The Italian Teacher

by Tom Rachman

  As a stopgap measure, he takes freelance work translating technical documents. The pay is low and tallied by the page, so he must work from first light, forking drippy fried egg between his lips, scanning his daily allotment. By dinner, he has done twelve hours, his only human contact the sound of footsteps from the flat above. When he bumps into those neighbors outside the building, he greets them with inflated cheer, hoping to precipitate a conversation. They nod, smile briefly, keep walking. So Pinch must take his companionship more stealthily, eavesdropping when on the Underground. He lingers amid the pub-leaving throng at a local chippie, handling a newspaper cone of breaded cod, drizzle-painted with tomato sauce, the malt vinegar wrinkling cryptic crosswords and editorials damning the miners.

  By far his closest relationship is with the Bengali clerks at Imperial Foods, which he visits for pipe tobacco and Maltesers—all his daily pleasures and most of his meals derive from there. He chats with shelf-stockers, restores products misplaced by other customers, commiserates after a skinhead smashes the window and calls them “fackin’ Pakis,” which is geographically incorrect, Pinch notes, in addition to being disgusting.

  When a new cashier is hired, Pinch makes his status at the shop known to her, asking after the owner by name. As she packs his items, the paper bag tips, a misshapen grapefruit lolloping down the checkout lane. He tosses it in the air (muffing the catch) and reads the name tag—“Julie M”—pinned to her orange jumper. She is distracted, and takes a pen from her apron, notes something in her palm. At the exit, Pinch pauses. “What did you write before? I’m just curious.”

  “Write?”

  “In your hand.”

  She opens her palm for him to see. He approaches, squints at the smudged ink, which reads “gochut.”

  “What language is that?”

  “It’s . . .” She looks for the manager—not around—so digs into Pinch’s shopping bag, taking out a jar. “That.” Again, she displays her palm, and he makes out two faded words: “mango chutney.” Julie, a recent arrival to the capital from the north of England, hasn’t tried this product or many others in the shop.

  “Would you like to?” He twists the lid but grunts, reddening, unable to take it off.

  Smiling sweetly, she insists he not bother. The expression transforms her. In repose, she was tired and middle-aged, but becomes a little girl when smiling. She must be around his age, perhaps a tad older, with caramel-brown curls framing confectionary eyes, a wide strong frame, soft without being curvaceous. Julie M is not beautiful. He experiences a rush of need for her.

  Julie explains that she wants to be more adventurous, especially now that she works at Mr. Khan’s shop. So that evening, he collects her outside Imperial Foods and leads her to a reserved table at the Taj Mahal, where Pinch explains the menu at length, only then daring to ask about her.

  Hailing from a town near Newcastle, she moved south only recently, after her marriage ended and she couldn’t find work there. Pinch mentions having read newspaper articles about the dire situation in the north—that it’s so bad mothers and wives are taking the train to King’s Cross and turning tricks behind the station.

  “We’re not all on the game, you know,” she says.

  “No, God, no!” Pinch responds, mortified, neck blotching. “I didn’t mean to suggest that. Sorry. Just meant how bad it is.”

  “I’d call myself lucky to have this job at Imperial. It’s a foothold.”

  “A foothold for something else?”

  “I hope so. Don’t know what yet.”

  “What would you do,” he asks, leaning forward, “if you could do anything?”

  “Me? I’d probably read all day.” If it has words, Julie tells him, she’ll be at it, from a cereal box to a Dickens. She asks about his line of work, evidently impressed to meet a translator, which emboldens Pinch. She laments knowing only English and asks how many languages he speaks. “Could you say a bit for me?”

  “In which one?”

  “All of them.”

  He offers a few remarks in Italian, speaking with formality, saying it’s a very pleasant evening, that he hopes she enjoys it.

  “How do you go to sounding foreign like that?” she says admiringly. “Give us some more then.”

  He speaks a few lines in French, then Spanish, then German, braver as he goes, daring to say how much he likes her.

  “What’s all that mean?”

