Naomi nods; the remark is too banal to merit a response, it seems. She scrutinises the little manuscript, but as if it were a mirror in her hand.
‘He must have worked at it,’ says Kate.
‘Of course,’ Naomi answers, then the consideration of the card produces a smile.
‘Tell,’ says Kate.
Bernát’s penmanship was attributable to a failed relationship, Naomi explains. A girlfriend, on the brink of becoming an ex-girlfriend, had remarked that his handwriting was contemptuous, ‘just like him’. There was some justice in the accusation, Bernát acknowledged, albeit not immediately. He was twenty years old and very clever – much cleverer than the girlfriend. But he was in love with her, and her accusation hurt him, and made him think. If his handwriting was the image of his character, he reasoned, perhaps the improvement of the former might bring about the improvement of the latter. And so, for hours each evening, for many months, says Naomi, Bernát had studied calligraphy. ‘A spiritual exercise,’ she says.
‘And did it work?’ asks Kate.
‘Well, it half-worked, at the very least,’ says Naomi, releasing a small laugh. As though replacing a relic in its container, Naomi inserts the card into the book and closes the book softly.
‘I’ll say goodnight,’ says Kate.
Naomi places the book on the pillow, then swings her legs around, to place her feet on the floor; she smoothes the bedding, making a place for her sister. When Kate is sitting, she takes a hand and holds it in her lap. ‘I like Martin,’ she murmurs; the remark is toneless. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ Kate duly answers.
‘I don’t know anybody quite like him.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘He’s so thoroughly himself, all of the time,’ she says, quietly, as if talking of a phenomenon that she cannot fully comprehend. Talking to him, sometimes, she ‘feels like fog on a mountain’, she says. ‘His life fits him so perfectly,’ she says, in pleasant perplexity. She is stroking the back of Kate’s hand, as one would a cat’s fur. ‘Do you ever argue?’ she asks; the question does not seem to be a criticism.
‘Of course,’ says Kate.
‘It’s an achievement,’ says Naomi.
‘What is?’
‘I think I might envy him sometimes,’ says Naomi. ‘And you.’
‘I don’t think you do,’ says Kate; her sister does not contradict her. For a minute more Kate sits with her sister; Naomi’s hand continues its stroking. ‘I’m turning in,’ says Kate, at a yawn from Naomi.
When Kate is standing, Naomi lies down again, on top of the bedding; she closes her eyes. ‘Goodnight,’ says Kate, and she puts a kiss on her sister’s brow; Naomi smiles weakly, in a way that is meant to signify gratitude, Kate assumes, but is also suggestive of condescension. At the door Kate turns off the main light. Naomi’s hands are joined on the book, holding it lightly to her chest; she looks like a figure on a tomb.
Not ready to sleep, Kate goes to her room. She browses websites for information about Prague in the early years of the twentieth century. Some time later, realising that she has spent the best part of half an hour looking at pictures of the railway station, she goes to bed. Martin is already asleep. Kate lies awake, imagining an incident that happened a few years before: Naomi emerges from the bathroom and, seeing Martin, closes her eyes and raises her hands, as if submitting to a firing squad; the towel falls; she is naked; it was a joke, said Naomi.
III
10.
At breakfast Naomi unfurls her fingers to present a pair of small grey oval things that look like diseased toenails. ‘Do you think Lulu might like these?’ she asks. Three small red beads are attached to each oval, and a silver hook; they are earrings. She tips them into the cup of Kate’s hand. They are more like plectrums than toenails, with a rougher patch of darker grey at the wider end; the red beads have a black spot, and are rather pretty, Kate thinks. Naomi sits down next to her, close; she straightens the earrings on her sister’s palm. The beads are seeds, the male seeds of the Huayruro tree, she explains. They come from the Amazon, and they protect the wearer from ‘negative energy’. And the grey ovals are from the Amazon too – they are scales, from a colossal fish called the pirarucu. Its tongue is so tough that the native people use it as a rasp, she says. ‘What do you think?’ she asks, eager to please.
