A Table of Green Fields (2 page)

—And what is
beth,
Micah?

—But Teacher, Yeshua said, we have not learned what is to be known about
alef,
and here we are hastening on to
beth. 
Zakkaiah's mouth fell open.

—So? he said. You want me to forget that you were having a late breakfast rather than paying attention to the lesson?

—Oh no, Teacher.

—I'm listening to what you have to say about
alef,
if you're quite through eating figs.

Yeshua worked his fingers in the air until there was a fig in them.

—Have a fig for yourself, O Teacher. And another. And yet another. They are from the great tree down the street, and are the juiciest and tastiest figs in all Jerusalem.

Zakkaiah stood with the three figs in his cupped hands, staring at Yeshua, speechless. He looked at the figs and he looked at Yeshua.

—My father sent them to you, O Teacher. They are good for the bowels, he says.

A silence.

—I will thank him when I see him, Zakkaiah said in a soft voice.

—
Alef,
Yeshua said. I will recite about
alef.

There was an uneasiness in the class. Zakkaiah was obviously thinking several things at once.

—
Alef!
Yeshua said in a voice pitched bright. In the
alef
there's a
yud
up here, and a
yud
down there, with a line between. As with all boundaries, this line both joins and separates. The
yud
above is the Creator of the universe, of the 
earth, the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars. The
yud
below is us, the people. The line between is the Torah, the prophets, the law. It is the eye for seeing what we can of the Creator. He is evident in his work, the world.

—You are reciting a commentary, Zakkaiah said, but whose? —I'm making it up, Yeshua said. The Creator made us creators, too. Look at the spider knitting its web and at the bird building its nest. Every work has a maker.

—Is it the blessed Hillel your father has taught you?

—Who is Hillel? The alphabet is all pictures. You can look at them and see what they are: a house, a camel. The
alef 
is a picture of the whole world. Cool water on dusty feet, that's a grand thing, and the smell of wood shavings and a crust dunked in wine, and honey, and dancing to the tabor and flute. These good things belong down here, but they come from up there. That's why there's a line between the top
yud
and the bottom
yud.
Everything has a fence, so we can know where it is. A house has rooms, a garden has a wall.

Zakkaiah sat on his stool, hard. He stuck the fingers of his left hand into his beard. His right hand held three figs.

—But the fun of the line between the
yuds,
Yeshua went on, is that it's a fence only if you look at it that way. It is really a road, and like all roads it goes both ways. You have to know which way you're going. Look at the anemones that make the fields red all of a sudden after the first rain of the wet season. The grand dresses at Solomon's court were not such a sight, and they were made with looms and needles, whereas the master of the universe made the anemones overnight, with a word. You can get near the line with much labor, or you can cross it with a step.

—I told you Yeshua's
meshuggeh,
Daniel whispered to Yaakov. —Why don't you eat your figs, O Teacher? Yeshua asked. I have more.

2

 

On a blustery late afternoon in March 1842, Professor James Joseph Sylvester of the University of Virginia was walking along a brick path across the lawn in front of Jefferson's Rotunda. He had been brought from London to teach mathematics only the November before, and still wondered at these neoclassical buildings set in an American forest, and at the utilitarian rowhouse dormitories, at the black slaves who dressed the students and carried their books to class. He taught arithmetic and algebra from Lacroix's serviceable manual, trigonometry, geometry, the calculus differential and integral. Next term he was offering a course from Poisson's
Mechanics
and Laplace's
Mecanique celeste.

He was a member of the Royal Society. At age twenty-seven he had distinguished himself with so brilliant a series of mathematical papers that he had been invited to come to Virginia. Jefferson's plan was to bring the best minds of Europe to dwell in his academic village, as he liked to call it. And now Jefferson was dead, leaving his faculty of European geologists, chemists, linguists, historians, and mathematicians to carry on his work of civilizing Virginia and her sister states.

