"Nope!" Charlinder answered. "There's my problem in a nutshell. I never heard another language, so I never imagined that it would mean I actually couldn't talk to anyone. I just had no idea of what it meant until I got to Russia. I probably would've changed my mind and gone back home if I hadn't already gone so far by then."
"I don't know what that's like," said Gentiola. "To grow up without ever hearing another language. When I was a teenager, we could hear people speaking Italian, English, German, Dutch, Greek, French, Turkish, Polish, and if we went to the capital there were places where we could hear Chinese. On printed labels there were even more. It was the most natural thing in the world, to me and my peers, that there were some people around who might not understand us, and that we'd be able to go more places and meet more people if we learned their ways of speaking."
"You grew up in a really different world than I did," said Charlinder.
"Yes, I know. Actually, my childhood was...really quite shockingly isolated--I lived under a dictatorship until I was sixteen, and they put a lot of energy into keeping the rest of the world out--but I still learned English at school, and others learned French. I just haven’t had a chance to use my English in so many decades, now it’s nearly gone. If I'd never heard anyone speak anything outside of my mother tongue, and no one else around me ever heard it either, I just don't know how much differently I would have seen the world."
"Well, I didn't grow up under a dictatorship. We just lived so far away from any other linguistic territory, we never knew what else was out there."
"Yes, most people now live in those circumstances. It's funny that you're an Anglophone who's come this far, because before the spring of 2010, your language would have gotten you farther than...well, farther than pretty much any other, really. English used to be the common language of India, for example, but it's been decades since they had any use for it, so they've lost it."
"I noticed," said Charlinder with a slight shudder.
"Also, in Western Europe--and by Western, I mean the wealthier countries--it was a popular second language, and you could have safely traveled all over the continent, but now, we can hardly go anywhere, so most people speak their mother tongue and nothing else."
"Whereas I somehow managed to go farther than anyone else, but of course I never stay anywhere long enough to pick up a language."
"I hate to break this to you, but you'd have to stay somewhere for years to learn enough to hold a conversation. If you want to learn a new language strictly by immersion, it's best to do it as a child, and you're not a child anymore, so..."
"I think that's the first time in my life anyone's ever said that to me."
"What? That you'd have to stay somewhere for years?"
"That I'm not a child anymore."
Gentiola took him to a tiny room in the upstairs of her house, where it was revealed that she had, of all things, indoor plumbing. First she showed him the glass set up above the sink. It was the clearest, most flawless glass he had ever seen; so clear he nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw his reflection.
"Is that
white
in my hair?!" he thought out loud, examining more closely.
"You haven't looked in a mirror in a long time, have you?" Gentiola asked curiously.
"Not one like this. Shit, when did this happen?" he asked himself, again about the white streaks appearing in his hair.
"Well, how old are you?"
"I think I'm twenty-three..."
"You
think
you're twenty-three?"
"I must sound like an idiot."
"No, it's just; what year were you born?"
"Twenty-one-ten."
"Yes, you're twenty-three now. And if you can believe it, I've seen worse cases of premature graying. Now, let me show you how to use the shower, and then you can get cleaned up. You can use this," she reached into the closet and pulled out an odd little T-shaped object, "to shave yourself."
The shower was a remarkable, miraculous contraption; he turned a couple of metal knobs counter-clockwise and clean water came jetting out of a spigot mounted in the wall above his head. Even better, the water quickly turned warm. He left his clothes on the outside doorknob as Gentiola instructed, and stepped under the spray. There was a bar of soap that smelled like lavender, and a white washcloth that showed all the dust and grime he scrubbed off his skin after months of accumulation since the last good rainstorm in April.
When the water running into the drain was again indistinguishable from that coming from the shower-head, he turned off the flow and stepped out to find his clothes waiting on the lid of the commode; dry and clean as new.
First, he turned to the sink and examined the shaving instrument his new hostess had suggested. He took a closer look at his reflection; he still looked a wreck. He was thinner than ever after months of walking constantly and eating only sporadically, but, of all things, the gaps in the two-week-old scruff on his jawline were nearly gone. It was almost a shame to take a razor to his face now, but Gentiola had asked him to shave, and it would, after all, grow back.
He dressed and went to find his hostess. Despite the months of malnutrition, exhaustion and willful sleep deprivation, he felt better than he had in years. He was clean, dry, warm but not sweltering, had a place to stay and a full stomach for what was arguably the first time since he realized he could travel east by going west.
The best part, however, somehow better than all the rest combined, was that he could talk with someone again. He felt as though his brain had been kept in a cage for the last two years and was only now allowed to stretch and breathe. In his opinion, Gentiola's spell of removing the language barrier between them was the most wonderful ability found in anyone on Earth, and the sooner she found a way to extend that gift to other people, the better a world it would be.
As if it weren't enough that he could understand Gentiola and be understood, she was the most engaging person to talk to. She did most of the talking, but as far as he was concerned, that was fine. She loved to talk about the most esoteric, fascinating subjects. She was endlessly curious, inquisitive and utterly uninhibited by any anxiety that her young foreign houseguest might tell her she was spouting nonsense. She was more knowledgeable than Eileen Woodlawn and without the attitude problem. She enjoyed making proud, brash pronouncements as if the world was suffering from a lack of having such ideas shouted from the rooftops.
"There are just a few things that Western medicine--you know, the type we had before the Plague--did really well. They are, in this order: immunizations, antibiotics, and contraceptives!" she proclaimed. "Those are the things that actually made life better at the population level. And even the antibiotics were easily abused and therefore made less effective. Everything else was either ridiculously over-prescribed or so loaded with side effects they hardly made life better. Although to be quite honest, non-Western medicine was hardly an alternative; it was mostly placebos."
