Irregular Verbs

by Irregular Verbs

  Freed, he ran back to his house, felt the mangrove poles that supported it sway as he shot up the ladder. He sat down, spat in the ink-bowl to moisten it, picked up his quill and—what had he been about to write? He scanned the leaf he had left on the floor, hoping to find some clue in what he had written before, saw no connections in the list of words he had been writing. Searching his mind for the words he had inventoried that morning, he found even more were gone. It was more than him simply forgetting them, he realized: the language was eroding, an atoll being washed away by the ocean of Grand Salutean. He would have to forego the conversation, then, until the language was preserved. He laughed. What would be lost? No poetry had ever been written in Grand Salutean. It was a deliberately simple language, shorn of all subtlety, a language of nothing but nouns and verbs; no genders, no tenses but now and not-now, no pronouns but I and not-I. It would do him no harm not to use it for a few days.

  keluarga: to move to a new village

  ngantuk: to call out in one’s sleep

  lunak: to search for something without finding it

  As the night went on, though, he started to wonder just how long it would have to be. Even with all the words he had lost, he wondered if he could ever write down what was left. He had enough fish oil to burn his lamp for a night, maybe two; more urgently, he was nearly out of banana leaves to write on. Squinting, he made the letters as small as the tip of the hook would allow, and began jotting apostrophes to separate words instead of spaces. Earlier, when he had devised his system of writing, he had not thought about space. Now he cursed his decision to use combinations of letters to represent sounds that did not exist in Grand Salutean, rather than inventing new characters. He was netted now, though. A dictionary had to be consistent, or it was useless; this much he had learned from Grand Salutean.

  He kept writing, pushing himself to make the letters smaller and smaller. Hunched over the banana leaf on the floor, his arm held tightly to keep his strokes small, Sendiri’s forearm jerked, scratching a line across the floorboard. He swore, drew the quill back to throw it across the room in anger, when he saw that the ink had dried on the wood without smudging. Of course, he thought. What else would be a suitable record of the language he and Kesepi had shared than the other thing that was theirs alone? Excited, he raised his arms to stretch his back, dipped the quill in the ink bowl, and began writing along the edge of the wall. He worked his way inward as dawn came, and the daylight hours passed; he worked in silence as Teman once again came up the ladder, called his name, called again, and finally left. His quill scratched against the floorboards as he followed an inward spiral towards the centre of the room, always trying to increase his pace, to write words down faster than they could be washed away by his mind’s tide.

  Thunder made him look up. It was dark again: lightning flashed through the holes in the thatch, illuminating the room for a moment. Focused on his work, he had not noticed the smell of rain in the air, the sound as it fell on the roof. Now, in the lightning’s flare, he could see puddles sitting on the floor, smudging and washing away most of what he had written. He froze for a moment, rigid with anger; then, too tired even to rage, Sendiri fell to the floor and let himself sleep.

  Asleep, he saw himself sitting with Kesepi in their boat, leaning against the palm-stem gunwales on a calm sea. She was speaking, but the words made no sense, and he knew that he had at last forgotten their language entirely. He opened his mouth to speak, then felt something resting in his hand: looking down, he saw that it was the book he had been writing, containing every word the two of them had ever spoken. Flipping through the book, he tried to speak, to say one of the things he wished he had said, but all he could do was string words together. Kesepi, now in a boat of her own, began to drift away. Sendiri called to her, but the words he read from the dictionary had no emotion, and no reaction registered on her face. Even in its perfect state, he realized, the book was just a record, a dead thing without the soul of the language.

  He woke from fevered dreams to see Teman sitting on the mat nearby, a bowl of water at his side. His friend rose to his knees and held out the bowl. “Have some of this,” Teman said. “I think you’ve had a fever.”

  “Thank you,” Sendiri croaked, then took a drink. He felt a sharp pain as he sat up; the hook he had been using as a quill had stuck in his side, leaving a black ink spot when he plucked it out. “Why are you—”

  “You’ve missed two conversations,” Teman said, “and you were moaning last night, loud enough your neighbours could hear. The talk is . . .”

