous tin ear, I'm not supposed to care about that. But Arthur Bliss was already in France. I didn't dare involve the parents. So I gave up. I have no idea if Bliss ever learned that Békássy was dead. He died himself not long after in the Somme, killed by a piece of shrapnel that lodged in his brain.

  Today I cannot get too worked up when I think of these deaths. Too many others were lost whose lives would have mattered more. Nothing of consequence, I suspect, would have come of these three anyway.

  One death in those years did affect me, profoundly, and that was Hermione's. Sheppard, if he were here today, would interrupt now to say that my suspicions about this matter are “paranoid.” (Like so many others, he has become an aficionado of psychoanalysis, and likes to pepper his conversation with its jargon.) In turn I would tell him that he is far too inclined to assume the best of people. For the facts are what they are. Hermione died suddenly of a digestive ailment that went undiagnosed. And I am convinced that it was poison. Yes, I am sure that someone gave her meat or fish laced with poison. It would have been easy to do. I never locked my door. And she died at the beginning of 1916, just as I was becoming actively involved, along with Moore and Neville, in a war with the Trinity council.

  This is what happened. As I mentioned, I was secretary of the Cambridge branch of the Union for Democratic Control, a comparatively benign organization the official goal of which was to agitate for a just settlement once the war was over and to insist that in future the government enter into no more secret “arrangements” with allies without parliament first having a chance to vote. As a goal, of course, this was hopelessly naïve, in that it was predicated on the assumption that the war would end quickly. Once it became obvious that the war was not going to end quickly, we in the U.D.C.—privately at least— began to think in terms of a draw and a compromised peace. This was, to say the least, an unpopular line to take, and as rumor spread that our secret and real ambition was to broker a ceasefire with the Germans, so the conviction that the U.D.C. was not at all what it pretended to be, that, on the contrary, it was a radical group bent on undermining the aims of England, took hold.

  Not surprisingly, the Cambridge branch was very active. Indeed, by the end of 1915, we had already held a number of private meetings, and hosted a public one at the Guildhall. The trouble began when we put a comparatively innocuous notice in the Cambridge Magazine, announcing that we would be holding our annual general meeting in Littlewood's rooms and that Charles Buxton would speak on “Nationality and the Settlement.” Although Littlewood was in Woolwich at the time, he, too, was a member of the U.D.C. (More of our members were in uniform than you might guess.) Littlewood had agreed to let us use his empty rooms for the meeting, while Buxton was an expert on the Balkans whose wife, Dorothy, each week, culled articles from the foreign press and published them in a column in the Cambridge Magazine that offered an alternative to the relentless jingoism and Boche-bashing of the Times. All, in other words, perfectly aboveboard, if a bit anti-government. But the meeting never took place. A week after the announcement was posted, a letter appeared in the same publications. Its author was the secretary of the Trinity Council, and in it he communicated the Council's decision to prohibit the U.D.C. from holding any meetings within the precincts of Trinity. No private communication preceded the publication of this letter, from which fact we deduced that the message was meant not just for us in the U.D.C. at Trinity, but for Cambridge at large. The day we had arrived as freshmen, Butler had told us that the university would “feed men of culture as God feeds the sparrows.” Now even peaceful dissent, it seemed, was no longer to be tolerated.

  Moore had his own solution. A week later he published a sort of “modest proposal” in the Cambridge Magazine, in which he applauded the Cou
ncil's “spirited” action and suggested, along the same lines, that the Council should “suspend all services in the College Chapel until the conclusion of the war” on the grounds that “at services of the Christian churches young men are liable to have brought to their notice maxims quite as dangerous to their patriotism as any which they will hear at a meeting of the Union of Democratic Control.” It was, I thought, a brilliant move, in that it threw into relief the Council's hypocrisy: how, after all, could an institution that claimed to be built on Christian doctrine suppress an organization that was striving for peace? A contradiction! Reductio ad absurdum. What I did not understand, then, was that as part of their training, agents of authority learn to adjudge when it is advisable simply to say nothing. Nothing was said now, and in short order the reading public—those members of it, that is, perspicacious enough to have gleaned Moore's Swiftian intention—let their attention wander from this tempest in a Trinity teapot to more pressing matters of political victory and trench defeat.

  Still, we felt obliged to do something, and in January, Neville and I called a special college meeting to protest the Council's ejection of the U.D.C. In retrospect, the proceedings are comical to relate, as may be typical of such gatherings. First we put forward a resolution “that in the opinion of this meeting a Fellow of the College should be entitled to receive in his rooms as guests members of a society invited to promote its objects, these being neither illegal nor immoral.” Before this resolution could be voted upon, however, an amendment was proposed “that the word ‘privately’ be inserted between the words ‘society’ and ‘invited.’” This was carried by a vote of 41 to 2. (I was one of the dissenters.) Then a second amendment was proposed “to add at the end of the resolution the words ‘provided the interests of the College are not prejudiced thereby.’” This amendment was carried by a vote of 28 to 14. So now the resolution read “that in the opinion of this meeting a Fellow of the College should be entitled to receive in his rooms as guests members of a society privately invited to promote its objects, these being neither illegal nor immoral provided the interests of the College are not prejudiced thereby.”

  All this Neville and I observed, as it were, open-mouthed. It was astonishing: with a kind of bureaucratic judiciousness, and by means of a discussion as rancorless as the letter that the Council had sent to the magazine, the fellows at the meeting had managed to transform the original resolution into a statement noteworthy only for its absolute impotence. And all this through the addition of eleven words. Democracy, though it may be the only choice we have, can by its very patience sometimes make one long for benevolent dictatorship.

