Читать книгу The Genius in my Basement - Alexander Masters, Alexander Masters - Страница 14

10 Mars

People do sometimes tell me how nice I am looking (e.g. at my mother’s funeral) when I wear new clothes, but it always makes me feel very embarrassed. I say, ‘I don’t want to know that.’ I don’t want to be thought of as someone for whom personal appearance is important.

Simon

‘I’m going to see a Martian. He aaah, hnnn … it lives in Woking.’

Simon blocked my sun, his holdall swinging slowly to a stop after his unexpected rush off the pavement at my café table.

‘Hnnn, aaah, uugh. As I say, my grandmother lived where the Martian is. Hnnnh. Would you like to come too?’ Spring on earth! Simon giving me encouragement!

I jumped up, swigged back my coffee and gathered my books and notes. A ballyhoo of cherry blossom leapt about the wall of Darwin College Fellows’ Garden. Dead-looking trees creaked out of the sodden grass, sprouted buds and crackled quickly into the sky.

I’d been working on a cartoon about the origin of numbers.

In the late 1970s a young French woman called Denise Schmandt-Berserat made an astonishing discovery. Forgotten in the storeroom of the Fogg Museum of Art in Harvard

was a prehistoric clay purse

from the ancient city of Nuzi,

in the country now called

Iraq.

‘Uuuugh, aah, errr … oh dear!’ Simon blustered. ‘What is the point of this? I don’t understand pictures.’

‘It’s the origin of your subject. The purse had an inscription on it that said it was the property of Ziqarru, a shepherd, and contained forty-nine “counters representing small cattle”. Not that that impressed the Harvard excavators any more than it does you. They broke the seal, found the forty-nine clay pebbles inside, as promised – and lost them.’

‘Oh, dear.’

‘Exactly. But this French scholar realised that Ziqarru’s egg-shaped purse was a simple accounting device, from the dawn of writing. People had discovered other egg-shaped purses containing counters before, but none with symbols on the outside like this. It was the earliest known attempt to symbolise the contents of the purse with abstract marks. According to her, it was the need, by palace accountants, to keep track of animal numbers that led to the invention of writing and mathematics. If someone who understood the new marks thought Ziqarru had been stealing animals, all they had to do was check the writing on the outside. And if Ziqarru suspected that person of using the newfangled cuneiform to cheat him, he could break open the purse and prove he was innocent by counting the flock off against the pebbles inside. Lo! Symbolic writing had begun. Next thing you know, it’s algebra, calculus and Shakespeare. Writing comes from mathematics, in short, and it all comes from accountancy.’

‘Oh, DEAR!’

‘Why “Oh dear!” this time?’

‘No reason,’ sighed Simon morosely, and unbent his elbow.

The handles of his holdall rippled down the forearm of his puffa jacket and the bag dropped to the pavement.

‘Excuse me!’ he gnashed. ‘I’d like to sit down. Can you remove all this paper?’ As he hit the seat he jolted into a better temper.

Simon’s most famous ancestor was the Prophet Abraham, of Ur of the Chaldees. Then came Joseph, of the Coat of Many Colours. His son was Manasseh, first mentioned in Genesis, who led one of the twelve tribes of Israel. Next follows 3,000 years of forgetfulness before the family pops back into life on a rolled-up poster in the back room of Simon’s Excavation – two shelves along and one up from the television-that-might-have-broken-twenty-years-ago-but-possibly-it’s-only-a-fuse:

ASLAN MANASSEH

b. Bombay 1884

m

KITTY MEYER

b. Calcutta 1891

The Manassehs are the leading family of the oldest settled community of people in recorded history: the Iraqi Jews of Babylon, 150 miles from Nuzi and Ziqarru’s purse.

Congratulating myself on my willingness to be at the coalface of biographical reportage and, at a moment’s notice, drop everything and go to Woking, I walked with Simon from the café, across the park . ‘The Martian’ turned out to be a statue in honour of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. According to a tourist leaflet Simon eventually discovered in his coat pocket, it’s seven metres high. It looks like a beetle trying to curtsey with its legs stuck in vacuum tubes. There’s also a Woking Spaceship embedded in the pavement nearby, and Woking Bacteria, made out of splodges of coloured concrete brick.