Professor Sylvester's problem was one he had never before met. His students, all healthy, strapping young men from the richest of families, were illiterate. They knew nothing. He could scarcely understand a word they said. They came late to class, if at all, accompanied by their slaves. They talked with each other while Professor Sylvester lectured. The strangest thing about them was that they did not want to learn. Take Ballard. He was from Louisiana, some great plantation with hundreds of slaves. He was a handsome lad, beautifully dressed. Yet if called upon, he would say:

—I could answer that, Fesser, if I wanted to, but frankly I'm not minded to do so.

—Is this not insolence, Mr. Ballard?

—If you were a gentleman, Fesser, you'd know how to talk to one, now wouldn't you?

A roar of laughter.

He had gone to the faculty. They told him that the students had reduced Jefferson to tears, that they had shot three professors already, that he had best deal with them as patiently as he knew how. There was no support to be expected from Charlottesville, which was of the opinion that the faculty was composed of atheists, Catholics, Jews, Jesuits. A Hungarian professor had had to leave town in the dark of night.

They dueled, and fought with Bowie knives. They drank themselves into insensibility. They came to class drunk. When Sylvester tried to find out why this was allowed, he was reminded that the students were aristocrats.

—Mr. Ballard, will you rehearse Euclid's proofs for the Pythagorean theorem of the right triangle?

—Suck my dick.

He had had to ask what the words meant, and blushed. On the advice of a fellow professor he had bought a sword cane. One never knew. He was paid handsomely, but what worried him was that the papers he had been writing were harder and harder to finish. He was famous for averaging a mathematical paper a month. He knew that he had the reputation among his peers of having the most fertile genius of his generation. He was a Mozart of mathematics. He was finding it embarrassing to keep up his correspondence with the few men in Germany, France, and England who understood his work. These barbarian louts with their slaves and dueling pistols were making him sterile, and that tore at his soul more than their childish disrespect and leaden ignorance.

Why were they here, at a university, at least a university in name and intent? The French professor was slowly losing his mind, as none of his students had learned two words together of French. They gambled all night, knifed each other at dawn, drank until they puked.

And on this March afternoon Professor Sylvester found 
himself approaching the brothers Weeks, Bill and Al, or Mr. William and Mr. Alfred Weeks, gentlemen, as he must address them in class. They wore yellow and green frock coats, with flowery weskits. They were smoking long black cigars, and carried their top hats in their hands.

—You ain't a-going to speak to us, Jewboy?

Thus William, the elder of the brothers.

—Sir! said Sylvester.

—Yes, Fesser Jew Cockney, said Alfred. If you're going to teach rithmatic and that damn calc'lus shit to gentlemen, you ought to take off your hat to them when you meet us on the lawn, oughtn't he, Bill?

—Sir! said Sylvester.

—May be, said William Weeks, that if we pulled the fesser's Jew hat down over his Jew chin, he'd remember next time to speak to gentlemen.

Sylvester drew his sword from his cane with one graceful movement, and with another drove it into Alfred Weeks's chest.

Alfred screamed.

William ran.

Alfred fell backward, groaning:

—O Jesus! I have met my fatal doom!

Professor Sylvester coolly sheathed his sword, tapped it on the brick walk to assure that it was firmly fitted in his cane, turned on his heel, and walked away. He went to his rooms, packed a single suitcase, and walked to the posthouse to wait for a stage to Washington. This he boarded, when it came.

Alfred Weeks writhed on the brick walk, crying like a baby, calling for instant revenge. William came back with a doctor, who was mystified.

—Have you been bit by a m'skeeter, son? They ain't no wound. There's a little tear in your weskit, as I can see, and a kind of scratch here on your chest, like a pinprick.

—You mean I ain't killed dead?

Sylvester retrenched in New York City, where he prac
ticed law. The mathematical papers began to be written again. He was called to the Johns Hopkins University, where he founded the first school of mathematics in the United States, where he arranged for the first woman to enter an American graduate school, where he argued with Charles Sanders Peirce, and where he introduced the Hebrew letters
shin
and
teth
into mathematical annotation.

