Translator (24 page)

The airport shuttle enters San
Francisco via Highway 1. It's early morning, the pale dawn bleaching the blue sky. Jet lag doesn't account for the knot of queasiness in Hanne's stomach. She opens the window, hoping to ease her discomfort, but the air is pungent with wood smoke.

She shares the shuttle with three women who are talking about their recent European tour of cathedrals. Evidently, they attended a church service of some kind, because they are raving about a sermon. “The way the pastor told it,” says one heavy-lidded woman, “everything makes sense.”

What did he simplify? wonders Hanne. What did he leave out? because nothing seems simple anymore. Outside Hanne's window, there's the glimmering blue of the Pacific Ocean, stretching all the way to Japan.

When the driver deposits her in front of her apartment building, she pays him and hears herself say “Thank you,” in English, with its rounded, drawn-out vowels. She murmurs it again to herself. This will be her primary language again.

A boy zooms by on a blue bike. Across the street, the red awning of the apartment building flaps in the cold wind, as if waving hello or good-bye. A pigeon struts around the sidewalk, looking for crumbs or bits of garbage, pecking at a piece of a hot dog bun, a gray glob of bubblegum. There's the bottlebrush tree, stripped of all its flowers. A malicious boy's hand has torn off the red blooms? Or maybe it's the wind's doing.

Her mailbox is full, mostly of bills. She watches herself stuff the stack into her handbag and step into the elevator, which rings its familiar high-pitched C note. She puts the key in the lock of her apartment and steps through the threshold. The air is stale, musty, dead still. A coat of dust dims the surfaces. She senses that her perceptions are being filtered through a haze of not quite being here, as if she is hovering above her body, her entire life, and reluctant to reenter.

In the front hallway, an oak table, a vase full of dead daisies, dried brown petals scattered on the tabletop, the floor, the water turned a thick, murky green. The apartment of someone in a hurry to depart, she thinks. A stench comes from somewhere else. As she heads down the hallway, the odor becomes more pungent, overpowering. She coughs and covers her nose with her turtleneck collar. It's coming from the bathroom—a toilet of old urine.

She opens all the windows and in pours the cold air heavy with the smell of sea and a torrent of city noises—horns, screeches, shouts, music—a dramatic play, everything in motion, and she stands at her window, watching the tiny people below carrying bright shopping bags and dull briefcases, the miniature cars racing down the street as if everything desirable is just around the corner. Across the street, where she once saw the couple running around naked, the gray curtains are drawn, no longer generous with their intimacy. A momentary vertigo. Still she stands there until she's no longer watching, but thinking, how disorienting all this is, to be here. The world, this world feels so far away.

She throws her dirty clothes in the hamper and surveys the bedroom, as if deciding whether to claim it. An entire wall of books. She's read them all, but by now most of them, because of the passage of time, are reduced to a sentence in her mind. That one, a man on a long journey; the book next to it, a woman going through a hellish divorce; the next, a day at the beach and a dinner party. Condensed and summarized, they sound trivial.

On her dresser are photographs of Tomas as a boy, of Tomas and Anne and her two granddaughters surrounded by palm trees and white sand. A holiday in Tahiti, if she remembers right; they asked her to go, but she declined. She can't take hot sun. Because his eyes are screwed up against the light, Tomas' smile looks half-hearted, even pained, but her granddaughters are in their bright pink bathing suits, smiling as if the world belonged to them. Hanne's gaze drifts to the empty space, which once held Brigitte's picture.

She takes it out. Hanne is hugging this wisp of a girl. Already at age seven, the outer edges to her potential were far beyond her peers, beyond what Hanne ever sensed for herself. How could she not become Hanne's receptacle for grandness? What's most striking to Hanne, something she's never seen before, is how dreamy and distant Brigitte looks. Her gaze is out beyond the camera—looking at what? Where did she transport herself? She was slipping from Hanne's clutches long before Hiro died. She failed her daughter so miserably that Brigitte had to retreat far into herself, or dream herself elsewhere, anywhere but near Hanne.

Or maybe not. How little she knows.

