Translator (5 page)

“Ready for a little ride?”
A different man, this one cleanly shaven, with breath of peppermint, crouches beside her.

The question seems profound. A ride? To where? How to answer? Words are flying around in Hanne's head.
Iie, Nan desu ka?
Abscheulich, wutend sein, informaste a los vecinos? Roto. La maleta esta cerrada y no la puedo abrir.

A thick hand slides beneath her head, back, legs, something hard against her spine. It seems no answer is required, she is moving sideways, effortlessly, traveling fast, and now she's sinking onto something downy soft. Thankfully, the circle of gawkers vanishes. Flat on her back, she stares at the ceiling, a world of white swirls, like cloud sculptures, no, not sculptures, not at all, a word, a word fixes upon her. She makes out the letter “H,” then “O,” “W,” slowly it comes to her. “However” written in puffy letters on the ceiling. What does it mean? But then the letters scatter and it's again nothing but meaningless swirls of mist.

“Hang on.”

Another imperative, this one comes with a lilt and she relaxes into it. She's moving, not sideways, but up, soaring above the ground, as if flying. But what if she falls again? Despite the new rush of panic, there's nothing she can do about it. She's tumbled into a place where she has no agency. She can't move a muscle, trigger a nerve ending, or spark a synapse to make a decision and then carry it out. In this new place, everything just occurs. She's certain something bad will happen; but hasn't it already?

Someone's warm breath is near her ear. The scent of peppermint. Peppermint Man is nearby. A splash of cold air strikes her face, her lungs, the squeal of a car tire, shrieks, laughter, a man's voice shouting something about broken. “A broken window!” Everything about her body seems to have departed, except her hearing, which has become excruciatingly acute. Noises are loud, deafening. She wants to press her hands to her ears, but she has no sense of her hands. Or her legs or feet or any part of her body. Where is her body? She can't lift her head to see it. Though she still has thoughts—her hearing and her thinking remain, as if her mind has been severed from her body. If that's the result of what's happened (what
has
happened?), well, what good has her body been, anyway? A vessel intent on aging, demanding pills to quell anxiety and insomnia, pills to level out cholesterol and high blood pressure, eventually rushing to its demise. More liquid streams down her face.

Hundreds of clouds overhead, the cold wind must have torn the sky apart. If she could move her mouth—
Where?
Doko? Donde? Wohin?
A grinding, then another, a pause before she places it—rusty doors opening, the light is dimming, the gray disappears. White overhead. She stops moving. Bam, bam, two doors shutting, the outside world muffled. Her mind is working so slowly, as if each thought, each word must pass through a solid wall. She knows where she is, but can't think of the word. Peppermint Man climbs in with her, smiling. A chipped front tooth. She hears someone else enter, huff, the sound of springs squeaking, the slam of a door. What is the name of the thing she's in?

A siren blares. Something bad has happened. To her! She remembers the circle of faces, the boy's eyes, people ogling. The warm liquid on her face.

Peppermint Man stands and pulls a dark blue blanket from the shelf. He wraps it around her, carefully tucking it around her shoulders, the sides of her, her feet. His skin is tan, the kind of tan young people wear, and he's bare-armed, revealing strapping muscles. Probably a job requirement, along with the bright smile. “You doing all right?” he says.

Okay, I think. She does not know if she said these words out loud.

There's an ease about him, about her situation. What
is
her situation? She's beginning to feel the first stirrings of a horrible headache right above her eyes. The bridge of her nose aches. Her eyelids feel heavy, her lower lip trembles and droops. He opens a cabinet, unwraps a cloth, and wipes her face. “Clean you up a bit. How about it?” His voice is low but riding alongside, that light inflection, as if none of this is truly happening—the blood on the cloth, a lot of blood. From her? When she closes her eyes, he grabs her forearm. “Oh, no you don't. No sleeping on my watch.”

He wraps a cloth sleeve around her arm and pumps it up. The red needle on the dial jags higher. Somewhere in her brain, she knows the name of the device he's using, knows what he's doing. The needle falls, stutters, falls again. He rips the sleeve off, writes something down, then snaps off the overhead light. “All done.”

