I studied Jerzy’s face. He looked different – leaner, older, but more than that. His eyes could not settle on anything. When he walked he kept looking up or at what was behind him. He seemed to be trying to reach for something with the words he spoke, but he couldn’t seem to get there.
‘We need something new,’ he said then. ‘Something cold and undeniable.’
PART TWO
6
All Is Number
I LIKE TO find a seat at the long wooden table near the window on the upper floor of the library and let the light fall through the stained glass on to my back and hands. The room fills slowly, like a church during an afternoon in Lent. Here there are the old men who will read the newspapers before passing on to the square at the end of the street for the last games of chess under the elms before winter. There are students with their textbooks and religious zealots with pamphlets and citizens consulting manuals in the hope of repairing faults in their cars or the electrical systems in their homes. Each day I see an African reading books about radiography and a man with a pinched face who long ago ceded control over his hair and garments to the elements and who for twelve years has been studying the habits of eels. At eleven o’clock the African pauses in his work, polishes his glasses and eats an apple. These are my companions in the library in Mickiewicza Street in the hours between breakfast and lunch. Here is the place where in recent years I have read in the way one does when waiting to have a tooth repaired. Now each day there is a ration of knowledge which I must take. From the shelves I take two encyclopaedias, general and scientific, a biography of Pythagoras and a history of Western thought. I write my observations in the kind of blue notebook used by schoolchildren. Sometimes the whole morning will pass before I realise that I have not raised my eyes from these books. Has anyone ever before attempted to cure a broken heart with physics?
The man who began that part of philosophy which is physics was said to have been born of a virgin, gone to the desert for holy contemplation, never cut his hair or beard, performed miracles, spoken in parables and when he died ascended bodily into heaven. He had a group of disciples of whom he demanded that they forswear their previous lives and possessions and embark with him on a search for mergence with God. They were not to eat beans nor sit on a quart measure. He was the only man in Greece to wear trousers instead of robes. Schoolchildren know of him as the man who discovered that in a right-angled triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. This is one of the things said of him which is unlikely to be true.
Pythagoras of Samos studied the relations between numbers and the world. Because six, ten and fifteen dots could be arranged into equilateral triangles he called these numbers triangular. Four, nine and sixteen were for the same reason called square numbers. The idea that numbers are units of a language that can express form is the basis for all the equations of physics that have been developed since.
He applied numbers to time and to sound. Time he represented as a vast and complex system of cycles – minutes, years, the cycles of reincarnation lasting 216 or six cubed years – which could all be represented by a number. When he and his disciples experimented with the strings of a lyre they discovered that doubling a string’s length produced the identical note one octave lower. Putting two strings into the length ratio three to four made the musical fifth, and four to three made the fourth. These discoveries made the world seem more sublime, more miraculous. Through them the hand of God in creation was made more visible. He stated that harmony is the simple and beautiful expression of the relations between whole numbers. He did not think as did others of his time that the world was made up of four elements, or atoms, or some ectoplasmic substance secreted by a deity. He said, ‘All is number.’ That was his first principle. When souls were poised between lives awaiting reincarnation, said Pythagoras, they spent their time among the number gods listening to the music of the spheres.
Suddenly I hear the echo of my own laughter around the vaulted ceiling of the library. It shocks me, for I don’t remember laughing. I look up. There are faces turned my way. The librarian looks like a nurse disappointed by a patient. I feel my own face reddening.
Then I turn to the African and see that he’s laughing with me. Such a fine laugh he has – slow and deep in the chest and with rolling shoulders. Compared to him, I in my laughter sound like a nervous hen. He is called Jacob. Now when he shuts his radiography books and puts away his spectacles at one o’clock I go out with him and we walk around the plac Pilsudskiego together. Sometimes we take a sandwich in the Café Lara and once he came to my home where we watched football on the television and drank beer until the eyes rolled in our heads. He is a bus driver who has decided to come to Poland to learn how to make photographs of bones.
During one of our turns I ask him the reason for his studies.
‘It was my father’s tooth,’ he says. ‘He brought me an X-ray picture of it home from the dentist.’ He turns his full round smiling face to me. ‘I had never seen anything so beautiful!’
After we walk a little further he says, ‘And you? Why are you reading about physics?’
‘It passes the time, I suppose,’ I say. ‘I come upon subjects by chance and then take them up. There’s curiosity, and then the obligation to serve what you’re curious about. In this case there was a friend. Well, not really a friend. Someone I met just once. But he impressed me. He was suffering and he seemed to think he might find salvation in the study of physics. Something about the clarity and completeness of it. That’s odd, I know, but it made me curious. And since then I’ve felt obliged to continue.’
But about what was I laughing when all the faces in the room turned to me?
I think for a time, then I have it.
