Translator (17 page)

“Now, you must be bored. So I'll read to you.”

“I feel bad enough about this.” She tries to shoo him away.

He pulls up a chair beside her bed. “You know,” he says, “some people take great pleasure in caring for others.”

It is the same way Jiro viewed tending to his wife. He felt needed, and many sweet hours were spent caring for her. Until he realized he'd done all he could. And it was still not enough.

Moto pulls out Gogol's
Dead Souls
and smiles. “And since you were so interested in my opinion of the translation, I thought I'd read it to you. Let you come to your own conclusions.”

On the fifth day, her fever finally breaks. She is weak, her limbs reluctant to move, but she makes herself get out of bed and dress. Enough lying around, staring out the window. She wants to go to town to buy gifts for their generosity, their patience, their caretaking. By now, she feels like part of the family: a bad relative who has stayed far beyond her welcome. They have seen her without make-up, sweaty, her hair puffed out by a pillow, her breath stale from not brushing her teeth.

“The fallen rise again,” says Moto. He's in the kitchen, stirring a raw egg into his orange juice. “Welcome to the land of the living.”

“Thanks to you and Renzo, I am standing again. I want to repay you for your hospitality.”

“I'll add it to your bill,” he says smiling.

“Are you going to town anytime soon?”

In fact, he has another voice-over.

She gets her bag and they head to the car. Outside, the landscape erupts in feverish colors. It's been so long since she's looked at anything but a wall. She inspects herself in the visor mirror. “Back to normal,” she says, but the truth is that her face is drawn, gaunt, as if she's aged ten years. It seems months ago that she and Moto were intimate. And now? She feels so old, she's sure any scrap of beauty is gone. Moto finds a radio station that plays American jazz. He hasn't bothered to brush his hair, but she supposes it isn't necessary—it's his voice the company wants, and, she guesses, his fame. His birthmark is smaller today, or so it seems, and in the shape of an egg.

He pulls out of the driveway and starts to drive. “Help yourself,” he says, pointing to the two cups and a thermos of coffee.

She raises an eyebrow. “You'd risk sullying your fine leather seats?”

“Only for you,” he says. “Before you say no, since you don't seem to want anyone to ever do anything nice for you—”

“Is that how you see me?”

“You're one of the worst patients I've ever had. Always apologizing. Always saying you don't need a thing. You're ‘perfectly fine'—at a 103 temperature.”

She pours him a cup and one for herself. “Growing up, I wasn't allowed to get sick. My mother didn't have time for it. Nor did my father. I learned not to get sick.”

“You can will yourself not to get sick?”

“I just don't. I wasn't allowed.”

“Except,” he says, smiling, “you did.”

As he drives, he runs his thumb along his right earlobe, stroking it absentmindedly, almost tenderly. When a car barrels down the road in the opposite direction, he drives with one hand on the steering wheel at twelve o'clock, while gnawing the inside of his cheek. He points out for her a woodpile stacked up to a house's rafters, a thick cluster of bamboo, a pond that, in the dead of winter last year, froze over and became an impromptu ice rink for the neighborhood.

“I've been thinking about your daughter,” he says. “Maybe you just go to her. You know, show up. Where is she now?”

It feels like he's picking up where they left off, before she got sick. Has he been thinking about Brigitte the entire time? Hanne buttons up her coat. “I don't know.”

He raises an eyebrow.

“She keeps in touch with her brother, but only because he doesn't tell me what she says.”

She's glad he doesn't say for a second time it sounds difficult. Drops of rain splatter on the windshield. She watches a drip trickle down the glass. “In the beginning, no one knew where she was. It took a couple of months for her to inform Tomas where she was. That was kind of her.” Hanne doesn't try to keep the sarcasm from her voice. She knew Brigitte had taken a leave from college and gone to Eastern Europe with an organization called Safe Houses for the World. They built prefab houses for low-income folks. “Admirable, yes, but I wasn't in support of this, not that she asked me. I no longer had any financial strings to pull, because she'd rejected my help and signed up for financial aid. She declared herself no longer my dependent. She was supposed to return and finish her final year of college, but she never did. And that had been my fear all along. That she wouldn't finish. That something else would come along, something that would yank at her heartstrings and throw her off course. The group's president had no idea where she'd gone to and everyone was frantic. Finally, she called. She was in Cologne. She'd joined some spiritual group and had gone on retreat.”

