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by Nina Schuyler


  A Japanese man in a dark gray suit stops and stands right beside the cherry tree. He lights a cigarette. Hanne is watching the smoke spiral and dissipate when the man’s arms curve in front of him and he begins to waltz, the familiar 1-2-3 pattern, around the tree, as if dancing with an invisible partner. Hanne stands to get a better view. She can’t see his expression; only now and then does he suck on his cigarette, exhaling a plume of gray smoke, as if his body is overheating and letting off steam. She watches, entranced by the public display of a private world.

  After she found Brigitte dancing with that first boy, Hanne stood in her doorjamb, hands on her hips, and Brigitte cried that he was the only one who truly loved her, who truly understood her, now that Dad was gone. Brigitte’s face was wet with tears. “He loves me,” said Brigitte, “and I love him.” Hanne’s mind spun a hundred retorts: fleeting first love, it held you in its grubby grip, fumbling, a moment of pleasure that quickly vanished when someone new and shinier came along and that was the end of that. And just as that comeback faded, along rushed in—how could everything I’ve done for you—out of love!—be so casually and carelessly tossed out? Am I nothing to you? And are you having sex? You’re still a child, for God’s sake, so you’d better not, but the way Brigitte was looking at her with teary eyes, as if Hanne had just ripped out her heart, she knew Brigitte had and she would again. “I hope you’re using protection,” said Hanne icily. “Being a mother is hard work.”

  She was aware that she was being hypocritical. She, too, had been sexually active around Brigitte’s age, but the word “love” wasn’t part of it. Hanne was never in love with these boys. Love and girls were a dangerous mix. Love entered and a girl thought, why not a baby? It became even more dangerous when a girl believed it was true love and he was the only one in the entire world who loved her. He, who said he loved her, who would leave when it wasn’t so fun anymore, when there was a crying baby at 3:00 a.m. and again at 4:00.

  Now she regrets that. Her quick, angry retort. She could have explained herself better, could have told Brigitte her fears. The man waltzing outside abruptly stops. Looks up at the hotel windows, as if suddenly aware that someone might be watching. Does he see her? Is that why he departs in short rapid steps?

  She’s back in the doorjamb. Brigitte answered back just as sharply: “You just make mothering hard. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  Hanne looks down and sees she’s crumpling the conference program, the cover of which is scattered with words in all different languages. Flipping through it, she reads the names of her fellow conferees, most of whom she does not know. She hesitates before turning to her listing: a professor at Colbert University, a long-time translator, whose work has received “rave reviews” from critics, who call her translations “music to the ear, you forget the original was written in Japanese.”

  Something settles inside. She made the right decision to come here, she thinks. She finds Yukio Kobayashi’s name. “An acclaimed Japanese novelist who is about to make his debut in America with the English version of Trojan Horse Trips, which in Japan sold over 1 million copies. Called a tour de force by The Japan Times, a stunning debut by Asahi Shimbun.” “Kobayashi peers into the soul of Japan. His language is charged and playful and poetic.” He is scheduled to speak tomorrow.

  She calls Tomas and tells him she’s arrived safely. Everything’s fine. It’s lovely.

  He pauses. “I wish you hadn’t gone. Anything might happen.”

  “Such as?”

  “What if you fall again?” She’s startled to hear his voice, now astonishingly bare, stripped of its authority, the voice of a small boy who used to play for hours with his Matchbox cars, lining them in neat little rows. “Your languages aren’t all back. Something isn’t right.”

  “Please, Tomas, I’m sure you have many other things to worry about.”

  “I just don’t think you should have gone.” The overlay of irritation has returned to his voice. She imagines him rubbing his eyelids, pinching the bridge of his nose.

  “I’m fine. By the way, I’ll get to meet Kobayashi.”

  “I hope it goes well.”

  “Of course it will.”

  “Well, he certainly has taken his time getting back to you.”

  She sighs. When did he become such a worrier?