Battling a wallet from his trousers pocket, in the centre of Cambridge Simon boarded a bus to the railway station. He muttered out coins into the driver’s cash tray, seized the ticket, held it to the light to investigate it with narrowed eyes, then made for a free space at the back of the bus, bouncing his holdall from ear to ear of the seated passengers.

The woman in front’s face was soured by watchfulness. Simon, though sexless as a nematode, is the fantasy image of a kiddy-fiddler, and this Bruiser Mum had spent her morning proudly dressing up her six-year-old daughter in lash-thickening mascara, gloss lipstick, Primark miniskirt and pink heels.

Simon, blank-eyed, belly exposed, his ski jacket rucked halfway up to his chest, threw himself at the seat with a self-congratulatory sigh and let his face settle around his grin.

I stood beside him, took out a notebook, and consulted a list of urgent biographical questions. It is important, with Simon, to select not just the correct wording for a query – one that doesn’t contain any banned nouns or adjectives, or lead to outbursts of correction because of a tiny factual error – but also the right context. PHILOSOPHICAL questions are best on a Tuesday night. This is because he has returned from his weekend jaunt to Scarborough, via Glasgow, the Isle of Man and Pratt’s Bottom, finished his week’s backlog of 347 emails: he is feeling expansive and post-prandial. Questions requiring REMINISCENCE can be extended as far as Thursday, or broached on country walks through Iron Age hill forts – there is nothing quite like 2000-year-old battlements, where the clash of Roman legion against shrieking Celt still trembles in the air, to get Simon going on the subject of Ashdown, his junior school.

Bus trips to the train station are strictly for the exchange of FACTS.

The scholar of Simon Norton Studies must proceed with delicacy.

‘I wanted to ask about your grandfather, Aslan,’ I began. ‘He was a businessman, wasn’t he?’

‘If you say so.’

‘What did he sell?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘According to your brothers it was textiles, but what …’

‘Yesterday I was in Blickling.’ Simon pinched his fingers into his wallet and extracted a worm of paper. ‘Here’s the ticket.’

‘Simon, your grandfather. Was it jute?’

He waggled the ticket higher in the air, closer to my face. Four inches long, it had arrowhead shapes cut out at either end, and purple 1970s techno-writing along the length repeating with great mechanical urgency, top and bottom, that it was 1.23 p.m. in King’s Lynn, and that Sheldrake Travel was ‘very happy to have you aboard’.

(‘I do not think that could have been the ticket I showed you. There is no direct bus from King’s Lynn to Blickling. But if you prefer to get things wrong deliberately, you belong on the team of a trash publication like the National Enquirer.’)

‘Is there anything special about it?’ I asked, too self-conscious to hold the snippet of paper up to the light and try out his squinting trick, without at least some guarantee of reward.

Simon considered for a moment, then shook his head contentedly. ‘No.’

‘I was in Blickling last week, too,’ said a fellow sitting beside Simon. The man was resting his chin on his hands, which were in turn piled on the handle of his walking cane; he bounced his head gently. ‘Lovely hall, and, aaah, the lake. I got there very early and the mist, it was …’

‘Did you go on any buses?’ Simon blurted.

‘To the hall,’ agreed the man, nodding some more, rather slowly, as if tapping the sharpness out of the interruption.

‘From?’ shot Simon.

‘Norwich, I believe it …’

‘The number X5,’ Simon declared, and directed a smile of triumph around the bus.

The elderly man was not to be put off: he was a trouper for the cause of discursive memoir. ‘I think my favourite – I mean, lakes are always lovely, but lakes are lakes, I always say – my favourite was the Chinese Room. Did you see that? That flock wallpaper, it was flock, wasn’t it, and that pagoda in the glass cage …?’

‘Any other buses?’ interjected Simon bluntly.

‘Well, after lunch, we went to Cromer, and had the most delicious brown crab …’

‘The X5 again. Unless you went on a Sunday?’

