Somewhere Else

Chapter 3: Teething Pains (ii)

Over the next few weeks, I find myself getting progressively quieter. I've never realised how much I've taken the power of language for granted. Until now that it has been stripped away from me, and I find myself struggling to understand even the simplest things.

I try hard at first. Stopping and starting, constantly racking my brains for vocabulary, grammatical rules, conjugation forms... It takes me ten minutes just to decipher a question like 'what's for dinner?' in my head.

Aksel, to his credit, is extremely patient with me. He waits quietly for me to figure out his words, sometimes even prompting me when he guesses that I'm struggling.

And whenever I get something right, he looks at me with those shining blue eyes of his, smiling like I've just single-handedly discovered the cure for cancer. At those times, his obvious pride in me hits like a jolt in the gut. He is so happy whenever I speak in Finnish or show an interest in Finnish things. He loves it when I try to integrate into his culture.

So I try, even as I grow frustrated with my own language-learning efforts.

I know that Aksel deliberately uses the simplest words and sentence structures when he's talking to me, but it doesn't matter. I am still unable to understand more than three words out of every ten that he says.

Theoretically, I know the root form of the most commonly used words. The Infinitiv, as we say in German. I just don't remember how to conjugate them or what different endings of the words mean. Finnish, being part of the Finno-Uralic language family, doesn't function in the way Germanic languages – or most European languages – do. It is agglutinative. The suffixes that give a word meaning are, in Finnish, tacked on at the back, instead of being separate words on their own.

Take the word auto, for example. Both German and Finnish – and to an extent English with automobile – have the same word for 'car'. But German is much more simplistic. To say 'in a car', we say in einem Auto.

'In my car'? In meinem Auto.

Whereas in Finnish, 'in a car' is autossa. And 'in my car' is autossani.

I know – what the fuck?

With Finnish, I can memorise stock phrases to ask for the time. To describe the weather; to order food. But when it comes to the suffixes, I'm completely lost.

That's why, even though Aksel has said that I can reply to him in English, I still can't make conversation with him when he speaks in Finnish. It is impossible to, when I can't even differentiate between kynällä and kynillä.

And so, after a while, I find myself saying to Aksel, over and over, "I don't understand."

He tries. I know he tries to make it simple for me. But the problem with the Finnish language lies in its structure. In how each word gets longer and longer, until it looks like something else completely but simply means several suffixes were added. No matter how hard he simplifies his speech for me, he can't change the grammatical rules.

"You're very quiet," Aksel says to me one day, a couple of days after he has first started speaking in Finnish to me. He is speaking slowly, the way he always does when he talks to me now. Every single time he speaks to me, it feels like a tedious language class I'm waiting to get out of. "Is everything okay?"

It takes me more than a missed beat to decipher his speech. I lift one shoulder in a shrug. I'm in a mood today. I don't want to understand him. Which doesn't take much anyway – I usually don't understand him.

"Okay," Aksel says. He pauses, as if waiting to see if I will start a new line of conversation, but I just dip my head and focus on my muesli.

I hear him let out a long breath through his nose. "Emilie–" he begins.