The First Dream in Another Language

It happened on a Tuesday in late November, nine years after Nazira had stepped off the train with two suitcases and a dictionary she had never needed to open twice. She woke at ten to five with the dream still around her like the warmth of the bed. In it she had been standing at a bus stop, talking to the neighbour from the flat below about the delay, the cold, and a parcel delivered to the wrong building. Not a word of it had passed through her mother tongue on the way. The neighbour had spoken, and she had answered, quickly and a little wittily, in the language of the country.

For years she had imagined this moment as a victory. Her teachers had called it the finish line: the day you dream in it, they had said, you will know it belongs to you. Lying in the dark with the radiator ticking, Nazira waited for the pride to arrive. What came instead was a quiet, sinking sensation, as if she had put her foot on a stair that was not there.

Not until that moment had it occurred to her that a mind has only so many hours of night. If she had been told at the start that the new language would one day take over her sleep, she might well have studied less hard. But then she would not have this job, this narrow flat, or the neighbour who had never once guessed how much effort lay under her polite small talk. She could not decide which loss to mourn first, so she mourned neither, and got up.

Having made tea she did not want, she sat at the kitchen table and called her mother. It was nearly noon there. Her mother always picked up on the second ring and never the first, so as not to seem eager, and the small delay had become one of the most familiar sounds in Nazira's life.

"Are you eating?" her mother said, in the old language, without a greeting.

"Yes."

"Properly?"

"Properly." Nazira turned the cup between her palms. "Mama, I dreamed in it. The whole dream. Nothing in ours."

The silence that followed was the long kind, with the faint hiss of distance in it. She could hear, behind it, a kettle and the radio her mother kept on for company. She waited to be congratulated. She was not sure she wanted to be.

"Who was in it?" her mother asked at last.

"The neighbour. We were waiting for a bus."

"And what did she call you?"

It was an odd question, and it took Nazira a moment to find the answer. In the dream the neighbour had said her name the way the country said it, with the weight on the wrong part, flattening the middle, and Nazira had answered to it without a flicker. In the waking world she still winced, a little, every time.

"She said it wrong," she said slowly. "And I answered anyway."

"Hm," her mother said. It was impossible to tell whether it was a comfort or a verdict. "Well. Eat something. It's cold there, you said."

"It is."

"Then I'll ring on Sunday."

After the call, Nazira sat without moving until the tea had stopped steaming. Outside, the first grey of morning was finding the windows of the building opposite. Then she said a word aloud into the empty kitchen, the old, soft one her mother had used for the room where the family ate, not the country and not the house. She said it once, and waited, as one presses a bruise to find out whether it is still there.