The Language of the Dragon

by Margaret Ball

  He stood, stashed the phone with the laptop, and pointed at the body. “Bu prdmt vlaad kzmtq.”

  He had a really terrible blinding migraine.

  But he also had an empty office again.

  5. The girl is scared stiff

  My first stop the next morning was at Sweet Georgia Realty. The office occupied the bottom half of my aunt’s house on Rio Grande; a pleasant set of rooms, with oak floors, high ceilings and old-fashioned sash windows (and slightly less pleasant old-fashioned window air conditioners; it hadn’t been retrofitted for central air like my parents’ house). Aunt Georgia and I were both “rich” in inherited houses, although she had a better work ethic and hence, less of a perennial crisis with the property taxes.

  I had a courtesy desk in the main room, though the other two realtors who worked in there had a bad habit of using it as a place to stash their paperwork. It was too much trouble to bug them about it; it wasn’t like I ever expected to spend much time actually sitting at the desk.

  It was a pleasant room, large enough for us to arrange our desks in a semicircle, with oak floors that glowed in the summer sunshine that slanted through the tall windows. And my colleagues were decorative too, in their own ways: Davis with broad shoulders and a pleasant face, Carly with dark curly hair like Laura’s and a piquant little face accented with eye shadow and bright red lipstick. For once, both of them were in the office, not out showing places. Must be a slow period.

  Davis, as usual in August, was dressed in what I thought of as Midsummer Respectable: slacks and shirt of the lightest-weight fabric known to humanity. I sometimes wondered if they’d dissolve during one of our infrequent summer downpours. Could be interesting to observe.

  Carly, who was tiny and compact, was doing Professional Realtor (Edgy Modern) in a red jacket over a navy dress, stacked red heels and pantyhose. The kind of look I sometimes aspired to but rarely achieved in an Austin summer. Pantyhose and hundred-degree days don’t mix well. Unless, like Carly, you had ice water in your… Oops. I’d resolved to cut down on the uncharitable asides. Even if I didn’t say the words out loud, I had a theory that thinking them generated aggressive vibes that made my working relationship with Carly edgier than it had to be, and not in a fashion-forward sense.

  Davis gave me a friendly nod and gestured towards one of the stacks of papers on my desk.

  “That’s okay, I can work around it,” I responded to the unspoken offer to move his stuff. It would just add another little source of tension if Davis cleared his papers off my desk and Carly didn’t remove hers – and Carly was sitting back with her arms folded, giving me the evil eye. Clearly not about to give back any of the space she’d appropriated. Oh well, I was only there to discuss the new rental with Aunt Georgia.

  “I thought you’d be glad of the money,” my aunt said when I followed her into her office to grumble about this surprise rental. “You certainly complained enough about finances after your old tenant moved to California – “

  “Colorado.”

  “Whatever. And then you said that foreign boy Thalia recommended took off without paying the rest of the rent he owed you?”

  “I should never have let him talk me into giving him a key before I had the cash. I’ve been having so much trouble around that room, I was thinking of making it into part of a private suite for myself instead of renting it out again.” I fiddled with one of the curls trying to break loose from the scrunchie that held them out of my face. Austin shouldn’t have been more humid than the beach, but my hair was acting as if it had been power-frizzed.

  “And how would you afford that?”

  “Maybe I could make up the money doing a little more here at the office.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Aunt Georgia said, and handed me three shiny new folders.

  “But now that I’m getting rent for that room again…”

  “Don’t be silly, it’s high time you grew up and started doing a responsible job instead of eking out a meagre existence by renting rooms in your parents’ house. You can start today, with the top folder. The Stevensons specifically asked for you, God only knows why, and they’ve been waiting for you to get back from the beach.”

  Carly’s evil-eye glare only intensified when I emerged from Aunt Georgia’s office with the new paperwork, and she made a barely audible comment about how nice it must be to have an in with the boss.

