Bar.bar

No picture. Immediately Wilhelm felt somewhat disappointed, since he had been half hoping that he might find a picture of someone resembling himself. In the wake of this letdown, the long series of derivations and grammatical details following the word bored him. Onward he read:

1. Etymologically, a foreigner; a person whose language and customs differ from the speaker’s.

Interesting, but not helpful, Wilhelm thought within the confines of his extremely meticulous schoolboy’s brain. The people who had smashed the windows were Austrians, after all, and Wilhelm was Austrian too. And they and he and his father all spoke German. So far, Wilhelm was not a barbarian.

2. Historically, a: a person who is not a Greek; b: a person living outside of the Roman Empire and its civilization; c: a person outside of Christian civilization.

Here things got muddier. Wilhelm ran down the list. Indeed he wasn’t a Greek, so that made him a barbarian according to 2a. But his father wasn’t Greek either, so who was he to go around calling other people barbarians when he was one himself? That couldn’t be right. As for 2b, well, in school they had learned about the Romans, who had lived a long time ago, in Italy. So Wilhelm certainly lived outside of the Roman Empire, and so did the people who had smashed the windows. But again, so did his father. Maybe his father was a barbarian after all. Definition 2c made Wilhelm’s throat hollow with nausea for a moment. It made him a barbarian, that was certain. But if it made him a barbarian, then it also made his father a barbarian. And it made the people who had smashed the windows not barbarians at all. So—and here Wilhelm’s brain worked out the mathematics of it—if he was a barbarian, and the window-smashers were barbarians, but his father was not a barbarian, then definition 2c couldn’t be what his father meant. Hence Wilhelm was still not a barbarian. Wilhelm suspected that something wasn’t quite right about his calculation here, but he forged on nonetheless.

3. A rude, wild, uncivilized person.

Wilhelm sighed. The dictionary really did include everything. But luckily, something lingered below the definitions:

Note: The Greek word originally referred to speech, and it is possible that the word itself represents an attempt to imitate inscrutable foreign speech.

So the word was actually meant to sound as silly as it did? “Bar, bar, bar, bar,” Wilhelm repeated to himself as he closed the dictionary, barbling his words as he went to bed.

The barbarians couldn’t be staved off for long. Soon Nadav fled to Amsterdam, leaving Wilhelm’s mother checked into her institution and thereby finding himself forced to take Wilhelm with him. Secretly, Nadav was dreaming of meeting that young Dutch woman again, of finding her abandoned by her husband, splashing in the water of the canals pleading for rescue, so that he could dive in and pull her up to dry land. He never would find her, but he kept looking for her, in the face of every woman he met strolling through the streets of Amsterdam, while his son barbled away at school, unable or unwilling to speak Dutch. Which brings us to the day in question. Roll film.