The Last Samurai (63 page)

It was bright white, perhaps not polar white. To our right a flight of stairs ran up. To our left a door through which we went; a small entrance, walls covered with cards, another door.

We went through this door, and now we were in a very high, very long room, and along its walls and on racks across the floor were pots and tubes and sticks and papers in hundreds and hundreds of colours. We were standing by the cash register. Two people in a queue turned and stared, and one salesman said

Mr. Watkins!

And the other said

Can I help you?

And he said

No.

Then he said

Yes. I need a knife. A Stanley knife.

And while an assistant hurried to get this he was walking through the room.

His hand still gripped my arm, though not so tightly. He stopped by a display and read out ‘chrome yellow’ and he said

I wonder what the real thing looks like, eh my old son?

And he walked on to the back of the room where there were racks of paper.

He was walking fiercely between the racks of colours, not looking after that remark. There were large sheets of handmade paper with rose hips and other dried flowers pressed into them. There were pieces of paper of smaller sizes on a side table. He took one and looked at it and took it and he bought this and the knife. Then he resumed walking around and the sales assistant hovered at our heels until he told him to stop. He would pause behind a case and then someone would come around the case.

At last he said

All right. All right. All right.

His hand now circled my wrist loosely. He walked through the air as if it were water, by jars of colours for painting silk, and white fringed silk scarves in cellophane for painting, and white silk ties for handpainting, and white silk hearts in cellophane.

He stopped and he began to laugh a breathy scratchy laugh like the stubble on his face.

No cheap jokes, he said.

He said

This will do. This is just what I was looking for.

He picked up a silk heart and he took £10 out of his pocket and handed it to a salesperson. He had to use his other hand to get the money, so he dropped his hold on me. Now he went up a short flight of steps, then up another step to a platform overlooking the store, and I followed him up to the top. On the platform were three round black tables and three chairs with cane seats. There was a table against the wall with two coffee machines and a sign that said Help yourself to coffee and Milk in the Fridge; next to the table was a fridge. A couple of small speakers sent Virgin FM scratchily out.

He pulled a second chair to one of the tables and sat down. I sat down.

He tore open the cellophane with his teeth and unwrapped the white silk heart. He pulled the Stanley knife free of its cardboard.

He said

You know my agent? He can tell you who’d give money for this; he’ll find someone who’d like to buy it.

He held his thumb up. He breathed on it, and then he ground it onto the white silk.

He said

You know the old joke. I suffered for my art and now it’s your turn.

He gripped my thumb tightly. I thought he would do the same with my thumb: it was dirty enough from my climbing. He held it so tightly it hurt, and before I understood what he meant he had seized the knife and slashed my thumb with the blade.

A big gout of blood welled out of the cut. He let it gather on the blade and then he took this away and did something on the silk, and then he scooped up more blood with the knife and transferred it to the silk, and he did this nine or ten times. Then he put the knife aside and he brought my bloody thumb down on the silk beside the black mark he had made.

He lifted my hand and dropped it on the table. He retracted the blade of the knife and put the knife in his pocket.

On the white silk were the two thumbprints, one black one red with a cut across it. Underneath was written in wet letters

Looking for a father had turned out to be an unexpectedly high-risk activity. Stand behind the door, Kambei tells Katsushiro. Bring down the stick as hard as you can, it will be good training for you. Any more training and I might not live to see 12.

A week went by and we got three red bills on the same day. Sibylla called the project and asked when she could expect her cheque for £300 and the person she talked to was rather snide and said if they took as long to pay as she did to do the work she would probably get the cheque around Christmas. So Sibylla said she would send in 10 issues of
Carpworld
by the end of the week and the rest the week after that. They sent the cheque for £300 and Sibylla paid off the bills and we had £23.66 to keep going until she got paid for
Carpworld
.

I was reading a book on solid state physics. Sibylla gave it to me for my birthday because it said inside the front cover that the extension of our understanding of the properties of solids at the microscopic level is one of the important achievements of physics this century and because she had found a damaged copy on sale for £2.99. Unfortunately it wasn’t quite the bargain it looked, because the blurb went on to say: Dr. Rosenberg’s book requires only a fairly basic background in mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, and atomic physics along with relatively intuitive ideas in quantum physics. Sibylla thinks no one is put off by difficulty only by boredom and if something is interesting no one will care how hard it is; it is certainly an absorbing subject but to follow it you really need at least some kind of introductory materials on the above-mentioned subjects. I was getting rather frustrated but I thought I would rather die than sell the heart, not because I wanted to keep it but because it would be horrible to take money for it.

I came in one night after a useless day at the Museum of Science and Technology. Considering they charge an entrance fee you’d think they’d hire people who knew about science and technology, I thought the attendants would be able to help me when I ran into trouble but the one I asked couldn’t.

I was thinking about the Umklapp process, or thinking about it as much as you can think about it if you don’t have a fairly basic background in mechanics, electricity, and magnetism, and atomic physics along with relatively intuitive ideas in quantum physics. The Umklapp process relates to groups of waves that cross each other’s paths: there is little or no interference when the waves are in a linear medium, i.e. one in which the displacement at any point is proportional to the applied force. The waves are said to be harmonic, and the energy of the wave is proportional to the square of its amplitude; the displacement of the medium at any point can be obtained by adding the sums of the amplitudes of the individual waves at that point. If the medium is not exactly linear, on the other hand, the principle of superpositon no longer applies, and the waves are said to be anharmonic. The Umklapp process is a special case of this: if the sum of two oncoming phonons is large enough, their resultant will be a phonon with the same total energy, but travelling in the opposite direction!

