Richard Powers - Galatea 2.2

Nothing was what C. had prepared me for. Everything generated astonishment. The two-and-a-half gulden coin. The rainbow bank notes with artists on them instead of politicians. The queen's birthday, when the men's chorus sang "Old Black Joe." The morning bedclothes hanging out of upper-story windows. Stork sculptures that materialized on the stoops of families with newborns. Strangers greeting each other on the street. Coffee and pastry gatherings after a funeral.

The almostness of the place bewildered me more than total strangeness would have. For the few months while I still marked the contrast, society went archaic. People sang in public. They spent weeks sewing Carnaval costumes and writing occasional verses for one another. Fifteen-year-olds idled away Sundays with their grandparents. Where I came from, these things occurred only in movie nostalgia or prime-time parody.

In E., they were the unexamined norm. E. — the real, measurable E. — turned out to be a medieval village that had grown up around a bustling funeral business. The village had crashed through a sinkhole in the thin crust of time. Tinkers, cobblers, and ex-coal miners cackled to each other and scratched their heads over American television imports. They speculated hermeneutically about talking cars and cyborg heroes, then got up at sunrise the next morning to attend Gregorian mass.

Everyone and his daughter belonged to the neighborhood starting eleven or played euphonium in the pickup marching band. They donned Napoleonic militia uniforms and spent all weekend at shooting competitions, or dolled up in vestments at the drop of a wimple to do the Scatalogical Nun sketch at any gathering over ten people. That meant every other night.

Limburg remained what society had been from the first: an amateur speculation. Life, the provincials insisted, might yet be anything we told it to be.

E. condemned me to belonging. I was no more than the Foreigner, but even that bit part wound me tighter into the social web than I'd ever been in my country. People dropped by unannounced, and took offense when we waited too long to reciprocate. Every word went public. Every choice had its trial by jury. The ongoing village epic made Stateside soap opera stars seem bourgeois.

Most sacred of public tortures was Ordeal by Birthday. The victim hosted, and every walk-on in the celebrant's life dropped by for the ubiquitous coffee and flan. Relative, friend, neighbor, colleague, neighbor of friend, relative of colleague, and so on, forever. Somebody's birthday, you went. With scores of aunts and uncles, ten dozen first cousins and their spouses (all militantly fecund), untold organizational acquaintances, and neighbors all up and down the street who tracked our comings and goings, C. and I celebrated birthdays as often as we ate.

Each one moved me closer to sainthood. "This is hard for you," C. said.

"Not so bad. I'm managing." C. had not yet decided her nationality. I kept still, trying not to agitate her further. I hoped to keep the world large enough for her at last to live in. Fatal stupidity on my part. But then, I was not yet thirty.

"Can you make out any of it?" she would worry.

"Key words. It throws me when they start in dialect, catch my eye, go over to Dutch. ."

"And lapse back the minute they turn their head." C. laughed in sympathy. "Poor Beauie."

Yet she was the one splitting down the middle.

Truth be told, I sometimes followed every word of whole birthday speeches at a shot. But if I derailed, I could go a quarter hour or more before recovering the thread. In extremis, I resorted to nodding like a narcoleptic and muttering, "I see, I see," hoping my conversant hadn't just asked me a question.

The supreme moment of character strengthening came that first year, at my birthday. "We don't have to do this, do we? We can head down to France for the weekend, or something? Leave the coffee in a thermos outside the door?"

"Beau." C. looked hurt, uncomprehending. "Are you serious?"

We baked for days. The guests started drifting through shortly after noon, and kept on drifting until midnight. Many brought gifts — a brace of pencils, a tablet of lined writing paper — tokens of small innocence North America had long ago abandoned. The relatives were saying it was okay with them, what I did for a living, even if I seemed, to most, not to do anything at all.

By that first birthday, I'd almost reached childhood. With concentration, I could follow most of Uncle Sjef's song about getting so drunk he lost his house, there just a minute ago. It helped that everyone chimed in on the chorus. After light gloss, I smiled at cousin Huub's Belgian jokes. The group story about the failed German attempt to steal the church bells I could have recited in my sleep.

I hovered, trying to keep everyone in caffeine, lager, and baked goods. "Would you like a teaspoon?" I tried to ask Tante Maria. A dike-burst of laughter all over the room told me that something had slipped 'twixt cortex and lips. C. turned blue with hilarity before I could pry the explanation out of her.

"You asked Auntie if she'd like a tit."

I gave my usual pained smile. I clowned a plea for forgiveness, but all anyone wanted of me was the next ridiculous howler.

Auntie's tit took its place in the permanent repertoire. I heard it again at three of the next five birthdays. My simple presence triggered associative smiles from assembled relatives. My little curveball slipped into the larger contour of party stories. Things meant what their telling let them. The war, the mines, the backbreak harvest, legendary weather, natural disasters, hardship's heraldry, comic come-uppance for village villains, names enshrined by their avoidance, five seconds' silence for the dead: the mind came down to narration or nothing. Each vignette, repeated until shared. Until it became true.

Birthdays formed the refrains in long, rambling ballads. Who knew the verses? Verses were written to be lost. Only that catchphrase chorus lived on after the tune.

Birthdays were life's customs posts, checkpoints on the borders of time. The community dropped by, to ask if you had anything to declare. And the only duty levied on new goods began with the triplicate phrase That reminds me. It took me a long time to recognize the capital under formation. Where I came from, the very idea provoked puzzlement or political suspicion. I was watching the growth of group worldliness, collective memory.

This wereldbeeld marked my spot for me at the continuous coffee party. I became our very own outsider. The buitenlander with the colorful expressions and creative charades. The man who once — just weeks before, but already mythic — asked Auntie if she wanted a tit. Second cousins once removed baited me with kind setups. What happened this week? They waited for me to give over my local hoard of experience, in the strangest of colors. Melons became monster grapes. Hearses became belated ambulances, death wagons. Zoos became beast libraries. Libraries became book gardens.

I became the living mascot, the group novelty. I was the only person the family would ever meet who had learned their language from the weirdness of print. I'd dropped out of the past, from some Golden Age travelogue. My Dutch derived from history, archive, the odd document, museum tag. Consequently, I knew the word for iconoclasm before I knew the word for string. This gave the family no end of puzzled pleasure.

I did fall back on more conventional self-teaching guides. I had a text called, in rough translation, Dutch for Othertonguers. I had a book of cloze-method passages. On one page, a paragraph spelled out some aspect of life here in dit klein land. On the next page, the same story now appeared with every fifth word missing. Story of my life.