101 Detectives

by Ivan Vladislavic

  Maryam Akello was that kind of reader, Prof. Ziegler thought. But without knowledge of the language, it was impossible to add a single bright thread of your own to her white linen. In fact – and at this thought Prof. Ziegler made a small, surprised sound that irritated the woman next to her – you could not even be sure it was linen. Or white.

  Akello came to the end of another page – her book had yet to be published in Acholi and she was reading from a typescript – turned it over and flowed on. Shutting her eyes, Prof. Ziegler concentrated on the stream of sound. She could almost feel the little beads of it striking her eyelids. Not a sewing machine, she decided, but a more robust contraption, a planter perhaps, scattering seeds onto the harrowed earth.

  By now, many of the listeners had decided that Maryam Akello was not a good reader, but their attention did not waver. Listening, like reading aloud, is an art. The silence was more than polite: it expressed the general feeling of the audience that Sugar was a good book. This was largely thanks to Horst Grundmann, whose article some of them had read in Die Zeit the week before, publicising the reading and the series it inaugurated. All of them, with the exception of a student who had arrived late and was leaning against the wall at the back beside the TV camera, had also just heard Prof. Grundmann’s introductory speech and so they had some idea what the reading might be about even if they did not understand. Having first set out the aims of the Writers under Fire initiative, and thanked the partner organisations and sponsors in the city government and the private sector, he had gone on to tell how Akello and her sister had been abducted from a village in northern Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army and carried off into slavery in Sudan. After much suffering, she had miraculously escaped and ended up in the refugee camp at Koboko, only for this place of apparent refuge to come under attack by rebels. Once again, she was lucky to escape with her life. With the help of Christian missionaries, she had reached the United States, which she now regarded as her home. Sugar, published there with the support of UNESCO, had been an unexpected success. It was unusual, Prof. Grundmann said, for such a dark story to become a bestseller, but no one who read it could fail to be moved by the spirit of the writer, which was bathed in light. The German translation by Hans Günther Basch, one of the finest practitioners in the field, was the fourth foreign-language edition, and half a dozen more were on the cards.

  Throughout Grundmann’s speech, Akello had sat immobile. She understood no German, and there was no simultaneous translation this evening, but she had a notion of what her host was saying because he had thoughtfully sent her the gist of his speech in an email. Although her face appeared open and frank, it was turned slightly to one side and her gaze was averted, as if she were watching something in the corner of her eye. It seemed to several people on the opposite side of the auditorium, including a young poet in the fourth row from the front, that her heavy-lidded eyes were actually closed.

  Behind the lectern she appeared to be even smaller than she was, scarcely more than a girl. When she reached for the microphone it shrieked and she pulled away as if a placid dog had snapped at her. A technician, crouching so that he would not obscure the view of the audience or the cameraman even for a moment, slipped in from one side, expertly adjusted the stand to bring the mic close to her mouth, and slipped away.

  Prof. Ziegler, who had spoken briefly to Akello in the lobby fifteen minutes earlier, and twenty other members of the audience who had heard her being interviewed on the radio the day before, expected her to say a few words in English. In fact, she had intended to read from the English translation. But when they’d met in the café of the Literaturhaus to discuss the order of proceedings, Prof. Grundmann proposed that she read in Acholi instead and Hans Günther supported him. It was an opportunity for her to use her own language, they said, to speak in her own voice. It was important for the audience too, hearing the cadences of the original would open their minds to another world. She would be free to speak English afterwards, of course, when she took questions from the floor. Nearly everyone in Germany spoke English. So now, once the microphone had been adjusted, she simply tapped her typescript on the top of the lectern, producing two discreet hammer blows that called the gathering to order, set the pages down and began to read.

  In the moment when the sheaf of papers was visible above the lectern, seven people in the audience assessed how thick it was and thus how long the reading might last. Yet the calculation was not a sign of impatience or boredom on their part, nor was there any indication of this on the part of anyone else. The room was silent and attentive. It was, thought Annemieke Vogel, who was reporting on the event for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, unusually silent for such a large crowd. Perhaps it was the effect of this slight woman and her whispery voice. Someone coughed quietly into a fist, a chair squeaked, and the audience seemed to suck in its belly and lean closer.

  That soft, synthetic squeak ran like a skewer through Karolina Fischer, the events coordinator of the Literaturhaus. She remembered again a board meeting at which she had argued, in vain, that plastic seat covers were impractical (she could not say vulgar). But no one had taken her seriously. She had been made to feel petty, glances were exchanged, there she goes again. She’d had a point though. Usually it was not too bad in a crowd this size, which shuffled, rustled, coughed and scratched sufficiently to drown out the childishly obscene noises of the cushions, but in smaller gatherings it was embarrassing. Especially if the book was a serious one and there were no opportunities for laughter to break the tension. She would raise the matter at the next meeting. The chairs were three years old, they could replace or reupholster them now without appearing wasteful.

