Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!

by Harry Harrison

  Once we were living in Europe we found ourselves welcomed by the greater community of Esperantists. Explanation is necessary. There is a cultural and social world out there that extends a warm welcome to anyone who speaks Esperanto. Every country has its own Esperanto association. And there are numerous specialist organizations, like Esperanto-speaking railway workers, Catholics, Quakers, Baha’i, youth clubs, you name it—and there are Esperantists doing it, including myself, who has used the power of publishing.

  Among the books I have written is a series about a character called the Stainless Steel Rat. I’ll speak no more of it now—other than to make this observation. The publisher was kind enough to allow me a full-page ad in one of the books. It plugged Esperanto and gave a New York address for more information. In the fullness of time the ad was reprinted in the Russian edition of the book. Complete with New York address. Enough to say that thousands of letters in Russian arrived in New York—rather than Moscow. This took many years to sort out. Good fun—though the New York Esperanto office was less than pleased. Esperanto vivo vi! Live on, Esperanto!

  One of the greatest things about Esperanto is the opportunity to meet ready-made friends speaking the same language in every country of the world. So one of the first things that I did when we settled into Denmark was to contact the local Esperanto society, and I began to appreciate the true value of the language. At the first meeting I attended there were mostly Danes and Swedes, but there was also a German couple on holiday in Denmark, a Yugoslavian doctor working in a local hospital, and three Greenlanders, and Esperanto was our common language. This was wonderful!

  Since this was before the days of package tours and cheap travel, they had never met an American Esperantist before. I was invited on the spot to address the Malmö group, a short ferry ride across the Øresund from Copenhagen to Sweden. I had never done this sort of thing before so I made careful preparations. I thought the audience, being internationalists, might be interested in Mexico. I prepared slides from photographs I had taken there and looked forward to the big day. I must admit to a little stage fright since this was a totally new experience for me.

  Svend Dragsted, president of the Danish Esperanto Society, introduced me. The sixty or seventy Danish and Swedish Esperantists in the room clapped politely. I spoke a bit about Esperanto in America and could see that I had their attention. I asked for the house lights to be lowered—and the room went black. There was no dimmer switch and no other light source in the hall but there was just enough light from the bulb in the projector to operate it, so I carried on. I showed the usual tourist items first, then ended up with our final drive when we left Mexico. We had driven through the seasonal cloudburst and the shots of the flooded plain and a mired-down truck drew interested murmurs from my unseen audience. Then I showed the pig truck accident.

  “You will see that the tires on the truck are completely bald; probably a blowout caused this one-vehicle accident. An ambulance was just leaving, as the driver was sent to the hospital. About half the pigs had been killed while the rest were being rounded up by the police. Since all of this fresh pork would have spoiled quickly in the sun, the local villagers are doing some on-the-spot butchery. This will be a great addition to their normally vegetarian diet.…”

  This was when I lost my audience. Even in the dark you can tell when people have stopped listening. There were murmurs, and people were obviously moving about. I must have bored these Scandinavians with my travels, gone on too long. I wrapped quickly and asked for the lights to be turned back on. I hadn’t lost my audience—I had petrified them! Row after row of staring eyes and gaping mouths faced me. They were shocked. In years to come I understood the provincialism of these people; they had never seen anything like this before. They thanked me kindly enough before they stumbled out into the night. I learned to consider my audience better in future talks.

  * * *

  A few years later we had saved up enough money to make a summer trip to Italy, to Ravenna on the Adriatic. They had a large Esperanto club there. When I wrote in advance they responded with some enthusiasm and promised to help us find a summer rental. This they indeed did. I spoke to the club—noncontroversial, no dead pigs, and the lights stayed on.

  The next day the chairman was kind enough to guide us through the various churches, to see their incredible mosaics. It was there that we met the president of the local organization, a Capuchin monk named Father Durante. We talked a bit before he was called away. It seemed that a priest had taken ill in a nearby church in the Camacho marshes and he was going to fill in for the man. He invited me to visit him in the church and I gladly accepted. Pastro Duranti was a small man with a squeaky voice—but was a great scholar as well. He was one of the people then working on a new translation of the Bible into Italian. Open on his study desk were texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. All of which he read.

  As we settled down for a chat there was a knock on the door and one of the local parishioners was admitted by the housekeeper. The monk’s voice deepened when he spoke as the voice of the church. The woman wanted to make some funeral arrangements, but first she presented him with a bottle of local wine, a gift to the priest being a local custom. They talked, she left—and he got two glasses and cracked the bottle. It was good wine.

  When we chatted he, like all priests, quickly got around to the relevant question—in Esperanto of course—and queried, “Are you a Catholic?”

  “No. I’m an Atheist.”

