Not My Language
by Galina Rymbu
It was my language.
And it was immense.
So immense it couldn’t fit in my mouth.
It wouldn’t stay in my palm. It couldn’t even squeeze into the house,
it got stuck in the doorway.
There was no way to hide it.
And it was as heavy
as a felled pine on a clearing,
as a crimson pond fed by underground water.
It was not my language.
And it was so small,
compressed into two or three words
that my grandma remembered,
And my grandpa repeated.
But at night it unfurled inside their chests,
buzzed beneath their hearts,
raged in their bones,
went mad in their muscles,
built traps in their hot mouths—
and then fled from there itself, leaping out of their mouths
like a magician’s rope,
bursting from their temples as an ancient sea
and flooding all of Siberia.
The language of darkness. The language of “Cheremshyna.” The language of “I’m going to fetch water.”
It hid in the corners of my eyes.
It dimly gleamed on my eyelashes.
Unfathomable as that first love.
Dark as the bruises from your first school fight.
A language like shame:
like cheeks smeared with oil, like a handmade toy.
So noticeable, like a stain on an apron—
Everyone around asks: how did it get here?
Heavy and conspicuous like the old clanging water-flask
my grandpa dragged across the whole village.
It draws attention. It irritates. It even makes the torturers wonder: What is that?
I didn’t hear it, but I heard it. I didn’t know it, but somehow I knew it,
like something hindering, somewhere in the temples.
I swallowed its salty water.
Mom said, “It’s a foreign language.
You imagined it. None of us knows it.
It’s a distant language.”
A language that later became tiny for us,
like some strange little bird—
hopping quickly from branch to branch of our rotting family tree—
you barely even notice it…
A language: folded and crushed like an old notebook,
handwriting inside like yours yet not yours, not a single word decipherable.
Maybe we never studied together anywhere at all?
Then just hold the notebook. Stroke the notebook.
Fall asleep clutching the notebook tight in your little paws
in worlds without signs.
A language like an abandoned factory where instruments come alive at night,
working unprofitably, without people.
This is my language!
This is not my language.
We’re acquainted and yet unacquainted.
It’s foreign… It’s ours… the language of Sumy region, the language of Sloviansk.
The language of the steppe. The language of Siberia.
A whisper in the camps, a surviving recipe for bread,
a tiny embroidery, something small, something light,
something you can quickly pass on (if there’s a meeting)…
And all that we did with it, all that we didn’t,
what we crushed on the road in a bag,
what we lost in cold taiga rivers,
under the belly of a badger,
in frozen hideouts, in giant ferns,
everything that scattered through musty train cars.
On snow-covered tanks, a language. A language made God knows how.
A hacked language.
A slashed language.
A poorly mixed language.
A “keep-your-distance” language.
A language without community. And mistaken—
as I am mistaken,
as mistaken as I am writing all this, holding myself back—
a language of horrors, a language of burials without a single sound,
a language without stories, but every moment it is in history,
where winners still breed their narratives,
where winners patch up their fascist sails.
On coffin-boats they travel again,
down the rivers of a plundered continent,
by poisoned streams of my memory and imagination:
something presses in the temples,
something hinders in the temples…
A language in which you can scream, but no one in this place will hear you.
You’ll write—but with a child’s spy pen.
You’ll write—but with a pencil without a lead.
A pocket-language, a ghost-language
floating above the taiga in a black shirt embroidered with star-signs—so small, and already wanted.
Is “язык” looking for you?
(you can’t learn it, you can’t forget it)
Does my “язык” hurt? Does my “язык” burn?
Perhaps it is armed?
My language, not my language,
hide with me under the blanket,
hide with me in the cellar,
darkness is so good here,
everything becomes clear here.
I tell it yet don’t tell it,
let it hear me and not hear me:
Look, it’s like we’re at home again,
like in Sloviansk, like in Sumy,
it is so quiet here…
With magic ropes the language ties me to a city
that exists for me only in dreams,
to a gate that has already turned into a ghost.
Everything is audible here. But how to feel it?
When coffin-boats move through my body
with torn sails of white, blue, red
full of fascists shouting the same songs—
mixed with the songs of others…
Hence the hacked language, hence the slashed language,
a careful language,
simplified and complicated.
It worries for me as for someone else’s child,
saying: Think of me as a native but foreign country.
Think until your thought breaks.
Turn away from me, but so you may return.
Return to me—then turn away and be ashamed,
curl into a ball. Let your thought break…
Then you’ll find yourself in an unfamiliar city on an unfamiliar street
where an unfamiliar festival is celebrated,
where everyone somehow recognizes you,
and says “Hello!”, “God bless you!”…
And then out of the warm crowd steps a woman
in a dress of branches, with a jerking birdlike face,
and says:
I want to hug you so tightly, like ivy,
but your eyes get in the way— they are like two drops of mercury…
II
A language in which it’s forbidden to befriend,
forbidden to unite.
Then what shall we do?
Study the preserved recipe for bread, the tiny embroidery, the drowned gaze?
What do you remember about the land?
What have you forgotten?
…
My professors in Moscow told me: “This isn’t a language, it’s a dialect.
Artificially created.”
But my grandma, shortly before she died, said otherwise:
A language is an unusual journey.
Even, for example, the plants’ language: they seem motionless,
yet their speaking still finds a way to wander…
The language my grandma used to speak to the potato blossom,
and I listened nearby—with huge mustaches hastily made of green onions.
There is such a language.
One you might not even know you know.
Your whole life you may never guess you have it.
What do you remember about yourself?
What have you forgotten?
Do you know how the forgotten shapes any speaking—
even the kind confident in its own right?
…
You can read this through a translator.
Perhaps you already are.
That’s okay, that’s good.
Are you reading this in a safe place?
I don’t know… but it helped me simply to think that this language once existed—
yes, existed not in me.
Imagination of language itself helped,
not even memory of language…
How can a language be both lost and remain?
How do you treat the forgotten? How do you navigate within it?
How do you treat this language if you are now in a place
where things are done that are better forgotten as quickly as possible?
If you aren’t sure whether you’ll ever be able to speak it?
Write to me, perhaps—
we’ll talk,
we’ll try, little by little…
Note from the editor:
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