Lieutenant (12 page)

Still, everyone smiled and nodded at him and cried words that he assumed were along the lines of,
Well done! Congratulations!

So that was the word, or perhaps words. But what did it, or they, mean? Something to do with the rain, but what, exactly?
What a downpour! Have you ever seen such weather?

The rain eased and stopped as abruptly as it had begun. The little boy pushed past Rooke’s legs and ran out. Two of the women followed more slowly. Rooke and the girl watched them splashing up the track, now a streaming torrent that gleamed in the rays of sun already emerging from the clouds.

‘
Yen-
narr-
a-
be
,’ the girl said. ‘
Yennarrabe
.’

‘
Yennarrabe
,’ he repeated.

Her mouth twisted, perhaps in amusement at the way it
sounded. They said it to each other a few times. For the moment it was enough to pass the echo backwards and forwards. Even without knowing their meaning, the fact of exchanging words was a kind of message:
I wish to speak with you
.

The girl’s face was so expressive, the sense of her personality so vivid, that Rooke’s instinct was to take a step back and look away. But he did not. The old woman had made herself at home, puffing at the coals to bring the fire back to life, taking the twigs that the other young girl was handing her from Rooke’s wood basket. With a reckless sense of taking a leap, Rooke laid the palm of his hand on his chest, where Warungin had laid his.

‘Rooke,’ he said. ‘Daniel Rooke.’

She caught on straight away and made a good approximation of his name. Then she put her hand flat on her own bony chest. Uttered a few syllables he could not properly catch.

‘
Ta-
ra
,’ he tried.

Over at the fire the other girl laughed behind her hand and he heard her mimic his effort.

He rolled his eyes, grimaced.
Yes, what an idiot I am, but
harmless
.

He tried again and the girl went slowly until the shapeless sound resolved itself into syllables:
Ta-
ga-
ran
.

The word he was making was still not quite the same as the one she had said. But he saw her face open with the pleasure of hearing her name in his foreign mouth, and at having been the one to teach him.

Her name and those two other utterances were in his mind now, but, as sounds not connected to anything, they would soon lose their shape in his memory. They were not
Wind or Weather
or
Barometer
, but like those, these words were part of the climate of the place, data that ought to be recorded.

He got down an unused notebook from the shelf, felt the girl watching as he sat at the table, dipped the pen in the ink and opened the book. On the first page, in his neatest astronomer’s hand, he wrote:
Tagaran, the name of a girl. Marray, wet. Paye
wallan
ill la be
—he hesitated—
concerning heavy rain
.

He read the words back to her, his finger under each syllable, stumbling through. She smiled, her face transformed, every part of it involved in the great beam of delight.

The old woman was calling out something. It might have been,
Come, children, time to go, time to go
, because she and the two girls left soon after. At the foot of the rocks, Tagaran turned.

‘
Yenioo! Yenioo!
’ she called, and he called back.

‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’ What else could she have meant?

‘Come again,’ he called. ‘Come again soon, you are always welcome!’

But they were gone. He was farewelling the bushes tossing in the breeze.

Small though it was, the hut seemed larger and emptier when they had gone. There was Montaigne on the bed where the
women had turned its pages. There was the blanket, crumpled from where the majestic one had held it up to her cheek.

In the silence, the dripping of water from the roof was very loud.

‘
Marray
, wet,’ he said aloud. ‘
Paye
wallan
ill la be
, concerning heavy rain.’

He drew a neat line across the page underneath the words. It said,
This is all I know
. Below, the space of white paper waited. He thought of Silk’s similar notebook, his similar, though more extensive, list of words.
Budyeri
, good.
Bogul
, a mouse.

But language was more than a list of words, more than a collection of fragments all jumbled together like a box of nuts and bolts. Language was a machine. To make it work, each part had to be understood in relation to all the other parts.

That required someone who could do more than collect words and learn them by rote. It required someone who could dismantle the machine, see how it worked, and put it to use: a man of system, a man of science.

Looking at the words he had written, he knew—in the way he knew a prime when he saw it—that he was that man.

And everything in his life had been leading here. He saw it as clearly as a map, the map of his life and his character. He had been born with the urge to understand how things worked. He could read in five languages. The unknown was his daily bread: astronomy was a profession of mysteries. Difference held no fear for him. He knew that strangeness
was commonplace when you inhabited it.

Above all, his temperament suited him to the task. Those qualities that made him such a diffident social being were the very ones that equipped him perfectly for listening.

He knew, with as much certainty as he knew his own name, that this would be his proper work in New South Wales: to acquire the native language.

Having gone so far in his mind, he went further, and allowed himself to picture the day when he would brush his jacket and set off down to the governor’s house with the notebooks in his hand.
Sir
, he would say. Perhaps it should be
Your Excellency
. Silk said that the governor liked to be addressed with his title. Perhaps he should ask Silk to go with him as a sort of ambassador.

