A Comedy In A Foreign Language: Chapter 4b

We arrived back at house in Wales, where, of course, the same sunshine was streaming through the same window at the same angle; and Voldemort stared at it with great dislike and said, "I hate how it's always the same time here."

"It's not its fault," I said inanely. He glared at me and started unwinding his scarf, and I ventured, "We could just go somewhere else."

"No, we can't," he said grumpily. "We need a base so people like Albert and the house-elf can find us, not to mention all the people they'll be sending from the Chinese Ministry."

"Leave a note," I suggested while I was putting the water on to boil for a cup of tea (NB: kettles are one of the best inventions ever), and Voldemort told me we didn't know yet whether they could read English; which, as it turned out, they couldn't.

First an elderly brown-skinned woman turned up and yelled at us in a completely unfamiliar language; we couldn't understand a word she was screeching and she couldn't understand English, French, German, Romanian, Arabic or Russian, all of which Voldemort tried on her in succession, so that was a fairly unedifying conversation. Next, two Russians arrived; a tall, grey-bearded bloke and a fat ginger woman. Voldemort greeted them automatically with "Zdrastvuytie, tovaritch," which for some reason didn't go down very well. Then the three of them had a long argument and the Russians eventually left with grim faces.

"Well, they say they're fucked," Voldemort noted heavily, "which doesn't really tell us anything we didn't already know."

"It doesn't?" I said blankly.

"There are something like 20,000 warheads in Russia," he said, nearly killing me on the spot. "Five thousand of them don't work."

"But that's good, isn't it?" I said, clutching at straws.

"Well, it would be, if we knew what they do instead of working."

"And in America?" I said hopefully.

"Say thirteen thousand. And it's dark there."

"So what do we do?"

"Carry on doing what we're doing," he said glumly, "and hope they sort it out."

He continued to pore over thuggishly inaccessible textbooks while muttering feverishly, occasionally creating molecular ball-and-rod diagrams in mid-air with his wand. He reminded me of Oliver Wood the night before the Quidditch Cup. I washed our clothes in the stream and dried them with a Drying Charm.

A steady stream of Chinese witches and wizards arrived, but conversation was rendered impossible by the fact that their English was terrible and Voldemort had forgotten all the Chinese languages he ever knew.

"Well, I can remember '你好' and '是'," he amended after they'd left, "but that wouldn't exactly have got us very far."

"Can't you cast some kind of... translation spell?" I wanted to know.

"An interpreting spell, you mean," he said. "I asked that of an interpreter once."

"What did he say?"

"When she'd stopped laughing she said 'I can tell you're not a linguist'. And you're definitely not, if you think most interpreters are men."

"What are you? Well. A physicist."

"Not really... I've never specialised, except in the Dark Arts. I can speak a few languages, but that's not linguistics. Being a linguist involves the freakish ability to think in several different dimensions simultaneously about the way people's minds work. Absolutely intolerable."

"But you seem to know so much about the way people's minds work." Stare. "Well, the way your mind works."

"The first thing you discover is that your mind's nothing like anybody else's."

"Is the interpreter still alive?" I asked. "Can we find her and get her to translate?"

"To interpret, not translate. No, we can't. I killed her."

Pause.

"You haven't forgotten what I am, have you, Harry?" he said softly, showing his fangs in a faint smile. "I'm a psychopathic tyrant whose only moral virtue is an overriding terror of any type of bomb falling from the sky."

I had to swallow a few times, but said reasonably firmly, "That's quite useful for the time being."

Did he have to keep reminding me what a horrible bastard he was? It would be so much easier to forget.

000

Eventually I got tired. With no change in daylight, and no way of telling the time, I had established a routine of just going to bed whenever I felt sleepy. Voldemort, who didn't appear to observe the same hours as mammals, just nodded when I told him I was off to bed; so I turned in, secure in the belief that he would take care of things. I was so tired I could have slept through a thunderstorm, and, in fact, I did.

At some point the meanderings of my dreams stopped abruptly and I was left blinking in bed and wondering why I had awoken. That only lasted a second, because at that point all this muffled shouting started up and I realised the house was full of people. This was most unusual. I decided the odds were strong that either (a) the newcomers would try to kill Voldemort or (b) he would try to kill them; so I decided to put in an appearance.

Upon peeping through the arch I discovered that the entire kitchen and dining room had been given over to an impromptu pow-wow. Every space was packed full of Chinese, Russian, South African and various other witches and wizards, plus a bored-looking Indian elf, who was once again levitating six feet off the ground and taking notes. Voldie was sitting in the middle with a mulish expression. The mood was decidedly tense.

