Translator

by Nina Schuyler

  She throws her dirty clothes in the hamper and surveys the bedroom, as if deciding whether to claim it. An entire wall of books. She’s read them all, but by now most of them, because of the passage of time, are reduced to a sentence in her mind. That one, a man on a long journey; the book next to it, a woman going through a hellish divorce; the next, a day at the beach and a dinner party. Condensed and summarized, they sound trivial.

  On her dresser are photographs of Tomas as a boy, of Tomas and Anne and her two granddaughters surrounded by palm trees and white sand. A holiday in Tahiti, if she remembers right; they asked her to go, but she declined. She can’t take hot sun. Because his eyes are screwed up against the light, Tomas’ smile looks half-hearted, even pained, but her granddaughters are in their bright pink bathing suits, smiling as if the world belonged to them. Hanne’s gaze drifts to the empty space, which once held Brigitte’s picture.

  She takes it out. Hanne is hugging this wisp of a girl. Already at age seven, the outer edges to her potential were far beyond her peers, beyond what Hanne ever sensed for herself. How could she not become Hanne’s receptacle for grandness? What’s most striking to Hanne, something she’s never seen before, is how dreamy and distant Brigitte looks. Her gaze is out beyond the camera—looking at what? Where did she transport herself? She was slipping from Hanne’s clutches long before Hiro died. She failed her daughter so miserably that Brigitte had to retreat far into herself, or dream herself elsewhere, anywhere but near Hanne.

  Or maybe not. How little she knows.

  She puts the photo back in its place on the dresser. When she opens her closet door to hang up her coat, she sees Brigitte’s four cardboard boxes stuffed in the corner. She opens one and looks inside. She remembers standing in that rundown lobby of the old monastery, with the dust-speckled murky light, one of Brigitte’s boxes perched on the desk of that sinister woman who ran the spiritual group.

  “I will see my daughter,” Hanne said, her voice shaking. “I will see Brigitte.”

  The woman smiled a tight, condescending smile. “Nivedita is not seeing visitors.”

  Her final retreat from Hanne—relinquishing her birth name and running straight into the arms of this group.

  She heads into her office. Her desk is swept clean of everything, a bare stretch of dark walnut oak stares ominously at her. She hesitates, hoping to prolong the sense of viewing her life from a distance. Of seeing it as someone else’s life. But as she sits in her chair, her former life rushes at her, as if all along it was crouched in a corner, waiting for her to take her usual spot so it could pounce.

  She calls Tomas’s office.

  “He’s out of the country.”

  Hanne explains who she is. “What country?”

  A pause. “I was told not to say.”

  “But I’m his mother.”

  The woman clears her throat. Another long pause. “I’m sorry.”

  He must have flown to see Brigitte. “When is he coming back?”

  “Maybe three days, he can’t say for sure.”

  She hangs up and looks around, stunned. She could call Anne, but can’t stomach more evasion, denial. She suddenly doesn’t want to be near her desk, or in her apartment or anywhere near her old life, which feels as alive as a pile of dead leaves. She grabs her coat, and, not bothering to wait for the elevator, runs down flight after flight of stairs. Winded, she steps out onto California Street and starts walking. The city is as she left it: people out with their panting dogs, children squealing in the playground, the old Russian men playing chess or checkers at their usual spot under the oak tree. There’s the same doorman at the St. Francis, the same doorman at the Top of the Mark. Probably the blue-haired lady is on the treadmill walking to nowhere, gazing out with a bored expression. The city sails onward in its constant wind. Why is she surprised it’s still here, nothing changed?

  And now there is a familiar-looking man, a slight lope to his walk. David, dressed in pressed trousers, a brown suit coat and blue tie, his hair slightly damp from a recent shower, he must be on his way to the university, which is only a couple of blocks away. They used to walk together. She looks at her watch. If she’d waited fifteen minutes, she could have missed him. She pictures her old classroom—the rows of chipped wooden desks, the fluorescent light flickering, the chalk on her hands, her clothes, in the air, up her nose. She doesn’t miss it.