Sir, Lieutenant Rooke seems to have found the basis on which the native
language is founded!

In fact there would be no seems about it, but a certain modesty was becoming to a mere second lieutenant. Once the governor was paying attention, Rooke would find his voice.

I am pleased to be able to tell you, sir, that I am now able to speak with
the natives such that a fruitful intercourse may be commenced
.

The governor would be astonished. It was hard to picture that face expressing excitement, admiration, awe, but how could he not be excited, admiring and full of awe? Rooke would be presenting him not only with the means for the governor to fulfil his own ambitions in New South Wales, but with something
bigger. The governor would be the first to learn of an addition to the world’s sum of knowledge almost as dramatic as Galileo’s or Kepler’s.
The earth moves around the sun. Gravity is a force that
operates at a distance
. The journey of discovery he had just embarked on was of that order of significance, a journey not simply into the language of a race of people hitherto unknown, but into the cosmos they inhabited: the ways they organised their society and the gods they worshipped, their thoughts and hopes, their fears and passions.

After such a leap of learning, the world would no longer be the same.

The first problem was not one of meaning but of music: how to convey in the familiar twenty-six letters those alien sounds. Thinking out the way to start was like stretching a muscle that had been unused too long.

He turned over the first page of the notebook. Those first entries had given him the beginning, but they were not the way he meant to continue. On the inviting field of the following page drew up four columns:
Letter. Name. Sound. As in the English word
.

He felt a thrill, a physical thing, anticipation like an appetite.

He was reminded of what he had not thought of for years, his old copy of Lily’s
Grammar of the Latin Tongue
: the worn
maroon cover, watermarked as with dark clouds, the spine that was coming away from the binding—his father had got it cheap from a stall at Southsea—and the woodcut in the frontispiece of men picking fruit with grand studied gestures.

Recklessly he turned over page after page of the notebook, heading each with a letter of the alphabet as Lily had done:
Native Tongue to English
, then again for
English to Native
Tongue
.

Now he took a second notebook and on its flyleaf he wrote:
Grammatical Forms of the Language of N. S. Wales
. Words were all very well, but with nothing more than words one was forever a child, piping out the names of things. Grammar was the gearing that made them useful.

To begin with, he would have to limit himself to actions that could be acted out:
to eat, to go or walk, to drink, to yawn, to creep
. Foreign they might be, but these people must walk and drink, eat and yawn and creep.

He had better start modestly, with the indicative mood.
I eat.
You eat. He, she or it eats
. Nothing much could be communicated without a sense of past and future, so he had better try for that too:
I will eat, you will eat. I have eaten, you have eaten
. And of course he must gather the useful imperative:
Eat!

On the left-hand side of the page he wrote the English. Beside each entry were the spaces that would be filled, word by systematic word, with the unknown tongue. He headed the page opposite the empty verb templates with a title he hoped
might gather up some of what was missing:
other inflexions of the
same verb
.

He laid the notebooks out side by side on the table. The
Vocabulary
, the
Grammatical Forms
. The books were like the jaws of some ingenious machine. Between them they would crack open the nut of this language.

It would be an extraordinary task. Even Kepler, even Newton, had not been presented with a
tabula rasa
but had built on other men’s work. Unlike them, he would be setting off to meet the unknown with only his ears, his pen and these little notebooks.

Rooke was aware of a tightness in his chest that was new to him. It took him some time to recognise that this was how it felt to be in the grip of a vision. Destiny was a grand word, but perhaps not too grand for what lay ahead.

T
he natives did not return for nearly a week. Rooke busied himself with the rain gauge and the barometer, wrote up his notes on the south celestial pole in a fair hand. He filled his kettle, he gathered wood for his fire. But as he worked he was watching from the corner of his eye for a movement at the top of the ridge. Branches fooled him, and the swift shadows of clouds. He would straighten up and begin a wave, and the ridge would mock him in its emptiness.

So when they arrived at last, he was half angry. But the little boy leapt down the rocks in his eagerness to reach Rooke and started pouring out a stream of words.

Rooke could not go on being haughty. After all, had they made him any promises?

The women came down the rocks slowly, babies on their hips, and behind them were the girls: the shy one, and the other one, Tagaran.

‘Good afternoon! Good afternoon!’ he cried. ‘I am glad to see you again!’

It was just a form of words, he had said them a thousand times. But he meant them now in a way he had not on most other occasions.

The women had brought a piece of smouldering wood with them and set about lighting a fire near the hut. They moved in such a leisurely way, almost absent-mindedly, talking to each other, that it seemed the thing would never work—surely those pieces of wood were too large, surely that kindling was too far from the smoking stick? One woman bent down and blew—so briefly, he did not think it would have any effect—but shortly there was a fire and they sat down around it, the babies in their laps, sinking into the ground as if planting themselves.

