by Nike Sulway
After she left I did as she’d suggested: showered, changed, walked. There was an umbrella hanging inside, near the door of the apartment. I bought coffee and sandwiches at a small café, relieved that the staff spoke enough English to understand my request to take the coffee away, and hurried back to the apartment to work on my paper.
I flicked through the conference proceedings. Many of the papers’ titles were impenetrable to me. I flicked over to the abstracts, which only made things worse. It was as if the authors spoke another language altogether. Would they ask questions using these terms? Would they be disappointed to find I could not speak their language? I had made some changes to my paper during the flight – nothing major – but meeting Elizabeth had made me feel uncertain. At home, the paper had seemed fine: elegant, informed, generous, intelligent. Elizabeth’s last email had been flattering, almost relieved, and I had allowed myself to think that what I had written was good enough.
I had no desire to be the dancing bear act: the fool whose attempts at seriousness only made him appear more foolish. Elizabeth had said that more than three hundred people had registered for my session. There were sections of the paper I had written up only in note form, thinking that it would be easy enough to talk from memory about the process Morgan and I shared, but now I was not so sure. The notes swam before my eyes, blurring. I was too tired to think, to write, to sleep, to read. I checked the time on the clock Elizabeth had left for me.
It was only one in the afternoon; the light was wet and cool. Soft glare bounced off the windows of the other apartments. I pulled closed the curtains and sat on the lounge with a printout of the paper, determined to flesh out the gaps I had left. I slumped on the uncomfortable cushions thinking, vaguely, that perhaps I would fall ill overnight and Dr North could deliver the paper on my behalf.
I once worked on translating a work left incomplete when its author died. A woman brought it to me at the shop one summer afternoon. It was a handwritten manuscript in a series of buff folders tied together with cotton tape. There were blank pages, notes he’d written to himself on index cards or scrawled up the sides of the printout: Write about Stanley and the herring boats; That time when Helen had the terrible TAO here; loving Julia; cf. that passage from Goethe in blue notebook. The manuscript was his memoir, written in a language she couldn’t speak or read, riddled with gaps that would never be filled. But the thing itself was beautiful, enigmatic. His handwriting was exquisite, and the margins often filled with pale, fine-lined and haunting sketches of the people and places he wrote about. Flowers long dead, clouds that had passed by overhead while he lay in a park. Rain falling on a woman’s hat.
Looking back over my life’s work, I could see that I had been too concerned with the form of things, rather than the things themselves, and had paid too little attention to what the form conceals. Morgan’s works had given a shape to my life, and to our relationship. All these years I had been concerned with the to and fro of our translations; the warp and weft out of which the works were formed, and not enough with the works themselves. I had left it to others to say what it all means, despite my certainty that the intimacy of translation is greater than that of any other reading. That I knew – as no other ever will – what his works truly mean.
Lying on the couch, with the light seeping in between the pale curtains, I began another paper altogether. One in which, instead of speaking of our roles, of the way we work, the structure of the language, the history of Nahum, I spoke about the work itself. Not about bringing it over, but about what it is, what it says, who it is for.
I drifted off to sleep without writing anything of substance and woke in the dark, the curtains closed, in a strange room in a strange country. For a moment things seemed familiar, but then I heard the traffic and the birds, the soft suck and hush of foreign voices lifting towards the windows, the sounds of wooden boats butting against stone walls, water lapping at their hulls. Outside the window there were parks and lakes, dykes and canals. The water was green and grey. The temperature made it seem slower, surer, more patient. It was cold in the bare, hospitable room.
I got up and went into the kitchen for a glass of water without turning on any of the lights. The water twisting out of the tap glittered like a stream of wet stars. I could smell it already – the green wrack of Europe’s enfolding water.
