Translator (7 page)

A baby girl, unexpected, but certainly wanted. There was an eight-year gap between the two children. With Tomas, Hanne had split herself into two, working and mothering, each role never fully committed to, and therefore, in her mind, never done well. With Brigitte, Hanne wanted only one role and to perform it to perfection. She would give her daughter the world. Hiro was an assistant professor at Stanford in the chemistry department, and though there wasn't a lot of money, it was enough. They'd make the sacrifices.

Hanne signed Brigitte up for French. And when French proved a breeze, Hanne added German and Japanese. All by the age of six. To be fair, she enrolled Tomas, but he despised the lessons and by age fifteen had dropped out of everything except Japanese. Brigitte loved to practice with Hanne. “Do I sound good, Mama? Do I? Are you proud of me?”

“Beautiful, my love,” said Hanne. “You sound like music. Tell me about your day in French.”

Now Sasha is reading about penguins. Wonderful, thinks Hanne, anything to transport her away from here. She is ravenous for life. Keep talking, tell me anything, anything at all, and I'll follow along gladly, willingly, forever grateful. Penguins and penguins mating, mommy told her, making babies, and a blue poisonous frog. Sasha pulls from her pocket a long necklace of colorful glass beads, and raises it to show Hanne, but the knot must be nonexistent because the beads slide off and bounce across the floor. Sasha scrambles, chasing them all over the room. Hanne would give anything to get down on her knees and help her gather them up. She closes her eyes, listening to Sasha move around the room, murmuring, “Here's one. Here's one.” This search takes a long while, but finally she returns to the chair beside Hanne's bed, and in a small, fragile voice, says, “Can you read me a story?”

Hanne shakes her head. I'm sorry, my love. More than anything, I wish I could.

Sasha nods gravely, then with a sharp twinkle in her eye, without any prompting, says “Ich liebe dich,” I love you.

Hanne's eyes water. She taught Sasha that German sentence a year ago. Hanne realizes that for days she's thought of herself only in disassembled pieces—a brain, frontal lobe, nose broken, arms paralyzed, gashed forehead—but now something below the fragments congeals.

When Tomas walks in and pulls up a chair, Sasha quickly climbs from her chair and into his lap, hugging and kissing him. “Daddy.” She leans up to his ear, cups it in her hands and tries to whisper. “Is Grandma going to die?”

“No,” he says quickly, studying Hanne's face. “No, sweetie. She had an accident, but she'll be fine.”

Through watery light, she looks at her son and his daughter, watches them snuggle into each other's warmth. A throb of joy fills her, and she feels, for a moment, full of grace.

Several days later, the first sign of improvement arrives. A nurse with big front teeth has removed Hanne's sweaty hospital gown of dull blue and is now administering a sponge bath.

“Still having hot flashes?” says the nurse. “No fun, are they? My mother had them until she was fifty-nine. Can you believe it? Hated them, absolutely hated them. Think what I have to look forward to.”

The nurse wipes down her arms, her neck. “Until you're up and about, this is the way a bath is given. My mother used to call this a spit bath. Ha! A spit bath, can you imagine the germs? How's your head feeling? More painkillers? You can have a certain amount each day, you know, and you could have more if you liked. In fact,” the nurse studies the bag of clear liquid hanging from an IV pole, “you've barely used any.” She laughs. “Usually patients gobble it up. Oh, your nose looks better. They've set it perfectly. Less black and blue around the eyes.”

A torrent of words, this nurse. Hanne knows she should feel indebted to her, the care, the concern for clean feet, it goes far beyond what she's ever done for anyone, except her children.

“Your big big toe.”

Hanne wouldn't be surprised if as she cleaned it, she wiggled it, the big piggy toe. And she does! Hanne tries to think about something else. To drift from this, the talking to her toe. She conjures up Jiro, but he has nothing to say. Hanne can't seem to escape this moment. Tomas is not here, Anne and the girls have gone home. She is stuck in this room with a nattering nurse and her head is pounding. She pushes the button and gives herself a dose of morphine.

On and on about her toes, how this nurse likes to paint her toenails, doesn't mind the smell, any color, changes it once a week, and the time she tried black, a horrid color on her—

“Please be quiet,” says Hanne, with some effort.

The nurse stops talking and her face opens. “I don't know what you just said, but it's a good sign.” She says she'll be right back.

