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The
Library
17 May 2001 04:49
Dear Dave,
Today - oh, I think it is
yesterday now - I went again to the library to look at some English
dictionaries.
Well, the two middle aged ladies in charge of the Foreign Languages
room couldn't master their curiosity anymore. They asked me "what
are you doing with all those big dictionaries that for years, nobody
has touched?"
There was no escape from the two mature Eves' eyes beaming on me...
the two, one a blonde and one a brunette, looked a bit like those two
of the ABBA band.
I tried to answer one question and that led to another one, and then
another... soon the story of me and David Scott-Morgan began to cover
more then four hours of uninterrupted telling until two Frenchmen
popped in and saved me and, oh, what a day!
"What are you learning and studying English for?"
"Because I like it and also because I have an old friend in
Britain who I am in touch with, and naturally I have to know the
language to be able to communicate, haven't I?", I said. -
Well, that was the beginning.
"An old friend eh, who is this man?"
I told them 'who', and that 'this man' has a wonderful wife, Mandy who
(and this was something difficult for them to grasp), is preaching the
Word of God, and further, how we met, how we became friends, how I was
your guest in Britain, about people I met, how the weather was, the
food, the public services, my mates at the place I worked ("You
worked in England?" - "Yes I went twice to work
there"), about your mom Vinnie - all the great times with her. I
told them about Edinburgh, London, and wow - the temple of the
playwriting world - Stratford upon Avon, right where Shakespeare was
born. I wonder how I could have forgotten about flying with you over
Warwick castle and the Great Will's birth-place.
Tomorrow I am going to surprise them with some wonderful photos taken
in company of King Lear's daughters, plus that one with the Iron Lady
at Madame Tussauds... There will be a lot more questions, 'how?' and
'why?'
They were both well-read ladies and really, I never met such persons
so greedy to know.
"Where did you learn English?" one asked.
"Everywhere" I said.
"Oh, how is that? - I am a university graduate and I have
forgotten almost all I learned about English although I remember some
French" blonde Eve said.
"Because you didn't really love it" I said cheekily,
"for me it was a platonic love at first that turned into real
one, thank the Lord, soon after the Revolution."
"How is that, Mr.Zaharia?"
"Well" I said, "it all began in the summer of 1982. I
picked up a scrap of paper lying on the street, a torn page from a women's
magazine. On it were 100 English words, both nouns and verbs like:
Break, Drink, Sleep etc.
That piece of paper, carefully preserved, became my treasure, and for
years I had no other source of learning except a Beginners English
Book that I found in a book shop in Bucharest in 1984.
"Not until the summer of 1990, when the Lord sent to me a real
person to talk with, someone who for eight years, I'd imagined having
all sorts of dialogues with (well, on my own they were more like
monologues actually!). Yes I had imagined it, and there he was in the
person of David Morgan.
"Never could I speak to anybody at work of my 'other world'
hobby, because English was the last thing my comrades could think of,
being turned into brutes by shortcomings and hardships of all sorts.
Moreover, they would be suspicious that I was actually learning
English for the purpose of fleeing the Communist Paradise, and they
would be right, for so many times I was dreaming, day-dreaming as well
as night-dreaming, of that distant ideology-free land that called to
me.
"I remember when I was working at the Heavy water plant at
Turnu-Severin, a town near Yugoslavian border. We stayed in a workers
block - close to the 'Portile de Fier' (Iron Gates) hydro-electric power dam. It was in a
wonderful, small mountain village and I would climb to a place atop
the mountain and look for hours and hours over the other side into
neighbouring Yugoslavia, where reigned the hope of freedom. Everyone
knew that in Belgrade was a UN consulate where they could ask for
asylum.
How many bones lay buried of freedom-thirsty Romanians who just
couldn't resist the fatal temptation of throwing themselves into those
deep waters and swimming their way to the other side of frontier. If
fanatical guards didn't shoot them, and the big river didn't engulf
them, and the Serbian soldiers on the other side didn't catch them and
sell them back to the Romanians for salt - yes salt!, they were
free.
"So I imagined myself hundreds of times, there up on that hill,
but never dared, for the instinct of survival was too strong.
And so
with a piece of chalk I would write English verbs on reservoirs,
pipes, cranes etc., to the scoffing of everyone.
I was to myself there, both a schoolmaster and pupil.
"Then in 1986 I was working in Isacea, a town in Tulcea
county (we workers were driven, like a herd of souls with tools,
wherever the Party wanted). Our 'accommodation' was an abandoned barge
on the Danube Delta, where inmates were once kept. It was full of
those disgusting bugs, without light in the winter time and freezing
cold in the small cabin, below the water line of the Danube. I shared
it with a fellow who was angry with me most of the time because I
would speak loudly to myself in English. He never stopped saying to me
'You're a fool, a fool! - Either get yourself a woman or else with a
bit of help and a stone around your neck, I am ready to put an end to
this foolishness!' Yes, I was practicing for the day I
would have someone to speak with.
