Native Tongue (40 page)

“Oh, my dear,” she said, not caring if she seemed disrespectful, because this was mute pain that she faced and tending pain was a function that she was not able to set aside for the sake of good manners, “I didn’t mean that! Of course not! And I will not let you go to Barren House in any other way than under my care, and in decent comfort. Please understand that, and forgive me my jokes . . . I only meant to make you smile, Nazareth.”

Nazareth only looked at her and said nothing at all, and something in Michaela gave way, some knot she had not realized was even tied inside her. “You’re very tired, Nazareth,” she went on, “and you need care, not clever conversation. I’ll get the nurse to help you dress.”

“Please, no!”

Michaela was firm, and there was steel in her voice. “I promise you, my dear, that nurse will be as gentle and as tender with you as if you were her newborn and beloved child. You have my word on it.”

“You don’t know. . . .”

“Oh, but I
do
know! I most assuredly do know. And I promise you. She will come, and she will be respectful, and she will be kind, and she will treat you with flawless attention. She will not dare do anything else—as for what she may be thinking, that is
her
narrow little twisted mind, and you are to ignore that as you would ignore any other deformity. For politeness’ sake. And I will get the cab and take you home.”

“I’m not a child, Michaela . . . you don’t have to. . . .”

“Don’t talk! Hush. If you were a child this would be much simpler, because I could just pick you up and carry you, whether you kicked and screamed or not. But you’re taller than I am, unfortunately, and I’m going to have to have some help—must you make it even more difficult for me than it is?”

She hated saying that, because all her impulses were to treat this hurt one tenderly, but it was exactly the right thing to say. The idea that she was causing trouble for the nurse sent to fetch her stopped Nazareth’s objections immediately.

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Landry,” said Nazareth. “Please proceed.”

Please proceed! Such a funny, awkward woman, and what a
very hard time she must have had with her whole personality akimbo like that . . . and that swift, ever so correct “Mrs. Landry!” Putting her in her place. Her dignity would see her back to Barren House, Michaela thought, and that was far more important than anything else right now.

Chapter Twenty

Then consider this, please: to make something “appear” is called
magic
, is it not? Well. . . . when you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, a face, an assortment of
parts
. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of the body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the bend of the elbow. Everyone has that surface; in fact, everyone has
two
of them.

I will name that the “athad” of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind—perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And there are both of
your
athads, very nice ones.

Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you will perceive the athad of every person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair. From now on. And I have made the athad appear . . . now it
exists
.

Magic, you perceive, is not something mysterious, not something for witches and sorcerers . . . magic is quite ordinary and simple. It is simply language.

And I look at you now, and I can say, as I could not say three minutes ago—“What lovely
athads
you have, grandmother!”

(from “The Discourse of the Three Marys,”

author unknown)

Nazareth went to Barren House bruised, as Michaela had seen that she was, and numb. The news that she was being divorced hardly penetrated that numbness, so that by the time she became aware of it any chance that it might cause her discomfort was long past. But after a while, under the competent hands of the women, she began to let that numbness go, and she realized that she was like someone who goes home at last after a lifetime of exile.

No more Aaron; he avoided her, and when he could not avoid her he was overpoweringly polite. No more being alone with him, where he did not feel obliged to be polite. Her children only a few steps away, and the little girls routinely here at Barren House in any case. And a kind of freedom. She would never have to bear a man’s eyes upon her scarred body. She would heal, and she would add to her usual clothing the garment with the false and foolish breasts, and she would go out to work as she always had; and no man would ever see her naked, or touch her body, again. Not even, so long as she was conscious, a doctor. Not ever.

She wandered about Barren House at first, absorbing it as if she had never been there before, luxuriating in the voices of the women, glorying in the bed that she could have all to herself without the snoring bulk of a man always waking her, always crowding her against the wall. It was luxury; she had not anticipated that it would be, because she hadn’t known what it was that she lacked.

Finally, when Michaela agreed that it was time, the women told her about the woman-language called Láadan, and explained the nonsense called Langlish. Nazareth sat and listened to them in amazement, saying not one word until they were finished, and then she said, “You women. You women and your fairy tales!”

“It’s true!” they protested. “Really, Nazareth . . . it’s true.”

“All my life you’ve told me that the tale of
Lang
lish was true.”

“That was necessary,” Aquina retorted. “We are a better judge of what’s required than you are.”

“And now, after a lifetime of lying, you expect me to believe that you are suddenly telling the truth?” Nazareth shook her head. “Go away with your bedtime stories,” she jeered, “tell them to the little girls. Along with the unicorn and the bandersnatch and the Helga Dik! Leave me in peace.”

“Nazareth,” Susannah chided. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“Should I?”

“You know you should. We’ve been waiting for so many years to show you this—I’ve grown to be an ancient crone able only to cackle and hiss while I waited. And now you won’t
let
us show you.”

“Show me, then,” said Nazareth, who loved Susannah dearly. But she could not resist teasing Aquina. “Aquina,” she asked, “does it have one hundred separate vowels, this Láadan?”

“Oh, you’re impossible!”

Nazareth chuckled at Aquina’s disappearing back, and Susannah told her again that she should be ashamed of herself.

“I am,” Nazareth said, with great satisfaction. “I’m so very ashamed I can hardly hold my head up. Now show me.”

“It’s down in the basement,” they warned.