Hanne feels a crackle of excitement. She stretches her lips over her front teeth, opens her mouth wide, runs her tongue along the soft inside of her cheeks. Be quiet. Please be quiet. Her mouth muscles feel like a new toy.

By the time the doctor arrives, she's carefully formed her speech, but can only manage a short sentence: Time for me to go home. The concentration required for that one, coherent sentence has worn her out. If granted more energy, she'd say “Thank you for such thoughtful care. I can't remember when I've been so well attended to, but it's time to resume my life. After nine days here, this place is beginning to sap my soul.” “Sap my soul” is her sole utterance.

He nods, staring at her more intently than he ever has, his eyes alight, alert, and says he'll be right back. He returns with the copper-haired doctor and a timid-looking Japanese woman with bony arms. The doctor introduces her as Keiko Matsuko. She is doing her residency in neurosurgery.

“Please tell her what you just told me,” says the doctor.

Hanne repeats her statement slowly. The Japanese woman translates.

“Fascinating,” he says, smiling, looking at Hanne as if she's a glorious star. “You're speaking Japanese.”

She is doing well. Walking now, urinating, bathing on her own. Everything seems to have returned, except her ability to speak her first languages. Though she can hear them in her head, sense the texture of the words in English, Dutch, German, she can almost feel the English word in the front part of her brain travel over a bridge to Japanese, a language she learned in her teens.

It seems that a second language learned in adulthood, says the doctor, is spatially separated in the brain from the native language, or in Hanne's case, the languages of English and German and Dutch. Both are located in the brain's language area, the Broca, but they are not in the same spot.

Tomas stands beside Hanne's bed, and the doctor's eyes flit from Hanne to Tomas, as if not certain to whom he should speak. The doctor had done some research and found a similar case in Israel involving a 41-year-old bilingual man. His mother tongue was Arabic, and he learned Hebrew later in life. A brain injury knocked out both languages, but rehabilitation eventually brought back his Arabic. His Hebrew, however, remained severely damaged. He could understand it, but not speak it proficiently.

“He represents the typical case—the mother tongue is recovered first. But you, you've retained the language learned later in life. That's unusual. There've been some cases where the later language returned first if it was used the most around the time of the accident. Is that true of your Japanese?”

Hanne shakes her head no. Despite the year-long effort to translate Kobayashi's novel, Hanne's primary language was always English. And even when her husband had been alive, English was their preferred language. For Hanne, Japanese has always been too quiet, too passive. With its verb at the end of the sentence and changing its form, depending on who one was speaking to, it made her too aware of what she was saying and to whom. When she spoke it, she could feel it shaping her private mental life into something more demure, indecisive, even wishy-washy. It would do no good to think this way, especially in dog-eat-dog America, where the winner takes all.

“Or the later language is the most practical—”

Again, Hanne shakes her head no.

“Another study suggests that the language first recovered might be motivated by unconscious factors. I'm speculating, of course, but maybe Japanese holds more significance for you. For some reason, in your subconscious, it's more important or meaningful for you to speak it right now.”

What's most important right now is that she go home. “When can I go home?” she says in Japanese.

“What did she say?” asks the doctor.

“She just wants to know when she'll be released.”

“Yes. Released. I should have used that word,” she says.

“A couple more days of observation, and she'll be on her way,” says the doctor.

“Observed like a monkey. And spoken of in the third person.”

Tomas reminds her she's at a university hospital, a teaching hospital. She's become an intriguing case for students and for the doctors. “It's a way of contributing, Mother.”

She frowns.

Before they can speak further, in comes a procession of medical students. She counts eight. Young, too young—five boys, three girls gather around her bedside, peering at her, the suture at the top of her head, where the tube was inserted. The copper-haired doctor tells them about her case. Describes the location of the impact, then asks the students for the patient's symptoms. The patient. Not Hanne or Ms. Schubert. The patient in room 272 is an odd case, Hanne imagines the doctor saying as a prelude. The students dutifully go through a list of symptoms associated with brain trauma.

“All right, Hanne, can you tell us how you're feeling? Please note, her first languages are German and English and Dutch.”

The circle of students moves in tighter, closer, an arm's stretch away. They seem to be collectively holding their breath, though she smells coffee, something medicinal, and watermelon. Lip gloss? The girl with shiny pink lips? What if she sat there mute? Just stared at them. Or stuck out her tongue. Or barked like a dog. For a moment she lets the possibilities exist—all of them in their surprising glory.