Voldie looked up, saw me and snapped, "Tea, please, Harry."

"Chae, chahiye," Lakshmi helpfully interpreted, and the room was suddenly full of voices repeating this important message while I put the water on to boil. I noted, bemused, that one of the Chinese witches was actually in chains, and that the captors sitting to her left and right were watching her with needly eyes. I wondered why they'd brought her to the meeting, then realised there wasn't really any other option.

An extremely ancient-looking Chinese wizard started to talk; well, I say extremely ancient, but even that's relative. Voldemort was a spring chicken compared with this lot. Most had white hair and beards down to the floor; the room was crammed with bunions, walking sticks and wrinkles. Even Albert Hottie looked pretty past it, come to that. The only young-looking person was Lakshmi, but I wasn't sure how long house-elves lived. I wondered how old Dobby was. He might be a hundred. You could never tell.

Anyway, a different, marginally younger Chinese wizard started to interpret for the first one, and while I was getting all the mugs ready I heard him say, "Besides, sir, as I was saying, if it was necessary to cast this spell, you left it remarkably late..."

"It was charmed to activate automatically if the American forces attained Defcon 1," Voldie snarled. "What was I supposed to do, cast it myself when the sirens sounded? When it took me a bloody year to cast?"

The Russian woman interrupted, in Russian, naturally, and Voldemort listened impatiently and then deprecated, "She is saying that Defcon 1 wasn't a good cut-off point, and that I should have set the spell to activate itself rather earlier. I'm going to tell her that's a stupid idea," and he did, very thoroughly by the sound of it; or perhaps Russian's just a fairly verbose language. In the background people interpreted his comments into five or six different languages, sometimes at a very high volume, since a lot of the ancient persons were going a bit deaf. The noise was overwhelming. I poured out the tea and started handing it round; an elderly East Asian person took an absent mouthful, choked in horror and spat it out all over the table. I began to perceive why international peace talks almost always ended in tears.

"Wrong type of tea," Albert whispered to me. "Try Darjeeling. And don't put milk in it."

"Fine, fine," I muttered, starting all over again. Meanwhile Voldemort was snapping, "Yes, correct, and I knew that was a possibility, and I could see that if the procedure was dangerous, disrupting it might have induced the Thaothong effect and killed a couple of hundred people – well, what? Who cares?" he demanded as everyone went berserk. "Oh, all right, then, listen, listen, for god's sake, d'you think a nuclear war wouldn't have disrupted it? Lord only knows what the combined forces of chain reaction and interrupted experiment would have unleashed," and after some discussion the Chinese bloke basically agreed and that particular argument was over.

My relief at this proved premature. The disrupting-magical-experiments argument had been two-sided, because Voldemort understood what a magical experiment was; we were now moving into nuclear war territory, and most of the wizards and witches here appeared to have been born considerably prior to the discovery of radiation. Even as I handed Voldemort his mug he started hooting, "Yes, it does mean they've started a war. They don't just initiate Defcon 1 for fun during their coffee break," and a long argument began.

Even though almost nothing they were saying made sense, even when it was interpreted into English, I could see that teams were forming among the foreigners. Some of them appeared to understand what Voldemort was talking about, particularly Albert and the two Russians we'd met before; Albert kept trying to interrupt and explain things, but nobody seemed to listen to him. The Russians, on the other hand, had great influence, and soon our parties had formed: on the right, the incredibly ancient Chinese, who had some difficulty remembering where America was; on the left, the Russians, Albert and the ancient woman we'd seen before, who turned out to be Peruvian. She could only communicate by idiot boards and knew nothing whatsoever about nuclear war but was mad as hell that it was the middle of the night in the Americas and dragons were rampaging through Peru.

I sat down next to Voldemort and listened. I needn't have bothered, because none of it made much sense. The Russians demanded to know why the planes had scrambled at such-and-such a time, and Voldie argued with them while the oldies asked what a plane was; Albert said he'd been to Israel and done a load of unintelligible stuff there, and Voldie quizzed him about it while everyone else in the room stared at him blankly like sheep in car headlights; the Chinese asked why Voldie hadn't told anybody since 1957 that he'd cast this spell, and Voldie pointed out that he had been distinctly persona non grata among the witzy community for most of this time.

Then there was a discussion lasting at least half an hour about whether Yeltsin had consulted his football, which confused me profoundly; I kept imagining Boris dressed up like Trelawney in huge specs and diaphanous shawls, exhorting us all to use our Inner Eye as we gazed into the crystal football. However, they finally concluded that yes, the football had been consulted, and as far as I could make out, this was bad news; at any rate, they all started shouting again.