  Tomas says he’ll be traveling for the next week or so. An unexpected trip. They leave it that she will call if she needs him. Jet-lagged, she falls into a deep sleep. A man’s face appears, but the face is missing eyes, mouth, and nose. She hunts everywhere for his features, in the tall grasses, cupboards, a swimming pool, hunting in a methodical way, not frantic or even particularly fearful. She hears herself calling for the man. The man waits calmly, pushing back his cuticles. Toward early morning, she settles into what feels like another long dream. She’s leaning over to blow out hundreds of candles on a cake, a birthday cake, hers—how did she get to be so old?—leaning so close that she feels the heat of the flames on her face, smells the burning wax, hissing as it melts, and she’s planning to blow the candles out in one big whoosh—“Make a Wish!” when her hair catches on fire. Crackling and sizzling, and she’s shouting for help, running madly, trying to find water—water!—faster and faster, the stench of burning hair thick in the air, her ears filled with the whir of the flames and wind.

  She wakes to the air conditioner running full blast and morning’s white light. It must have turned on automatically. It’s cold in the room. What could the dream have meant? She looks around, locating herself in time and place. The dream was in Japanese. It has been years since she’s dreamed in Japanese. But she has no time to ponder this. It’s morning, and if she’s going to take a walk before her presentation, she needs to leave now.

  Weaving her way through throngs of people, mostly businessman in gray suits and heavy coats, she catches snippets of conversation, “—tomatoes . . . ripe—”; “—trip to—” “—work on Saturday—” and as she strides at a brisk pace to stay warm, she feels part of the great big beat again, part of progress up Uchisaiwaicho Street, past the shops with jade bracelets and skimpy skirts. As she reads more signs, she becomes aware of a change in her brain. Prior to the fall down the marble stairs, a second or two had lapsed between reading a Japanese word and recalling its meaning. It felt like following a bridge that attached the word to its meaning. The more obscure the word, the longer the bridge. Now there is no searching, no bridge. She knows the Japanese word and simultaneously knows the meaning. No need to search for meaning in English. For the first time, she’s living inside this language. As if this were her native tongue, as if she had been born and raised here.

  At a construction site, a crane smashes a wrecking ball into a building. Walls of brick collapse, windows shatter, support beams tumble, and up rise great plumes of gray dust. She can see straight into the building now—office cubicles with gray carpet, filing cabinets, an employee lunch room with a bright, white refrigerator, a photocopy machine, a water cooler. Another woman comes up beside her.

  “Soon it will all be gone,” Hanne says to the woman wearing a black cardigan sweater.

  “So desu ne.”

  They stand there together watching.

  “Then something new,” says the woman, who points to a picture of the new building posted on a board near the sidewalk. From the rubble a fifty-story building with bluish-tinted glass. “Kireina,” beautiful.

  They chat about it a bit longer—why this design, who thought of it, marvelous, isn’t it?—with Hanne taking pleasure in the ease of conversing and watching her mood shift to something lighter, even buoyant, from the simplicity of interaction with another human being. She finds out this woman is a secretary and is worried about losing her job. “The world can be a difficult place,” says Hanne.

  “So desu ne.”

  On her way back to the hotel, she stops into a department store to buy gifts for her granddaughters, two kokeshi wooden dolls, with big round heads and cylindrical bodies. Not
particularly cuddly, nor can they do much—they lack arms or legs—but they are traditional Japanese dolls, staring at you with bright black eyes that will never blink, as if they don’t want to miss even an instant of life. “For my granddaughters,” she says to the shop clerk. The clerk smiles and points to candy shaped like sushi. Made out of gummy, says the clerk. Hanne adds it to her basket. On impulse, she also buys a bottle of black hair dye.

  Three phone messages from Amaya are waiting—“Does Ms. Schubert need anything?” “Please contact if you need anything.” “If there’s anything Ms. Schubert needs.” Wrapped in red cellophane on the coffee table, there’s a gift basket overflowing with rice and seaweed crackers, Satsuma oranges, chewing gum, Pocky Shock, chocolate pretzels, and red apples. A small note is tucked between the apples, “Welcome to Japan!” from the Ministry of Culture.

