Translator

by Nina Schuyler

  “You seem to have the right attitude about all this,” she says, not bothering to conceal her praise.

  Then he is right beside her, his long fingers approaching her face, his breathing near her ear, steady, loud, low. And now he’s so close she sees the filigree of intricate red veins that make up his birthmark. She freezes. What is he doing? From her shoulder, he plucks a single strand of her newly blackened hair and holds it in front of him as if it’s the most enchanting thing he’s ever seen. He twists it this way and that before he lets it go. They watch it slowly fall. And it keeps falling, it’s taking forever to fall, as if he has thrown it into a world where time operates differently, if at all. Her strand of hair is still falling through space when the front door opens. The loud creak of the door hinges breaks the spell, then Renzo’s chipper voice. Her first thought: Why did he have to come back? The black hair lies on the wood floor, a scribbled pencil mark on an otherwise pristine canvas.

  Renzo comes into the kitchen and stops. “Well, finally. You meet Moto.”

  Now that they are standing side by side, she can see the resemblance. The same coarse hair, though Renzo keeps his cut short; the same broad forehead; they are almost the same height, though Moto is slightly taller; but Renzo, with his hunched shoulders, concave chest and baggy trousers, looks almost malnourished and dried out, while Moto has the build and stance of a young athlete, ready to tackle someone.

  Renzo wants to know where Moto was last night. Renzo turns to Hanne. “He didn’t come home until 2:00 a.m.”

  “Something came up,” says Moto. “But we’re all here now.”

  “You haven’t served our guest a drink,” says Renzo. Hanne is a distinguished translator of Japanese literature, says Renzo, giving the Western world the best of Japanese writing. “And here you are, treating her so poorly.”

  Hanne senses she’s caught in a longstanding feud. “Oh, I’m fine.”

  “You mustn’t be mean to our guest,” says Renzo. Though he’s trying to be playful now, there’s still an edge to Renzo’s voice. “That’s what my mother always said to Moto. Remember how you’d whine about the other schoolboys and their dull minds, their dull lives? Only if someone had a limitless capacity for tragedy or comedy or passion would you befriend him.”

  Moto leans his back against the counter, his arms crossed, his expression not giving anything away.

  “You might have judged me wrong, Moto,” says Hanne, smiling, trying to lighten the mood. “Maybe I have limitless capacities.”

  Magically, Moto’s whole face fans out, as if something has finally unclenched and is bursting open. In his new leonine splendor, he lets out a loud, deep belly laugh. There is his warmth, his charm. That smile, that laugh, he keeps it hidden, she thinks, until it is earned.

  The dinner isn’t spectacular; what is spectacular is the amount of sake consumed by Moto. No longer taciturn, Moto has opinions about everything—cars, photography, suicide, rice growing, boredom—one opinion is as good as another, and he won’t be pinned to any of them because, moments later, he contradicts himself. It’s as if he isn’t listening to anything he says or simply doesn’t care. An illogical force of verbal nonsense. Hanne can barely believe this is the same monosyllabic man she first encountered at the fish tank.

  “Japan has never truly opened up its doors to foreigners,” he says, opening another bottle of sake. “Its true heart can’t be known by a foreigner.”

  Is he taunting her? “What is its true heart?” she says.

  Before she can stop him, he refills her glass, then his. Wagging his finger at her, he gives her a great big smile. “You might speak perfect Japanese, my dear, but you won’t ever understand Japan.”

  “Try me.”

  “It takes more than perfect Japanese to understand.”

  “Aren’t you judging me a bit early?”

  “Surprise! It has no heart,” he says, laughing loudly. “Nothing in the center.”

  “Oh, come now,” says Renzo, who’s sitting at the head of the table.

  “A beautiful heart right here.” Moto pounds his chest with his fist. “We Japanese got a bad reputation. The truth is we are passionate, as passionate as the Italians.” His face is flushed, his birthmark is blazing deep scarlet, as if the alcohol has lit a fire inside. “No. Wait a minute. A heart split into thousands of pieces. An ugly shattered mess.” He tips back another drink. “Watch out! This fractured heart can change in an instant because nothing holds it together. It can turn into a clod of dirt. A wild river. A manga figure.”

