Translator (15 page)

“Why not?”

“I don't find it very becoming.”

“You should give it a try. You might enjoy it,” he says.

“And you, are you happy? All is well?”

He shrugs. “It is how it is.”

This time she hears in his voice profound resignation. “So you're a fatalist? You're dealt a hand and you just resign yourself to it?”

He laughs at her. “Is that what translators do? Put a name to everything?”

Not just one name, she thinks.

That night, she cooks supper for the three of them. No one feels like driving to Kurashiki, so she uses what's on hand—nothing fancy, vegetable soup, red beet salad, garlic potatoes.

“Just with this soup, you've earned your keep,” says Renzo. He explains to Moto that Hanne wants to pay them to stay in the cottage.

Moto studies her a long time before announcing, “All right. That meal just earned you three days.”

“No,” says Renzo. “Four. And why are you speaking English?”

Hanne explains what had happened to her.

“I thought it might help Hanne to hear English,” says Moto, turning to Hanne. “And before you object, Hanne, I get to practice.”

Renzo says he's so sorry to hear about the accident. Unfortunately, his English isn't very good, so he won't be able to assist. Then he smiles. “But I'll grant you five nights for this meal.”

“You two are making fun of me,” she says.

Renzo laughs.

“Four it is,” says Moto. He pounds the table with his fist.

“I was raised by very proper and dignified Europeans who believed in decorum and etiquette,” she says, “and above all honor and decency.” She could go on—good shoes and an ironed skirt, clean socks and underwear before exiting the house, a thank-you note for every gift or kind gesture, and a written invitation required to attend any party, any function.

“Okay. Only three nights,” says Moto.

After supper, Moto gets his coat and heads out. To where, he doesn't say, but Hanne guesses to Midori's. Hanne retires early. When the dog scratches on her door, she lets it in and pats the end of the bed, hoping it will settle there and warm her freezing feet.

The next day, Moto is
up early. He's driving toward town to go swimming. She informs him Renzo has invited her to continue to stay in the cottage.

“Renzo loves company,” says Moto.

“And you?”

“Depends on the company.” He smiles. “Stay. As long as you like.”

“Thank you. Just a couple of days.”

And now she must impose again. Can she accompany him to town so she can retrieve her luggage from the hotel? She's wearing the same clothes from a day ago and they've begun to feel like a second, oily skin.

“My god! What an imposition,” he says, mocking her. “Told you it would be fun having you around.”

“I'm glad I'm entertainment for you.”

“I'm just playing around.”

Which you always seem to be doing, she thinks.

They head out to the garage. She's expecting a dirty clunker filled with old newspapers, crumpled receipts, empty soda cans, torn upholstery with dirty foam exposed. Instead, he drives a shiny black Mercedes, as pristine as if it had been bought yesterday.

“I wouldn't have guessed,” she says, touching the shiny hood.

“I like to keep you guessing,” he says, opening the car door for her.

She climbs into the passenger seat. The car still has its smell of newness. He doesn't get in right away. It seems something across the street has beckoned to him. He walks across the street, then comes back over to her side of the car. “You have to see the clouds. They look like huge ships sailing across the sky.” He makes her get out and look.

She sees clumps of white billowy clouds. No ships, not even a sail.

“Quixotic, that's what you are, Moto,” she says, getting back in.

“Oh, yeah. The woman who must name everything,” he says, backing out on the gravel driveway and heading down the narrow two-lane road.

“We've kept ourselves busy over the centuries, naming and organizing and categorizing. Why not use them?” she replies.

“Do you ever wonder when you're busy naming, what you might be leaving out?”

“That's the beauty of knowing more than one language. The act of naming conjures more than one word for me, and each word hauls with it its own nuances, as well as cultural, associational, and etymological overlays. Suddenly, that one word has expanded into a large world.”

“Of words,” he says.

“Of course. What else?”

“I would think the beauty of speaking many languages is that you could talk to people. You know, travel to a foreign place and not feel foreign.” He points to a squirrel on a bare birch tree branch and smiles brightly. “He's moving so fast, he's making that thick branch bounce. See it?”

She watches the squirrel leap to a telephone wire. “I don't travel much anymore. Occasionally I visit my son and his family, but that's about it. Besides, I've been reduced to only one language.”

“Lucky for you it's Japanese. If it was Armenian, we wouldn't be talking right now.”

The morning air is cold. She didn't come prepared for this weather. She needs to buy a heavier coat and a scarf.

“You mentioned a son.”

She tells him a son and a daughter. Tomas and Brigitte. “And you? Do you have children?”