  Intent though he appeared to be on the reading, as befitted a translator, Hans Günther Basch was studying the footwear of his friend Horst Grundmann, which the angle of his head had placed in his line of vision. Leather hiking boots with rubber soles. The man was a famous walker, always tramping through a forest or over a hill, restless and indefatigable. He would come back from a hike flushed and triumphant, with moss smeared on the seat of his pants and hillocks of snow on his toecaps, and tramp mud up and down the corridors of the Department to show that he had been abroad, that he was not some desk-bound egghead afraid of the outdoors. There was something embedded there in the treads of his boots, a brand name probably, in an oval frame. It really did look like a brand, like a sign you would burn into the hide of a cow. It was a sole that would make a deep impression in a flower bed beneath the window of a vicarage. Basch didn’t have the stomach for the hard-boiled private eyes the publishers were always pressing on him, but he liked the old-fashioned ones like Hercule Poirot and Father Brown. As he watched Grundmann’s boots swivelling on their heels – big feet, perhaps a 48, he thought – he wondered how often a footprint helped to catch a thief or a murderer. Did they really fill them with plaster of Paris and present them in court? There was probably some synthetic modern substitute, like resin or silicone. These days everything was a gel. Footprint, one said, although strictly it was a shoeprint, a soleprint.

  While he was thinking this, Hans Günther’s eyes wandered to the glass wall that ran down one side of the room. There had been quite a bit of argument about that between the board and the architect. It would make the space cold, they said, especially in the winter. But the architect had argued that a place like the Literaturhaus needed to be open to the world, it was part of the symbolic logic of the building, and she was right, people often passed by outside during a reading and that sense of life going on, of the city outside, made the words on the page seem more vital. Not that there was anyone out there now: just the cold square covered in snow and the avenue of beeches with their skinny trunks and naked limbs.

  Some familiar word, a husk of sense in the granular outflow of Maryam Akello’s reading, snagged Basch’s attention and he became aware of her voice again. What was that word? It sounded like magic or make-believe. A foodstuff. Some kind of millet? He remembered discussing it with her. She had
come to see him at his apartment to iron out the problems with his translation. He’d cleared a space among the books and papers on the kitchen table, which was never used for eating at, and opened his working manuscript between them. It was stuck all over with notes and queries on yellow Post-its and they’d spent the entire morning going from one to the next. She had the Acholi typescript in a box file beside her, but she did not refer to it once. Perhaps she knew the text by heart. On the chair beside him lay the published English edition, also laden with notes in green, and the French one bristling with blue, but they did not open them either. While he raised his doubts and asked his questions, she pored over the German version as if she understood it, and he made notes and revisions on the manuscript with a pencil or a fountain pen, her English explanations and his German equivalents, often shadowed by question marks. The discarded Post-its, covered with deletions and options, heaped up in an ashtray at the corner of the table.

  He invited her to stay for lunch, but her guardian was waiting for her at the hotel. They had to meet a photographer from Der Spiegel, and then they were leaving that very evening for Osnabrück, where she was doing a reading at the Felix Nussbaum Museum tomorrow, and so he walked her to the station at the end of the block and made sure she got on the right tram.

  They parted cheerfully, anticipating a reunion soon enough when the book was published, but as he walked back home a dark mood settled over him. His legs and his heart grew heavy. He had held this feeling at bay all through the long months of work on the translation, forcing himself to keep his professional distance and focus on the job at hand. Meeting her in person, sitting with her at his kitchen table with their knees practically touching, had closed the space between them. It was unspeakable, what had happened to her; it could scarcely be imagined. Yet she had made something of it, she had written it down, without a trace of self-pity. He climbed the stairs to his apartment, and everything made him sad: the bicycles with their training wheels on the landings, the rubber overshoes in three sizes at the front door of the downstairs neighbour, like an illustration from The Story of the Three Bears, the sheen of the wooden balustrade under his hand, the glimpses of rooftops and chimneys through the windows. When he shut his front door behind him there were tears in his eyes, but he swallowed the sob pushing up in his throat. He could not weep when she herself was so composed. It would be an insult. Was it strength, this self-possession of hers? Or had something been undone in her, permanently disconnected, short-circuited? She gave away so little. It was as if she had told the story and kept it to herself at the same time. As if she had concealed it precisely by sharing it.

  It’s a waltz, thought the young woman who had arrived late, as Akello came to the end of another page, peeled it over and went on. One two three, one two three.

  Four of the page-counters estimated that Akello had reached the halfway mark and that she was now on the downhill slope.

  Prof. Ziegler got an itch under her thigh but could not scratch it without annoying the woman beside her, who had already given her several cautionary glances. She was reminded again of poor Edward Sheldon, lying immobile on his catafalque in his Upper East Side apartment, unable to move a finger. He was lucky to have a squad of minders to minister to his needs, she thought, to have night nurses and cooks, and the money to pay them. But the word ‘lucky’ troubled her in relation to someone so direly afflicted. How frustrated he must have been. And then she wondered how he had passed water and whether he had bodily urges and what he did about them.