  “Hanne!” He embraces her, smiling. “You’re back. How are you?”

  She begins to feel the need to walk away. But where? “I just got back.”

  “And when did your English decide to return?”

  An image comes to her: she is standing in a field, beckoning to the hills, trying to lure her English from its hideout. That’s as strange as the story she tells him about the generous Japanese man who spoke a steady stream of English, the fake beach, the bad translation of Macbeth, the note from a Japanese girl.

  “The doctors will be puzzling over you for years,” he says, smiling. “Do you feel like your old self again? Everything in its place?”

  She gives him a simple pragmatic response, mostly because she wants to be on her way: her lifeline to the doorman, the postman, the grocer has been restored, she says. But there’s something more that she doesn’t try to convey. Nor can she, because it remains inchoate—it has to do with possibilities and the need for something richer, more meaningful.

  He takes hold of her hand. “You look spectacular. Do you have time for a quick cup of coffee?” He gestures behind him to a café. She sees that look in his eye. Inside the café are big, comfortable chairs, only a few patrons, a fire burning in the hearth. She smells brewed coffee. She has all the time in the world, but she doesn’t want to spend it with him, with anyone. Standing here, she is aware of the thinnest of threads running from him to her. He’s a kind man, but how little she’s survived on. Like thin gruel.

  “Unfortunately, I’ve got to run,” she says. “A possible job translating.” Someone said—who was it?—that to say “no” to reality is one of the greatest ways to endure. So, she tells herself, she’s enduring.

  “Wonderful!” He looks disproportionately happy, as if he might hug her again.

  “It’s nothing grand, just a translation of some documents. Government documents. A big stack.” She pauses. “And maybe a book of poems. Japanese love poems.” Listen to her!

  He kisses her on the cheek. “I’ll call you. We can get together.” He winks at her. “I’ve missed you terribly.”

  Of course there is no interview, no job waiting for her. Though mentioning it has stirred her up.

  She calls Anne. After congratulating Hanne on the return of her English, Anne’s voice becomes somber. “I’ve always hated this secrecy, this arrangement between Brigitte and Tomas,” says Anne, but before Hanne’s hope has a chance to flutter, she adds, “but it’s not my role to dismantle it.”

  “You can at least tell me if he left in a hurry?”

  “I’m not the one to do this. You’ll have to talk to Tomas.” Her voice is stern, as if she’s admonishing a deviant child. Then she sighs. “Perhaps this time he’ll break this awful code of silence.”

  “Do you have a phone number for him?”

  A pause. “I’ll have him call you when he gets home.”

  Sasha is suddenly on the line, telling Hanne that her mom has been reading to her about beetles. “The beetles camouflage themselves and you can’t see them,” says Sasha, her voice flush with excitement, pouncing on each word. “You have to look really hard and wait until they move. But I saw one in the back yard!”

  Anne comes back on the phone. “We’re heading out for the Hall of Science. Sasha wants to see the insect collection.”

  Or did you go on and on about the insects, subtly and craftily shaping Sasha’s interest? Magically, Sasha thinks she’s the sole originator of this desire, when it is you, Anne. Hanne can’t restrain herself: “What if she grows up and despises science?”

  Anne pauses. “I just want her
to know that that world exists and she has choices.”

  Hanne recalls saying something similar about Brigitte and languages. She hangs up before she becomes a nag, a bad mother-in-law, though it’s probably too late for that now.

  Hanne must busy herself or she’ll go mad. If she had a garden, she’d go out and put her hands into the dirt. Wasn’t that her mother’s refuge when Hanne became too much for her? When the world was too much? The fury with which she attended to her garden yielded an abundance of green beans, tomatoes, and lettuce.

  There’s her play to think about. It seems so long since she’s looked at it because, truly, the project has come to depress her.

