Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 25

I’m no longer drunk. Not scrupulously sober, but not drunk, though I’ve got a wine glass in my hand again. Rosemary’s desk is set up as a bar, but Johan doesn’t drink. I’m getting evil-eye looks from Rosemary that I’m spending too much time with him and that, as the evening’s human centrepiece, it’s time to mingle, but I pretend not to notice.

Johan is an enormously tall Swede with knobbly knees, long, straight hair, and rectangular granny glasses that give him an ardent, scholar-punk look. He’s wearing shorts and high-top sneakers, and is the first person in Norway I’ve recognized as a socio-economic, style-and-age compatriot. He first went to Wales on a mountain climbing trip, then returned to study Welsh in Aberystwyth; now he’s getting a PhD from the University of Oslo in Welsh literature. As far as I can tell, he and I are the only ones speaking Welsh in the house. It was easier when my conversation partner was replying in Pakistani.

Rosemary sweeps by and tops up my glass. ‘A lovely boy, but so boring,’ she whispers in my ear. ‘Come meet Jean, Pamela.’

‘Dwy funud,’ I stall, two minutes.

My mind’s eye does its gravity trick again, and I’m treated to a rare view: an American trying to talk to a Swede in Welsh on the outskirts of Oslo. By the time I re-focus on Johan, who can effortlessly switch from Welsh to English like a native, Welsh words are clinking around in my brain like ice cubes, but my tongue is beyond getting a grip on them. I’ve been topped up about a hundred too many times. It’s a relief when the door opens and a Welsh voice shouts in English,

‘So, who here is from Verona, New Jersey, then? How about those White Castle hamburgers?’

This literally stuns me. I was beginning to think I actually might be Welsh, and it’s a slap in the face to be reminded I’m from New Jersey. The husband of one of the CLs, now a high-up in the British embassy, tells me he went to university near my home town. It’s my sad duty to tell him that Verona’s White Castle hamburger franchise – the chain was the first with the vision to serve square burgers – has gone out of business.

As the party winds down, Iori, who arrived with Lynn a few hours ago, but whom I haven’t spoken to at length, takes me aside and gives me a gift that I won’t have to declare at customs.

‘I’ve been wanting to tell you,’ he says, ‘that I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t hear your American accent when you speak Welsh. You have a pure De Cymru – South Wales – intonation, with a Ceredigion lilt, like Rosemary’s. I thought you’d like to know that.’

Like to know that? I’m sure this can’t be true, but it’s a finer music to my ears than Rosemary singing, ‘Where’s your glass, Pamela?’ I let the wine confuse my brain into a welcome identity crisis. Tonight all the gossip, the references, the Norwegian prices translated for my benefit into pounds, all that I have in common with these people, has been filtered through Wales. When I began a sentence with, ‘Well at home we …,’ I found my listeners thought I was talking about Lampeter.

‘Oh,’ interrupted one woman, ‘it’s probably different in the north.’

As the Trip continues, it is Wales that more and more seems to be the starting point, not the States. The more I use this word ‘home’, and the farther I get from it (wherever home is), the more I’m beginning to wonder what I mean.