Translator (10 page)

At a construction site, a crane smashes a wrecking ball into a building. Walls of brick collapse, windows shatter, support beams tumble, and up rise great plumes of gray dust. She can see straight into the building now—office cubicles with gray carpet, filing cabinets, an employee lunch room with a bright, white refrigerator, a photocopy machine, a water cooler. Another woman comes up beside her.

“Soon it will all be gone,” Hanne says to the woman wearing a black cardigan sweater.

“So desu ne.”

They stand there together watching.

“Then something new,” says the woman, who points to a picture of the new building posted on a board near the sidewalk. From the rubble a fifty-story building with bluish-tinted glass. “
Kireina
,” beautiful.

They chat about it a bit longer—why this design, who thought of it, marvelous, isn't it?—with Hanne taking pleasure in the ease of conversing and watching her mood shift to something lighter, even buoyant, from the simplicity of interaction with another human being. She finds out this woman is a secretary and is worried about losing her job. “The world can be a difficult place,” says Hanne.

“So desu ne.”

On her way back to the hotel, she stops into a department store to buy gifts for her granddaughters, two kokeshi wooden dolls, with big round heads and cylindrical bodies. Not particularly cuddly, nor can they do much—they lack arms or legs—but they are traditional Japanese dolls, staring at you with bright black eyes that will never blink, as if they don't want to miss even an instant of life. “For my granddaughters,” she says to the shop clerk. The clerk smiles and points to candy shaped like sushi. Made out of gummy, says the clerk. Hanne adds it to her basket. On impulse, she also buys a bottle of black hair dye.

Three phone messages from Amaya are waiting—“Does Ms. Schubert need anything?” “Please contact if you need anything.” “If there's anything Ms. Schubert needs.” Wrapped in red cellophane on the coffee table, there's a gift basket overflowing with rice and seaweed crackers, Satsuma oranges, chewing gum, Pocky Shock, chocolate pretzels, and red apples. A small note is tucked between the apples, “Welcome to Japan!” from the Ministry of Culture.

She slices into quarters what is probably a $5 apple in this expensive island of a country, where most everything is imported; she tries to eat each section as a Japanese person would, savoring it, like a treasure, a luxury, but to her it's just an apple and she's hungry.

She steps into the bathroom. Her hair has always been nondescript, the color of mud, she called it, though at the beginning of their marriage Hiro referred to it as beautiful dark cinnamon and made her promise not to change it. When she began to go gray, she dyed it and tried to match her natural color. But that was long ago—is that why she's pulling on the thin latex gloves and rubbing in dye? Or is it that she's in a different country with a language she speaks exclusively and doesn't quite feel herself? Against the emerging darkness of her hair, her pale skin glows; her green eyes are darker, a forest green. For a long time she stares at herself in the mirror. Not mesmerized by beauty—that would be too generous—but the sense that she's both herself and someone else, both the subject and the object.

She puts on what she calls her performance suit—a dark gray skirt and jacket, a white blouse—and clip-on gold earrings. With her new black hair, she would have to call herself striking.

She has ten minutes before she's due downstairs. As she dries her hair, she reads over her lecture notes. Written during the eleven-hour flight, she must have been under a spell of sustained optimism. She's about to give her audience a glowing picture of the wonderful powers of translation, an elixir to the human tragedy. There's no mention of the difficulties, the inability to do a literal translation, the issue of fidelity—to what? To whom? She can't do anything about it now, and she's not sure she wants to.

In the cavernous conference room, only a smattering of chairs are filled. Well, she'll give her talk, collect her fee, and that will be that. She hopes Kobayashi isn't in a rush, so maybe they can go to dinner tonight. Amaya is wearing a red suit coat and a red skirt. A good-luck suit. Amaya motions to her that it's time. Hanne is introduced with fanfare, a renowned translator, an impeccable speaker of Japanese as well as many other languages.

When Hanne steps onto the stage and to the podium, she is unexpectedly overcome with stage fright. The blinding bright light makes it impossible to see out to the audience; and in that gap, her panicked mind imagines that everyone is intently watching her, waiting for her to fail.

