Freeman's

by John Freeman

  You get changed swiftly, anticipating the use of one of those hairdryers that you have missed all summer, before the cycle to the magazine’s workspace, preparing yourself for what they will have to say about your portfolio. You have left enough time not to rush, to get a coffee from the little artisanal wagon on the pavement outside their building, which you will drink in the smoking shelter going over your pitch until you are ready to go inside, past the bicycles hanging on the walls of the entrance, the expensive disordered furniture, into the hub. If they approve of the Ebro photographs for their autumn issue—the first of several River Roadtrips they want to do through Europe—there is a good chance that they will commission you for the whole series.

  The Asian man is still there, drying his great beard, when you step half-dressed out of the cubicle. You walk round him to the final hairdryer. It is astonishing, this beard. Deep chestnut. Luxurious. It has the celebrity pomp of a small pedigree animal. The man is using one steady shaft of air from underneath, to lift it, while with the other hairdryer he twists and flicks with surprising dexterity. You will enjoy telling Charlotte about this beard.

  The final dryer does not work. You try it a couple of times, then stand aside to wait for the Asian man to finish. You try to relax with the thought of cycling to Old Street, your coffee, how important it is that you do not hurry any of that.

  Somebody from Stephen’s team will be preparing the sofa space now. Your photographs will be splayed across the glass table, beneath their indoor tree. Stephen will want to know what ideas you have for other rivers. As the anxious thought of it comes again you train your eyes on the beard and you experience the strong, comforting impression of resting your head against it, stroking it.

  You look abruptly away—at yourself in the mirror, and see how much more toned your chest is than the other man’s; how much better your hair will look dried with the blower and not a towel. The man has a towel wrapped around his waist and beneath it a pair of trousers, shoes, but his head hair and chest are completely dry. It occurs to you that he has not been for a swim. He is here only to attend to his beard.

  He has not used overshoe protection. A yellow leaf protrudes from the damp cake of mud under his left foot. A thin brown dribble is leaking across the floor. You check your watch, and know that you should leave, but you remain where you are. You are wearing overshoe protection. You look down with deliberation at the ruched blue bonnets covering your feet and see suddenly the paired heads of your grandmothers, and you understand precisely their opinion of this Asian man, who has not used the pool, taking all of the functioning hairdryers to blow-dry his beard.

  From inside one of the cubicles there comes the sound of a man’s voice: ‘Amazing. See. Amazing. Told you she would, didn’t I? Look, mate, I’m just leaving the pool.’ It has been five minutes that you have been standing. And he was already here, installed, when you came in from the pool. The beard, clearly dry now, has grown. The reds and browns of its thick foliage catch the light as it quivers in the wind. He does not appear even to have noticed you. Again you look at your watch. If you do not leave right now you will be late. You are about to step forward and speak to him, but some strange force holds you back. All at once the schoolchildren are thundering towards the exit. The teacher at the rear by the lockers, shepherding them through. ‘Okay boys, nice and orderly, wait in a line outside.’ They stream past the Asian man, and though they all glance up at him there is not the hint of a smirk, a giggle. Only one boy, near the back of the group, is staring. He cannot stop himself, until he is beyond the man and you catch his eye, giving the boy a little complicit smile. He turns his head away, ignoring you.

  In the still aftermath of the boys, only the buzzing of the hairdryers in the air, you step forward.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  He does not hear you above the motors of his hairdryers.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  He looks at you over his flapping beard.

  ‘You will be finished, yes? Soon you will be finished?’

  He continues to look at you, not stopping the hairdryers, before turning back to the mirror, and you understand that he does not speak English.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ you say loudly, walking by him, your anger quickened by the knowledge that he does not comprehend.

  You go back inside the cubicle to finish getting dressed. Water has bled across from the neighbouring stall and the whole floor is wet. In the irate fluster of pulling your remaining clothes out of your bag, the noise of the dryers invading the cramped space, your shirt drops to the floor. ‘Fuck,’ you shout, picking it up. It is a fine, white material, and instantly it is sodden. It will need drying. You place it damply beside you and put your head back against the partition panel, trying to regain your composure.

  High up on the opposite panel is a yellowed slice of masking tape on which somebody has written, years ago: not cleaned since October 2014. You begin, roughly, to towel your hair. A child’s crying, on the other side of the wall in the women’s changing room, cuts through the hairdryers. It did not come easily to you, learning English. Those first months, in the Palmer’s Green bedsit: the constant struggle of textbooks, expensive CDs, tenses. You think about how far you have come since that time. In the beginning, before you met Charlotte, you made yourself go to places—a running group, a five-a-side morning—where you would meet English people, never allowing yourself to fall back on the Greek clubs and cafes that were only minutes down the road. You dream, now, in English. Is that not proof enough that you belong here? The noise of the hairdryers fills your brain. There is a shout on the other side of the wall, a woman: ‘Molly! Stop that!’ You pick up the wet pudding of your shirt and tighten your fist around it. Water drips to the floor. Outside the cubicle the Asian is still pampering his beard, oblivious to you, to anyone else. He has never once, even now, had to face the prospect of going back. He will remain, installed in the same streets and cafes and barber shops as the rest of his people, surrounded by themselves, dreaming about a place that they have never left, in Pakistan, Bangladesh, wherever.

