an excerpt from

Foreign Words

by Vassilis Alexakis

translated from the French by Alyson Waters

1

The first word of Sango I learned was baba, “papa.” It’s easy to remember, of course. “My father” is translated as baba ti mbi. The possessive adjective “my” apparently doesn’t exist in Sango, for baba ti mbi literally means “the father of me.” Kodoro means both “village” and “country.” If I had to say something about my identity, I would say, “Kodoro ti mbi is Greece.”

Is there a word in Sango for Greece? But I don’t want to talk about me (I repeat, mbi). I think I have exhausted the subject of my comings and goings between Athens and Paris. I realize in fact that it has become oppressively commonplace: several flights a day link the two capitals, and they’re almost always full. And I don’t feel like inventing a story. I suppose I should, for my published novels are so few and far between. I must admit, translating my own works from Greek into French or French into Greek takes so much time. My bibliography would surely be more extensive if I had not written each of my books twice.

These last few months I’ve had no ideas for a novel. Was I discouraged by

The Tin Soldier’s lukewarm, not to say cold (de, in Sango) reception last year? The adventures of Martine, the book’s heroine (a little girl in love with a toy soldier) had been so moving to me, and I thought the public would be moved as well. Alas, this was not the case.

“Your book came out either too early or too late,” my publisher said as he gazed absent-mindedly out the window. “The French don’t feel like crying this year.”

The Tin Soldier will be published in Greek at the end of the year, with the same title (O Molyvénios stratiotis). I made several changes to the novel as I translated it. I got rid of quite a few sentences and abridged Martine’s interior monologue in the basement of the Galeries Lafayette. By rereading myself through the lens of another language, I see my weaknesses more clearly, I correct them, and this explains why I prefer to be read in translation rather than in the original. I hope my compatriots will have a more positive reaction to the story. But perhaps they don’t feel like crying either.

Only one idea has occurred to me since I finished this translation: to learn a new language. At first the project struck me as absurd. What did I need a third language for? I recalled all the trouble I had gone to at twenty-four to learn French, and all the difficulties I had come up against to regain fluency in my mother tongue some ten years later. I went even further back in time, to when my mother was teaching me the Greek alphabet. I had such a hard time recognizing the letters. My mother was despondent. She realized very early on that I had no gift for languages. I learned almost no English all those years I studied it in school.

Still, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. So perhaps I needed to admit to myself that it made some sense, had some meaning? Did I want to prove to myself that, at fifty-two, I was still young enough to learn something new? Whenever you start to learn a new language, you inevitably seem a bit foolish, you become a child again. Was I nostalgic for that time in my life when I didn’t yet know how to speak? I had had no end of trouble getting the hang of French, but the effort had not been devoid of charms. Some of the words I encountered were so delightful to me, and I would enthusiastically try combining them in different ways to form sentences. The French language has become less amusing since it has become the tool with which I earn my so-called living. It’s no longer a foreign language; I learned it so long ago that I have the impression I’ve always known how to speak it. Maybe I wanted to learn a foreign language simply because I didn’t know any.

The project continued to ripen in my unconscious. One morning I woke up thinking about Africa. “I’ll learn a little-known African language,” I thought. This was yet another surprise, for I know hardly anything about Africa. I had been interested in it only as a child and teenager. I was aware that periodically it experienced dreadful tragedies, but I really never thought about it. I was content simply to boycott oranges from South Africa. My ignorance prevented me from striking up conversations with the Africans I’d meet in Paris or Athens. What was the point of asking them where they were from if I couldn’t even find their country on a map? Each African I’d encounter would add another layer of mystery to my confusion and embarrassment. What was behind this sudden interest in black culture? And why had I thought about a minor language? Was it so that my endeavor would be more unique? Because I felt compassion for those small languages that are having more and more difficulty making themselves heard? Greek was an endangered language as well.

The books and films from my childhood had described Africa as the crossroad of every imaginable danger. Tarzan had to be ever vigilant. He had a few friends—an elephant that was his means of transportation, a monkey that made faces at him (Tarzan would laugh from time to time)—yet he lived under the constant threat of ferocious animals and cannibalistic warriors. These warriors spoke in a rudimentary language that just barely allowed them to elaborate their diabolical schemes. Most of the white men who ventured into the jungle were slave traders and elephant slaughterers.

Yet Africa enchanted me. Instead of the narrow little world I inhabited, it offered me a free space where everything remained to be invented, everything was still possible. No other continent stimulated my imagination in this way. It was an amazing playground. I perceived Tarzan’s famous cry as a hymn to freedom. I dreamed of sleeping on a bed of leaves. The lion that roared at the beginning of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer films didn’t frighten me; on the contrary, I wanted to see more of it. In fact, hadn’t Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced the Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller? We used to make a mad rush to see those films at the local cinema on Sunday mornings.

