The Last Samurai

He returned to a civilisation which in the interim had known John Travolta and the Bee Gees and he published a book in which he spoke of the silence of the lost tribe. Then people demonstrated that he could not have been where he said he had been and people who had travelled in China said that it was not like that at all and people who had climbed those strange mountains said they were in some completely different part of the country and anyway he could not have climbed one in ten hours the way he had said. Others argued that a tiny peasant village would not have had the quantities of silk he claimed to have requisitioned, and would not have had the battered old Singer sewing machine he had claimed was used, & would have had no use for hard currency even if it had. Others said kiteflying had been banned as a bourgeois practice by the Red Guard. Then HC laughed scornfully and said he certainly did not propose the lost tribe to be a subject of a documentary but if he should ever decide this was a suitable fate for it he would at once publish an accurate itinerary of his travels to facilitate location of that wandering people. Then of course there was a great hue and cry and people tried to investigate where he had really been for the public had a right to know, but no one was able to discover anything apart from the fact that he had walked into the consulate in Peshawar.

That book said Sibylla had come out in 1982 and HC had done this and that for a while. She said that she had met him at an Oxford party in the Fraenkel Room in Corpus Christi College. Skarp-Hedin had been talking to Robin Nisbet and so Sibylla had talked for a time to HC. I said Skarp-Hedin? and Sib said One of my boyfriends his real name did not do justice to his pale ill-starred look. She said that HC had spent years with the tribe though they had offered no encouragement to stay and even after his first breakthrough he could understand little or nothing.

Then one day everything had changed. They had he said a barbarous initiation ceremony which he would not describe. Afterwards many of the boys required prolonged nursing. One day as he lurked behind a tent he heard one of the initiates say something to his nurse, and then when she laughed correct himself. He had understood everything in a flash. It was the most wonderful thing he’d ever come across. There was an elaborate system of case-endings he said which was used only by women—the thing was quite extraordinary, as if you had at once for example a group of people speaking Arabic as it is written and another group speaking it as it is spoken. Amazing! And it was the same for moods and tenses. There was an indicative, past present and future, and an imperative, and these were used only by men—and then there were what he would call by analogy the subjunctive and the optative, and these were used only by women. It was very confusing, he said, for when presently they began to speak to him at last he would find that if he asked a question of a man, no matter how slim or even non-existent the knowledge might be on which an answer might be given, it would always be given as a statement of fact—whereas you might ask a woman whether it was raining outside and she would commit herself only to saying that it might be so. He said that when he worked it out he lay flat on his back in the grass and laughed till he cried.

Now the Fraenkel Room at this time said Sib had a long table covered with a mauve corded cloth like a cheap Sears bedspread, and a black and white photo of Fraenkel on the wall.

HC took one look at the picture and another at the people there and he said Oh my God and walked out.

That is, said Sib, he said Oh my God let’s get out of here, and though she knew Skarp-Hedin would complain that she did not love him she had said Yes let’s get out and they had both walked out.

HC had gone off again she said and now he was back. Sibylla said of HC that he could go for months without human contact, and if he made contact the first thing he wanted to know was how his interlocutor handled sequence of tenses, and the second was whether he used a subjunctive.

I said: What happened to RD?

Sibylla said: Oh he got a job on one of the dictionaries. You can see him around the Bodleian.

I said: Was he at the seminar?

She said: Oh he goes to all the seminars.

I said: Did they say anything?

She said: Well, RD asked the speaker a question about Phrynichus.

I said: Did they say anything to each OTHER?

She said: Of course they didn’t say anything to each other. As soon as HC saw who was there he said Oh my God let’s get out of here.

I said: Did you play chess?

She said: No, we didn’t play chess.

I thought about this for a while and I said: What’s the youngest anyone has ever gone to Oxford? Sibylla said she didn’t know, in the Middle Ages it was more like a boarding school & she thought a lot of boys would be sent there at 12 or so. She thought a girl had gone to read mathematics at the age of 10 a few years ago.

I said: 10!