An Exaltation of Larks

An Exaltation of Larks

On my seventh birthday, I acquired a tutor, and on that first day of our acquaintance, Sirius Autenberg chose to tell me about the number seven.

‘So, Andre, did you know that seven is auspicious? Why do you think that is?’

I took a guess. ‘Um, I… Is it lucky?’

‘Absolutely! My friend, we will get on splendidly.’ Sirius’s glasses glittered in the morning sunlight. A faint smile added an odd effect to his face as his spectacles and a sparse, greying beard failed to hide an old but poorly mended scar on his left cheek.

‘Seven is also the fourth prime number. Since you have wisely pointed this out, it is known as the lucky prime, not to forget the safe prime. Each aeroplane in Boeing’s passenger jet line is named with a three-digit number beginning and ending in seven. You are clearly very bright, so doubtless you already know all this: there are the Seven Kings of Rome; Seven Heavens – more about those when you get older; Seven Continents; Seven Seas; Seven Days of the Week; Seven Hills of Istanbul, etcetera, etcetera.’

Sirius arrived to supplement whatever knowledge I had not been getting at the local school. According to my mother, this amounted to quite a lot. She bought me a microscope and perhaps considered my new tutor a supplementary birthday present.

My mother explained she’d have to spend more time in the city in her new role as dean of research at the university. She also served on two government advisory boards and had speaking engagements at various conferences abroad. Our house, over an hour’s drive from the city, employed a gardener and a cook-housekeeper from the village and then came Sirius. It later dawned on me his position had all the characteristics of a nanny, albeit a brilliant one. Since my father died when I was two, she also might have thought I needed a male role model.

Sirius came complete with luggage and moved into the garden flat attached to our house.

My mother was as remote as an Arctic science facility. The metaphor has some precision because that is my location at the time of writing. It is unimportant to know what my colleagues and I do here for this short memoir’s purposes, although it is pretty important for every other purpose.

My mother and I had arranged a large desk near a floor-to-ceiling window and placed a bentwood chair on either side. I remember the view of our long driveway lined with the ubiquitous plane trees to the left of the window and a fallow meadow to the right, belonging to the farmer, whose daughter was hired to clean and cook for us.

Upon my birthday, each year after that, Sirius told me about the significance of the number of my age. Next time, I anticipated this and thought of something more amusing to say. Out of respect, I waited until my teacher offered his wisdom.

‘In China, the number eight is believed to express the totality of the universe, the sign for infinity,’ he said brightly.

I piped up after composing and rehearsing the night before, my response in a poetic form. ‘I tried writing a song, and it was not terrific. I sang it to my mom, who told me it was very bad, but then added, since I am only now turning eight, it was okay.’

‘Ha!’ Sirius said. ‘Well done, you scallywag. I intended to say something about the eight virtues, but this intention has been stumped by a boy of that number’

When I turned twelve, Sirius escorted me to England to board at a posh school. He shook my hand and said he would see me soon. He left me at my college gate with the porter and a small leather satchel containing some clothes and a few books he deemed too essential to leave behind. One of them being Shakespeare’s sonnets. He told me I might find them helpful since I would soon have certain confusing emotions, some inclined towards the opposite sex. I tried to show him I was strong by holding back the tears. Sirius also did an excellent job hiding his own tears. We had become close over the years.

He drove away in the car he called The Lark, a 1963 Studebaker Lark Convertible. He would say, ‘Come, Andre, we will take the Lark for a spin.’ We had many spins, the last being from Geneva to Winchester via the car ferry from Calais. The longest and saddest spin of them all.

Sirius never told me a lie except for the two on that day. He said I would be boarding only until my mother returned from her professional engagements and that he would come back to visit me. I didn't see much of my mother at all, even after I had completed my doctorate at university. Our relationship was civil but frosty. I guess she also had her demons.

I never set eyes on Sirius again.

Like The Lark, this story is spinning breathlessly forward before I have had a chance to tell the rest. I can hear Sirius’s voice. Now, Andre, my friend, are you relaxed? We will explore the significance of numbers a little more.

‘I want you to create a double transposition cypher from a plain text message which includes something about yourself but is unknown to anybody else. It does not have to be particularly private.’ It took me a few hours while Sirius read quietly at his desk. By then, I was ten years old, so some regard must be given to that.

Sirius broke the code within minutes. The best-designed code is simple and can outperform more complex code. He explained their necessity throughout history. He insisted that cyphers can save lives and had saved thousands.

‘If it had not been for Alan Turing’s cracking of the German Enigma code, the war would have taken a much grimmer turn.’ He paused and added quietly, ‘As if it had not been grim enough.’

Interrupted by spins in and around Geneva, I became a passable code-maker but a more effective code-buster. Sirius relished my delight in cracking a cypher.

‘I suspect you might agree, Andre, breaking something, by its very nature, implies the possibility of renewal. The Phoenix principle—rising from the ashes and all that.’

Aside from the fun of our spins in the Lark, he could be a sombre man, sometimes distracted and given to long periods of sitting and thinking. ‘Just have a think for a bit, Andre,’ he would say before leaving me to be on his own.

He showed me many things about the world and how to be in it through literature and science. He also taught me ways of seeing and thinking through philosophy and history. As it turned out, I did end up breaking codes—those of physics—but that is another story.

An introduction to Darwin solved any spiritual questions I might have had, for there was no more straightforward answer to the question of biological emergence. From then on, it seemed absurd to replace a system of understanding based on proven evidence with mere beliefs producing not one scrap of the stuff.

Sirius was never patronising. After a while, I didn’t think it strange that he tutored me as though I were his intellectual equal. Nevertheless, being asked my most inane questions must have been irritating. If so, he never showed it.