  “And that’s a heart?” she says.

  “No,” he says, sticking out his lower lip, pretending to pout. “Too bad. There is no heart. Empty. Vacant. Nothing. It fills with water after each rain.”

  “This is a very good meal,” says Renzo, the little muscles flinching along the line of his jaw.

  A futile attempt at changing the subject, thinks Hanne. Was Jiro ever this drunk? There was that month when Jiro went to a karaoke bar every night after work. That one night, he drank so much whiskey, he ended up singing the Eagles’ Heartache Tonight at least twenty times, hogging the microphone. The owner of the bar came out and barked at him to sit down and give someone else a goddamn turn.

  Moto leans toward her until he is about seven centimeters from her face. His pupils are huge and he seems to be studying her face, as if he sees something that doesn’t belong there. Or something he’s never seen before. The moment stretches out until it becomes embarrassing. What? Is there food on her face?

  She takes a napkin and wipes her chin.

  “Moto marinated the salmon,” says Renzo. “Everything Moto makes is a marvel to me.”

  “Noh is the purest expression of the Japanese soul,” says Moto, his eyes a little out of focus.

  “Finally,” says Renzo. “Let’s hear the sensei talk about something he knows.”

  “You’ve probably never heard of the founder of Noh,” says Moto to Hanne. Then he turns to his brother. “Don’t call me sensei. Zeami is the sensei. He figured out a way to produce the essence of Japan, Japan’s heart, the deep reality of all things.”

  “The deep reality of all things,” she says. “That’s pretty vague.”

  Renzo tells her Noh means the perfect art or accomplishment. “Usually the plays involve the main character returning in ghost form to revisit a significant event in his or her life—”

  “I don’t care about any of that,” says Moto, waving his hands in the air, as if clearing it of a stink.

  Maybe she’s had a lot to drink too, because she asks directly: “Is that why you can’t perform anymore? You’re no longer in touch with this so-called reality?”

  “The stage is a place of shared mortality,” says Moto, ignoring her. “The superb Noh actor creates this space because theater is about the moment, an intense moment that’s gone in an instant.”

  “So you and your audience must live and die together?” says Hanne.

  “Yes! A million times. You probably don’t believe in life after death. Neither do I. But guess what? On stage, it happens.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to forgo a Noh play because I like being alive,” she says.

  He puts down his glass and stares at her. “Do you? Do you?”

  What does he mean by that?

  “Noh demands a great deal from both the actor and the audience, more than any other art form,” he says, balancing a chopstick on the end of a finger. “To experience it fully, the audience must undergo a blossoming, an upheaval, a complete collapse of reality. That’s what the good actor experiences on stage. But for a foreigner,” he says, shaking his head, letting the chopstick fall, “impossible. Someone like you will sit there baffled, muttering, what the hell is going on? Or fall asleep.” He pretends to snore, then looks directly at her. “Especially a woman.”

  “Really?” she snaps back. “I didn’t know you were a misogynist and an elitist.”

  He laughs again. “This is going to be fun.”

&
nbsp; “Oh?”

  “You. You’re so easy to get riled up. You’ve got a temper.”

  Hanne stiffens. “Funny, none of my friends would say that about me.” The truth is, she rarely sees her friends. And when they do gather, the conversation is usually about the university or problems with their translation projects. Safe topics.

  “Maybe I’m seeing a new side of you. Or maybe I’m more honest.”

  Coming from him, almost a complete stranger, the comment seems inappropriate.

  “Okay,” Renzo claps his hands, a forced cheerfulness to his voice. “Let’s turn on the music and dance.”

  Miles Davis’s “Fat Time Shout” cascades into the room, vibrating the table, the floor underneath her. Renzo slides open the paper walls, and now the eating room flows into the other room, giving them a perfect dance floor, empty of furniture. Renzo shuffles his feet, slowly making his way to Hanne, and extends his hand. “May I?”

