A Language No One Speaks Here
The house of a mother tongue, kept warm for a guest who may never come
There is a particular that belongs only to those whose language no one around them speaks.
For the first years here, I carried my mother tongue like a coin from a country that no longer trades.
It had value once, and it has value still, but there is no counter where I can spend it.
In my own tongue I could be witty, tender, exact; in the new one I was and slow and childish.
A whole self, it turned out, could be locked inside a grammar that nobody here had the key to.
I began to notice how a language lives only in the mouths that use it daily.
Words I had known since childhood started to feel , like teeth that had begun to work free.
I would reach for the name of a common flower and find, to my horror, an empty place.
No dictionary could help me, because what I had lost was not the meaning but the warmth of the word.
A language, I think now, is not a list of words but a house in which one has once been happy.
When no one enters that house with you, the rooms grow cold, however carefully you them.
So I spoke to myself, quietly, on my evening walks, simply to keep the rooms from freezing.
Passers-by must have thought me a harmless madman, murmuring to no one they could see.
They were not entirely wrong, for I was speaking to a country that existed only in my mouth.
Then one winter I met an old woman at the market who had come from a town near my own.
She said one ordinary sentence in our language, asking the price of apples, and I nearly wept.
It was not the meaning that undid me but the music, the old rise and fall I had almost forgotten.
For an hour we stood among the vegetables and spoke, and my tongue remembered what it was for.
When she left, the returned, but it was no longer quite the same .
I had proof, now, that the house still stood, and that others could still be found to enter it.
Since then I have taught the language to my grandchildren, though they learn it as a .
They will never be happy in that house as I was, but they will at least know that it exists.
A language dies not when its last book is burned but when its last two speakers fall silent.
As long as I can find one person to answer me, my country has not entirely disappeared.
I have come to believe that to keep a language alive is itself a kind of quiet .
And so I go on speaking, into the cold, waiting for a single warm answer.
It does not always come, but the waiting, I have decided, is not the same as .
A house kept warm for a guest who may never arrive is still, after all, a house that is loved.