Chapter Three
During the meal—a thick concoction of beans, hearty and dark and exotically spiced—my benefactors labored to act normally. Though Magda and her younger brothers could speak passable English, their parents’ abilities were much more limited, and as a consequence they all fell back to speaking amongst themselves in their own tongue. Yet, even without understanding their words, I was still able to sense their lingering discomfort. Talk sometimes broke down awkwardly as brothers or parents, suddenly guilty that I could not enjoy their conversation, lapsed into unnatural silence. All too soon, however, they would feel the oppression of that quietude and begin speaking again—their voices neither loud nor soft, trying uselessly not to call attention to the bond of language which I d