  “It’s just things from work.”

  “And you like your work then, the translating?”

  “Depends. Can be a slog. But sometimes, yes. I like coming across words I never knew existed. That’s the best part. There are tons even in English that I didn’t know.”

  “Such as?”

  “Absterge.”

  “That’s not English.”

  “It means ‘to wipe clean,’ like you’d do with a wound before surgery.”

  “I would not!”

  He laughs. “It’s from Middle French, by way of Latin. Sorry, I’m getting boring. Throw a samosa at me when I do that.”

  “I should do, if you hadn’t eaten them all, greedy bugger.”

  He suppresses the electric thrill of this—that he’s dining with a woman, that he just asked her out, that she works at the best shop in London. This had better go well or where do I buy milk?

  “But I’m mad,” he adds. “Because it’s not like I can ever use these words when nobody understands them.”

  She rises to find the toilet, her grin baring a gap between her front teeth. “Pardon me,” she tells him. “I always absterge my hands before pudding.”

  Alone at the table, he continues to view her seat. This is what I want to dedicate myself to. This. After a mere hour in her company, he has lost any understanding of his years obsessing about art, posterity, failure. She seems truly intrigued by him. There’s nothing cynical about Julie; perhaps that’s it. He recalls a remark she made: “You survive off your wits.” That recast in an instant how he perceived his entire life to date. Before, he had planned to badger more universities with applications. Seated here, he throws off that future. He’ll take this future, even if he doesn’t know what it means. Me, alone in the world, braving it! (Though he’s emboldened to go it alone only by dint of not being alone tonight.) In a passing glimmer, he imagines sex with Julie: his hands on her hips, her breasts under the bra, his thighs against hers. Stop that—too far ahead of yourself. And here she is.

  Over dessert, Julie speaks of her family, noting that she comes “from working people.”

  “Everyone is so preoccupied with the class system here,” he says.

  “You do realize that we’ve got a queen?”

  “Yes, I often run into her waiting for the Tube.”

  Smiling, she nudges his spoon out of the way to reach their mango kulfi. “In this country, a person speaks two words and you know where they come from, what their schooling was. You’re lucky, you are. You don’t have that, with your nice American accent.”

  “Canadian.”

  “See? I didn’t even know.”

  “Back when I used to teach, I always—”

  “You were a teacher?”

  “Only during my doctorate. Very junior classes on art history, plus Italian.”

  “So you qualified as a doctor too?”

  “Not the useful kind. Not the kind that absterges.” Flushed from lager and expectation, he looks directly at her. From his perspective, she has experienced a life so much fuller than his: raised three younger sisters and a brother; married a hard drinker, whom she supported by working as a cutter at a garment factory, where blokes gave the girls cuddles, like it or not; got divorced when Ben’s boozing became too much; moved down here to London. By contrast, Pinch’s life—so fumbling in his view—seems to Julie as sparkling and exotic as his foreign words.

  “You’re my bit o
f posh,” she tells him. “And I’m your bit of rough.”

  42

  Pinch’s basement flat is small for two and would test another couple. But the better he knows Julie—her pudgy grin upon waking, her tone-deaf singing—the more Pinch is lifted from his crusty professorial manner. Often he praises her mind and criticizes the state education forced on her in childhood, implying that she could make more of herself. A person can still study at age thirty-four. When she enrolls at Birkbeck College, he deems this the relationship of his life—she esteems his view. After classes, Julie returns bubbling with big talk on big subjects, making insightful, innocent links among literature and sociology and philosophy. Listening rapt, Pinch feels his love galloping ahead. After a snotty man lampoons her question in class, Pinch orders her to ignore bullies like that. “You’re the smartest person there by miles. I promise, Jules.”

  “He’s actually pretty clever. Always talking about everyone’s ‘subjectivity.’”

  “Subjectivity is just an underhanded way to attack other people. I’m sure he is entirely objective, right? He’s preening for attention, I assure you.” Pinch stops, sheepish suddenly. “Sorry—I’m frothing at the mouth.”

