Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Just one leg?”

“I give half price if you buy two.”

“A hundred baht?” she guessed.

“Not even left shoe without sock do I sell for hundred baht! This is high-demand product.”

Nevertheless, the legs sat around (stood around) for days before he found a buyer in a cuddly Cameroonian named Lovemore Ngubu, who planned to paint the legs brown and ship them to Yaoundé for sale at his uncle’s electronics-repair shop. It was Lovemore who told Tooly that Humphrey had served time in jail.

“Not jail,” Humphrey clarified, when she asked about this. “It was Gulag. That is like jail but made by Russians, so worse.”

“What did you do?”

“Communists say I am social parasite, which is big exaggeration.”

“What was it like in jail?”

At first, they kept him awake for days in complete isolation, he said. To stay sane, he tried to recall his life, framing recollected events as if they were photographs, looking at each in detail. Talking with prisoners in adjacent cells was forbidden, but he and a neighbor had a sewer pipe in common, so they communicated with a tapping code used in Russian prisons since tsarist times. It was at this point that Humphrey started playing chess seriously — different taps connoted different moves. The man in the next cell had been there for eight years, and each day paced back and forth, counting his steps to calculate the distance, mapping in imagination the walk back to his hometown, thousands of miles away on the other side of the Soviet Union.

“What happened to him?”

“They let him out, but his body is ruin; he dies. After this, they send me north for chopping wood.”

“What was that like?”

“Hungry every day. They tell us when to eat — little soup with grains — and when to sleep. Very cold. Everybody dreaming of food all night. One prisoner, he is crazy, kills friend — they find him eating.”

“Eating what?”

“Eating friend. They mix me with common criminals. This is where I become corrupted. Before, I am honest man,” he said. “It is so cold up there all time. Even here and now, where it is so hot and sweating, I am cold in my bones. Yes, it was bad in Gulag. Another man, he puts ground glass in his eye just to get to hospital. Other politicals, they try hunger-strike.”

“What’s that?”

“You stop eating as protest. But only works in country where they care you are not eating. In Soviet Union, they stick tube in you with boiling soup, and this destroys stomach right away. There is saying in Gulag: ‘Only first life sentence is hell. After that, everything gets better.’ You want Coca-Cola?”

His resentment over those six years of detention had expanded into a generalized hostility toward his birth nation. If one mentioned anything to do with the Soviet Union, he remarked contemptuously, “Typical Russian! This is typical Russian way of behave.” As for the language, he refused to speak it even when his countrymen approached him — a provocation that would have led to violence had Venn not intervened. Humphrey even spurned Russian in written form, saying that English was more beautiful than the ugly Cyrillic script. There were many people who had the misfortune of being born in the wrong place. He was one of them.

“How did you get out of Gulag, Humphrey?”

“I run away hundred miles. At Black Sea, I get boat to Turkey, through Greece, bottom of Sicily, into Portugal. I meet man at dock and say, ‘Mister, where this ship is going?’ He tells me, ‘England.’ I am thinking, Very nice — land of Samuel Johnson, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill. I say, ‘I can come? Is all right?’ He says, ‘Yes, why not.’ Then, halfway into sea, someone asks, ‘Why you are going to Africa?’ I say, ‘No, I go to England.’ He says, ‘We go to South Africa on this boat.’ So, that is where I end. Years, I am stuck there. Why? Because trivial being tells me wrong boat. It is example of Moron Problem. If not for moron, I have different life, write many books, have nice fat wife and children. But no. This idiot”—Humphrey pronounced the word as if it contained only two syllables: EED-yot—“this idiot, he has been highly — how should I put to you?”

Remembering one of his favorite words, she said, “Detrimental?”

“Yes, highly detrimental. But there is important fact I learn: half your life is decide by morons,” he explained. “Does not matter how brilliant you are. You can have intellect big as John Stuart Mill. Even he probably has many difficulty from idiots.”

“I have difficulty from idiots,” she told him. “My old school in Australia sent the wrong information to the place I go to now, and they’re making me do a whole year over.”

“Why they let this happen? It is like something from Soviet Union. Just because moron sent wrong papers?”

“I told them.”

“This makes me fury. Quite fury. Why they do this to you? They do not realize you are high-quality intellectual?”

“I’m supposed to be in fifth grade.”

“You should be in sixth! In seventh! Better, I put you in medical school. That is how intellectual you are.”

“I hate trivial beings.”

“I hate them also. But careful; it is trivial beings that run the world.”

So went their days — talking, reading, commending each other’s forbearance in a world bedeviled by the Moron Problem. Whenever it suited them, he cooked a meal. His specialty was anything potato-based: potato sandwiches, potato pie, and his favorite, smashed-potato pizza.

“What’s your favorite food, Humphrey?”

“Me? I like all things eatful.”

That was daytime. When night fell, all changed. Some evenings, Venn kept her near. Other times, he entertained associates, and she watched from a distance until he summoned her. “Little duck!” he said, scratching his thick beard, lines crinkling around his eyes. And she walked away from Humphrey as one might from a classroom friend when a fancier after-school companion arrives. She was ashamed of him, and he knew this, so let her go. Yet he watched from afar. When she was tired, it was he who asked Venn to banish the revelers upstairs, a trick that Humphrey, despite his pleas to the crowd, had no power to effect.

A COUPLE OF DAYS PASSED before Tooly noticed that the students’ apartment was less populated, and that the missing person was Noeline. She and Emerson had broken up. Without her there, he walked around shirtless, stroking his blond ringlets, and inserting his opinions everywhere. That is, he hadn’t changed at all.

But Noeline had, as Tooly witnessed when they ran into each other on Broadway. She appeared jollier, slimmer, and was startlingly affectionate, insisting on a hug. Neither had eaten lunch, so Noeline proposed Chinese. Tooly loved the idea; it was exciting, a professor inviting her for a meal. Since she couldn’t afford to dine out, Tooly pretended to have no appetite, but agreed to sit and watch. Noeline falsely attributed this abstention to dieting and insisted that Tooly was thin enough to eat whatever she wanted — who cared, anyway! She requested an extra plate and extra chopsticks, making the case that it wasn’t a diet violation if you hadn’t ordered it.

Noeline chose General Tso’s chicken and white rice — not brown rice, which was the only kind she’d been allowed during her year with Emerson, who was a nutrition hard-liner. Tooly sampled the food, then laid down her chopsticks, took up her napkin, dabbed her lips, trying not to look famished.

“What’s your opinion,” Noeline inquired, “of thongs?”

“The sandals?”

“No, no. Thong underwear. The kind that goes up your butt.”

“Don’t think I have a strong opinion about it.”