  With a sigh, she pulls out her pages. There’s Ono no Komachi, living out a steady drumbeat of days, one the same as the other. Another poem scratched out that no one bothers to read, stuffed in a box. By now, her small hut is packed with boxes of poems. Ono no Komachi writes one, flings it in the box—even she doesn’t bother reading it, for she knows it falls far short of what she means to say. How come it’s so difficult to write about things as they are?

  But that’s it. Hanne has reached the limits of her imagination. What’s the ending? The one ending that seems most likely: a steady deterioration to her lonely death, her body crumpled over her latest poem. The world gets along just fine without her. Who would want to watch that?

  How much easier to return the poet to her glory days, the glory of youth. She pulls out another sheet of paper. For a long time she sits there before thinking, What about a Noh play, but for a Western audience? Ono no Komachi in a mask, a mask covered with hundreds of words, random words. She finds inspiration for a poem by plucking from the mask a single word. “Water,” and her mind alights, races off to write a poem. “Pine tree,” another poem. “Betrayal,” another. Day after day, a word chosen, a poem springs to life.

  She is not alone in her hut. She’s haunted by ghosts—the illustrious dead poets are with her, wearing white gowns and white masks empty of words. They are whispering in her ear. Is the poet writing to please the ghosts? Are the ghosts her audience? Not at all. Early on, they were welcome. But by now they are weary, meddling companions who she wishes would go away.

  Why, then, put pen to paper? Why bother trying to fit words to the feeling of loneliness? Of love? Misunderstanding? Not for the ghosts, not for any readers waiting in the wings. There are none. Certainly she has other options. Hanne imagines marriage, children, grandchildren, friends. But Ono no Komachi does not choose this path, because it would be a betrayal. She can’t disavow what feels like her heart’s sole desire. She is here for one thing, not imposed by anyone but herself; she is, and always has been, circumscribed by herself. No choice in the matter; for, if a certain measure of happiness, a certain modicum of meaning is to be had in this world, it’s through the arrangement of words into beautiful rhythms and sounds—the writing of poetry that no one cares about. It’s as if she’s in a small room making precise, detailed figurines out of crystal that no one wants, no one will ever buy. That is her life sentence, which she must live out to the very end.

  Hanne pushes aside her notes and puts her head down on her desk. It has been so long since she’s thoroughly immersed herself in the careful movement of words from one language to the other, weighing each word in her hand like a precious stone, the tone, the meaning, the context, then searching for its equivalent. At some point, she will have a sentence, melodic or anxious, liquid or jagged—whatever is required—and she’ll run it through her mouth by saying it out loud.

  She knows everything is made to perish, but why this? Why couldn’t her work as a translator have waited until she could no longer hold pen in hand?

  It has been so long. The passive voice, a passive verb, present perfect; she is not the agent, but the object of the sentence, the world acting upon her. She once chastised Moto and Brigitte for their lack of agency, but what about herself? Why has she denied herself this pleasure, when she has so few? Because she’s been a coward, beaten down by a steady stream of self-castigations. But more than that: doubt—doubt that, if she tried again, she could do any better, so the only choice was to move forward.

  She knows what sentence she will begin with even before she opens the desk drawer and pulls it out. Kobayashi wrote: As his wife showered, the first time in a week, Jiro fled to the moon-filled garden. Each day his wife’s health deteriorated, Jiro became more distant.

  How did she translate this? “Fled” became “went,” to emphasize that Jiro had choices, and he chose to go. But how much choice did he really have? If Moto has taught her anything, it is how easily the mind’s equanimity can be swallowed up by grief.

  “Distant” became “despondent.” Despondent, to give up, lose heart, resign. She wanted to be more precise, but it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? A swarm of emotions—longing, anger, bewilderment, loneliness, guilt, humor—crowding into the gaping chasm between two people who love each other.

  She saw that in Moto, his ever-changing emotional landscape. So much like Brigitte. How a mood could settle in, but then lift, by the seemingly most inconsequential thing. She remembers Brigitte spending an afternoon in a park collecting Japanese maple leaves. When they’d arrived, Brigitte was sulking about something, but two hours later, she didn’t want to leave. Each leaf had its own display of colors—red, green, yellow, and brown. And that brought her infinite delight.