  Sendiri nodded. He knew what the talk would be. Sometimes when a person dies, they take the souls of those they love with them to the sea floor; what’s left is just a hantu, a dead, empty shell. To see or even talk to a hantu is dangerous, itself an omen of death.

  “Maybe I’m not alive,” Sendiri said. “All that’s worth saving is fading away.”

  Teman frowned, gestured around at the smudged marks on the floor. “Is that what this was all about?”

  “It’s useless, I realize that now,” Sendiri said. “Even if I had all the words, it would be no more alive than a dried fish.” He rubbed the spot where the hook had jabbed him with his thumb. The ink mark was still there, just under his skin. “It needs to live. . . .”

  Teman waited for his friend to continue, rose to his feet when he did not. “Well—I shouldn’t even be up here. I hope you’ll forgive me.” He moved to the top step of the ladder, began climbing down.

  “No—wait,” Sendiri said. “You have to help me. Help me keep her alive.”

  “But you said—”

  “No, please. I have an idea. Help me.”

  Teman paused at the top of the ladder. “Sendiri—you have to let go. I know how you feel, but you have to let go.”

  Sendiri picked up the hook he had been using as a quill, held it up to show to Teman. “Please. Just stay—help me.”

  “You have to come out for the conversation. Today.”

  “One day. That’s all.”

  Teman took a breath, nodded. “All right,” he said.

  hadapi: to awake to one’s lover’s face

  cinta: to love truly

  mencintai: to love for the last time

  At the end of the day, as the shadows reached over the main walkway, Sendiri rejoined the conversation. Many people turned to look, not only because of his absence but because of the black marks that had appeared on his face, arms and legs. Those nearby saw that the marks were letters pricked out under his skin, forming words that meant nothing even to those that could read Grand Salutean. Only he and Teman knew that the words, in fact, covered his whole body, arranged so that their location and position would represent the grammar of the language he and Kesepi had shared: the oldest root words along the spine, verbs on the muscles, every inch of skin recalling the meaning and inflexion of a word.

  Despite the small commotion he was causing, Sendiri paid the ink marks little mind. The Saluteans have no mirrors or steel, and their sea is too dark to ever show a clear reflection, so he would never see most of the words Teman had scribed on his skin. That was not important, though. All that mattered was that they would not fade away. That they were, still, a living language.

  ANOTHER COUNTRY

  Geoff squinted at the figures emerging from the fissure, his period recognition chart at the ready. Not that he needed it, in this case: he was able to fix the new arrivals as soon as he saw their tunics and trousers—late-Empire Romanized Goths, probably fleeing Attila’s invasion of lands their own ancestors had invaded a few generations before.

  “Te salutem do, amici,” he said slowly, holding his hands up and palm-outward. The light was fading now, and the four prefugees were looking around apprehensively. The reception room, built around the fissure that had first opened right downtown fifteen years before, had been designed to minimize culture shock, with no modern technology or materials vis
ible.

  The fissures had consistency but no logic: prefugees from the Mongol invasions wound up in Seattle, Aztecs in Paris, Romans in Ottawa, and so on. The only thing that was known for sure was that they always brought people from places and times that were much worse than now, periods of tremendous chaos and danger; as a result, the people that came through were wary, and some of the first encounters had not ended well.

  “What is your name?” Geoff asked in slow, careful Latin.

  The prefugees—a bearded man, a woman with her blonde hair in braids, and two young boys—regarded him cautiously. The man turned back to the woman, said something in a thickly Gothic-accented dialect Geoff couldn’t follow. She nodded, keeping her eyes down, and gathered the two boys to her. “Odoricus Aemilianus,” the man said. “Where have we come?”

  “This is a safe place,” Geoff went on. “It is very different from the place you left, but you are welcome.”

  “How did we arrive here?” the man said, keeping himself between his family and Geoff.

