Before I Could Really Talk I Was Singing In A Language No One Taught Me

My family tells this story about me, and they have told it my whole life, so I know it the way you know a scar you cannot remember getting. Before I could really talk, before I had proper words in our language, I used to sing. Not babble. Sing. A tune with actual shape to it, always the same one, and sounds that my grandmother swore were words, just not our words.

My mother did not think much of it at first. She thought it was the noise small ones make. But my grandmother, who had a good ear and a long memory, kept stopping what she was doing to listen when I did it. She said it was a real melody, minor and slow, the kind you would sing to settle someone. And she said the sounds were too regular to be nonsense. The same shapes came in the same places, the way words do.

There was more to it than the song. My family says that when I was upset I would cry for someone, calling out a name, and the name was not a name any of us used. It sounded like Nadia, or something close. There was no Nadia in our family, no Nadia among our neighbours, no Nadia anywhere in the small world I had been alive in. But I would reach up out of my cot and cry for her, and nobody could comfort me because nobody was her.

I do not remember any of this myself. That is the honest and frustrating truth of it. Whatever I knew when I was that small, I lost it the way we all lose those first years, and by the time I could hold a memory the song and the name had gone out of me. My family carried them instead. They became a story told at gatherings, half wonder and half joke, the strange thing I did before I was really me.

But my grandmother never treated it as a joke. When I was grown she took me aside once and told me she had, over the years, quietly figured some of it out. She had heard the language once, at a market, from a family who had come from far to the east, and she had gone cold because it was the tongue I had sung in. She was sure of it. She said she had even asked them, embarrassed, about the tune, and an old woman among them had known it, and had told her it was a lullaby, an old one, a song a mother sings.

And the name, my grandmother said, was a real name in that place. A common one. A name a woman would have. She had wanted to tell me for years but had waited until I was old enough not to be frightened by it.

I have thought about it a great deal, being the only one in the story who cannot actually remember the story. What was I doing, that small, singing a lullaby from a place I had never been, in a language nobody around me spoke, crying for a woman with a real name from that place. Where does a song like that come from, if not from having heard it, over and over, from someone who loved you.

I am not a person who needs it to mean something grand. It may be that the mind, at the very beginning, is closer to somewhere else, and that most of us simply forget the crossing. I forgot mine. But my grandmother did not, and my mother did not, and so I have it secondhand, a lullaby I once knew and cannot sing, and a name, Nadia, that I must have loved before I loved anyone here.

Sometimes I try to hum what my grandmother hums when she remembers it for me. I never get it quite right. She closes her eyes and corrects me, gentle, and for a moment her face changes, and I think she believes, fully, that she is hearing a woman on the other side of the world sing to a person who would one day be her grandchild. I have decided that is a beautiful thing to believe, and I do not need it to be more than that to keep it close.