The Last Samurai (47 page)

He was giving me another humorous wide-eyed look. He said:

Now I believe you read my book.

I did not know what to say.

I said:

I’ve read all your books.

And he said: Thanks.

He said: I mean that. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

I thought: I can’t stand this.

I thought of the three Prisoners of Fate. I could walk out any time. I wanted to walk out and I wanted to drop hints. I wanted to mention the Rosetta Stone and watch realisation dawn. I don’t know what I was going to say.

I was just about to say something when I saw Fraser’s
Ptolemaic Alexandria
on a shelf. I exclaimed artlessly:

Oh
, you’ve got
Ptolemaic Alexandria
!

He said:

I shouldn’t really have bought it but I couldn’t resist.

I didn’t ask where he’d heard of it. Somebody had obviously told him it was a superb work of scholarship which no home should be without.

I said:

Well, it’s a brilliant book.

He said:

Not that it’s much use to me. Did you know there was a Greek tragedy about God and Moses? It’s got it at the back but it’s all in Greek.

I said:

Would you like me to read some for you?

He said:

Oh—

and he said

Well, why not?

I got Volume II off the shelf and I started reading where God is saying Stretch out thy rod in iambic trimeters and I translated as I went along and after about three lines I could see he was looking bored and amazed.

I said:

Well, you get the drift.

He said:

How old are you?

I said I was 11. I said there was nothing very difficult about the passage and anyone who had studied the language for a few months would be able to read it and I had known it for years.

He said: Christ.

I said it was not such a big deal and that J. S. Mill had started Greek at the age of 3.

He said: How old were you when you started?

I said: 4.

He said:
Christ
.

Then he said:

Sorry, I don’t mean to make you self-conscious, it’s just that I’ve got kids of my own.

I was looking down at
Ptolemaic Alexandria
thinking I’ve got to say something. I said What did he try to teach them and he said nothing in a formal way but the point was they had watched Sesame Street and it was about the right level. There was a piece of paper at the front of the book. I said: What’s this?

He said: Don’t you recognise it?

and I thought: So he knows

and I thought: How did he know?

I said: Recognise it?

He said: It’s from the
Iliad
. I thought you’d recognise it. Somebody gave it to me.

I said: Oh, of course.

I said: Have you read it then?

He said: I keep meaning to get around to it.

He said: I think subconsciously it reminds me of Latin.

I said: Of Latin?

He said: I took a year at school and I spent most of it smoking behind the bike shed.

I said I had heard the things worth reading in Latin were things you couldn’t appreciate until you were 15 so maybe it was just the texts.

He said: I don’t think we made it as far as texts, I just remember on the first day the teacher writing some noun on the board with nominative genitive bla bla bla. It all seemed so fucking pointless. I mean, look at the Romance languages. As far as I know every single one got rid of the case endings because the people actually speaking the language thought they were a complete waste of time. I kept thinking why do I have to sit here learning this evolutionary failure of a language?

He was grinning broadly as he said it and he said he thought whatever it was that had made him get out of the class and smoke behind the bike shed instead of sitting in the class learning case endings was probably the thing that had helped most to make him successful if you could call it success.

I was looking at a piece of paper that ended hope you like it Must dash S[illegible scrawl].

I thought: My father is Val Peters.

He said: But I really should read it one of these days, she obviously went to a lot of trouble.

He said: I’m kind of glad mine weren’t put under any pressure to start early, they grow up so fast and they spend so much time in school anyway, but I think it’s amazing what you’ve done I really do and it really does mean a lot that you like my books, I wasn’t just saying that, because at the end of the day it’s not just how many people buy them.

I thought I should say something.

He said: Look, let me give you something else, something that’ll be worth something some day. I mean I don’t know what you think, but maybe you’d like one of these, it’s not as if I’m ever going to read them, they get translated into about 17 languages and you don’t necessarily do signings every time so if I signed one it would be unique,

and he went to another bookcase that was full of books and he said why didn’t I take one of his books in Czech or Finnish or something and he would sign it and it would be unique.

I said You don’t have to do that and he said No I insist, and he asked me which language I would like and I said Well how about Finnish?

He said Don’t tell me you know Finnish and I said Do you want me to lie about something like that and he said Gordon Bennett.

He said Just out of curiosity is there any language here you don’t know? I looked at the books and I said No but there are a lot I don’t know very well and he said Sorry I asked and gave me another humorous look.

He said:

Why don’t I make this one more personal, is there something you’d like me to say?

I thought: I’ve got to say something. I thought: Am I just going to go away without saying anything? I said: What did you have in mind?

He said: How about, for David, I promise never to decrease the market value of this book by signing another Finnish edition, your friend in Mammon Val Peters? He was grinning at me and holding a pen.

I said: Say whatever you want.

He said: I’d like to say something more personal but everything you think of saying always sounds so wet.

I said I probably wouldn’t sell it anyway so it didn’t have to be unique.

He said: Well in that case why don’t I just put For David with best wishes Val but you’ll know it came from the heart. He did not really say this with another humorous smile because he was smiling humorously throughout. I said Fine, thanks, and he scrawled something in the book and handed it over.