  She slices into quarters what is probably a $5 apple in this expensive island of a country, where most everything is imported; she tries to eat each section as a Japanese person would, savoring it, like a treasure, a luxury, but to her it’s just an apple and she’s hungry.

  She steps into the bathroom. Her hair has always been nondescript, the color of mud, she called it, though at the beginning of their marriage Hiro referred to it as beautiful dark cinnamon and made her promise not to change it. When she began to go gray, she dyed it and tried to match her natural color. But that was long ago—is that why she’s pulling on the thin latex gloves and rubbing in dye? Or is it that she’s in a different country with a language she speaks exclusively and doesn’t quite feel herself? Against the emerging darkness of her hair, her pale skin glows; her green eyes are darker, a forest green. For a long time she stares at herself in the mirror. Not mesmerized by beauty—that would be too generous—but the sense that she’s both herself and someone else, both the subject and the object.

  She puts on what she calls her performance suit—a dark gray skirt and jacket, a white blouse—and clip-on gold earrings. With her new black hair, she would have to call herself striking.

  She has ten minutes before she’s due downstairs. As she dries her hair, she reads over her lecture notes. Written during the eleven-hour flight, she must have been under a spell of sustained optimism. She’s about to give her audience a glowing picture of the wonderful powers of translation, an elixir to the human tragedy. There’s no mention of the difficulties, the inability to do a literal translation, the issue of fidelity—to what? To whom? She can’t do anything about it now, and she’s not sure she wants to.

  In the cavernous conference room, only a smattering of chairs are filled. Well, she’ll give her talk, collect her fee, and that will be that. She hopes Kobayashi isn’t in a rush, so maybe they can go to dinner tonight. Amaya is wearing a red suit coat and a red skirt. A good-luck suit. Amaya motions to her that it’s time. Hanne is introduced with fanfare, a renowned translator, an impeccable speaker of Japanese as well as many other languages.

  When Hanne steps onto the stage and to the podium, she is unexpectedly overcome with stage fright. The blinding bright light makes it impossible to see out to the audience; and in that gap, her panicked mind imagines that everyone is intently watching her, waiting for her to fail.

  “Welcome. Thank you for coming. Let me begin with a personal anecdote,” she says, her voice cracking from nerves. “Early on, I was drawn to making sense of the incomprehensible. When I was seven years old living in Holland with my parents, I invented a language, which I called Lombot. It contained 72 characters and was syllabic. I wrote plays and stories in this strange language that looked a bit like Arabic and sounded—I found out later—Japanese. At the dinner table, my parents asked me to translate, which I did with great joy, turning Lombot into Dutch or German, depending on their preference that evening. It was my first experience with the joy of translation, my first encounter with the translator’s array of alternatives. This activity brought great pleasure to my parents, who, between them, spoke thirteen languages. We were like a familial United Nations, though our negotiations usually concerned my failure to clean my room.”

  There’s a titter in the audience, which relaxes her a little. But she feels exposed, so vulnerable. She normally doesn’t talk about herself. She tries to calm herself down by remembering why she’s doing this—she was terribly lonely. And the money is a help. At least here she can speak, and right now she’s speaking too fast, but at least her hand is no longer shaking. There’s no elegant way to segue from her private disclosure to her prepared speech except to proceed.

  “For centuries, people have posited that we once spoke only one language, an Ur-Sprache. With this language, we understood each other with perfect ease. This language supposedly contained the original Logos, the words giving us direct knowledge of the nature of things, providing an intimacy with the world that we can’t even begin to fathom today. This first language gave us not a representation of reality, but reality itself. Words spoke not of things, but the truth; and it was with this language that man once had total understanding of the world and of each other.”

