The Interpreter

by The Interpreter (retail) (epub)

  That night I slept very fitfully; I had the feeling I was suffocating, and opened the windows several times to air the room. The sky was dark and starless; a heavy mist was advancing slowly over the sea, spreading into the streets and covering everything with what looked like heavy dew. Towards dawn, a huge cruise ship sailed silently past the town and berthed in the harbour at the end of the bay, the thousand lights of its decks reflected brokenly at the water’s edge, sending a watery dazzle over the walls of my room. I went back to bed and, after much tossing and turning, fell into a troubled sleep. I thought I heard someone fiddling with the handle of the door, and tried to arouse myself from my drowsiness to go and check, but then decided it was just another of my hallucinations and went back to sleep. The dawn light was at last filtering in through the shadows of my tousled sheets, my head ached, my eyes were burning, my breathing was heavy and laboured. I decided to get dressed and go and get a breath of air. The hotel was still sunk in sleep; the lift was standing empty at the top floor, its light falling gloomily on the wall. I eavesdropped outside Burke’s door and was about to knock, but decided not to wake him and took the stairs. The restaurant was still in darkness, but the foyer smelled of smoke and liquor. I breathed in the damp, salty outside air with a sense of relief, then crossed the road and went to the jetty where the cruise ship was moored. The funnels were still smoking, and deep in the depths of its iron hulk I could hear distant engines throbbing. A lone lorry was shunting around, its headlamps slicing through the violet air; a few shivering passengers were already on the deck of the cruise ship, watching the outline of the city gradually emerging from the mist. But suddenly, rather than clearing, it became thicker; a salty wind blew in from the sea, and the city was enveloped in ragged spray. I retraced my steps and went absent-mindedly down to the beach rather than back to the hotel. I could hear the waves lapping gently on the shore; I went down the steps and let my feet sink into the sand. In the distance I could just make out the vague outline of the landing stages at the tourist harbour; rather than floating, the boats rose out of the glassy water as though they were somehow attached to the sea floor, their masts oozing plump drops which fell almost silently onto the deck floor. I walked down to the waterline and stamped my feet in the wake of a lingering wave, sinking my stick into the sand to see how firm it was and leaving deep, soft footprints, then watching them disappear as the water swept over them. It was then that I saw them, like a mirage: a few metres from the shore, half-sunk in a muddy pool, lay dozens of black narwhals, their spiral tusks pointing towards the sky. Some were twitching their tails, others lay there motionless, as though dead. I left my shoes on the sand and waded towards them, thigh-deep in water. In the meantime, other people too had become aware of their mysterious presence, and were running in the same direction. Now I was standing right by their huge, wrinkled, shell-encrusted bodies. They did not seem at all alarmed: they looked at me sadly with their moist eyes, moving their upper jaws set, like a nose, with their single pointed tusk. A silent crowd had gathered on the shore, but few people actually approached the creatures. One of those who did was an elderly man with a thin red beard, who was wearing waders; he was considering the scene with a sorrowful air.

  ‘Are you a foreigner?’ he asked me in German, staring at the elegant windcheater with which Burke had provided me. I nodded.

  ‘This is the third time this has happened this spring. No one knows how they come to land up here; they don’t come from around these parts, yet dozens of them end up stranded here,’ he said, extending his arms in a puzzled gesture.

  ‘Will they die?’ I asked.

  ‘A few will survive until the turn of the tide, but they clearly suffer from being stuck here; they wave their tusks around and moan piteously – you can hear them right in the centre of town. But yes, most of them will die. Then the waves bring them ashore; they get stuck in the sand, like great black stones, and have to be carted away by bulldozers, because they make a terrible stench,’ he said with a look of utter disgust. I followed him towards the shore, dragging my feet in the sand.

  ‘The strange thing is, they’re all male; only the males have that tusk. And they’re all young; it’s as though a whole generation had lost its sense of direction and started wandering through the Baltic, looking for a way out towards the Arctic!’ He paused, as though pondering the matter.

  ‘They’re not afraid of humans; they let themselves be touched,’ he went on; going up to one of them, he drew his hand over the dark skin of its back, sheathed in a layer of glittering sand. The narwhal gave a weary shake of its tail, lifted its tusk and sank back into the stagnant shallows.