  She turns to the beginning of the manuscript and pulls out a pen. Crosses out an unnecessary word. Step by step, she works slowly, methodically, and the hours tick by. She reads a sentence out loud, her ear tuned to the euphony or discord.

  They wore the same gowns to the costume party, though hers showed off her shapely calves. She translated “same” to “identical.” The four lively, bouncing syllables, i-den-ti-cal, to capture a joyful moment between Jiro and his wife before the calamity. A good decision, she thinks, feeling better about herself, but then she flips to another page: His mouth tasted foul, his back stiff.

  After his stiff back, she inserted They could do more for his wife than he. That’s what he told himself. Kobayashi placed these sentences later in the scene, but she moved them here to show his unwavering belief that he was doing the right thing for his wife. And she added That’s what he told himself, what he knew. But maybe in that moment, he wouldn’t be thinking so clearly; maybe he was in shock, so conflicted and torn apart, his reason could provide no comfort. He didn’t know if he was doing the right thing. Maybe he even doubted he was doing the right thing. But he did it anyway, so weary of his wife and her need for constant tending. Hanne had set the wheels of a machine turning, and then there was the stern woman telling Hanne: “We’ll take care of it. Just go.”

  It’s late at night, the city quiet with only the occasional siren, and Hanne keeps following Jiro deeper into his sadness. He’s at wits’ end, watching his wife’s decline, and the doctors say nothing is wrong with her, it’s all in her head. Each day brings less of her, too weak to lift a fork, to comb her hair, brush her teeth, sometimes she can’t even make it to the toilet. He’s losing her. He doesn’t recognize her, he doesn’t recognize himself. This is not the life he wants! But what can he do?

  Few of us get the lives we want, she murmurs to Jiro. She’s surprised at her tone, not chastising or cold but gentle and soft and patient. That enticing illusion that everything is possible, how difficult it is to let it go. But it was never the case, we were never infinite possibilities. We were never wholly divine.

  I can’t sleep, says Jiro. Her demons are becoming mine. There’s nothing solid separating us. I don’t recognize myself.

  Hanne looks up, startled. These words are not in the text. For the first time, she hears him speak. He is speaking to her. She has heard writers talk about how characters take on lives of their own. She has always written it off as a romanticized version of writing. Perhaps it is, but there is no denying that she is hearing Jiro speak to her. As if he’s in the room, his head in his hand
s.

  This stillness, this deadness inside. His voice wobbles and comes to Hanne as a moan. When she looks at me, she doesn’t really see me. I take her to the park and sit beside the river to feed the geese. But she sees none of it. Not the geese, not the water, not me. I am so tired.

  That’s what the ache is, isn’t it? she says back to him.

  My heart is done with the human realm. I don’t want daylight or the color of deep green. I despise a world that would take her from me. The world feels broken.

  Hanne rests her cheek on the manuscript. She hears Brigitte speaking now, right after Hiro died. I’m broken, Mom. I feel broken inside. I don’t want to fix it because I can’t.

  Sunder, everything is asunder, murmurs Hanne. You are losing your dearest one, Jiro. Your heart will feel broken for a long time, perhaps forever.

  I no longer want a place here at the banquet. His voice is pleading, desperate. I am lost without her. Her breath was mine.

  Nothing makes sense, she says. There’s no understanding it.

  She sits with him, tries to comfort him as he cries out She’s deserting me. How can she do this to me? I am lost without her.

  Chapter Twenty

  The phone rings. Hanne is standing at her huge blackboard, considering the Japanese word “ma.” How to convey in English—a language with forceful directness and flat assertions like punches to the arm—a pause in a conversation pulsing with as much meaning as a spoken word? She is nearly finished re-translating Kobayashi’s novel. The phone rings and rings until she can no longer ignore it.