your schools—I mean, about the treatment of Native Americans?”
Carl, Meja, and Christy snap to attention; with Greta’s coaching,
they scrape together the words: traktatoj (treaties), teritorioj rezervataj
(reservations), spuro de larmoj (trail of tears).
I ask Greta for some one-on-one time to find out more about her;
I’m half hoping she’ll switch to English when we’re alone, but she
sticks to Esperanto, paced between a trot and a canter. I’m
following without too much difficulty, though fashioning questions
and follow-ups is taxing. As we walk through the eucalyptus groves,
she tells me she was raised in East Germany. “Before eighty-nine. I’d
always been civitema”—community minded—“and interested in
other cultures, and there were very few opportunities to travel,” she
said. “When I was eighteen, my girlfriend was doing Esperanto and
it became a way to get out of my own place and connect to people
in other places, cities, countries.” After she earned her master’s
degree in Korean, Greta and Benedikt moved to Seoul, where she
now teaches at a foreign language institute. Greta lives in the
interstices between cultures, speaking German with her students,
English with her colleagues, Korean with her neighbors, and
Esperanto with her husband.
I ask her what she understands by the phrase interna ideo—the
vaguely defined “inner idea” of Esperanto. “When I come home from
a congress,” she says, “and I look at my photos and I see Germans
and Nepalis and Indians and Japanese and Americans all together—
all speaking together—I think, this is really an amazing thing. I guess
the central idea is friendship among peoples.” She pauses to
consider. “But it’s different for me than for a lot of Esperantists.
They meet another Esperantist and they think, ‘Ah! My automatic
friend!’ But there are plenty of Esperantists I don’t like; I choose my
friends. I have Esperantist friends and German friends and Korean
friends. For me, Esperanto is a private language—the language I
speak with my husband, the language in which I live my private life
—so I don’t primarily think of it as something belonging to the
whole world.”
Benedikt, a quiet, slouchy Swede, dorky-cool in his habitual red T-
shirt, is by profession a programmer. In Esperantujo, however, he’s a
rock star, a founding member of the band Persone; the name is a
pun, meaning both “personally” and “via sound.” He’s written many
of their songs, all bearing diffident titles such as “Mi ne scias” (I
don’t know) and “Kaj tiel plu” (And so forth). Even within
Esperantujo, Benedikt leads a double life; he is not only a rock star
but also a grammarian, the author of PMEG (Complete Manual of
Esperanto Grammar), a hardcover book four inches thick in a
taxicab-yellow dustjacket. (Word on the street is that the P in PMEG
stands for Peza—“Heavy.”) Around NASK, he’s known as the
homavortaro—the human dictionary—and deservedly so; he’s even a
member of the Akademio de Esperanto. No question about it: Greta
and Benedikt, strolling into the dining hall in shorts, T-shirts,
backpacks, and sandals, are an Esperanto power couple.
Wayne Cooper, who teaches the beginner class, is a professional
American Sign Language interpreter from Missouri. Tall and lanky,
with the pale blue eyes of a Siberian Husky, he always wears ironed
button-down shirts and white khakis, and he speaks as crisply as he
dresses. After lunch, he and Benedikt are discussing signolingvo—sign
language—and Benedikt knows enough Swedish sign language to
compare notes with Wayne, their four hands flying, tapping, slicing
the air. Suddenly Wayne stands up and shakes two imaginary pom-
poms over each shoulder; Benedikt laughs, shakes his head, and
says, “No, there’s no word in Swedish sign language for huraistino.”
That’s Esperanto for “cheerleader,” literally, “female hurrah
specialist.”
During a lull in their conversation, I ask Wayne and Benedikt
whether they have a favorite Esperanto word. They look at one
another with the shy smiles of twelve-year-old boys asked to reveal a
crush. “Mirmekofago,” says Benedikt, and before I can start to decode
(mir-, “a wonder”? meko-, “a bleat”?), he says in English “anteater,”
and, in Esperanto, “based on the Latin name, Myrmecophaga
tridactyla.” (Later that evening, I look up the word in Wells’s English-
Esperanto dictionary, which defines mirmekofago as a giant anteater,
ekidno as a spiny one, and maniso as a scaly one. An Esperanto
lexicographer’s work is never done.)
Wayne’s turn: “Vazistaso—a transom. Poefago—a yak…”
“I have a new word for you,” I say, and they exchange a glance
that says, How unlikely.
I’d coined it the previous afternoon, walking through the San
Diego County Fair with Kalindi. When we visited the 4H show, she
taught me the word for llama (lamao, not jamo), and I taught her the
word for goat (kapro). Back in Nepal, she said, her family eats kapro
and porko and … she searched for the word in Esperanto, then
declared, in English, “beaver!” I let it go. Kalindi didn’t want to join
the screaming teens on rides, so we wandered about, watching the
roller coasters and sampling the greasy fare.
“Ready?” I say to Benedikt and Wayne: “Profundefrititaj-tvinkoj.”
Now it’s their turn to decode. Benedikt’s lips move and he looks
puzzled, but Wayne laughs: “Deep-fried Twinkies,” he says in
English, then, with ironic nostalgia, “Ahh … la provinca foiro!”
Ah … the county fair.
4. “A Stay-at-Home, Midwestern Guy”
At sixteen, Wayne found a teach-yourself guide to Esperanto. He
taught himself, but since he knew no other Esperantists, he used it
only as a written language. One day he answered the phone and a
woman’s voice said “Saluton!”—the customary Esperanto greeting. It
was a Croatian Esperantist, visiting his town, eager for
conversation. “When you haven’t spoken the language,” Wayne
says, “it’s hard, at first. Well, in fact, Esperanto isn’t really easy,
though that’s the selclass="underline" it’s easy and the people are fun. There are four
things that make it difficult: the accusative, the reflexive, the table
of correlatives, and the causative.” In keeping with NASK protocols
—if you’re going to crocodile, spare the other NASKanoj—Wayne
and I have gone to another room to speak English.
In college in his native Missouri, Wayne studied two years of
classical Greek and planned to major in French, but a mix of
prudence and midwestern practicality led him to nursing. He had
worked in the Veterans’ Administration as an administrator for
decades, grabbing an early retirement when it was offered, then
training for his second career as a sign-language interpreter. His son
is a physician in the Army—“It skipped a generation,” he says
wryly; his daughter, adopted from India, is a social worker.
(Interracial and interethnic adoption is more common in the