Scattered All Over the Earth Page 2

  “How do you do?” I said. “My name is Knut, and I’m studying linguistics.”

  “name feeling of intimacy gives.”

  “Actually it’s an old man’s name. My great-grandfather was apparently a wonderful person, so my mother just had to name me after him.”

  “great-grandfather also linguist?”

  “No, he was a leftist Arctic explorer.”

  “among arctic explorers also leftists and rightists exist. linguist knud knudsen also your ancestor?”

  “Unfortunately, no. I was really surprised when I saw you on TV today. That was a live broadcast, wasn’t it?”

  “yes. in your country live program without incident. your country fearless when guest suddenly sounds antidemocratic. your country with such incident naturally can deal.”

  Hiruko was sometimes hard to follow, but when I stopped to think, it seemed like maybe that was because I just wasn’t very bright. Not that I think I’m particularly stupid, but after I smoke pot, I’ll suddenly go all foggy in the head for days afterward. Like there’s this idea right in front of me but my brain’s too sluggish to grasp it — that sort of frustration. I couldn’t tell whether the strangeness I felt listening to Hiruko was because of the dope or thanks to this entirely new kind of grammar she was using. But any sort of distance between us was purely due to language — on a personal level, I felt as if I’d known her since we were children.

  “Are you living in Copenhagen?”

  “no. in odense. but today single room reserved, so at wristwatch looking unnecessary.”

  “Well then, can I take you to dinner? As a budding linguist, there are lots of things I want to talk to you about.”

  “to most people linguist not interesting job. to me linguist equals diamond.” Hearing her say that made me so happy my heart did a back flip.

  “What kind of food do you like?” I asked her. “How about Finnish home cooking — sushi, for instance.”

  “sushi not finnish.”

  “Are you sure? I always thought it was Finnish. There’s a sign in the Helsinki Airport that says ‘Welcome to the Country of the Three Wonderful S’s’.”

  “three s’s?”

  “Sauna, Sibelius, Sushi.”

  “not sushi, sisu. sushi entirely not finnish. i alone say, no one will believe.”

  “Well, I believe you,” I assured her. “Shall we go? Do you have an umbrella?”

  The rain had lifted, and the evening sun was tinting the clouds orange. For the Copenhagen sky, this was first-class service. I had promised to have dinner with someone else, I now remembered. Someone whose first name had dropped out of the picture, replaced by the privileged title Mother, the moniker under which she rules the inside of my head. As Hiruko and I walked along the canal, the evening sun glinted off the water like bits of gold dust.

  “I can’t get over your making up your own language. When you say made-up language, what I think of mostly are computer programming languages. Once I considered developing a theory for the language that’s used in interactive computer games, but I gave it up because it’s more a mathematical problem, basically different from what I think of as language. I studied Esperanto, too, but not for long. Just unlucky, I guess. There’re lots of good Esperanto teachers, but the one I ended up with had terrible pronunciation. We used to talk about it behind his back. ‘This must be the Paris dialect of Esperanto,’ we’d say. It’s an artificial language made so that people from all over the world can talk to each other, but with this teacher, the only ones who’d understand us were the people in our class. We would have been better off studying French. But you don’t blame your troubles on anyone else, and all by yourself you’ve perfected a language you can use to communicate with people all over Scandinavia. That’s really something.”

  “not perfect. my present situation equal to language itself. after one month less like norwegian, more like danish possible.”

  “If you stay in Denmark permanently, do you think your homemade language might turn completely into Danish?”

  “unclear if immigrants in one place permanently can stay.”

  “I’d be really happy if you’d say Danish was more beautiful than any other Scandinavian language.”

  “pronunciation difficult because soft, mushy. now soft, mushy things eating while danish pronunciation practice.”

  “And all this time you haven’t spoken your mother tongue at all?”

  “mother tongue people not easy to meet. where all are i know not. little by little, planning to look for.”

  “How are you going to look for them?”

  “after broadcast, many emails and phone calls came. so many places to look.”

  “Oh, so I wasn’t the only one who called. I’m kind of disappointed to hear that.”

  “tomorrow in trier umami festival held. umami from my mother tongue originated. going there, some mother tongue person might meet.”

  “Can I go with you? I’m interested in languages from countries that have disappeared. Actually, this is a research topic I just thought of today, but it’s starting to feel like something I’ve always wanted to study.”

  “trier good place for such research. center of holy roman empire, now extinct.”

  “The Holy Roman Empire isn’t so interesting, now that all the native speakers of Latin have died out. You, on the other hand, are still young and full of life even though your country no longer exists.” I thought I saw a shadow pass over Hiruko’s face when I said “full of life,” though I may have been imagining it.

  Ever since we’d left the studio, we’d been talking as we walked down the street side by side. This is basically what she told me, although I may have gotten some of the details wrong.