The water of home smells of greenstick wildness, of burned-clean skies and summer rain, but here the water was darker, older, less forgiving. The rain was a slow grey drizzle. Low fogs mingled with the breath of the dead, misting up onto the pavements, twirling around the ankles of the living. A dyke is not a river, with a grassed bank and a willow leaning over it. You cannot wade down into its mangroves, feeling the mud squelch between your toes. The rim of a dyke is a stone wall, and the water that flows in it tastes a little of blood and old earth. If you go down to the water and lean out, if you put your hands in it, you can feel the cold hands of the dead reach towards your fingertips like weeds.
I could not drink a glass of water there without tasting my brother’s death. Without seeing the dyke’s heavy waters close over him, the weedy hands of the ancient dead reaching up to tangle and claim him. The green waters blurring him, pulling him down until his skin was like a dream – a flash of something drifting and twitching in the deep.
In the seventeenth century, people believed that the swallows of Europe spent their winters congealed underwater: a lumpen mass of tiny bodies, featherless, stopped. If a fisherman drew up the gelatinous mass through a hole punched in the ice, it could be hung in front of a fire and the birds revived. In the fisherman’s smoke-darkened kitchen they would flap damply, then fly free, circling the room until he opened a window to release them into the winter air. According to one story, Monsieur Achard was travelling down the Rhine to Rotterdam in the 1700s when he saw some boys being lowered down the face of the cliffs to fish hibernating swallows out of their hiding places. The boys were lowered head-first at the end of long ropes, like tiny replicas of the tarot’s hanged man. Achard purchased one of the torpid birds from the boys and tucked it into his shirt, against his bare skin, as women sometimes do with babies born too soon. The bird lay still for a half-hour before it caught his heat, twitched and quickened. He pulled the bird out, holding it firmly in both hands to admire its elongated outer tail feathers, the dusky steel blue of its coat and bib, its ruddy face. Its revived heart beat quickly and lightly against his palms for a moment before the bird escaped.
Once a brace of six swallows was found in a hollow, sleeping the feathered sleep of the dead. Rather than allow them to quicken in the winter air and be lost too soon, they were placed in the drawer of a desk for safekeeping. Perhaps the owner of the desk opened the drawer occasionally, putting his hand in to stroke the feathered breasts and curled feet. Taking one out and turning it over slowly in his hands, studying its shape, uncurling its talons, ruffling its feathers and smoothing them down again. Feeling its heart beat slowly against the hot palm of his hand. Eventually, spring came, and though the room got very little sun, and the desk was heavy and dark, the swallows began to flutter and clatter in their drawer and the man regretfully stood up from his desk, opened a window, and let them go.
There is so little to remember, after all, and so little to be said. In a room not far from where I was staying, Morgan once sat and wrote. The next day I would walk into a room where a crowd of people knew as much about him as I did. Their belief in his existence was a balm and a wound: a soft needle diving for veins and finding nerves, pinking and piercing the illusion that he is dead, and that he is not. That he is merely lost, or sleeping. That one day I will sift him up out of the dark and hold him before he quickens, flutters in my hands, and leaves.
Though I had worked hard to believe in his death, in that city he was appallingly close.
I put my empty glass on the sink, opened the curtains and let in the ghastly light. On the street below me umbrellas bobbed and ducked around each other. Occasionally, I saw
someone without one: their coat pulled up around their ears, hands shoved deep in their pockets as they hurried along the clean, hushed streets. Any one of them could have been him. His dark hair tousled and stiffened into feathers by the cold air. His cheeks rubbed pink by the wind.
A man turned in to the street and hesitated. Looked up at the window where I was standing. He was far away, blurred by rain and distance, but my unfaithful heart lurched with the certainty that it was him. That he had been fished up out of the dark and quickened, heated into premature, resurrected life. That he had put on again the heavy coat of flesh, and was coming to meet me.