‘No, let’s see, Tuesday, that’s it, because then at Wells-Next-the-Sea, the sunlight on the water was sparkling in just …’

‘Uggh, ah …’ Simon pulled out a dog-eared timetable from his bag and searched the pages. ‘Let’s see, aah … the 73.’ Spotting that Nodding Man still had a bit of life in him, Simon brought in the heavy artillery, lifted out a second book, which seemed to be compressed from the scrag ends of newspaper, ran his fingers down the index and began darting back and forth between two sections at once. ‘But you could have taken the 645 and changed at … let’s see, aaah … or, uuugh, aaaghhh, if you’d wanted to go on the steam railway …

(‘Alex! What are you saying? Number 73? Number 645? A steam train? I am sure you have invented these references also. I could not have said them. Do you want me to be seen as an ignoramus on public transport?’)

‘… which calls at hnnnn … King’s Lynn, and …’

It began to rain. First, a barely visible drizzle, picked out only against certain backgrounds – the black reflections in the windows of the Cambridge Hotel; a middle-distance blurriness when the bus stopped at the crossroads by the Catholic church, and we had a view up to the park. But it might have been nothing more than stripes of movement left in my eyes by the Clint Eastwood action smack-’em-blast-’em-ride-off-into-them-thar-cactus-lands flick I’d watched last night. Next, streaks of water on the window. Finally, drops pounding the metal sill by Simon’s elbow in buttercup explosions.

‘Getting back to your grandfather, Aslan …’

The driver slammed the brakes and swerved to avoid a line of Japanese girls who’d abruptly pedalled across the road in front. The bus was filled with sudden pushes and violent attempts to avoid falling over. I crashed forward down the aisle and fell sideways onto the six-year-old nympho.

‘Oi, watch where you’re fucking going,’ growled Bruiser Mum.

Simon, who spends much of his time smiling, smiled wider. He burrowed into his bag and, after much rustling and what looked like punches delivered at the fabric from the inside, re-emerged holding a carton of passionfruit juice, which he upended over his mouth.

At the end of the nineteenth century there were 50,000 Jews – a quarter of the city’s population – living peaceably alongside Arabs in Baghdad. Today, according to the latest web report, there are four – four in the entire city. The pro-Hitler Iraqi government expelled and murdered them in pogroms before and during the Second World War. In the late 1940s underground movements smuggled them to safety at the rate of 1,000 a month. In 1951, Israel airlifted 60,000 more from the whole of Iraq and, with the perversity of the self-justified, bombed the rest to try to persuade them to follow. There are today more ostriches in Baghdad than there are Jews.

On one edge of the genealogical poster I’d excavated in the basement is a dedicatory note about Simon’s family:

All probabilities and evidence go to suggest that this community is descended from the ancient Jewish communities settled in Mesopotamia since the days of the Babylonian Captivity, 2,600 years ago … The purpose, in compiling the genealogical table, is to preserve, in some way, a record of a section of this community

The very same day that Israel finally declared independence as a refuge for the most persecuted race on earth, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq launched a combined attack, which the Secretary of the Arab League declared on Cairo radio was ‘a war of extermination, and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades’.

‘Murder the Jews! Murder them all!’ shrieked the leading Islamic scholar of Jerusalem.

Sixty years later, a man in London offered a million pounds to any breeding Iraqi Jewish couple who would go out to Baghdad to repopulate the city. ‘I have a friend who’s interested,’ I enthused to Simon. ‘What do you think? Her name’s Samantha.’

‘I dislike the name Samantha, so anyone with that name would be unlikely to attract me. Maybe it’s because it makes me think of Samantha Fox, the pornography star … I may say, I do have a relation with a Samantha. She deals with my tax affairs.’

Simon settled into a dead-eyed stare, gave himself a hug with his elbows and went back to looking out of the window: a quiet, euphoric gesture. Until we were on the train, he could devote his entire attention to ignoring me.

