Between Two Languages

Lena grew up with one language at the kitchen table and another one beyond the front door, and for most of her childhood she assumed that everybody's house worked like that.

By eleven she had understood that it was unusual, and had also worked out, without anyone teaching her, that the two languages were not two versions of the same thing. They were two different sets of tools, and neither box was complete.

She works now as an interpreter, mostly for small firms: eight people round a table, a supplier on a screen, and somebody, always, who has decided that speaking loudly is a shortcut through the problem.

The job is not, as people imagine, a matter of swapping words. Roughly half of it is register: knowing that a phrase which is ordinary in one room is rude in the other, and finding, in one second and a half, something that is neither.

In her second year she let a joke through untouched and watched a two-day misunderstanding grow out of it, tidily, like a plant. Had she paused for even a moment, had she offered the polite version instead, nothing at all would have happened. She has never repeated the mistake, which is not the same as saying she stopped thinking about it.

People tell her, kindly, that she is fluent in both, and she says thank you, because the alternative is a twenty-minute conversation that nobody at a birthday party wants.

What is true is more awkward. Her mother tongue holds everything to do with weather, illness, food and being told off. The other one holds tax, insurance, medicine and every argument she has ever had after the age of nineteen. Numbers she still counts in the first one, silently, even when she is speaking the second.

For years she has kept a notebook of words with no equivalent. Not the famous ones that appear in newspaper articles, but small working ones: the verb for tidying a room that is already tidy; the noun for the particular tiredness of having been friendly all day.

There are sixty-one entries. Eleven of them have been borrowed by her nephew, who is nine, speaks only one language properly and has begun using the tidying verb in English as though it had always been there.

Her accent, she is told, is impossible to place, which is meant as a compliment and lands somewhere near one. At work it is useful. In her mother's kitchen, less so: there she is told that she now says certain things the long way round, like a form.

Last spring, standing in that kitchen, she wanted to tell her mother something about a difficult year, and found that the phrase she needed existed only in the language her mother does not really speak.

She did what she does at work: she paused, she took the long way round, she used four sentences instead of one. Her mother nodded and put the kettle on. Whether anything had actually arrived, Lena could not tell.

That evening she wrote the phrase into the notebook as number sixty-two, in the wrong column, and did not correct it. It is still there, sitting between two headings, which is roughly where it belongs.

She still hesitates before saying she has two languages. Most days she would say she has one and a half, twice over, and that the halves do not overlap in the middle where a sensible person would have put them.