The Indian Clerk

by David Leavitt

  “What kind of debts?” Hardy asks.

  “Most are of the ordinary variety, monies are owed to shopkeepers, for coke and for the delivery of milk. And of course the doctor's bills. But there are other debts—older debts—these she seems to have inherited from your father. He had borrowed some money, many years ago, and with interest the amount owed is now … considerable.”

  “She never mentioned any of this.”

  “I rather suspect that she hoped that if she simply stuffed the notices in a drawer, they would, as it were, disappear. Such is often the case with elderly persons.”

  “How much is owed?” Gertrude asks.

  “Not so much that the estate cannot pay it. But there will be very little left over.”

  “Does that include the house?”

  “No, the house is safe.”

  “Thank heavens for that,” says Gertrude. “Thank heavens, at least, for that.”

  Afterward, at home, they are not, for once, laughing. “I wonder why Father was borrowing money,” Hardy says. “Do you suppose he had a mistress? Or gambled?”

  “Father? Don't be ridiculous.”

  “You never know. Down, please.” It's the terrier again, pawing at Hardy's knees as he takes off his hat. “Well, at least when we sell the house we'll get something.”

  “Sell the house? What are you talking about?” Gertrude grabs the dog to her breast.

  “But I thought you wanted to move to London.”

  “Perhaps, yes. But even if I did… I won't have this house sold. This is where we grew up, Harold. We must keep it in the family.”

  “I don't think it likely that either of us is going to have children.”

  “You can't be sure of that.”

  “What, are you suggesting I might marry?”

  “Are you suggesting I never will?”

  Suddenly she starts to weep. He is bewildered. “Gertrude,” he says, but she won't meet his eye. She's buried her face in the fur of the dog's back, the poor dog, now absolutely still in her arms, as unequal to her mawkishness as he.

  “Gertrude, why are you crying?”

  “Isn't that obvious? Our mother has just died.”

  “But yesterday you were glad.”

  “Not that she was dead. That it was over. It's not the same thing. Are you honestly saying you don't see the difference?”

  He says nothing. She puts the dog down. “You must feel it too,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Grief.”

  But the fact is, he doesn't. Nor can he make sense of the change that has come over his sister. After all, wasn't she insisting, just a few days back, that it was only the burden of having to care for their mother that kept her in Cranleigh? And now the burden has been lifted, and she won't lift a finger to escape. Instead she goes to bed. She takes out her glass eye and settles, as she has all her life, into the narrow bed of her childhood.

  Now her attitude toward him changes—subtly but distinctly. For the first time in their lives she appears to regard him as an adversary. Though they never speak of it, the house, and their very different ideas as to what they should do with it, becomes a barrier. The flat in Pimlico is empty; Alice Neville has moved, with her husband, to Bayswater. Yet Gertrude, despite the removal of this last obstacle, won't go into London even for a weekend. “I'm frightened by the air raids,” she says; whereas Hardy himself isn't the least frightened by the air raids. On the contrary, he relishes the possibility of being caught in one, seeing the zeppelins passing overhead like great airborne whales. And why? He knows that, were he ever actually to have to endure an air raid, he wouldn't be so flippant. Norton got caught in an air raid, and afterward, for two days, he could not stop shaking. And yet … how to explain this secret longing he nurtures for apocalypse? Others share it, he suspects. Catastrophe might shake them all from their anomie. Sometimes late at night, from the window of the flat in Pimlico, he gazes out at the black sky, hoping to witness brilliant illuminations, hear distant roaring. But he never does. It seems that the sky glows orange, that sirens wail, only when he is in Cambridge or Cranleigh. Every day the papers publish lists of the dead, every day he scans them, looking for familiar names. If there are fewer and fewer, it is only because so many of the men he knows have died already. There is not an infinite supply of youth. And though he never sees Thayer's name, this doesn't mean Thayer isn't dead. Meanwhile he waits for a note, and none comes.

  For reasons he cannot quite deduce, he starts to spend more time at Cranleigh than he did before his mother died. Gertrude affects indifference not just to his presence but to his efforts to win back her sympathy. One afternoon when they're having lunch outdoors, on the back lawn, he even tries to make friends with her dog. Gertrude seems hardly to notice. “Here Daisy,” he calls, and throws an old tennis ball across the lawn. But even though Daisy chases after it and picks it up, she won't bring the ball back to him; instead she runs up to him and, when he tries to take it from her mouth, darts away; runs up to him again and darts away again, over and over.

