humanities majors—data point? In practice, it only means that the
women are quicker with advice for a frozen MacBook: “Just take the
battery out.” Residing in the next entryway are students in a Stanley
Kaplan SAT intensive, who are referred to affixedly as Kaplanuloj—
Kaplaners. It is Slim who refers to non-Esperantists in general as
mugloj; muggles. Our dorm is hardly Hogwarts, but stocked with
twenty-nine Esperantists, it is a place apart.
There are no pledges to sign, no vows to take, but it goes without
saying that we’re to speak only Esperanto, morning, noon, and
night; on campus and off (assuming the company of other NASKers).
And almost without exception, we do. Had there been an explicit
rule, it would have been simple: Neniam krokodilu! (Never
crocodile!). Krokodili is the first slang word any Esperantist learns; it
means “to speak one’s native language at an Esperanto gathering.”
But Esperantists, a great many of whom are polyglots, are given to
fine distinctions: aligatori (to alligator) means to speak one’s first
language to someone else speaking it as a second language; kajmani
(to cayman) means to carry on a conversation in a language that is
neither speaker’s native tongue.
Only Esperanto could have brought together the four women in
my suite. There is Marcy, a travel agent who arranges Esperanto-
language package tours each July and the producer of a goofy
instructional video series called Esperanto: Pasporto al la Tuta Mondo
(Esperanto: Passport to the Whole World). Across the hall is Kalindi,
a jolly forty-six-year-old secretary from Kathmandu. She has long,
shining black hair and applies peppermint-pink lipstick as soon as
she finishes a meal. On hot days, she favors cotton saris; on cool
ones, track suits in mint green and fuschia. She has come the farthest
of any participant, and after NASK she’ll continue on to the
Universal Congress in Rotterdam and then travel around Europe for
a month with samideanoj. Kalindi hosts every Esperantist who passes
through Kathmandu in her home, where one bedroom is designated
the Esperanta Ĉambro (Esperanto Room).
The fourth member of the ensemble is a heavyset woman in her
sixties who sits on the landing beside a heavy-set bearded man;
perched on folding chairs, they could be a couple escaping a stifling
Bronx apartment for a gulp of fresh air. Greeting me, she says in
flatly American Esperanto, “Mi estas Tero, jen mia edzo, Karlo” (I’m
Earth; this is my husband, Charles), handing me a shiny green
cardboard star. Outside of NASK, he is David, a computer
programmer, but she is harder to nail down. She was born Angela
Woodman, the daughter of a trombonist with the Detroit Symphony
who’d also played with Artie Shaw: “Look him up on the
International Tuba Euphonium Association oral history website,” she
urges. Every afternoon she can be found writing the words of
Esperanto pop songs in indelible marker on a huge lined, easeled
pad, kindergarten style. One day it is “Ĉu vi, ĉu vi, ĉu vi, ĉu vi volas
dansi” (“Do You Wanna Dance?”), another, “Kamparanino”
(“Guantanamera”). When we walk through the leafy campus to class
in the morning, Tero picks up pieces of eucalyptus bark and turns
them into eerie gray masks. She tells me she spent many years on a
Hare Krishna ashram but one day left with the ashram’s mandolin in
tow and never looked back. (“I knew I could use it in my clown
act.”) At home in Northern California, she is a part-time Berlitz
teacher, but mostly, she and Karlo work as sound engineers for …
she pauses, not to find the word, but to coin it.
“Filkfestoj.”
“Kio ĝi estas?” I asked. (What is that?)
She explains, in what will become a familiar resort to paraphrase
and circumlocution, that “filkfests” are musical jam sessions that
occur at science fiction conventions. I add the word to my glossary.
3. Greta’s World
The intermediate class comprises three sleepy college students—
George, Meja, and Christy—and three middle-aged women: Tero,
Kalindi, and myself. Promptly at 9:00 a.m., Greta Neumann enters
the room and asks, “How do you greet people in your culture? With
a handshake?” (shaking her left hand with her right); “A hug?”
(hugging herself ardently); “A kiss on the hand?” (grasping her right
hand in her left and bringing it tenderly to her lips).
Greta is by far the most fluent Esperanto speaker I have ever
heard; not surprising, since she and her Swedish husband, Benedikt
(the teacher of the advanced class), met in Esperanto, romanced in
Esperanto, and now live their married life in Esperanto. A German
woman in her early thirties, she has close-cropped strawberry-blond
hair, limpid blue eyes, and a plastic face that, to convey new
vocabulary, knows no limits. It can delight in an imaginary glass of
champagne, show the weariness of a great-grandmother, or crinkle
and pout like a bawling infant. Her teaching methods are
vaudevillian; she mimes the word skotaduŝo—“Scottish shower”—by
taking an invisible shower that runs very hot; then very cold; then
very hot.
Sudden shifts from ludic to tragic are a daily occurrence in Greta’s
class. Strong, expressed emotions, it seems, are par for the course in
Esperantujo, where trust runs high and emotions run large. Laughing
one moment, weeping the next, we resemble a bipolar support
group. Today, Greta starts class with a game called Onklo Federiko
Sidas en la Banujo (Uncle Frederick’s Sitting in the Bathtub). Greta
calls out a word in that sentence, and we scrawl a substitute in the
same part of speech, then fold down the paper and pass it to the
left. At the end of the round, we read out the sheets before us, one
by one, to reveal what odd escapades our fellow NASKanoj are up to:
Spiono Bernardo pensas pri io sur la kafejo.
(Bernard the spy thinks about something on top of the café.)
Bestkuracisto Wayne vicas malantaŭ la ratonesto.
(Veterinarian Wayne lines up in back of the rats’ nest.)
The room is inundated by belly laughs, cresting in giddy shrieks;
Greta herself laughs uncontrollably, dabbing at tears.
When we reconvene after a coffee break, Greta passes out a
purple sheet and reads the poem printed on it; the poem is narrated
by a German man, a devout Christian, who passively watches a
Jewish neighbor being dragged out of his apartment. By the end,
Tero is crying silently, amid a general hush. Then Greta asks each of
us in turn a simple question: Who is speaking? When is this taking
place? When it comes to Kalindi, she’s bewildered; she can’t identify
the setting. Greta begins, tentatively, to assess Kalindi’s ignorance.
Does she know who Adolf Hitler was? Yes, she’s heard of him, it is a
familiar name, but … So Greta explains to our Nepalese samideano
about the rise of Hitler, the Nazi regime, the Final Solution, the
wagons of Jews sent to death camps; about the murder of Jews,
communists, gypsies, and gays. (She might have added Zamenhof’s
three adult children, all executed by the Nazis.) Suddenly she turns
to the three college students: “What do you learn about genocide in