The Grasshopper King by Jordan Ellenberg Page A

and actual meal had met me at the door, had been to think, I’m in the wrong place .
    â€œI got the recipe from our secretary. And the pot is from the kitchenette in my old dorm.”
    We sat down on either side of the bed and dug ambitiously in. “How was the first day?” Julia asked me. Beneath the first layer of noodles the cheese was waxy and cold. Strangely, this touched off in me a little hubbub of affection.
    â€œI couldn’t wait to get home,” I said.
    Meanwhile, I was learning more about Henderson. By the time I came to the subject, his life story had been scavenged and glued into something that almost made sense. It turned out Henderson was the terminus of a somewhat noble English line, which had been reduced by the end of the nineteenth century to landlessness and progressive politics. In 1895, his parents, reckoning correctly that no proletarian revolution was imminent in Britain, picked up their meager stakes and moved east. They settled in the Gravine as party organizers, and, when the revolution finally came, were rewarded for their efforts by being purged. Henderson left for Berlin a month later. He stayed there until 1940, when, having somehow run afoul of the Nazis, he fled to London.
    In the intervening years he wrote, and he published; mostly, that is, he copied out his verses in his own painstaking hand, and passed themout at streetcorners, or in parks, or in front of churches and banks. On one occasion he released a hundred copies of “Vile Mouse Conspiracy” from the roof of an apartment house in Potsdam. (That was what had gotten him the littering citation.) His poems, which he carefully marked with the date of composition and his initial “H,” formed a more or less complete record of his time in Berlin. The only break of any size was a six-month interval in 1932, which time, Henderson intimated later, he had spent in Holland. He never said why.
    McTaggett had me working on a short story of Henderson’s that had appeared, with the author’s own impenetrable translation alongside, in a 1922 number of an agrarian-feudalist monthly called Tractor . Each day I brought the story with me to Higgs’s house, where I sat in the chair across from him, translating, my copy of Kaufmann on the table between us, trying to ignore the racket from upstairs. I had hoped that the sight of Henderson’s text in the original Gravinic might catch Higgs’s attention—in vain. Only the checkerboard could stir him. We played fifteen or twenty games each afternoon. I had gotten into the habit of making a running commentary as we played, partly to hear the sound of a voice, and partly to convey the idea that my attitude toward the game was one of detached amusement, that it was nothing more than a mildly entertaining respite from my work, one about which I maintained a healthy sense of humor, and that it certainly did not matter to me when I lost—which was every single time.
    â€œA costly miscue by Grapearbor,” I’d say, as Higgs laid me open with a triple jump. “The champion wastes no time taking advantage of the upstart challenger’s childish blunder.” Then, a little later: “Grapearbor’s defense is in disarray. Ladies and gentlemen, the desperation is palpable. It appears Grapearbor has no chance . . . and Higgs jumps Grapearbor’s final man. This one is history. Higgs is the winner.”
    When Higgs played checkers, he made a small continuous sound, deep in his throat, a bit like a growl but with no connotation of menace. It was as if the checker-playing segment of him had grown noisy with age and overuse, like Ellen’s vacuum cleaner. I noticed the soundonly after a few days; it took me that long to pick it out under the general din from upstairs. Ellen would change the channel on the radio now and then, to keep me distracted, I supposed, and some days would leave the tuner between stations, besieging me with