A consequence of the variegated fabric of my education and career is that I do nothing particularly well. I have enough Greek to make a nuisance of myself; I’ve absorbed enough higher math to make my obvious errors in basic daily calculations seem rather grand. I can play a very cautious, conservative rubber of contract bridge. Somehow, this has added up to a life.
From time to time, I do get a wild hair to acquire a skill or trade. I attempted to learn to code in a marketable way for a four-week period of professional dissatisfaction in which I swore great oaths to go straight from journalism; instead I sank deeper into the mire of the fourth estate, picking up a temporary editing sideline. I have at various points figured out how to do things with spreadsheets, and then forgotten them. And now—well, şimdi de bir daha Türkçe çalışıyorum, which is to say, I’m back to my old nonsense.
Strange to say (or not, given the prevailing dilettantism of my other spheres of activity), I have never learned a modern language to any proficiency. In college, I scraped together enough Italian and German for reading to stagger through the scholarship I needed from time to time—the period of my greatest command of German coincides perfectly with my exciting but not to be repeated semester of Hittite—and I can read Spanish well enough to feign occasional expertise on Mexican affairs. (This is sort of the trick of newsmagazine journalism, feigning expertise, building Potemkin villages with whatever scrap wood and paint you can find and lash together before the deadline.) Yet my actual travel abroad has generally been a linguistically hapless affair—a potpourri of lingua franca (am I in a germanus country or a frater country?), airplane magazine tourist phrases, and good old American, accompanied by goofy smiles and generous tips.
The exception was my brief inglorious jaunt in Turkey, where, as documented previously in this column, I worked as an archaeologist in a small village, a not altogether happy experience. Out here in the hills and plains of ancient Lydia, there was less English than in the tourist-traps of Rome and Athens. I didn’t exactly become fluent, but I could get around bus terminals and tell my men how to move taş, kir, and toz in more or less detail.
I didn’t much like archaeology, but I did like Turkish. Much like dear old English, it’s a mixture, a substrate on which is set a vast superstructure of Arabic and Persian adoptions, with the occasional Slavicism or Europeanism set into it for piquancy. The language reformers of 1932 and later set about purging it of its Ottoman-era foreignisms, with varied success; in any case, when you visit the great mausoleum of Ataturk at Ankara, the curators have included modern demotic translations of the speeches made in Mustafa Kemal’s rather more ornate, genteel register.
I find this all agreeable, as I do the sound of the language, its propensity for very finely shaded subtleties of word-formation, even its simplicity of syntax. It reminds me of the city of Rome, the multiplicity of architectural layers overlapping and interpenetrating, the residues of occasional efforts at top-down rationalization and reform. Somewhere Freud says Rome is the illustration of consciousness and the irruptions of the unconscious. Something like this is also the case in languages like English and Turkish; speech is itself the reflection of mind.
A strange aspect of long-running archaeological expeditions is that they begin to develop their own histories and their own layering, which intertwines with the physical site itself. An old art historian, an emeritus professor at my university, visited the dig for a week with his nurse. His mind was slipping; he had a reputation for a brusque demeanor, which it was held he had adopted to cover the fact that he forgot names and times and sometimes where he was. He was once quite rude to me at a funeral for a mutual friend, where I was an usher, and I was prepared for the worst. I was a hopeless excavator, which is bad enough when you aren’t taking up anything interesting. I had, however, lighted on the misfortune of something worthwhile—an architrave fragment with a partial inscription on it. Based on the context of the find, everyone expected me to find the matching fragment to complete the inscription, or so it seemed to me; this much occupied my mind as I sat down in the dining room with this one-time demigod of the excavation.
In fact, he was the very image of charm. He smiled at everyone, asked the newcomers (myself included) about themselves, proposed theories and areas of promise. Someone asked him to look at my partial architrave to see whether he had any suggestions of where to look in already excavated materials of yesteryear, or what emendations to make to the inscription, or at least which direction I ought to be digging in to find the rest. I had hesitated, aware of his condition and how forgetting could give way to anger, but was cajoled into showing him in the end. He examined the photograph carefully and closed his eyes in silence, brow furrowed. I felt stupid and excused myself. He nodded briefly without opening his eyes. At dinner, he was his lively self, and I did not bring it up again.
I learned shortly after that he had, in his youth, converted to Islam and run off with a girl from the village, a union which did not have a happy ending—a very uncomfortable thing for a foreigners’ operation in a place where everyone was a cousin. Yet the peasants seemed to forgive all. They loved him; they gathered around him just to hear him talk. He had learned the language from two sources, the peasants and Ottoman novels of manners; so his fluent speech was a delightful and entirely original mixture of Palace Turkish and kaba Türkçe, “rough” Turkish. I remember our compound’s majordomo, an enormous mustachioed fellow named (inevitably) Mustafa, smiling dreamily as the professor passed the time of day with the cook. His speech in some way articulated and recapitulated their own history, both personally as members of a particular village and workers in a particular enterprise, and as members of some longer, more ancient continuity.
A free afternoon shortly before his visit came to a close, I found him in the dining room with many archival photographs spread out before him. He called me over and smiled: The rest of my architrave, which he had excavated in 1963—a two-fold irruption of the past into the present, of memory into active thought.
I come back to him—let us call him David—when I come back to Turkish. And, strangely, as I wrote this column, he came back to me. I just received the latest issue of the alma mater’s alumni comic; though he has been dead these three years, there is a two-column appreciation of him here, sitting before me on the desk. The older layers come back to the surface unexpectedly; that is the nature of variegation. Perhaps no single color runs very deep or very broad, but is the resulting cloth so unpleasing?