*
It was Saturday during the semester break, and the campus was largely empty of students. A few foreign exchange students wandered about and, when we passed a computer lab, we saw them huddled in rows, sitting in collaborative isolation in front of the screens. Finally, we reached the conference venue. An open space filled with academics sipping coffee from caterer’s cups. A registration desk. A temporary bookshop. People watched us enter: a man smiled at Elizabeth and raised his cup to her. A small group of women nodded and smiled as we passed. I felt like a bear being led on a silver chain through the king’s court.
The room in which I was to present was a modern lecture theatre with tiered seating. There were enormous white screens behind a long presenter’s desk, which had a blinking array of equipment packed in beneath it. Elizabeth logged in and set up the slide presentation, asked if I wanted to use a lapel mike. I was fine, I said, my head pounding. It was hard to imagine the auditorium filled with people. I was trying to decide which would be worse: a full house, or an empty one.
She stood in front of me, fixing the microphone to my shirt like a debutante’s corsage. ‘Do you want to test it?’ she said. ‘One, two. One, two.’
‘Is there time for a coffee before we start?’ I said.
She tilted her head to the side. For a moment, absurdly, she reminded me of Ana, though her hair was blonde and short and she was tall: as tall as me in her flat shoes. She tucked the transmitter for the microphone into the pocket of my jacket. I could smell her perfume: something clean and light, like pure soap. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Are you nervous?’
I nodded and grimaced. ‘I’m not used to public speaking.’
She brought me a glass of water and asked me to hold out my hand. ‘Here,’ she said, placing two small white tablets in my palm and leaning in to whisper to me. ‘My dirty little secret.’
‘I don’t –’
‘They’re beta-blockers,’ she said. ‘Harmless. They’ll help you relax a little.’
The door to the lecture theatre opened. A young woman with a folder and an orange lanyard greeted Elizabeth. ‘Ready, Professor North?’ she said. Elizabeth nodded and took my arm, leading me towards the chair and table at the front of the room. The young woman spoke into a walkie-talkie and latched the doors open. A small group of academics wandered in and took their seats, chattering to each other. I took a sip of the water and one of the pills, pocketing the other. At first, I counted the people as they entered, but soon lost count. They came and came. Unfamiliar faces, chattering, some still flushed with cold, rubbing their hands together, taking their seats. The hall was overflowing. Younger students sat on the stairs at the side of the room. Extra chairs were brought in. I refilled my water glass and took the other tablet.
The young woman closed the doors and dimmed the lights. Elizabeth introduced me and stood behind the lectern, clicking through the slides as I talked. During my talk, the audience seemed alert to something I was not saying. As though behind me a child or a fool was peeking at them. I resisted the urge to turn around too often, though I glanced back as each new slide flashed up. They laughed politely, took notes, whispered to each other. One fellow towards the back was leaning back with his eyes closed and a folded newspaper pressed to his chest. Perhaps sleeping. I became convinced that another man, about three rows in, was doing a crossword. When he frowned and stared at the page, I had an urge to ask him what clue it was that had him stumped.
It was easy, after all, even pleasurable, to have an audience who sat and listened to me talk about our work. I spoke about how Morgan’s writing had filled and extended my own life over so many years. How the language we had created as children, and the culture within which it lived, were in a state of constant flux and change. How in Nahum, as perhaps in the real world, languages did not create culture or thought, nor did thought or culture create language. To think of the flow of invention or influence in this way was to misunderstand the complexity of linguistic and cultural, perhaps even human, evolution. Instead, I argued, there was a constant back and forth – a constant productive tension – between the domains of language, culture and thought. Language does not restrict thought; culture does not constrain language. Not in any absolute sense. It is not true to say that in a language, like Nahum, where there are no words for death, death cannot be understood. That a life lost is never grieved. Or that a language of grief cannot emerge. Any more than it is true to assert that a culture without a grammar of war is irrevocably pacific.