  “This is ridiculous,” he says, after a few minutes. “You're supposed to want to chase the ball.”

  “She's a terrier, not a retriever,” Gertrude says. “Probably in a minute she'll be trying to bury it.”

  “Then why am I bothering?”

  “No one asked you to.” His sister smiles over her knitting, some strange fragment of a sweater that hangs from her needles, its ragged edges dragging the remnants of the lunch on her plate. “You should really get yourself another cat.”

  “I suppose I will someday. Here, Daisy!” And he gets up and runs after Daisy, which delights her to no end. She drops the ball; nudges it with her nose; waits until he's reaching to pick it up and then grabs it away again. “Damn you!” he cries in exasperation, for he's learned that what she really wants is to torment him. And wouldn't you know? She keeps leading him back to the spot where, thirty-five years ago, he swung a cricket bat, heard a cracking noise, reeled back, and saw his sister splayed out, her skirt blown up over her drawers. Always that spot. The grass stayed red for weeks, until the spring came, and the gardener cut it, and it was green again.

  Here's the irony. Gertrude doesn't remember any of it. But he does.

  Suddenly a butterfly distracts Daisy's attention. It's his moment. “Got you!” he cries, tackling the dog, who wriggles in his grasp, escapes, and leaps away, bringing him crashing down onto the lawn. Gertrude laughs.

  He stands up; brushes himself off. “Ridiculous animal,” he says to Daisy, who sits before him, tail wagging, the ball held firmly between her teeth.

  4

  AMONTH AFTER his admission, Ramanujan is still in the nursing hostel on Thompson's Lane. Hardy goes to visit him as often as he can. He brings work with him when he goes: scribbling paper, pens, notes on what they've already done. Unfortunately Ramanujan is listless and contributes virtually nothing. No one seems to know exactly what is wrong with him, only that the pain in his stomach has persisted. He describes it now as a dull pain—and for Hardy, dull is exactly the right word for it, especially after so many weeks of listening to Dr. Wingate speculate as to its cause. Gastric ulcer was blamed only until “intermittent pyrexia” set in. “Pyrexia,” Hardy soon learned, simply meant “fever.” How unbearable doctors are, with their private language, their pomposity! Nonetheless, and much to his own annoyance, he soon finds himself employing the same language. When he arrives in the afternoons to visit, he asks the matron for a report on Ramanujan's pyrexia. “Down a point,” she says. Or: “Up half a point at three o'clock.” The fever, in other words, is capricious, coming and going at its whim, until in July—for reasons no one seems to be able to determine—it settles down into a routine. Now there is no pyrexia during the day. Instead, every night at ten, his temperature spikes. He shivers and sweats so much the sheets have to be changed, and while they are being changed, the matron tells Hardy, he mutters mysteriously, frightening the nurses. “He's probably just speaking Ta
mil,” Hardy says. “His native language.”

  “It doesn't sound like any language to me,” the matron says. “It sounds like the devil.”

  No wonder Ramanujan is tired during the day! The nights are an ordeal for him. Examining him one afternoon, Dr. Wingate says, “Tuberculosis seems likely.” It sounds like a weather prediction.

  “But doesn't tuberculosis affect the lungs?”

  “Usually, yes.”

  “Has he had any lung trouble?”

  “His lungs are clear—for now. Even so, Indians in England are always contracting tuberculosis. The change in diet,” he adds, waving his fingers about. “Not to mention the cold weather. We need to watch him carefully. The other symptoms should start manifesting themselves soon.”

  After Dr. Wingate leaves, Hardy returns to Ramanujan's bedside. He hopes that he'll be able to read in his face how his friend has reacted to the news. Will he be relieved, at least, that a diagnosis seems to have been hit upon? At least tuberculosis can be treated, even, on occasion, cured. There are sanatoriums for that. And yet, whether Ramanujan is relieved, or terrified, or grievous, Hardy cannot guess, for his face remains impassive. Tuberculosis! In One Tuscan Summer (Hardy has now read it, furtively) another young genius, a pianist, contracts tuberculosis. Shreds of romance cling to the disease. Perhaps Ramanujan is reflecting on the utter idiocy of the doctor's backward reasoning: because many Indians get tuberculosis, it must be tuberculosis. The fact that he shows no symptoms of the illness does not matter. Now they must all just sit back and wait for the coughing and spitting to begin.

