Translator

by Nina Schuyler

  “No. But that was just damn luck. The path chosen for me by my parents was the right one.”

  “And now?”

  He shrugs. The light drains completely from the room, as if the day has rolled by in an instant and now it is evening. She watches him sew a new button on her sweater. A feeling of apprehension sweeps over her.

  “Were you and Brigitte ever close?” he says.

  Why is he so interested in her? What’s he fishing for? “When she was little,” she says. “Back then, she loved languages and, as you know, that’s my forte.” In her mind, she sees Brigitte, with pudgy baby-fat limbs, hears the pitch of her voice as she wrapped her mouth around German. How hard she’d grip Hanne’s fingers, as if she never wanted to let go. Hanne tells Moto about their birding expeditions. “But,” she takes a deep breath, “she made things hard for herself by dwelling on her problems. Or perceived problems. Or other people’s problems.” She almost says she took every little thing to heart. But stops herself. She hears Moto’s explanation from the other night as to why he might not finish Gogol’s novel—how his heart might lose interest. Is that why he’s intrigued by Brigitte? Might he hear an echo of himself? “I tried to help her, instill some hardiness. Some fortitude. Life is rarely easy, as you know.”

  When he says nothing, she finds herself telling him about the time Brigitte found a mangy gray kitten rummaging through their garbage can. She must have been eight years old, and she insisted that she keep it. Its mother had been hit by a car. The big black birds were in the street, picking at it. She had to take care of the kitten. From the moment she held it, Brigitte worried that it, too, might die. “I don’t want it to die. Will it die? What can we do so it will never die?”

  Her anxiety was endless, but Hanne refused to lie. She told Brigitte that just like all living creatures, the cat would eventually die, but they’d give it a good life and when it came time, give it a proper, dignified burial in the back yard. That solved nothing. Brigitte continued to fret and Hanne wouldn’t budge. Hiro was no help. He was teaching more classes at Stanford, and during the week he was sleeping in the spare bedroom of one of the other faculty members, driving home only on the weekends. Tomas, who was sixteen at the time, finally cornered Hanne in the kitchen. “God, mom. Tell her someday that cat will go to sleep for a long time. Just tell her that.”

  “I won’t disrespect her like that.”

  “Dad does it. Whenever Dad drives by a dead animal on the road, he tells Brigitte it’s sleeping.”

  “Oh, hell.” She scoffed. “How weak, how cowardly, how—”

  “It works.”

  Hanne refused. Brigitte wasn’t a baby.

  The cat soon died of distemper. Hiro took a week off from his classes and spent his free time with Brigitte, who was inconsolable. They went out to lunch, to the museum, the movies. Hanne and Hiro fought about it.

  “You’re sending her the wrong message,” said Hanne. “You’re teaching her to wallow when something difficult happens.”

  “I’m not sending her any messages. I’m just being with her.”

  “You’re not considering the consequences of your actions. You’re encouraging her to be spineless. To fall apart when something hard happens. That won’t serve her well in life.”

  Hanne suggested getting a new cat, but Brigitte wouldn’t hear of it. You can’t just replace one with another. How could you think like that? She loved that kitten. Eventually Brigitte stopped all her language lessons and spent every afternoon at the animal shelter. Hiro had suggested it. Her job was to feed the cats and clean their cages. But soon the tasks went beyond that, to walking the dogs and helping the veterinarian administer shots. Her dream changed from becoming a translator to a veterinarian. She planned on saving all the hurt and abandoned animals in the world.

  When is the last time she has told that story to someone? Or even thought of it?

  “She sounds very tender,” says Moto. “To realize that everything will perish. To fear the death of something or someone you love so much.” He shakes his head, as if amazed by her depths. “So wise.”

  “Not that wise. And not that tender.”

  “No?”

  She takes a deep breath. “It’s a commonplace story. A girl hits teen years and rebels. Drugs, most likely. Sex. Nothing I said or did mattered. She could be cruel.”

