Free Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann Page B

neither speak nor drink. He made a gesture of apology, wobbled home, lay down in bed, and thought about his mother up there in Brunswick. It had been a mistake to come to Göttingen. The university here was better, but he missed his mother, and even more so when he was ill. At about midnight, when his cheek had swollen still further and every movement in every part of his body hurt, he realized the barber had pulled the wrong tooth.
    Luckily the streets were still empty in the early morning so nobody saw him stopping continually to lean his head against the house walls and sob. He would have given his soul to live a hundred years later when there would be medications for pain and doctors who deserved the name. Nor was it that hard. All that was necessary was to numb the nerves in the right spot, the best thing would be little doses of poison. Curare needed to be researched better! There was a flask of it in the Institute of Chemistry, he would go and have a look. But his thoughts slid away from him and he was only more aware of his own groaning.
    It happens, said the barber cheerfully. Pain spread itself wide, but Nature was intelligent and man came with plenty of teeth. At the moment when he pulled the tooth, everything around Gauss went black.
    As if the pain had wiped the event from his memory or from time itself, he found himself hours or days later—how could he tell—back in the chaos of his bed, with a half-empty bottle of schnapps on the night table and at his feet the Universal Advertiser and Literary Supplement , in which Privy Councilor Zimmerman laid out the latest method for constructing a regular seventeen-sided figure. And sitting beside the bed was Bartels, who had come to congratulate him.
    Gauss fingered his cheek. Oh, Bartels. He knew all about it. He himself came out of poverty, had been considered a wunderkind, and believed himself chosen for great things. Then he had met him, Gauss. And he knew, meanwhile, that for the next two nights after they met, Bartels had lain awake and thought about whether he should go back to the village, milk cows, and muck out stalls. Sometime during the third night, he had realized that there was only one way to save himself: he would have to like Gauss. He would have to help him, no matter where it led. From that moment on, he had thrown all his strength into working with Gauss, he had talked to Zimmerman, written letters to the duke, and one difficult evening, by means of threats none of them wanted to remember, he had got Gauss's father to agree to let his son go to high school. And the next summer he had gone with Gauss to visit his parents in Brunswick. Suddenly the mother had taken him aside, her face small with worry and shyness, to ask if there was any future for her son at the university with all the educated people. Bartels hadn't understood. What she meant was, did Carl have any future researching things? She was asking in confidence, and promised not to repeat anything. As a mother, one always had worries. Bartels had remained silent for a while, before asking with a contempt which shamed him later if she didn't know that her son was the greatest scientist in the world. She had wept and wept, and it had been extremely embarrassing. Gauss had never succeeded in forgiving Bartels.
    He had come to a decision, said Gauss.
    For what? Bartels looked up distractedly.
    Gauss gave an impatient sigh. For mathematics. Until now he had wanted to concentrate on classical philology, and he still liked the idea of writing a commentary on Virgil, in particular Aeneas’ descent to the underworld. He felt that nobody yet had correctly understood this chapter. But there would still be time for that, after all he had only just turned nineteen. But above all he had realized that he could achieve more in mathematics. If one had to be born, even if nobody had bothered to ask, then one could at least try to accomplish something. For example, solving the question of what a number is.