She glances at Tomas, who's standing by the window looking out. But if she chose to bark or bay, they'd probably keep her here longer. Extend the observation period. Make her perform over and over for these blurry-eyed students. She's at their mercy. This is what she's been reduced to, a performance, an act, a patient in room 272 whose brain got rearranged in a most entertaining way.

She speaks. “Hello, my name is Hanne. I am a monkey.” In Japanese.

A Japanese boy with a thin wisp of a dark moustache laughs, showing off crooked teeth. “Wow.”

“Wow is right,” says Hanne, now speaking directly to the boy. “The monkey does her little tricks and makes the audience laugh.”

The young Japanese man laughs again.

“What did she say?” one of the interns asks the boy.

The doctor smiles. Clearly pleased with the performance.

With his arms crossed, Tomas comes over to her bed. She asks him please to get these people out of here. Tell them she's tired. Tell them anything. One good thing: at least she didn't yield to the Japanese language's love of politeness and decorum.

“You're in a bad mood,” he says to her in Japanese, then turns to the students. “My mother would like privacy now.” He frowns again at her. “But I do hope everyone learned something.”

There's nothing ceremonious about her
departure from the hospital. She's outside, finally, and it feels remarkable, this quick pulse in the chilly air. Noises lie everywhere. Across the street, a group of kids are playing basketball, and the ball hitting the court aligns with the beat in the air. The squeaky shuffle of sneakers, the grunts, outbursts of “Hey!” are like instruments in an orchestra, all of it sends pleasure spiraling down her spine. She almost feels like her old self again.

In her apartment, she quickly unpacks, tossing everything into the laundry basket, and checks her voicemail. How odd, only David calling to find out if she went away on an unexpected vacation. She thought for sure she'd hear from the publisher. Kobayashi should have finished reading and signed off. And she expected a call from Claire Buttons, an editor at one of the big publishing houses, who'd mentioned several months ago she had a translation project for Hanne. She checks her e-mail. Nothing. Hanne announces she's going for a walk.

“Why don't you relax,” says Tomas, who disappears down the hallway, carrying his luggage into his old bedroom. “We just got here.”

“I've been cooped up for too long.”

“I need to call the office first!” he calls from the room.

“I'll go alone, then,” she says, grabbing her coat, closing the door, shutting out his likely protest. Fresh air, outdoor sounds, pavement underfoot, these are the things that will re-anchor her to the world of the living.

Across the street, the lone bottlebrush tree, stuck in its small patch of dirt, an island in a sea of concrete sidewalk, shows off its red-tipped branches. The blare of a car alarm, high-pitched, intermittent, pierces the morning. A robbery, she thinks, or a tap on a front bumper. Who cares; it exists and it's close enough for her to hear at least three different notes in the seemingly monotone blare. Just like Brigitte, Hanne has always had keen hearing. A girl with two dark braids bounces a red ball on the sidewalk, like the rhythm of a heartbeat. Next to the girl by the stairway, a tall birch tree flutters hundreds of heart-shaped leaves. Hanne heads down the sidewalk, where a man with a big belly lifts the hood of his beat-up car, plunges his head, a tangle of red hair, inside and starts to sing a sad love song.

She stops beside him. A big, stunning voice, made for the opera. Jiro would love this—there's a scene in the book where he's walking down the street and hears a woman singing in the shower. He stops and listens to the entire song. After a while, the man pokes his head out from under the hood and looks at her, curious, puzzled, before he dismisses Hanne, who has just been standing there, staring at him mutely. “Bunch of wackos in this town.”

Still, she smiles at him. Pasted onto the sidewalk, leaves, the color of dirt; sheets of newspaper scuttling down the street; a man in a suit, his shirt robin's-egg blue.
Kireina
, beautiful, she murmurs, beautiful. She walks slowly, deliberately, aware of the sidewalk, the cracks and bumps, the dips and drops. Aware now of how easy it is to fall.

In the brightly lit lobby of her apartment building, she even lets her neighbor's collie press his wet black nose on her dress, leaving a long smear. “I'm so sorry,” says the neighbor, whose blue-tinted hair seems remarkable today.

Smiling, Hanne strokes the dog's head. “What a lovely dog,” she says. “She must keep you company.”

The neighbor leans toward Hanne and tilts her ear. “Are you feeling all right, Ms. Schubert?” Her voice wavers and warbles with age. “I didn't understand a word you just said.”

