The Discovery Of Slowness. Sten Nadolny
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for later. School had its disadvantages, but John was firmly convinced that one could learn something useful for life anywhere in the world, hence also at school. Even if this had not been so, escape was out of the question. One had to wait, if not out of desire, at least from prudence.
No news from Matthew. But why should there be? Two years, he had said, and they weren’t over by a long shot.
Learning in class. The room was dark, windows high up; autumnal storms outside. Dr Orme sat behind his desk as if in an altar niche, with an hourglass in front of him. The grains of sand had to get through the narrow waist to accumulate in the same pile below that they had formed above. The resulting loss of time was called Latin lesson. It was getting chilly, and the fireplace was near the teacher.
The older boys were called monitors. They sat high up against the wall and looked down on all the others. Assistant Master Stopford sat near the door and took down pupils’ names.
John was staring closely at the curved lines of Hopkinson’s ear when just at that moment a question was directed at him. Still, he got the drift. Careful now! If he answered hastily he’d stutter and choke; that would bother his listeners. On the other hand, Dr Orme had made it clear during the first week once and for all that ‘When somebody says something that’s correct, he has no need to look good.’ He could live with that.
Reciting, conjugating, declining, using the proper case. When he got that done he had time for Hopkinson’s ear curves, or for the wall beyond the window with its wet bricks and its vines tossed by the wind.
Studying during times off in the evenings. Archery allowed in the courtyard. Dice and cards forbidden. Chess permitted; backgammon prohibited. When he got permission, John went out to his climbing-tree; when he didn’t, he spent his time reading or practising. Sometimes he tried to learn speed by using his knife: one hand spread out on the table, with the other he stabbed the triangles between his fingers with his blade. The knife had been swiped from the kitchen. The table suffered noticeably. And now and then he hit one of his fingers. Well, it was only his left hand.
He also wrote letters to Mother and to Matthew. Nobody liked watching him when he wrote, and he loved writing, especially in fine script. Dipping his goose-quill into the ink, wiping it off, then inscribing his letters, folding the sheet to seal it – nobody could bear to watch all that.
Turning into somebody else at school, that was hard. Here it was just as it had been in Spilsby: they knew his weakness; nobody believed in his exercises. They were all convinced that he would always stay the same.
Learning how to get on with the other pupils. Aboard ship he’d be involved with many people, and if too many of them didn’t like him it might be troublesome.
The other boys were done quickly with everything, and they noticed at once when one of them lagged behind. Names were said only once. If he asked, they spelled them. He followed their fast spelling even less well than their slow enunciation. Put up with the others’ impatience. Charles Tennyson, Robert Cracroft, Atkinson and Hopkinson – they all sharpened their claws on John whenever possible. It seemed to him as though they always looked at him through only one eye, and with the other communicated among themselves. If he said something they tilted their heads, and that meant, ‘You’re boring; get it done quickly.’ The most difficult was Tom Barker, now as before. If John gave him what he asked for, he acted as though he had asked for something entirely different. If he spoke to him, he was interrupted at once; if he looked at him, he found a mere grimace. In the dormitory, John and Tom had to sleep next to each other because they were both from Spilsby. They shared a chest between their beds. Each of them knew what the other owned. Perhaps this was good preparation for sea voyages: space was tight there, too, and some people couldn’t abide each other.
Nothing could make John miserable; his hope was the size of a giant. Obstacles he couldn’t overcome he simply ignored. Most of the time, however, he knew how to manage. He had memorised a hundred expressions. They lay in readiness and proved most useful, for John’s fluency with them encouraged many listeners to wait a little until he got to the point of his answer. ‘If you wish.’ ‘Much obliged.’ Or ‘That stands to reason.’ ‘Many thanks for your efforts.’ One could say all that quickly. He also knew the names of admirals well. Everybody talked a lot about victories, and so he wanted to know and to be ready to supply the admirals’ names at once.
He also wanted to learn how to make conversation. He loved to listen, anyway, and was pleased when bits and pieces he caught fitted together to make sense. He was careful about tricks. Simply saying yes and acting as if he had understood didn’t work. Too often something was expected if he said yes. But if he said no, they pounced on him even more. Why no? Reasons! No without a reason was even more quickly exposed than an unfounded yes.
I don’t want to make anyone believe anything, he thought. If only others don’t try it on me. They must ask me and hold on to wait for my answer. I must get that worked out, that’s all.
The tree. The way to it led through Evangelist Alley and then through a street called Breakneck Lane. Climbing didn’t make him faster; he knew that by now. But that didn’t make the tree useless. As he moved from branch to branch he found that coherent thought was better there than on firm ground. When he had to breathe heavily he perceived the order of things.
From this lookout-point he could survey the town of Louth: red brick, white window-sills, and ten times more chimney pots than in Spilsby. All the houses looked like the school, only shrunken. They also lacked the walled-in courtyard and lawn. The school had three high, sharp-cornered chimneys, as if it contained a forge. There was a lot of hammering.
‘Correction Day’. There were two of them: rod day and cane day. Could a plant grow in freedom and become a cane? Strange, too, how many names there were when it came to punishment. The head was called a ‘turnip’ or ‘poet’s box’; the backside was called ‘register’; ears were ‘spoons’; hands ‘paws’ – those to be punished were malefactors. John had enough on his hands with current words. This additional vocabulary seemed to him a waste.
Punishment itself he ignored. Mouth closed, his eyes turned to a faraway world – that was how one got over correction days. It was humiliating that the moderators held the delinquent as if he wanted to run away. John ignored them as well. There were also punishments outside the regular order. Being late for prayers, not having signed out before going to the tree, being caught at a game of dice: then one got it ad hoc. On the school’s seal was written ‘Qui parcit virgam, odit filium’ – ‘He who spares the rod hates the child’. Dr Orme remarked that this was pig Latin: parcere takes the dative.
Dr Orme wore silk knee-breeches, lived in a house on Breakneck Lane, and, it was said, conducted experiments with clocks and plants – both of which he collected assiduously. An ancestor, they said, had been one of the ‘eight captains of Portsmouth’. Although John never found out what the captains were supposed to have done, the gentle schoolmaster assumed something navigational for him: often John even saw in him a secret ally.
Dr Orme never shouted or thrashed anyone. Perhaps he was less interested in the children than in his clocks. He left it to his assistant master to enforce the necessary discipline and came over to the school only for lessons.
John wanted to learn better how to behave with people like Stopford; they were not undangerous. On one of his first days at school he said in response to a question by Stopford: ‘Sir, I need a little time to find the answer.’ The assistant was irritated. There were crimes by pupils that didn’t give even him any satisfaction. Asking for more time, that was no discipline to speak of.
Thomas Webb and Bob Cracroft kept thick notebooks in which they entered something every day in fine script. On one of the covers was written ‘Sayings and Thoughts’ or ‘Common Latin Phrases’. That made a good impression. So John started a voluminous copybook with the heading ‘Noteworthy Phrases and Constructions to Be Remembered’, which included quotations from Virgil and Cicero. When he wasn’t writing in it, the notebook was buried in his chest under his linen.
Dinner.