Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [29]
He was still in mourning for his Saltnatek years. It grieved him to hear, at a linguistic congress in Helsinki, younger colleagues in the most offhand way confusing Saltnatek with Malta and Madagascar. Saltnatek consisted of an archipelago of naked islands, one of which had been a port of call for cruise ships early in the century. Most tourists had not even bothered to go ashore: there was nothing to admire except straight rows of undecorated houses, and nothing to buy except shells of giant sea snails, on which the nation’s artists had carved in a spiral pattern WHEN THIS YOU SEE, REMEMBER ME. The motto was thought to have been copied from the lid of a snuffbox found in the pocket of a drowned naval officer during the Napoleonic wars. (Missierna supposed the box was probably a lucky piece, even though it had not turned out to be providential. He kept this to himself; he was not in the business of offering speculations.) Even that trifling commerce had come to a stop when, just after the First World War, a society for the protection of sea snails urged a boycott of mutilated shells – a prohibition that caused Saltnatek great bewilderment and economic distress.
In Helsinki, his heart galloping, his voice trembling sometimes, Missierna disclosed the existence of a complex and living language, spoken by an inbred population that produced children of much thievishness, cunning, and blank beauty. He stood on a stage too large for him, fuzzily lighted, in an auditorium the size of a concert hall. Nine men and three women sat, singly, in the first fifteen rows. They were still and unresponsive, and as soon as he had finished reading they got up in the same quiet way and filed out. There were no questions: he had brought back to Europe one more system, and no one knew how to make the old ones work.
If he was disappointed, it was in part because he was no longer young, and it was almost too late for his competence, perhaps his genius, to receive the rewards it deserved. Although he was far less vain than any of the substandard teachers he had interviewed and hired for Saltnatek, he still hoped that at least one conclusion might be named for him, so that his grandchildren, coming across his name in a textbook, could say, “So this is what he was like – modest, creative.” But all that anyone said at the Helsinki congress was “You have demonstrated nothing that cannot be shown through Hungarian.”
During the years when he was so obsessively occupied, Europe had grown small, become depleted, as bald in spirit as Saltnatek’s sandy and stony islands. The doubting voices were thin and metallic. No one was listening. His colleagues said, “One step after the other,” and “One at a time.” They trod upon discarded rules of address, raked the ground to find shreds of sense and reason. Salvation was in the dust or it was nowhere. Even if he were to reveal twenty new and orderly and poetic methods of creating order by means of words, he would be told, “We had better deal with matters underfoot, closer to home.”
He was a divorced parent, which meant he had children and grandchildren but no place in particular to go. Saltnatek had been like a child, and he had stayed with it longer than with any other, had seen it into maturity, and it had used and rejected him, as children do, as it is their right. It was not in his nature to put out emotional ultimatums. In the past, it could have been his business – he should have made it his business – to observe the patterns of exchange among his real children, even if the information, tabulated, had left him depressed and frightened. He could have taken them as an independent republic and applied for entry. Even now, he considered inviting himself