  Hiruko grew up in a high-tech village; they had electronic sensors buried under the roads that could detect snowfall, so hot water, apparently redirected from local hot springs, spurted out of tiny holes whenever it snowed. That kept the roads from ever getting blocked with snow. The roofs were heated, too, so snow melted as soon as it fell. Hiruko’s grandmother said she needed to shovel snow or she’d get stiff all over, so even at age 100, she used to look for back alleys that weren’t equipped with sensors so she could shovel the snow there. Her shovel would rise so lightly you’d have thought the cloud god was pulling it up from the sky by an invisible rope, then toss its load of snow exactly on the spot her grandmother was aiming for. All that snow, piled up in the same place, looked like a castle made of sugar. As a child, Hiruko never got tired of watching her grandmother shovel snow.

  By the time Hiruko got that far in her story, my favorite sushi restaurant had come into view. When I saw the big sign out front with its picture of a Moomin, I knew I wasn’t wrong after all.

  “See — sushi is Finnish.”

  Hiruko shrugged her shoulders. “moomin to my country as exile came,” she said, “finland between ussr and western europe in difficult balance was caught, great stress for Moomin loss of weight caused. to restore round body shape moomin exile became. as lover of snow, in my area lived.”

  “What’s that area called?”

  “hokuetsu. official prefecture name niigata. rule requiring use of prefecture name was made. that rule everyone broke. niigata no one said. hokuetsu everyone said. moomin everyone loved, because gentle, domestic, plump, almost hairless. very popular type of man, on TV every day appeared. but when cold war ended, moomin back to finland went.”

  “And why was that?”

  “about old age worried. unlike finland, in my country pension not so much paid.”

  Inside the restaurant the air was hot and steamy; several people were already seated, having dinner. I pointed my chin toward an empty table by the window, and Hiruko nodded. The menu was new: it still had a list of different kinds of fish, but now each had from one to five stars beside it. I called a waiter over to ask him about i
t.

  “What do these stars mean?”

  “They indicate degrees of pain.”

  “Degrees of pain?”

  “How much pain each species felt while it was dying after being caught. Fish caught in a big net die slowly, writhing and struggling. Those caught one at a time are immediately euthanized by more compassionate fishermen with a bang on the head. Our customers are free to choose.”

  I saw a hint of a smile on Hiruko’s face.

  “Now that human rights are totally protected,” I said in defense of Denmark, “we’re moving on to animal rights.”

  “all fishermen truth only tell? certain?”

  “When the safety net covers everybody, no one has economic reasons to lie any longer, so people stop lying.”

  Salmon was by far the cheapest fish on the menu. There were rumors that too much growth hormone had been poured into the salmon farms in the Baltic Sea, causing such a population increase that the salmon had started eating each other. Since only the biggest and strongest survived, they kept getting bigger and bigger until you even heard about salmon the size of whales leaping out of the water. When people ate salmon raised on Baltic fish farms, their reproductive capacity was greatly stimulated as well; there were stories about couples coming home after eating sushi and heading straight for the bedroom to have sex. The women always had at least twins or triplets, but also quintuplets, and even way beyond that — you could find pictures on the internet of ten or twenty tiny fetuses in some woman’s womb, all breathing through their gills. So I definitely didn’t want to order salmon. Tuna’s on the verge of extinction, and I’d been avoiding shellfish ever since that time I got food poisoning. I saw a fish called hamachi on the menu. A funny name that sounded sort of like “How much.” I decided to forget about what they tasted like and order by name instead. A friend of mine, a literature major, once said you can see menus as a literary genre.

  “There’s a fish called ‘Ça va.’ Tako — that must be singular for tacos. Suzuki sounds cool, like the car.”

  “new model suzuki you saw?” Hiruko asked, surprised.

  “No, not new. Though a friend of mine has a used Samurai, so old it’s falling apart.”

  When we’d finished ordering, Hiruko told me more about her childhood. Bored with the snow-free roads, the kids always wanted to go deep into the mountains to play. But with the paths, trees, paddy fields, and everything else buried in snow, there were no landmarks. Worried about their kids getting lost, the parents had them wear kanjiki (snowshoes) outfitted with a computerized navigation system. Kanjiki were invented long, long ago, during “The Age of Writing with Rope” — that probably means before they had written language. Though we don’t get enough snow in Denmark to need special footwear, I wore snowshoes once when I went deep into the Swiss mountains to research Rhaeto-Romance languages (minus the computerized navigation system, of course). The computer on Hiruko’s snowshoes not only told kids which way to go or where deep crevices were hidden that they needed to avoid, but could also have simple conversations. Hiruko says that looking back, she now sees that that part of the program was utterly useless.

  “Kanjiki-san,” she’d ask, “where can I find a snowshoe rabbit?”

  “I do not know,” would be the answer. “May I help you with anything else?”

  “Kanjiki-san, why does snow fall?”

  “It takes too long to explain, so ask at home. Otherwise you will freeze to death.”