Unlike the dead languages, whose grammars and lexicons are frozen in time, whose cultures are extinct, the language and culture of Nahum, though imaginary, are subject to the same laws of flux as those of other living languages. The paracosm of Nahum goes cycling on according to the simple fixed laws on which it was built: adapting and evolving from this simple foundation endless new forms of speech, action, and intention. New thoughts create the need for new facets of language, and the opportunity for new cultural acts and artefacts. New aspects of language open up new ways of writing, thinking, being. And new experiences create the need for new language and thoughts. The connections between language, culture and thought form a complex, multiple, messy web. At the centre of all this is the human, which is everywhere in Morgan’s work. Language, culture and thought pass through the medium of the human, of the individual, who is – however overwhelmed and infinitesimal – a necessary medium for mutation and change.
When I had finished speaking there was an abrupt and surprisingly loud burst of applause, after which Elizabeth came and sat beside me, asking if there were any questions or comments from the floor. I sipped at my water, peering up at the ranked men and women. A smattering of hands shot up into the air, and Elizabeth nodded at someone. ‘Hank,’ she said.
Hank stood, thanked me, and introduced himself before bringing his glasses down onto the end of his nose and reading from his notepad. He was young and thin and pale. He was wearing a dark jacket that looked borrowed, over an unironed shirt. He looked more like a hung-over student than an academic. Hank had a soft Southern American voice: a kind of genteel, gentlemanly drawl. His question was long and detailed. He didn’t once look up from the page in front of him, even when the woman beside him made a noise in the back of her throat and nudged his leg.
He laboured over each word, too tense to include any inflection. As far as I could tell, he paused mid-sentence, rather than at the ends of them, to preclude polite interruptions. I struggled to stay focused. Elizabeth coughed and looked down at her lap. A man in the front row rolled his neck, loudly cracking a joint. Finally, the man in the back row – the one I had assumed was sleeping – called out. ‘For fuck’s sake, Hank, you’ll get your chance to give a paper tomorrow. Do you have a question or not?’
Hank turned and peered into the darkness at the back of the hall. ‘I simply wanted to be clear in stating the grounds for my objection,’ he said. ‘Some of us still value clarity and intellectual rigour.’
‘And brevity. Sit down, Hank. Or ask a bloody question.’
Hank turned back to the front, glanced at his notes, flipped over a page and began reading again. Elizabeth shifted in her seat. ‘I was wondering whether you are aware,’ Hank said, ‘of Bakhtin’s statements in The Dialogic Imagination about language not being a neutral medium, and the ways different genres allow for variation and a multiplicity of voices, a
nd whether you have any comment to make on how Bakhtin’s model of the dialogic impacts on your reading of Walker’s work.’
I glanced at Elizabeth and smiled wryly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, shrugging in what I hoped was a charming, Gallic fashion, ‘I’m afraid all that’s a bit beyond me. I’m just a translator. What was it Camus said? I have nothing to offer but my confusion.’
‘But surely,’ said Hank, ‘you understand the theoretical naïveté – the dangerous complacency – of an ontological commitment to the neutrality of linguistic evolution.’
‘Sit down, Hank, give the guy a break.’
‘To be honest,’ I said, ‘I haven’t read Bakhtin, but I would like to. It sounds intriguing.’
Elizabeth smiled at me gratefully, as at a child who has successfully completed an awkward but effective bit of social interaction, and turned back to the audience, asking for more questions. There were a few: polite, practical, couched in a language even I could understand. One about the difficulties of transcribing and translating handwritten script, and another about the influence of other language structures on Nahum. The crossword-puzzler asked whether Nahum was an attempt to create a perfect language: one that, as Louis de Laboureur had once argued in regard to French, followed exactly the order of thought and Nature.
Afterwards, at the long buffet loaded with cakes and pastries and tea, several tall, well-dressed strangers approached me to thank me for my honesty, for sharing my story, for my insight, and to commiserate about Hank. To tell stories about how, each year, he came with the express intent of delivering long, dull sermons at the end of everyone’s papers, most of which had little, if anything, to do with the papers themselves, and everything to do with Hank’s own research.