“Of course. With the tub of green bubbling slime that you sacrifice a virgin to every Monday morning. Where else would it be? I can walk to the basement, I’m not crippled—lead on, please.”

She followed them, laughing again as they pulled the scraps of paper from the backs of drawers and the middles of recipes files and other assorted nooks and crannies. But she sat down and looked at the assembled materials when they handed them to her, and she stopped laughing as she read. Once she said, “It would be so easy for all this to be lost! And so awful.”

“No,” said Faye. “It would be a nuisance, but not a tragedy. It’s all in our memories. Every last scrap and dot of it.”

Nazareth said nothing else at all. She had begun, laughing and dubious, but enjoying herself; now, as she examined the materials, she grew more and more tense, and they wondered if they had bothered her with this too soon. She was still far from well.

“Nazareth,” asked Susannah cautiously, “are you all right, child? And are you pleased?”

“Pleased!” Nazareth handed the little stack of papers to them as if it were a spoiled fish. “I’m disgusted!”

The silence spread, and they looked at each other, bewildered. Disgusted? They knew about Nazareth; there was no other woman in the Lines as good at languages as she was. But were they really so far from what was needful in a language that Láadan disgusted her?

Nazareth stood up, swaying a bit, but she pushed them away when they would have helped her and went back up the stairs ahead of them. “There’s no excuse for this,’” she announced with her back to them. “No excuse!”

“But it’s a good language,” Aquina cried, saying what the others hesitated to say. “You have no right to judge it like that,
on ten minutes’ casual examination! I don’t care
what
your damn test scores are, or how distinguished your damn Alien language is, you have no right!”

“Aquina,” Grace said disapprovingly. “Please.”

“It’s not that,” Nazareth said, tight-lipped. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the language.”

“Then what
is
it, for the love of heaven?” Aquina demanded.

Nazareth turned on them, where they stood uneasily in the kitchen keeping an eye out for a stray child who might hear something she should not hear, and said, “What is inexcusable is that the language isn’t already being used.”

“But it can’t be used until it’s finished!”

“What nonsense! No living language is ever ‘finished’!”

“Nazareth, you know what we mean.”

“No. I
don’t
know what you mean.”

Caroline came running then, exclaiming over the racket they were making and the stupidity of keeping Nazareth standing like that, and herded them all into one of the private bedrooms like disorderly poultry, which was precisely what she compared them to. When she had the door closed and her back against it, she said fiercely, “Now! What
is
all this?”

They told her, and she relaxed against the door and let her hands fall to her sides. “Good heavens! I thought it was an earthquake at the very least . . . all this fuss because Láadan doesn’t suit little Nazareth? Mercy!”

“But it does suit me, Caroline,” Nazareth insisted. “Not that it would matter if it didn’t—but it does.”

“It isn’t finished, you know. They’re right.”

“They’re wrong.”

“Oh come on, Natha!”

“I assure you, this language that they have just shown me is sufficiently ‘finished’ to be
used
. It obviously has been for years, while you played with it and fiddled about with it . . . when I think, that there are little girls of the Lines six or seven years old that could already have been speaking it fluently and who know not one word! I could kill you all, I swear I could.”

“Nonsense.”

“You know what you’re like?” Nazareth demanded. “You’re like those idiot artists who never will let their paintings be put on the wall because they always have to add just one more stroke! Like those novelists never willing to let their books go, who die unpublished, because there’s always just one more line they want to put in. You silly creatures . . . the men are right, you’re a pack of silly ignorant
fools
over here! And at all the Barren
Houses, obviously, since you’re all muddled equally. Dear heaven, it makes me almost willing to go back to Chornyak Household, not to have to look at you!”

“Nazareth—”

“Be still!” she commanded them, not caring at all how arrogant or unpleasant she might be. “Please, go away and let me have a little while to think about this! I’m too upset now even to talk to you . . . go
away!
”

She was trembling, and if she hadn’t been who she was they knew she would have been crying, and it bothered them to leave her like that. On the other hand, it was clear that their presence was not any comfort to her, and so they did as she asked.

“We’ll wait for you in the parlor,” Susannah said quietly as she went out the door. “That’s the safest place to talk about this—when you are willing to talk, child.”

She wasn’t long, and when she joined them she was calm again. They handed her a stole to work because it required no attention whatsoever and would leave her free to talk and to listen. And they sent someone to watch the door and divert any little girls that came along to the basement to “help with the inventory,” if they didn’t seem willing to simply go back to Chornyak Household because everyone was too busy to keep them company.

“Now then,” Caroline began, stabbing at the sampler that said “There is no such thing as a primitive language,” in elaborate cross stitch, “if what you say is true this is the most important day of my life, of many of our lives. But it seems very unlikely to all of us, Nazareth—think, you’ve been here only a few weeks, and you haven’t been yourself until just the past day or two. We have been here, some of us, for more than twenty years. And we have been working at the language all that time, in every spare moment we could steal. Don’t you think that if the time had come to bring the Encoding Project to a close and start teaching the language we would have noticed it? Without you to tell us?”

“No,” declared Nazareth. “I
would
have thought so, if anybody had described this absurd situation to me. But I would have been wrong. It must be that you are so close to the matter that you can’t see it—it takes someone with fresh perceptions to peer past the claptrap.”

“And so the good Lord has blessed us with you, Nazareth Joanna Chornyak Adiness . . . how lucky for us to have the benefit of your ‘fresh perceptions.’ ”