“Hang on,” I told the boy, though in my native language so I’m sure he couldn’t understand me. The meaning on my words must have been obvious though because he clung to me even tighter then before, though that may have just been an instinct of self preservation.
My muscles were screaming by the time I was half of the distance I had to go. It grew harder and harder to weigh our lives against my overwhelming urge to just give up and sink under the river water. It was the boy’s mother standing on the riverbank, ringing her hands in anguish and still screaming that carried me on. I didn’t have the courage to die with that woman’s pain on my shoulders and so I continued swimming, mechanically. By now a large crowd had gathered around the river bank and they had all started screaming encouragement. It didn’t pass through my exhausted mind, as they pulled the boy and I back up onto the bank, but I did think later, if they had wanted to encourage me they could have helped me. Their cheers hadn’t done any good but I could have used them sending a fishing boat after me or something like that.
I lay on the grass gasping as people all around me pounded on my back and told me how amazing I was. I spoke a few words of my native language and they got the idea I was a foreigner which only toned down their enthusiasm slightly. The mother just kept holding the boy and sobbing into his hair which was too wet to notice the addition of some more water.
The reporters descended as I suppose could be expected with an event that had attracted this much attention. They found a translator to talk to me from the audience. He was a native but had a fairly masterful grasp of my language and wasn’t ashamed to speak to me in it. I envied him. I told him everything that had happened, and then filled them in on some more personal details that they wanted for their report. Reporters everywhere want to know how old you are, where you were born, when you moved to this place, what your job is, what your experience is in whatever it is you just did. I asked all of their questions and they went away but the man they had pulled forward to translate remained.
The boy’s mother came forward and thanked me profusely, that was awkward. She hugged me, and kissed my cheek, and told me that I would always be welcome at her house, that they would always be in my debt. The little boy came forward and thanked me as well, in a tired, warn out voice. It had been a long and eventful day for him and I got the feeling he still didn’t really understand much that had happened except that someone had told him that he should thank me.
Finally everyone started to drift away but the translator still remained next to me, telling people what it was that I was saying, mostly I was saying that they should stop thanking me that I hadn’t really done anything other then what I should have done. Being a fellow human shouldn’t deserve praise. After a while only he and I were left.
“You’re a very brave man,” the translator said, shaking my hand. He walked away before I could deny it. I knew better, I was a coward, even through all of that, even to cry out for a boat to help get us to shore, not once had I spoken any language but my own. I went home and read. It was a book in the local language; I didn’t have any problems with it. When a telemarketer called though I spoke in my native tongue and she hung up because she couldn’t talk to me. I am not a brave man.
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