It was about a mathematician named Agesilao from the island of Crete. He had been labouring over an algebraic proof through the whole of one winter and into the spring. Each day he would sit at a table thinking about it until his head ached and then lie down on his bed in a torment about his own worthlessness. One morning while eating an orange under a tree and thinking about the number of goats belonging to his cousin and how he had none because of his idiotic devotion to this infernal algebraic problem the solution came to him as though delivered by messenger from the heavens. He ran into his house and then through all of its corridors banging the doors and shouting out his own name until he collapsed on his bed laughing for a full hour as though being tickled by invisible hands. I couldn’t help it when I read that.
Agatharcos developed the laws of perspective so that he could help paint the scenery for the plays of Aeschylus. When a god demanded through an oracle that the size of his statue be doubled the geometers at Plato’s Academy began to work at finding the cube root of two. That is how I always supposed science moved. There was a need followed by an ingenious solution.
But that was only rarely the case with the Greeks. Above all else they loved theory, and because they hadn’t instruments they based their theories on what they could imagine, rather than on what they could measure. They thought beauty equal to harmony, and asked questions of the world designed to give them answers they thought would be beautiful. They imagined that the world was composed of minute particles which they called atoms. When Aristarchus of Samos looked to the sky he could not have known the shape or patterns of movement of the heavenly bodies or have any idea how many of them there were. He would have seen flashes and trails of light, a glittering chaotic assembly, motion which he could not possibly decipher. But he was a follower of Pythagoras, and Pythagoras believed that the world was created according to principles of simplicity, harmony and beauty. To him the most beautiful shapes and movements were spherical and circular, and he based his thesis not on what he could observe, but rather on what appealed to him as an expression of mathematical beauty – that the planets, including the earth, were perfect spheres moving around the sun in circles. What happened to this idea? No one believed him, not Aristotle, cer
tainly not the churchmen and scientists of the centuries that followed, until Nicolaus Copernicus, the world’s most famous Pole, the wavy-haired astronomer-canon from Torun, vindicated him in 1543 with the publication of On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres.
A cold wind from the east has arrived loaded with snow. There are streaks of frost up the window pane, and outside people bent low into the wind. The dark sky seems lower each day. We pass from darkness to a half-light and then to darkness again. I want to get out of bed but I put it off. I think, That would be like falling through a hole in the ice over a pond. I lie under the covers in a tube of warm air with the scientists of ages past and Pan Kazimierz and Jerzy and M. and Hanna and Angelina and people I’ve never even met in here with me. They flit about. I can’t get hold of the idea of where they are going. They are like birds trapped in a room. It’s difficult to see them distinctly. I must put some order there.
The telephone rings. I run into the living room on my toes. It’s my sister Renata. She says that the doctors have told her that they are not going to try to burn the cancer out of her with radiation because there is too much of it. She is just waiting, she says. What matter to anyone when it comes, least of all her. I think of her in her white gown in that white room in Krakow, her long white hair untied and flowing over her pillows. I think of the lines running over her brow, the little twitches at the corners of her mouth, her hands moving on the bedclothes as though trying to find the rhythm of a tune she has lost. That demon of hunger she had when she was young has turned to something else. Her eyes move from side to side. She looks like she’s reading a letter that is making her angry. Really she is counting all the times she took a step one way when she should have gone the other. For each of these wrong turns she tries to find someone to blame, and when she fails and can see only herself her bitterness deepens. Can her son the manufacturer of paper clips see this when he looks into her face? If so, does it shock him?
I feel well, most of the time. I laugh at the jokes we tell during our games of cards on Tuesday evenings. I think of taking up ice-skating again, and I call Jerzy to propose it to him. I can get a good sleep, eat heartily. But then there are times when something breaks through. Something heavy, damp and all around me, something that makes me inconsolable. Am I alone in this?
* * *
As I cross the tramline to the library in the morning I see Jacob moving towards me through the snow. He has his eyes on the ground and is upon me before he realises I am there. He is wearing two coats, two pairs of gloves and a scarf pulled over the top of his head, around his ears and tied under his chin. Over it is a fur-lined hat. He has difficulty moving his arms. It’s as if he’s wrapped in bandages.
He sees my shoes and he looks up. His eyes open wide. He has the kind of smile already lost to most of us by the time we are ready to grow beards.
‘It’s unbelievable!’ he says, a cloud of white steam like that from the engine of a train billowing out of his mouth. ‘I never expected this.’
We turn together towards the library. He moves through the snow as if he’s wearing buckets on his feet.
‘Couldn’t you have chosen somewhere warmer to learn about X-rays?’ I ask him.
‘It was my father,’ he says. ‘He sent me. He came here himself to study when I was a baby.’
