faintest rumblings of this hidden language at the edges of his perception. But it was not until his mother’s death that, for the first time, Schultz perceived a tongue unlike any other, the sounds that things made to him directly, unobscured by human speech.
When he was a boy, Schultz and his mother had a closeness that other mothers envied and other boys ridiculed. Schultz and his mother had been as two parallel lobes of a single functioning mind, until, one June day, the half that was his mother vanished. That afternoon, on a walk back from the well in the rain, Schultz’s mother had carelessly crossed the Milavetz Road, a dirt path primarily used by farmers and their horses. She had crossed the road, oblivious to the motorist from Vilnius, out for a weekend joyride with his girlfriend, exploring the back roads with teenage velocity. It had been as simple and stupid as that: she was struck. She was killed.
The sounds had begun almost immediately, at her funeral, the torn pockets of the grieving crying out with their own
sh-rook
, the rabbi’s beard emitting a
ffff
. Schultz had not been worried,not for his sanity, and not for his hearing. Whatever these sounds were, they sutured, at least temporarily, the unbearable gap that had suddenly opened, with his mother’s death, between the world and him. The vast distance of his mourning, a vast silence that separated him from others.
Cococo
, the wooden slats of a floor called out to him.
Bleee
, a crow’s abandoned feather said. He had not yet begun to comprehend what he heard; he was simply glad for the sounds, the small compensation. Four months later, his father, Moshe, finding no equal compensation, one morning left for work at the bookshop he owned, bypassed the shop, and walked instead to the river, to the tree under which his wife and he had first kissed, and hanged himself from a wide, low branch.
Thereafter, when the people of Bolbirosok tried to speak with the seventeen-year-old orphan, they grew increasingly concerned as Schultz would either not answer them or answer them with words that were not quite words. But how could Schultz be expected to attend to conversation in that restrained language? The world had begun its own conversation with him; daily, more things revealed their sounds. With each step, his pants told him of their motion. Each sympathetic face spoke with something other than its human voice. The hair of Irit Mendelsohn, the girl he had always loved from afar, made a string of vowels, like wind passing through barley.
As fate or chance would have it, over the years that followed, Schultz lost a great many things, more than one might expect any person to bear. Each loss, however, seemed to allow more and more sounds. And it was not until he had lost everything—his parents, his wife, the town of his childhood, his career, his freedom—that he could begin to perceive the true names of all things. He has suffered greatly, he knows, but he also suspectsthat this suffering was absolutely necessary, that if he still maintained all his human relations, with all those exchanges spinning out in their common words, noise would have obscured the other language he is now able to catalog.
The universe is a text
, Irit’s father once told him.
An unending text, in which all is written in living words
.
Schultz remains uncertain if the language he perceives is a part of a text authored by some higher mind, or if it is merely the true and natural sound of things; he does not know if it is fate or chance that has brought him this far. But he knows all that has happened to him has been essential for his revelation.
Schultz has focused his morning energy on the specific sounds emitted by each pen in his jar, tuning out, as much as he can, the sound rising from the east. But now he lets himself listen. It is like a single syllable screamed by a baby who is just learning the word for
want. WAWAWAWA
, the storm says.
6
Instead of circumnavigating the