Tarzan reappeared in a Greek serial written by the journalist Nicos Routsos and published in inexpensive weeklies. But Routsos’s Tarzan was a full-grown man who jealously guarded his prerogatives, and he was much less likable than the Edgar Rice Burroughs character. The enormous success of this series was due to a new denizen of the jungle who was younger and stronger than Tarzan, with a darker complexion, and who had also been raised by a female monkey. In our eyes he had the incomparable advantage of being of Greek origin. His name was Gaour. The name has echoes of the Turkish word giaour, “infidel,” a name the Ottomans used for the Greeks. In spite of his loyalty and kindness, Gaour annoyed Tarzan, and every now and then Tarzan would imagine ways to get rid of him and steal his fiancée, a hotheaded brunette from the Greek diaspora named Tatabou. I still remember a poignant scene in which Gaour and Tatabou were fashioning a Greek flag by coloring the four corners of a white piece of cloth blue so as to form a cross in its center.

These installments were abundantly illustrated. I was aroused by the powerful thighs and bomb-shaped breasts of the tiger-skin bikini clad Tatabou. Africa fascinated me all the more because I imagined it peopled with half-naked women. Several Greek pop songs in fact described the beauty of black women and heady tropical nights. Vassilis Tsitsanis expressed his desire to meet Tarzan in person in a humorous song:

Should I ever win the lottery

I’ll go and see Tarzan

And play for him my bouzouki

To move him best I can.

When I was about fifteen, I discovered an Africa much less exalted than that of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Jules Verne, thanks to a novel by Mihalis Caragatsis entitled Amri a mugu and subtitled In the Hands of God. The author follows two wayward Greek sailors as they travel through the Dark Continent. They are searching for a mysterious character—a German, I seem to recall—whom they never manage to find. They earn a great deal of money, but little by little they lose their health and their minds because the local gods don’t want them to succeed. I don’t know if Caragatsis was familiar with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which describes the quest of an almost mythical character lost in the jungle. I myself read this novel only much later, when I had already come to France. I remember people moving through dense shadows, and the cry shouted twice, like at the end of certain operas: “The horror!  The horror!”

I’m almost certain that Caragatsis never names the language that provided him with the title of his tale. How does one say “God” in Sango? Nzapa. I just looked in the dictionary. One says Nzapa. I also just learned the expression ngu ti Nzapa, “the water of God,” which designates rain. The preposition ti, “of,” holds no more secrets for me. If there were a “god of the cold,” he would certainly be called Nzapa ti de. Ngu, “water” is pronounced ngoo, and de, “the cold,” is pronounced deh.

Were there many Greeks in Africa during the colonial era? I knew that one of my mother’s cousins lived in Cape Town and that he worked for the railroads. My paternal grandmother, who was born in Alexandria in the late nineteenth century, never tired of boasting about the prosperity of the Greek communities in Egypt. She claimed to have known the poet Cavafy, which seemed quite extraordinary to me. She despised Nasser, who had caused the foreigners to flee Egypt. According to her, he was an ingrate.

“Without the Greeks,” she used to say, “Alexandria would have forever remained a village.”

She left Egypt in 1911, when she was pregnant with my father, in order to raise her son in the land of her ancestors. Her husband followed two years later, the time it took to sell his business and say goodbye to his sister Clotilde who was living in Bangui at the time. The only photograph I’ve seen of my grandfather was taken in Bangui, probably during this visit. He died in a typhus epidemic when he was very young, at the beginning of World War I.

“They’re always talking about the epidemics ravaging Africa,” my grandmother would say, “and yet it’s Greece that killed my husband.”

In the sepia photograph he is armed with a carbine, and his foot rests on the back of a cardboard lion. This décor seems to amuse him, for he has that hint of a smile that made him resemble my father so much. A few pots with exotic plants complete the picture, taken in the “Studio de Paris, rue Paul-Crampel, Bangui,” as you can read in silver letters at the bottom. As a child I confused the man holding the rifle with my father, and I used to imagine I was the son of an adventurer. One day I learned this wasn’t true. My father told me he had never been to Africa and that he was the director of a municipal funeral home.

“I attend to dead people,” my father said defiantly. “Do you know what a dead person is?”

I did not. But I thought about the lion, whose head was resting on the ground and whose eyes were closed, and I answered “Yes.”