  But here's the thing: they don't begin. The summer draws to a close, and Ramanujan's lungs remain clear. And this failure of his lungs to do what they're supposed to do appears to puzzle Dr. Wingate as much as it does Hardy. Whether it puzzles Ramanujan himself is uncertain. Most of the times Hardy visits, he lies feebly in his bed, gazing at the river. He continues to show scant interest in mathematics, and consequently work on the partitions and compositeness papers grinds to a halt. Even when Hardy tells him that he's read Raymond, and asks his views on the séance, he mumbles only the vaguest reply.

  It reaches the point where Hardy wonders whether he should bother continuing to visit. “What good does it do?” he asks Mahalanobis, who looks at him with a pained expression.

  “But Mr. Hardy,” Mahalanobis says, “every day before you come, he asks if you are coming. He looks forward to your visits more than anything else.”

  Is this possible? It hardly seems likely. Still, Hardy takes Mahalanobis at his word, and keeps visiting. Sometimes, when he arrives, another patient is lying in the bed next to Ramanujan's, usually an old don with lung trouble or an undergraduate sent back from the front with an infection. Invariably these companions are gone within a matter of days. Ramanujan, from what he can tell, never exchanges so much as a word with any of them. Nor, apparently, do they introduce themselves to him. The situation puts Hardy in mind of a joke he once heard, about two Englishmen stranded on a desert island for thirty years. A ship finally rescues them, and the captain is amazed to learn that they have never spoken to each other. He asks why, and one of the men says, “We haven't been introduced.”

  And yet, if the man in the next bed knows Hardy, then he'll talk to him. Usually they talk about the war. By now, news has reached England of the explosions under the Messines Ridge. For more than a year British miners have been tunneling under the German lines, planting stacks of dynamite all of which were detonated at once, on the same day. The mines blew the top off the ridge. You could hear the explosion in Dublin. Lloyd George claimed he could hear it on Downing Street.

  It is a turning point: Hardy is sure of that. At last, after months of leading its men to slaughter, England has done something intelligent. Plumer has taken the Germans by surprise; he has undermined, literally, their complacency, the trenches in which, if rumors are to be believed, their officers slept in comfortable beds, and ate their meat off china, and drank their schnapps from crystal glasses at tables laid with cloths, in bunkers illuminated by electric light. No more of that. A rude awakening: the phrase echoes in Hardy, because the battle of Messines has been an awakening for him, too. Suddenly it is clear to him how inured he has become to living in a state of chronic war. Out in the world, Russell is agitating; miners are tunneling; and in Cambridge, too, they are tunneling, with a mind toward exploding certain foundations, the ones on which the members of the Trinity council rest their large bottoms. Yet how modest is their ambition! It is merely to reinstate a philosopher who is decidedly ambivalent about being reinstated, and even then only once the war is over. But when will that be? And what is Hardy doing to bring the day about? Nothing.

  One afternoon he goes to see Ramanujan and finds Henry Jackson lying in the second bed. He has not spoken to Jackson since the meeting in which Jackson said that he hoped the war would continue after his death. Now he lies in the bed next to Ramanujan's with his bandaged left foot outside the covers, the heavy wrinkled lids of his eyes lowered, and Hardy thinks: your wish will come true. Judging from the look of you, the war will outlast you.

  Hoping not to wake Jackson, he sits, as is his habit, at Ramanujan's bedside. He asks Ramanujan how he is feeling, and his voice is enough to rouse the somnolent old man; the heavy lids flutter and open, revealing reddened slits of eyes. “Hardy,” he says. “And what brings you here?”

  “I am visiting Mr. Ramanujan,” Hardy says.

  “Ah, the Hindu calculator,” Jackson says, as if Ramanujan isn't even there. Then he says, “I'm here for my gout. My gout is bad. I'm old, Hardy. Seventy-eight years old. I am nearly deaf, I suffer from rheumatism as well as gout. My life is nothing but pain.” Without a hint of embarrassment, he passes wind. “And there is the war. There is always the war.”

