After some time in school, I was able to spot who were the other misfit in the class, and I began to make some friends. Mine was probably the first generation that was exposed to a moderate amount of multiculturalism: of the forty children in the class only four spoke a different language at home. One was a Persian whose family had smelled trouble and left the country ahead of the Islamic Revolution. One was a Guatemalan, who was having the hardest time in school, the language being so similar that it was nearly impossible to eliminate systematic mistakes. One was a stiff Protestant Swiss German and the fourth, who was to become my closest ally in mischief, was a British who spoke with a very quaint Scottish accent. They were the only other people in that large crowd who looked with puzzlement at things everybody else gave for granted, and who, like me, seemed to perennially ponder over the Chatwin question: "What am I doing here?"
While I continued to speak proper language with the grownups, with my peers I ended up adopting a curious pidgin, born of a most improbable combination of languages.
My father, who noticed that I was so bored at school and who worried about my increasing use of pidgin instead of proper linguistic expressions, decided that, if I was going to speak in several languages, I might as well do it properly. He signed me up for a weekend language school that offered a package of intensive courses for school children covering three major European languages.
It was all very well with that, until my mother realized that one of the three languages I was learning was German. She stormed into the school and dragged me out of the classroom in the middle of a lecture, screaming that over her dead body I was ever going to speak a word of German.
For somebody whose father narrowly escaped ending his days in Auschwitz, and who grew up in the part of the country where German occupation had been the most atrocious, the reaction is understandable.
Learning those languages at that age, however, would have been a very good idea, and if I am still, to this day, using pidgin instead of proper languages when I move around Europe, it is probably due largely to that missed opportunity.