  “No, no, I’m enjoying the show.” She smiles.

  “Enjoy this then.” He pulls up his shirt, slaps his gut. “Look at this monstrosity. How did I gain so much weight? I’ve become disgusting.”

  “Yes, but you’re my disgusting,” she teases. “You know, I wouldn’t mind a big tummy.”

  “They’re not hard to achieve. I call it the Maltesers diet.”

  “Like a pregnant belly.”

  “That’s a bit insulting!” he says, laughing, petering out as he digests her remark. Julie delayed a family because of her ex and his drinking. She lost years because of that, and doesn’t have endless time. He ponders the features of their child, but keeps seeing the daughter he’s previously imagined: a little Barrows. He pulls down his shirt. “When you’re further along with your degree, we can think of kids. If we took that step now, it’d be the end.”

  “Not the end of steps. Just a different one,” she contends. “Charlie, don’t think that I know nothing because I don’t know Latin.”

  “Julie, everyone I ever met who knew Latin, me especially, knows fuck-all.” He fetches a sausage roll from the fridge, eats standing, knowing why he rebuffed her. He loves Julie—but he isn’t sure he accepts her. She isn’t accomplished, isn’t expecting to become important, which reinforces that he isn’t, and won’t be. Wincing at his disloyalty, he shoves the sausage roll back into the fridge.

  “Grumpy?” she asks.

  “Just some work things on my mind.”

  In the bathroom, he brushes his hair roughly across his balding pate, holds in his tummy as if an attractive stranger passed. He makes himself relax, looking directly at the reflection, jabbing his stomach with the toothbrush end, repelled by himself, needing Julie, though she is just on the other side of this door.

  When her sister visits London, she wants to do a bit of Oxford Street window shopping without her kids, so Julie and Pinch take the two youngsters to the National Gallery, with Pinch acting as impromptu tour guide, pointing them toward famous paintings, explaining historical context, the tragedies and quirks of artists, embedded symbols, the technical choices that direct the eye or acknowledge predecessors. As Natalie once taught him at Galleria Borghese, he shows these kids to crouch before the pictures to catch a raking light, revealing outlines of the underpainting, where one discovers what the artists intended, in contrast to what they achieved. “And what a person intends is as important as what they achieve. Don’t you think?”

  “Are those mushrooms, Uncle Charlie?” the eleven-year-old girl asks, pointing at the foreground of the Wilton Diptych.

  “Good eye, Liz. They were long thought, by people less sharp than you, to be flowers. But they’ve since been identified as aniseed toadstools and milk-caps—very rare medieval depictions of mushrooms, which appear much more frequently after fifteen hundred.”

  Bemused, the two kids run off to see a picture of soldiers fighting, and Julie goes with them.

  Following after, Pinch considers her from behind, knowing her soft body beneath that dress, a secret knowledge—permission to her—that moves him, causes him to act sternly with the children at their next inquiry, because stern is the opposite of what he feels.

  43

  Bear Bavinsky has soured on matrimony. His latest ended in a divorce, with Elodie contesting ownership of his entire art production—the paintings he labored on for decades and kept, those that survived his scathing judgment, and which have held out all this time, awaiting a call from the great museums. Eventually she settled for a hefty lump of cash. But the close call unnerved Bear. He moved all his works to a private storage location in Europe, away from “the rats,” as he refers to anyone who dares meddle with his hoard.

  “I know you’re not enthused about weddings right now, Dad, but could you be persuaded to attend one if you weren’t the sucker in question? If it was me?”

  “Charlie boy!” he responds, dropping the phone in enthusiasm, grabbing it again and apologizing. Was that the first time, Pinch thinks, that Dad has said sorry to me? “Happiest news I ever heard, kiddo! Congratulations, son! Who’s the lucky lady?”

  Pinch purposely kept details of Julie from his father. Now he pours them out, with Bear’s enthusiasm serving to confirm his own, assuring Pinch that he loves her. After the call, he finds Julie doing the dishes and kisses her. “Let me finish. You call your sister.”

