Читать книгу Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh - Pamela Petro - Страница 31

Locked in Nina’s bathroom is the only time I get to flip through her stack of New Yorker magazines and look at the cartoons in peace. Today I create a furore by staying in long enough to read a story by Robert Olen Butler called ‘Jealous Husband Comes Back as Parrot’. The reincarnated bird intends absurdly more than it can say. It squawks for a cracker and means, why can’t you see that even though I have feathers and a beak I’m your husband? I know just how it feels. I sound so skimpy in Welsh, so matter-of-factly shorn of subtlety and, I fear, tact.

Outside the door, Audrey, Marguerite’s nine-year-old niece, is about to burst – not her bladder but her patience. She wants to talk about air pockets. We’re all travelling tomorrow: Nina, Bernard and the kids to the States for a month, Marguerite and I on a ten-day Eurail trail through Holland, Germany and Luxembourg.

‘Pam-Pam, what are you doing in there?’ she demands in her precise, French-invigorated English.

‘I’ll be right out.’

‘You said that ten minutes ago. Do you know what air pockets are?’

I’m about to explain but she interrupts. ‘They are thief planes. They are like pick-pockets. They are bad planes that steal other airplanes’ passengers!’ She says this with an appropriate sense of outrage.

‘That’s not going to happen to you tomorrow,’ I call out.

‘I hope not,’ she says, and leaves me to my parrot.