Sarah Bernstein is from Montreal, Quebec and lives in the Northwest Highlands. She is the author of Study for Obedience, The Coming Bad Days, and Now Comes the Lightning. Her writing has been called ‘the new millennium’s answer to modernism’.
Hear an audio extract of ‘A Dying Tongue’ here
‘A Dying Tongue’
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What needs explaining was that, and it was a funny thing, a very funny thing, I did not speak the language. It was not for lack of trying, for I had been enrolled in a programme of daily language tuition for several months prior to my relocation, tuition I continued remotely upon my arrival in the place my brother called home. I was studious. I was meticulous. For whatever reason it would not stick. I had never had a problem with language acquisition up to that point, in childhood I had spoken four languages, at least two of which I had lost in the passage of time, all the same I pursued in a haphazard manner my studies of foreign languages at university, picking up German and Italian with ease, in fact the facility with which I read and wrote, not to mention conversed, in these languages after barely a month’s attendance at weekly classes floored my instructors of German and Italian, in no small part because of a certain vacant quality I had always had. The teachers lavished me with praise, holding me up as an example in front of my classmates, who despised me with good reason, in the first place because I appeared to relish the attention, taking every opportunity to answer the questions the teachers posed to us, delivering sentences with multiple clauses to showcase my linguistic virtuosity, revelling in every single syllable as it rolled off my tongue and into the space of the classroom in which I sat, together with my classmates, who observed the spectacle with silent loathing, suspecting I had prior knowledge of the languages and was in point of fact a cheat. But the mother tongue of the locals foiled me, as it did not foil my brother, who had long mastered the language, who even as a child loathed any sign of weakness, who always sided with the victors, whatever their stripe. For a long time it did not occur to me that my brother had come to the town for just this reason, not an overwriting of history so much as a realignment of himself with the powerful, the crowning achievement in a lifelong pursuit of dominance.
But here again I go too far. Let me confine myself to my own motives. With regards to the problem of language, it was not the weather of the place that hindered me, for I liked the cold, had been born in the wintertime, and as a child had often lain down in the snow, in my snowsuit, and looked up at the white sky for hours, for hours. The situation in this northern country town seemed to me to offer a robust life, a hale life, a life of people with smooth and youthful skin, a much healthier lifestyle, in short, than I had been accustomed to, and my brother, prior to his illness, had been exactly this sort of vigorous person, could be found, at any given time, running a marathon or energetically and in a team rowing a skiff on rough seas. I, on the other hand, had been a dedicated and lifelong smoker, I loved nothing more than a smoke, it’s true, from the age of fourteen I could be found smoking on street corners and doorsteps, in alleyways and in stairwells, and yet I was a stationary smoker, never moved while smoking, hated the sensation of smoking while walking, and I walked plenty – if I had a second, not quite equal, love, it was walking; I spent entire days walking from one end of the city I lived in to the other and back again, travelling by foot from tram terminus to tram terminus, bus station to bus station, municipal park to industrial park, and back again, always back again. I felt these were pleasures that ought not to be mixed, I had always wanted to be good and so, as a kind of offering of gratitude for my new life, I gave up smoking, which was just as well, for I had enough to be getting on with, as it turned out.
At first, I stayed away from the town in the valley, supplementing my brother’s stores of dry goods with vegetables from the overgrown kitchen garden. I got to know my immediate surroundings. I explored the house, inside and out. I stood under the pines on the long drive, under the stand of alders by the creek, by the birch trees at the edge of the forest. I felt the cold ground of the kitchen garden give beneath me as I knelt down, so many hours spent weeding, mending the fences and darning the netting that cradled the winter crops. I untangled the tender leafy greens from the viny plants that had grown around them, wondering about the lives of cabbages, their hearts and their vitality. They did not know, how could they, the care and attention with which I applied myself to them, and I loved them for that, the essential mystery of their being, no exposition possible, no question of knowing or being known. The beautiful, the unthinkable cabbages! The kales too and the mustard greens, even the garlic, having survived the winter, throwing out its slender stalks. Do you understand what I am saying? Beauty is something to be eaten: it is a food. I endeavoured to learn from staying in place. I studied under the plants, under the earthworms, I felt the texture of the earth in which all these organisms lived changing with the seasons. How might a person, a people, take root? Roots and rootlessness, the preservation of what little remains of the past, such were the thoughts that blew through me on any given morning, standing very still in the porch, or in the garden in my bare feet, feeling suddenly: that sound, that rushing, it is the wind, it is the trees!
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