  You should have texted Stephen by now to tell him that you are going to be late. You wring out the shirt, sling it over your shoulder, and gather the rest of your things, thinking about how impossible it would have seemed to you once that people like Stephen, his team, consider you a colleague. There is nothing for you back home now. You do not call it that anymore. Home. You rarely think about that place, where your parents lived and died, the water still lapping against the blackened walls of the harbour. Cats moving in the shadows of old boats, slipping between buckets to scavenge the piled wet guts of fish. Your father’s hand against your back, the smell of him against you, imploring you to stay. Charlotte would never live there, anyway. It is a conversation that you have had, once, jokingly, at a dinner party with her friends.

  The drone of the hairdryers is inside you. It is obvious that the Asian knows you are here, hiding inside your cubicle. He is mocking you, laughing at you. You move to the door, ready to confront him. To wrestle one of the hairdryers from him, if he will not give it up. What can he do? You are stronger than him. If he seeks a member of staff—he has not used the pool; he does not even speak their language. Your bright blue feet transport you over the slick tiles, out of the cubicle. He has gone. An English man stands there, drying his hair. A slug trail of shining floor leads towards a squeegee propped by the exit. In the reflection of the mirror the Englishman regards you standing behind him; the other hairdryer, in the space next to him, cocked in its holster, silent.

  Contributor Notes

  Eric Abrahamsen is the recipient of translation grants from PEN, to translate Xu Zechen’s Running Through Beijing, and from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has written for the New York Times, among other publications. He also hosts the website Paper Republic, which features Chinese literature in translation.

  Eric M. B. Becker is a literary translator, a journalist, and the editor of Words Without Borders. In 2014, he ear
ned a PEN/Heim grant, and in 2016, he was awarded a Fulbright to translate Brazilian literature. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, and elsewhere. With Mirna Queiroz dos Santos, he edited the PEN American anthology Women Writing Brazil.

  Garnette Cadogan is an essayist. He is currently a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is editor-at-large of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (coedited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro) and is at work on a book on walking.

  Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, will be published by Viking (United States/Canada), Atlantic (UK), and Foksal (Poland) in 2018.

  Tara Chace has translated more than twenty-five novels from Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Her recent translations include Jo Nesbø’s Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder series (Aladdin, 2010–2017); Johanne Hildebrandt’s Unbroken Line of the Moon (Amazon Crossing, 2016); and Sven Nordqvist’s Adventures of Pettson and Findus series (NorthSouth, 2014–2017). She translated Johan Harstad’s YA sci-fi thriller 172 Hours on the Moon (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012). An avid reader and language learner, Chace earned her PhD in Scandinavian Languages and Literature from the University of Washington in 2003. She lives in Seattle with her family and their black lab, Zephyr.

  Marius Chivu’s first published book was a poetry collection, Vîntureasa de plastic (The Plastic Windess), which won several awards and was translated into French. He is also the author of the short story collection Sfîrşit de sezon (End of Season) as well as two travel journals Trei săptămâni în Himalaya (Three Weeks in the Himalayas) and Trei săptămâni în Anzi (Three Weeks in the Andes). He has edited various anthologies, including Best of proza scurtă a anilor 2000 (Best of Short Stories of the 2000s) and 111 cele mai frumoase poezii de dragoste din literatura română (The Most Beautiful 111 Romanian Love Poems, with Radu Vancu). He is a literary critic at Dilema Veche and has his own radio show, All You Can Read, on Radio Seven. He lives in Bucharest, Romania.

  Alexandra Coliban has translated into Romanian a wide array of works by British and American authors including Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Sylvia Plath, Will Self, Nick Cave, and Jeffrey Eugenides.

  Mariana Enríquez is a writer and editor based in Buenos Aires. She is the author of two novels, two short-story collections, a biography of Silvina Ocampo, a chronicle on cemeteries, and a novella. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, McSweeney’s, Electric Literature, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her English-language debut The Things We Lost in the Fire has been translated into twenty languages.

  Athena Farrokhzad was born in 1983 and lives in Stockholm. She is a poet, literary critic, translator, playwright, and teacher of creative writing. Her first volume of poetry, Vitsvit, was published in 2013 by Albert Bonniers Förlag (translated by Jennifer Hayashida and published as White Blight by Argos Books). In 2016, her second volume of poetry, Trado, which was written together with the Romanian poet Svetlana Cârstean and from which these poems are excerpted, was published.

