Felix was writing his own dissertation on the behavioralist implications of Leonard Bloomfield’s analyses of the Algonquin language family. He had recently arrived from Chicago to attend a seminar by Roman Jakobson critiquing the dogmas of contemporary neogrammarian theory.
Helen was a twenty-six-year-old Bavarian of Scandinavian extraction who knew German, Norwegian, Czech, Sanskrit, and French. Felix was a twenty-five-year-old Mexican Jew with Slavic roots who spoke Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew, Cree and English.
They had very little in common.
Dr. Jakobson’s seminar was masterfully delivered, and after it was over, the lecturer granted a private question and answer session to the two eager students. Helen spoke in Czech, while Felix posed his queries in a wobbly version of the doctor’s native Russian. The amiable professor translated back and forth between them, and was impressed by the knowledge they both possessed of their respective fields.
When the questions of the two bright-eyed language enthusiasts had finally run dry, he invited them both to a faculty party that was to be held that night. Everyone knew that the famous soirées of the Prague Linguistic Circle were not to be missed, so both students readily accepted the offer.
That night they were treated to a grand spectacle, as Dr. Trubetzkoy got thoroughly poleaxed and stood up on a chair in the middle of the bar, giving his best spit-flinging imitation of Hitler (“Wir wollen nur ein bisschen Lebensraum im Osten!”), gesticulations and all, while literary critic Jan Mukarovsky walked circles around him, reverently pistoning a fascist salute with one hand and wrapping the venerable old scholar in a roll of toilet paper with the other. Then Dr. Jakobson tottered up with his pipe and ceremoniously lit the paper on fire, igniting the old linguist like a phoenix and sending him screaming into the loo. After a few laughter-filled minutes, the legendary developer of morphophonemics emerged vengefully from the toilet with a garden hose he had somehow found in the bathroom closet and started blasting away at everyone in the place. Two men playing chess in a corner of the room soon had their board washed away by a high-pressure jet of water, and were then themselves plastered against the wall and soaked to the skin. Jan charged wet-bearded into the fray with two spritzer bottles he had swiped from behind the bar and started shooting back, dousing everyone within range with a furious mixture of seltzer and Czech invective.
Felix covered Helen with his jacket while they ran laughing out of the bar, provokingly wet and exceedingly drunk. Neither one wanted to go home alone, so they headed into a nearby café. In the course of the evening they had discovered that although they had no common spoken language, they both knew enough Classical Latin and Koine Greek to be able to communicate with a blunt pencil and soggy pad of paper.
Helen laboriously explained her research, discussing in permitted detail how the word vak (“speech”) was deified in the oldest extant Sanskrit texts, and briefly summarized Max Mueller’s intriguing investigation of how the ancient Hindus had even acknowledged the interrogative particle, ka, as a god.
Felix was fascinated (by her voluptuous Teutonic body), and did not miss the opportunity to mention the esoteric Kabbalistic doctrine that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are the building blocks from which the world is created, and how the text of the “Sefer Yetzirah” treats the Jewish script as if it were a kind of periodic table. Properly arranged and joined, he explained, the letters could theoretically be used to construct living beings or even whole universes. He wrote down some examples to illustrate the point: chapter one, verse one of the King James Version of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and the original Hebrew of Psalms 33:6:
He sat her down on a couch and discussed Plato’s Cratylus, tracing Greek letters on her bare knees with a lascivious finger. But when his hand drifted more than halfway up her thigh to spell the sinuous eleventh letter of the name Aristophanes, she protested with unmistakable feminine gestures that she was not that kind of a girl.
So he wrote on the pad to ask her if she ever considered the fact that the Latin alphabet comes from a code used to permit the traffic of Mediterranean contraband by the Phoenicians. Therefore they were already conversing in what was effectively a criminals’ cant, and any pretentions of saintliness were inappropriate.
The sun was rising and the logic was infallible.
When they had finished, she complemented him on his performance in Latin: “Felix,” she said, glowing, “bene futuis!”
“Nam fuit ante Helenam cunnus,” he panted back, “taeterrima belli causa!”
Felix delayed his return to the States and stayed with Helen, studying her German while she studied his English, as the Wehrmacht tanks rolled into the city and the jackboots began to march incessantly outside their window. In time, as the war loomed larger and more inevitable every day, they started to argue over politics.
Finally, after a horrible screaming match in half a dozen dead and tortured tongues, they separated. A week later Helen received a note in her mailbox that read:
