The Mystics of Mile End (37 page)

Words I Wish I Had

JUST WEEKS before I began writing
The Mystics of Mile End,
in 2010, I wrote a short story called “Words I Wish I Had.” You could say that the story provided the seed for the novel. Or you could say that during that time I was preoccupied with certain themes, which kept showing up anytime I sat down to write fiction: mystical obsessions, the relative power of language versus silence, and the impact of both on family relationships.

Either way, the discerning reader will notice similarities between the novel and the story. Montreal setting? Check. Father-daughter duo? Check. Words that don't exist but should? Check. A precarious-looking pyramid that threatens to collapse at any moment, yet manages miraculously to endure? Check! I hope you enjoy the spy work of identifying these common threads. But I also hope you enjoy the two works of fiction for the separate worlds they set up, each with its own distinct characters and internal logic.

—
Sigal Samuel

The first time I saw him, I was eleven years old and my nose was bloody. It was the first time Annie invited me over to her house, which was strange because we'd been in the same class since kindergarten but also not strange because I was a boy and she was a girl and you know how these things go. She must have taken pity on me that day because it was a Monday. I always got beat up on Mondays.

In her kitchen we made cheese-and-jam sandwiches and ate them standing up.

“Those kids are just dumb, Aditya,” she said between bites. “Ignore them.”

“Mmm,” I answered. I was busy savoring the taste of the cheese and jam.

“You shouldn't let them get to you,” she insisted.

I shrugged. What did she know about it? It's true that she didn't have many friends, but that was better than getting beat up, as far as I could see. I licked the smears of strawberry jam from my fingertips and asked where the bathroom was.

On my way, I noticed a strip of light coming from a door that had been left ajar. I tiptoed toward it and peered through the crack and what I saw was books, books, books, overflowing the bookshelves, stacked upon the windowsill, propped beneath the potted plants—everywhere.

Only after a minute of staring did I notice the man, whose metallic glasses caught the sunlight as he sat half-obscured by the stacks of books on his desk. I must have gasped, because suddenly he—Annie's father—looked up and saw me. His bright blue eyes pierced me like a javelin. I squirmed free and half walked, half ran back to the kitchen.

“What does your dad do?” I asked Annie.

She hesitated. “He's a translator.”

“How many languages does he speak?”

“I don't know, exactly.”

“How can you not know?”

“I just don't.” Then, “Last time I checked he spoke English, French, Arabic, Persian, Norwegian, Russian, Greek, German, Mandarin, Aramaic, Portuguese—”

Or something like that, anyway. I don't remember now exactly which languages she listed, but I remember that the list stretched on and on, beyond the realm of the impressive and into the realm of the impossible.

“Yeah, right,” I said with a snort. I figured she was making it up, the way Becca Kline had made up that story last year about her dad being a firefighter who saved dozens of lives and then we found out that he was just the guy who sits in that booth all day selling tickets at the Place-des-Arts Metro station. “Nobody can speak that many languages, it's not possible.”

She just shrugged and took another bite of her sandwich. She didn't try to defend her position, as Becca Kline had tearfully done for weeks after the discovery of her lie. In retrospect, this should have struck me as odd, but at the time I didn't give it a second thought, just licked the remaining jam off my fingers and reached over for Annie's crusts, which she never ate.

A month or so passed before I saw him again. Returning to the kitchen on my way back from the bathroom, I risked another peek into his study. The surface of the desk was now entirely covered with books, the man himself scarcely visible between the stacks. Dictionaries encased him like a child's snow fort.

Back in the kitchen, I asked Annie, “Why did your dad decide to become a translator?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I looked away from her keen gray eyes. The truth is that I was curious about everything having to do with words just then. For some time I had been nursing a secret dream of becoming a writer, but I had not yet dared to tell anyone. My father was dead set on me becoming an engineer, and my mother, she was still trying to get me to learn how to make a decent aloo gobi.

“Just wondering,” I said.

Annie considered, then asked, “Have you ever heard of
esprit d'escalier?”

“No.”

“It's an expression.”

“Okay.”

“In French.”

“Okay.”

“It means the feeling you get after leaving a conversation, when suddenly you think of all the things you should have said but didn't.”

Annie explained that when her father was a teenager he lived in an apartment building on the corner of Clark and Saint-Viateur. Every morning at exactly eight o'clock he would run down the stairs on his way to school. There was a girl who lived one floor above him, and she would also run down at that exact same time every morning. A francophone, she had the most beautiful red hair he had ever seen. All through high school, he tried to get up the courage to speak to her during these daily pilgrimages down the stairs. But he always felt so nervous—a nervousness compounded by the fact that he only spoke English. No matter how many hours he spent privately rehearsing the perfect lines, when he was actually faced with the girl, the words got stuck between his teeth like so much unsightly spinach.

It was only years later, after the girl had moved out, that he learned the French expression
esprit d'escalier,
which literally means “spirit of the staircase.” And he thought:
If only I had known this expression earlier
—
if only I'd had a word to express what I was feeling
—
then maybe I could have explained it all to her, and how different things might have been!

All of a sudden he remembered other moments from his past, moments when he had been unable to translate his inner experience for somebody else because he lacked the word for that experience. Like that time when he was six years old, and his best friend's mother had just given birth to a new baby girl. The best friend brought him over to look at the baby, and when he saw her in her bassinet, all shiny and pink-smelling, he reached out and pinched her. She howled. The mother howled. The best friend glared at him angrily. If only he had known the word
gheegle
—Filipino for the irrepressible urge to pinch or squeeze something that is unbearably cute—on that day! The word might have explained him, might have exculpated him.