She puts the photo back in its place on the dresser. When she opens her closet door to hang up her coat, she sees Brigitte's four cardboard boxes stuffed in the corner. She opens one and looks inside. She remembers standing in that rundown lobby of the old monastery, with the dust-speckled murky light, one of Brigitte's boxes perched on the desk of that sinister woman who ran the spiritual group.

“I will see my daughter,” Hanne said, her voice shaking. “I will see Brigitte.”

The woman smiled a tight, condescending smile. “Nivedita is not seeing visitors.”

Her final retreat from Hanne—relinquishing her birth name and running straight into the arms of this group.

She heads into her office. Her desk is swept clean of everything, a bare stretch of dark walnut oak stares ominously at her. She hesitates, hoping to prolong the sense of viewing her life from a distance. Of seeing it as someone else's life. But as she sits in her chair, her former life rushes at her, as if all along it was crouched in a corner, waiting for her to take her usual spot so it could pounce.

She calls Tomas's office.

“He's out of the country.”

Hanne explains who she is. “What country?”

A pause. “I was told not to say.”

“But I'm his mother.”

The woman clears her throat. Another long pause. “I'm sorry.”

He must have flown to see Brigitte. “When is he coming back?”

“Maybe three days, he can't say for sure.”

She hangs up and looks around, stunned. She could call Anne, but can't stomach more evasion, denial. She suddenly doesn't want to be near her desk, or in her apartment or anywhere near her old life, which feels as alive as a pile of dead leaves. She grabs her coat, and, not bothering to wait for the elevator, runs down flight after flight of stairs. Winded, she steps out onto California Street and starts walking. The city is as she left it: people out with their panting dogs, children squealing in the playground, the old Russian men playing chess or checkers at their usual spot under the oak tree. There's the same doorman at the St. Francis, the same doorman at the Top of the Mark. Probably the blue-haired lady is on the treadmill walking to nowhere, gazing out with a bored expression. The city sails onward in its constant wind. Why is she surprised it's still here, nothing changed?

And now there is a familiar-looking man, a slight lope to his walk. David, dressed in pressed trousers, a brown suit coat and blue tie, his hair slightly damp from a recent shower, he must be on his way to the university, which is only a couple of blocks away. They used to walk together. She looks at her watch. If she'd waited fifteen minutes, she could have missed him. She pictures her old classroom—the rows of chipped wooden desks, the fluorescent light flickering, the chalk on her hands, her clothes, in the air, up her nose. She doesn't miss it.

“Hanne!” He embraces her, smiling. “You're back. How are you?”

She begins to feel the need to walk away. But where? “I just got back.”

“And when did your English decide to return?”

An image comes to her: she is standing in a field, beckoning to the hills, trying to lure her English from its hideout. That's as strange as the story she tells him about the generous Japanese man who spoke a steady stream of English, the fake beach, the bad translation of
Macbeth
, the note from a Japanese girl.

“The doctors will be puzzling over you for years,” he says, smiling. “Do you feel like your old self again? Everything in its place?”

She gives him a simple pragmatic response, mostly because she wants to be on her way: her lifeline to the doorman, the postman, the grocer has been restored, she says. But there's something more that she doesn't try to convey. Nor can she, because it remains inchoate—it has to do with possibilities and the need for something richer, more meaningful.

He takes hold of her hand. “You look spectacular. Do you have time for a quick cup of coffee?” He gestures behind him to a café. She sees that look in his eye. Inside the café are big, comfortable chairs, only a few patrons, a fire burning in the hearth. She smells brewed coffee. She has all the time in the world, but she doesn't want to spend it with him, with anyone. Standing here, she is aware of the thinnest of threads running from him to her. He's a kind man, but how little she's survived on. Like thin gruel.

“Unfortunately, I've got to run,” she says. “A possible job translating.” Someone said—who was it?—that to say “no” to reality is one of the greatest ways to endure. So, she tells herself, she's enduring.

“Wonderful!” He looks disproportionately happy, as if he might hug her again.

“It's nothing grand, just a translation of some documents. Government documents. A big stack.” She pauses. “And maybe a book of poems. Japanese love poems.” Listen to her!