  Daniel Galera is a Brazilian writer and translator. He was born in São Paulo but lives in Porto Alegre, where he has spent most of his life. He has published five novels in Brazil to great acclaim, including Blood-Drenched Beard, which was awarded the 2013 São Paulo Prize for Literature. In 2013 Galera was named a Granta Best Young Brazilian Novelist. He has translated the work of Zadie Smith, John Cheever, and David Mitchell into Portuguese.

  Johan Harstad is a Norwegian novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and graphic designer. His novels include Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?—a Kirkus Reviews best book of the year, which has been published in thirteen countries—and Max, Mischa, and the Tet Offensive. He is also the author of 172 Hours on the Moon, which won the 2008 Norwegian Brage Prize in the young adult/children’s literature category; four plays; a collection of short stories; and a prose collection. He lives in Oslo, Norway.

  Jennifer Hayashida is a writer, translator, and visual artist. Her most recent projects include translation from the Swedish of Athena Farrokhzad’s White Blight (Argos Books, 2015) and Karl Larsson’s Form/ Force (Black Square Editions, 2015), named one of the ten best books of 2015 by Partisan. She is director of the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, CUNY, and serves on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

  Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). He teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

  Tania James is the author of the novels Atlas of Unknowns and The Tusk That Did the Damage, and the short-story collection Aerogrammes. She lives in Washington, D.C.

  Mieko Kawakami has published numerous books including novels, short stories, essays, and prose poems. Her second novella, Breasts and Eggs (2008), won the Akutagawa Prize and was translated into Norwegian, Spanish, French, Chinese, Korean, and other languages. In 2016, Granta selected her for its Best of Young Japanese Novelists volume, which included her story “Marie’s Proof of Love.”

  Born in the north of France in the 1990s, Édouard Louis has published two novels, The End of Eddy and History of Violence, both best sellers translated into more than twenty languages. He is also the editor of a scholarly work on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of “Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive,” published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

  Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of a number of books on modern French literature, including Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust. He is also the translator of Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims and Édouard Louis’s The End of Eddy, among other works.

  Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Africa. She is the author of Sidewalks, a collection of personal essays; the essay “Tell Me How It Ends”; and the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth. The latter novel, which was written in installments for workers in a juice factory, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Harlem.

  Christina MacSweeney was awarded the 2016 Valle Inclán Translation Prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth. She has translated two other books by the same author, and her translations of Daniel Saldaña París’s novel Among Strange Victims and Eduardo Rabasa’s A Zero-Sum Game both appeared in 2016. She has also published translations, articles, and interviews on a wide variety of platforms, including Words Without Borders, Music and Literature, Literary Hub, and BOMB, and in three anthologies: México20; Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories After Cervantes and Shakespeare; and Crude Words: Contemporary Writing from Venezuela. She is currently working translating texts by the Mexican authors Julián Herbert and Verónica Gerber Bicecci.

  Allison Malecha is an associate editor at Grove Atlantic and the assistant editor on Freeman’s. She lives in Brooklyn.

  Megan McDowell has translated books by many Latin American and Spanish authors, and stories she translated have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Tin House, Harper’s, Vice, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in Santiago, Chile.

  Fiona McFarlane was born in Sydney, Australia. She holds degrees in English from Sydney University and Cambridge University, and was a Michener fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first novel, The Night Guest, was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is also the author of a short-story collection, The High Places. She l
ives in Sydney.

  Dinaw Mengestu is the award-winning author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air, and All Our Names. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s M.F.A. program in fiction and the recipient of a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 award from the New Yorker. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such publications as Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Rolling Stone, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal. He is the recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Foundation grant and currently lives in New York City.

  Nadifa Mohamed was born in Hargeisa in 1981 and moved to London with her family in 1986. Her first novel, Black Mamba Boy, was long-listed for the Orange Prize; was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award; and won the Betty Trask Prize. Her second novel, The Orchard of Lost Souls, was published in 2013 and was long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize and shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; the novel won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Albert Bernard. Mohamed was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2013. She lives in London and is working on her third novel.

  Sayaka Murata was born in Chiba Prefecture in 1979 and graduated from the Department of Literature at Saitama University. Her debut work, Junyū (Breastfeeding), won the Gunzō Prize for New Writers in 2003. In 2009 she won the Noma Prize for New Writers with Gin iro no uta (Silver Song); in 2013, the Yukio Mishima Prize for Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City); in 2014, the Sense of Gender Prize and Measures to Counter the Falling Birthrate Special Prize for Satsujin shussan (Breeders and Killers); and in 2016, the Akutagawa Prize for Konbini ningen (Convenience Store Woman). Other works include Tadaima tobira (A Welcoming Door) and Shōmetsu sekai (Dwindling World).