  It wasn’t favoritism, not really. I’d been tutoring desperate language students since my freshman year at the university – that made what? Eight? No, nine years of making contacts with people, many of whom stayed in Austin after graduating and remembered me fondly. I wasn’t just good at learning languages; I was also good at helping jittery students absorb the cruel realities of life, such as that French les is not pronounced “less” and that some German verbs can come apart like Legos to occupy distant parts of a sentence. Blossom and Floss regarded me as the sole buffer between them and ignominious expulsion from the Spanish Education program, and they weren’t far wrong.

  I’d tried to explain this fact of life to Carly before, but had never yet succeeded in communicating to her that the clients that she thought were just a gift from my aunt were actually the result of my having been in town a long time and having had the chance to help a lot of people. She went to business luncheon meetings, dressed for success, and had a huge profile on LinkedIn; she felt that I must be cheating somehow, to have clients without playing the networking game.

  Now I took a quick look through the folders in my hand. Bruce and Angie Stevenson, I was definitely keeping those; they were the ones who’d made a point of waiting for me to get back so I could show them the Harris mansion on the lake. Next were a newly married couple, first-time home buyers, one of whom I had hand-carried through the pitfalls of Russian 201. Forget those, Carly wouldn’t thank me for clients who would require lengthy education in the realities of real estate before settling for the kind of starter home they could get a mortgage on. The third client was a young man who’d demanded a crash course in Arabic so that he could be eligible for an overseas assignment with his company. The fact that he was back in Austin and shopping for a condo suggested the Arabic hadn’t done the trick for him. He’d probably only contacted Sweet Georgia Realty because I was the only realtor he’d ever met.

  I handed Carly his folder. “Would you do me a huge favor and take care of this one?” Maybe that would sweeten her temper.

  Davis followed me out to the coffee and tea stand that occupied what had once been a front hall. “Sienna, you don’t have to give in to Carly every time she grumbles. She knows just as well as I do why you have so many clients without hustling for them.”

  I sighed and searched through the tea bags for something that wasn’t Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong. “I know, but… well, it’s not like I can take care of all three clients immediately. Somebody’s going to have to wait or go with a different realtor, and if Carly takes them over, at least the business stays in the office.” There was one bag of Orange Spice left. I poured hot water over it and jiggled it up and down by the string.

  “If you hadn’t been out of touch for a week…”

  “Well, I was. It’s a little late to fix that now!”

  Davis’ face shocked me and I apologized. “Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap.” Too late I remembered Aunt Georgia’s training: count to three before speaking, she always told me, and I wouldn’t irritate so many people.

  Fortunately, Davis was too sweet to stay irritated. He cheered up immediately, and I let him advise me on how to build my client list into a solid career while the tea steeped. It wasn’t too hard; I let my eyes drift slightly out of focus, nodded at intervals, and developed my mini-fantasy about his shirt and slacks dissolving in a thunderstorm. That wouldn’t display any more of his body than he showed on the tennis court three times a week, but the setting was more fun to daydream about. The hard-hitting tennis he played, that kept him in such good shape, also made him hot and sweaty
and as close to aggressive and snarly as he ever got. Rain, on the other hand…

  Well, rain was clearly not on the agenda today, and neither were fantasies. I had clients to appease. I contacted the Stevensons and was able to set up an appointment with them almost immediately. If that worked out, and if I was a very good girl and spent the long hours that would be necessary to talk Mr. and Mrs. Newlywed down to a starter home within their budget, and if Carly got somewhere with Mr. Executive Arabic, the clients would be happy; Aunt Georgia would be happy; possibly even Carly would be happy.

  Life was a lot less trouble if people weren’t annoyed with me. I really should appreciate Davis more; he coupled smooth good looks with reliable friendship and always accepted my apologies when I snapped at him. Too bad the real man didn’t do as much for me as soaking-wet fantasy-Davis did. He was definitely a low-maintenance friend, and a girl could always use one of those.

