The Last Samurai (17 page)

heptakaihebdomekontapus

[Ah. Forget it]

Another day on the Circle Line, house too cold to stay in. An icy rain sweeps the city, underground it is warm and dry.

LIVERPOOL STREET ALDGATE TOWER HILL MONUMENT

Far too young

CANNON STREET MANSION HOUSE BLACKFRIARS

Etymology so helpful

TEMPLE EMBANKMENT WESTMINSTER and around and around

At St. James’s Park a woman gets on and sees the tiny head bent over a book, pudgy fingers dragging a blue Schwan Stabilo highlighter across the page. Twinkling eyes share the joke, she longs for adult bonding. He looks up & gives her an enchanting smile, all chubby cheeks and sparkling black eyes & tiny milk teeth. He says: I’ve almost finished Book 15!

She says: I SEE you have! You must have been working very hard.

Another Shirley Temple special for the nice lady. L: I only started it yesterday!

Isn’t He Adorable: Did you REALLY?

Adorable: Today I read this and this and this and this and yesterday I did this and this and this and this and this and this! [tiny fingers flip back through pages covered with fluorescent pink and orange and blue and green]

Isn’t: Isn’t that wonderful!

Wonderful: I’ve read the
Iliad
and
De Amicitia
and three stories in
Kalilah wa Dimnah
& one Arabian Night and Moses & the Bullrushes and Joseph and his Manycoloured Coat and now I have to read the
Odyssey
and
Metamorphoses
1–8 and the
whole Kalilah wa Dimnah
and 30
Arabian Nights and
I Samuel
and
the Book of Jonah
and
learn the cantellation,
and
do 10 chapters in
Algebra Made Easy
.

Slightly Taken Aback: Why do you have to do that?

All Innocence: Sibylla says I have to.

Appalled: Isn’t he rather young etymology so helpful of course for spelling inflected language so helpful of course for grammar not taught in schools but classics after all part & parcel of old divisive educational system wouldn’t he really be better off playing football I think you are making a terrible mistake.

Standard reply.

SLOANE SQUARE SOUTH KENSINGTON

Four hours have gone by. We have taken the Circle Line around four times. We have been to the toilet twice; L has hopped the length of the platform at Mansion House on one foot and back on the other foot; we have left the train each time at Tower Hill to make faces at the video camera & watch ourselves making faces in the banks of TVs. Or rather—you see yourself in one TV. In the others you do not appear—they show sometimes an empty platform, sometimes a platform with a few people, sometimes a platform with a train pulling around a bend. I think these are images from cameras further down the platform, but they look like glimpses into possible worlds, worlds where the sun rises and the trains run without you. There are pushchairs to be pushed but not by you, bad memories to be dodged but not by you.

My name is Ludo. I am 5 years and 267 days old. It is 99 days to my sixth birthday. Sibylla gave me this book today to write in because she said I should practise writing because my handwriting is atrocious, and they will not let me write on a computer all the time at school. I said I didn’t know what to write and Sibylla said I could write about things I liked so that in later years I would be able to see what I liked as a child. Also I could write about interesting things that happened so that in later years I would be able to remember things that had happened.

One thing that I like a lot is polynomials but I do not like the word binomial because it is wrong. I have decided never to use it. I always use the right word for a polynomial whatever anybody else does. My favourite Greek word is γαγγλíον and that is all the things I like today

It is 98 days to my birthday. One interesting thing that happened today was that I took Kalilah wa Dimnah on the Circle Line too and somebody asked if my father was an Arab. Sibylla said whatever gave you that idea. The person said isn’t that Arabic. Sibylla said Yes. Then she said but my father wasn’t an Arab. I was going to ask her what he was but then I decided not to.

I think that Greek and Arabic and Hebrew are my favourite languages because they have a dual. Greek has better moods and tenses but Arabic and Hebrew have better duals because they have a feminine dual and a masculine dual but Greek just has the one. I asked Sibylla if there was a language with a trial number and she said not that she was aware but she didn’t know all the languages in the world. I wish there was a language with a dual trial quadral quincal sextal septal octal nonal and decal, if there was that would be my favourite language.