  The young man who had come with his girlfriend read the blurb on the back of the book, which he was holding for her; she wanted to get it signed afterwards. He wondered what life was like in Uganda now and whether there were wildlife reserves there.

  Florence Lawino, the author’s guardian, the only person in the room who heard Akello’s voice falter as she began to tell about the murder of her sister, slipped her hand through the gap between two buttons on her blouse and touched the scar on her own stomach.

  Something else came back to Hans Günther. It was later on the day of her visit, when he was clearing up the kitchen table, that he came across the ashtray full of Post-its. It was like a little bonfire and he felt like putting a match to it. But that was absurd. He stripped off the first of the notes and looked at it. ‘Resurrected?’ it read in his blue pen. And then in pencil the word she had suggested: ‘translated’. And then in blue again: ‘brought back, raised, revived?’ He always had other ideas. That was the problem with translation: there was always another possibility. Which made her suggestion doubly difficult. Why had she said ‘translated’? Translated from the dead. As if death itself were a language, the source language, and translation a matter of faith. Suddenly the whole enterprise felt hopeless. He opened the English version and read the phrase to himself again: brought back from the dead. It made more sense. Then he picked up the French version but did not open it. It had one of those unfussy French covers of clean white board upon which floated a picture the size of a playing card; a cross section of sugar cane in close-up, cut off between the earth and the sky. He gazed at it in despair.

  It would have intrigued Hans Günther Basch to learn that Florence Lawino, whose hand caught his attention as it stirred beneath the fabric of her blouse, had a life story every bit as harrowing as her charge’s. But she had never spoken about it outside the counselling room, let alone written it down. The two of them had journeyed independently to America, but they had been placed in the same foster home because their stories were so alike. They discovered that they had grown up in villages not far apart in the Gulu District. Florence too had been abducted, she had even been in Koboko a few months before Maryam, but had left before the rebel attack. She was a little younger than Maryam, but she had become her guardian nevertheless.

  She had heard Maryam speak or read at scores of briefings, conferences and workshops. In the beginning, the telling of the story, which was so like her own, left her feeling exposed, sometimes angry, but she got used to it and these days it hardly bothered her. She thought every day about what had happened to her and these memories were more vivid than any scene that could be conjured up in words by someone else. In any event, it was different here, on this evening, with Maryam reading in Acholi while the trees stood aghast behind the glass with their feet in the snow. It was as if Maryam was speaking only to her.

  As she listened to the story, so familiar she could recite parts of it by heart, her hand moved along the livid blanket stitch of scar tissue. With her middle finger she followed the ridge from her navel to her hipbone, tracing each of the eleven stitches, first the part above the slash and then the part below, while in her mind she passed down a corridor, trying the doors on one side and then the other, and found them all locked.

  There were no clues in Akello’s reading to indicate when she might stop: the listeners could not judge whether a passage was rising to a climax or falling to a resolution, and so their attention was not modulated by the usual sense of anticipation that accompanies a reading in a familiar language. She gave nothing away, neither speeding up nor slowing down, and never once looking up from the page. Again Andrij Leonenko, the young poet in the fourth row, had the impression that her eyes were closed and she was reciting from memory. She turned the pages so precisely, rolling back one after the other with exactly the same gesture and without licking her finger. When she did stop it was not abrupt but final, given the same flat emphasis with which she had begun. She did not smile or say thank you. She gathered up her papers, squared them once against the lectern and went back to her seat.

  The audience drifted for a moment on the receding tide of her voice, then roused themselves and applauded. At the same time, they began to do all the things people do when the hold of a crowd relaxes and releases them back into their separate bodies, sitting up straight, stretching their legs, arching their backs, craning their necks, clearing their throats.

  To Karolina Fischer, the events coordinator of the Liter
aturhaus, the squealing and screeching from the chairs was intolerable. It was like the cacophony that arose when you walked into the House of Tropical Birds at the Tiergarten. But before she could start going over the whole saga of the chairs in her mind, something distracted her. She noticed that the woman next to her was wearing some kind of safari suit, and that the khaki tunic had tiny patches of leopard skin scattered over it at random, triangles and parallelograms with loose flaps and tabs that suggested they had a purpose that was not simply decorative, like storing bullets or securing a water bottle or a bush knife.

  As the applause drained away, the members of the audience began to do many other things with their hands, patting their knees, straightening their skirts, winding off scarves, pushing back cuffs to glance at watches, folding the creased and sweaty programmes they had been holding and putting them in their handbags, retrieving the crisp progammes they had put away in their handbags and smoothing them out on their laps, fumbling in the pockets of the jackets hanging over the backs of their chairs for tissues, cough lozenges, antacid tablets, lip balm, cleaning their glasses on the tails of their shirts, rubbing their palms together, covering their yawning mouths. Nearly all of those who were on their own checked their cellphones for messages; nearly all of those who had company turned to their companions to exchange stored-up observations.