“Welcome. Thank you for coming. Let me begin with a personal anecdote,” she says, her voice cracking from nerves. “Early on, I was drawn to making sense of the incomprehensible. When I was seven years old living in Holland with my parents, I invented a language, which I called Lombot. It contained 72 characters and was syllabic. I wrote plays and stories in this strange language that looked a bit like Arabic and sounded—I found out later—Japanese. At the dinner table, my parents asked me to translate, which I did with great joy, turning Lombot into Dutch or German, depending on their preference that evening. It was my first experience with the joy of translation, my first encounter with the translator's array of alternatives. This activity brought great pleasure to my parents, who, between them, spoke thirteen languages. We were like a familial United Nations, though our negotiations usually concerned my failure to clean my room.”

There's a titter in the audience, which relaxes her a little. But she feels exposed, so vulnerable. She normally doesn't talk about herself. She tries to calm herself down by remembering why she's doing this—she was terribly lonely. And the money is a help. At least here she can speak, and right now she's speaking too fast, but at least her hand is no longer shaking. There's no elegant way to segue from her private disclosure to her prepared speech except to proceed.

“For centuries, people have posited that we once spoke only one language, an Ur-Sprache. With this language, we understood each other with perfect ease. This language supposedly contained the original Logos, the words giving us direct knowledge of the nature of things, providing an intimacy with the world that we can't even begin to fathom today. This first language gave us not a representation of reality, but reality itself. Words spoke not of things, but the truth; and it was with this language that man once had total understanding of the world and of each other.”

Her throat is dry. She pauses to sip water. Is anyone listening? Is anyone there?

“But when we were tossed out of Eden, our true home, and later when the mythical Tower of Babel fell, we lost this language and our understanding of the world. Besides creating the question—what's the meaning of our existence—as Humboldt said, ‘all understanding became at the same time a misunderstanding, all agreement in thought and feeling is also a parting of the ways.'”

She hears movement in the room, hushed voices, but she can't tell what's going on. A door opens and slams shut.

“How to access this common language again? Is it possible? For centuries this question has plagued us. In the sixteenth century, Paracelsus believed divine intervention would restore the unity of human tongues. Not wanting to wait, the Royal Society of London commissioned a man to create a universal language, which was so complicated that its only suitable purpose was to be satirized by Jonathan Swift in
Gulliver's Travels
.

“Some posit the language after Babel can never lead us to our primal tongue—only silence will do that. Remember Kafka's narrator in ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk,' who asks ‘Is it her singing that enchants us, or is it not rather the solemn stillness enclosing her frail little voice?'”

Metal scrapes against metal, followed by a long hiss. Is someone opening a can of soda? Too rude to be Japanese; probably an American who wandered into the conference hall and is eating his lunch. Will the crunch of potato chips follow? The ring of a cell phone? The grunts of monosyllabic speech?

“To date, no one has located this first language, the language of home, if you will. Translation, then, is a necessary evil; but for our exile, we'd have no need for it. Then again,” she says, feeling an old excitement dust itself off, “perhaps translation is also our blessing.”

This is what she used to believe, what she used to argue as a student to others about the importance of her subject matter. Why bother mastering so many languages? they'd ask. No one cares about translation anymore. You could do so many other things. The State Department. The United Nations. Years have gone by since she offered up her reason for choosing her profession. “Maybe it holds the key to our understanding each other, to the meaning of our world.”

Sweat trickles from her underarms down her sides. There's a flurry of footsteps on the hardwood floor. Are they reprimanding the soda drinking? Escorting the rude
gaijin
to the door?

“Might it be that a translation from language A into language B creates a third presence—almost like the birth of a baby, pure, uncontaminated, truer? Might that third presence hold the essence of what lies underneath both languages? As evidence, consider what it takes to move language A over to language B—it is a search for the true meaning of the words. A hunt for what lies buried under colloquialism, culture, gender, age, all the layers of skin on a language. If our first common language was scattered around the world, might we come closer to it if we combined the two languages and formed another entity based on meaning? A purer speech. Translation then is about the birth not of A or B but C. And C, it could be argued, is the closest we get to truth.”