The staff at the museum had not been very helpful when I had asked questions, and I knew that Sibylla would not be able to help. I was wondering whether I should try to get into a school. I came into the house and Sibylla sat at the computer with the 12 issues of
Carpworld
1991 to her left and the 36 issues of
Carpworld
1992 1993 and 1994 to the right. The screen was dark. I opened the door and she said:

He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

She said:

The sun’s rim dips, the stars rush out

At one stride comes the dark.

She asked if I had had a good day. I said I was reading
The Solid State
by H. M. Rosenberg. She asked if she could see it, and when I handed it over she looked inside. She said: What is a phonon?

I said: They are quanta of lattice vibrational energy.

They died as men before their bodies died, said Sibylla.

I said: What?

Never mind, said Sibylla. I believe that the body can survive 30 hours of typing
Carpworld
into a computer, for mine seems to be still of a piece.

She was flipping through the book and now she said: Oh, listen to this!

However carefully we prepare a specimen, using extremely high purity materials and very specially controlled methods of crystal growth, one form of defect will always be present—that due to the thermal vibration of the atoms. At any instant in time the atoms are never exactly at their correct lattice sites. At room temperature they are vibrating with approximately simple harmonic motion at around 10
¹³
Hz about an origin which is at the geometrical lattice position. Even at very low temperatures the zero-point motion of the atoms is still present.

This is delightful, said Sibylla. If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport. And look! It was written in 1976, so that Liberace might have read it in his intellectually malformative years and profited thereby, instead of allowing his mind to solidify, we may say, to the state where the cerebratory atoms spent their time perpetually away from their correct lattice sites. I wish I understood this, said Sibylla, and she flashed a bitter look at
Carpworld
1991, but I’m glad that you have come upon it so young. Approximately simple harmonic motion—it sounds so Platonic, doesn’t it? Plato says—oh what does Plato say? Or it may be the Stoics. But I think Plato says something about it in the
Timaeus
. And she looked even more bitterly at
Carpworld
1992-94, and she said at last: Well anyway I know what Spinoza says, he says—and she stopped. And she said: Well I can’t remember the precise words but what he says is that the mind when it becomes conscious of its own weakness is saddened. Mens blankety blankety blank tristatur.

Her face was pinched and grey. Her eyes were burning. The next day I took the heart out and put it in my backpack and left the house.

I took the Circle Line and when it stopped at Farringdon I stayed on. I didn’t want to go to the agent but I was going to have to do it. Sometimes I thought the problem wasn’t really money but then I remembered that someone had saved Sib’s life because it wasn’t worth killing yourself over money.

Someone left an
Independent
behind at Baker Street so I went around another time doing the crossword.

The train reached Farringdon. I started reading the paper. Red Devlin had come out of hiding and was publishing a book about his experiences as a hostage. There was an article about nationalism and intervention. There was a short column about Mustafa Szegeti, who had been reprimanded by the authorities in West Papua for claiming to be Belgian consul and issuing a number of Belgian visas in that capacity. Suspicions had been aroused; the Belgian embassy in Jakarta had denied any connection with Szegeti, who was in fact of Egyptian and Hungarian descent and bridge correspondent for the
Independent
. When asked why he had impersonated a member of the Belgian diplomatic corps he had replied: Well, someone had to.

This was exactly like Szegeti. He had been arrested in Burma when I was six for claiming to be a delegate from the United Nations, and in Brazil when I was seven he had passed himself off as an American commercial attaché, and he had been self-appointed deputy director of the World Bank in Uganda and Bhutanese ambassador extraordinary to Mozambique. He had helped large numbers of people to escape death and torture and flee to reluctant asylums with imaginative documentation.

That was obviously not the way he made his living.

Szegeti had learned bridge as a boy from his parents, both avid players. His mother was Egyptian, his father Hungarian. They were wealthy, but compulsive gamblers, and had lived in constant uncertainty and excitement.

They had lived in magnificent hotels when they could afford it and often when they could not. On arriving they always insisted on having a grand piano installed in the suite so that his mother could play Brahms when she was not playing roulette. They ordered lavishly from room service. Sometimes Szegeti had not seen his parents for days at a time; sometimes they had not gone outside for a week, getting up to gamble and leaving the gambling to go to bed.

His mother wore only designer clothes. Once when she had pawned all her jewellery she pawned the clothes too. Men had to wear evening dress to the casino; women were not allowed to wear trousers. She put on her husband’s black tie. She did not even have the money to buy a false beard. She cut off her hair, and she glued a few wisps to her upper lip, and she went to the casino with the money raised from the clothes. She was gone for two days.

She came at last to the room. Instead of a two days’ growth of beard she had only wisps of black hair coming loose from the glue. Her black hair stood in spikes. She came to the room—they had not dared to call room service for two weeks, they had been living on half-finished boxes of chocolates and leftover breadsticks—and she threw one chip on the bed.