Charlinder's Walk

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Charlinder's Walk Page 26

by Alyson Miers


  "Now that just makes me wonder," said Gentiola, nearing the bottom of her salad, "about your trip. Where are you from? Did you walk here all the way from England?"

  "No, I've never been to England. I'm from the American territory, but yeah, I walked."

  Gentiola looked up at him and blinked. "Goodness. You must be from California, or further north?"

  "No, no such luck. My home is east of the Appalachian Mountains."

  "Well. Now I see what you mean about the past few years. Where are you headed?"

  "Actually, this area is...pretty much where I wanted to go. I still don't know exactly how close I am, but I didn't just end up here by accident."

  "Really," she said. "I haven't met someone from so far away in the longest time. What brings you to this part of the world?"

  He began to answer, and in that instant, he recalled his 20-year-old self safely at home where he had a job he loved, saw his friends every day, slept every night under a roof and off the ground, and could ask his uncle for advice whenever he needed. He remembered the version of himself that had never butted against a language barrier, never gone a full day with nothing to eat, never crawled through a fire, walked through a monsoon, been chased out of a village half-dressed, or suffered frostbite and deliberately kept himself awake for half the night walking out of the mountains. It was that part of himself that didn't know how it felt to be perpetually cold, hungry, sore, exhausted and unable to talk with anyone.

  "I wanted to learn about the Plague," he answered, with that alien, long-forgotten part of himself now rising to the surface. "And I thought this part of the world was the place to do it. Does that make sense?"

  Gentiola peered back at him with the most intense, focused expression of wonder. As if he weren't bizarre enough for her merely as a foreigner so far from home, now he wanted to know about the Plague, of all things. "Yes, that makes perfect sense. But, I don't think you came all this way out of simple curiosity."

  Then he recalled arguing with Robert in the schoolroom, Ruth challenging him about Eileen, and Kenny waking up in the infirmary. "Um, my home village is getting kind of, at odds?--about the issue, and some of my neighbors are trying to use it as a way to push others around, so I thought it would be best to find a real answer."

  "There's a controversy over the Plague, and it's causing problems for your village," she paraphrased.

  "I didn't want it to get any worse," said Charlinder. He suspected that if he tried telling Gentiola about the events that led up to his decision to leave home, he would only sound pathetic, overreactive. "I thought it would be best to put an end to that back-and-forth of yes it did/no it didn't, because all that was just digging us into a deeper hole."

  "No, no, I get what you mean," she said. "You're doing what needs to be done."

  "Only, I just thought I'd come out here and find something that would give us an answer," he went on. "But I didn't think about just what it would be. And I'd never been anywhere, so I didn’t know how long it would take to get this far, or how many stupid things I could do in that amount of time. I just had no idea what I was getting into."

  "You know," began Gentiola, "I was around for the Plague."

  Charlinder looked over at her. How was it possible that she was even still alive, after that many years? She didn't look older than the late thirties. "You were around over a hundred-twenty years ago?"

  "Yes," she said, looking nearly as puzzled as he felt. "It must be the magic that's making me live so long, though I've never heard of such a thing happening before. But either way, I was around for the pandemic, and I can certainly tell you what I remember."

  "I'd really like that," he said, almost at a whisper. There was a sensation creeping over him, just as powerful as sitting in front of a roaring fire after nearly freezing, or of having a good meal after days of hunger and constant walking. "That would get me off to a great start, if you could tell me."

  "Of course, I'll tell you as much as I know. You just decide when you're ready to ask."

  "Sure, but," he hesitated. If he wasn't mistaken, she was giving him permission to wait a while before getting to business. "I don't want you to have to wait around for me, since I don't have anything to offer you in return."

  "Oh, you don't understand. I'm so tired of having this ridiculous house all to myself with no one to talk to, and I haven't had a guest in...it must be longer than you've been alive, now. You look exhausted; surely you'd like to put down your bags and rest for a while?"

  "You're sure this is no trouble?"

  "No, you're not troubling me at all. All you need to offer is that you'll put up with me."

  Charlinder took a disbelieving breath and started laughing. "Yes. I would really like to put down my bags for a while."

  "Wonderful! Once you've had enough to eat, I will show you where you can sleep, and then I will show you to the washroom, where you can take a shower."

  "I guess I must smell pretty atrocious to you, huh?"

  "Don't worry about that; you've been walking in very hot weather for the last several months, and I'm sure a cleanup will make you feel a lot better."

  "Here's an odd question," he asked between bites of her bean-based stew. "Do the people who live around here call you something like...La Mamma?"

  Gentiola looked slightly embarrassed. "Yes, that is a nickname I've acquired. Why?"

  "Because it kept coming up in people's homes when they hosted me. I couldn't very well understand what anyone was saying, except that phrase kept coming up and it was obvious when they were talking about me. And I swear, they kept pointing me in this direction."

  "Oh, that's so funny," she remarked, apparently thinking out loud. "The guys who brought you here thought I could make you stop being crazy, but I imagine the people further off directed you to me because they didn't know what to do with someone who didn't speak their language. It's probably the first time in their lives that most of them have ever met someone who didn't speak Italian. Back home, did you ever meet anyone who spoke a language other than English?"

  "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 Charlinde
r 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 a
bout 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."

 

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