He takes a deep breath and for a long time doesn't speak, as if he's lost all memory of English words. “Unfortunately, we were never blessed that way.”

“I'm sorry.”

They drive by fields of soybean and barley, and then a lake. He points out the geese, says they look incandescent, as if they'd swallowed light bulbs. “Such beauty for no obvious purpose.”

Hanne always wished she had that impulse: to be drawn to the world in front of her, not always reaching for something beyond herself. Jiro had it. Brigitte, too. “You're fortunate, Brigitte,” she told her daughter many times. “This world is enough for you, isn't it?”

Now Moto says: “Your daughter. You don't travel to see her?”

“That's for another time, I think.”

“Fair enough.” Minutes seem to go by. “And what about translation?” he says. “Where does the beauty lie there?”

“I've always explained it as an effort to deepen the connections of the world. One culture converses with another, and the recipient culture receives a new vision of the world.”

Even before she finishes, she's assaulted by the memory of Kobayashi humiliating her—
your hopes of uniting mankind.

She concedes it's a romanticized version of translation. She's making it appear grand, and making herself appear far more magnanimous and generous than she really is. By the way Moto is smiling, as if there's an old joke between them, he must be aware of that too. Why does it always feel as if he's seeing right through her?

“And it enchants me,” she says. “It gives me pleasure purely for what it is.”

“You mean you like it.”

“Yes. I like it. Love it.”

“You know, I'm a pretty informal guy. You don't have to talk to me as if you're giving me a lecture.”

“I'm just speaking. It's the way I speak. I was raised in a very proper household.”

“I'm just saying you can lighten up with me.”

“I thought the Japanese language with its proper, polite—”

“Yeah, well, not me.” There's a long pause. “You know, it's like you think it over before you speak. It puts a lot of distance between you and everyone else.” He glances at her. “You're guarded. That's why you do it, right? To protect yourself. But listen, I promise I won't bite.”

Guarded? Why is he scrutinizing her? “I pay attention to what I say and how I speak, that's all.”

They drive on in silence. Out the window, she looks at farm-houses, pastures filled with brown cows. She has no idea where they are. They pass by a temple and an orchard of bare fruit trees. Hanne considers all the ways to broach the subject and finally settles on something simple, direct. “So I understand you're no longer married.”

“That's right.”

“You've moved on, then.”

He smiles faintly.

“Is Midori your girlfriend?”

“Back to the labels,” he says, smiling. “Why? Are you going to make a move on me?”

She feels herself blush. When is the last time she's done that?

He laughs. “Let's see. She's an aspiring actress. A fairly good voice-over actress. A woman who has a closet full of pantsuits and shoes. A pretty lousy cook. Should I go on?”

“I meant in relationship to you.”

“A woman who wants to learn everything about my voice. Who likes to hang out with me when I'm in a good mood. When I'm not, she'd rather not. And I don't blame her one bit. I can be a real stick-in-the-mud.”

Did she really think this elusive man would give her the answer? It's almost as if he is intentionally vague, hiding from her, playing around, ducking away each time she probes. Why is that? He's tapping his thumbs against the steering wheel. Hanne looks out the window at the rice fields. Maybe it's early in his relationship with Midori. In the beginning, before Jiro and Chikako became a couple, Jiro dated other women. When Jiro was asked about his relationship with Chikako, he, too, was noncommittal.

Moto pulls into the parking lot of the hotel and she runs in, checks out, and gets her luggage. She's not sure she's doing the right thing, camping out in their cottage, but Japan is exorbitantly expensive, and, as she'd hoped, she's getting to spend time with Moto.

It's a short drive to what apparently is the swimming pool—a long building that seems to be constructed out of polished metal, glimmering in spite of the overcast day.

“We're here,” he says, lighting up a cigarette.

“You smoke?” she says, getting out of the car. Jiro did too, but that's like saying he had black hair. Nearly everyone here smokes, she knows that, yet somehow it surprises her with Moto.

He closes his door. “Only before I'm about to swim,” he says, his voice playful, as if he might be teasing her.

“It's not good for you.”

“Yeah, well, breathing this crummy air probably isn't good for me either.”

“I smoke only when I speak French,” she says, opening her luggage and digging out her suit and clean clothes.

Moto begins to laugh, as if this was the most hilarious thing he's heard in a long time.

“And I only eat dark rye bread when I'm speaking German,” she says, laughing with him, which prompts her to go on, “and pickled herring when I speak Danish. I think I look my best when I'm speaking French. My clothes, my hair, my complexion, French brings out a shimmer.”

“Oh, you don't look so bad speaking Japanese.”