Years later, the great Georg Cantor, remembering Sylvester, introduced the letter
alef
as a symbol of the transfinite.

3

 

As we descended westward, we saw the fen country on our right, almost all covered with water like a sea, the Michaelmas rains having been very great that year, they had sent down great floods of water from the upland countries, and those fens being, as may be very properly said, the sink of no less than thirteen counties; that is to say, that all the water, or most part of the water of thirteen counties falls into them.

The people of that place, which if they be born there they call the Breedlings, sometimes row from one spot to another, and sometimes wade.

In these fens are abundance of those admirable pieces of art called duckoys; that is to say, places so adapted for the harbor and shelter of wild fowl, and then furnished with decoy ducks, who are taught to allure and entice their kind to the places they belong to. It is incredible what quantities of wild fowl of all sorts they take in these duckoys every week during the season, duck, mallard, teal, and widgeon.

As these fens are covered with water, so I observed too that they generally at this latter part of the year appear also covered with fogs, so that when the downs and higher grounds of the adjacent country were gilded by the beams of the sun, the Isle of Ely looked as if wrapped up in blankets, and nothing to be seen, but now and then, the lanthorn or cupola of Ely Minster.

 
4

Now the bike that was idling down the sheepwalk to the cove as sweet as the hum of a bee was a Brough, we saw, Willy and I. The rider of it lifted his goggles, which had stenciled a mask of clean flesh on the dust and ruddle of his face. A long face with shy blue eyes it was, and his light hair was blown back. He wore a Royal Air Force uniform and was, like we judged, a private.

Willy asked if he was lost or had come on purpose, after naming the bike a Brough and the uniform RAF, showing that he knew both by sight.

—Right and right, the motorcyclist said.

He spoke Oxford.

—I'm here on purpose if I've found Tuke the painter's, though I shan't disturb him if he's busy. I wrote him last week.

—Aye, the penny postal, I remembered. He was interested in it. —Name's Ross, the cyclist said.

—Sainsbury here, Willy said. My mate's Georgie Fouracre.

We all nodded, fashionable-like.

—Mr. Tuke, I said, is down yonder, in the cove, with Leo Marshall, painting of him in and out of a dory. If your postal named today, he'll be expecting you. We get the odd visitor from London, time to time, and some from up north and the continent.

So we rolled the motorbike down to Mr. Tuke and Leo. The canvas was on the easel, the dory on the strand, and Leo was drawing off worsted stockings, brown as a nut all over.

For all of his having the lines of a Dane, this airman Ross was uncommonly short. The crinkle of Mr. Tuke's eyes showed how pleased he was. His blue beret and moustache, his French blouse and sailor's breeks made one kind of contrast with the tight drab uniform Ross seemed to be bound in, with no give at all anywhere, and horse-blanket tough, and Leo's want of a stitch made another.

Ross was interested in the picture on the easel, which was 
the one that got named
Morning Splendour,
two of us in a dory and me on the strand as naked as the day I came into the world. It hangs in Baden-Powell House, in London, bought by the Boy Scouts. The color harmonies are the same as those of the more famous
August Blue
that's in the Tate.

This visit of Ross's was a summer morning in 1922. And a nice little watercolor came of it, of Ross undressing for a swim. Except that it isn't Ross.

What was it about him? He was at ease with us, as many are not, but he wasn't at ease with himself. Tuke got on with his painting. He posed Leo with a leg up on the dory.

—And your hand on your knee, just so. Turn a bit so that the light runs gold down your chest and left thigh.

He explained to Ross how he made quick watercolor studies, light being fugitive.

—There's nothing here, you know, but color. Light on a boy's back can be as mercurial as light on the sea.

Ross, it turned out as they talked, knew a lot about painters. He said that Augustus John is a crack draftsman but that of light and air he knows nothing.

Tuke smiled, and then he laughed, with his head back.