Since Charlinder had not been around to see "Western medicine" in action, he could not say to what extent she made a valid argument, but even that was beside the point. The more excited she became over whatever subject they had broached, the more Charlinder enjoyed listening to her, and the more she picked up on his excitement at hearing what she had to say, the more eager she was to tell him what was on her mind, and that mind held entire worlds of thoughts. He could listen to her for hours, and when he had something to add, she was delighted to hear it. When he disagreed with her, she was fascinated to hear his point of view, and sometimes even conceded that he made a good point. When she held her ground, he always learned something new as a result. It was the first time in his memory that he'd met someone who had these big, strange ideas and wanted to talk about them just for the sake of having such conversations. She was visibly transported by the presence of someone in her home who wanted to listen to her and talk with her, and that excitement was infectious.
Neither Charlinder nor Gentiola was in any rush to go anywhere or do anything else, so as the afternoon wore on, he told her more about his recent travels. When he described the country he'd traveled just before Italy, he found her laughing out loud. It wasn't just the punch line to a clever joke to her; she rolled to her back with legs in the air, cackling with unabashed glee, like something in her most nefarious plans had just come to fruition without the dangerous legwork she'd expected to do. Charlinder couldn't see someone behave like this without chortling a little bit himself, though he could only speculate over what exactly was so funny.
"You were in Albania," she chuckled upon sitting up, once she got herself under control.
"Is that what it's called? My map just calls the whole area the Balkans," said Charlinder.
"
That's
not surprising," Gentiola snapped, no longer rolling in mirth. "Most Americans didn't know the first thing about Albania even before the Plague. They thought Europe was all England, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Greece and Scandinavia, with maybe a day trip to Prague thrown in somewhere. I'm from Albania, originally," she explained.
"Oh, I'm sorry," said Charlinder, suddenly. In fact he'd never heard of the country before, but he'd noticed she looked slightly different from most Italian women he'd met. "I mean, sorry I didn't know about it."
"It's certainly not your fault," she assured him. "My country never managed to do very much to present itself to the outside world, in fact for a long time in recent history it kept itself needlessly isolated. And now we're all isolated for the same reason. How are they? My people, I mean."
"They were really decent people," he said. "The looking through my stuff part was kind of scary, but they didn’t do any harm. They probably saved me a few months of walking with that raft over the Adriatic."
"But what I mean is, how are they doing? Perhaps you could describe it in comparison to the Italians and Greeks."
Charlinder thought this over for a moment. "If you mean food, clothing and shelter, they seem pretty much neck and neck. Couldn't tell you about much else, though; bit of a language barrier in the way. They seem to be struggling about as much as most North Americans."
"That’s what I gathered, but I haven’t been outside Italy in all this time, whereas you’ve been all over and seen it up close," she said. "A hundred-thirty years ago, you could cross an invisible line and suddenly you’d be in a different world. Poor, desperate countries would be right up next to rich, exciting countries that looked like they had everything, but you couldn’t just pick up and go anywhere you pleased. Now, those countries don’t really exist anymore because each village is a country unto itself, and they’re all poor and struggling in the same ways. You’ve already shown that anyone could just get up and go somewhere else if they had the time to spare, but since we don’t have cars, trains and airplanes anymore, no one has much of anywhere to go."
"But if you had cars, trains and airplanes back then, why couldn’t you just pick up and go anywhere?"
"Border patrols, visa requirements, passports," she listed. It sounded like someone was speaking Greek to him with a small mixture of English. "It all depended on where you started out. North Americans and West Europeans could come and go as they pleased. Those of us in poorer countries couldn’t go much of anywhere without breaking the law."
"Did you break the law to come and live here?" he asked.
"No, I came legally as a student. Odd, how if I’d come of age just a few years before, I wouldn’t have had the chance, though I can’t blame anyone except the dictatorship for that. As it was, I was lucky enough to do so well in secondary school, so the immigration authorities thought I was worth giving a chance."
"So you came here for school. If not for school, what did the authorities think you might be doing?"
"Oh, I’m not saying any of it made sense, it was all a way to treat poor foreigners like criminals for wanting to make a living. Honestly, back in the modern era, most other Europeans decided we Albanians were all crazy. It was easier than getting to know our country, I suppose."
Charlinder nodded along with her speech, deciding that he would wait for more direct information before he came to any conclusions. There was something in the way she switched from blissful serenity to focused agitation without the merest discernible transition that suggested something undeniably interesting going on in her brain. Of course, he reasoned, he couldn't properly expect to make the acquaintance of a woman well over 120 years old, who could harness and manipulate intangible energy from the Earth's crust, without witnessing some unusual qualities.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Conversation
There was so much else to see in the garden. At each cluster, some plants of a species were in full bloom, some wilted as though dormant for the winter, while still others went through their transitions. The temperature of the garden changed almost as quickly as Gentiola's moods. As he followed her around the plots, the air turned from August to November to May as if contained by invisible barriers. They passed the animal cages in a patch of March, and Charlinder noticed that the fluff-balls had long ears and twitching pink noses.
"Are those
rabbits
?" he asked in surprise.
"Yes, those are my babies," she cooed.
The most bizarre sight in the garden--even Gentiola still looked upon it in some amazement--was the orange trees. Their branches held clusters of delicate white flowers, mature fruit, and deep green pod-like immature fruit. Charlinder couldn't help but gawk at this phenomenon while Gentiola magicked some mature fruits off the tree and deposited them into a basket that he held out.
"I don't know why they do that," she said upon catching the look on Charlinder's dumbstruck face. "They've grown like that since the year after the Plague ended. The whole garden's in all seasons at once, and I don't know of any other place that behaves this way. Of course it rotates, so I have to keep moving the hutch around so the rabbits stay comfortable."