  “Ĉu, jes!” he said, eyes sparkling with interest, an exclamation like “You don’t say!” The lines for intellectual combat were drawn. He bested me in the beginning, since I didn’t know what the words for the Holy Trinity and other theological terms were in Esperanto, but I learned fast and soon held my own. Of course theological arguments, in Esperanto, are thirsty work; the wine was there. There were occasional interruptions for church business. The next visitor presented him with a freshly baked pizza Romanoglia, a local oven-baked specialty, flat bread without cheese or tomatoes but coated with fine herbs instead, and delicious. Particularly when washed down with the local wine. We were already on the second bottle when darkness fell. It had been a lovely and stimulating afternoon, the stern intellectual argument softened by numerous bottles of wine. In the end he had to leave to ring vespers; I had to go out by the church wall to relieve my bladder. We embraced and parted, each to his duty.

  This wasn’t our only trip south. We lived in Denmark for over seven years. After trading the loyal Anglia in for a VW bus—fixed up as a camper—we drove south every summer to Italy, camping on the way in all of the western countries, and many of the then-communist countries. We made many new Esperanto friends that way, with sometimes surprising results. It was in a campsite on the beach in Yugoslavia that we met the eye surgeon from Hungary. We chatted in Esperanto while the kids splashed on the shore. When they had enough he invited us to his tent for a glass of wine. I brought over a bottle of Swiss wine, which was much admired all out of proportion to the quality of the wine. In his experience, shut off behind the Iron Curtain, this was an alien object from another world. Since the wine had proved so popular I dug out another bottle, which proved equally successful. The eye surgeon was relaxed and loquacious about life behind the curtain. It seemed that there was a limit on the amount of foreign currency he could take out of the country. It was the equivalent of $2.35 a day. Right there in the tent on the beach in Yugoslavia a great commercial deal was struck. He was very well off in Hungarian forints. While I was loaded with dollars and other Western currency, having come well prepared for currency exchange. With the simple preparation of closing the toggle on the tent flap we began our happy numismatic exchange. The doc set the rate—something like ten times the legal exchange. He was so cheered by the few U.S. greenbacks that were included in the deal that he said this was still a great cheat if he went to the black market. We finished the Swiss wine and deals were struck that pleased us all. We would be in Yugoslavia for another week, and the
gray, limp banknotes really were a viable currency. The wine was gone and, financially happy, we retired.

  The rest of our stay behind the rusty Iron Curtain was that much happier now we knew what to do with their decrepit financial system. By hindsight it seemed so obvious. We were loyal warriors in the Cold War against Communism. We retired well pleased with our labors.

  Esperanto now was really a home from home, a ready-made circle of friends that extended right around the world. And every year there is an annual world convention of Esperantists, each time in a different country. When we discovered that the world convention in 1986 would be held in Beijing, the first time ever in China, I knew that we had to go; Joan was in complete agreement.

  The trip was long and tiring but well worth it. I shall resist the temptation to write a travel article about China and stick with Esperanto. Suffice it to say the trip and travels around China were more than worth the visit. And the food! We never ate a Chinese meal as it is served in the West. And every meal was a gustatory winner. But back to the convention.

  We were staying in a great Canadian hotel. Its existence was a neat solution to the primitive state of Beijing’s lodging in 1988. The deal was that the Canadians brought in all the plumbing, lights, elevators—all of the finished products of the West—while the Chinese supplied steel, concrete—and manpower. We moved into the just-completed hotel—with cheerful Esperantists on all sides, all reveling in the patrolingvo. There were 2,482 attendees at this convention—at the time the largest foreign convention held in China, with attendees from fifty-one different countries.

  In the morning I went down to breakfast—after making sure Joan had her cup of coffee. There was quite a crowd around the buffet table, which was being constantly topped up. As a tip of the hat to the multinational crowd there was an oriental and a Western table. While I do love my curries and tofu, they are not for breakfast. Bacon and eggs were in order and I tucked in.

  I don’t communicate very well early in the morning and hid behind a muttered Bonan tagon (Good morning) or two, but I could still listen. All around me they were talking Esperanto and I eavesdropped automatically. There were two men sitting opposite me, chatting away.

  “I’m from Korea—and you?”

  “I’m Chinese—but not a local. This is the first time I have been to Beijing—so far from the mountains where I teach.”

  “I envy you. I live on the shore.”

  They chatted on and my attention faded—until the teacher said: “This is all new to me, particularly the food. I don’t think I like Western food.”

  Western food? What was he talking about? I looked up. I wouldn’t like it either the way he was eating it—he was eating a piece of cold, dry toast speared on a chopstick!

  The convention went from one success to another. It was indeed a feast of communication and a convention to be long remembered. The high point was the banquet at the People’s Palace on Tiananmen Square (to become famous later after the man-against-tank standoff). When we went it was filled with a sightseeing crowd eager to see the visiting celebrities. As a patron of Esperanto I was high on the VIP list. On the morning of the banquet an envelope was hand-delivered to our room by a uniformed flunky who did everything but bow. I did everything but bow back. It contained a list of our evening activities, starting at the time of our limo’s arrival. After that we were in the hands of conquerors.