Indeed, something is done, and to the dull drone of the car—is it a car?—she sinks into murkiness, her eyelids hovering half-mast. That lullaby, she tries to conjure it up, the one her mother used to lull her to sleep, but just as it rises, other words swoop in:
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
/
All mimsy were the borogoves,/And the mome raths outgrabe.
She memorized
Jabberwocky
when she was a girl and went around her small town—where did they live?—repeating it to the confusion of everyone. Calls from neighbors, “Has your daughter gone mad?”
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

From somewhere far away, she hears someone talking. The tan man says something, but the words enter her brain like drips. “Why don't you—” but she loses the rest. The place where they lived, she remembers old buildings, blackish green moss on white, bone-white, church bells chiming, a funny echo afterward. Switzerland. They lived in Switzerland.
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!/Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun/ The frumious Bandersnatch!

For a while her parents thought it endearing, even clever. She took the poem and developed a new language, something with its own logic, inserting a consonant or a vowel where one was least expected. An almost-word. She spoke what she secretly called The Language of Jabberwock—all the time, refusing to utter any other language. Her teachers sent her home from school, “an incorrigible child.” Worried, her parents enlisted the help of a Viennese shrink, who declared her sane, a clever, mischievous girl who carried things too far, such as this riddle-making havoc. If she didn't want to age her parents prematurely, she'd better straighten up and act like a proper young girl.

For the first time, she notices two small windows. They give her a view of what's outside, what she's leaving behind. She has to squint—the world outside is too bright—an endless stream of cars, people on the sidewalk, the white dome of City Hall.
She closes her eyes.
He left it dead, and with its head/He went galumphing back.

“What's your name?”

A voice floats around her. An accent, a missing “r” in “your.” From New York? Almost a “wa,” “youwa.” A gray-haired man in a white coat stands beside her bed. Red broken veins cover his cheeks, and his wire-framed glasses, the lenses thick and strong, make his intense gray eyes larger than normal. Peppermint Man had not taken her home. From somewhere comes
byohin
, then
Krankenhaus
, a cascade of words, ending in “hospital.” The last time she'd found herself in a hospital was with Brigitte, getting her stomach pumped.

The man in the white coat and glasses leans closer. He has a bulbous nose, like a clown. Is he a clown? But why is he in the hospital too? None of this makes sense, yet she can't stop her mind from wondering.

“Do you understand the question?” he says.

She nods. Her name. What is?
Namae wa nan desu ka?
She understands perfectly, but she can't make her mouth move, nor can she recall her name. He repeats the question, louder, more firmly, as if her hearing is impaired or her mental capacity—and it is, yes? A panic seizes her, turning the question into a crucible that must be answered. What . . . her name . . . is?
Namae wa
? She frantically searches through the corridors of her brain, opening doors, slamming them shut. Where is?

“Can you tell me your address?”

She's still searching for her name!

“Phone number?”

The clown is waiting, not smiling. Unwanted words swirl around her head, pineapple, helium, quail, harpoon, fie fie fie, rooster, sock, Prussian blue, toad, then,
chiisai, hyaku, karai, sarada, akai, Puedes salir de casa un poco mas tarde, Gaze, hauchfein, versteinern, wiederherstellen, doyatte kaisha ni ikimasu ka
?—as if she had opened too many doors and now everything is flying around, a nonsensical mess, shoes on top of a toad, the rooster with a harpoon, and the ringing of fie fie fie. But her name? Where? Buried underneath the pineapple? Or the harpoon stomping around like a one-legged pirate—fie, fie, fie! She used to say this as a child when she was angry. Fie! Her name, where?

A woman magically appears beside the clown. Arms folded, she's in the same white coat, the same solemn face. Her hair is coppery gold and pulled back in a bun, revealing a broad forehead. Her plump lips move, she's speaking to the man. Slowly, how slowly her brain works. What . . . her brain . . . to . . . happened? Doctors. Doctors are. If she could get her mouth to form words, she'd say,
What . . . to me . . . happened? Incomprehensible.