  “I don’t know about this,” she says, laughing nervously. When was the last time she danced? Hiro didn’t like to, so it must have been when she was nineteen and lived a year in Paris. A man named Jacques comes back to her. Dark hair, a smooth way of talking, smooth hands and lips, far too beautiful to be trusted with anything, let alone her heart. She didn’t give him anything but her hand and body to move around the dance floor, to make love to in his one-room apartment with the red-beaded lamp.

  Renzo’s eyes sparkle. He’s a boy again, moving and twirling her, enveloped in the music, but there’s nothing carnal about it. It’s like dancing with your brother.

  “Now you’re getting it,” he says.

  But she isn’t. It’s been too many years, and her body in space is a strange, foreign object. She stumbles along, following Renzo’s lead, until the next song, when he swings her over to Moto.

  She has no chance to decline because his hand is in hers and he has slipped an arm around her waist, pressing her against his chest, until there is no space between them, his arm firmly clasped behind her. His birthmark is no longer the shape of Montana, but seems to take up his entire cheek. Most remarkable is how they are moving: How are they circling around the room? Not a foxtrot or waltz or anything she can name; they are, it seems, floating an inch off the floor. It’s the same silent, fluid motion she witnessed earlier in the kitchen, but now she’s experiencing it, as if she’s under his skin and now skimming the surface of the world, unleashed from gravity.

  “You move,” she says, slightly out of breath, “seamlessly, no heel toe, heel toe, no beginning, no end—”

  Despite her failure to find the right words, she keeps trying, tossing word after word after word, until he says in his deep, resonating voice, “Hanasanai de kudasai,” Let’s not speak.

  A shiver of excitement runs through her. They are in the middle of a scene from the book. She remembers it perfectly. Three monosyllabic words, a softened imperative, the intonation, hushed, intimate, spoken close to her ear—they already live inside of her. Jiro said them to his young lover not long after his wife was checked into the hospital. Chikako was cooking stir-fry on the stove and Jiro flicked on the radio. A song came on—something American—and he grabbed her around the waist. They’d never danced before, but he was flush with his new life. As the chicken sizzled in the wok, he danced with her across the kitchen floor, while she agonized out loud about the dinner party in a couple of hours; what if no one showed up? Didn’t he see the way the wives of his male friends glared at her, as if to say, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? “But don’t you see my male friends looking at me with immense envy?” He kissed her earlobe. “I have someone young and beautiful and they do not.” And that soothed her, and she laughed and talked on and on about the things they’d do together, their future, a trip to Florence, until he touched his finger to her lips and said, “Hanasanai de kudasai.”

  When Hanne initially encountered them, she fretted; should it be, “Don’t talk,” or “Please don’t speak.” “Let’s not talk,” or a curt, cold, “Don’t say another word,” or simply, “Don’t.” She ultimately decided: Let’s not speak.

  The music is still playing. The way Moto is smiling, humming in her ear, running his hand along her back, says to her he’s not too upset about his divorce. What’s it been? Over a year since his wife left? He’s just like her Jiro. But her thoughts are interrupted by a vision of Brigitte. Brigitte dancing with that man, that first young man, and earlier in the morning before Brigitte left for school, her face had been drained of color, her eyes dull, but dancing with that young man, her face was lit up, dazzling like a bright star. That moment right before Hanne told the young man to get out, right before that, Hanne stood there captivated and bewitched by her lovely daughter. She couldn’t remember the last time Brigitte had looked so beautiful, so happy. Now she wishes she could crack open that moment again, tell that to Brigitte, “My, you look stunning,” instead of scolding her.

  Hanne realizes Moto has stopped dancing. His eyes seem to be full of tears. What’s happening? “Are you all right?” she says. “Do you need to sit?”

  She glances over at Renzo, who is lost in his own fog.

  Moto’s arms hang limply. He opens his mouth, as if to say something. He is, in fact, crying. Her breath catches. Before she can ask him anything else, he rushes out of the room.

  It’s too late to call a taxi, Moto is holed up somewhere, and Renzo confesses that this time he is too drunk to drive.