  “Good fortune,” Geoff said. It was Welcome Services’ official answer, and as good a one as anyone could give. “Please—there are many things you have to know, before we can find you a new home. If you’ll come with me, my comrades will get you started.”

  The man looked back over his shoulder, whether at his family or the vanished fissure Geoff didn’t know. Finally he made a grunt of assent, jerked his head to order his wife and children forward.

  Geoff released the breath he had been half-holding. Ninety percent of what the official terminology called “Delayed Integrations” happened in the initial encounter. Now that that was over he could do the rest on autopilot, supervising the prefugees’ processing and initial billeting. When the fissures had first opened, the people that had come through had been seen as a tremendous opportunity, a goldmine for historians and anthropologists; now, in the thousands, they were just more immigrants to be settled and assimilated. This family would probably integrate all right, he thought: the boys looked young enough to pick up English without too much of an accent, and despite the wife’s public deference to her husband Gothic women were typically more independent than their Roman counterparts.

  He was still thinking about them a few hours later, as he climbed the stairs of an apartment building in Vanier on a follow-up visit to a family he’d welcomed two years ago. More than anything else in modern society, it was the difference in relations between the sexes which prefugees found the most difficult. Women and girls mostly flourished, while men and boys—deprived of the pater familias status even the poorest free Roman male could expect within his family—did less well. At least these new arrivals, unlike most prefugees, still had their father.

  Knocking at the Columellae’s door, Geoff wished they had had the same advantage. He stepped back, smiled at the fish-eye. A few moments later the door opened inwards a few centimetres before being stopped by the security chain. “Galfridus?” a female voice said from within.

  Geoff sighed. “Ave, Fulvia,” he said. “How are you?”

  The door closed briefly, opened again once Fulvia had unlatched the chain. She was a broad, buxom woman in her late forties, pure Roman stock from about five hundred years earlier than that afternoon’s arrivals. Her black-and-white streaked hair was done up in a messy bun and she was wearing a simple blue house toga, accented with a long string of fake pearls. “Please, come in.”

  “Thank you.” The small apartment was spotless, as always, but the smell of a thousand meals’ worth of anchovies and olive oil—unrelieved by windows that didn’t open and a range hood that didn’t work—was overpowering. Two armless Ikea couches, in some spots worn through to the stuffing, were perpendicular to the TV, on which the lares sat in a neat pile. The set was tuned to the Latin-language community channel, a Plautus play with the sound off. Between the couches, facing the TV directly, sat an unused armchair wrapped in clear plastic. “How is work?”

  “Fine,” Fulvia said, brushing a stray hair out of her face. She waved him to the chair. “Someone a maid pretending was, and stealing, so ID cards now we have to get.”

  Geoff settled uncomfortably into the chair. “Are you going to miss work?”

  “No, I’m on my own time doing it. There’s a bus I can take, the picture taken to get.”

  “Good.” Geoff accepted a cup of coffee, sipped it carefully. Few Romans ever acquired a taste for coffee, and Fulvia was no exception; she only made it when he came over, and had no idea how much to use, so that it was always either near-water or Turkish-style sludge. “Any other problems?”

  A painful look flickered across Fulvia’s face before being replaced by a fixed smile. “No, no problems,” she said. “A little cake would you—would you like, a little cake?”

  Geoff shook his head. His friends in the community told him Fulvia was an excellent cook, well-known for her lentils with chestnuts, but it was his misfortune to always be served prefugees’ idea of what moderns ate—an idea in which plastic wrap and microwaves figured strongly. The penalty, he supposed, for being the poster boy for integration. “No thank you.” He took a long sip from his coffee. “How is Attius?”

  Fulvia grimaced again, showing Geoff that he had guessed right. “In school he’s doing well. In Heritage Latin he has top marks in his class.”

  “Good. Is he still in ESL?” He really ought to know that—prefugees’ language status was supposed to be kept updated in Welcome Services’ records—but since most of his workload had shifted from first encounters to follow-ups like these, there were simply too many to keep track of.