“That's kind of you.”

“And Japanese?”

She tells him it's too humble, too yielding, too ready to get down on its knees and apologize for the smallest thing. “Everyone's so polite here, always saying you're sorry. Except you, of course.”

He laughs loudly.

“I meant that as a compliment, you know. But maybe it's because you're speaking English, a rather blunt language.”

“No. Doesn't matter what language. I'm always impolite. And rude and loud and disrespectful, if you ask my brother. He says I offend everyone.” He picks up his swim bag. “My American friends who speak Japanese say it makes them aware of the other person. Your relationship to someone. You know, should you use honorific or standard or informal verb when you talk to someone? That kind of thing.”

“Yes, that too. The other person.”

Getting into the pool involves a procedure more suitable for entrance into the United Nations. Moto pulls out his membership card, which shows his picture—expressionless, staring straight at the camera. He produces his driver's license with a similar photo, and she's asked to do the same, in addition to paying the rather extravagant entrance fee. They must sign in, state their purpose (to swim), and walk through a security gate, which presumably will buzz if it detects too much metal on their persons.

Once they get inside, she sees what all the fuss is about. It's not a pool. It's a beach with fine white sand, blue waves rolling onto a shore, and the aroma of coconut suntan lotion drifting by. People are stretched out on bright, colorful beach towels, sitting under sun umbrellas. Straight ahead, a turquoise sea. All enclosed in a huge building.

The indoor sea went over so well in Miyazaki, says Moto, they built a smaller version here. Over by the lifeguard's chair, there's a statue of a monkey holding a cold drink. Down the way, a group of teens plays volleyball.

“Nature's so unreliable,” she says. “Better to create your own sea.”

“After a while, you'll forget it's fake.”

He points to the women's locker room. “You can swim,” he says, “or not.”

She watches him walk toward the men's locker room, that flowing graceful gait again, his head not bobbing up and down like a normal human's. She watches until he disappears.

She steps into the locker room. White floors, white walls, white benches, white lockers. Not just an off-white, a bright white, as if designed to make someone go a little blind. She quickly changes into her black one-piece suit, a piece of clothing she threw in her suitcase at the last minute, thinking she'd never use it, and studies herself in the mirror. Still trim, she can wear a bathing suit without embarrassment. For a moment, she tries to see herself from Moto's point of view. No Midori, that's for sure. But not too shabby. For a woman her age. She steps outside, or rather inside, onto the fake sand.

The shore is crowded with people, the water filled with swimmers. She sits alone on the white sand. She has no idea where Moto is. Her skin is ghostly pale, though most everyone is the same anemic coloring; the Japanese, like her, avoid the sun. She is self-conscious, like a bystander. Oddly, she starts to sweat. Maybe a heater is used to mimic the sun's warmth.

Wading into the warm water (unnaturally warm), she can't remember the last time she went swimming. She does the breast-stroke, but her legs are not kicking hard enough. And she's out of breath. She floats on her back, until someone swims by, kicking hard, splashing drops of water on her face. She resumes the breast-stroke, her chin in the water, and tries to spot Moto. Is he the fanatical freestyle swimmer, charging just outside the waves in a beeline, then doing a flip turn? Or the steady one slowly raising his arm over his head, his hand a perfect cup, entering the water delicately, without a splash?

Jiro would be the charger, throwing himself into his strokes. Before she became ill, before he sent her away, Jiro had told his wife that if he ever became sick with no hope of recovery, he'd commit suicide. He wouldn't put up with a withered body, a demented mind. She argued with him, a big fight. His life was valuable, even if he was ill, even if he was a vegetable. She'd love him regardless. She'd never let him kill himself, never! How ironic, then, when she became ill, she tried to end her own life. One never knows what one is capable of, thinks Hanne. You can only speak from the circumstances you currently find yourself in; change the circumstances and you might have an entirely different view of things.

Truthfully, she can't say for sure that Moto would be the charger. She could just as easily see him floating on his back, staring at the ceiling just because he wanted to. She feels herself slowing down, her bottom half sinking. When a young woman swims right into her, hitting her shoulder, she has her excuse to swim to shore and get out. She stretches out on her towel.

A boy appears and sits about five yards from her. He's looking at her. He looks away. Then back again. “This is a pen,” he says in English.

This is a pen? There is no pen. Not in his hand. Not in hers.

He repeats it, smiling bigger, clearly pleased with his statement. He must be seven or eight years old.

In Japanese, she tells him her name and unfortunately she doesn't have a pen.
“Sumimasen
.” She raises both hands up in the air to show they are empty.