Aan Zee

CHAPTER 1“No wise man can tie water into a knot on the edges of his garment/ No sage knows the number of grains of sand on earth” -- from Ifa Divination Poetry As he was operating the xerox machine, Hubert stared out of the window of the library onto a pompous landscape made of marble. The architecture -- monolithic, posturing, enduring -- was Hitler's unacknowledged redemption in the very country that had fought him to death. Young students with bleached sneakers crossed the plaza. In the absence of a breeze, the flag on the big pole was tired; the stars and stripes were jumbled up and half-hidden in the folds of the fabric. Hubert copied a page of the International Science Citation Index. It listed the citations of his own work by other scientists: an entire page-long column in the finest print. He received great satisfaction from seeing his work acknowledged; the heaviness of these orange-colored volumes seemed to signify the profound mark he had left in the history of human endeavor. Studying the page he had just copied, he was quite startled to realize that the Belovski, H. listed there was, in reality, the composite of four scientists, only one of whom was himself. The decision of the publishers to list initials rather than first names for economy had thrown together the scientific output of four Belovskis who were probably at odds with one another in all imaginable attributes, such as hairstyle, age, and habitat. What was worse, every trace of gender was lost, and the initial H. had become a fountain of two streams of speculations sharply divided by the s*x of their bearers: namely one including all those dull co-Huberts, Herberts, Henrys, and Hanks and the other one sparkling with Henriettas, Heathers, Hildegards, and Helgas. The first H. Belovski, in neurophysiology, had jumped onto the stage sometime in 1963. There was a seemingly timid H. Belovski in the field of agriculture who had launched a paper in 1967 on the use of pesticides in the Finger Lakes, which was widely cited for a brief period but then disappeared into oblivion. Meanwhile, the neuro-physiological Belovski had gathered quite a following, as witnessed by twenty-odd papers in reputable journals, until, presumably, a high administrative position separated him from his coauthors' quest for truth. He might have become a functionary in some professional society, administrator of grant monies, co-editor of journals with names that had a pregnant sound to them, such as Nerve, Soul, Self, or Applied Conscience. During the decline of the second Belovski's scientific output, H. Belovski proper stepped in, the one whose H. stood for “Hubert.” At once, he recognized his papers in the physics of turbulence, and his first article was entitled “The Birth of a Twister.” He was one of those scientists of whom it is said that they are spending their life proving their Ph.D. thesis right, and the birth of the twister gave rise to many afterbirths in papers, letters to the editor, abstracts, and reviews, finally to be crowned by a monograph on “A Twister's Sudden Birth,” subtitled “The Onset of Turbulent Phenomena in Meteorology.” The book was a phenomenal flop; it earned him exactly $324.50 in royalties before it disappeared from the bookshelves for good. The fourth H. Belovski was a curious fellow who dwelled on organic compounds. He worked himself up from two-ring compounds to those with three and five and then landed himself safely in the lap of a pharmaceutical company. What Hubert had never hoped to accomplish in his lifetime materialized in front of his eyes: here was the true genius H. Belovski, beloved scholar of arts and letters, equally accomplished in fields as widely separated as the science of the grain and the science of the brain. The Science Citation Index had created a universal mind bearing his very own name. Coming centuries, unable to grasp the subtleties of citation listings in the twentieth century and the obliterating need for economy, would rank him with none less than Leonardo da Vinci. He had the sensation of standing in an enormous cathedral and feeling dwarfed by the columns and beams of light coming in from the windows; in reality, he was a nothing, a speck of dust that was barely visible and could be blown away by the whisper of a prayer. “Operator, operator, out of paper,” the machine screamed. A red light started flashing, demanding attendance by an unspecified operator, much like a little boy who gets in trouble and calls his mother by her generic name. Hubert pressed a button to activate a tiny bell that was used on this occasion. Anticipating the approach of benevolently smiling library personnel, he hastily hid the traces of his self-indulgence under one of the heavy volumes. When the motherly figure of the senior duplication technician arrived, Hubert found himself unequipped to answer the question he was sure to be asked: what kind of business had caused the machine to run out of paper, and since he evidently cared enough to wait, what other copy-worthy material was still to follow? However, instead of starting such inquiries, she simply smiled under her silver-chained, silver-plated glasses, and said, “Hi,” with the open-hearted sympathy of a compatriot of letters. Paper was added, and no questions were asked, but the “Hi” reverberated in his mind because it had the inviting ring of a family gathering to it. That “Hi” was inviting and expectant and somehow Shakespearean in that it seemed to project all persons irrespective of their professions, creeds, or classes -- beggars and kings alike -- onto the same stage of humanity. On that stage, they might all sit in soft easy chairs by a fireplace and turn pages of voluminous novels, only clearing their throats intermittently to give each other comforting signals of the I'm-here-are-you-also-here? sort. There would be the fine tingling sounds of her silver chain. In that world, there was no hunger, no thirst, no itching; just boundless harmony between cerebral and bodily existence.