  As you can imagine, Joan was wondering what dress she was to wear. With no woman present she turned to me for aid, forgetting that I was a weak reed in these matters. Each suggestion of mine was rejected with a sniff of disdain. Eventually I was thrown out of the room altogether. A gaggle of women were passing at the same moment. “Ladies, I need assistance badly. Can you help me? My wife is having trouble choosing what to wear tonight.” Since they were dressed to the nines and smelling of all the perfumes of the world, I knew that the ladies in my new audience were not strangers to the problem. I threw the room door open mere minutes since I had closed it and to Joan’s amazement herded her new companions in to her aid. I introduced her new assistants and slipped into the hall and closed the door. Fingers crossed I made my cowardly way down to the bar. Upon my return I could expect happy cries of joy or … I shuddered and signaled the bar man.

  I can only report a happy return; Joan was all smiles and laughter and had enjoyed the brief invasion. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door by our chauffeur, who politely told us that we were ready to leave for the palace of joy. A hulking black limo was waiting outside the hotel. Our fellow Esperantists cheered us on—and took photos of this great occasion. Waving to the crowds, we made our majestic way to the square, where we were slowed by the crowds and other arriving limos. More photos were taken—this time by the Chinese onlookers—and I waved, smiled, and nodded majestically at the crowd; a sharp elbow in the ribs curbed my majestic enthusiasm. We slowed to a ponderous stop, flunkies opened the door, a people’s majordomo bowed us onto—yes!—a red carpet. This was the big time. Until they served the food. When I said I never had a bad meal in China my mind was certainly cleansed of this shuddering memory. It began with thousand-year-old eggs and went downhill from there.

  Chinese friends later explained that at important banquets only special banquet food is served. Nobody really ate it and honor was satisfied by pushing it around my plate with my gold-tipped chopsticks. And oh yes, ha-ha, my friends explained that the eggs were only a few years old, maybe three or four, and buried in the ground to ripen.…

  I have come a long way in exploring Esperanto. That demonstration I attended in Texas all those years before has more than earned its worth. I shall be ever grateful to that nameless GI who set my feet on the road to Esperanto. Learning Esperanto was a wise decision that I have never regretted. I can truthfully say Vivu la patrolingvo kaj eterna mondpaco! Long live the father language and eternal world peace!

  * * *

  Learning to read and speak Esperanto was fun. One thing about learning this language that I didn’t appreciate at the time was that it proved to me that, yes, it was possible to learn a second language, or even a third. To learn to read it and speak it—and enjoy it. My linguistic experience in high school left me with no desire or intent to learn any other languages: English was more than enough, thank you.

  Forest Hills High School curriculum required at least two years of a language. I opted for Spanish, which turned out to be a disaster—with all thanks to Señorita Murphy. I don’t think she cared if we learned Spanish or not. Certainly I have no memory of any attempt to teach us to speak the language. I remember no nouns or adjectives—just lists of grammatical verb forms. (For some reason I still remember the preterite of ir—though I don’t remember what a preterite is.) After two years of her tutelage I learned barely enough to fail my regent’s exam with a massive thirty-one points out of a hundred. To take the exam again I would have to repeat the second year. But salvation was at hand, for I studied that year with Señorita Soller, not the dreaded Murphy. She did her best and I managed to pass the test with a score of exactly sixty-five—which was the lowest passing score at the time. She loved the language, read us some poems by Lorca—and I still remember bits of one of them. But the curse of the Murphy remained; I shuddered away from the thought of learning a language. A good number of years passed before the possibility was raised again by that poster advertising Esperanto!

  A number of years slipped by before I thought of the dreaded Spanish again. This was when we had decided to move to Mexico. Were we naïve about this? About packing up the baby, loading the faithful Anglia—and driving to Mexico? Many would say we were. (Many would also think we were bonkers with the whole idea—and told us so.) But we did think about it, to the extent that before we left we studied Spanish privately with an old buddy from my early Esperanto days. Jim Donaldson was now a high school teacher in New Jersey, just across the river. He was always hungry and was more than happy to trade Joan’s meals for him and his companion José—we exchanged
dinner for them for lessons for us, an arrangement approved by all. Joan prided herself on her cooking and the fact that no one left her table hungry, except for Jim. He was tall and thin and apparently suffering from starvation. No matter what she made he demolished it—then smiled wanly at his empty plate as though wondering where the rest of the meal was. You don’t do that to a Jewish mother, particularly one like Joan, who took great—and justified—pride in her table. Of course she won in the end. She forgot haute cuisine and settled for one of our simpler favorites. It was the most inexpensive and filling of meals: stuffed franks. A hot dog sliced down the side and the slices filled with cheese, the whole wrapped in bacon—a delicious and calorific cholesterol nightmare. I could get down one, possibly two of the things. To satisfy her pride she served Jim two, sweetly asked if he wanted another, then brought it with his happy agreement. I think he managed to get down nine of them before he signaled glassy-eyed admission of defeat. She smiled in satisfied triumph as she cleared the table.

  The day came when we left for Mexico and, after an adventurous trip, settled into the small market town of Cuautla in the state of Morelos. Our lessons with Jim now proved their worth. The local Indians spoke Nahuatl, the Aztec language, with Spanish as a second language. So we and they learned Spanish together! In the year that we lived there we became quite proficient, learning by ear all the ins and outs of the language that aren’t mentioned in the textbooks.