The doctors wait, write something on a notepad, then whisk away. For a long time, she is alone. How long has she been here? A flowery pink curtain stretches across the room. A TV blares. But there is no TV. It's not a TV, but moaning, a man is moaning. “Call 911!” he shouts. Over and over. “911 911 911!” A refrain, like a Greek play, the only tragedy to be sung. A cosmic joke on her! Her love of words ridiculed by the endless loop of numbers. What might come next? A recitation of prime numbers? A stream of calculus? She must stop. He's probably in a great deal of pain. Someone must help him.

A nurse with a band-aid on her chin suddenly appears at her bedside. Help that man, Hanne wants to say. The nurse is young, not a day over twenty. “I draw blood.”

An accent. Romanian? A prick and she watches, almost as if it's someone else's blood rapidly filling the vial. Dark red, rich. A beautiful color. Inside her, this beautiful rich red. Another vial. Another. Five, six, how many vials? She wants to protest, “Too much!” The nurse disappears, six vials of blood gone. It feels like five minutes later when another nurse with tight white curls comes in and says she must draw blood. But! There must be a panicked look in her eyes for the older nurse explains matter-of-factly, “We can't find them. Misplaced or mislabeled.”

The nurse finishes, changes the band-aid on Hanne's forehead, her nose, and disappears in her soft shoes. A sliver of silence strolls in, but the man in a nearby room snatches it away, shouting “911!” A belly laugh echoes in a hallway, garbled words float into her room. She drifts, as if in a dream. Maybe it's not a circus, but a dream. The 911 shouter, the belly laughter, the whir of an engine, the buzz of an electric light. Anything, anything at all could happen. And now here materializes a man in a powder-blue uniform. He's huge, his face is the size of a cannonball. He lifts her onto a gurney as if she were a leaf.

In her version of events, they are sending her home—she has failed to provide sufficient answers, so out she goes. She can't tell them name, phone number, address, so they cannot or will not accommodate. Whatever role they had for her in their circus, they must give it to someone else. She wants to cry, “Please give me another chance.” Though why she feels this, she doesn't know because she'd actually like to go home.

He rolls her into a small silver room that smells of disinfectant. He pushes a button and they start to descend, finally stopping with a shudder and a rattle. The doors magically open and spit her into a dreary corridor.

“I'll go see if they're ready for you,” he says. “Wait right here.”

She looks at her hands resting on the blanket. Her long fingers seem perfectly designed for a piano, and perhaps they could play; she's never tried. No piano lessons or violin during her childhood; no ballet or dance. Only musty libraries and museums, her bedroom, plenty of time spent in dark places. When her father left them, not for another woman, but for work, a position in China, mother took a full-time job. Hanne was sent away to live with her Oma. For the best, said her mother. A small, bitter, old woman, Oma dressed head to toe in widow's black. She had a long dour face, and her breath smelled like garlic and onions and pickled herring. She lived in a small town, Brunsbüttel, in a drafty old house on the North Sea, where she'd grown up as a child. She spent her hours plotting myriad ways to defeat the Russians. Her mind was still firmly planted in the aftermath of World War II, certain the Russians would return to rape and pillage some more. She'd taught herself Russian to prepare and made Hanne learn too. “They are a cold, cruel people, Hanne,” she said. “This time I will negotiate our freedom. You must speak the language to get what you want.”

Every day Oma cleaned the floors. “Out!” she ordered Hanne. And Hanne stood in the snow for hours, shivering, knees knocking, cursing her Oma and her mother for sending her here, as she waited for the floors to dry. If she spilled her milk or didn't clean her plate, she was locked in the cellar, dark as black ink, with the rats scratching. If she cried, if Oma heard even a whimper, if she pleaded with Oma to let her out, she was kept down there longer. So Hanne discovered that if she held her breath, taking only shallow sips of dank air, the tears stopped. Despite the bleak childhood, Hanne now has a deep longing for her mother, even her Oma. For someone to take care of her. Mama! She hears the cry in her head.

When she realizes there's no one around, she closes her eyes and imagines Hiro has come back to life. Just as he reaches for her, his ghostly hand disappears. And now it is Jiro. He is writing scores of music, wearing a scowl, his eyes blazing. When he sees her, his expression instantly changes into something milder, kinder. To be looked at like that, soft, lovingly. He puts his hand on her forehead. “What can I get you?” he says. “Have you had breakfast? You must eat something.” She smiles, tears running down her cheeks.