She forgot. She can't speak to her neighbors. Language, she remembers her mother telling her when she was a girl, is the umbilical cord to other humans.

By the time she returns to her apartment, she has a slight headache. Her brain, that convoluted gray mass, feels tender, like a small nocturnal animal that has been thrust into the sun. She sits at the kitchen table, watching Tomas attack an empty cardboard box with scissors. He thought he'd be useful, he says. He's replaced the light bulbs in the hallway, swept away cobwebs in the corners of her rooms, put oil on the bolt of a squeaky cupboard. Is there anything else he can do?

“There was a man singing, a beautiful voice, that man,” she says in Japanese. “Baritone that swung into tenor.”

“Just a state of ecstasy,” he says, as he scissors through the side of the box. “The etymology of the Greek word,” he reminds her, as if her fall had stripped her of more than her English, “being outside oneself. What you're experiencing is a complete forgetting of the past and future; you're conscious of only the present instant. I read about it somewhere.”

One side of the box is cut in half. “Probably something to do with endorphins.” He steps on it and crushes it. “Or maybe serotonin. I forget all the chemistry of the brain these days.” He goes on interpreting and speculating about the possible reasons for her ecstasy—maybe something she ate, or the lighting outside, or some medicine they gave her—and as the list grows longer, she feels her ecstasy, if that's the right name for it, dissolve.

She's grateful when his cell phone rings. She fixes herself a coffee and rubs her temples. As he paces the living room, his voice rises and falls, circling around the word “contract.” When he finishes the call, he says he should probably leave soon. Maybe tomorrow morning. “Do you think you'll be all right?”

For a moment, she feels cold panic. How will she negotiate this city speaking only Japanese? David doesn't speak it. Who will keep her company? But she can't ask her son to put his life on hold. He's done more than enough. “Absolutely.”

She asks Tomas to call David—a friend, she says—to tell him what happened to her. “Tell him there's no need for concern. I'm on the mend.” Tomas dials the number and leaves a message. And then could he please call the university and let them know at least for the foreseeable future, she will not be able to teach Japanese. She knows her students; they require a professor who can explain things over and over in English.

“I don't want you here alone,” he says, frowning. “I'll arrange for a nurse.”

“There's no need. Really, Tomas.”

He reminds her to check in with her doctor.

She agrees to do just that. He nods absentmindedly.

In the morning, he slips into his coat, snaps shut his briefcase, no, no breakfast, tells her he's called a taxi and should head to the lobby.

He reaches for the door.

“Tomas.”

He pauses.

“Any word from Brigitte?”

“No. Call if you need anything,” then he closes the front door.

She looks around her empty apartment. There on the side table, Tomas forgot his yellow legal notepad. Not words, but a doodle, a man on his back, his legs lifted up in the air. At first she feels a flush of embarrassment, thinking she's intruded on his fantasy life. But the image reminds her of something else: Picasso's painting of a man on his back eating watermelon. Was her son contemplating delight?
Her
ecstatic delight?

With her son no longer here making calls, his voice scaling peaks of excitement, then sliding down into a hushed reassurance, his hard heels smacking the hardwood floors, his head bowed reverently over a notepad, his long fingers running through his inky black hair, there is only deathly quiet.

She hurries down the hall to the elevator. “Hurry up,” she murmurs as it descends. She runs across the marble floor of the lobby, but by the time she pushes through the heavy glass doors, he is gone. Whisked away in a yellow taxi. What greets her is the rush of traffic, music blaring from god knows where, people hurrying by on their way to work, as if pushed along by a strong wind. She stands in the lobby doorway, trying to catch her breath, hoping to spot him, wave him back, one foot in, the other out. She glances down. How unlike her; she is standing in the foyer barefoot.

The next day, she cuts her morning walk short, deciding against a trek across the bridge in the fog, with the wet gray clinging to her. And she doesn't stop by Cecilia's Bakery because she doesn't want to dumbly point to her selection and nod like an idiot—yes, yes, that's the one. Cecilia, with the lines on her face filled with flour, will ask what happened in her heavy accent, and Hanne will be reduced to more hand signals or jotting everything down.

By the time she gets home, she's chilled to the bone. She picks up the phone to call David. Then remembers she can't. Fortunately, he comes by at noon. She can see he's startled by her appearance. Does she look that bad? He studies her, then looks away, then sneaks another glance before he walks into the foyer and announces in a voice deliberately loud and upbeat that he has brought a homemade meal of rosemary chicken, mashed potatoes, and salad. “I never claimed the English were good cooks,” he says. “But, ta-da.”