It is boring on the Circle Line but I am up to Odyssey 15.305. 9 books to go.

97 days to my birthday.

One interesting thing that happened today is that we took the Tube one way and then we took it the other way and a lady got into an argument with Sibylla. Sibylla said let’s take the example of two men about to be burned at the stake, A dies at time t of heart failure while B burns to death at time t + n, I think we can all agree that B’s life would be better if it were n minutes shorter. The lady said she thought it was rather different and Sibylla said she thought it was exactly the same and the lady said there was no need to shout. Sibylla said she wasn’t shouting she just thought it was barbaric to force people to die at time t + n and she said barbaric so loud that everyone in the train looked around!

Barbaric comes from the Greek word β
ρβαρος which means a non-Greek but in English it means something completely different.

96 days to my birthday.

Today I was reading the Odyssey on the Tube and a man got on and said it was good that I was starting so young. He said he started Hebrew when he was three and I said I knew Hebrew and he said what have you read in Hebrew. I said I had read Moses in the bullrushes and he taught me this song:

Pharaoh had a daughter with a very winning smile

She found the baby Moses while swimming in the Nile

She took him home to Pharaoh, said I found him on the shore

Pharaoh winked at her and said I’ve heard that one before.

I sang it three times and he said splendid and he said it was never too soon to start on your religious education. He asked Sibylla if my father was teaching me or if I was studying at school or with a rabbi and Sibylla said she was teaching me herself. He said it was a shame all Jewish mothers did not take religious education so seriously. Sibylla said she was really only teaching me the language and he said of course, of course. I was hoping he would ask if my father was Jewish but he didn’t. When he got off the train I asked Sibylla and she said she didn’t know, it didn’t come up in the conversation, but she didn’t think so.

95 days to my birthday.

One thing that is funny is that even though I have been reading the Odyssey on the Tube for a long time nobody ever asked if my father was Greek. Today I read Babar but nobody asked if he was French.

Speaking of French a funny thing happened today on the Tube. A lady got into an argument with Sibylla who said let’s take the example of two men who are about to be ritually disembowelled. A dies at time t of heart failure and B dies at time t + n from having someone plunge a stone knife into his chest and rip the beating heart out with his bare hands, I think we would agree that B’s life was not improved by the additional n minutes in which the stone knife was plunged into his and the lady said pas devant les enfants. I said parlez-vous français? The lady looked very surprised. Sibylla said would you be more comfortable if we continued the discussion in Bengali? The lady said pardon? Sibylla said or perhaps some other language he does not know? She said her Russian, Hungarian, Finnish, Basque and Icelandic were not up to much but she thought she could manage something in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish or Bengali. I was surprised because I didn’t know Sibylla knew any of those languages. I don’t think the lady did. I asked when I could learn those other languages and Sibylla said after I have learned Japanese. I asked if my father was French and Sibylla said no.

We took the Tube again today. It was boring. I read Odyssey 17 part of the time and the rest of the time White Fang. On the way home I asked Sibylla if my father was Russian, Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, Icelandic, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Swedish, Danish or Bengali. She said No.

94 days to my birthday.

and around and around and around and a

L is up to
Odyssey
17. This is so bad for him. Hundreds of people saying wonderful marvellous far too young what a genius. It seems to me that it is does not take miraculous intelligence to master the simple fact that ’Oδυσσε
ς is Odysseus, if you go on to master 5,000 similar simple facts you have only shown that you are a miracle of obstinacy.

Anyway I have been watching Seven Samurai once a week with L to counteract the deplorable influence of the Circle Line. But today something terrible happened.

A woman sitting across from me saw the
Reader of Handwritten Japanese
sitting unopened in my lap and said Are you studying Japanese & I said Sort of.

Nine green bottles hanging on the wall

I said I was mainly learning the language so I could understand Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and also (if it ever came out on video) Mizoguchi’s Five Women Around Utamaro which I had watched five days in a row when it showed at the Phoenix, and that I was also interested in a text called Tsurezuregusa by a 14th-century Buddhist priest.

NINE GREEN BOTTLES HANGING ON THE WALL