He kisses her on the cheek. “I'll call you. We can get together.” He winks at her. “I've missed you terribly.”

Of course there is no interview, no job waiting for her. Though mentioning it has stirred her up.

She calls Anne. After congratulating Hanne on the return of her English, Anne's voice becomes somber. “I've always hated this secrecy, this arrangement between Brigitte and Tomas,” says Anne, but before Hanne's hope has a chance to flutter, she adds, “but it's not my role to dismantle it.”

“You can at least tell me if he left in a hurry?”

“I'm not the one to do this. You'll have to talk to Tomas.” Her voice is stern, as if she's admonishing a deviant child. Then she sighs. “Perhaps this time he'll break this awful code of silence.”

“Do you have a phone number for him?”

A pause. “I'll have him call you when he gets home.”

Sasha is suddenly on the line, telling Hanne that her mom has been reading to her about beetles. “The beetles camouflage themselves and you can't see them,” says Sasha, her voice flush with excitement, pouncing on each word. “You have to look really hard and wait until they move. But I saw one in the back yard!”

Anne comes back on the phone. “We're heading out for the Hall of Science. Sasha wants to see the insect collection.”

Or did you go on and on about the insects, subtly and craftily shaping Sasha's interest? Magically, Sasha thinks she's the sole originator of this desire, when it is you, Anne. Hanne can't restrain herself: “What if she grows up and despises science?”

Anne pauses. “I just want her to know that that world exists and she has choices.”

Hanne recalls saying something similar about Brigitte and languages. She hangs up before she becomes a nag, a bad mother-in-law, though it's probably too late for that now.

Hanne must busy herself or she'll go mad. If she had a garden, she'd go out and put her hands into the dirt. Wasn't that her mother's refuge when Hanne became too much for her? When the world was too much? The fury with which she attended to her garden yielded an abundance of green beans, tomatoes, and lettuce.

There's her play to think about. It seems so long since she's looked at it because, truly, the project has come to depress her.

With a sigh, she pulls out her pages. There's Ono no Komachi, living out a steady drumbeat of days, one the same as the other. Another poem scratched out that no one bothers to read, stuffed in a box. By now, her small hut is packed with boxes of poems. Ono no Komachi writes one, flings it in the box—even she doesn't bother reading it, for she knows it falls far short of what she means to say. How come it's so difficult to write about things as they are?

But that's it. Hanne has reached the limits of her imagination. What's the ending? The one ending that seems most likely: a steady deterioration to her lonely death, her body crumpled over her latest poem. The world gets along just fine without her. Who would want to watch that?

How much easier to return the poet to her glory days, the glory of youth. She pulls out another sheet of paper. For a long time she sits there before thinking, What about a Noh play, but for a Western audience? Ono no Komachi in a mask, a mask covered with hundreds of words, random words. She finds inspiration for a poem by plucking from the mask a single word. “Water,” and her mind alights, races off to write a poem. “Pine tree,” another poem. “Betrayal,” another. Day after day, a word chosen, a poem springs to life.

She is not alone in her hut. She's haunted by ghosts—the illustrious dead poets are with her, wearing white gowns and white masks empty of words. They are whispering in her ear. Is the poet writing to please the ghosts? Are the ghosts her audience? Not at all. Early on, they were welcome. But by now they are weary, meddling companions who she wishes would go away.

Why, then, put pen to paper? Why bother trying to fit words to the feeling of loneliness? Of love? Misunderstanding? Not for the ghosts, not for any readers waiting in the wings. There are none. Certainly she has other options. Hanne imagines marriage, children, grandchildren, friends. But Ono no Komachi does not choose this path, because it would be a betrayal. She can't disavow what feels like her heart's sole desire. She is here for one thing, not imposed by anyone but herself; she is, and always has been, circumscribed by herself. No choice in the matter; for, if a certain measure of happiness, a certain modicum of meaning is to be had in this world, it's through the arrangement of words into beautiful rhythms and sounds—the writing of poetry that no one cares about. It's as if she's in a small room making precise, detailed figurines out of crystal that no one wants, no one will ever buy. That is her life sentence, which she must live out to the very end.