Moto says nothing. Then, “Was she religious growing up?”

“She found a church. Church friends.” What was it? Presbyterian? Unitarian? She's ashamed to say she doesn't know. “But as a family, we had no religion. No regular attendance at a church. I suppose you could call Hiro a Buddhist.”

“And you?”

“Me?” She laughs. “Do I think there is some great power that will, when the grand curtain of life closes, judge my character and condemn me for my many failings? Do I believe there is some inherent meaning to existence? Unfortunately, no. Though we need meaning, I believe that. That's one thing I firmly believe. We are meaning-making machines. It keeps the storytellers and entertainers and psychologists and translators—yes, I benefit—in business.”

He slows down for a stop sign. “Maybe your daughter found a different way of viewing things.”

“Such as?”

“The world has its own inherent meaning. There's no need to do or make anything. It's just there. It's life in all its glory and, what's the word in English? Banality. That's the meaning.”

“Is that your belief?”

He smiles. “If you're asking is it a habit of my mind to think this, then no. It just is. A truth. And I was lucky to discover it.”

“Why lucky?”

“Sounds like a lot of work, trying to make meaning all the time. You can just sit back and enjoy life's meaning. No need to do a damn thing.”

Does he really believe this? Why does she always get the sense he's toying with her? Poking her in the ribs? The rain falls harder. Moto turns on the wipers, and she listens to their steady, hypnotic beat. The car ahead of them is spraying a white tail of water. She watches the rain with something like tension.

“I went over there,” she hears herself say. “To Europe. I went to her, hoping to bring her back, but I was denounced and rebuked by her so-called spiritual leaders. Hardly generous, these leaders. I was told I'd failed my daughter. She'd found her real family. Basically I was told to go away. I didn't know her defection would be permanent.”

She was going to add “I was found guilty without a trial and as punishment banished from my daughter's life,” but when she imagines it spoken out loud, it sounds too excessive, too self-pitying. And she doesn't feel self-pity. For years now, she's lived without knowing her daughter's whereabouts, without speaking to her. She's at peace with what she did, how she handled it. It was necessary, all of it necessary. She doesn't fault herself for trying to save her daughter.

Why is she dragging up the corpse of those hard times? It seems she forgets her purpose for being here. “May I ask, why did your marriage end?”

“It just did.”

She waits for him to say more. The rain is coming down in great silver sheets of water.

“And Midori?” She almost says “and all the others.”

“Yes?”

“Did she come before or after the demise of the marriage?”

“Right smack in the middle. Confusing for someone like you, isn't it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone who needs things to have labels, definitions. Someone who isn't allowed to get sick.” He smiles. “Midori wasn't the cause, if that's what you're asking. She just appeared in the middle. And she isn't a girlfriend, she's a friend who happens to be a woman. Nothing is neat and tidy.”

Moto hums a little overture, a resonating baritone rising from deep in his body. A wondrous sound; Hanne could listen to him all day.

Then, “My ex-wife, she's an amazing woman. Not just a businesswoman, but a painter, on the board of the public school and hospital, and a million other things.”

She hears the awe in his voice. Jiro loved his wife, too, and devoted himself fully to her well-being.

“But we couldn't have children and I didn't think we could move beyond it. It's what she wanted more than anything. For years we tried.”

It's her turn to say she is sorry.

“I had to let her go,” he says. “She didn't want to part ways, but I insisted.”

Like Jiro. Moto sent his wife away. He had to, if he wanted to do the right thing.