The children came into the hut, the boy shouting at Rooke as though he would understand words said loudly enough.

‘Well, yes, my young friend,’ Rooke said, ‘but I wonder if you will give me some words one by one? Will you tell me what this is?’

He pointed at his ear, but the boy covered his fine teeth with a hand, bending himself in two in hilarity. The girls called out to each other, a muddle of words in which he could not fix a single individual sound. It seemed that these children were too
young and too cheerful to be useful to a man who needed conversation one syllable at a time.

The girl Tagaran was over at the table where the sextant sat out of its box. She reached for it and he put out a hand to stop her, flushing with the fear of it coming to harm. Courteous as a lady in a drawing room, she drew back. She turned to him and spoke with a question in her tone.

‘Sextant,’ he said. ‘It’s a sextant.’

With thumb and finger he made a circle around his eye and peered up through it. She watched gravely and followed his gaze to the shingles.

‘No, not there,’ he said. ‘For measuring the vertical angle between the horizon and a celestial body. Such as the sun. For instance. Or the moon.’

She watched his words trail away.

‘Daniel Rooke,’ he said, ‘at your service, and you’—he pointed to her—‘you are Tagaran. But who are your friends, what are their names?’

He pointed at the boy and the girl, and Tagaran saw what he wanted. She spoke to the girl, gesturing towards Rooke, who bowed and pointed to himself.

‘Daniel Rooke.’

But the girl could not seem to look at him, much less answer. Surely he was not frightening?

But perhaps he was. Large, male, a stranger, and clad in incomprehensible coverings: flaps and folds and bulges and
puckers of a tissue that was soft like skin, but not skin.

The girl murmured some syllables, more or less into her armpit.

‘Again, if you please?’

Tagaran saw the difficulty. ‘
Wo-
ro-
gan. Worogan
,’ she said.

She had already caught onto the need to articulate a new word one clear sound at a time.

The boy had no fear whatsoever. He jumped up and down in front of Rooke, bursting to be next. He tried: said something, but much too quick. Tagaran spoke to him and he said it again, but he could not go slowly enough. At last Rooke got it:
Bon-e-
da
.

He opened the book at the page where he had written
Tagaran, the name of a girl
, and dipped the pen in the ink. Tagaran was watching every movement of this operation with the close attention of someone playing the cup-and-walnut game. He wrote:
Worogan, the name of a girl. Boneda, the name of a boy
.

She showed him that she wanted to try the pen, so he helped her dip it in the ink. Her hand was small and bony, hard in his own. She drew five small neat marks on the page, then another two sideways.

The boy exclaimed at the way the black marks appeared on the paper, but did not want to try. Worogan would not even come close enough to see, as if the pen held a dangerous power.

He had planned to start his vocabulary with
Parts of the
Human Body
. He pointed at his head and made a questioning face.

‘Perhaps you will tell me,’ he said. ‘What is this, what do you call this?’

Tagaran understood immediately.

‘
Kubbura
.’

She repeated it until he was able to write it down and read it back. Going almost too fast for him to keep up, she pointed to various parts of her head and face, so that in short order he had the words for mouth, forehead, eyebrow, even eyelash. But there seemed to be distinctions in her language that English did not bother with. As well as
kubbura
there was
ngulu
, forehead,
kamura
, top head, and
kuru
, which he translated as hind head although he knew that English had no such word except for the name of a deep-laned muddy village between Portsmouth and Greenwich.

He was eager to move on to arms and legs, feet and hands, but he thought Boneda and Worogan were becoming weary of the minute demarcations of the human body. Fearful of losing them, he picked up a piece of bread and made to eat it and straight away Tagaran said a word that sounded like
patadjiumi:
presumably,
you eat
or
you are eating
. He gave the bread to her and motioned for her to eat it. Like him, she only feigned, and said
patadjiu
, which he understood to be
I am
eating
.

Oh, she was quick.

A conjugated language then, and the root possibly something like
pata
. There was a swollen feeling in his chest as if he needed room to breathe. In one leap he had gone beyond the simple exchange of word for thing, word for action. Here was his first principle of the grammar, the first means of connecting and articulating!

He leaned away from the table beaming at Tagaran. She beamed back. Clearly she was enjoying this as much as he was.

Then, to everyone’s extreme amusement, he acted out the other verbs he had already made the blanks for. He walked, he drank, he yawned and sneezed and pinched.

Worogan forgot to be shy, so entertaining was Rooke’s performance. By the time he was creeping on all fours they were staggering with laughter, their dark cheeks slick with tears, Boneda almost crowing, unable to catch his breath.