Higher up Simon’s genealogical poster, closer to the rustle of the Old Testament, the children are nameless, lives are replaced by question marks, but deaths are biblical: a sister to Habebah, ‘drowned in the Euphrates’; Sassoon Aslan, ‘buried in Basra’; Minahem Aslan, ‘childless, in Jerusalem’. Before that, Simon’s family disappears off the top of the page into the Mesopotamian sand dunes.

At the train station, Simon jolted off the bus to the fast ticket machine in the concourse and pressed screen after screen of glowing virtual buttons. Once he’d finally amassed all our possible discounts, off-peak fares, and unexpected mid-journey changes to thwart the local train operators’ pricing structures, he stared for a minute at the screen, which was demanding to know how many passengers apart from himself were taking the trip.

‘0’ pressed Simon, and looked up at me without crossness or dismissal.

Together, Aslan and Kitty Manasseh had five children, spaced every two years: Maurice, whose wife sneaked off one day when he was out and had herself sterilised; Nina, an old maid; Lilian, who ended up ‘in Blanchard’s antique shop’ …

(‘Do you mean she was for sale, Simon?’ ‘No! Of course not, he, he he.’)

… in Winchester, childless; Helene, Simon’s mother (Gaia among women in that barren setting, because she had three boys); and Violet, a war widow, who added another boy. This man, Simon’s first cousin, goes by the name of David Battleaxe.

‘You mean he was christened that?’ I perked up.

‘Not christened, although we do celebrate Christmas. He’s Jewish. We’re all Jewish,’ replied Simon. We were on the train now, hurrying down the aisle.

‘David Battleaxe …?’

‘After a racehorse.’

‘A racehorse?’ I puffed.

‘In Calcutta.’

‘In Calcutta?’

‘One of my grandfather’s,’ said Simon, then lunged left and landed with a thump in a window seat, his bag arriving on his lap – crucccnchch – a split-second after.

‘So you do know something about your grandfather,’ I observed, squeezing past two beer cans into the rear-facing seat opposite, next to the toilet. ‘He kept racehorses and named his grandson after a stallion. Yet when I asked you what your grandfather did just now, you said you didn’t know.’

‘You asked me what he traded, and I said I didn’t remember.’

The train pulled away, clacked across various points until it found the London tracks, and mumbled past the Cityboy apartments with tin-can Juliet balconies.

‘I don’t think he did trade horses,’ resumed Simon, as we picked up speed towards the Gog Magog hills. ‘Therefore I did not feel that it was relevant to provide that as an answer.’

A conductor hurried up to us, clicking his puncher, jutting his chin across seat columns, and demanded tickets and railcards.

Simon had his wallet already prepared, bunched in his fist, and offered up his pass and all the other necessary pieces of coloured cardboard in a derangement of eagerness. So many, the man needed an extra hand to deal with it all: the outward from Cambridge to Wimbledon via Clapham Junction and Willesden Junction covered by one set of reduced-fare permits; a continued discount outward from Wimbledon to Woking, with ‘appropriate alternative documentation’. As the conductor sifted through these triumphs of cunning, Simon’s face was suffused with expectation. The man adopted a bored expression and punched whatever suited him with a machine that pinched the paper hard and left behind purple bumps. Simon snatched the pile back and studied the undulations with satisfaction.

Another cousin I’d noticed on the family tree was called ‘Bonewit’. This woman appears on the fecund side of the family. It’s difficult to count the tiny layers of type on that half of the poster: seven children to Joseph and Regina; eight to Isaac Shellim and Ammam; ten – no, twelve – wait, my finger’s too fat for the tiny letters, eleven – to Shima and Manasseh: Aaron, Hababah, Ezekiel, Benjamin, David, Hannah, Esther … a rat-a-tat from the Pentateuch. Fifteen kids! to Sarah and Moses David. By the time they got to Gretha Bonewit, their seed was worn out.

‘Bonewit?’ said Simon, interrupting. ‘“Wit” is Dutch for “white”. I’ve got a Dutch dictionary in here.’