  ‘Have you seen them fight?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They clash their tusks together like sabres and fight endless duels. I’ve caught them at it on occasions, in the ice floes, outlined against the rose-pink wall of the arctic ice, when there’s no wind and it’s never dark – it’s a rare sight. They heave themselves out of the water black as pitch, and in that endless silence you can hear their tusks rattling like branches in the wind!’

  I looked towards the throng of animals, now vanishing into the mist; some of them had ceased moving, and were gradually sinking into the sand.

  ‘Can you smell that smell? They smell of seaweed, of the depths, of a cold, dark world where man has never set foot!’ he went on, staring at me with an expression I could not fathom. Then he waved me a mournful goodbye and wandered towards the creatures furthest off, at the far side of the shallows; feeling they had sufficient water around them to make a getaway, they were flinging themselves this way and that, leaping about frantically in their efforts to reach the open sea.

  Cold and bedraggled, I plodded up the beach, then sat down and rubbed my numb feet before putting on my shoes. A sudden burst of blinding sunlight pierced through the mist, lighting up the doomed landscape with a surreal gleam; floating there on the hushed surface, the narwhals took on the appearance of one single, gigantic beast, its back bristling with barbs. As though it had registered this similarity, the crowd on the beach let out a unanimous gasp; the shells embedded in the creatures’ skin now caught the glancing light and sparkled like shards of glass; even the damp sand lit up in a fitful glitter.

  I hurried back to the hotel; I wanted to wake Burke up and take him to see the beached narwhals. But there was a message for me from him at the reception desk:

  Mr Bellamy, this morning someone called about our ad, a certain Mirko Stolojan. I’ve agreed to meet him at ten. If you want to join us, this is the address: Perkelos Gatve 40, Klaipeda. The porter tells me it’s a road somewhere near the port. See you later,

  K. Burke.

  Still stiff with cold and bewildered by the message, I stared idiotically at the porter, who in his turn was giving me a puzzled look.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked out of the blue.

  ‘A quarter past ten. Breakfast is over, but we could still serve you some coffee,’ he hastened to assure me, as though he could read my thoughts. I folded up the note and leaned wearily against the counter; nothing would have been more welcome than a cup of hot coffee, its smell wafting towards me from the jugs on the trolley by the window. I was hungry and tired from my long walk; I could have sat down in the foyer and waited quietly for Burke’s return. But my head was spinning, as I now had another worry.

  ‘Is there anything wrong, sir?’ enquired the doorman solicitously.

  ‘No, everything’s fine,’ I said distractedly, then ran out of the foyer and leapt into the first of the taxis parked in front of the hotel.

  Perkelos Gatve was a quiet residential road which began just beyond the mouth of the harbour canal, below the last cranes in the goods yard, to continue along the coast and on into the woods. Number forty was a small villa with an unfenced garden, set back a little from the road; it was surrounded by an unkempt lawn dotted with thorny bushes, sloping gently down to the shore. I waited for the taxi to drive off, then walked up the sandy path to th
e door, which was on the right side of the house; I rang the bell, but there was no answer. Total silence, except for a rustling of leaves. After a few minutes, I rang again, then went to peer in through the small window which gave on to the street, but all I could see was a dark wooden chest of drawers and a divan upholstered in some pale material. I checked Burke’s message – I was at the right address. I inspected the back of the house, the side facing the sea, where there was a tradesmen’s entrance; I knocked and found it was open, so I went in.