It was not hard to imagine a world where my body stood in this room with something else inside it. If I said something he would see that other world. I thought: Well am I going to go away?

I said:

Do you ever bury your books?

He said: What?

I said: You could bury your books in a plastic bag a few metres down, one on each continent. Then if there was a cataclysm they’d be preserved for posterity. They could dig them up again.

He said he hadn’t tried it.

I said: What they should really do is bury a book in the foundation of each house. Sealed in plastic. It would help archaeologists in a millennium or so.

He smiled. He said: I hate to throw you out, but I’m gonna have to throw you out. I’ve got work to do.

I thought again that I could say something and everything would be different, and seeing his casual slightly complimented look I wanted to say it.

Then I thought:

If we fought with real swords I would kill him.

I thought:

I can’t say I’m his son, because it’s true.

He obviously thinks he’s a samurai

The night I met him I went outside to sleep on the ground. It was stupid, I wasn’t going anywhere. I rolled up my sleeping bag and brought it inside. I went upstairs and slept on the mattress, covered in blankets.

I could sleep outside if I had to.

I finished
Njal’s Saga
. I had planned to go back to Inuit when I had finished but now there did not seem to be any immediate point so I decided to go on with aerodynamics.

I put the book on aerodynamics in my backpack as well as the two Schaum Outlines in case I needed Laplace transforms or Fourier analysis. I went to the National Gallery and sat on a bench in front of The Virgin & Child Enthroned between a Soldier Saint and St. John the Baptist.

4.9 Bound Vortex

It was shown in the last section that the force on a body is determined entirely by the circulation around it and by the free stream velocity.

Now I believe you read my book, said my father.

In an identical manner, it can be shown that the force on a vortex that is stationary relative to a uniform flow is given by the Kutta-Joukowski law.

Thanks, said my father. I mean that. That’s the nicest thing I’ve heard in a long time.

The vortex that represents the circulation around the body

Thanks, said my father. I mean that.

departs in its characteristics from that of a vortex in the external flow

Thanks, said my father.

in that it does not remain attached to the same fluid particles

I mean that, said my father. That’s the nicest thing

I got up and went to the main wing and sat in front of A Young Man Holding a Skull by Frans Hals. My father didn’t say anything. I opened Kuethe & Chow on
Foundations of Aerodynamics
to page 85.

4.10 Kutta Condition

The Kutta-Joukowski theorem states that the force experienced by a body in a uniform stream is equal to the product of the fluid density, stream velocity, and circulation and has a direction perpendicular to the stream velocity.

I think you’re going to have to wait a while, said my father.

The Kutta-Joukowski theorem states that the force experienced by a body in a uniform stream is equal to the product of the fluid density, stream velocity, and circulation and has a direction perpendicular to the stream velocity.

I think he’s one of the greatest writers this century, said my father.

The
Kutta-Joukowski
theorem states that the
force
experienced by a
body
in a
uniform stream

Thanks, said my father.

I stood up and left the room. I went this time to Room 34, and I took the corner seat by Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus. Still no sign of Polyphemus. I couldn’t really remember the Kutta-Joukowski theorem but I wasn’t going back to it again. I opened the book to page 86 and I started reading down the page very fast

The above discussion applies to an inviscid flow, but in a viscous fluid (however small the viscosity), the circulation is fixed by the imposition of an empirical observation. Experiments show that when a body with a sharp trailing edge is set in motion, the action of the fluid viscosity causes the flow over the upper and lower surfaces to merge smoothly at the trailing edge; this circumstance, which fixes the magnitude of the circulation around the body, is termed the
Kutta condition
, which may be stated as follows:
A body with a sharp trailing edge in motion through a fluid creates about itself a circulation of sufficient strength to hold the rear stagnation point at the trailing edge
.

The flow around an airfoil at an angle of attack in an inviscid flow develops no circulation and the rear stagnation point occurs Thanks Sure Now I believe you read my book. Isn’t that cheating? Why don’t you use a dictionary?

It wasn’t all that easy to understand the book anyway, and with my father interrupting all the time it was practically impossible; what if he never stopped? What was it going to be like hearing it for 80 years? I thought of giving up and going home. Then I thought of Sibylla, jumping up and sitting down, jumping up to walk here and there, jumping up to read this book and that book a paragraph a sentence a word at a time.

I got up again, and I started walking quickly through the gallery, past the Fragonards, past the Caravaggios, past a room of Rembrandts and a room of followers of Rembrandt, looking for one of the boring little rooms people never visit to hide from him there. What about this? Still Life with Drinking Horn of the Saint Sebastian Archer’s Guild, Lobster and Glasses, not to mention a half-peeled lemon—but beside it was a Vanitas by Jan Jansz Tech, a picture of a skull, an hourglass, a silk scarf, a drawing & other precious things, meant according to the caption to remind the viewer of the absurdity of human ambition. This was exactly the type of thing my father liked to comment on in philosophical moments, generally in the presence of a crumbling temple or tomb, what about the next room? Here was Cuyp’s large painting, A Distant View of Dordrecht with a Milkmaid and Four Cows, and his small painting, A Distant View of Dordrecht with a Sleeping Herdsman and Five Cows—
no one
would look for me here.