The Legacy of Babel: Part One

Walking into the Pergamon Museum in Berlin is like having half of your body transported back into the Classic era. Within its temple-like dimensions are partially reconstructed statues, columns, towers, gates and various other pieces of civic memorabilia from the ancient world. Where stone ends it is met with a blank whiteness – the fuzzy point where you must use your imagination or at least admit that you’re not a fully accomplished time traveller.

I came here in my last hours of Berlin so as to see the special exhibition of “BABLYON: MYTH and TRUTH”. In a very nice touch, the museum had created two separate exhibitions: one that looked at the historical reality of Babylonian culture, while the other collected the artistic legacy drawn from the legends of biblical Babel.

To be blunt, the factual exhibition was interesting, but relied heavily on information cards to explain a library of cloned cuneiform tablets. There was also a wealth of corroded rings and spearhead slivers that, after the fiftieth identical cabinet display, made me think more of old plumbing than the birth of civilisation. This was especially disappointing after the start of the exhibition, where visitors enter through the azure Gate of Ishtar, constructed from the same stones that its ancient architects selected.

Sadly, the mythical section wasn’t much better, replacing cuneiform tablets with semen-crusted newspaper clippings of Saddam Hussein (I wish I were joking). Where it did deliver a spark of joy into my withered heart, though, was in its catalogue of famous myths about Babylon. There’s the image of a maddened Nebuchadnezzar, crawling naked through the wilderness, and of the sultry Whore of Babylon riding atop her seven-headed monster. But, most lingering for me, is the story of the Tower of Babel and how its height affronted God so much that he cursed everyone within to speak a different language.

He’s a cheeky devil, that God character.

A recurrent theme throughout my travels has been the language barrier. English, despite what television and the internet told me, isn’t widely spoken and monolingual travellers need to resort to new tactics in order to eat. Yes, sometimes it’s hard, especially when I’m tired or on the receiving end of too many pints, but some of my best experiences have stemmed from linguistic gymnastics. For this reason I don’t think that God actually cursed the Tower of Babel – he just gave us something new to talk about. And anyone who complains is being lazy.

One night in Krakow, the three Frenchmen and I joined with two Polish girls in a retro hair salon that became a fancy bar after the sun fled. For several hours we crammed into a tiny booth and the air turned soupy with Polish, French and the occasional English (for my benefit). Somehow I ended up in a very complex conversation with one of the French guys – the one who spoke the least amount of English – that employed the full array of communicative tools. I couldn’t demonstrate it for you now, but somehow I discovered a gesture that roughly translates to “I don’t agree with your particular theory about what constitutes a real artwork”. And – in a demonstration of how physically communicative humans truly are – he understood me perfectly.

I later realised that shaking my head would have also done the trick.

It took three times as long as a normal conversation. But I actually enjoyed it more, and I think the reason is that the language barrier forced us to pay deeper attention to what we were both saying, rather than instantly recognising a familiar linguistic pattern and firing off the appropriate retort.

This theory came back into my mind the other night, while standing in a crowded London pub. In the countries where an English sentence is prefaced with a grimace, I found every scrap of random conversation amazing. Two Hungarian girls giggling on the train are obviously talking about something of great intellect and importance because I can’t understand them. But, when hearing the same characters dubbed in English, it is instantly driven home how inane those exotic conversations probably are.

There is a third type of language barrier that I came across in my travels – neither talker speaking in their native tongue. But before I get to that, here’s an aside about Hungarian.

Hungarian, like a few other European languages, uses the same informal word for hello and goodbye. Confusingly, Hungarians say “see-ya”, which has the habit of putting newly arrived Australians in a state of panic. To make matters more odd, Hungarians have appropriated English words into their daily chatter. These tend to crop up like magic mushrooms, catching the unwary tourist and flipping his head into a world of smelly colours and noisy tastes.

Such as...

When leaving the house of my hosts in Tapolca (more on that shortly), the mother took me to the door. She smiled and spoke the only English word she knew – “Hello” – while waving a friendly goodbye. This wasn’t just an isolated slip of the tongue, either. Most Hungarians bade me goodbye with a polite “Hello” once they learned that I spoke English. It must’ve been their way of making me feel more at home.