Rooke collapsed on the dirt. He was laughing so uncontrollably at the picture of himself creeping that he had given himself a pain in his side. How odd it was that he should finally learn how to play the fool, and become the child he had never been in his childhood, in the company of these three children with whom he shared hardly a word.

It was turning into a warm afternoon and he could feel the fleas, enlivened by the heat, nipping him in his jacket. The children watched the business of ridding each arm of the sleeves and peeling the thing off. When a flea jumped out they took the
coat from him, flipping the fabric around, until they caught it and cracked it between their nails.

Looking at Tagaran, Rooke made his fingers spring off the coat.

‘
Burudu
,’ she said.

He was still writing this down under
B: burudu, a flea
, when Tagaran picked up the jacket and said a few words, he guessed,
What do you call this?

‘Jacket. That is a jacket.’

She nodded once, and went through the action of taking off a garment.

‘
Minyin
bunilbangadyimi
jacket?
’

He heard with surprise how quickly she had adopted the foreign word. And she must be asking,
Why are you taking off
your
jacket?

‘To rid it of fleas,’ he said. ‘
Burudu
.’

‘
Ah,
Burudin
!
’

Her question was answered, she was ready to go on. But he gave a guffaw of excitement that made her stop. He knew now that this language was not only conjugated but its noun forms were inflected too, like Latin and Greek.
Burudu
was flea, and
burudin
seemed to be
because of the fleas
, some form of the ablative case.

Was this what Galileo had felt, turning his telescope to the night sky and seeing stars that no one had seen before?

It was like a dance between the two of them, or the voices
of a fugue. He pushed it further, taking the jacket from Tagaran, and shrugged it back on in order to take it off again.

‘Now, how might you describe what I just did, I wonder,’ he said. ‘Since you have no jackets, what words might you use?’

He did not expect her to understand, but she copied his action with her own imaginary jacket, movement by movement: peeling back the opening on both sides, pushing the right shoulder up, reaching around with the left hand to tug at the cuff of the right sleeve.

‘
Bunilbanga
.’

He repeated the sounds, made to write them down, but she stopped him.

She mimed putting the jacket on.

‘
Banga
,’ she said, and looked to make sure he understood.

Then she took the imaginary jacket off again. It was as if she had spent her life removing jackets from her narrow body.

‘
Buni
.’

With a shock like a fright, Rooke realised that
banga
must be a word like
to make
or
to do
or
to
put
—like
faire
or
machen
perhaps, he could clarify that later—and
buni
or
bunil
must be a negating or reversing principle. At this rate, he would be fluent in a month!

‘
Bunilbanga jacket
,’ he said, for the pleasure of feeling the words in his mouth. Her face in repose was made stern by the heavy brows, the prominent cheekbones, the deep-set eyes, but was transformed by her smile.

‘
Budyeri karaga
,’ she said, splitting the words off from one another so that he understood.

Karaga
, mouth. And
budyeri
was one of Silk’s words. She was saying
good mouth
, which could surely only have the sense of
you
speak well
.

What an astonishing thing, that her praise filled his heart.

The sun was sinking, the women were gathering up their babies, calling to the children. Worogan and Boneda went after them, and Tagaran was about to follow, but he held out a hand to stop her.

‘Tomorrow?’

He made hand-over-hand gestures.

‘You will come again tomorrow?’

She did as he had, speaking and making gestures. He hoped she was saying,
Yes, I understand, I will return tomorrow
. When they had come to the end of gesturing they looked at each other. He opened his mouth, there was something he wanted to say to her, but what could he tell her, and in any case how would she understand?

Then Worogan called to her from the rocks, she turned and shouted back, and the moment was gone.

He waved from the doorway.

‘Goodbye! Goodbye!’

They all called the word: the women, the girls, the boy. Even after they had disappeared beyond the rocks, he could still hear Boneda’s clear voice:
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!

Taking off his shoes that night, he saw even by firelight how dirty his feet were, each toe ringed with a dark halo. It was the shoes that did that, he realised. The toes of the natives, as straight as fingers on a hand, were not dirty. The dust must fall off their feet rather than be trapped by footwear.

As he got the basin and warmed some water in the kettle, he thought what a marvellous symmetry there was to the whole business. If you had the convenience of shoes, you also had the convenience of basins of warm water. But if you lacked shoes, you also lacked the dirt that made the basins of warm water necessary.

What was the word for
foot
? Next time he would ask Tagaran. And then he had better ask for the plural, in case it was as irregular in her tongue as it was in his own. He imagined himself earnestly showing what a quick pupil he was, announcing
foots!
She and Worogan had a way of not looking at each other, studying the ground, that he was beginning to suspect was their courteous means of not laughing at him.

He lay down and brought the candle close so he could read.
He that shall tax me with ignorance, shall have no great victory at my hands
.
As I am, so I goe on plodding
.