  Her throat is dry. She pauses to sip water. Is anyone listening? Is anyone there?

  “But when we were tossed out of Eden, our true home, and later when the mythical Tower of Babel fell, we lost this language and our understanding of the world. Besides creating the question—what’s the meaning of our existence—as Humboldt said, ‘all understanding became at the same time a misunderstanding, all agreement in thought and feeling is also a parting of the ways.’”

  She hears movement in the room, hushed voices, but she can’t tell what’s going on. A door opens and slams shut.

  “How to access this common language again? Is it possible? For centuries this question has plagued us. In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus believed divine intervention would restore the unity of human tongues. Not wanting to wait, the Royal Society of London commissioned a man to create a universal language, which was so complicated that its only suitable purpose was to be satirized by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels.

  “Some posit the language after Babel can never lead us to our primal tongue—only silence will do that. Remember Kafka’s narrator in ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,’ who asks ‘Is it her singing that enchants us, or is it not rather the solemn stillness enclosing her frail little voice?’”

  Metal scrapes against metal, followed by a long hiss. Is someone opening a can of soda? Too rude to be Japanese; probably an American who wandered into the conference hall and is eating his lunch. Will the crunch of potato chips follow? The ring of a cell phone? The grunts of monosyllabic speech?

  “To date, no one has located this first language, the language of home, if you will. Translation, then, is a necessary evil; but for our exile, we’d have no need for it. Then again,” she says, feeling an old excitement dust itself off, “perhaps translation is also our blessing.”

  This is what she used to believe, what she used to argue as a student to others about the importance of her subject matter. Why bother mastering so many languages? they’d ask. No one cares about translation anymore. You could do so many other things. The State Department. The United Nations. Years have gone by since she offered up her reason for choosing her profession. “Maybe it holds the key to our understanding each other, to the meaning of our world.”

  Sweat trickles from her underarms down her sides. There’s a flurry of footsteps on the hardwood floor. Are they reprimanding the soda drinking? Escorting the rude gaijin to the door?

  “Might it be that a translation from language A into language B creates a third presence—almost like the birth of a baby, pure, uncontaminated, truer? Might that third presence hold the essence of what lies underneath both languages? As evidence, consider what it takes to move language A over to language B—it is a search for the true meaning of the words. A hunt for what lies buried under colloquialism, culture, gender, age, all the layers of skin on a language. If our first common language was scattered around the world, might
we come closer to it if we combined the two languages and formed another entity based on meaning? A purer speech. Translation then is about the birth not of A or B but C. And C, it could be argued, is the closest we get to truth.”

  She goes on for a while longer, talking about language C, but her voice is fading. Somehow she’s lost her original enthusiasm. She senses that something in the room has stirred, flexed. She finishes quickly and looks up, removing her glasses. A smattering of applause.

  Well, that’s done. When she steps down from the stage, a Japanese man is waiting for her at the bottom of the wood steps. He’s frail, bony, almost delicate in his tan trousers and dark brown sweater vest.

  “You are Hanne Schubert?” he says.

  She smiles, nods, slips her glasses back on. “Yes. And you are?”

  The man smells of cigarette smoke.

  “What you speak of. It’s idiotic. This idea that translation is purer than what the author creates.”

  Her mind goes blank. She had imagined him as a younger man, full of vitality.

  Kobayashi takes a deep breath. “You may be a very well-educated woman, speaking Japanese and English and other languages and all that, but what you have done is wrong.”

  A couple of people nearby stop talking. Hanne feels them listening.

  “You were supposed to translate my words, my story, not rewrite it and make your own story in the hopes of uniting mankind. I don’t know where you get your ideas about translation, but no author in his right mind would want you to translate his work. I put my trust in you to bring my story to the English-speaking world. My story. Not yours.”

  Now a small crowd has gathered. Hanne feels her face burning.

  “There’s only the author,” he says, his voice rising. “You don’t exist without me. That’s something you seem to have forgotten.”

 

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