The ethnic look is not Lulu’s style at all, Kate knows. ‘She’ll be very touched. Thank you,’ she says, giving her sister a kiss.
‘Even if she doesn’t like them, they’re unusual,’ says Naomi. ‘And they have a story.’
The earrings had been a gift from Bernát, of course. Bernát has a brother, Oszkár, one year his senior. The Kalmár boys were raised in the West Midlands, as far from the coast as it is possible to be in England, and Oszkár has often attributed the direction his career has taken to the fact that his home town was so deeply landlocked. Each summer the family had taken a holiday in Cornwall, always staying in the same clifftop chalet, overlooking a long beach. At the end of this beach rose an outcrop of rock, which would be wholly surrounded by water for at least an hour before and after high tide. Just before the incoming tide touched it, Oszkár would climb to the summit of this rock, where he would remain until the water had retreated from the landward side. He might take a book, but he rarely read more than a few pages of it; the spectacle of the sea was sufficient in itself. It was as fascinating as the night sky. The ever-changing constellations of the waves enchanted him. Nothing was more exciting for Oszkár than the annual voyage on a mackerel boat, to experience the dark immensity underneath him and all around. Once, an area of discoloured water, twenty feet from the boat, revealed itself to be the back of basking shark; the fish was as big as a canoe, and some of the other children on board the boat were terrified. For Oszkár, the encounter was akin to an annunciation.
A few years before Naomi met Bernát, Oszkár Kalmár was on sabbatical from his university, and was undertaking research in Brazil, studying the migration of Amazonian catfish; his first publication had been a study of the Indo-Pacific striped eel catfish, Plotosus lineatus and he had become, apparently, a modestly renowned authority on siluroids. Oszkár’s activities in Brazil were focused on the Mamirauá reserve and he was based in a place called Tefé, a town that cannot be reached by road. Its isolation was perhaps the crucial factor for Bernát: he decided he would visit his brother. He spent three or four days in Manaus, which was like a tropical Croydon, Bernát reported, says Naomi, perhaps worried she might have given her sister the impression that the great man lacked a sense of humour. In Manaus he did the things that every tourist must do. At the Teatro Amazonas he admired the one hundred and ninety-eight chandeliers, the Carrara marble staircase, the rosewood seats. Outside the theatre, he inspected the rubber-coated bricks that had been laid to muffle the noise of the carriage wheels. He went to the fish market, where he saw very many varieties of catfish. He went back to his room, for the air conditioning. Traffic droned ceaselessly in front of the building and behind. He could have been in a motel beside a British motorway, had it not been for the finger-length insect that was gradually traversing the ceiling. A fourteen-hour boat journey took him to Oszkár.
Tefé was founded by missionaries in the eighteenth century and missionaries were still at work in the area. Oszkár had befriended one, a man named Walter Doniphan, from Virginia, who had been struggling to translate the Gospel into the language that was spoken in a cluster of villages upstream from the town. For several years Walter had lived among these people, and in all that time he had found no evidence that they had any idea of history or of myth. Indeed, they seemed to lack all forms of fiction. The story of Jesus did not engage them, once Walter had admitted that Jesus was not someone he had actually met. They asked him: why did his God give us this life if this life was not enough for us? Why did he need to test us? Why did he need to create us? Why did he need to create anything? To amuse himself? In the six months before Oszkár met
him, Walter had made a single convert: a man who had been stung in the foot by a stingray. To cleanse the wound quickly a woman had urinated on his leg, but the woman was a prostitute, with diseases, and the man had been infected by her urine. It was more than possible, Walter conceded, that the man had thought that baptism would cure him. At times, in the small hours of the night, Walter had to battle against discouragement.
He had, however, met a remarkable man in Tefé, a man by the name of Afonso. It would be truer to say that Afonso’s story, rather than the man himself, was remarkable. Afonso was a difficult character, it seems: abrasive, argumentative, and often drunk. Somewhere in Manaus lived a woman who had been his wife; she had gone away, with their son, because of his drinking, he admitted. He had been to jail for robbery. But Afonso’s life had the makings of a book or a film, Walter told Oszkár.
