How to Learn Any Language 5
My Toughest Opponent
For the next four years I avoided taking up any new languages. I had nothing against any of them (except one). It was just that there were too many gaps in the tongues I’d already entertained and I wanted to plug them up.
The language I had something against was Hungarian. Before a summer weekend with army buddies in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, I went to the post library and checked out an army phrase book in Hungarian to look at over the weekend. The introduction bluntly warned, “Hungarian is perhaps the hardest language in the world, and it is spoken by only about ten million people.” I resolved I’d never get any closer to it.
Hungarian was the next language I studied.
When Hungary rebelled against Soviet oppression in 1956, I was invited by the U.S. Air Force to join a team of reporters covering Operation Safe Haven, the airlift of all Hungarian refugees who were to receive asylum in the United States. That was far from enough to make me want to study Hungarian – yet.
Every child is treated to fantasies like Buck Rogers and his invincible ray gun, Superman, Batman, or, in my case, Jack Armstrong and his “mystery eye”, a power imparted to him by a friendly Hindu who, merely by concentrating and holding his palms straight out, could stop every oncoming object from a fist to a bullet to a bull to an express train. By this time I began to note that similar powers – offensive and defensive – could unexpectedly and delightfully accompany the mastery of languages.
No Iron Curtains for Language
Many reporters got to the Hungarian border with Austria during the outpouring of refugees that followed the Soviet oppression of the Hungarian freedom fighters. They went to the Red Cross shelters on the Austrian side, interviewed some refugees and relief workers, and went home. I was invited to join a secret team of volunteer international “commandos” who actually slipped into Hungary by night to ferry refugees across the border canal on a rubber raft.
The centre of the refugee operation was the Austrian border village of Andau. I asked a local policeman in German where the refugee headquarters was. It was Christmas night. It was dark. It was cold. There were no tour bus operators on the streets hawking tickets to the Hungarian border. He told me to go to Pieck’s Inn. At Pieck’s Inn the bartender said, “Room nineteen.” The fact that I was getting all this in German without looking around for somebody who spoke English was a convenience, but that’s not what I mean by the power of another language. That came next.
I went upstairs to room nineteen and knocked on the door. “Who’s there?” shouted a voice in interestingly accented English.
“I’m an American newspaper reporter,” I yelled back. “I understand you might help me get to the Hungarian border.”
He opened the door cussing. “I’ll never take another American to the border with us again,” he said before the door even opened. “No more Americans! One of you bastards damned near got us all captured night before last.”
He turned out to be a pleasant looking young man with blonde hair. When I knocked, he was busy adjusting heavy duty combat boots. He continued his tirade as we
faced each other. “That American knew damned good and well that flashlights, flashbulbs, even matches were forbidden.” He went on in rougher language than I’ll here repeat to tell how an American with a camera broke his promise and popped off a flashbulb while a raft load of refugees was in the middle of the canal, causing the refugees and the rescuers on both sides of the canal to scatter. That burst of light, of course, let the Communists know exactly where the escape operation was taking place. He described in valiant but not native English exactly how much ice would have to form around the shell of hell before any other American reporter or any reporter of any kind would ever be invited to join the operation again.
As he railed on, I noticed a Norwegian flag tacked to the wall behind him. “Snakker De norsk?” I asked (“Do you speak Norwegian?”).
He stopped, said nothing for a few seconds. Then, like a Hollywood comic of the 1940’s pulling an absurd reversal, he said, “You’ve got big feet, but there’s a pair of boots on the other side of the bed that might fit you. Try ‘em on!”
All night long we stood there waiting for the shadows to tell us that another group of refugees had arrived on the far bank of the canal. Then we’d push the raft into the water and play out the rope as our two boatmen paddled across. One would get out and help four or five Hungarians into the raft. When the raft was loaded, the boatman still in the raft would tug on the rope and we’d pull it back over. Then the lone boatman would paddle over again and repeat the process until all the refugees were on the Austrian side. The second boatman came back with the last load.
We had to wait at least an hour to an hour and a half between refugee clusters. I was the coldest I’d ever been in my life, and there was no place to huddle behind or curl up inside. All we could do was stand there and wait. Light wasn’t the only thing prohibited. So was talk. Normal speech travels surprisingly far over frozen flatland, and it was important not to betray our position to the Communist patrols. We were only allowed to whisper softly to the person immediately ahead of us on the rope and the person immediately behind.
I tried to remember what day it was. It was Thursday. It had only been the previous Saturday night when I’d taken a Norwegian girl, Meta Heiberg, from Woman’s College to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, where we saw newsreels of almost the very spot where I was now standing. When the screen showed Hungarian refugees pouring into Austria, Meta had said, “My sister Karen’s over there somewhere helping those people.” That was all.
The next day I got the call inviting me to fly over with the air force. On Monday I flew. And here I was, freezing and waiting and marvelling at the courage of the boatmen who voluntarily put themselves into jeopardy every time they crossed to the other side of the canal.
Eventually I decided to avail myself of whispering rights. The figure in front of me was so roundly bundled against the cold I couldn’t tell if it was male or female. I leaned forward and said, “My name is Barry Farber and I’m from America.”
A woman’s voice replied, “My name is Karen Heiberg and I’m from Norway.”
The cold, the power of the coincidence, and the tension of the border all combined to keep me from maximising that opportunity. All I managed to do was flatfootedly utter the obvious: “I took your sister Meta to the Carolina Theatre in Greensboro, North Carolina, five nights ago.”
The effect on Karen was powerful. I can’t complain, but I wish I’d been quick enough to add, “She sent me over here to find out why you never write Uncle Olaf!”
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