Shibumi, page 20
One morning, after he had passed six months in silence in that cell, he was startled out of his meditation by the sound of the door being unlocked. His first reaction was to be annoyed, and a little fearful, at this rupture in reliable routine. Later he learned that this visit was not a break in routine, but only the final element in the cycles that measured his life out. Once every six months he was to be visited by an elderly, overworked civil servant whose duty it was to attend to the social and psychological needs of the inmates of this enlightened prison. The old man introduced himself as Mr. Hirata and told Nicholai that they had permission to speak. He sat on the edge of Nicholas's low bed-shelf, placed his overstuffed briefcase beside him, opened it, fumbled within for a fresh questionnaire, and inserted it into the spring clamp of the clipboard on his lap. In an atonic, bored voice, he asked questions about Nicholas's health and well-being, and with every nod of Nicholas's head, he made a check mark beside the appropriate question.
After scanning with the tip of his pen to make sure he had checked off all the required questions, Mr. Hirata looked up with moist, fatigued eyes and asked if Mr. Hel (Heru) had any formal requests or complaints to make.
Nicholai automatically shook his head... then he changed his mind. "Yes," he tried to say. But his throat was thick and only a creaking sound came out. It occurred to him suddenly that he had fallen out of the habit of speaking. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Yes, sir. I would like books, paper, brushes, ink."
Mr. Hirata's thick, hooked eyebrows arched, and he cast his eyes to the side as he sucked in a great breath between his teeth. Clearly, the request was extravagant. It would be very difficult. It would make trouble. But he dutifully registered the request in the space provided for that purpose.
Nicholai was surprised to realize how desperately he wanted the books and paper, although he knew that he was making the error of hoping for something and risking disappointment, thus damaging the fine balance of his twilight existence in which desire had been submerged and hope diminished to the size of expectation. He plunged ahead recklessly. "It is my only chance, sir."
"So? Only chance?"
"Yes, sir. I have nothing..." Nicholai growled and cleared his throat again. Speaking was so difficult! "I have nothing to occupy my mind. And I believe I am going mad."
"So?"
"I have found myself thinking often of suicide."
"Ah." Mr. Hirata frowned deeply and sucked in his breath. Why must there always be problems such as these? Problems for which there are no clear instructions in the manual of regulations? "I shall report your request, Mr. Heru."
From the tone, Nicholai knew that the report would be made without energy, and his request would fall into the bureaucratic abyss. He had noticed that Mr. Hirata's glance fell often upon his battered face, where the scars and swellings of the beatings he had taken were still purplish, and each time the glance had flicked away with discomfort and embarrassment.
Nicholai touched his fingers to his broken eyebrow. "It was not your guards, sir. Most of these wounds came from my interrogation at the hands of the Americans."
"Most of them? And the rest?"
Nicholai looked down at the floor and cleared his throat. His voice was raspy and weak, and he needed to be glib and persuasive just now. He promised himself that he would not let his voice fall into disuse again through lack of exercise. "Yes, most. The rest... I must confess that I have done some harm to myself. In despair I have run my head against the wall. It was a stupid and shameful thing to do, but with nothing to occupy my mind..." He allowed his voice to trail off, and he kept his eyes on the floor.
Mr. Hirata was disturbed as he considered the ramifications of madness and suicide on his career, particularly now when he was only a few years from retirement. He promised he would do what he could, and he left the cell troubled by that most harrowing of torments for civil servants: the need to make an independent decision.
Two days later, upon returning from his twenty minutes of fresh air, Nicholai found a paper-wrapped package at the foot of his iron bed. It contained three old books that smelled of mildew, a fifty-sheet pad of paper, a bottle of Western-style ink, and a cheap but brand-new fountain pen.
When he examined the books, Nicholai was crestfallen. They were useless. Mr. Hirata had gone to a secondhand bookstore and had purchased (out of his own money, to avoid the administrative complexity of a formal requisition for articles that might turn out to be prohibited) the three cheapest books he could find. Having no language but Japanese, and knowing from Hel's record that he read French, Mr. Hirata bought what he assumed were French books from a stack that had once been part of the library of a missionary priest, confiscated by the government during the war. The priest had been Basque, and so were the books. All printed before 1920, one was a description of Basque life written for children and including stiff, touched-up photographs and etchings of rural scenes. Although the book was in French, it had no apparent value to Nicholai. The second book was a slim volume of Basque dictons, parables, and folktales written in Basque on the left-hand page, and in French on the right. The third was a French/Basque dictionary compiled in 1898 by a priest from Haute Soule, who attempted, in a turgid and lengthy introduction, to identify scholarship in the Basque language with the virtues of piety and humility.
Nicholai tossed the books aside and squatted in the corner of the cell he reserved for meditation. Having made the error of hoping for something, he paid the penalty of disappointment. He found himself weeping bitterly, and soon chest-racking sobs were escaping from him involuntarily. He moved over to the toilet corner, so that the guards might not see him break down like this. He was surprised and frightened to discover how close to the surface was this terrible despair, despite the fact that he had trained himself to live by taut routine and avoid all thoughts of the past and the future. Worn out at last and empty of tears, he brought himself to middle-density meditation, and when he was calmed, he faced his problem.
Question: Why had he hoped for the books so desperately that he made himself vulnerable to the pains of disappointment? Answer: Without admitting it to himself, he had realized that his intellect, honed through Gô training, had something of the properties of a series-wound motor which, if it bore no load, would run ever faster and faster until it burned itself out. This is why he had diminished his life through rigid routine, and why he passed more time than was necessary in the pleasant vacuum of meditation. He had no one to speak to, and he even avoided thought. To be sure, impressions passed unsummoned through his mind, but they were, for the greater part, surd images lacking the linear logic of worded thought. He had not been conscious of avoiding the use of his mind for fear it would run toward panic and despair in this solitary and silent cell, but that was why he had leapt at the chance to have books and paper, why he had yearned terribly for the company and mental occupation of the books.
And these were the books? A children's travelogue; a thin volume of folk wisdom; and a dictionary compiled by a preciously pious priest!
And most of it in Basque, a language Nicholai had barely heard of, the most ancient language of Europe and no more related to any other language in the world than the Basque people, with their peculiar blood-type distribution and cranial formation, are unrelated to any other race.
Nicholai squatted in silence and confronted his problem. There was only one answer: he must somehow use these books. With them, he would teach himself Basque. After all, he had much more than the Rosetta stone here; he had page-by-page translation, and a dictionary. His mind was trained to the abstract crystalline geometry of Gô. He had worked in cryptography. He would construct a Basque grammar. And he would keep his other languages alive too. He would translate the Basque folktales into Russian, English, Japanese, German. In his mind, he could translate them also into his ragged street Chinese, but he could go no further, for he had never learned to write the language.
He stripped the bedding off and made a desk of the iron shelf beside which he knelt as he arranged his books and pen and paper. At first he attempted to hold rein on his excitement, lest they decide to take his treasures back, plunging him into what Saint-Exupery had called the torture of hope. Indeed, his next exercise period in the narrow lane was a torment, and he returned having steeled himself to find that they had confiscated his books. But when they were still there, he abandoned himself to the joys of mental work.
After his discovery that he had all but lost the use of his voice, he initiated the practice of talking to himself for several hours each day, inventing social situations or recounting aloud the political or intellectual histories of each of the nations whose language he spoke. At first, he was self-conscious about talking to himself, not wanting the guards to think his mind was going. But soon thinking aloud became a habit, and he would mutter to himself throughout the day. From his years in prison came Hel's lifelong characteristic of speaking in a voice so soft it was nearly a whisper and was rendered understandable only by his great precision of pronunciation.
In later years, this precise, half-whispered voice was to have a daunting and chilling effect on the people with whom his bizarre profession brought him in contact. And for those who made the fatal error of acting treacherously against him, the stuff of nightmare was hearing his soft, exact voice speak to them out of the shadows.
The first dicton in the book of adages was "Zahar hitzak, zuhur hitzak," which was translated as "Old sayings are wise sayings." His inadequate dictionary provided him only with the word zahar meaning old. And the first notes of his amateur little grammar were:
Zuhur = wise.
Basque plural either "ak" or "zak"
Radical for "adages/sayings" is either "hit" or "hitz."
Note: verb "to say/to speak" probably built on this radical.
Note: is possible that parallel structures do not require verb of simple being.
And from this meager beginning Nicholai constructed a grammar of the Basque language word by word, concept by concept, structure by structure. From the first, he forced himself to pronounce the language he was learning, to keep it alive and vital in his mind. Without guidance, he made several errors that were to haunt his spoken Basque forever, much to the amusement of his Basque friends. For instance, he decided that the h would be mute, as in French. Also, he had to choose how he would pronounce the Basque x from a range of possibilities. It might have been a z, or a sh, or a tch, or a guttural Germanic ch. He arbitrarily chose the latter. Wrongly, to his subsequent embarrassment.
His life was now full, even crowded, with events he had to leave before he tired of them. His day began with breakfast and a bath of cold water. After burning off excess physical energy with isometric exercise, he would allow himself a half hour of middle-density meditation. Then the study of Basque occupied him until supper, after which he exercised again until his body was worn and tired. Then another half hour of meditation. Then sleep.
His biweekly runs in the narrow exercise lane were taken out of time for Basque study. And each day, as he ate or exercised, he talked to himself in one of his languages to keep them fresh and available. As he had seven languages, he assigned one day of the week to each, and his personal weekly calendar read: Monday, BTOPHNK, lai-bai-sam, jeudi, Freitag, Larunbat, and Nitiyoo-bi.
