Last Night in Montreal Read Free Page B

the research in itself wasn’t without merit: he’d become somewhat of an expert in the study of absence. Specifically, dead languages, or if not dead, then at least terminally ill. He studied small languages on the edge of extinction: the oldest languages of Australia, California, China, Lapland, obscure corners of Arizona and Quebec, fading out for exactly the reasons one might expect—colonization, the proliferation of residential schools and smallpox, the dispersal of native speakers over vast distances, etc. He’d grown used to watching girls’ eyes glaze over when he started talking about it; that Lilia actually seemed to find the whole thing fascinating, watching him seriously across a table at the Café Matisse, came as a bright and exuberant shock.
    The majority of languages, he told her grandly, will disappear. Since she still seemed somewhat interested, Eli flashed his favorite statistics across the table like a Rolex: of the six thousand languages currently spoken on this earth, 90 percent are endangered and half will be gone by the end of the next century. An optimistic few hope to save a handful of them; most hope for nothing more than a chance to document a fraction of the loss. His work was part reconstruction, part thesis, part requiem, he told her. She listened quietly, apparently rapt, and asked intelligent questions just when he thought her interest couldn’t possibly be sincere. She said lightly that she was used to much more localized vanishing acts: individual people, motel rooms, cars. She wasn’t used to disappearance on a larger scale. Imagine, he said, losing half the words on Earth. Although what he was actually trying to imagine just then, as he said that, was what it might be like to kiss her neck. She nodded and watched him across the tabletop.
    Three thousand languages, destined to vanish. He’d become obsessed with the untranslatable: his idea, and the subject of his thesis (or what had been a thesis, some years earlier, before it suddenly imploded and went unfinishable on him overnight), was that every language on earth contains at least one crucial concept that cannot be translated. Not just a word but an idea, like the French déjà vu: perfect and crystalline in its native language, otherwise explainable only by entire clumsy foreign paragraphs or not at all. In Yup’ik, a language spoken by the Inuit along the Bering Sea, there is Ellam Yua: a kind of spiritual debt to the natural world, or a way of moving through that world with some measure of generosity, of grace, or a way of living that acknowledges the soul of another human being, or the soul of a rock or of a piece of driftwood; sometimes translated as soul, or as God, but meaning neither. In a Mayan language, K’iche, there is the Nawal: one’s spiritual essence but separate from the self; one’s other, not exactly an alter ego or merely an avatar but a protective spirit that cannot be summoned.
    And if you accept this, he told her, this premise that every language holds something that exists in no other tongue, an entity far outweighing the sum of its words, then the loss takes on a staggering weight. It isn’t so much a question of losing three thousand words for everything. There aren’t three thousand words for everything; the speakers of Yup’ik have no reason to describe tigers in the high arctic; the speakers of the jungle languages need no language for the northern lights. It isn’t even so much about the words. His belief, the premise of the thesis, was that these are not just languages we lose in the gloaming, not just three thousand sets of every word, but three thousand ways of existing on this earth.
    “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I didn’t mean to get so pedantic about it.”
    “It’s all right. It’s interesting,” she said.
    She had been listening for a very long time. They’d met early in the afternoon, and it was almost evening now. It had been weeks since he’d first noticed her