Duncan The Geometer Lobachevsky

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-84351-841-9
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 208 Seiten

When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology. It is 1950 and Nikolai Lobachevsky, a Glav Torf mathematician and great-grandson of his illustrious namesake, is aiding Bord na Móna by surveying a bog in the Irish Midlands. Far from home, he studies the locals and the land. One afternoon, soon after he arrives, he receives a telegram calling him back to Leningrad for a 'special appointment'. Lobachevsky may not be a great genius but he is not foolish: he recognises a death sentence when he sees one and leaves to go into hiding on a small island in the Shannon estuary, where the island families harvest seaweed and struggle to split rocks. Here Lobachevsky must think about death, how to avoid it and whether he will ever see his home again. Following Duncan's critically acclaimed Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019), A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) and Midfield Dynamo (2021), Duncan's themes of emigration, displacement and work connect Ireland with the world stage. Colm Tóibín said of Love Notes: 'Written in spare, exact prose ... Duncan writes beautifully about cold weather, gruff manners, systems of hierarchy ... A portrait of work [and] a picture of a sensibility'. SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 WALTER SCOTT PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR

Adrian Duncan was born in County Longford and originally trained as an engineer. He is a Berlin-based visual artist and filmmaker. His short fictions have appeared in literary journals both in Ireland and the USA. His acclaimed debut novel, Love Notes from a German Building Site, published by Lilliput and Head of Zeus in 2019. He was shortlisted for the Emerging Writer Award at the inaugural 2020 Dalkey Literary Awards and won the inaugural John McGahern Annual Book Prize. His second novel, A Sabbatical in Leipzig, was published by Lilliput in 2020 and is forthcoming from Profile Books. It was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2020. His first short story collection, Midfield Dynamo, was published in 2021 and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Duncan, Adrian

Leseproben

1

I am standing on the edge of a bog. There is wind. And sky meeting arm-opening land. Three men stalk out into this dark terrain. One carries a clinking tripod under his arm and two leather cases in his right hand. Another, head down, bears two bundles of timber stakes on his shoulders, as does the other. I hold a sledgehammer and coiled around my left hand are twenty-two yards of steel chain. My shoes, foot- clothes and feet are wet. I trudged with these men through mud of this kind yesterday and the day before and the day before, laying out across this land a giant if invisible triangle.

A gust of wind breaks and rushes at my face. The two men carrying the timbers topple.

The gust passes.

The two men right themselves and gather up their stakes.

One of the points on this triangle has been carved onto an obelisk three yards to the north of a concrete chimney that protrudes from the horizon in the distance – towards the west-south-west, they tell me. It is a huge if slim flue for a power station being built by Germans and on the face of this squat stone obelisk has been inscribed the foot of a crow, with three talons extending down from a horizontal line, the centre of which lies thirty-four feet, six and five- eighths inches above sea level. The second point on this triangle has been carved onto the side of a bridge three miles east of where I stand now. This structure is old and of British construction and they refer to it as Kjaknu Bridge. It carries a railway that runs west to a large town called Galway, and east to the capital city of Dublin, and beneath this cut-stone bridge runs a canal that leads north to a lake and south to another. They tell me this canal once carried boatloads of flax, then boatloads of people, until it fell out of use. Onto the keystone to the northern face of this bridge is carved another crow’s foot, at twenty-two feet, eight and one-quarter inches above sea level. These three men and I are struggling to place accurately the third point of our triangle into the middle of this stretch of bog before me.

It has begun to rain. The dark undulating hills in the distance have become shrouded in a mist that opens then rolls around these unimpressive summits. The sky is grey in that drab way I would often see, when I was young, in the sky over the shivering countryside outside my hometown, Kazan, on any morning in early spring. The cheerful clipped voices of these three men disappear skyward as they walk a path trampled between long oily openings in the bog. The land reaches out into further plains of brown and black, and tufts of deep green punctured through with tiny wavering dots of white.

The third man, Kolim, a dark and blue-eyed person, drops a dozen stakes. They make a hollow clatter that seems to trigger from behind me the call of a distant crow or raven or an indigenous bird of some kind whose name I have not yet learned. The second man, Mehl, a balding and bearded person, tips from his arms his stakes, then rubs his hands together while smiling impishly – raising his eyebrows as his thinning dark hair lifts from his forehead and stands for a few shuddering moments, then falls. The first of these country men, Rhatigan, creaks out the legs of his tripod. He speaks calmly to his men as he scans the leaning land, while beckoning me, in turn, out onto it.