He was a great fan of Opera and attended performances with my mother when she was home. Sometimes I went too, but often a babysitter was hired for the night. In fact, by the way Sirius spoke of my mother, they seemed to enjoy an affinity for the Opera and the arts that exceeded their professional relationship. There appeared to be less distance between her and me when in Sirius’s company, as though he made up for a lack she could not provide.

Sirius and I would occasionally go to concerts in Geneva and listen to recordings together. I began to appreciate the purity of the trained voice. My mother was an amateur singer of a very high standard, and once or twice, she sang while Sirius accompanied her on piano. She was away so much I barely knew her as a person, so I became acquainted with the next best thing, her remarkable vocal instrument. Sirius once said my mother could have been a famous Diva with such a voice. I was glad she wasn't. I imagined her in the firmament of fame and glory, a star shooting through the universe and leaving me even further behind.

One day, I asked Sirius why she was so aloof and hardly ever spent much time with me. I remember him looking at me like a great tragedy had befallen us. Before he spoke, I was worried I had hurt him in some way.

‘Come on, young man, enough lessons for today, time to take the Lark out for a spin.’

Later, we ate lunch in a park on the lake’s edge. ‘You know what, Andre? We can legitimately call these spins an exaltation because that is the collective noun for a group of Larks.’ His laughter was both surprising and infectious. We giggled like not one but two schoolchildren. Those nearby must have thought us completely mad.

Over the years, Sirius told me a little about his background. A few weeks before I was to go off to England, he began to speak at length about the war, and our Lark adventures took on a melancholic air. Eventually, what I considered was going to be a fantastic adventure gradually became a grave and torturous set of events, the grumbling road noise beneath the Lark’s tyres working in unison with the dark story of his youth.

He was an Austrian Jew, and his family of the academic class. He told me about living in Vienna in the thirties with his older brother, sister, and parents. They were part of a group of intellectuals who frequented the Café Louvre in the late afternoon and evenings, discussing issues of the day, especially the troubling events in neighbouring Germany.

Young Sirius and his siblings met political refugees, famous writers, composers, and foreign correspondents who frequented Café Louvre. It was also a source of information for spies, pretending to be part of the intellectual milieu.

Theirs was a life filled with books, music, and art until 1938, when the Nazi militia carried out a pogrom in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. This atrocity, known as Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass, referred to the shards of glass littering the streets where Jewish shops and businesses were vandalised. His mother, father and sister died shortly after arriving at the concentration camp outside Linz. Many more met their death, weakened by malnutrition and neglect.

Sirius and his brother survived until 1945 because they were still strong enough to work. By April, the Americans were rolling through Austria, liberating town by town with little resistance. Despite direct orders from Himmler to exterminate them all at the eleventh hour, the surviving inmates were put to work building barricades to defend the camp against the enemy's imminent approach. Conditions were appalling at this point, with rations down to the barest minimum, the inmates weak and diseased.

He told me the rest of his story on that last spin to the English boarding school.

‘My brother was in a group designated to move equipment. After they completed the task and one week before American tanks rolled into the city of Linz, the workgroup was machine-gunned and buried in one of the tunnels that perforated the camp. My brother would have survived if the American tanks had arrived a week earlier.

The commandant, a demented SS ideologue, finally understood the US army was about to knock on the camp’s doors and fled to his nearby farm. A neighbouring farmer exposed him, and the dreadful creature was shot while trying to escape. He was brought back to the camp wounded, and his naked body strung up on the camp’s gate by his former victims.’

Some thirty guards chose to remain in the hope of receiving mercy. Sirius stayed long enough to watch all of them shot dead by the surviving inmates able to hold a gun while the US troops stood by. He said he had been offered a firearm to join the executioners, but refused.

‘I was sorely tested that day because the temptation to tear the guards to pieces with my bare hands, let alone shoot them, was immense. Instead, I forced myself to watch the killings before retreating behind a tank to weep for my family.’

He said the camp had brutalised him forever, believing he’d lost some irredeemable portion of his humanity. I knew this to be untrue because he was the kindest, most generous person I had ever known.

‘War is a game played by despots, and we become their playthings. I expect you, Andre, will continue to grow as you have begun and that this will be the one game you will never play.’

As I sit on my bed with my laptop, the freeze settling in for the arctic winter, I will finish in the shadow of the numerical significance of seven.

It wasn’t until the early nineties that I learnt that on July 21st, 1987, Sirius, my fondest childhood friend and owner of the adventurous Lark, hung himself in the garage of his home in Sydney, Australia, where he had emigrated. He would have carefully chosen the day. So, Andre, did you know that the number seven is auspicious? It was his code to tell me he hadn’t forgotten me.

Sirius must have concluded that he could no longer rise from the ashes. He was brilliant of mind and sad at heart, so who could blame him? It is no great revelation that the gentlest among us are often the most injured by life.

After he delivered me to the college porter all those years ago, I slipped into a depressive malaise. I refused to eat or drink and became sick enough to end up in the school clinic. Under the care of the college nurse, I recovered. Nurse Julia had a forthright manner, but she was also kind. One evening, she sat on my bed and placed her cool hand on my forehead.

‘You are looking better, Andre.’ We spoke of other things, including what I wanted to be when I grew up, though I couldn't remember what I'd said the next day. She stayed with me until I fell asleep, and the following day, I joined my cohort for lessons.

On receiving the news that Sirius had taken his own life, I remembered what I had said to the nurse before I went to sleep all those years ago.

‘Andre, what do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘I'll drive a tank and make sure I’m not too late.’