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.
She’s moving again. She opens her eyes and watches herself being rolled into a white room with a large white tube in the center. A young woman comes over, smiling, showing squat white teeth. She begins to talk fast, a waterfall of words cascading from her red lipstick lips, pouring over Hanne. She tries to hold on to something, to stop herself from hurtling over the fall of words, “picture,” “brain,” “scan,” “rattling,” “pounding.”
She’s slid into the tube, surrounded on all sides by white and utter quiet. Here she will be buried, she thinks. In a soundless white tube, no one present, no gathering, no ceremony of solemn words. It’s what she’s always known: underneath everything, the thoughts, the situations, there is nothing. The entire stretch of life is a wild distraction from this nothingness. There’s no white light at the end of a tunnel, no God or Gods, just a white tube. After she’s placed in the tube, she imagines it will be inserted into a cannon that will shoot her into outer space, where her dead body, cocooned in the white tube, will orbit the earth forever, for why should she take up any more room on the planet? What use is she?
Suddenly she is surrounded by pounding. A perfectly designed punishment, given her keen hearing. And why must she suffer this way? There is no reason. And just as quickly, the pounding stops. She hears herself breathing. Rapidly. Panting. As soon as she thinks the torture is over, the pounding begins again. Stops. Again. Again.
“Hanne Schubert.”
The four syllables float above her, then slowly fall, like raindrops. Their texture feels familiar, both mellifluous and hard. A puff of air, a hush, a full-voiced stop. Her mind runs over and over the sounds, finding them immensely pleasurable. She’s always believed words to be music and her name, she thinks now, is evidence of that.
The gray-haired doctor says the ambulance driver had had enough smarts to pick up her purse. And what luck, inside they found her driver’s license and an address book. Her name is Hanne Schubert. “We’ve contacted your son. He’ll be here later today.”
She has been named, words bonded to the subject. She has a name. She’s half listening—“head trauma, left frontal lobe,” busy running the four syllables of her name through her mind, like stroking smooth silk. “Confusion, impaired motor functions, aphasia, all quite normal. Your brain is likely swollen.” Han ne Shu bert. “—watch for intracranial hemorrhaging, but so far, a scan—as a precaution,” Han ne “—inserting a small tube—a fifteen-minute procedure.” A name, a beautiful name. “—relieve the pressure by removing spinal fluid.” Her eyes are watery, she is weeping. Hanne. “As the brain finds its normal shape—faculties return, most likely.” Something about pain medication, a speech language pathologist. Her mother had had the good sense not to christen her with a name hurtful to the ear. Like her mother’s name, Dorca. Hanne Schubert. Han ne. Her mother had met a Swedish woman by the name of Hanne, a woman full of poise, intelligence, charm, and something else. A quick smile? No, Dorca wouldn’t care about that. From the chaotic clutter of her mind comes this memory; her name has a meaning. “Grace,” unmerited divine assistance. If there is a God, she thinks, now would be a fine time to make an appearance and bring to fruition the full meaning of her name.
For the first time, the doctor smiles. A dimple in his right cheek. In his earlier years, before he witnessed over and over the tragedy of the human body, he must have been quite handsome. He rests his hand on her shoulder. “There, there, it’ll be all right, Hanne Schubert.”
Thank you. She may or may not have said that out loud. But she says it again. Thank you.
It’s late when her son rushes into her room. Prior to his arrival, she remembers being rolled into a bright white room and out again. The doctor came and went, telling her they had relieved some of the pressure. “So now we’re in the wait-and-see mode,” he said.
Tomas’s face is white as paper, and with the lines of worry on his forehead, around his tired eyes, he’s aged ten years. What is she doing to her son? He pulls up a chair and takes her hand in his. “Mom, what can I get you? What do you need?” His voice sounds like hard shoes racing over cobblestones. When was the last time she walked on cobblestones? Prague? She can’t remember. You cannot rush on cobblestones.
She senses that someone else is in the room. Brigitte? She thinks she smells Brigitte’s hair, or what used to be the scent of her shampoo—lavender. An image comes to her: Hanne on her knees in the bathroom, soaping Brigitte’s long black hair with shampoo, Brigitte’s face tilted to the ceiling so the suds didn’t run into her eyes. She must have been eight or nine. She’d have spent a good hour in the tub reading, her whole body submerged, just the orb of her face and the hand holding the book exposed. Now Hanne tries to sit up to see, inching her back on the soft pillow, carefully.