She goes on for a while longer, talking about language C, but her voice is fading. Somehow she's lost her original enthusiasm. She senses that something in the room has stirred, flexed. She finishes quickly and looks up, removing her glasses. A smattering of applause.

Well, that's done. When she steps down from the stage, a Japanese man is waiting for her at the bottom of the wood steps. He's frail, bony, almost delicate in his tan trousers and dark brown sweater vest.

“You are Hanne Schubert?” he says.

She smiles, nods, slips her glasses back on. “Yes. And you are?”

The man smells of cigarette smoke.

“What you speak of. It's idiotic. This idea that translation is purer than what the author creates.”

Her mind goes blank. She had imagined him as a younger man, full of vitality.

Kobayashi takes a deep breath. “You may be a very well-educated woman, speaking Japanese and English and other languages and all that, but what you have done is wrong.”

A couple of people nearby stop talking. Hanne feels them listening.

“You were supposed to translate my words, my story, not rewrite it and make your own story in the hopes of uniting mankind. I don't know where you get your ideas about translation, but no author in his right mind would want you to translate his work. I put my trust in you to bring my story to the English-speaking world. My story. Not yours.”

Now a small crowd has gathered. Hanne feels her face burning.

“There's only the author,” he says, his voice rising. “You don't exist without me. That's something you seem to have forgotten.”

The event organizers appear.

“My character had a beating heart—”

One of the organizers tries to interrupt him.

“Go home,” Hanne says finally.

Go home? What does she mean by that? It sounds like a command to a feral creature, a creature following the scent of something, its ferocious instinct driving it onward. She needs a stick to beat it back. Go home.

“Over a year I spent,” says Hanne. She feels herself finding her bearings. “I worked hard—”

“Let me tell you something. You ruined my main character. Turned him into an asshole. A class-act jerk!”

“Jiro?” she says. “You're talking about Jiro?”

Hanne smells his breath weighted with whiskey.

“I am ashamed of what you did to my Jiro,” he says, the line between his brows deepening. “You should be ashamed.”

Amaya is speaking into a walkie talkie.

“If Moto read what you did, he'd hate it. That makes me ashamed. Deeply ashamed!”

Moto? For a moment, she can't think. Then she recalls Jiro was modeled after this man, Moto Okuro, the Noh actor.

“If this Moto saw what I had to work with, he'd give me a medal,” says Hanne, filling with anger and his horrific accusation. She loved Jiro! She understood this character better than Kobayashi did himself. How can he be saying such things?

The man's face pinches. “You know nothing. If you knew Moto, you'd see.”

A security guard approaches and tells Kobayashi he must leave. She watches the guard escort him to the door. Kobayashi's shoulders are hunched, his head bowed. The room is quiet. With trembling hands, Hanne gathers her notes together. When she slips out a side door, into a dark hallway, she has no idea where she is.

She needs fresh air. If
she could find her way across the busy street into the green. Green of a park with bare winter trees. The name escapes her, and for a moment she worries that her head injury has asserted itself again. Brought on by the public humiliation, no doubt. But then the name rushes at her. The Shinjuku Imperial Gardens, where, for the first time since she's arrived, she hears birds—blue jays and brown sparrows fluttering tree to tree. It's a relief. She and Brigitte used to escape the city on the weekends and drive across the Golden Gate Bridge to Bolinas Lagoon, where they'd wander the shoreline looking for birds. Tomas didn't like bird watching, and so Hiro would stay home with him.

That one Saturday, Hanne packed a picnic and as they ate, they saw four great blue herons, a flock of willets, and then Brigitte spotted a rare black-crowned night heron. They'd never seen one before, and she saw it along the shoreline in the tall reeds. Brigitte talked about it for weeks afterward and couldn't wait to go again. She must have been ten, maybe eleven years old. Hanne offered to teach her bird calls, but Brigitte said she didn't want to learn. “They seem so content,” she said, “I don't want to disturb them.” She just wanted to sit and listen.

