Translator

by Nina Schuyler

  “—is a friend indeed. Rob Peter—and pay Paul. Beggars—can’t be choosers.”

  She’s just trying to do her job, Hanne tells herself. She picks up her pen and paper: “I’m sorry.”

  The woman sighs and goes on. As the clichés pile up, she no longer waits for Hanne to respond.

  “All right. Enough. We’ll try again tomorrow.” Her tone is cheery, upbeat, but her eyes suggest otherwise.

  Anne arrives with the girls, bringing purple lilacs that send forth a lovely scent that fills her palatial room. Hanne nods, hoping they see her appreciation, her gratitude for their visit. She tries to smile, but feels only one side of her mouth twist upward.

  Sasha looks at her wide-eyed. “Mom! What’s wrong with Grandma?”

  Hanne is reminded of the fairy tale: And what big eyes you have. What a big nose, big ears. Anne, glowing with youthful health, says in her cool, collected voice, “Grandma had an accident. We discussed this on the plane.” A cut on her forehead, her nose broken, a jostle and bump on her brain.

  Sasha tentatively comes over and strokes Hanne’s arm, while Irene, happy to be out of the hold of her mother’s arms, explores the room, pulling on the cord of the shades, raising them as high as they can go. A bright light fills the room, clinging to Hanne’s white sheets. For a moment, Hanne can’t see. Anne comes over beside Sasha, casting a great shadow, slicing the bed in half. With a hand on her daughter’s head, Anne explains what happens to the brain when it hits the hard shell of the skull. She uses all the correct terminology—everything has a specific name, a name fashioned from Latin roots—even drawing a diagram on the sheet, with her finger, of the frontal lobe. Like a science experiment, thinks Hanne.

  When the brain lesson is over, Sasha looks at Hanne. “Hi, Grandma.” Her voice is shy, barely audible.

  “Grandma can’t speak,” says Anne. “You can talk to her, though.”

  She turns to her mother. “What do I say?”

  Anything, thinks Hanne. Anything at all. I’d listen to you until the end of time.

  The shades slam down, darkening the room.

  “Tell her about the science museum we went to yesterday.”

  Of course, thinks Hanne, more science. Irene runs out the door, and Anne dashes after her. As Sasha strokes the dark hairs of Hanne’s arm, she talks about dinosaur bones and sharks, dead beetles and dead squid. No, she made a mistake, alive squid with their tentacles swimming in a glass case. She reaches into her backpack and pulls out a brochure. new york science, she begins to read the fine print.

  So bright, thinks Hanne. Just like Brigitte, who, at the age of two, spoke complete intelligible sentences. And without anyone’s counsel, began to sound out words, as if she would not be denied access to the world of language. It was pure Brigitte, naturally gifted and gravitating toward sounds and words and sentences. Of course Hanne was delighted. Wasn’t this every parent’s secret dream? To give birth to a wonder? A child prodigy who might rise to unheard-of heights? That her gift was language delighted Hanne even more. Cut from the same cloth as I, thought Hanne. And something meaningful that they could share.

  “Listen to her,” Hanne whispered to Hiro as Brigitte read the stop sign. Brigitte was in the back in her car seat and they were driving to Brigitte’s music class, which wasn’t far from their home in San Francisco on Noriega Street, a house perpetually wrapped in cold fog. “Do you hear her? She’s reading. At age two.”

  Brigitte kept saying “stop” as if it were a live thing that must be rolled around in her mouth to be kept alive.

  “Did you read that early?” said Hanne.

  “Hmm. No.” Hiro was his usual restrained self. “She’s just being herself.”

  “Which is remarkable. Tomas wasn’t reading until age five.”

  “Hanne, don’t compare. They will each have their strengths and weaknesses.”

  He was right, of course, but she couldn’t help herself. Brigitte’s language ability was just one of many differences. Unlike Tomas, who came out with an elongated head because of an agonizing labor, Brigitte was a beautiful baby. Her perfectly shaped head courtesy of a Caesarean, her symmetrical sparkling eyes, her tuft of black hair, like a dark rain cloud. Tomas liked the playpen, so he could stand up and throw blocks at the wall; he was independent and strong-willed, always wanting to do things for himself. But Brigitte would swing for hours, as long as Hanne was in view. When she could walk, Brigitte trailed Hanne around the house, up and down the stairs, to the basement and into the kitchen. When suppertime came, Hanne gave Brigitte a chore—folding the napkins or stirring the pudding—so she could stay near. If Brigitte took pleasure in Hanne’s company, Hanne reciprocated. Hanne cooked and sang to her in different languages. German made Brigitte’s eyes widen; French made her smile. Japanese she imitated, saying kokonoko. Nine. At night when she’d cry out, a small whimper, it was Hanne Brigitte wanted, not her father.

  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. Thi
nk 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 di
dn’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.”

  Chapter Five

  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.