Girl in Ice by Erica Ferencik
For George
How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses?
—STANLEY KUNITZ
In ice is the memory of the world.
—JAMES BALOG
one
Seeing the name “Wyatt Speeks” in my inbox hit me like a physical blow. Everything rushed back: the devastating phone call, the disbelief, the image of my brother’s frozen body in the Arctic wasteland.
I shut my laptop, pasted a weak smile on my face. There would be no bursting into tears at school. Grief was for after hours, for the nightly bottle of merlot, for my dark apartment, for waking on the couch at dawn, the blue light of the TV caressing my aching flesh.
No, at the moment my job was to focus on the fresh, eager face of my graduate student as she petitioned for a semester in Tibet, a project in a tiny village deep in the Himalayas accessible only via treacherous mountain passes on foot and maybe llama, all to decipher a newly discovered language. As I listened to her impassioned plea—trying to harness my racing heart—an old shame suffused me.
The truth was, I’d never embarked into the field anyplace more frightening than a local graveyard to suss out a bit of Old English carved into a crumbling stone marker. And even then I made sure to go in broad daylight, because dead people—even underground—frightened me too. Never had my curiosity about a place or a language and its people overridden my just say no reflex. Citing schedule conflicts, I’d declined a plum semester-long gig in the Andean mountains of Peru to study quipu, or “talking knots”—cotton strings of differing lengths tied to a cord carried from village to village by runners, each variation in the string signaling municipal facts: taxes paid or owed; births and deaths; notices of famine, drought, crop failure, plague, and so on. I’d even passed on the once-in-a-lifetime chance to deconstruct a language carved into the two-thousand-year-old Longyou caves in Quzhou, China.
Why?
Anxiety: the crippling kind. I’m tethered to the familiar, the safe, or what I perceive as safe. I function normally in only a handful of locations: my apartment, most places on campus—excluding the football stadium, too much open space—the grocery store, my father’s nursing home. During my inaugural trip to the new, huge, and sparkly Whole Foods—chilled out on a double dose of meds—a bird flew overhead in the rafters. All I could think was, When is it going to swoop down and peck my eyes out? I never went back.
Ironically, I was the one with the power to give or withhold the stamp of approval for my students’ research trips, as if I were any judge of risk and character. Watching the glistening eyes of the young woman before me, one of my favorite students, I stalled a few moments—tossing out a couple of insipid questions about her goals—an attempt to soak up her magic normalcy. No such luck. I signed off on her trip to Tibet wondering, How does she see me, really? I knew she was fond of me, but—that casual wave of her silver-braceleted hand as she turned to leave, that look in her eye! I swear I caught a glint of pity, of disdain. It was like she knew my secret. Her teacher was a fraud.
* * *
I’M A LINGUIST. I can get by in German and most Romance tongues, and I’ve got a soft spot for dead languages: Latin, Sanskrit, ancient Greek. But it’s the extinct tongues—Old Norse and Old Danish—that enrapture me.
Languages reveal what it is to be human. This desire to make ourselves understood is primal. We make marks on paper, babble snippets of sound—then agree, by way of miracle—that these scribblings or syllables actually mean something, all so we can touch each other in some precise way. Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love, from the particular love of a new mother for her baby to one for unrequited romantic love, but it has twice as many for grief. My favorite is sokaparayana, which means “wholly given up to sorrow.” A strange balm of a word, gentle coming off my tongue.
Though words came easily for me, I tended to miss the patterns that were staring me in the face. The fact that my ex genuinely wanted out didn’t hit me until divorce papers were served. The fact of my father passing from just old to genuinely ill with lung cancer and not-here-for-much-longer didn’t sink in until I was packing up the family home and found myself on my knees in tears, taken down by dolor repentino, a fit of sudden pain. The stark realization that my twin brother, Andy—the closest person in the world to me—had been pulling away for months came to me only after his death and at the very worst times: lecturing in an auditorium packed with students, conversing with the dean in the hallway. When it happened, these vicious, sudden, psychic stabs, I’d briefly close my eyes or turn away to cough, repeating to myself: sokaparayana, sokaparayana, until I could speak again.
I felt safest in my office, alone with my books, charts, runic symbols, and scraps of old text; and when I deciphered a chunk of language—even a word!—a thrill of understanding juddered up my spine. The distance between me and another human being, just for that moment, was erased. It was as if someone were speaking to me, and me alone.
For two decades, these glimmers of connection had been enough to sustain me, but over time, they began to lose their shine. These private revelations no longer fed me, warmed me like they had. I yearned to be drawn closer to the human heart. Not through words—however telling or ingenious—but in the living world.