  A serious realtor, I knew, would regard clients like mine as a gift from God, not as a nuisance. The fact was that I’d never been all that serious about the real estate business. Getting my license had been less trouble than withstanding Aunt Georgia’s insistence that having graduated from UT with a useless degree in linguistics, I really needed to get some kind of professional certification. And since then, okay, I’d closed just enough deals to keep me around the office on a semi-regular basis. It just wasn’t me.

  But then… I wasn’t entirely sure what was me. My only real talent was a knack for picking up languages quickly, something I’d discovered in high school. And experience had demonstrated that a degree in linguistics bolstered by fluency in half a dozen languages and a smattering of a couple of dozen more would not quite buy me a latte at Starbucks. So, given property taxes and the cost of groceries and other unpleasant realities, I had better continue to do what Aunt Georgia suggested.

  Out to the lake it was, then, to let myself into a conglomeration of glass and metal cubes and redwood decks that only somebody really, really rich could love. The place had a checkered history. The original builder hadn’t been able to pay for his creation, and it had passed into the hands of one of those Harrises, the grocery store moguls. But the Whitney Harris who’d owned it for a few years had been involved in some kind of scandal – I hadn’t paid attention to the details – and it was up for sale to pay her legal bills.

  Had been up for sale for quite some time, actually, and the asking price had just been cut again. The kind of history realtors mean when we say, “Motivated seller.” No wonder the Stevensons were unhappy that I’d been out of town last week; they must have been afraid that someone else would snap up this unique house at the newly lowered price. Most people would have let another realtor show them the place. Wasn’t it a good thing that Bruce Stevenson had been one of my first tutoring jobs when I started at UT? And that he was still so grateful to me for getting him past the German proficiency exams for his Ph.D. qualification?

  For people who’d insisted they wanted me and nobody else to show them the lakeside property, Angie and Bruce Stevenson were awfully late. But considering that the commission I’d make on a house this size would make me feel financially independent for months, I could afford to wait on their convenience.

  I got a respectable number of loyal clients like this every year, ex-students or referrals from ex-students like Thalia who thought that without me they’d never have passed their language requirements. In many cases they were right. And there was a certain karmic balance to the situation that I appreciated, because without them I wouldn’t have any income at all from the real estate business. Aunt Georgia was constantly on my case to take the job more seriously, but as long as I could eat regularly and pay the sky-high property taxes on my house every year, it just didn’t seem worth the trouble. Okay, I admit it: I’m an Austin slacker. Blue skies and a string of lakes like jewels, good Mexican food and a great live music scene keep our species alive with remarkably little cash flowing anywhere at all.

  Certainly it was no hardship to lounge on the tree-shaded bottom deck of this hymn to modern architecture, occasionally responding to the Stevensons’ texts with “OK,” or “See you when you get here.” The only little problem was that during that week in Port Aransas I’d already read everything I had on my phone. Not much of a problem, really; my tote bag still held that notebook of Koshan Idrisov’s that I’d taken to the beach with me after I threw the rest of his possessions into a couple of cardboard boxes.

  It had been nothing more than a slight incongruity that caught my eye, the fact of notes written in a tight, spiky German handwriting among the possessions of a young man from Central Asia. German wasn’t a popular language in the ‘stans. If the handwriting had been Cyrillic or Arabic, I’d probably have tossed this tightly bound, stained notebook in with the rest of Koshan’s junk.

  But German? And in a script that hardly anybody could read these days? A couple of my professors at the university might have been familiar with it, the old guys who’d done research in Germany back before computers replaced card catalogs. Apart from them, I didn’t think anybody in Texas read German script – except me and the other survivors of Frau Heilemann’s high school German classes.