I’d like to believe that overall politeness and hospitality is a cultural trait in Hungary (it’s not, unfortunately – just ask the Roma), because I came across it in a very big way whilst staying in Tapolca, a small town fed by the wines, springs and hills of the Lake Balaton region.

I arrived in Tapolca late on a Saturday night. Couchsurfing had kindly provided me with a host in this town – the last known residence of my mother’s aunt and cousins. I’d decided in a fit of whimsy to see if they were still around after thirty years of silence.

Explaining this to my hosts was a case of verbal acrobatics. My contact, Melinda, spoke some English while her father had developed a kaleidoscopic manner of switching English, French and German in the one sentence. Melinda later told me that her grandmother had been an interpreter, so her father learned these three languages through a haphazard osmosis.

The biggest sticking point was that I didn’t actually have my aunt’s address or her full name, just a few scattered memories from a conversation with Mum months earlier. Blessed with such a portfolio of genealogical facts, it would’ve been easier to prove that Nicolas Sarkozy was my long-lost half brother (he is, by the way).

So, early on the Sunday morning, I walked into the four-star Hotel Pelion. I needed to ring Australia and a large hotel seemed to be the best-equipped for the job. Most hotels have a strict policy not to allow shabby, hairy strangers to make international calls, no matter how dire their situation. But after some words and puppy dog eyes, I was able to convince them that the sun would disintegrate unless I was able to call my Mum in Australia. Moments later, I had the important address details in hand and, best of all, I’d charmed the desk clerks so much that they hadn’t charged me for the call.

Armed with the address, it was obvious what my next step would be. I made a beeline for Szenchenyi Istvan utca, a tiny harelip of a street between the main road and Tapolca’s graveyard. Throwing caution (and Hungarian) to the wind, I knocked on every door I could find, rousing families in an effort to find my own. Whether I mispronounced my great aunt’s name or not, no-one knew where my family could be found. But, not wanting to send me off empty-handed, a kind lady took me to a nearby pub, where she introduced me to a local man who balanced his greasy mullet with a handlebar moustache.

Called Ferenc, he’d been drinking since ten o’clock that morning and it had obviously given him a charitable bent, because after a single handshake we were back out into the cold and door-knocking again. Though he could only speak Hungarian, Ferenc assured me that we’d find my family. Like some proud ambassador, he took me from door to door – the same doors that I’d knocked on about half an hour earlier – and proclaimed me as the returned heir to the Hungarian throne. Unsurprisingly, no-one had a clue as to what either of us were talking about.

By this point Ferenc appeared to be on the point of hypothermia, so we returned to the pub where I thanked him with two shots of pálinka. As for myself, famished from the morning’s exertions, I planted myself down and stuffed my stomach into hibernation.

Local customs are something else that can be difficult to translate. This proved the case when I returned to my hosts shortly around 4pm, which happens to be the time that most Hungarian families have their biggest meal of the day. I had barely given Melinda’s father the discovered address before I was bolted to a table and served a week’s worth of food.

While the dark blur of food coma misted my eyes, Melinda’s father revealed that he’d surveyed my great aunt’s house ten years earlier to make sure that she was selling it for the right amount. Furthermore, he produced the phone number of Tapolca’s largest gossip who, after a long phone call, revealed the following details:
1) My great-aunt was still alive,
2) She was living with my Mum’s cousin in a town 20km away,
3) I was actually related to the gossip, because my great-grandfather’s mother’s sister was the mother of her second cousin’s hairdresser.

Despite all of this happy news, I became aware that Melinda’s mother had noticed my casual picking. So as not to embarrass myself, I asked Melinda to explain that I was just too excited to eat.

It wasn’t a complete lie either. The last 24 hours had seen my emotions wrenched in many directions, from the excitement of obtaining the address to the cold, disappointment of door-knocking with Ferenc. Now, here I was, at the threshold of completing my final major goal for 2008 and every hair on my body stood rigidly on end. I was in one of those films where the protagonist, having travelled far from home to find their kidnapped partner/lover/child, is assured in heavily accented English: “My father says that she is alive – we know where she is and will take you to her tomorrow.”

But first I had to sleep off the meat hangover.

TO BE CONTINUED....