A hard blast of wind hits us. Jacob’s face grows taut, like someone’s pulling on his ears. Finally we reach the doorway to the library and climb the stairs to the research room. At the long table where we sit he removes his scarf and gloves slowly, as if he does not trust the library’s ability to protect us. He takes his books from the shelf and then returns to his place and removes the outer coat. He tests the air. He sits down and waits. Finally the second coat hangs over the back of the chair.
He sees me watching him.
‘I can’t help it,’ he whispers across to me. ‘The day I landed I nearly took the first plane back to Africa. And I still can’t get used to it.’
‘Let me take you tonight to eat bigos,’ I say to him. ‘It will warm you, at least for some hours.’
He nods, and we set ourselves to work.
There was a time when the philosophers of Greece looked out at the world like children who open drawers, lift the edges of carpets or try to remove the backs of clocks. This was the time of their great discoveries. Then their nation grew rich and powerful, and the philosophers turned their attention to good, civic behaviour. When Greece became weak again the philosophers developed superstitions and other systems of personal salvation. Then again after Greece was destroyed there were no philosophers for hundreds of years.
7
Three Photographs
TO BEGIN I order beetroot soup with dumplings for Jacob, the cabbage and meat stew with prunes we call bigos, and then go on to pancakes with cheese, accompanied by lemon tea. When he sips the tea the steam rises up from the cup and around his ears, leaving tiny beads of water like stars across his brow. We are in a small, quiet, dark place hung with curtains made from purple velvet. There is light, faint piano music being played by a man with poor teeth who has hair hanging down the back of his formal suit, the notes spread far from each other like farmhouses on a plain. His head is bent low over his keyboard, but I can see him scowling and talking to himself as he plays. I ask for one brandy for me, and another for Jacob. Young couples hold hands over their tables. We can hear nothing of what they are saying, just a low murmur and the tinkling of porcelain and glass. I am a little embarrassed to be in my blue suit and de in this place contrived for romance, smiling at and ordering food for a man rather than a woman. But Jacob seems pleased with it all, even when the waitress looks at him as though he could take off the whole of her arm with a snap of his jaw. I envy him his ease.
He asks me how far along I am in my studies.
The sixteenth century, I tell him.
‘You have a long way to go.’
‘That’s true,’ I say. ‘But I enjoy it. I like to read about the physicists. They are good company. They want so much for the world to be perfect and beautiful. They try to show with numbers how beautiful it can be. Their numbers are like prayers. They are innocents. At least that’s how they seem to me. Maybe it’s their white coats and instruments. Or the impossibility of lying successfully with numbers. I had not expected they would be like that.’
‘They should come and drive my bus,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t stay innocent for long.’
I have found that he is never so guileless as when he is trying to be the cynic. Here we are the reverse.
‘You remember I told you I was making this study because of someone I met,’ I said. ‘He told me a painful story one night when I was in Krakow. I found I kept thinking about him afterwards. His suffering was something terrible. It seemed to be breaking him up right in front of me, though he endured it well. That’s something we put too high a value on here, I think. Anyway, he told me he had got the strange idea that physics could somehow cure him.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘What do you think? A woman.’
He raises his brow, shrugs.
‘He’ll get over it.’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘That’s possible, but so is the reverse. He says he put everything that he was before her. Nothing kept back. And it was worth it. He says he’d never in all of his life known anything like it, and maybe never would again. But then just in the middle of it all she disappeared.’
‘Where did she go?’
‘He doesn’t know.’
He considers this.
‘He should forget about her,’ he says.
‘She could be difficult to forget,’ I say. ‘She’s very beautiful.’
‘Did you see her?’
‘No. But I have photographs. You can see for yourself. I tell you, Jacob, that if she were a dentist you would want for all of your teeth to ache.’
He laughs, and heads lift from tables in a single movement, as if pulled by a string.
&nbs
p; ‘Have you ever – how shall I say? – had the misfortune …?’ I ask him.
‘We’ve all had that misfortune, haven’t we?’
‘Who was yours?’
He looks at me, then away. His smile fades the way the fog of breath disappears from glass.
‘She was a girl,’ he said. ‘I knew her when I was learning to drive buses. She worked in a banana grove outside the town.’
‘And she went away?’ I said. ‘You lost her?’
‘I went away,’ he said.
‘You went away?’
‘My father stopped it. He found out that her mother was without her husband. He thought the daughter could go the same way. He said he couldn’t extend to me the right to be with her.’
‘Extend to you the right? That’s how he put it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you accepted that?’
‘There wasn’t the possibility of not accepting it.’
‘I see. And did you tell her?’
‘I didn’t tell her anything. I didn’t go to her. I tried to think of what to say to her, but I couldn’t find a way. One day we were marking out on a map the place where we’d have our house, then I never saw her again. I didn’t know how to face her.’
He turns, and the candlelight flows over the surface of his glasses.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘It was a long time ago,’ he says.
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