Annie's father discovered that there were words unique to each language, untranslatable words that cannot be expressed in English— and what one cannot express in language, one cannot fully experience. Without a name to nudge it into shape, a feeling always remains cloudy and dim, like a shadow hovering at the edges of one's peripheral vision. One can barely communicate it to oneself, let alone to others. With this in mind, Annie's father began to gobble up as many dialects as possible. He collected their untranslatable words in a special notebook, which he referred to as his dictionary.

Annie showed me this notebook once, and a typical page looked something like this:

Dictionary of Words I Wish I Had

Coonoomoonoo
Trinidadian): translated as “shy,” the word has a deeper pejorative meaning of being unwilling to come forward, speak up, make oneself heard, or make waves

Cualacino
(Italian): the mark left on a table by a cold glass

Forelsket
(Norwegian): the euphoria one experiences when first falling in love

Iktsuarpok
(Inuit): to go outside to check if anyone is coming

Ilunga
(Tshiluba, Congo): a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never allow it a third time

Mamihlapinatapai
(Yaghan, Tierra del Fuego): the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are reluctant to start

Sgriob
(Scottish Gaelic): the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whisky

Saudade
(Portuguese and Galician): the feeling of longing one gets upon realizing that something one once had is lost and can never be had again

Of course, this is just a small sampling of the words he gathered. There were many more—hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands—but these are the ones I remember.

By the time Annie and I entered the seventh grade, I'd started going over to her house almost every day after school. I helped her with her math homework and she helped me with my English. We spent hours working side by side, or with me stretched out on her floor and her sitting up on her bed. Sometimes I would feel her eyes on me, grazing the back of my neck in a way that made all the little hairs stand up, but I kept my eyes fixed on the algebra problem at hand.

Despite my constant presence in her house, I almost never saw Annie's father anymore.

Basic laws of nature ensured that there would be occasional sightings—a trip to the bathroom, a quick foray to the fridge—and on these occasions I noticed that he had grown paler, the skin of his face having taken on the glossy white sheen of paper. He shuffled down the hall in a frayed blue bathrobe. He put his hands in the pockets, then took them out again. Scraps of paper fluttered away from his palms like birds. But as time went on even these sightings grew rare. I was puzzled—until one day, overcome by curiosity, I peered into his study and saw the pyramid.

I call it a pyramid for lack of a better term. The fact is that the piles of books on the floor and around the corners of his desk had risen to such a height and at such an angle that they now merged at a point above his head. This precarious-looking structure threatened to collapse at any moment, yet managed miraculously to endure. Whether it was the result of accident or intelligent design, I could not say.

I confronted Annie about her father's bizarre living arrangements.

“How does he breathe, surrounded by all those books?”

“There are some gaps in between. The air gets through.”

“What about when he gets hungry—how does he eat?”

“I pass him his meals through the gaps.”

“But—what about—you know? Going to the bathroom?”

At this, Annie shrugged. When I pressed her, she said that he rarely felt the need to go anymore. He hadn't used the bathroom in almost a month. Perhaps he never would again. His appetite was shrinking as time went on; it had been three days since he'd requested something to eat. My jaw must have dropped when she told me that, because I remember Annie's hand reaching toward my chin and gently, almost sadly, closing my mouth.

I believe it was around this time that Annie's father began giving her lessons.

One afternoon, mystified by the fact that she had given me the brush-off for the third Monday in a row, I let myself into her house using the spare key I knew she kept hidden inside a little plastic frog on the front porch. When I tiptoed down the hall in the direction of the study, I could see Annie kneeling by the pyramid, her hands pressed up against its sleek walls. Father and daughter seemed to be communicating in whispers through a certain crack down near the base of the structure.

All of a sudden his voice rang out loud and clear, and goose bumps rose on my flesh.

“Criminal,” he said. “Definition.”

“One who commits acts outside the law.”

“Etymology.”

“Old French—
crimne.
From Latin—
crimen
—charge, indictment, offense.”

“Spelling.”

“C-R-I-M-I-N-A-L.”

“Permutations.”

What followed was a string of permutations on the letters of the word
criminal,
Annie's voice—somehow taut and slack at the same time— letting each letter roll around for a while in her mouth before releasing it into the air.

“Texture.”

“Dark alley. Diffuse light. Tightness in the stomach. Neon thrill. Excellent danger.”

My eyes widened as understanding lapped at me in slow, small waves. He was teaching her to get inside the word, to get at some mystical essence that was housed within its letters yet was not reducible to them, and was not reducible to any translation.

A moment later I heard him say, “Every word is a key that opens up a new world of experience. The trick is knowing how to take hold of the key, how to turn it inside the lock.”

From common English words like
criminal,
Annie eventually graduated to untranslatable words in foreign languages. Of course, she had neither her father's breadth nor his depth of knowledge when it came to these dialects, but by then it no longer mattered. He had trained her to develop an inner reflex that would respond to each word's unique taste and texture, not to its translatable ingredients. It was an instinct that, again for lack of a better term, I am tempted to call mystical. She knew how to sniff out a word, how to keep it poised on the tip of her tongue and turn it, key-like, until it opened up its world for her.

During that period, Annie's face shone with a wild light. She was processing hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of new experiences. I crouched outside the door to the study, eavesdropping.

Then came the day when Annie entered the study and the pyramid was sealed off. Without warning, her father had closed all the cracks with slim volumes of poetry, had caulked the smaller gaps with crumpled-up dictionary pages—dictionaries themselves having long ago become expendable.