Whenever Brigitte suggested they go, Hanne put everything aside. Let it wait. Everything could wait. By then, Brigitte had her own language teachers and didn't need Hanne. Brigitte's teachers were more blunt: it was best if Hanne didn't interfere. “It's hard to listen to more than one teacher,” they said. Brigitte was studying advanced German, French, and Japanese—and, Hanne found out later, Sanskrit. Bird watching was the one thing they still shared. And Hanne loved it as much as Brigitte, but more than that the long drive there and back, with its windy road that ushered in a meandering conversation. They talked about everything: her new favorite shoes, or what she was learning in school or why it is that every living thing must die. It was on one of these drives that Brigitte asked if Hanne could take her to church. The one near their house, a small white thing. She just felt the need to go.

The next day, Hanne sat beside her daughter and watched her pray. The priest told the story of David and Goliath. A good enough story, thought Hanne. A clear moral, Hanne could see its mass appeal. David's belief in something bigger than himself gave him a different view of Goliath. Not a giant after all; a measly mortal. Brigitte sat there transfixed. Which baffled Hanne; what was Brigitte hearing that Hanne wasn't? As the sermon went on, Hanne's mind wandered to the different translations of the Bible. The Septuagint, the Greek translation, which sometimes omitted entire verses. The King James, with its seventeenth-century English, the New International Version, with its modern-day English.

The next Sunday, Brigitte wanted to go to church again. Hanne said she had too much work to do. What she didn't tell Brigitte was that she found religion with its moral codes, rules, and promises of an afterlife far too easy. But more than that, too patronizing, too infantilizing. Life and its meaning were for you to decide, and she wasn't going to turn that decision over to anyone or anything else. So Hiro went with Brigitte. Then they went to a different church. Brigitte kept going and another life ensued, one that took up the weekend with church activities, one that Hanne knew little about. She wishes now that she had accompanied Brigitte, if only to find out what she was learning. Tomas says it's not technically correct to call the group she's now with a cult, because Brigitte could leave at any time; she just chooses not to. Just as she chose to go to that little white church all those years ago.

Now Hanne calls to a blue jay. It calls back. Back and forth. A handful of jays gather in the branches of a pine tree. She can see them, their dark blue feathers and black beaks. She remembers when she used to make Hiro laugh with her calls. “You are a very powerful woman,” he'd tell her. “You're probably changing the migration of these birds.”

She sits on a park bench, her mind still reeling. She doesn't understand what has just happened. Jiro, an asshole? A class-act jerk? She doesn't know what to make of it. Because the Jiro she put on the page is honorable and courageous, full of generosity and patience. Her Jiro is anything but a jerk. She smelled alcohol. Maybe Kobayashi was drunk. Maybe he said those things to get attention, though he doesn't seem that type of man. Maybe his English is so bad, he didn't understand her translation. What just happened seems almost dream-like, a bad dream. She knows she isn't wrong. She knows Jiro.

In her hotel room, the glass table is covered with bouquets of flowers and gift certificates—free sushi at the Imperial Hotel's restaurant, free massage, a manicure, a trim. The conference organizers send their apologies.

Amaya calls. “If there's anything else we can do—”

Maybe she'll go meet this Moto Okuro. See for herself what kind of man he is. That's exactly what she must do. “Do you know where I might meet the Noh actor Moto Okuro?”

Amaya says she will find out immediately. She knows of him, remembers her parents going to see one of his performances and raving about him for days afterwards. “We apologize for the disturbance this morning. It was most unfortunate.”

Mid-afternoon, Amaya calls. Moto lives in a small town called Kurashiki, about two hours from Tokyo by bullet train. “It's quite beautiful,” says Amaya. “It wasn't bombed during the war, so it retains its natural beauty.”

She should have known. Kurashiki is where Kobayashi set his novel.

Mr. Okuro, however, is not working right now, says Amaya.

“You mean he's not in a show?”

“No. Not working. He is not with a theater company right now. Technically he'd be considered unemployed.”

“What happened?”

Amaya doesn't know. She falls back into apologies. “We are so sorry for what happened this morning. We would like to make it up to you. Perhaps you'd like to visit Kurashiki?”

Indeed she would. Amaya says she will secure a train ticket and find a hotel. Five minutes later, Amaya says she's booked a seat on a train that leaves at 8:00 in the morning.

“Thank you,” says Hanne. “That's very kind.”