  “I'm sorry you're not feeling well.”

  “What?” He cups a hand round his ear. “Well, it cheers me no end to see the troops drilling in Nevile's Court.”

  “You know my views on that, Jackson.”

  “What?”

  “You know my position.”

  “So many have died. Friends, students. Hardly anyone left here in Cambridge. We are all just spinning in place.”

  Jackson is right. Stasis—unhappy stasis—is the condition of their lives. The explosions under the Messines Ridge shook things up for a time; but only for a time. “I fear you are right,” Hardy says. But Jackson has fallen asleep.

  After that the war resumes its halting, grinding immobility. Once again, the badly planned offensives fail, the names of the dead are published in newspapers, the shell-shocked are brought home stuttering, “treated,” then sent back to the front. Intermittently there is talk of an armistice; hope shimmers in the distance, then recedes. Soon Hardy learns that he must greet any mention of an armistice with the same skepticism with which he and Gertrude greeted their mother's doctor's assurances that her death was imminent. Take nothing for granted. Assume the worst.

  And Ramanujan? He lives in a stasis of his own, his condition neither worsening nor improving. Experts are called in. A host of doctors poke and palpate him. The dull pain, they note, is now constant. Eating and drinking make it neither better nor worse. Not typical of tuberculosis. So what is he suffering from? Some mysterious Oriental germ, one doctor suggests, but can go no further. Specialists visit Ramanujan, throw up their hands, and recommend other specialists, who in turn throw up their hands and recommend yet more specialists, until it is agreed that Ramanujan must go into London and see Batty Shaw. Yes, Batty Shaw is the man. A lung man. Batty Shaw will be sure to know what to do next.

  5

  THEY GET HIM DRESSED, Hardy and Chatterjee. After so many weeks in bed he is shaky on his legs. His trousers hang loose on him, even with the belt buckled its tightest—evidence of how much weight he has lost. “You must eat more,” Hardy says every time he visits. But Ramanujan will not eat. Even when Maha-lanobis provides the cook with recipes for dishes to his liking, she prepares th
em incorrectly, Ramanujan says. Nor does he trust her not to fry the potatoes in lard.

  They take a taxi to the station, the train to Liverpool Street, another taxi to Batty Shaw's surgery, which is in Kensington. During the examination Hardy and Chatterjee sit in the waiting room. Chatterjee is reading the Indian Magazine, his hard cricketer's legs twitching and agitated within their folds of loose flannel. As for Hardy, he has brought no book. He feels too tired to read. These last weeks he hasn't been sleeping well. As soon as he gets into bed, images start flashing before him: Jackson cupping his hand round his ear, the vicar eating a sandwich, a postbox on the dock in Esbjerg. Only during the day does he find himself able to sleep peacefully, and then only at moments like this one, when prolonged sleep is impossible. Indeed, no sooner has he felt his eyes starting to close than Batty Shaw's nurse is summoning them. Chatterjee puts down his magazine; she leads them down a long corridor into a study full of books, diagrams, maps, dark old paintings. On one shelf, Hardy notices a scale model of a lung. Not far from it something murky seethes in formaldehyde. Three chairs face a huge oak desk behind which a man in his sixties with a flat-topped head and a high, shiny, furrowed brow reads a medical textbook. Ramanujan sits in one of the chairs, staring into his hands, which are folded in his lap.

  They sit, and Batty Shaw looks up. On his nose hangs the tiniest pair of spectacles Hardy has ever seen. He stands, offers them his immense, dry hand to shake, then sits down again. “I have made a thorough examination of Mr. Ramanujan,” he says. “Dr. Wingate—and you may correct me if I'm wrong—reports nightly pyrexia, a steady abdominal pain with no apparent link to digestion, weight loss, and a white blood count that is lower than usual, if not strikingly so.”

  “I didn't know his blood count was taken,” Hardy says.

  “Standard procedure,” Batty Shaw says. “Further examination on my part has revealed an enlargement of the liver, which is tender to the touch. I also observed a jagged scar of about one-and-one-half inches in length running the length of Mr. Ramanujan's scrotum.”