The Discovery Of Slowness by Sten Nadolny Read Free Book Online

comfortable in detention. The stones in the cellar were still wintry. Lying on his back, John spoke to Sagals through the vaulted ceiling – to the spirit who had written all the books in the world, to the creator of all libraries.
    Burnaby had shouted: ‘That’s how you all reward me!’ Why ‘you all’? It was only John in whose grip he had wriggled. And Hopkinson murmuring, full of admiration, ‘Man alive, are you strong!’
    He wouldn’t be able to stay at school. Where could he wait for Matthew? He should have shown up long ago. Better get out as soon as he could. Hide on a barge under a load of grain. Let them think he had drowned in the Lud.
    In the port of Hull he could start on a coal-carrying ship, like the great James Cook.
    There was nothing doing with Tom. Sherard Lound would have gone along. But he was now hoeing beets in the field.
    While John was taking counsel with Sagals, the cellar door opened and Dr Orme entered, his head way down between his shoulders as though he wanted to show that a school cellar wasn’t really designed for teachers.
    â€˜I’ve come to pray with you,’ said Dr Orme. He looked at John very carefully, but not in an unfriendly way. His eyelids clapped open and shut as though, under great strain, they were trying to fan air into his brain. ‘Your books and your notebook were delivered to me,’ he said. ‘Tell me, who is Sagals?’

4
The Voyage to Lisbon
    N ow he was on a ship in the middle of the ocean! ‘And I’m not too late for this!’ he whispered, and he smiled at the horizon. He joyfully hit the rail with his fist, again and again, as though he wanted to prescribe a rhythm for the ship in which to pitch her way to Lisbon.
    The Channel coast was out of sight; the fog was only a thin strip of mist. The rigging stood up straight or ran crosswise from side to side. At some point it always led to the top, making the viewer bend his head and neck back to follow it. It wasn’t the ship that bore the masts but the sails that pulled and lifted the ship, which seemed to hold on only with a thousand lines. What ships he had seen in the Channel, elaborately rigged ships with names like Leviathan and Agamemnon . Since the gravestones of St James’s, he had not found so worthy a place for letters as the bow or stern of a ship. In the end, a gigantic ship of the line had emerged from the fog; they had almost been rammed in spite of bells and foghorns.
    Before him lay the sea, the good skin, the true surface of the entire planet. John had seen a globe in the library at Louth: the continents were furry and jagged; they locked into each other and spread out to try to cover as much of the globe as they could. In the harbour at Hull he had observed that pyramids of wooden planks were built in the water to prove the land’s dominance over the sea. ‘Dolphins,’ they called them, to cause even more confusion. The Dutch sailor said: ‘That’s no dolphin, that’s a Duckdalbe – a breakwater.’ And since he didn’t grin or wink but only spat as usual, it had to be right. John asked him to repeat it and learned the word. He also discovered that the French enjoyed having a long reach and that since the Revolution the concave mirrors oftheir lighthouses had been made of pure silver. John felt fine. Perhaps all this was already the longed-for freedom.
    In Hull, over a dish of jellied meat, he had mused about freedom. One had it if one didn’t have to tell others in advance what one planned to do. Or if one kept quiet about it.
    Half a freedom: if one had to announce one’s plans in advance. Slavery: if others could foretell what one would do.
    All reflections led back to the conclusion that it would be better to come to some understanding with Father than simply to stay away. One could become a midshipman only through connections. Since Matthew had not returned, only Father