A Lover's Discourse. Xiaolu Guo

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СКАЧАТЬ I was on the sofa leafing through the Berlin book, my flatmate asked:

      ‘Are you going to Berlin soon?’

      ‘No. But I met a German, actually a half German,’ I explained. ‘That’s why.’

      She giggled, and asked: ‘And the other half is?’

      ‘Australian,’ I answered. ‘I know. Opposing characters, like yin and yang.’

      ‘Ha, so you prefer reading books about Germany than Australia?’

      Perhaps, I thought. But what do I know about either of these cultures?

      ‘In Chinese we say, 爱屋及乌 – ài wū jí wū. Which means if you love your mansion you’ll love the magpie too.’

      ‘Why? What’s the connection between mansion and magpie?’

      ‘In Chinese “mansion” and “magpie” have the same pronounciation – wū.’

      She looked at me, as if I had grown three heads. Then she yawned and walked away, carrying her Swinging Sixties book.

      On my bed later that evening, in my pyjamas, I looked at Internet images of those ice-age lakes in and around Berlin, and their strange German names: Schlachtensee, Wannsee, Müggelsee, Plötzensee. So they call their lake see (sea). And they call their sea meer. Curiously non-English, I thought. This was of course obvious. German is different from English. But still, I realised, I was encountering a third language. This was very different from learning English, because English was always in the atmosphere like pollen from the plants permeating the air, whereas German was like a specific mountain in the landscape which you had to have a particular ambition to climb.

      Der Mond – Moon

      – Why is moon masculine in German?

      – There is nothing objective about how you feel about stars or planets. It’s all literature.

      The next time I met you, I asked many questions about your German-ness. Or rather, I interrogated you and even accused you of being Germanic. I found German culture confusing.

      ‘So you are half German. Can I ask you a question? In every culture, moon is feminine. In Chinese too. Why is moon masculine in German? Do you really see the moon as a male character?’

      We were in a Turkish cafe near Dalston. Everyone around us was eating brown mushy chickpeas. People in east London seemed to eat a lot of chickpeas.

      ‘Why is moon masculine in German?’ You repeated my question.

      As if you sensed this was not a simple linguistic question. You thought about it for a few seconds. Then you answered:

      ‘Well, der Mond. In some old languages like Sanskrit, the moon is masculine and the sun feminine. I remember learning in school about some pre-Babylonian Sumerian languages, and the word for moon is explicitly masculine, as it is in Arabic, in which the word for sun is feminine.’

      It was like you were giving me a lecture, presenting the findings of some research you had carried out on historical linguistic study.

      ‘I thought you were a landscape architect. But you sound like a linguist. You know a lot about language!’

      ‘A landscape architect knows everything.’ You smiled. ‘Well, to be honest, this isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this by a non-German speaker.’

      ‘So you think it’s just a different tradition that we see the moon as female?’

      ‘Yes, there is nothing objective about how you feel about stars or planets. It’s all literature. People put too much feeling and emotion into these things.’

      I thought about what you said for a while. Perhaps I was just one of those romantic and cultural preservationists who view things according to convention? Or according to the ­clichés of literature, as you pointed out? But I continued:

      ‘So if der Stuhl – the chair – is masculine, then why is the table not feminine? I thought chair and table make a perfect match.’

      ‘There is no logical explanation. There is no why. You just can’t ask a question like that about a language.’ Your eyes were looking for something, then you pointed to my cutlery. ‘For example. You have die Gabel – the fork, der Löffel – the spoon and das Messer – the knife. A fork is feminine, a spoon masculine and a knife neutral. Why? No reason. Just convention. So, the only way to learn the genders of nouns is to treat their articles as a component of the word.’

      ‘That’s very unnatural for Chinese people. In our language we don’t have articles.’

      ‘You don’t have any articles?’

      ‘No. Why bother? We save time for something else.’

      ‘Something else like what?’

      ‘Like enjoying the taste of green tea, or staring into a pond, checking out frogs and lotus flowers.’

      You raised your eyebrows, not commenting, but almost laughing. Now the waiter appeared. We began to study the menu, which was full of pictures of all sorts of cooked chickpeas.

      ‘German is a hard language, no?’

      ‘Not as hard as Chinese, probably.’ You chuckled. ‘I remember when I first came to Germany from Australia. I was in my late teens. One day I learned a word at school: Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung. I got back home and told my father proudly that I’d learned the longest word I’d ever heard. Then he told me that it was the most useless word to learn.’

      ‘Geschwindig . . .’ I tried to copy this weirdly long word. But I couldn’t. You wrote it down on a napkin:

      Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung

      ‘You don’t need to remember it, if you don’t drive.’

      ‘Do you mind to tell me what it means?’

      ‘Speed limit.’

      Ah. I instantly lost interest.

      ‘Do you want to share some chickpeas?’ you proposed.

      I nodded, tossing the speed limit napkin away.

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