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came out with that were usually less interesting than the other kind.
    â€œGothic,” I said again. “Oldest Germanic language that got written down. Bishop Ulfila translated the Bible—most of it—into Gothic in the fourth century A.D.”
    â€œThat’s a while ago now.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œAnybody still speak it?”
    â€œNot since the eighteenth century,” I told him. “Some of the Goths settled in Italy. The Byzantine Empire conquered them in the sixth century. Some settled in Spain. The Arabs conquered them in the eighth century. A few stayed behind in the Crimea. They were the ones who lasted longest.”
    â€œIf no one still uses it, what’s the point to studying it?” he asked.
    That was the other question everybody came up with—also including my mother. But he didn’t ask it in a snarky way. He sounded as if he really wanted to know. So I answered, “You can learn a lot about how the younger languages grew and changed if you compare them to one that didn’t grow and change so much. And I have fun doing it.”
    â€œThere you go!” he said. “If you can get paid for what you get off on anyway, you’re ahead of the game. I do it, too.”
    â€œDo you?” He’d listened to me. The least I could do was pay him back. “How?”
    And it turned out he was a farrier. I found out more about shoeing horses and horseshoe nails and trackside gossip than I’d ever imagined. He didn’t just work at the track. He had a regular business with the horsy people in Woodlawn Heights, which is where the horsy people mostly lived.
    After we’d talked a while longer, it also turned out he’d watched somebody get clobbered by a car—by a pickup, as a matter of fact. He’d seen it happen, poor guy. I told Victor. By then, I was most of the way down my third beer, so letting Victor know seemed uncommonly important.
    He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Must be something going around,” he said. And he also let the farrier—whose name, I haven’t told you, was Eddie—have a free one. Mandelbaum’s is a class joint.
    Victor was behind the bar when I came in again a couple of weeks later. “How you doing, Stan?” he asked.
    I kind of waggled my hand. I’d had a couple of nightmares of my own. You see something like that and you can’t get it out of your head no matter how much you want to. The more you try, sometimes, the harder it sticks.
    Later on, after I’d drunk a couple, I got to talking with an Indian woman—East Indian, I mean, not American Indian. Her name was Indira Patel. She wasn’t drop-dead gorgeous or anything, but she wasn’t bad. Hey, I’m not exactly drop-dead gorgeous myself. But I was unattached just then, so I entertained certain hopes, or at least a certain optimism. Mandelbaum’s isn’t a meat market, no, but you can make connections there. They may not be as young or as bouncy as they would be at the places a few blocks away. Chances are they’ll last better, though.
    After a while, she got around to asking me. I told her. She didn’t ask the whys and wherefores the way Eddie had. She nodded seriously and said, “This Gothic is the Sanskrit of the Germanic languages, then.”
    â€œPretty much,” I said, “except it’s more like the weird great-uncle to the languages we have now than the grandfather. There’s a much smaller, much poorer sample of it, too.” Details, details. “How about you?” I asked. How many people know there even is, or rather was, such a thing as Sanskrit? Sure, her background gave her a head start, but even so.…
    â€œI am a parasitic ecologist,” she answered.
    So she was from the university, then. No surprise we hadn’t noticed each other before. The humanities types hang out on the east side of campus; the west side is for the science