The most significant event of Nicholai Hel's years in solitary imprisonment was the flowering of his proximity sense. This happened quite without his will and, in its incipient stages, without his conscious recognition. It is assumed by those who study paraperceptual phenomena that the proximity sense was, early in the development of man, as vigorous and common as the five other perceptual tools, but it withered through disuse as man developed away from his prey/hunter existence. Too, the extraphysical nature of this "sixth sense" derived from central cortex energies that are in diametric contradiction to rational reasoning, which style of understanding and arranging, experience was ultimately to characterize the man animal. To be sure, certain primitive cultures still maintain rudimentary proximity skills, and even thoroughly acculturated people occasionally receive impulses from the vestigial remnants of their proximity system and find themselves tingling with the awareness that somebody is staring at them from behind, or somebody is thinking of them, or they experience vague, generalized senses of well-being or doom; but these are passing and gossamer sensations that are shrugged away because they are not and cannot be understood within the framework of pedestrian logical comprehension, and because acceptance of them would undermine the comfortable conviction that all phenomena are within the rational spectrum.
Occasionally, and under circumstances only partly understood, the proximity sense will emerge fully developed in a modern man. In many ways, Nicholai Hel was characteristic of those few who have flourishing proximity systems. All of his life had been intensely mental and internal. He had been a mystic and had experienced ecstatic transportation, and therefore was not uncomfortable with the extralogical. Gô had trained his intellect to conceive in terms of liquid permutations, rather than the simple problem/solution grid of Western cultures. Then a shocking event in his life had left him isolated within himself for a protracted period of time. All of these factors are consonant with those characterizing that one person in several million who exist in our time with the additional gift (or burden) of proximity sense.
This primordial perception system developed so slowly and regularly in Nicholai that he was unaware of it for fully a year. His prison existence was measured off in so many short, redundant bits that he had no sense of the passage of time outside the prison walls. He never dwelt upon himself, and he was never bored. In seeming contradiction of physical laws, time is heavy only when it is empty.
His conscious recognition of his gift was occasioned by a visit by Mr. Hirata. Nicholai was working over his books when he lifted his head and said aloud to himself (in German, for it was Friday), "That's odd. Why is Mr. Hirata coming to visit me?" Then he looked at his improvised calendar and realized that, indeed, six months had passed since Mr. Hirata's last visit.
Several minutes later, he broke off from his study again to wonder who this stranger with Mr. Hirata was, because the person whose approach he sensed was not one of the regular guards, each of whom had a characteristic forepresence that Nicholai recognized.
Shortly later, the cell door was unlocked, and Mr. Hirata entered, accompanied by a young man who was in training for social work within the prison system, and who diffidently stood apart while the older man ran routinely through his list of questions and meticulously checked off each response on his clipboard sheet.
In response to the final catch-all question, Nicholai requested more paper and ink, and Mr. Hirata pulled in his neck and sucked air between his teeth to indicate the overwhelming difficulty of such a request. But there was something in his attitude that left Nicholai confident that his request would be fulfilled.
When Mr. Hirata was preparing to leave, Nicholai asked him, "Excuse me, sir. Did you pass near my cell about ten minutes ago?"
"Ten minutes ago? No. Why do you ask?"
"You didn't pass near my cell? Well then, did you think about me?"
The two prison officials exchanged glances. Mr. Hirata had informed his apprentice of this prisoner's precarious mental condition bordering on the suicidal. "No," the senior man began, "I don't believe I—ah, a moment! Why yes! Just before entering this wing, I spoke to the young man here about you."
"Ah," Nicholai said. "That explains it, then."
Uneasy glances were exchanged. "Explains what?"
Nicholai realized that it would be both difficult and unkind to introduce something so abstract and ethereal as the proximity sense to a civil service mentality, so he shook his head and said, "Nothing. It's not important."
Mr. Hirata shrugged and departed.
For the rest of that day and all of the next, Nicholai contemplated this ability he had discovered in himself to intercept parasensually the physical proximity and directed concentration of people. During his twenty minutes of exercise in the narrow court beneath a rectangle of stormy sky, he closed his eyes as he walked and tested if he could concentrate on some feature of the walls and know when he had approached it. He discovered that he could and, in fact, that he could spin around with his eyes closed to disorient himself and still concentrate on a crack in the wall or an oddly shaped stone and walk directly to it, then reach out and touch within several inches of it. So this proximity sense worked to some degree with inanimate objects as well. While doing this, he felt a flow of human concentration directed at him, and he knew, although he could not see past the sky-reflecting glass of the guard tower, that his antics were being observed and commented on by the men there. He could distinguish between the qualities of their intercepted concentration and tell that they were two in number, a strong-willed man and a man with weaker will—or who was, perhaps, relatively indifferent to the carryings-on of a crazed inmate.
Back in his cell, he pondered this gift further. How long had he had it? Where did it come from? What were its potential uses? So far as he remembered at first, it had developed during this last year in prison. And so slowly had it formed that he couldn't recall its coming. For some time now he had known, without thinking anything of it, when the guards were approaching his cell, and whether it was the short one with the wall eyes, or the Polynesian-looking one who probably had Ainu blood. And he had known which of the trustees was bringing his breakfast almost immediately upon waking.