Walter had first encountered him on the riverfront at Tefé. Strolling past a place where dozens of small boats were tethered, he heard a shout; in one of the boats, a man was kneeling, spanner in hand, over the components of a dismantled outboard motor; looking directly at Walter, he shouted again, as if summoning a slow-witted employee. An extra pair of hands was needed, it appeared. Despite the man’s peremptory manner, Walter made his way to the boat, via the decks of several others. He was directed to pick up a spanner and tighten a certain nut, while the man held two wires in place; after ten seconds, his help was no longer required. Walter wished the man good day, to which the response was: ‘Cigarette?’ He mimed the action of smoking.
‘Sorry, but I don’t smoke,’ Walter answered, in the language of the river traders.
The man squinted, as if not sure what to make of this reply. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘Virginia,’ said Walter. ‘And you?’
He made a gesture as if flinging bait over the water, and laughed. ‘Very far,’ he replied. Terrible teeth were shown, like pieces of gravel wedged into the gums.
Intrigued, Walter enquired further, but he learned only that the man had been born in a distant village, by a river that had no name.
‘The river is the river,’ said the man. As for his own name: ‘Here I am called Afonso,’ he said. He had also been Abilio, but that was not the name he had first been given either. ‘Here I am called Afonso,’ he repeated, as if reciting an instruction that he had been given. Then he uttered a sound that Walter could not have transcribed; he repeated it, a little slower. ‘My name,’ he explained. Again he pronounced the word, and Walter tried to mimic the syllables. Laughing, Afonso put a hand on Walter’s shoulder, in consolation for his failure. ‘I am hungry,’ he said; Walter understood that an exchange was being proposed.
They found a backstreet place with plastic tables and chairs, lighting as bright as an operating theatre, and a rotisserie in the window. Roast chicken, Afonso declared, was the best food. He ate an entire bird, and drank four beers in an hour. His story became difficult to follow in its latter stages. Whole sentences were unintelligible.
It was a miserable tale, but Afonso related it without self-pity or anger – or indeed any sentiment of any kind. ‘My mother and father were not of the same blood,’ he began, as though speaking of characters in a folk tale. ‘When my mother was young,’ he went on, ‘her people started to die of an illness that could not be cured, so her family decided that they had to leave.’ They took a boat, but after some days on the river the parents both fell ill, and they died. The children – Afonso’s mother and two brothers – buried their mother and father in the riverbank and continued down the river. One of the brothers then died, but the two survivors at last came to a village. ‘This is where I was born,’ he said, dotting a fingertip into a line of beer that he had drawn across the tabletop.
On a map, Afonso could show where the village was, but not exactly. As for the people who lived there, the people of his father, they had a name that simply meant ‘our people’. Afonso spoke the name and repeated it many times, for the American to repeat, comically. The name could not be written, because the language had no writing. Afonso could not write anything in any language.
At about the age at which her own mother had died, Afonso’s mother died. How many years she had lived, Afonso could not say, just as he had no figure for his own age: when asked how old he was, he opened and closed a hand several times, in a gesture that signified nothing more precise than ‘many years’. He would have been somewhere between ten and fifteen years of age, he thought, when his mother died. That was the point at which his life went bad, because his father took up with a bad-tempered woman who treated the children like slaves. There were arguments all the time: between the father and the children; between the woman and the children; between the adults; between the adults and the other adults. ‘It is the same in the jungle as in the cities,’ Afonso said, as if he thought the American might be in need of the lesson.
One night, Afonso and his sister ran away: they took a boat and set off down the river. They were on the water for many days, until they came to a place where there were river traders. Young Afonso was given work to do, first with these traders, then on another boat, and another, and another, and so he worked his way downstream, a very long way from his village. On the boats he started to learn his new language; for a long time, he said, it was ‘like wearing clothes made of wood’. Eventually he and his sister came to Tefé; his sister, he believed, now lived in Manaus.
