The Indian Clerk (44 page)
Authors: David Leavitt
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.
A
MONTH 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 Tamil,"
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 seance, 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.
T
HEY 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 Mahalanobis provides the cook with recipes for dishes to his liking,
she prepares them 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."
Chatterjee coughs.
"When I asked Mr. Ramanujan about this scar, he told me that in India, before his departure for England, he underwent surgery
for the treatment of a hydrocele. A swelling of the testicles. Is that correct, Mr. Ramanujan?"
Ramanujan waggles his head.
"Yet incredibly, none of the doctors who examined him took note of the scar, nor did he inform them that he had had such an
operation."
"I did not think it pertinent," Ramanujan says.
"I therefore speculate," Batty Shaw says, "that the operation was in fact not for the treatment of a hydrocele, but for the
removal of a malignant growth on Mr. Ramanujan's right testicle. For whatever reason, the doctor chose not to inform Mr. Ramanujan
of what he found. Subsequently the malignancy spread and now my theory is that Mr. Ramanujan is suffering from metastatic
liver cancer."
"Cancer?"
"It would explain all the symptoms, but most crucially the tenderness and enlargement of the liver."
Hardy looks at Ramanujan. His face, as always these days, is without expression. And really, what extraordinary brutes doctors
can be! They deliver the grimmest news without even a hint of compassion, as if the patient wasn't even in the room.
"The diagnosis would also be in keeping both with the nightly fevers and the low white blood count," Batty Shaw says.
"But are you sure it's cancer? How can you be sure?"
Batty Shaw removes his tiny glasses. "Nothing is definitive," he says, "though in my many years of experience, it has generally
been the case that when the symptoms match a diagnosis, the diagnosis is correct."
"So there's no way to tell for certain? No way to test?"
"Time will be the test." He puts his spectacles back on. "If, as I surmise, Mr. Ramanujan has liver cancer, then within a
very few weeks his condition will begin to deteriorate markedly."
"Is there a treatment?"
"Neither treatment nor cure. He will live six months at most." Almost as an afterthought, he adds: "I am very sorry." The
curious thing is, he says this to Hardy, not to Ramanujan. He doesn't even look at Ramanujan.
They get up to leave. Batty Shaw follows them through the door that leads into the corridor, Chatterjee with his arm around
Ramanujan's shoulder. And what is Chatterjee thinking? Has grief struck him dumb? Or is he raging, as Hardy is, not just at
the arrogance, but the sloppiness of doctors?
When the symptoms match a diagnosis, the
diagnosis is correct. . .
No student of mathematics would be allowed to get away with such fallacious logic! It seems to Hardy that doctors ought to
have to prove their diagnoses, the way that mathematicians prove their theorems.
Reductio ad absurdum.
Let us postulate that indeed Ramanujan has liver cancer. Then . . .
"Sir."
Hardy turns. Batty Shaw is beckoning him.
"I wonder if I might have a word with you in private."
"Of course."
Batty Shaw nudges closed the door to the waiting room, through which the Indians have already passed. "If you don't mind my
asking," he says, his voice low, "I was wondering about the bill . . ."
"What about it?"
"To whom should it be addressed?"
"To Mr. Ramanujan, of course."
Batty Shaw raises his eyebrows. "But can he afford the expense?"
"All his medical bills are being paid out of his scholarship. Trinity can guarantee that."
"I see." Suddenly Batty Shaw looks impressed. "He told me nothing about himself, you see. What is he?"
"He is the greatest mathematician of the last hundred years. Possibly the last five hundred."
"Really," Batty Shaw says.
"Really," Hardy says. And without another word, he passes through the door into the waiting room.