When I was sent by the Soviet state to London to further my studies in calculus, knowing I would never become a great mathematician, I strayed instead into the foothills of anthropology. What I lack in my ability now to read numbers I make up for with my ability to read people; and I know these people here will never triangulate this land accurately because this land, as far as I can tell, sits upon a lake, of which they seem completely unaware. When I watch them walking across the surfaces of this place, these people suddenly list or stumble, or some days they simply fall over, as if, unbeknown to them, they are on the deck of an enormous ship heaving upon a distant subterranean ocean on a gusty day. Then they pick themselves up like nothing has occurred and continue on their way. I can feel these small shifts in the ground beneath my feet too on days when the dark seas far below must be rough. I picture descending labyrinths in the hull of this ship, shaking around terrifyingly, scaring the crew hands within. Sometimes, on these choppy days, when Rhatigan invites me to the tripod and I lift my spectacles and look through the lens of the level perched on top, with its crosshairs trained, say, on the centre of a distant chimney pot piercing the ridge of a small thatched house, issuing climbing strings of smoke from its cup, he utters: ‘Can you not see that, Nikolai? The chimney, moving across the vertical, then above and below the horizontal.’

‘I can,’ I usually reply.

‘Ground vapour?’ he usually asks.

And he always looks doubtful when I nod to his increasingly convenient postulations, and in his doubt he has begun, I feel, molecule by molecule, to see through me. He will soon see that what is in me, is not what I know about the solution here, but what it is I am keeping from him about this problem – that it is the bogland under their feet that is moving and not the buildings in the distance. I will tell him soon that he is better to use the navigation tools of the seagoing vessel here – the sextant, the chronometer. I will tell him, just before I board my train to Dublin on my route back to the Soviet embassy in London, that he is better to turn away from the Euclidean rigidity he has been employing here up to now, because planes of that kind rest too brittlely on soaked-out places such as this.

I pull my collar up on my neck, tug my cap over my spectacles and step down onto the bog.

Rhatigan dangles an inverted bronze cone from the end of a follicle of shining copper. He is in his late forties, grey- haired but well preserved, and entirely engrossed in his work. The plumb, swinging between the legs of the tripod, is seeking in the wind its centre over a ten-foot iron stake that was hammered into the ground the day I arrived. Six inches above the peat hovers a circular head plate with lurid red and white concentric diameters printed upon it. The circumferences decrease to a circle the size of a kopek and in the middle of this circle a tiny dot has been etched, and somewhere within that tiny dot oscillates the secondary benchmark we are trying, in theory, to place into this expanse.

‘Look,’ says Rhatigan, nodding towards a black cloud rumbling up over the ridge of the distant hill.

‘Kolim, Mehl; leave the stakes. We’ll take shelter!’

The rain drums onto the roof of Rhatigan’s auto as we slough off our coats. The land outside has now disappeared behind this odourless curtain of passing rain. There have been many far more intense storms here this week.

‘I had a thought,’ says Rhatigan, as Kolim, turning from the front seat, flares a match then lights a cigarette, ‘we’ll stake out across this parcel in triangles. The parallelograms feel like points too many.’

Kolim exhales a cloud of smoke across the land map upon which Rhatigan has neatly drawn a grid of squares expanding across a segment of near-featureless land. As the smoke lifts, this grid of squares reappears, pinching to a point in the middle of the indicated trunk road – from where stems the corner of another square, leading to others spreading outward across the land and penetrating this bog in which we shelter from the rain. Rhatigan pencils diagonals through an interlinking line of squares; then, he hopscotches his pencil tip across the drawing, ending at a pillar – the entrance to a house burnt down fifteen years before, or so they told me one day, with barely concealed ardour, almost as if they had done it themselves. A ‘planters’ estate’ they called it.

The rain passes and brings with it a weight of air. We pull on our wax jackets and step down again into the glistening bog.

Two hours have passed and the sun is shining. Our coats lie in a mound to the left of Rhatigan who is stooping, in the distance, to the tripod. We have set out fifteen equilateral triangles across this parcel of land and Mehl and Kolim now trudge back to the auto to collect further armfuls of stakes.

It was fifteen years ago when I first met Rhatigan. He was on a state research trip to Kirov, visiting the largest of Glav Torf’s peat-extraction works and power stations. He came with another Irish engineer, referred to as Oleeri, and their chief, a large man called Glenin. They had flown in some days earlier from Berlin and had been brought on a tour of institutions in Moscow, then Leningrad, then east to us. I was the de facto receiving dignitary at Kirov. The vice- minister for peat had fallen ill and I was dispatched to take his place. I was then instructed to stay there – one of many confusing and paranoiac demotions during that decade. In Moscow they met Minister Malenkov, then a senior state official, a brute, for whom a few years later I would work briefly at the Special Committee on Rocket Technology. At Kirov, we received message ahead that none of these visiting Irish men drank alcohol, but that luckily they all smoked. We wondered what strangers from distant lands might say to each other over the course of an evening if they cannot drink together. This Rhatigan was with us to learn how to ‘win the peat’, as he said often.

Each day he’d wake at four, call us from our rooms and would not relent until after ten in the evening. Each night, as if marking the day’s progress, he’d drink, with a militant moderation, a glass of milk in our company, before retiring to bed. On his first evening, as if trying to impress on us the special difficulties he faced back in...