  Snow made a lot of trouble for the grown-ups, but to Hiruko winter was an exciting time, when her father got together with the neighbors and dug out a snow tunnel to school for her. There were lots of winter events, too. As drama was popular in that part of the country, they’d build a stage out of snow for Snow Troupe Musicals and Snow Kabuki performances. Though plays sometimes ran for over three hours, no one had any trouble remembering their lines. Hiruko had classmates who were discovered by casting agents and went on to careers as actors in the big city. And for some reason, almost everyone in Hiruko’s country considered cities to be superior to rural areas, so even the words “the country” had negative connotations. This cultural climate led one man to devote his entire life to an outrageous plan to utterly transform the rural region where he lived, so that it wouldn’t be “the country” anymore. He was undeniably dedicated and industrious. But too much dedication and industry can create terrible problems for the people around you. Because a mountain range was the only thing separating the northern district where Hiruko grew up from the big city, this man decided to remove that obstacle and connect rural to urban by scraping off all the mountaintops with a bulldozer. He believed that if he could level the mountains off in this way, the whole area would be swept by humid winter winds blowing in from the Communist Bloc, and snow would no longer fall. He bought a huge bulldozer with public funds and set to work, which was fine as far as it went, but leveling the mountains got to be so much fun he couldn’t stop himself, and since the waters were rising due to global warming as the mountains got lower and lower, finally the whole island, completely flattened out, sank into the Pacific Ocean. Hiruko says it’s possible that this is why her country vanished. When you hear someone talk about losing her country it sounds like a national tragedy, but what made Hiruko angry was the destruction of the mountains she’d loved. She couldn’t care less about the nation. She just can’t forgive the politicians who’d had no respect for the mountains.

  While she was telling me this sad story, Hiruko’s voice got so loud that people at other tables started giving us funny looks, so I picked up my cup of green tea as if I was making a toast and sang a little song to smooth things over. Hiruko’s face softened as she put some wasabi into her soy sauce and stirred it around with her chopsticks.

  Then I asked: “You are going to Trier tomorrow, aren’t you? Is it really okay if I come along?”

  Hiruko nodded, not the least bit wary. The smaller the country, the less time it takes to make friends.

  “morning flight to luxembourg reservation i have. from luxembourg bus.”

  I called the waiter and had him make a reservation for me on the same flight. When I was an undergraduate I used to make reservations on my Smilephone, but a friend of mine, a year ahead of me in grad school, told me that a waiter will do anything you ask.

  While we were eating matcha ice cream for desert, I said that matcha must come from Spanish, like macho, but Hiruko shook her head and said, “no. I alone say, so no one will anymore believe. but tomorrow one alone perhaps two will become.” Her voice, though quiet, was full of hope.

  Chapter 2 Hiruko Speaks

  I got the phone call on a Tuesday, the first sunny day in a long time.

  I was staring absentmindedly out the window, wondering why I’d come so early that morning. I couldn’t see far because the building next door was in the way. The smooth wall usually looked gray, but that day it was much brighter, like milk with a pat of butter dissolving in it. A delicious color, with a flag’s shadow dancing over it. The flag billowed, rose up, and started flapping, swimming in the breeze until it drooped down and played dead. Then it would wake up and start swimming again. That reminded me of something I’d seen long ago. What was it called? Koi-nobori? Didn’t koi mean love?

  I’d been working at the center for three weeks. The way the sunlight had been shifting little by little all that time had made the shadow appear just where it was on the wall, I thought, amazed by how the celestial bodies had pulled me into their silent workings.

  But what was the flag doing there? I could only see its shadow, so I didn’t know what it looked like. Perhaps it was some country’s national flag. A few days before, on my way to buy a sandwich at a neighborhood shop, I’d seen a sign for an embassy. Of a country so tiny and unpretentious it made me happy to know it was still around. I couldn’t remember its name, though. I leaned out the window and twisted around, trying to look behind me, up and over
to the side, but I still couldn’t see the flag. When a chilly breeze slipped under my collar and started down my back I quickly pulled my head in and shut the window.

  On the table was the stack of drawings I’d worked so hard on the day before, for my kamishibai picture drama. The first one was supposed to be a crane in a paddy field with its leg caught in a trap, but the bird’s head looked like a sprouting onion, and the body was shaped like the head of a golf club. I’d worked on it for hours and this was the best I could do. The first time I must have made the neck too short and fat, because when my friend Dorethe stopped by for a look on her way home she asked me if it was a duck.

  “Oh, it’s a swan,” she said when I’d drawn it over with a longer, thinner neck. I quickly added two long legs, and her face lit up like a candle.

  “I see,” she cried, her voice rising, “A stork? Or a crane?” and without thinking I grabbed her hand and shook it. Dorethe is Danish, so the crane, who doesn’t appear in any of Andersen’s fairy tales, must have been hiding in a drawer at the back of her brain. And since this drawing managed to drag the word “crane” out of her, I guess it’s one of my more successful efforts.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned around to see Dorethe standing there. Her lush blonde hair, not tied up in a “horse’s tail” as usual, flowed down in waves over her shoulders. Her long wraparound skirt had a pattern of fish scales.

  “similarity to little mermaid,” I said.

  “It’s cosplay, to cheer the kids up.”

  “ ‘cosplay’ from my mother tongue comes.”

  “Cosplay is English, isn’t it?”

  “different. english language people costume to cos shorten. english parts in non-english way put together.”

  Knowing all too well that when I start talking about language I get so excited I can’t stop, Dorethe quickly changed the subject.

  “You’re so good at drawing I really envy you.” She wasn’t joking, or being sarcastic — she really meant it.