The Last Speaker

Her papers said Anna. The clerk who registered her birth had not been able to spell the name her mother gave him, and Anna was the name she had answered to for eighty-nine years, in every language but one. She received the linguist in a kitchen that smelled of woodsmoke and quinces, poured her coffee and watched her unpack the microphones with the courteous wariness of someone who had been recorded before. A man from the capital, she said, had come when she was a girl, recorded three of her grandmother's songs and taken them away. Nobody in the valley had heard them since. Whether this was an accusation was not clear, and Leah, who had funding for eleven weeks and a department waiting for results, decided not to ask.

Leah began, as she had been trained to, with lists: parts of the body, numbers, the words for kin. Anna supplied them with visible boredom. Nobody, she pointed out, had ever needed to say "elbow" on its own; one said it about something, to someone, usually in a complaint. By the second week the lists had been put away, and Leah simply let her talk: about weddings and floods, about a cousin who had walked to the coast in a single night, about a goat of legendary bad temper. The recorder ran for hours, and in the evenings the notebooks filled.

It was in the third week that Leah noticed the endings. Every verb, it turned out, declared how the speaker knew what she was saying. One ending marked what she had witnessed with her own eyes, another what she had been told. A third, rarer form was reserved, Anna explained, for things that only one living person could vouch for: dreams, mostly, and memories of people whom nobody else alive remembered. Her grandmother had used it constantly in old age. Leah copied out the forms three times, with the private elation of a specialist who could already see the article.

How the language had come to this was not a mystery, merely a history. The school in the valley had made children who spoke it stand facing the wall, and parents, hoping to spare their own children the wall, had stopped speaking it at home, out of a love that proved more efficient than any punishment. The language retreated from the market to the kitchen, and from the kitchen to the bedsides of the old. For a decade there had been only Anna and her younger sister, who had quarreled in it, prayed in it and, on the sister's last afternoon, said goodbye in it. Since then, Anna had spoken it only to the radio, which never answered, and to her goat, which sometimes did.

Some of what the language held could at least be written down. There was a noun for a path that grass has almost reclaimed but that feet still remember, and a verb for leaving a door unlatched for someone expected after dark. Leah glossed them carefully, and each gloss felt like a small betrayal, as though she were describing a face by listing its features. Gradually it dawned on her that she was not collecting a language at all. A language is not an inventory but an agreement, and an agreement cannot be kept by one party. What her microphones were capturing, with impeccable fidelity, was one side of a conversation whose other side had died.

On her last morning, Leah asked the question she had been circling for weeks: which ending should be used now, for the language itself? Anna considered it with the gravity she brought to all grammatical questions, and then laughed. Everything she said, she replied, had slipped into the third form years ago. "Grammar is very honest," she added. "It noticed before anyone else did." At the door, she told Leah the name her mother had given her, and Leah, who had recorded everything else, did not reach for the microphone.

On the train home, Leah opened her notebook and tried, under her breath, to say a single sentence in the language: that in the valley, people leave their doors unlatched for anyone expected after dark. She hesitated over the ending of the verb. She had never seen it done; she knew it only because she had been told. So she chose the form for hearsay, and as the train carried her out of the valley, it occurred to her that this was the form in which the language would be spoken from now on, by anyone who spoke it at all.