Eventually, just as the long round of interpretation-reply-interpretation began again, Voldemort tapped me on the head with a spiky claw and whispered, "You can go now. There's no reason why you should have to sit through this."

I got up very rapidly indeed. "You won't curse any of them, will you?"

"Not unless I have to," he said indifferently, which left me hoping none of our guests said anything rude. I really had to get away from it all, though, so I went and took a nap.

I was woken abruptly an hour or so later when from the next room I heard ground-shaking screeching. Rubbing my eyes, I picked out the words "WHEN THE WAR ENDS!", and concluded that some hapless Asian person was about to be forced to wash his or her mouth out. Now might be a good time to get up.

By the time I arrived in the kitchen the mouth-washing was mostly finished, and there was only a stunned, wet Chinese bloke and a seething Voldemort to prove it had ever happened. Certain factions, however, appeared less than pleased, and the Chinese bloke was the least among them. The Russians were shooting one another meaningful looks that suggested they had correctly identified Voldemort's cuckoo tendencies; the Peruvian witch was goggling, and Albert just looked resigned. The peace talks, I decided, might be about to hit a large pothole.

They did: the Russian bloke with the grey beard cleared his throat and rapped the table, and everyone looked at him blankly, possibly grateful for any escape from the impromptu ducking-stool scenario. "Yes?" Voldemort said irritably. "What?"

I can't give you my reactions to the next scene as it unfolded, because it took place entirely in Russian, which I didn't understand. Therefore I will translate it retrospectively for your benefit. I didn't do a great deal anyway, until right at the end.

"Are you sure, Your Lordship," he said with a slight trace of mockery, "that you are entirely sane?"

Voldie curled his lip like an unimpressed horse and said "I'm not at all sure you are, if you're trying to start something with me."

"I know you were in the Indian Ministry of Magic yesterday," the Russian said menacingly. "We went to the library there, and guess what we found?"

"Twenty-six tigers dancing the tango," Voldie said irritably. It would have been good if that had been true, but instead the bloke produced the book about Nostrodamus and held it up mockingly. The non-Russians took a moment to figure out what it was, but then, to my surprise, there was a great chorus of groaning and eye-rolling. Clearly, they didn't find him as impressive as Voldemort did.

"AND?" he demanded, showing his teeth. "You find it surprising that a war breaks out at the end of the century and I think to consult Nostrodamus's writings?"

"I don't find it surprising," the bloke said. "I find it stupid."

Voldie shot upwards like a rubber band and suddenly sprouted a wand. The Russian gadgy did the same. "Stop it! Stop it!" I begged, grabbing at Voldemort's sleeve. "Stop fucking cursing people, we haven't got time!"

There was a silence of several seconds, during which he didn't move or break eye contact with the Russian bloke at all; but at last he said "I shall allow this fool to count himself among the fortunate," in a very low voice, and sat back down.

"Well?" the fat ginger woman said. "You admit that it's true? You think this war is the one that Nostrodamus predicted, and you were seeking guidance from his prophecies?"

Voldemort rolled his eyes with expert disdain and said "No, I do not think this war is the one he was referring to, since he was not a true Seer and, besides, the year is 1997 and not 99."

The Russian bloke's question was still being relayed around the room, and its interpretation into Chinese elicited an enormous amount of angry groaning. "Voldemort, stop aggravating people," I heard Albert trying to intervene, but everyone ignored him again.

"Oh," Mr Russian said. "So simple. So Nostrodamus just got his sums wrong. So you're not obsessed with prophecies this time? Well, that does make a change."

Between gritted teeth, inasmuch as you can grit very long fangy teeth while speaking Russian, Voldie said, "What do you mean by that?"

"Let me explain this simply," the ginger woman said. "Sixteen years ago you believed a prophecy to be true and acted on it. All you managed to do with that was fuck everything up. And now again you believe a prophecy to be true and you are the only person who knows how to interpret it and the only one who knows what should be done. And you go ahead casting your spells and fiddling with your bombs, and you expect us to listen to you and join you, assuming that you will not have got this prophecy disastrously wrong as you did before, forgetting that you are a mass murderer who has shown himself time after time to be untrustworthy – "

Bang. Out came the Voldewand. Up jumped the Russians. "Listen," I said hastily, jumping in front of Voldie, "calm down, don't lose your rag – " But I don't know what happened after that, because she really did Stun me, the cheeky sod, and I didn't wake up until several hours later; so I suppose that'll have to be the end of this section.