  I remember that at this meeting, I was sitting between Butler and Jackson, the classicist, who must have been in his late seventies by then, and was both shortsighted and rather deaf. As I recall, I was in the midst of making a statement—a response to the addition of the final clause to the proposal, the clause that was its undoing—when Jackson interrupted me, perhaps because he could neither see nor hear me speaking. “I am an old man,” he said, “and I hope that the war may continue many years after my death.” This is—I swear it—what he said.

  The next afternoon I found Hermione dead. Whether she suffered agonies to equal those of the soldiers who died alone, abandoned in No Man's Land, I shall never know, for I was away in London most of the day in question, and only returned late, to find her lying quite still before a pool of vomit. She looked peaceful, and had stretched out her body in much the same way that she did in sleep. And while she was not atop her favorite ottoman, she was near it. There was vomit on the ottoman too, a tidy pile. Hermione always was a very tidy cat.

  I carried her corpse to the Backs, and buried her near where Gaye and I had buried Euclid. And then I decided that, as soon as I could find a means to, I would leave Trinity.

  Euclid's death had been less sudden. He suffered from worms. We had taken him to the veterinarian, who explained that whenever he tried to eat, the worms would come up from his stomach into his esophagus and nearly choke him. The veterinarian gave us a powder, which we mixed with milk. Unfortunately, whenever we tried to get the milk and powder mixture down his throat, he would be sick.

  My recollection of the afternoon before he died is far more vivid than most of my memories of the war. Leonard Woolf had come to see us, along with a chap called Fletcher who now told the most disgusting story. At a circus in France he had seen a woman, bare-breasted and immense, crawl around a pit in a pair of bright red drawers, catching rats with her teeth and killing them. I can't recall exactly what led Fletcher to tell this story, only that the telling was vivid, and that he punctuated it with the same repetitive expressions—“It was really too repulsive”; “It really was too filthy”—to which he customarily took recourse in conversation. When he was done, Euclid, much to our amazement, got up and started walking backward, which led Gaye to inquire whether walking backward was a bad symptom in a cat. No one seemed to know. And then Woolf and Fletcher left, and Gaye and I were alone with Euclid, who continued to walk backward about the room, hitting walls and knocking over furniture. We dared not stop him, as one dares not wake a sleepwalker, and when, once or twice, Gaye made an effort to turn him aright, he would resume walking backward within seconds.

  Finally he hit the door to my room and collapsed. We carried him to his basket and tried, once again, to give him some of his medicine. Again he vomited it up.

  Shortly thereafter Gaye and I bade each other goodnight. Although we had been sharing the suite for a year, we had not yet spent a night in the same bed. But that night he came into my room, woke me, and said, “Harold, may I get in with you?” And I said that, of course, he could. And then he embraced me from behind—we were both wearing our pyjamas but even so, as he embraced me, I could feel that he had an erection and was pressing it into my backside. And I pressed back.

  We lay there like that for an hour or so, alternately pressing and sleeping, until Gaye complained that his left arm was falling asleep, at which point we switched positions, and I did the pressing, and he the pressing back. Then my right arm fell asleep. All night we kept shifting position as our respective arms feel asleep.

  Sometime during that night, Euclid died. We buried him the next morning near the river. But the next night, and for many nights thereafter, Gaye slept in my bed. And though, when we were with others, we continued to call each other “Gaye” and “Hardy,” in private we started to call each other “Russell” and “Harold.”

  Soon enough the pyjamas came off.

  PART SIX

  Partition

  1

  ONCE AGAIN, Ramanujan is making rasam in his gyp room. It's the middle of January, 1916. He's wearing two jumpers and a woolen muffler made especially for him, Hardy told him, by a writer who, having developed acute insomnia as a result of war worries, has taken up knitting as a means of passing the long nights. Now the writer generates upwards of twenty mufflers a week, most of which he sends to the troops in France. This one, however, he made specially for Ramanujan when he learned of his difficulties coping with the English winter. The muffler is green and orange—“no, not green and orange,” Hardy corrected himself, when he presented it to Ramanujan, “mint and saffron. Strachey insisted that I say mint and saffron.” In fact, the green is more the shade of banana leaves than mint leaves, while the orange lacks saffron's hint of gold. It brings to mind ripe mangoes or turmeric. As it happens, Ramanujan is just now spooning some turmeric into a bowl. The lentils for the rasam sit in a second bowl. Picking through them for bits of grit, as his mother taught him to do, he spills a few on the table top. As he sweeps them together, he counts them. Seven lentils. How many ways can you divide up seven lentils? Well—he tests it out—you could divide them into 7 groups of 1 each, or one of 6 and one of 1, or one of 5 and two of 1 each, or one of 5 and one of 2, or one of 4 and one of 3, or one of 4 and one of 2 and one of 1, or three of 2 each and one of 1, or …

  15 in all. Yes, you can divide 7 lentils
up 15 ways.

  So how many ways can you divide up 8 lentils?

  Carefully he takes a single lentil from the bowl and puts it on the table with the others.

  Eight groups of 1 each, one group of 7 and one of 1, one group of 6 and one of 2, one group of 6 and two of 1 each …

  22 ways.

  And 9?

  30 ways.

  He keeps going. He does not eat. It is well past midnight by the time he has worked out the number of ways you can divide up 20 lentils, and by then lentils are everywhere: spread out over the table in neat configurations, on the floor, under the hob. Some, he will soon discover, have migrated into his bed. They stick to the fibers of the muffler made by the famous writer. For the next year his bedmaker, when she does the sweeping, will find them in her dustpan. In 1994 an engineering student from Jakarta, while trying to retrieve a lost contact lens, will excavate one from the gap between two floorboards.

  The rasam remains uncooked.

  627 ways.

  2

  IN THE MORNING, he goes to Hardy's rooms. When he takes his coat off, lentils fall from the lining. “What's wrong?” Hardy says. “You look exhausted.”