My class was in a new wing that had been built just that summer. In my miserable state I was unable to make out the numbering scheme of the rooms, and when I saw at the end of the long, gleaming corridor a man standing half out of a doorway, beckoning me in, I assumed that I had found my destination.
The class I was looking for was Can Art and Industry Co-Exist?–a question about whose answer I cared not a whit. As soon as I sat down I began to suspect I was in the wrong place. There was no slide projector set up, and the students were not ones I had seen in other art history classes. In fact, they were not ones I had seen anywhere. There were three men in identical razor ties and red satin jackets, who did not act as if they knew one another; a very fat albino black man; an impatient-looking punk wearing that T-shirt with the Milky Way and the legend, “YOU ARE HERE”; in the front, a hyperglandular adolescent boy who, after some minutes of examination, I realized was in fact a woman of no less than forty. I felt as if I were at a casting call for a film whose tortured, whimsical plot I could never hope to understand. I wondered briefly what my own part in it could be.
The class was Introductory Gravinic. The man who had beckoned me in was Professor Gregory McTaggett–that same man whose broken wrist, decades before, had turned him from basketball to the life of the mind. He was the department chairman now. Seeing me wandering, he’d taken me for the final student on his roll, a freshman named Bobby Trabant, who (I later found out) had tripped on a sidewalk outcropping on his way to class and split his forehead from his hairline to the bridge of his nose. Bobby never did come to that class, even after the stitches came out.
But I stayed. Why not stay? Julia had opted out of Can Art? in favor of a course for which I lacked the prerequisites. Anyway, it had recently become clear to me (although I had not yet told Julia) that no amount of industry would allow me to graduate in art history at the end of that year. I was going to have to switch to mass communications. Consequently I had a great deal
of room for electives in my schedule.
The first day was not what I expected–no hello, goodbye, my name is, I would like. Instead McTaggett outlined the history of the Gravine and its strange language, assuming correctly that the material was unfamiliar to all of us.
McTaggett’s lecture began in the final, heady days of the Pleistocene, about 18,000 years past, when a stray arm of glacier looped over a ridge and smashed a bowl-shaped hollow in the Carpathians. Before long a troop of fresh-minted Cro-Magnons happened upon the valley, and, finding game plentiful and the climate to their liking, stayed. The only entrance, a narrow, snow-clogged pass, was easy to defend even with Neolithic ordnance. So the proto-Gravinians retained the integrity of blood and territory, while clans displaced clans in violent feuds outside. Their language, too, developed without interference. There had been attempts to link Gravinic with other pre-Indo-European remnants: Basque, Finnish, the Tiktiksprache of certain Baltic islands. None were convincing. As far as was known, Gravinic constituted a linguistic family in and of itself.
I found myself paying as much attention to McTaggett himself as I did to the content of his lecture. He was tall, of course, shocked with red hair, strangely wide in the shoulders and tapered thereafter. When he was speaking he paced out the blackboard side of the classroom, almost stomping, like a coach facing an inevitable loss. I noticed with some embarrassment that the students around me were all writing furiously. I had not even brought a notebook.
Gravinian folklore had it (McTaggett went on) that the country had been founded by two ancient monarchs, called King Speaker and King Listener. Listener was perfectly attuned to the needs and desires of his subjects; a single word, it was said, would suffice for any petition to him. Speaker’s gift was to issue royal decrees in language so stirring and precise that it was considered a privilege to obey them. There was no archeological evidence for the existence of this colorful pair. The going theory had the Gravinian state developing gradually out of the usual communalistic sentiments, without the intervention of any individual figures worth noting.
The Gravine’s modern history was no less placid. Now and then an
aspiring emperor would lay claim to it; but the valley was mineral-poor and unstrategically placed, and no foreign ruler had ever exerted sovereignty there in more than name. At the time of McTaggett’s lecture the Gravine was a semi-autonomous district of the U.S.S.R. The Soviet government had changed the name of the capital to Beriagrad but had otherwise left the place alone. That was where it stood.
That night I told Julia I was quitting art history. She took it well. The fact was, I hadn’t been much good at it, and both of us knew so. When I told her I was taking Gravinic she wrinkled her nose.
“Just so long as you don’t speak it in the house,” she said.
It was months, it turned out, before I could speak it at all. The Roman alphabet had arrived in the Gravine too late to exert much normative force on the spoken language. Pronunciation was governed by a staggering collection of diacritical marks, haphazardly applied. But the pronunciation was simple compared to the task of constructing a grammatical sentence. Gravinic, like Latin, had its cases: its nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and ablative. But then, too, there was the locative, the transformative, the restorative, the stative; the operative and its tricky counterpart, the co-
operative; the justificative, the terminative, the reiterative, the pejorative, the restive, the suggestive, the collective, the palliative, the argumentative, the supportive, the reclusive and the preclusive, the intuitive and the counter-intuitive, the vocative and the provocative, the pensive, the defensive, the plaintive…
As the declension of the Gravinic noun dragged on, the enrollment of our class declined alongside. One morning in December, I found myself the only one left. The boy-woman, my last classmate, had given up.
A little self-conscious, I sat in my usual place, opened my notebook, and cocked my pen just as if a roomful of students was following along.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” McTaggett said. “This happens every year. Shall we just call it an A minus and go home?”