  I grinned, remembering the glorious revelation those classes had been to me. I’d signed up for French and Spanish in ninth grade only to discover that both classes moved at a pace so glacial, I memorized the dialogues in the textbooks while my classmates were still stumbling over the opening sentences. Tenth grade opened up new worlds with a fanfare of trumpets… or, to put it more prosaically: Frau Heilemann’s announcement that God had sent her to Texas for a reason and that His reason was to convey the benefits of German civilization to the young barbarians of Beeville, Texas.

  Frau Heilemann employed the time-honored German tradition of Blitzkrieg. Students ambled into her classroom expecting to be granted a generous time to warm up their brains after leaving them turned off all summer, and exited in a state of shock clutching handouts on Fraktur (a printing style used in Germany until the mid-twentieth century), Sütterlin (the traditional spiky handwriting, hereafter to be referred to as ‘German script’), Faust (Part I) and Sprich Deutsch: A Conversation Manual, all of which we were expected to master well before mid-terms. As in, Frau Heilemann suggested, how about next week?

  Honors students, meaning kids who cared about their GPA, fell over each other to get out of a class where the teacher hadn’t been trained by American educational philosophy to pass out A’s to everybody with nicely combed hair. I stayed, loved the atmosphere, learned to love the language, in fact loved everything about the class except Frau Heilemann herself – even for me, that was a German too far. That was okay. I hadn’t signed up out of admiration for her sparkling personality, and I didn’t stay for that.

  I stayed because, for the first time since my incarceration in Beeville, I was learning something.

  I even learned to scrape my unruly hair back from my face and contain it with elastic bands, rather than listen to Frau Heilemann’s comments on people who didn’t bother to comb their hair before class. I actually did comb it, it was just that it reverted with reprehensible enthusiasm to its nature as a mass of frizzy curls.

  And it wasn’t red. Bright brown, maybe. Farther than that I would not concede.

  Fairness compels me to add that I wasn’t any brighter than the honors students diving over the side of that particular ship. My failure to get much out of other subjects might have had something to do with my slacker-style attitude to life and the fact that most Beeville High teachers were too worn down to do more than go through the motions. It was just that something in my brain seized on the patterns of language with delight. I soaked up vocabulary by just reading the lists, and by the second week I could fake my way through an improvised conversation by relying less on consciously memorized grammar than on a feeling that the sentences wanted to sound a certain way.

  Like I said – my one talent.

  Now, with a smile curving my lips at t
he memory of how thin-lipped, grey-haired little Frau Heilemann had turned my life around and sent me heading for college, I took up Koshan Idrisov’s mysterious notebook and gave it the attention I’d omitted to give during that gloriously lazy week at the beach.

  The first surprise was that despite the script, it wasn’t written in German. Half of it wasn’t, anyway. It seemed to be an unordered collection of words and phrases in some language that was totally unfamiliar to me, with German translations and queries jotted down beside them. This language apparently had some sounds that the writer felt traditional script was unable to express, because the transcribed words were peppered with phonetic symbols and explanatory notes in brackets.

  After working my way through a couple of pages I put the notebook down and stared over the lake. What language was this, anyway, with its jangling sounds and grating syllables, its superfluity of consonants and shortage of vowels?

  Thalia Lensky had been in Taklanistan last fall, so it stood to reason that the guide she’d met and subsequently recommended to me was a Taklan. In which case he was probably a speaker of some dialect of Farsi, which was an Indo-European language even if it did look kind of strange to most Europeans.

  This language was definitely not Indo-European.

  Nor was it Pashto, Uyghur, Kazakh, or any of the other languages common in Central Asia. I didn’t actually know those languages, but I could recognize them.

  And it was barely even pronounceable.

  “Q!z – girl,” I muttered. The string of phonetic symbols identified with “!” suggested something like a glottal stop followed by a hacking cough.

  “Vlaad – becomes, is becoming.” Okay, at least that sounded like a real word.

  “Bakhsh# - contented.” The hash mark meant… huh, he’d written it out, evidently despairing of phonetic symbolism. “Rocks clashing.” How the hell were you supposed to use soft human organs to make a sound like rocks clashing? I