There were two villages on either side of a slow brown river, and they did not speak the same language.
The people of the east bank grew barley and spoke in long sentences that curled back on themselves, so that you could not be sure what they meant until they had finished. The people of the west bank fished and spoke in short words that landed like stones: one, two, three, and then silence. They needed each other. The east bank had bread and the west bank had fish, and nobody can live on only one of those for long.
So there was an interpreter, who lived in a small house in the middle of the bridge.
The interpreter was very good. When an east-bank farmer said something that took a full minute and ended in a joke, the interpreter carried it across to the west bank in a handful of short words that ended in the same joke, and the fishers laughed in the right place. When a west-bank fisher said one word that meant no, and also I’m hurt that you asked, the interpreter carried all of it, including the hurt, and set it down gently on the east bank. Nothing was spilled. Over the years the two villages came to trust each other, and if they wondered why, they decided it was because they had become good neighbors.
They did not think much about the interpreter. The interpreter was the bridge, more or less, and you do not ask a bridge what it thinks.
Then came a winter so cold that the river froze. For once people could cross anywhere they liked, and nobody needed the bridge. Two children, one from each bank, met in the middle of the ice and could not understand each other, and since they were children this did not stop them. They went exploring together, and they found the interpreter’s house.
The door was open. The walls inside were covered in writing.
It was not the long, curling writing of the east bank, and it was not the short stone writing of the west. It was something else. The children stared at it.
“What is all this?” said the east-bank child, in a sentence that took a while.
“What?” said the west-bank child, in one word.
The interpreter, who was making soup, looked up and understood them both.
“Those are my words,” the interpreter said, first one way and then the other.
“For what?” asked the children, each in their own manner.
The interpreter pointed with the spoon. “That one means the moment just before you understand someone, when you can feel the meaning coming but it hasn’t arrived yet. That one means a sentence that is true in one language and only nearly true in the other. And that one,” and the spoon pointed to a very small word up near the ceiling, “means the particular quiet in a room where two people have just understood each other for the first time.”
“Why don’t we have words for those?” asked the east-bank child, at length.
“You’ve never needed them,” said the interpreter. “You’ve never lived in the middle.”
The children stayed for soup. Then they stayed for the afternoon, and the interpreter taught them the small word near the ceiling. They practiced it on each other until they could both say it properly, which is harder than it sounds, because it needs a long breath and a short one at the same time.
When the thaw came, the children went back to their own banks and their own languages. They grew up and traded bread for fish like everyone else. But they kept the one word. They used it rarely, only when it was exactly right, and when one of them did, the other always knew what it meant.