  She follows Renzo outside to the guest cottage. It’s fully stocked with everything she might need—toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, lotions, even a terrycloth bathrobe. “It’s not much,” he says, “but you’ll have privacy.”

  A small white Scotty dog prances around his heels. Renzo introduces her to Morsel, who was in the other room during dinner so as not to disturb them. He lights the wood-burning fireplace, shows her the bathroom, the fresh towels, then excuses himself. “Good night. I’ve got to put this head on a pillow.”

  The guest cottage contains solid, clunky pieces of furniture: a Western-style bed, a nightstand, a lamp, an empty chest of drawers, a hard chair. She sits at the sizeable polished oak desk and opens the drawers; full of blue pens, and a pencil, sharpened to a fine point. Oddly, a woman’s shiny green pantsuit with silver buttons hangs in the closet. She checks the label—Ann Taylor. Perhaps this is what these two brothers do: bring home foreign women.

  She gazes out the window. Outside, only darkness, tar black, no streetlights, no gas stations or bars or cafés, not even a car passing through, as if this is the center of the earth. What happened to Moto? She felt like she stepped into a scene from the book during that dance, but was then abruptly tossed out. She tries to remember how Kobayashi wrote the scene between Jiro and Chikako, but the exact words are lost to her. Her overall impression was that Jiro was swept up in the moment, swept up in love with Chikako.

  She sits on the edge of the bed. Maybe Moto was overwhelmed with joy instead of love, because how could he possibly be in love with her after one meeting?, and that joy moved him to tears. But she sees in her mind his quivering lower lip, his sad, dark eyes. Maybe while he was dancing, he remembered acting and the stage and suddenly missed it. Maybe she’s making something out of nothing. He did seem like someone who was prone to emotional swings, and after all, in that scene Jiro was with Chikako and Hanne is nothing like that young woman, so why on earth would Moto be swept up by her?

  The dog is scratching at the door. She finds Morsel on the stoop. The dog bounds inside and sits in the middle of the room, watching her, thumping his tail on the floor, waiting—for what? Cold air rushes into the room, crowding out the heat. She shuts the door and stares at Morsel. Shivering, her teeth chattering, she gets into bed, and Morsel jumps up with her and turns around and around, as if trying to grab its tail, then settles at the foot of her bed, a perfect circle. She has never liked the idea of dogs on beds or, really, dogs in a house, shedding their fur, polluting the air with their gamey smell. Her first impulse is to
push it off. “Itte,” she says, go. She points to the door. But after a few more tries, she gives up. Through the heavy blanket, the dog’s body heat warms her feet and she quickly falls asleep.

  Chapter Ten

  She wakes, unsure where she is. Sunlight blasts into the room, and the walls blare bright white, telling her she has a hangover. Not since her fall down the marble stairs has her head throbbed this badly. And now Morsel is flitting around the room, leaping onto the bed, jumping to the floor. She untangles herself from sweaty sheets and pulls one leg and then the other over to the edge of the bed. When she finally stumbles to the door, Morsel darts out, as if on fire.

  She takes two aspirin, showers, dresses, and heads to the main house. What she needs is coffee. A few chickadees are hopping along the stone path, and the trees are stubbornly bare. As the house comes into view, she sees it is still dark. She enters through the back door and steps into a house of silence. Both Renzo and Moto must be asleep. She quietly shuts the door and returns to the cottage.

  What day is it? It feels like she’s been in Japan for weeks. She has a suspicion that her fall down the stairs not only affected her languages, but her sense of time. Though she’d never tell her doctor that, for fear he’d imprison her at the hospital for a litany of more tests. And they’d find out she suffers from headaches a lot more often than she let on. Well, she won’t go back to the hospital. She doesn’t care if she’s putting her health in danger; her health was in far more danger being cooped up in that hospital and her apartment.

  In the back yard, Morsel is running in circles for no apparent reason. She lies back down and naps. When she wakes, she’s disoriented again. Only a few minutes have passed, but it feels like hours. She throws cold water on her face, calls her message machine at her apartment. Nothing. She rings Tomas to let him know her whereabouts.