She didn’t need anyone, which worked like a magnet on both sexes. The lunatic fringe, poets, actors, the hip-pocket revolutionaries, bored housewives slumming it in the Village, the three-piece wool and steel-rim crowd looking for a girl and a room, the doe-eyed professors dreaming of Paris. She threaded her way in and out of them all.
By the time Turk was in her mid-forties, she was the lone resident of the sprawling apartment at the Apelles. Her mother had died and her father had been packed off to an institution in the Berkshires, suffering from a strange, possibly self-induced mania that caused him first to speak in tongues and then not at all.
Lazlo. Dear Lazlo. Because his strange story is essential to my strange story, I must tell you about him. Turk’s father, born Lazlo Friedrich Krupp, unraveled in 1961. At the time of his de facto resignation from his post at the Brunn Institute for Linguistics and Cultural Advancement and his commitment to the decidedly less gabby Pickering Institute for Psychiatric Care, there had been no signs of illness, no frailty beyond a hitch in his stride (bone spur, heel) that required a walking stick, and he’d continued to work quite happily until his collapse, precipitated by an unexplained physical event. One night Turk had come home late, peeked in on him at his desk, where, still wearing his Koss SP/3 headphones, he appeared to have nestled down for a nap, and she’d gone to her room to get out of her rain-wet clothes before she returned to his study to rouse him.
If he’d suffered a heart attack or a stroke, it was certainly one of the more genteel in medical history, as he was arranged in the manner of a chem major catching a few winks in his carrel, head atop neatly folded arms. The rain was trickling down the bow window, projecting colloidal shadows that drained up the back of Lazlo’s tweed suit coat, through the gossamer atop his head, wiggling like tadpoles across the various texts spread out before him, through the glass jar of pencils, across stacks of tape reels, the gray tape decks, the row of books barricading the far side of the desk, over the sill, before meeting again at the glass their progenitors. She’d not been at his desk in several weeks, and it was hard to ignore the unusual symmetry of the items atop it.
Her father had bisected the space so that on the right were Urdu texts: academic papers, brochures, recipes, maps, and notebooks filled with glossaries, phrases, grammatical rules. A couple of primers on the German language for the ambitious speaker of Urdu. On the left were German texts on Urdu. On both sides were translations of original texts into the correlative language. The collected poems of Khawaja Haider Ali Aatish in both tongues. A two-volume original and translation of Baḥrul faṣāhat, Najmul Ghani’s treatise on versification. Also sprach Zarathustra and a twelve-volume set of Goethe ( volumes 1–15). What was here was there and what was there, here.
In the background, the two Grundig TK 45 suitcase reel-to-reel tape decks, friendly-looking fellows: each one had two big spools for eyes and a set of push-button teeth along the bottom. The left was slaved to the right with a bit of wire so that they would start and stop simultaneously, controlled by the playback buttons on the right-hand unit. RCA cables fed into a Y-connector that had been modified so that the right tape deck played only in the headphones’ right ear cup, and the left deck played only in the left.
When Turk found him, the decks had spun out their reels and the flopping tails of tape were spanking the heads at about fifty bpm. As mentioned, her father looked to be snoozing peacefully, and she reached over him and turned them off, unalarmed. Not a light sleeper, it usually took him a while to come around, and after some gentle nudges Turk finally gripped him by the shoulders and gave him a coconut-tree shake. Pale, a distant look in his eye, he rose, tapped his chest, and said something that sounded like, Obligartiamo essa boulxin plang qualz.
Turk, considering the options available to her father—Esperanto, Italian, Chinese, German, Dutch, Schweizerdeutsch, Wallisertiitsch, Creole, Persian, De Gammon—all of which he spoke on a conversational level, all of which she thought she might have heard within the miasmic tones he’d uttered, not to mention hints of a couple of others with which he had a passing familiarity—a touch of Gullah or Hokkienese?—answered as she’d always done, speaking only some Bornean tongues and a couple of the more pedestrian Romance languages herself: ¿Que?
He obliged, even in his diminished state attempting, as always, to teach by example, and, under the impression he was repeating himself, slowly drawing out the words so she might make some sense of their construction; to his alarm, what came out of his mouth bore no resemblance to what he’d said before. Stung. in. tr’amal. eng. er. wayeh! he said. His fingers walked over his lips, as if to identify the strange source of these splatter paintings. Turk was now alarmed.
A stroke, she thought. He’s obviously had a stroke.
The Brunns were not a particularly affectionate family—reunifications after extended absences had always unfolded like middle school dances, no one sure where to put their heads, their hands, their—dear god—their bodies, the advances and retreats comical if not for the desperate tang of anxiety, the frozen, apologetic rictuses, all in the name of a simple embrace—and Turk found herself patting her father down, as if searching for a weapon, her hands tattooing the length of his arms, legs, torso, though she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps for the same reason
