Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [31]
For twenty-four years the eyes of Saltnatek had appraised him, and had then turned away. He had become to himself large and awkward – a parent without authority, dispossessed, left to stumble around in an airport, as if he were sick or drunk.
He could still recite by rote the first test sentences he had used for his research:
“Now that you mention it, I see what you mean.”
“There is no law against it, is there?”
“I am not comfortable, but I hope to be comfortable soon.”
“Anyone may write to him. He answers all letters.”
“Look it up. You will see that I was right all along.”
At the outset, in Saltnatek, he had asked for a governmental ruling to put a clamp on the language: the vocabulary must not grow during the period of his field work. Expansion would confuse the word count. They had not been sure what to call him. Some had said “Father,” which was close in sound to his name, as they pronounced it. His own children had for a while avoided saying even “you,” dropping from their greetings such sentences as “What did you bring us?” and “Are you staying long?” They were like long-term patients in a hospital, or rebels interned. Their expression, at once careful and distant, seemed to be telling him, “If you intend to keep coming and going, then at least bring us something we need.”
His children were not proud of him. It was his own fault; he had not told them enough. Perhaps he seemed old, but he appeared young to himself. In the shaving mirror he saw the young man he had been at university. In his dreams, even his bad dreams, he was never more than twenty-one.
Saltnatek was his last adventure. He would turn to his true children, whether they welcomed the old explorer or not. Or he could find something else to do – something tranquil; he could watch Europe as it declined and sank, with its pettiness and faded cruelty, its crabbed richness and sentimentality. Something might be discovered out of shabbiness – some measure taken of the past and the present, now that they were ground and trampled to the same shape and size. But what if he had lost his mixture of duty and curiosity, his professional humility, his ruthlessness? In that case, he could start but he would never finish.
At Helsinki he heard young colleagues describing republics they had barely seen. They seemed to have been drawn here and there for casual, private reasons. He did not like the reasons, and he regretted having mentioned, in his lecture, sibling incest in that village in Saltnatek. He had been careful to admit he had relied on folklore and legends, and would never know what went on when the children tore all their clothes off. Repeated actions are religious, but with children one can never decide if they are heathen, atheistic, agnostic, pantheistic, animist; if there remains a vestige of a ritual, a rattled-off prayer.
Say that he used his grandchildren as a little-known country: he would need to scour their language for information. What did they say when they thought “infinity”? In Saltnatek, in the village, they had offered him simple images – a light flickering, a fire that could not be doused, a sun that rose and set in long cycles, a bright night. Everything and nothing.
Perhaps they were right, and only the present moment exists, he thought. How they view endlessness is their own business. But if I start minding my own business, he said to himself, I have no more reason to be.
Was there any cause to feel uneasy about the present moment in Europe? What was wrong with it? There was no quarrel between Wales and Turkey. Italy and Schleswig-Holstein were not at war. It was years since some part of the population, running away, had dug up and carried off its dead. It seemed to him now that his life’s labor – the digging out, the coaxing and bribing to arrive at secret meanings – amounted to exhumation and flight.
The village children had wanted white crash helmets and motorcycles. He