"The trouble was, I didn't have any idea what I was speaking
like. Who could I listen to in order to hear how words are properly
pronounced? Every night before going to bed I would try to memorise
ten words and if the next morning I could remember at least six or
seven, I was happy. This I did all the time, breaking the nerve of my poor
cabin mate aboard that phantom barge. I tried to find someone else who
could speak that magical language, but I couldn't find anyone who would
want to adventure beyond 'Good-bye, Come back and Hello.'
(Later, much later, I bought a huge 16,000 word Masterpiece
English-Romanian dictionary with international phonetic alphabet -
what a revelation was this second bible!)
"When I was back home in Enisala, my village, I listened avidly
to the BBC, and I remember being surprised to discover how many words
I had already learned to pronounce wrong! It was another job to forget
the wrong ones and re-learn properly how to say them. Sometimes I was
8-10 hours a day in my room at Enisala, fighting always doubts that it
was useless to persevere in learning a foreign language - a dead
language like Latin, it seemed to those around me - and on top of that
I might have learned it wrong.
"I wanted so much to check what I had learned and practice
speaking it - oh at least once in my life.
"Then In Mamaia, in the summer of 1990, my unspoken pleas were
answered when I caught sight of the Union Jack sticker on the back of
a foreign coach.... I approached, tight-hearted, stepping like a
nervous pigeon, to speak with an Englishman sat alone beside the
coach, an Englishman who, it turned out, was the one I had imagined
for so many years - David Morgan was 'this man' who God sent that day
to turn a new leaf of my life and......"
Suddenly our story was broken:---
First one Frenchman, then a second, invaded the lecture room where
before there had been just the three of us, me and the two Eves, the
audience for my one-man monologue!
Blonde Eve showed the French men the room filled with books. They said
they were from Medicine sans Frontier and wanted to know if there was
French literature on the shelves, and if people were reading it?
With my rudimentary French I asked the elder one "Messieur excuse
me, what language do you think will eventually be spoken in a future
United Europe?"
He looked highly surprised and, hesitating a bit and glancing at the
big English dictionaries that were sitting on my desk, said nervously:
"There will be no one language, the EU documents will be
translated in all languages."
I think in his heart he wished it to be French. -- I heard him say
"ordinateur" not computer!
Miti's library experience
continues on page 5 - Bread & Circus
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Pink
Floyd
20 May 2001 10:42
....it was in the
spring of '82. I was at home in Enisala. A close friend of mine, Sandu
- who was a sailor, had brought back from abroad a cassette with Pink
Floyd's 'The Wall' on it. He was the only man, well boy really, in the
whole village who had a radio cassette recorder!!!
When I look around now in this internet cafe room and see 15 computers
and all this gadgetry, it seems all so very far away in the past.
Around that radio cassette we would get together every Sunday for long
hours in a ritual-like act - playing 'The Wall'. We listened with awe
- "Another brick in the wall" - though we didn't understand
the words at all, the music itself was conveying to us its own
powerful message of revolt against any form of oppression.
Good music knows no frontier in time and space, and touches lives in
such a way that the author has no idea of, just how or where or when.
And in our imaginations, that music had us believe that someone out
there was speaking freely for us.
Instinctively we each felt like we were frozen bricks in a wall that
seemed eternal, and when we heard that voice crying 'hey, teacher
leave those kids alone', well, we all knew who the impostor was - the
one who was violently assuming the role of not only teacher, but of
God in our lives.
Later, I was very surprised to see at a secret watching of the video
album on a video-player (it was illegal), those hammers marching in
time to the music, because when listening to 'Another brick in the
wall', I always used to see myself as nothing but a hammer and sickle
crossed on the communist party flag.
Hardships had turned us all into idealists secretly longing for
something better - freedom! Today when we have it, nobody seems to
care about it anymore, running the real risk of losing it again, I
mean here in Romania.
But
I was unhappy that I couldn't understand the lyrics because I felt
they were carrying for me, an incendiary message. I wanted to know
more. My friend had the titles of all the tracks translated into
Romanian with gross mistakes! (now I know it, but then...!)
So from that time, the desire of learning English became for me, a
permanent obsession, but I had no idea how to do it.
Then later that same year, in the summertime, I was standing here in
Tulcea at a bus stop waiting for bus, just leaning against a pillar,
when suddenly my sight fell upon a trampled piece of paper - a torn
page from a women's magazine. Not being a tall guy I could see easily
a few odd words on it, words that seemed somehow familiar. I bent down
and picked it up. Below a big photo of a woman it read:
'If you want to learn
quickly how to express nearly everything in English, all you have to
do is just memorise the 100 English nouns and verbs on the back page.'
It was 'quick-fix' talk, little more than a joke, but then I took it
seriously!
Well, nearly 19 years have past since then and though I
have memorised a lot more than those 100 words I still cannot say that
I can express 'nearly everything in English'. But I am thankful for
one thing: that bit of paper did not say, and I did not know, how hard
it would be, otherwise I would have not started!
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