  Her teen years came, unfortunately, at the same time Hanne’s husband died, she tells Moto. “We weren’t living together at the time. The decision was mutual, but Brigitte, I think, blamed me. If only he had been living with us, if only we’d been there, we could have saved him. Called an ambulance. Rushed him to the hospital. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But after that, Brigitte was lost to me. I became the enemy. The hated one.” She doesn’t tell him about the many nights she heard Brigitte crying in her room. How at first Hanne tried to console her. When she couldn’t, she tried to ignore it, hoping it would subside.

  “I felt the best thing for us, all of us, was to carry on. Hiro would have wanted that, I think. Not pull her out of school, not grant her a leave of absence, a stretch of idleness. All those things she wanted. What would she have done? Just mope and sulk around the house some more? Get into more trouble? A girl of fourteen can easily meet with ruin. I was teaching Japanese and translating, the equivalent of full-time work. I couldn’t monitor her. She was failing school. Refusing to study, cutting class, hanging out with the wrong crowd. I don’t know where she met these boys. She wouldn’t listen to me. In the end, I suppose, she found a way to take her leave of absence.”

  She stops. How out of character, going on and on. Why is she laying out her life story before him? As she picks up her tea, she sees a slight shake of her hand. To her surprise, she feels like she must say more—as if she’s trying to convince Moto of something.

  “She’s a very bright girl and she was throwing her life away. I couldn’t just stand idly by. I located a boarding school for her. A very good school. Perfect for her. It was the right thing to do. She didn’t want to go, of course. Her friends were in San Francisco, not Connecticut, where the school was located. I didn’t find that hard to understand,” she says. “But I did find it hard to understand why she made such a mess of her life.”

  “The heart can be a mysterious thing,” he says quietly. He hands her back her mended sweater.

  She makes herself stop. Enough airing of dirty laundry. They sit in the quiet for some time, and it feels as if he’s still listening, threading through his mind everything she has just said. No longer smiling, he looks in deep concentration. The fish tank gurgles and bubbles, as if they’ve fallen deep underwater. Hanne has the urge to grab her coat and head out, anywhere, but now it’s not only her leg that’s hot. She feels feverish, nauseous. “I’m suddenly not feeling very well.”

  “You don’t look well.”

  “I think I need to lie down.”

  “Let me help you.”

  He takes her arm and helps her out to the cottage. She slips off her shoes and, shaking uncontrollably, climbs into bed. He leaves and comes back with hot tea, a tray of rice crackers, and aspirin.

  He places his hand on her forehead. “You’re burning up.”

  “I feel foolish.”

  He opens the bottle of aspirin and hands her two. She feels like a child as he holds a glass of water to her lips. “Now rest.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing serious. Please just go about your business.”

  She’s in bed for four long days. Renzo and Moto take turns bringing her food and herbal drinks. She tries to put on a cheery face, but in the back of her mind she’s worried her decline might have something to do with her fall. The doctor warned her there might be unforeseen complications. He couldn’t guarantee anything. So here she is, drifting in and out of sleep. Babbling in a feverish state. Sweat pearling on her forehead. Staying here far too long and requiring so much from them. So weak, it’s an effort to lift a glass of water. Sounds are amplified. Sometimes it seems like th
e dog is barking directly in her ear, even though when she opens her eyes, Morsel is nowhere in sight.

  A doctor comes and determines she has the common flu. She should feel relieved. It has nothing to do with her brain. Still, she is concerned. She can’t remember the last time she had the flu or even a cold. That part of being human, she always thought, didn’t apply to her. The doctor says she is to rest and get plenty of fluids. Whenever Moto or Renzo appear, she apologizes. For herself. For this inconvenience. For imposing. As soon as she is better, she will leave. They will never have to see her again.

  “If you apologize one more time,” says Moto, “I’m going to make you stay for another five weeks.”

  “But you didn’t intend for a visitor to stay for so long, let alone become so demanding.”

  “People get sick.”

  “But this isn’t what you signed up for.”

  “So?”

  He pours her a cup of tea. The smell is horrible, a mix between boiled grass and underarm odor. “Chinese herbs. I use them all the time. Can’t hurt.”

  “Surely they can.” In an effort to be a good patient, she drinks it. “It’s horrible.” She puts the cup on the nightstand and gulps down water to cool her burning throat.

  “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.