  Julie leaps off to do so, spreading the happy news. After rinsing the last knife, Pinch turns off the faucet and catches a snippet of her conversation in the other room.

  “Not weak at the knees, Queenie. It’s hard to explain . . .”

  Pinch tries not to mind—he can hardly expect to stir a woman’s passions! He knows what Julie likes about him: He’s from a world more appealing than this dreary country, where her father is still fulminating about the strikebreaking scabs, her mum worries about the broken boiler, her brother spends his days at the new video slot machine in his local pub. Lately Julie talks about leaving England and setting up overseas; Australia maybe. He flips through the atlas in bed, and she tests him on capitals.

  “Ouagadougou,” he answers.

  “How do you know that, Charlie?” She flicks off the light, not for romance but to dream open-eyed beside her foreign bloke.

  A month before the ceremony, Pinch checks that Dad has his travel booked. Bear is finishing an important painting before flying over, and it’s hard to know when he’ll be done. It’d be crazy to buy a flight when there’s a chance he’ll be tied up. Pinch nods—he never entirely expected his father. “Either way, you’ll be here in spirit. We’ll raise a glass to you.”

  “A glass? Hell, a bottle at least! Here’s what, kiddo: I’m sending over a case of champagne.”

  The event takes place at a register office with Julie’s friends and family, plus Mr. Khan from Imperial Foods and a huge bouquet from Birdie, who is about to give birth in North Carolina, so can’t make it. After the formalities, husband and wife step out into a drizzle, Pinch looking skyward, a droplet hitting his eye. He blinks, seeing Julie in a blur. “Nice weather for ducks,” she says, and he lifts his new spouse off her feet, prompting her to wave theatrically, damsel in distress. Out of breath, he puts her down, presses his face to hers, the coolness of her powdered cheek against his warm temple.

  “It’s just you and me,” she whispers.

  “Well, for now,” he responds, catching her eye.

  44

  A honeymoon is beyond their means, so they spend a week vacationing at home, starting with a fancy Italian meal prepared by Pinch. It’ll be indulgence for days, with cakes and wine, reading in bed, sleeping late. He’s a little embarrassed to have promised a case of champagne, which never a
rrives.

  As the months pass, Pinch thinks more about having children of their own. In the past, when Julie hinted at starting a family, he dismissed the topic, speaking of finances: couldn’t afford a baby, me as a freelance translator, you part-time cashier, part-time student. But lately, to himself, Pinch brushes aside all objections. He stops in the middle of the sidewalk, ruminating. Julie always depicted him as an intellectual of range and experience. Yet she is catching up—already, she knows plenty of professors more erudite and sophisticated than he. When she takes him on a trip to her hometown, he wants to treat her parents to dinner out. But it turns out that going for dinner strikes them as a showy extravagance. They only come to a shabby French restaurant to accommodate him, turning out in their Sunday best, worried about garlic, disliking most of the funny tastes. To make matters worse, Pinch cuts himself shaving before they set out, and the nick won’t stop bleeding throughout dinner. When the bill comes, Julie’s father insists on paying. This was not the agreement, but the man—in his early sixties, with a craggy face of a hundred—is offended by Pinch’s insistence.

  On the train to London, he recalls sitting beside Bear when they returned from New York City to Dad’s wife and kids in the suburbs. He leans to Julie’s ear. “I need to discuss something.”

  “In whispers?”

  “Yes,” he says, smiling. “Thinking about your nephew and niece.”

  “What about them?”

  “Just thinking, I don’t know.” He pauses. “About a little person to join us.” He leans back to see her eyes. “You don’t seem overwhelmed by the prospect.”

  “We agreed: Not now.”

  “That was more than a year ago.” His proposition—a source of doubt for Pinch until he spoke it seconds ago—feels like an urgent need now. “I wrote a list of baby names,” he says, to lighten the mood, or perhaps cajole her.