I saw this picture for the last time when I closed up my parents’ house in Athens, a house where no one lives any more. They both died, my mother nine years ago, and my father this year on March 7. The photo was in its usual spot, in a drawer of the buffet, carefully wrapped in tracing paper. I was struck once again by the resemblance between my father and my grandfather. I almost put the photograph in my pocket, but that didn’t seem proper to me. The only thing I took with me was the letter my grandfather had written to his son right before leaving for the front. Did he have a premonition that his days were numbered? I don’t know, but nonetheless he felt the need to express his affection for his little boy. My father didn’t know how to read at the time. When he was old enough to decipher the letter, he was so moved by the first words that he had to stop reading at the third line.

He told me this story late last year, when his health was beginning to fail. He was eighty-six.

“When did you read his letter?”

“Never. . . . Not that I didn’t try. But tears would always spring to my eyes immediately. I could never get beyond the third line.”

Just thinking about that letter made him cry. I wiped his face with a Kleenex. In the box were pink, sky blue, and pale green ones.

“So who’s going to read it?” I asked him, a little naively no doubt.

“You!” he exclaimed, sitting up.  “You!”

Indeed I inherited that letter, but I still haven’t taken it out of the envelope on which my father’s name appears, written in ink in a slanted hand below which my own name is clumsily written in pencil. I’m in no hurry to read it. It can wait a bit longer to be read. It has already waited since 1915.

It was in the drawer with the photograph. I didn’t touch anything else, I didn’t throw out the medicine on the night table. One of the Kleenexes was half out of the box, as if it were about to take flight. All I did was put the top back on the Thermos where my father used to keep his cool water for the night. Then I left, closing the front door gently so as not to disturb the silence that would dwell forever after in the house.

Clotilde would regularly send us New Year’s wishes on postcards that were also signed by her husband, André Bérémian, an Armenian from Marseilles. They were black and white pictures of buildings, fishing boats. I would plunge them into a bowl filled with water to get the stamps off. The words would come off as well, dissolving in the water, turning to ink once again. The Latin adage that claims that writings remain seemed wrong to me. “No,” I would think to myself, watching Coltilde’s good tidings evaporate, “they do not remain.”

Thanks to my great-aunt I had lots of stamps from French Equatorial Africa. My friends had none; I suppose there were few Greeks living in this region. There must have been more of them in Egypt, the Belgian Congo, South Africa, and Ethiopia, because it was relatively easy to collect stamps from those countries. King Farouk alone had a whole page in my album. I knew his profile by heart. My stamp collection confirmed in my mind the sizable Greek presence in Africa and taught me about the extent of Greek migration to the United States, Canada, and Australia; it showed me my compatriots’ total lack of interest in Asia. Not one person I knew had Indian or Chinese stamps. Stamps from Eastern Europe were almost as rare. And yet many Greek Communists had sought refuge behind the Iron Curtain after the Civil War. Evidently they rarely gave word of themselves. Perhaps their letters were intercepted? Royalist Greece of the 1950s kept its distance from the Communist bloc, just as it kept its distance from Turkey, which had chased all the Greeks out of its territory. I had only three or four Turkish stamps.

Clotilde stayed in Athens for a short time in the mid-1960s and came to visit my parents. I recall a large, square-shouldered woman. There was a sense of vigor about her that was hardly compatible with her age and sex.

“Africa has made a man of Clotilde,” my father remarked after his aunt had left.

She had thought I was younger than I was and had presented me with a teeny-weeny stool that stood on three crossed legs held together at the center. I tried it out anyway and found it to be extremely stable, which made me think that our seats had one too many legs. I didn’t ask Clotilde a single question about Equatorial Africa; Tarzan no longer fascinated me.  I now much preferred Dostoevsky’s diabolical characters. My mother asked something about Clotilde’s children, I think she had a girl and a boy. I left the room without waiting for the answer. I never did learn what André Bérémian was doing in Bangui.

I was in Athens on March 7. I learned of my father’s death from his housekeeper, a Bulgarian woman who would watch television all day long while she knitted wool socks. It was raining that day. I wiped my feet very thoroughly before crossing the threshold of the house. I stroked my father’s forehead. It was cold. Even after he was buried, I was still afraid of losing him, as if his death had been merely a warning, a bad omen. Ten times a day I would think of calling him to reassure myself.

I almost called him again when I got back to Paris, just as I had always done for the past twenty-eight years. I reached for the phone, but I didn’t touch it. Then I set about unpacking my suitcase. As I was taking out my shirts, which had been carefully ironed by the Bulgarian lady, the telephone rang. I was squatting in front of the open suitcase on the floor. The sound frightened me. It rang only once, as if the person who was calling had realized he or she had dialed a wrong number, or as if he or she could not speak.