She hears not a woman’s voice, but a man’s. The man is speaking Polish. Not just one man. Now a woman. Have they been here the entire time? The room smells of barbecue chicken.
Tomas takes up his position as guardian and inquisitor of those who dare approach. He can stay as long as she likes, he tells her. All his work has been assigned to other attorneys. Anne and the kids are coming in a couple days. He thought it might raise her spirits to see her grandchildren.
He pauses. “Do you understand?”
She nods, looking at the knife crease of his trousers, and he squeezes her limp hand.
When a nurse comes into the room, he leaps out of his chair. “Is everything being done for her?”
The nurse with puffy eyelids assures him she is receiving the best care.
He leans over Hanne, as if he’s preparing to kiss her cheek. “Why is she black and blue around her eyes? Those big scoops of color.”
The nurse explains it’s from her broken nose.
When she leaves, Tomas sits again and adjusts her blankets. The TV blares from the other side of the room. The room erupts in awful canned laughter. A grunt from behind the curtain, the Polish woman’s voice, angry, loud. The man answers in turn, louder. Now that Tomas is here, she’s listening more closely, as if she, too, has just entered the room. She realizes the Poles have been here the entire time; she just blocked them out by lumping them together with the dreadful drone of the TV. Tomas’s jaw flares. “How can you stand this?” he says.
He charges out of the room.
How can she stand this? The same way you stand anything that isn’t under your dominion to change—you accept it and move on.
But does she really accept any of this? No! She feels a fresh wave of fury. The couple behind the curtain is arguing. Tomas returns stern-faced with a new nurse in tow, who isn’t smiling. Tomas gathers her few belongings from the narrow closet. A hefty man appears with a gurney. A private room, her son tells her. He’s paying for it, whatever it costs, he doesn’t care. She wishes she could hug him and say “Thank you. Thank you. God bless you.”
“Don’t cry, Mom,” he says, wiping her face with a tissue.
She’s moved to the south wing and the new room is four times as large, with shiny wood floors, big windows, a view of the city, white and gold lights twinkling, as if showing off for her. The other side of the hospital, from where she just came, is an impoverished country, on the verge of anarchy and revolution. Here, there’s beauty and peace and a stunning view. Even marigolds on a table by the window. And a private bathroom.
In the morning, another MRI is taken. The result reveals less swelling. “We should see improvement soon,” says the doctor.
We. As if somehow they’re in this together. The doctor is up and about, and here she lies like a rotting log, speechless. She knows she’s in a gloomy mood. He’s doing all he can for her; she must not yield to her dark feelings. Patience. This will change. It will have to change. Jiro’s words, she recognizes them, spoken right before his wife crashed into the garage, right before his life
did, indeed, change.
She reminds herself that there has been improvement. She can now move her hands and legs. And here is her son bringing her orange juice, blueberries, and a newspaper. But the words on the front page keep moving on top of each other, then floating around, blurry, as if they are caught in a heat wave. How will she work again? More than anything she wants her old life back. She pushes the paper away. With a shaky hand she writes Please call school. Tell them what happened. Unless there is a minor miracle, she won’t be out of here in two days to teach her classes. She thinks about having him call David, but decides against it. When she can speak again, she’ll contact him.
Late afternoon, the speech pathologist arrives. She’s a lardy woman who takes huge sips of air, as if she’s just run up a flight of stairs. “Oh, you’ve got the best room in the house,” she says, pulling up a chair beside Hanne’s bed, and now Hanne can see the dark mustache above her upper lip. She says she’s going to get Hanne’s “old brain clicking again.” “Isn’t that a good idea?” she says, patting Hanne’s arm.
Hanne nods. Her natural inclination is to be a good student.
Tomas steps out to get a late lunch so the two of them can get to work. They’ll go through a series of little exercises, says the woman. She’ll say a phrase and Hanne will finish it. “We’ll play a little game together. Doesn’t that sound fun?”
“The early bird—”
Hanne opens her mouth, but nothing comes out.
The woman waits.
“—gets the worm.” The woman shifts in her chair. “Short but—”
Even if she could move her tongue to move, she’s not sure she could utter these clichés. Dead words beating their lifeless wings.
“Sweet. A bird in the hand—is worth two in the bush.”
The woman scoots her large behind on the chair. “A friend in need—”
Hanne closes her eyes and breathes deeply.
Translator Page 5