She smiles, nods, grabs a notepad and writes:
It smells delicious. Thank you.

“How are you?”

Doing better. It's so nice to have your company.

He puts together a plate of food for her, then serves himself. For a while, they try to converse with David asking questions, and she responding via her notepad. But the conversation moves slowly, like drips from a faucet. He launches into a monologue, telling her about school, a tedious faculty meeting, his wonderful students, a concert he attended, his visit to the Monet exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. She nods, smiles, gestures with her hands. About mid-way through the chicken, he runs out of stories and steam. A long interval of awkwardness settles over them. The lunch, she knows, is exhausting. For him. For her.

When they make love, it's not the same. A cotton layer has wrapped tightly around her, dulling her senses. She is just going through the motions. He must sense it because afterwards, he doesn't lounge around in bed. “Call me—” then he catches himself. He says he has to go to Sacramento for one of his kids' soccer tournaments. When he returns in a couple of days, he'll stop by, take her out to dinner.

I'd like that,
she writes on a paper. She refrains from writing
Please don't forget.

She can't sleep. Around midnight, half dazed, she steps into the living room, stretching her back to untangle the knots. The lighting seems different, brighter, a strange yellow glow. It takes her a moment to realize she's failed to perform her nightly ritual of shutting her curtains. Through her big wall of windows, her life is on display to whoever wants to peer in. She hurries over to shut them, but just as she's about to do so, she glances straight into an apartment across the street, where a woman in a blue dress is chasing a man around a couch. Or maybe he is chasing her. Around they go. The woman is barefoot and tosses her head back, laughing, exposing the long line of her pale throat. The man is running and now unbuttoning his white shirt, flinging it into the air, and it sails beyond the couch, as if caught in an invisible wind, and it floats onto a chair. She should look away, shut her curtains, but will he catch her?—she's decided he is chasing her—and he does, and now they tumble onto the couch, their arms and legs entangled, their bodies glued together. No one is watching her—it's she who is watching them. She yanks closed the curtains.

Four days go by and she slips into a great hole of silence. She can't while away the hours reading, because she's unable to focus on words without ushering in a headache. The doctor explained it, but she didn't quite understand. She only clung to his final phrase—that, too, should return. Some day. She'd give anything to have the demands and absorption of her work, the reassurance of a new manuscript to translate.

When there's a firm knock on the door, she nearly runs to answer it. She's expecting David. Thank God. Finally back from his trip. A woman with straight black hair, as thin as a wire, is standing there in a skimpy black skirt, holding a fistful of balloons, one hip provocatively thrust forward. She's tottering on four-inch heels, shoes that are surprisingly large to accommodate the woman's surprisingly large feet. A tight red top accentuates her big breasts, but black fishnet stockings sag loosely on her rail-thin legs.

A trollop, thinks Hanne, frowning her disapproval. Who in the condo association would order such a woman? Probably that man on the ninth floor with the huge paunch and greasy hair, who has a permanent ring of sweat gleaming underneath his eyes. Hanne grabs a paper and pencil.
You have the wrong apartment.

Pink foundation covers the woman's face, and her black eyeliner is so thick the effect is raccoonish. Garish red lips compete with the eyeliner, and Hanne's eyes dart back and forth, from eyes to mouth, as if both exaggerated features are clamoring for her attention. It's hard to see, let alone fathom the real face underneath all that gunk, though Hanne imagines this woman, surely a prostitute, is not much older than twenty. A drug addict too, thinks Hanne, too thin, unkempt, malnourished.

Snapping her gum, the woman runs her hand up and down the doorframe, as if stroking velvet, her charm bracelet jingling on her skeletal wrist. She glances at the door number, then the card in her hand, and, shaking her head, grins her slash-mouth. “Nope.”

Are you sure?
she scribbles.

“Hanne Schubert?” She lurches toward Hanne, who takes a quick step back.

You're not coming in.

The woman shrugs her bony shoulders to her ears. “Suit yourself.” Her voice is low, grating, with a hint of an accent—Bulgarian?—and her tone amused. “Most people don't want it in the hallway.”

From the streets, thinks Hanne, getting a whiff of the woman, who smells unwashed, oily. Now Hanne sees that the woman's foundation reaches only to her jaw line; her neck is ghostly white, as white as death. There is something familiar about the woman.
Who sent you?