  ‘Is anyone at home?’ I called, and immediately found myself in the living room I’d seen through the window. It was furnished like the cabin of a ship, with brass lamps hanging from brightly painted beams and gleaming doorhandles. All in apple-pie order, not a speck of dust. It smelled of ammonia and well-oiled rope; a clock in a copper case ticked on the chest of drawers. In the kitchen I heard the buzz of a fridge; I opened the door – it was empty, but immaculate. I went back into the living room, which was dimly lit by such light as made its way in through a little porthole of coloured glass. A wooden staircase led to the upper floor; the handrail and banisters were carved with elaborate motifs connected to the sea, and small glass cases containing weirdly shaped shells hung from the wooden walls. I went up cautiously and found myself in a large studio which took up the whole floor, the end wall occupied by a nautical chart of the Baltic Sea; on a console table between the two windows stood a small model of a sailing ship bearing the Polish flag. Behind a table strewn with books and maps, almost the whole of the opposite wall was occupied by a sophisticated sound system; I was intrigued by the two large spools, placed behind a glass panel, and the sound boxes, protected by thick chunks of foam. The only remaining empty space, I noticed, was occupied by a document set in a gold frame, which proved to be a diploma – awarded by the University of Heidelberg to Mirko Stolojan, a simultaneous translator whose languages were Russian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Overcome by sudden weariness, I sat down in the leather armchair in front of the sound system. I was sweating profusely, though from exhaustion rather than emotion, and my throat was strangely dry. Through the porthole I could see the dark mass of water, heaving like a slab of steel, sending ripples of white light over the walls of the room. Since it was right there in front of my nose, I pressed the button on the sound system, setting the spools in motion. At first it gave out a dry whirring noise, then the sound of waves on the seashore and distant engines; then suddenly there was a voice, perfectly loud and clear. I recognised it – it was that of the interpreter, speaking in German, in the typically distant tone adopted by such professionals. I noted the awkward way the sentences were stitched together, the tail ends left loose, then suddenly if clumsily tidied up and made to fit together. Another voice was audible in the background, probably that of the original speaker, but I couldn’t make out what language he was speaking; the words seemed to me short, three syllables at most, with the stress on the penultimate. He must have acquired it relatively recently if he had such trouble translating it. I carried on listening, and then I heard his voice changing, becoming deeper and taking on a syncopated rhythm, with mangled single syllables and incomprehensible combinations of diphthongs. Then I recognised the wheezing, rasping, gurgling sounds given out by the uvula when the throat muscles become constricted. If in some ways similar, those sounds were also different from those which I myself produced when I was having one of my convulsions. I thought the effort involved might have explained the difference. I listened on, until the sound lost all resemblance to any human voice and became just a whistle, rising and falling, elusive and mysterious. I saw him in my mind as he had been that last time by the lake, and it occurred to me to wonder whether indeed that tape might have been recorded in that very place, on just such a wild night. I wound back the spool and put on another, then another; all they contained were whistling, lowing sounds, a slow repeated twittering interspersed with a low buzz. No trace of a human voice, as though he had ceased to speak once and for all, and was now simply howling.

  I left Mirko Stolojan’s house on foot; it was not yet two o’clock, but already the sun was going down, and thick white mist was rolling in from the sea, settling over the shoreline but stopping at the woods. Anchored at the edge of the bay, the cruise ship was now nothing more than a ghostly, shapeless presence. A siren hooted in the distance and the harbour lights started flashing. Suddenly seized with a burst of panic, I stumbled through the pebble-strewn sand, but the effort caused my head to swim and I had to pause for a moment on the grass. In the goods yard I at last found a taxi to take me back to the hotel, where I found the foyer in a state of uproar; people were talking at the tops of their voices, and the smoke was as thick as the mist outside. Seated on the sofas, several photographers were fiddling with their cameras; a reporter was heaving his cinecamera onto his shoulder. Seeing me coming in, the porter gestured at me in alarm from behind his desk. I was about to go over to him, when I found myself surrounded by black-uniformed police. Cameras flashed, photographers clustered round me, jockeying for position; I could hardly breathe. I tried to fight my way towards a chair, but a man with fleshy pink lips burst through the cordon of policemen and pushed his way towards me threateningly, grabbing me by the elbow and dragging me into the manager’s office.

  ‘Are you Mr Tibor Preda?’ he asked in German, leafing through my passport.

  ‘That’s me,’ I lied.

  ‘Inspector Zabukas, border police.’ He handed me back my passport and clasped his hands behind his back.

  ‘Mr Preda, I must ask you to come with me,’ he said in a solemn tone, summoning two other policemen with a flick of his fingers. I allowed myself to be led out without a struggle, already thinking of new headlines in the Swiss and Romanian papers. I’d be back on the front page with a new photograph, the new clean-shaven face of the Beast of Bukovina, this time with handcuffs. I would inspire new editorials, crowds of journalists would be waiting for me at Bucharest. I’d see Magda again – in a courtroom. They’d question us, try us and sentence us; in the dark confines of some godforsaken prison, they might even rough us up – out of sheer rage, by way of punishment, to make us confess to other crimes we didn’t commit. I’d end up in some stinking cell where, stricken with illness and brought low by violent treatment, I might find death at last. It was better that way; that was how things should end.

