Endangered Species
We’d finished classes in the Faculty of Philology, and my time was now taken up with curriculum planning meetings, exam monitoring and a few hours of tutoring for which hardly anyone turned up.
That Tuesday morning, I was amusing myself by watching how the summer light slid through the big window to light up a landscape of cracks and dust on my old office table. Suddenly I caught myself sighing.
Since I’d got my PhD in German Studies and started to work as a lecturer, everything had changed within the walls of that faculty building.
The BA in German Philology, which I had studied, was no longer being offered, and the small pile of exam papers of the last group doing this course was now waiting for me in my office.
There were barely a dozen students in my class, so they were almost like family.
Now the course had been “discontinued”—which is to say it was to become extinct just like other archaic, unnecessary wild species, and I was going to be subsumed into the English Department.
My literature classes had been cut down to one, for PhD candidates.
For the rest of my classes, I taught Goethe’s language to students who found the subject too demanding.
German is like a lover who respects you only if she has your exclusive attention.
If it’s taken as a minor subject by an English student, it can be hell.
The long list of nouns with irregular plural forms and the complex declensions are enough to put anyone off, especially if they are taking only one or two classes a week.
Since the extinction of my degree course, therefore, I’d become a teacher of a language that brought more pain than joy to my students.
The only good thing about not having regular literature students, I told myself, was that I didn’t have to mark those exams—an almost impossible task in the Internet era.
Nowadays, correcting an essay on any author or work means major research trying to find out the sources of the students’ plagiarism in that copy-and-paste mishmash they try to pass off as their own work.
When proctoring an exam in the classroom, I need a thousand eyes to make sure students aren’t using their smartphones as an endlessly resourceful cheat sheet.
I was musing about all this when my office door flew open and I saw a mop of curly blond hair. The girl asked if she could come in. Snapping out of my forty-five-year-old lecturer’s bout of nostalgia, I looked at her and noticed she had a triangular, cat-like face.
She was old enough to be a PhD student, but I’d never seen her before.
“Who are you looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
She came over to me and put a CD on the table. The cover showed a circle drawn in a single brush stroke. It seemed to have been done by a master of Japanese calligraphy.
“I’d like to know the meaning of the words on this CD,” she began in a low, melodious voice. “Could you listen, please—just for a minute?”
She took a Discman from her bag—an obsolete item in digital times. Another extinct species. She loaded the CD and offered me the headphones, which were emitting a male voice speaking a strange language.
I played my part of the lecturer in German with no time to waste. “You should go to the School of Languages,” I said. “We don’t teach Japanese in this faculty.”
“It’s not Japanese,” she said. “It’s a dead language, and I want to understand it. Or at least know what language it is . . .”
Taken aback by this, I started listening. With guitar chords in the background, a young man was singing a strangely melancholy air. I couldn’t make out a single word. It didn’t seem to be any Semitic language, or Germanic language either. The blonde girl waited impatiently for my verdict.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you.” I handed back her Discman. “I haven’t got a clue—”
She interrupted. “At first I thought it might be Elvish, but a friend of mine who’s writing a thesis on Tolkien says that Elvish is completely different.”
The cat-girl’s phone started ringing, which gave me the perfect excuse to put an end to this bizarre conversation. I stood up, ready to usher her out, but she cut off the call and said, “I suspect it’s Atlantean.”
I was astounded. I’d been working in the faculty for seventeen years and no one had ever come to me with anything as weird as this. My penchant for oddities prevailed over prudence, so I asked, “What makes you think it’s Atlantean?”
As soon as the question was out of my mouth, I realized how laughable, how preposterous it was for a university teacher to be asking such a thing. Atlantis only existed in a couple of hazy mentions by Plato. I’d never heard anything about any Atlantean language.
She returned the CD to its case and her phone rang again. She looked crossly at the screen and finally answered, as if in the privacy of her own home and not in a university office.
“Look, I told you, I never want to see or hear from you again. Didn’t I say that clearly enough before?”
I deduced from the girl’s exasperated expression that the person on the other end wasn’t giving up easily.
She carried on answering harshly, backing toward the door.
She waved goodbye from the corridor and closed the door behind her.
Disconcerted, I remained standing by the window for a few moments.
A gigantic squalling gull flew by, its wings spread wide.
When I glanced back at my table, I was startled to see the CD of songs in the unidentified language still lying next to my pile of uncorrected exam papers. I rushed to the door, but there was no sign of the curly-haired girl.
Not even a treatise on the language of Atlantis could have been emptier than the corridor was just then.