My father, in his introductory session, would have delivered to The Compass class a brief biography of Ludwig Zamenhof, mentioning the Irish origins of the green star that was the Esperantist emblem. And he would have outlined to them how Zamenhof arrived at the fundamental principle which was to guide his new language, how one day, when he was seventeen or eighteen, in about 1876 or so, he had been walking to school in Warsaw when suddenly he noticed a sign which read ŠVEJCARSKAYA, meaning place of the porter; in other words, a porter’s lodge; and then he saw another sign which read KONDITORSKAYA, place of sweets, in other words a sweetshop, or confectioner’s. And then, envisioning all the various places of trade and business in Warsaw, the hundreds of grocers and butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers and hairdressers and restaurants and public houses, he saw how by means of a suffix, — skaya, the many could be made one, that one word could be made into other words that need not be separately learned, and hence one did not require a multiplicity of words for the multiplicity of things in the world. A ray of light fell upon those huge, terrifying dictionaries, said Zamenhof, my father would say, and they began to dwindle rapidly before my eyes. So Zamenhof began constructing his language with a basic stock of root words to which a series of prefixes and suffixes could be attached to generate a wealth of different meanings. My father would add that Zamenhof’s Jewishness and his knowledge of Hebrew might also have led him to this illumination, for a logical economy of root consonants is common to both languages. And, my father would proceed, when you come to The Compass class, when we assemble in this upper room, I don’t care whether you are Jew or Catholic or Protestant or Mohammedan, for as Esperantists we are all brothers — and there were indeed no sisters, you were quite right, Nina, in your stylish dress you would have looked out of place among these drab-suited old men and young men who looked older than their age — and though we are few in number, my father would continue, we may, by the grace of the one God that made us all, and by our own efforts, spread the gospel of Esperanto throughout the world.
He would finish by giving an account of the first Esperanto Congress, held in Boulogne on Saturday 5th August 1905, when the new Esperanto flag, a green rectangle with the green star in a white quarter in the upper left-hand corner, flew together with the French tricolour from the flagstaffs and windows of the Municipal Theatre. It was the first time Zamenhof had spoken in public; he did not even know if his words would be understood by the seven hundred or so delegates who came from many different countries, each perhaps with their own notions of how the language should be pronounced. He began nervously, but his confidence grew as he saw his audience respond with nods of comprehension and appreciation. This present day is sacred, he said. Our meeting is humble; the outside world knows little about it and the words spoken here will not be telegraphed to all the towns and villages of the world; Heads of State and Cabinet Ministers are not meeting here to change the political map of the world; this hall is not resplendent with luxurious clothes and impressive decorations; no cannons are firing salutes outside the modest building in which we are assembled; but through the air of our hall mysterious sounds are travelling, very low sounds, not perceptible by the ear, but audible to every sensitive soul; the sound of something great that is now being born. Mysterious phantoms are floating in the air; the eye does not see them, but the soul sees them; they are the images of a time to come, a new era. The phantoms will fly into the world, will be made flesh, and assume power, and our sons and grandchildren will see them, will feel them, and take great joy in them.
Zamenhof spoke on, realising that his audience, so willing to understand, was hanging on his every word; and when he ended by reciting a prayer he had composed for the occasion, a prayer not directed to the God of any national or sectarian religion, but to some mysterious Higher Power, a thunderstorm of acclamation broke out in the hall, and complete strangers embraced, and shed tears of joy. And my father would then conclude his introduction to Esperanto by telling how Ludwig Zamenhof, heartbroken by the events of the First World War, died on 14th April 1917. It was my father’s first birthday, and Zamenhof was fifty-seven, the age, Nina, that I am now.
It’s taken me some time to respond directly to your latest card, but I seem to have spent years in my mind since it arrived just yesterday. I note the stamp, the 65c Bluebell, a flower also known as wild hyacinth, behind which lies one of those Ancient Greek stories concerning the jealous cruelties of the gods, which so much resemble our own. It concerns the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, who was loved by both Apollo, the Sun-God, and Zephyrus, the God of the West Wind. But Hyacinthus preferred Apollo, and Zephyrus looked for revenge. So one day, when Apollo and Hyancinthus were throwing the discus, Zephyrus blew it out of its proper course, striking Apollo’s lover on the head and killing him instantly. Apollo, stricken with grief, raised from his blood a purple flower, on which the letters, Ai, Ai, were traced, so that his cry of woe might live forever on the earth. But since the bluebell that is native to these islands bears no such message, it was called Hyancinthus nonscriptus, not written on.
And your postcard is barely written on, just my name and address, and the initial of your name, that I last saw twenty years ago, the slanted ascender of your N beginning on a curlicue and rising to an apex with the downward sweep of the diagonal, then rising again to end as it began in a matching curlicue. It is an elegant N that makes me think of the N we saw emblazoned on the bridges, monuments and state buildings of Paris, N that stands for Napoleon, whose remains are enclosed, like the last of a series of Russian dolls, within six coffins locked within a massive tomb of porphyry. You remember, Nina, how we thought N might more happily stand for Jules Verne’s Nemo, the captain of the Nautilus, Nemo meaning Nobody, whose underwater realm knew no boundaries of nation, or language for that matter, for Nemo and his crew communicated among themselves in a kind of Esperanto.
Language takes many forms, as witnessed by your postcard, THE LANGUAGE OF STAMPS, a vintage curiosity, perhaps some eighty or ninety years old, which purports to show how the position of a stamp on an envelope or card can bear a coded message: upside down in the bottom left, DO WRITE SOON; right way up in the top left, DO YOU LOVE ME; slanted in the same corner, I SEND YOU A KISS; right-hand side of the surname, FORGET ME NOT; and so on. You’ve placed your Irish Bluebell in the top right-hand corner, which could mean either HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME, or nothing at all, since this nowadays is the conventional position for stamps, and we are not used to seeing any other. More meaningful to me is the fact that you were in Drogheda when you posted it the day before yesterday, some thirty miles nearer to me than you were. I know that you would have been thinking of my father, for you could not have forgotten my telling you that, when I was ten, he had taken me on a pilgrimage to Drogheda to see the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett. The Blessed Oliver Plunkett, my father had often told me, was the Archbishop of Armagh at a time of relentless persecution of Catholics. He had set up a college in Drogheda in 1670, which was razed to the ground a year later. In 1679 he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of fomenting rebellion; and in 1681 he was executed at Tyburn in London by hanging, disembowelling, quartering and beheading, the head and forearms being salvaged soon afterwards, hidden in two tin boxes, and thence transported to Ireland, while the rest of the body remained in England.