  “No, regular Anglish,” Fulvia said.

  “Is he making friends?”

  Fulvia glanced away. “Some.”

  “Different kinds of people, or just other Romans?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, her voice quickening. “When they’re here, they just go into his room and the counter use.”

  “The computer.”

  “Yes. And when I come in they talking stop.” She sat down, perching on the edge of the couch nearest to him. “The boys outside, on the walls they write, they into fights get. Maybe in his room he’s safer.”

  “Probably. It can be dangerous out there, for a boy his age.”

  “He’s so sensitive, and smart,” Fulvia said. “His father a quaestor was, and a poet, did I tell you that?”

  Geoff shook his head, though of course she had. “Would you like me to talk to Attius? Make sure he’s fitting in okay?”

  She looked away, then nodded. “You’re not too busy?”

  “This is my job, Fulvia,” he said. “And I’m happy to do it.”

  Fulvia held a handkerchief to her face, dabbed at her nose. “Thank you,” she said. She rose, vanished into the kitchen, returned a moment later carrying two plastic-wrapped Twinkies. “Here. So you don’t away hungry go.”

  “Do not concern yourself, Geoffrey. This boy of yours is in no trouble.” Marcus Apicius was holding court at Mello’s, the restaurant that was his in all but name. On the table in front of him sat a plate crowded with fat snails; painted on the cream-yellow wall behind were the words Hold back your quarrels, if you can. If not, go home.

  “He’s Fulvia Columella’s,” Geoff said. “Do you know the family?”

  Marcus popped a snail into his mouth with a tiny silver fork and chewed thoughtfully. “Maybe,” he said.

  Glancing up at the quote written on the wall, Geoff bit his tongue. “How do you know he’s not in trouble, then?” he asked.

  “These Columellae, they’re an old family, even in my time—a good family, yes? So he’s not in trouble.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily follow, you know that,” Geoff said. They had both been part of the earliest wave of arrivals, but Marcus remained every inch the old Roman. That was why Geoff was meeting with him: Marcus had always been the man Roman prefugees came to when they needed help of a kind Welc
ome Services couldn’t provide, and he stayed in touch with the community in a way Geoff couldn’t hope to.

  “But it does, Geoffrey,” Marcus said. “Tell me, what do you mean by ‘trouble’? Is it running around in a gang, playing tough?”

  “I don’t know. Probably, yes.”

  “Then no, he’s not in trouble.” He speared another snail, dropped it in his mouth and closed his eyes. “Geoffrey, you must have one of these. Do you know we feed them on milk for six days before cooking them? You have to lure the live snails out of the shell, fatten them up until they’re too big to get back in.”

  Geoff shook his head; the strong smell of garum wafting out from the kitchen had taken away his appetite. “Listen, I just want you to ask around—”

  Marcus waved a hand—waving him quiet, Geoff thought, until a waiter appeared with another tray. “Geoffrey. I will do this if it makes you happy, but let me explain,” he said. The waiter uncovered the tray, revealing a plate ringed with what looked like a dozen perfectly oval white mice.

  “Fine,” Geoffrey said. “Tell me again how I don’t understand the Roman mind. I was only born on a farm on the Tiber.”

  “And came here when you were, what? Ten? You’re a modern, Geoffrey. You dress like one, sound like one, smell like one.” Marcus reached into the salt cellar, pinched and sprinkled across the plate. “‘Trust nobody until you have eaten much salt with him,’” he said. “Cicero, of course.”

  “That’s just what I’m saying—a lot of us fit in perfectly well. We’re not all determined to relive the last days of Pompeii like you are.”

  “Ha—you say Pompeii like it was something. In my day it was a fishing village; there were a thousand like it. It was just lucky to get buried alive. But listen, Geoffrey, here is what I want to say. There are two types of Romans, and they are both missing something here. The first type is the everyday sort of man, the worker, and here he cannot work. We had the same problem in my time, of course, but back then we had laws against slaves taking too much of the jobs.”