  We left the office and went out into the street, dodging the photographers who were waiting for us in the foyer; the man with fleshy lips was walking beside me, with the policemen following. We crossed the road and walked towards the sea. I wondered what our final destination would be; I was expecting to be bundled into a police car and driven off to the police station, sirens blaring, but instead we were walking down the beach. The mist was thicker than ever, and everything was enveloped in the early darkness; the outlines of the narwhals were still just visible in the dark water, though there seemed to be fewer of them. I wondered whether some of them might have managed to make it into the open sea, borne off on the outgoing tide. The man with fleshy lips was walking straight towards them. A wooden footbridge had been laid on the shore, spanning the pool and reaching out into the shallows; I made out several dim figures standing by a narwhal – one of them was the elderly man with the red beard. Beside him, two policemen were unrolling a rope which they then fixed to pickets planted in the sand. It was only then that I saw Burke, awkwardly sprawled over the narwhal, knees bent, arms thrown out; its tusk had skewered his stomach, to reappear, reddened with blood, between his shoulderblades. His expression was one of amazement, even slight amusement; or perhaps incredulous, amazed to have met such a death.

  ‘Do you know this man?’ the inspector asked me curtly.

  ‘Yes, he’s called Klaus Burke; he’s my travelling companion,’ I answered faintly. The inspector held out his arms, as though to apologise.

  ‘We can’t understand how this could have happened! There are no witnesses. It must have been at about one o’clock; the mist had alrea
dy cleared, and the tide was beginning to turn. Perhaps the creature was trying to ease itself off the sea bed, and felt threatened,’ he suggested in some agitation.

  The man with the red beard now joined us, shaking his head.

  ‘That’s not possible. This morning that one was already dead!’ he objected. Then, turning to me, he added:

  ‘When we met. Remember?’

  He waded a few steps into the water towards the creature, then bent down to run his hand over its pectoral fin.

  ‘Anyway, a beached narwhal can’t use its tusk; it’s a physiological impossibility!’ he shouted, lifting his nose and thrusting his hips forwards in imitation of a narwhal’s slithering gait. The inspector put his hands into his pockets and looked at him severely.

  ‘Take him away!’ he said to the policemen, who were standing some distance away, holding a stretcher.

  I glanced with some distaste at Burke’s crumpled body as they lifted it clear of the tusk; meeting his glassy stare, I thought perhaps he had met the death that he desired.

  I returned to the hotel in some bewilderment. The foyer was deserted; the waiters were picking up the dirty glasses and emptying the ashtrays. I went up to my room and stretched out on the bed, trying to sleep, but I lay awake, tossing and turning, until it was very late. Sensing I had a fever, I wrapped myself up in all the covers I could find and then at last I did sleep a bit, though very uneasily. I was sweating, but my flesh had come out in goose pimples from the cold. I was woken by the sound of rain on the roof; day was breaking, my fever seemed to have abated and my forehead felt unexpectedly cool, though I still felt weak. I threw off the drenched covers and went over to the window: the sea was grey and foam-flecked, fanning out over the beach in broad frothy waves. The cruise ship was still there, lights ablaze, funnels smoking; it hooted twice, as though preparing to depart. I was desperately thirsty; I took a long drink of water from the tap, then took off my clothes and had a wash, noting that my reflection in the mirror was yellower and more stooped than ever. There were yellowish marks around my eyes; my teeth were chattering, though whether from cold or fear I wasn’t sure. I went down to the restaurant, downed a coffee and went out for a listless walk along the beach, my head thronged with a ragbag of thoughts I couldn’t piece together. Memories of my year-long wanderings were paraded before me like snaps in a photo album, the last one being the awful lifeless mask that was Burke’s face. The streets were empty; a few coloured umbrellas were opening up on the landing stages near the aquarium. I wandered back to the hotel without the faintest idea of what I was going to do.