As the train passed Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Simon’s attention swerved, to gout. Jolting his hand out of the foreign-dictionary sector of his holdall, he sank it back in six inches further along and two inches to the right, and extracted a scrunched-up Tesco bag containing tablets. Allopurinol, for gout; Voltarol, for swelling (though it’s bad for his kidneys); Atenolol for blood thinning. He washed a selection down with more passionfruit juice and returned to dictionary-hunting.

‘Simon, why have you got a Dutch dictionary?’

‘Why shouldn’t I have a Dutch dictionary?’

‘Do you have a Mongolian dictionary?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have a dictionary for roast chickens?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then, why a Dutch one?’

Simon’s mother, grandfather Aslan (far right) and Battleaxe.

‘Because,’ he honked, triumphant that the answer had got such assiduous courting, ‘I …’ But at this point he found the book in question and pulled it out. ‘Let’s see, aaaah, hnnnn, bonewit, bone, bon … ooh …’ – his eyes lit up – ‘… it means “ticket voucher”.’

Simon will rot his floorboards with bathwater, immure his kitchen surfaces in Mr Patak’s mixed pickle and hack his hair off with a kitchen knife, but he is never unkind to maps. Returning the dictionary, Simon burrowed a foot and a half to the left and cosseted out an Ordnance Survey ‘Landranger’. He shook it into a sail-sized billow of paper, then pressed it gently into manageable shape.

Outside, the rain was frenzied. It clattered against the roof and ran in urgent, buffeted streaks along the glass. The flat lands of Cambridgeshire swelled up into a wave of hills.

When I looked back at Simon, a banana had appeared in his hand.

‘Right, your granny. Why did she live in Woking, but your grandfather stayed in Calcutta?’

‘I have no idea.’ Simon looked up from his map and considered the point. ‘Isn’t that the sort of thing married couples do?’

‘Was there a huge argument?’

‘No, oh dear, I don’t know.’

‘Did he have a harem?’

‘Huuunh. Should he have?’

Ordinarily, I like to record all interviews, because it’s not just the words that count, but the hesitations and silences. But this opportunity had occurred without notice, and I didn’t have my voice recorder.

I decided ‘Hnnn’, ‘Uuugh’ and ‘Aaah’ should be noted as ‘H’, ‘U’ and ‘A’. Stage directions ‘pained’, ‘dead-eyed’ and ‘yawning’ to be added as appropriate.

‘OK. How about this: why did your ancestors leave Iraq for Calcutta in the first place?’

‘Oh, dear, no. No, no,’ Simon replied. ‘I can’t possibly remember that. A. How can I be expected to remember what happened before my birth?’

Letter to grandparents, from Simon (signing himself by number 5) aged 5.

In all of Simon’s recollections Kitty hobbles. After emigrating in the year he-doesn’t-know-when, leaving behind he-doesn’t-know-why her husband Aslan, she bought a he-doesn’t-know-what-type-of-house in Woking with a bamboo plantation.

‘Bamboo?’

Simon doesn’t-know-how – I mean, doesn’t know how – it got there. Every day, until her nineties, she dragged herself round, at first flicking gravel off the petunia bed with her walking stick; then, in her final stages of life, pruning the box-hedge parterre from her wheelchair, pushed by a daughter or a friendly guest.

‘One of her legs was broken,’ is Simon’s explanation for the hobble.

‘Permanently?’ I asked, and paused. ‘Which one?’

Simon thought carefully. ‘H (pained), the left.’ Then he considered the problem a moment longer: ‘A (aggravated), the right.’

Another bout of concentration.

‘They alternated. Would you like some Bombay mix?’

Letter to his mother, aged 5.

When she wasn’t in the garden, Kitty sat in the front room overlooking the croquet lawn and played bridge. Her entire last thirty years seem to have been wasted on hobbling and cards.

Grandfather Aslan was ‘fairy-like’. Once every few years he appeared in London for a week, then disappeared. ‘Feeew-ff, just like that.’ The rest of the time he remained in Calcutta, the very successful dealer in … Simon still-doesn’t-know-what.

That’s it. There’s no point in prolonging this ancestral agony.