“Two years she's been gone. She met someone who could give her what she wants. She's forty years old and eight months pregnant.”

He rubs his eyelids.

“How generous of you,” she says, her voice quiet. “Not everyone could do that.”

“Not that generous. It feels as if part of me is off doing something else,” he says, “and I'm left waiting until she comes back.”

“She'll fade, by the by. The dimensions of the pain will contract. You'll forget about her.”

“I don't want to.”

“It's our nature to forget.”

“Not my nature. Besides, I couldn't bear it.”

“But wouldn't that make it easier? Happiness is often about forgetting.”

“Maybe. But I'm not able to do that.”

“Of course you are.”

“No. I'm not. I am who I am today because of her. She's threaded through every fiber of my being.”

“Is this something that's particularly Japanese?”

He slows the car down and turns to look at her. “No. It's something human. You haven't forgotten your husband, have you? Even though it's been years?”

Hanne stiffens. “Well, I'm sure Midori or someone else has helped you move on.”

“No.”

“So Midori means nothing to you?”

“I didn't say that. She's kind, and kindness goes a long way these days.” He talks some more about her, how she puts a little bright light into his otherwise gray day. He doesn't mention love of Midori, how she, or anyone else has swept him up and hurtled him back into life. No mention of how passion has made him new again. How in the years since his wife's absence, he's put one foot in front of the other and walked away from tragedy.

They drive by a dilapidated white barn, part of the side caved in, threatening to take the other side down. She tries to smooth the wrinkles from her skirt. A shiver runs from her scalp, down her arms, her legs, as if a cold wind just blew over her. Her skin feels like ice, and all her warmth has rushed out of her. She glances at Moto. He looks tired, a deep sadness in his eyes.

Jiro wanted to live, let the past drift away like a stick in the current so he could go on with the living. A year after his wife was placed in an institution, Jiro, her Jiro, was in the full embrace of another life, another woman. Or that's how she translated it. She remembers this line:
He was tired of feeling waterlogged with sadness.
She sensed in him an insatiable thirst for life. A refusal to be confined to the narrow space of loss. Didn't she translate the line:
He wanted to use himself up before he died?
Those dreary, melancholy sections of darkened windows and corridors, tear-stained pillows, she didn't give those to Jiro; she gave that messy malaise to Jiro's wife. But now she has a seed of doubt.

“Do you know an author named Yuri Kobayashi?” She can barely keep her voice steady.

“Sure. Years ago my ex-wife hired him to do a commercial. I can't remember what it was for. He became a good friend of mine.”

“He said he based the main character of his latest novel on you.”

“I wouldn't know about that.”

“You haven't read it?”

“No.”

She recites a passage to him:
Sunlight streams in through the bedroom window and he becomes aware of vast acreage in his mind that is wonderfully uninhabited. Where just yesterday it was populated by worry, anxiety, and vigilance, there is now a small country of nothingness. He wasn't even conscious of how much of his mind was devoted to, no, obsessed with her well-being. He feels a funny little smile on his face. He is a free man.

She studies him closely, trying to gauge his response. His face remains blank. “Does that sound like you at all? Since your wife left? Have you ever felt this way?”

“Some days. But most days, I can't do anything but stare at a damn wall. I've spent enough days like that to describe the way my blood feels coursing through my veins. Every day I miss her. Every day I wonder if I did the right thing. If I should have let her go. That's the truth of it. Maybe we could have made it work.”

She's sinking into a mood she can only describe as unfamiliar. “The other night when we danced, you said ‘Let's not speak.' Do you remember? It's a scene straight from his novel. That scene ends quite happily, on an upbeat, but you, you wept.”

“My wife. She loved to dance. I was remembering the times we'd open up our living room and dining room, just like we did the other night, and turn on the music and dance. After a long day at work, we'd set aside time and dance. It was such a wonderful way of finding each other again. When we were first a couple, we went dancing all the time. She looked radiant on those nights, so happy and full of laughter. What's this all about?”