Silverfiskarnas språk
Pravasan PillayI picked up the Swedish-English dictionary from the dusty shelf. It was my third week in Stockholm, where I had moved to for a new position, and I was browsing at a secondhand store near the central subway station. I checked the price on the back cover. It was cheap.
I needed a dictionary for my Swedish lessons, which I had started attending on weekday evenings. The lessons weren’t a work requirement but, since I was going to be based in Sweden for two years, it made sense to learn a little of the language – even though most Swedes spoke excellent English.
I paid for the dictionary and took it back to my small, rented apartment in Kista, a neighbourhood that was home to many expats. I left it in a bag in my hallway, and quickly forgot about it when an urgent assignment landed on my desk at the office.
A few weeks later, on a Saturday, I finally took the dictionary out to check a phrase (“Ingen reklam tack”) I had seen on stickers placed on most of the apartment doors in my building. It was while I was paging through the dictionary that an index card fell out. The card was filled with neat, cursive handwriting and was in Swedish.
I made out a word here and there, like “jag” which meant “I”, but I still didn’t know enough of the language to make any sense of it. I was, in truth, more distracted by the tiny and not so tiny holes that were peppered throughout the pages of the dictionary, which had clearly been made by insects.
I hadn’t checked the condition of the dictionary at the store so I couldn’t really complain. There were also burrows in some parts that obscured words, but, all in all, the dictionary was still relatively usable. I discovered that “Ingen reklam tack” meant “No advertising please”.
*
A month later, I opened the dictionary to check up a term on my lease, and the index card fell out again. By now, I had attended enough classes that the words didn’t seem so strange anymore. It was a Sunday afternoon and I had nothing to do, since I still hadn’t made any acquaintances outside of the office. I decided that I would try to translate the card using the dictionary and a basic vocabulary workbook that had been handed out in class, which I had found useful.
It took me about an hour but I managed to translate the entire card, with only one word giving me difficulty.
The short text was titled “Silverfiskarnas språk”. It – bizarrely – claimed to be a lexicon of a silverfish language, and consisted of a few lines of commentary; a list of words and their meanings; and some examples of sentences.
It read:
“The silverfish language contains five sounds, which are produced by their minute stridulations on surfaces.
“srrr/srrr srrr – i/we
sjiii – eat
ssss – danger
kssi – food
ssaa – absence
“srrr/srrr srrr sjiii kssi – i’m/we’re eating food
srrr ssss kssi – i’m hungry
kssi kssi – there’s much food
ssss ssss – there’s much danger
“I spent two years studying this colony, before it began to die. I moved the survivors to my copy of Finnegans Wake. I learnt their language by means of close observation, my dreams, and field recordings using intricate homemade instruments.”
The note was signed, “HC, 99-01-23”.
I thought the text was fascinating. It was obviously written by an unwell person, but I, nevertheless, found myself repeating the five silverfish sounds until I had memorised them. The syntax in the examples also seemed simple enough to extrapolate and make my own sentences.
The thing I was confused about was the “ssaa” sound. HC hadn’t used it in an example. What was meant by “absence”? A negative particle such as “not”? Or did it mean “death”? Or the holes the silverfish left behind?
I spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning my apartment while speaking broken bits of silverfish to myself, like “ssss kssi” when my stomach began to rumble. Later that night, I carefully turned every page of the dictionary to see if I could find a silverfish that HC had perhaps missed. I didn’t want to admit it out loud but I wanted to try and speak to it.
*
At the end of my stint in Sweden, on the day before I was leaving, I took the dictionary back to the store I had bought it from and donated it, along with my other books. I tend to travel light. I kept HC’s index card, however, even though I now considered myself fluent in silverfish, and didn’t need it as a reference. It was more of a memento.
During those years in Stockholm I continuously searched the book shelves of charity and secondhand stores on my weekends for copies of Finnegans Wake and, later, other works by James Joyce. But I never found the colony or another card from HC.
I sat on the plane the next night, on my way to a new position and a new apartment in Amsterdam. It was a bumpy flight, and I constantly hissed “ssss ssaa” under my breath each time we hit a patch of turbulence. As soon as we landed safely in Schiphol I rewarded myself with a few small pieces of paper torn from the Dutch-English dictionary I had bought the week before.