Several single-phrase answers were delivered, without emotion, as if they had been memorised for a test, before Afonso let slip an extraordinary item of information: his mother, he said, had understood a language that was not the language his father spoke, but was, as far as Afonso knew, a language spoken only by his mother’s people, a people who, he assumed, had been eradicated by the disease from which she and her family had fled. In her new home she had, of course, been obliged to learn his father’s language, but she had retained something of that original tongue for the rest of her life, though there was nobody other than her brother with whom she could speak it. She taught her children as much as she could, and they often used the old words when talking to each other. Even so, their knowledge of that first language, a knowledge that had been incomplete at the time of their removal from it, dwindled as their first memories faded, so what was passed to Afonso and his sister was but a tiny remnant of the language, a remnant that had decayed still further since Afonso’s separation from his sibling. For all he knew, he and his sister were the last people on the planet who could comprehend anything of his mother’s mother tongue.
Having intrigued Oszkár with the story, Walter Doniphan had taken him to the bar where Afonso was invariably to be found. The evening was something less than a success: Afonso had taken a lot of drink before they arrived, and was in a truculent frame of mind. In return for more alcohol, he had answered some questions from Oszkár, in the minimum number of words. Almost nothing was added to what Walter Doniphan already knew.
Nonetheless, when Bernát arrived Oszkár persuaded him with no difficulty that he would benefit from making the acquaintance of the remarkable Afonso. Accordingly, on Bernát’s third evening in Tefé, he and his brother met up with Walter Doniphan and proceeded to Afonso’s favoured dive. On the way, Walter told Bernát some of the things that Afonso had told him about the moribund language of his mother. It had no equivalents to north, south, east and west. The same was the case with left and right: orientation was achieved by reference to topography, to the position of hills, rivers, the village and so on. From Afonso’s testimony, it seemed that abstractions of any sort were alien to this language. There were no nouns for units of weight or distance or time, nor any colour adjectives. The colour of an object was not a quality that could be considered apart from it: a pepper was a pepper and blood was blood; they were not instances of redness. None of these characteristics were unique, Walter knew, and he was also aware of other languages in which, as in Afonso’s mother’s language, different verb forms were employed when speaking of the past: on
e when talking of things of which one had direct knowledge; another to report things that had been inferred from direct evidence; a third for conjectures; a fourth for hearsay. But two aspects of the language of Afonso’s mother surprised him greatly. Firstly: Object-Verb-Subject was the customary word order. Afonso was insistent on this point: whereas most people would say ‘the man drinks the beer’, in his mother’s language one would say ‘the beer drinks the man’. The second peculiarity was that it seemed to be the case that recursion was alien to it. In the language of Afonso’s mother one would not say, for instance: ‘I drank the beer that Walter paid for.’ Instead, one would say: ‘The beer drank I. The beer bought Walter.’ Likewise, one wouldn’t say: ‘I am retelling the story that Walter told.’ One would have to say something like: ‘The story tell I. The story told Walter.’
A Dominican friar, writing about the Arawak language in the seventeenth century, had observed: ‘There is no language poorer than this. They have no words for anything beyond what relates to our physical senses.’ One might likewise be inclined to characterise the language of Afonso’s mother as impoverished. This, said Walter, would be an error. The language of Afonso’s mother, like the language of his father, possessed a superabundance of nouns. It had a specificity that makes English look understocked. So Afonso was amazed that a branch of a tree in Portuguese is always just a branch, regardless of its size; in his mother’s language there was, for example, a word – something like uxchâ – for branches that were thicker than a man’s wrist but thinner than a thigh. It was strange to him that the sun, in Portuguese, is labelled always with the same word, whether it be seen at dawn, noon or sunset, through cloud or uncovered. The Portuguese language had too few words for rivers, Afonso thought, and for varieties of shadow and shade. His mother’s language had at least three different words for dusk, and three for what we call dawn, as did his father’s. Why should he have to make do with only one word for ‘we’? In his mother’s language, there were two forms of the word, one meaning ‘all of us, including you’, the other signifying ‘we but not you’. Uxchâ, Walter repeated, as if the word were magical. The tone of the last syllable was all-important. Uxchà meant something entirely different, and uxchá meant something else again.
The river is the river Page 6