She doesn't doubt that she'll find Moto Okuro; Kurashiki is a small town, and he's probably its biggest export. Hanne has one more night here. She finds it impossible to sleep. She decides a drink might help. The hotel bar is dimly lit with flickering candles on round tables, a counter where one can sit and talk to the bartender. She chooses a corner table and orders a brandy. What seems moments later a tall man, impeccably dressed in a good tweed coat, approaches her.

“May I join you?” he says in Japanese.

He has a foreign tinge to his Japanese—Danish, she guesses. Not appearing any age in particular, with his thick sandy-brown hair, and his eyes a beautiful ice-blue. His tan, slightly ravaged face suggests he plays golf or tennis or perhaps spends time sunning by a pool. Definitely Northern European, so many months spent in darkness, they develop an unquenchable craving for the sun.

“Oh, I'm not here for very long,” she says, glancing across the room, willing the waitress not to come so she can get up and leave. But there she is, with Hanne's drink on a tray, ice cubes tinkling against glass, and a complimentary plate of sushi. The waitress sets the drink in front of her, and he slides into the seat across from her and tells the waitress he'll have whatever she's having.

In fact he is from Denmark. Copenhagen. He introduces himself as Jens Radmussen. Passing through, unable to sleep. Someone in the room next to his with a loud TV. “And you're not from here either,” he says.

She supposes they've reached that point in the conversation when she's supposed to divulge her personal information. An awkward silence follows, and he's looking at her, his eyes alert, glittery. “In fact I've spent years in Japan,” she says. Why is she inventing? She spent three years in this country, then her mother moved them to Germany, then to the United States. “My parents were missionaries. That's how most Anglos and Europeans learn the language.”

“And what do you do?” he says.

Before she answers, before she gives herself over to a definition, a noun, she floats in the excitement of becoming something other than what she's been. With the elevator music twinkling in the background and this man enjoying her, she feels another landscape, a different life running parallel to her existing one. “A surgeon,” she says, surprising herself.

From the expression on his face, he is duly impressed. More than he'd be if she told him the truth of her profession.

“A surgeon,” he repeats, his voice full of awe.

“Cardiac pulmonary,” she says, then adding when she sees his puzzlement, “heart and lung.” What is she doing? If given the chance, if handed another hundred years, this is hardly what she'd choose. She can barely watch a nurse stick a needle in her arm to draw blood. Jens is watching her, his eyes bright, interested, his elbows on the table, leaning toward her. She asks, out of politeness, of his profession.

“Sales. Software, networking,” he chortles. “Stuff I don't really understand.”

The waitress brings out his drink and Hanne scoots the plate of sushi over to him. “Please. Help yourself. I'm not that hungry.”

He pops one in his mouth. “Have you ever saved anyone?”

It's becoming ridiculous. She should leave. “Maybe. Maybe not. But that's not what interests me. It's when in the face of tragedy there arises the divine in a human being. An almost pure selflessness. You don't always see it, but when you do, it's breathtaking.”

They are both humbled by her statement. And she's startled—where did that come from?

The sushi is gone. The drink is too, gone straight to her head. She probably should not be drinking in her current neurological state, she realizes, too late.

“I should do something else with my life,” he says, looking out across the tables, as if the answer lay on the other side of this room. “I travel too much. None of this is worth anything and I'm really out of shape.” He pats his stomach. For a moment, the mood feels gloomy. Then he smiles. “But if I didn't travel, I wouldn't meet interesting girls like you.”

Girls. Does he not know the Japanese word for woman? She feels the small spark of desire flicker, fade. “I've got an early morning. It's been a pleasure,” she says, standing, hearing the sound of silk as she uncrosses her legs. She extends her hand. His large hand envelops hers, sending a rush of unexpected heat through her, and she can't suppress the accompanying thrill.

“A pleasure to meet you,” he says with respect in his voice. He stands, smiling down upon her. “A real pleasure, doctor.”

She can feel in his gaze a promised intimacy. For a moment, she flashes on their intertwined nakedness. How would his hands grip her? But then someone walks into the bar and the landscape of her fabricated life collapses, like a wilted flower, leaving her with herself again.