Translator (28 page)

Hanne reads it over. How inadequate, these words. She thinks of Noh and feels a new appreciation—its refusal to rest on words to convey emotion. If she's allowed to stay, she'll have many ways to show Brigitte how she feels. And if she's asked to leave? This will have to do.

At dawn, Hanne wanders around the compound, which is just stirring to life. She passes by the dormitories, the classroom, a two-room health clinic with five chairs in the waiting room. The barn for the cows and goats. The compound is clean, neat, organized, but what Hanne mainly sees is the endless manual labor required to keep the place running, the labor her daughter must offer up every day. When she wanders into the kitchen, she finds Brigitte scrubbing dishes. On every counter, there are stacks of dishes from last night's dinner. The kitchen smells of curry and coconut.

Brigitte doesn't notice her right away. She has muscular arms and a fierce look of concentration on her face. A singular focus on the task at hand. Without hair, her face is rounder than Hanne remembered. Her thinness makes her cheekbones more pronounced, like two balls. She looks content, even happy doing the simple task of washing a dish.

“Good morning,” says Hanne, forcing a cheery tone. She comes over beside Brigitte and picks up a sponge. “It's quite a place here.” She feels like she keeps repeating herself.

Brigitte motions to the dirty dishes and says the dishwasher broke last night. “Another thing we must figure out how to fix.”

“You seem pretty good at it.”

“Practice. Lots of practice.”

Hanne begins on the stack of plates. A mountain of mangoes waits to be peeled and sliced. There is a long silence between them, one that is relaxed, calm, peaceful. The morning air is cool and the birds are singing. Through the window above the sink, Hanne sees an ox harnessed to a plow. A young boy walks beside it, talking to it, whispering in its ear, perhaps urging it to pull the heavy contraption. He's trying to get it to go around a large tree.

“How does it feel to know you are dying?” Hanne is startled by her question. “If you don't want to talk about it—”

Brigitte stops scrubbing, lets the water run. “Some days everything is so vibrant, so precious. The slightest thing. The way the light flows through a leaf, the smell of dirt, the sound of rain on the roof. The other day, I spent the longest time watching a monkey crack open a walnut. I think, this is heaven. Everything is astonishingly beautiful. But other days, I'm scared. I'm scared because it's the unknown. I don't know what I'm crossing over into. Oh, I know what I've read about the afterlife, but I've never experienced it.” She laughs at herself.

It's the most honest moment they've had so far.

“I couldn't do it,” says Hanne. “What you're doing.”

“We're different, that's all.” Brigitte looks at Hanne, as if to make sure Hanne heard her.

“You're a saint,” says Hanne, turning over the word in her mind. From Latin,
sanctus
, meaning “holy, consecrated.” What she means to say is that her daughter is exemplary, extraordinary, far more evolved than most, including herself.

Brigitte smiles faintly. “No. Far from it.”

The bell chimes. Prayer time again. Brigitte turns the water off and dries her hands. Hanne learned at lunch that Brigitte gives all the sermons, six a day.

Hanne skips the sermon and wanders out to the barn. The barn her daughter built with the help of a farmhand. It's a solid, sturdy post frame construction. A high roof, a loft and eight stalls. Hiro would be proud. He was always enthralled with architecture.

The woman who sat next to Hanne at lunch comes into the barn, bows to Hanne, and dips a bucket into the water barrel. She goes to each stall and refills the cows' bowls. When she is done, she comes over to Hanne, pulls a bandana from her pocket, and unwraps two biscuits. She hands one to Hanne.

“Your daughter has a strong spirit,” she says. “So wise. That's what will help her. And a circle of people who love her dearly.”

“Maybe that circle could help out more. Have her do less.”

“They're doing what she wants. She wants to be part of life. You can understand that, can't you? Here, life requires a lot of work. She wants life until the very end.” The woman tosses new hay around the barn, then comes over to Hanne. “Do you intend to stay? We could find you a job. Brigitte always said you were a hard worker. That you're a well-regarded translator.”

“That was a lifetime ago.”

“We've got plenty to do here. Work from dawn to dusk.”

And what would she do? She knows none of the languages spoken here except English. Perhaps teach English or French or German. But that's not what the woman had in mind. She hands Hanne a bucket of soapy water. “If you want, you can scrub out the stalls.”

Hanne spends the rest of the afternoon in the barn, on her knees, scrubbing cow shit from the walls. It's just as well. Brigitte, it seems, is busy the rest of the day. When the six stalls are clean, Hanne finds Aruna in the garden. After much pestering, Aruna agrees to let Hanne help. The soil is rich, heavily fertilized with manure. It seems every kind of grain is grown here, along with sugar cane and potatoes. Hanne points to a potato and Aruna tells her the word for it in Hindi and Urdu. We feed many of the villagers, she says, in addition to the schoolchildren, most of whom are orphans. In the field, she sees one of the women in white robes tickling a small boy. His laughter carries through the still air. A feeling of goodwill sweeps through Hanne.

Brigitte is not at dinner. “Receiving those who come for a blessing,” someone tells Hanne.

Hanne goes to bed early, tired from the physical labor, but it's a welcome tiredness that sends her into a deep sleep. In the middle of the night, she's jarred awake by a vision of Brigitte cleaning, giving sermons, but her flesh is gone. Only her skeleton remains. Hanne grabs her bony wrist and tells her she must stop. Stop! Brigitte tersely shakes her head: “Go back to bed.” Hanne looks around her white cell, breathing hard. What was most alarming about the dream, what most shook Hanne was that she complied—her shoulders stooped, she shuffled back to bed and fell asleep again.

In the morning, after the children have filed in, Hanne steps into the prayer hall and sits in the back. It seems the only way she's assured of seeing her daughter is by attending the services. She feels a dry pinch behind her eyes. She must have caught a cold, because her nose is runny. If she stayed on, how quickly could she learn these languages? And if she did, would these sermons mean something to her? Help her accept her daughter's slow demise? Can she watch as Brigitte becomes weaker and weaker and remain silent at her side? She looks at the thin points of her daughter's shoulders. Watches them rise and fall. Listens to the foreign language flowing from her dry lips.

Hanne closes her eyes and falls asleep. She wakes when she senses that someone is standing in front of her. It's Brigitte.

“I'm sorry,” says Hanne. “The heat. I don't think I'm adapting.”

“It doesn't happen that fast.”

Brigitte waits while Hanne gathers herself, then tells her the schedule for the day. Breakfast next, classes to teach, prayers, more classes, prayers, lunch, class, prayers, and a walk to the Ganges, where they'll step into the river to cleanse and purify themselves.

The prayer hall is empty. In the cool darkness, Brigitte sits on the bench next to Hanne. When Hanne reaches over and rests her hand on her daughter's shoulder, she feels her daughter's body soften.

“I'd like to stay. Help out here,” says Hanne, not swallowing her longing. “The garden. The barn. Anything. If you'll let me—”

Brigitte smiles. “I heard about the barn. I never thought I'd see the day.”

Hanne laughs and Brigitte joins in. Something between them falls away. They sit for a while in the quiet. Hanne glances at Brigitte's hands and sees that her fingernails are chewed off, just as they were when she became frightened as a child. Whatever you want, I will do, thinks Hanne. There will be a point when you will be too weak to walk, to lift a cup of water to your lips. There will be no fight, only a slow, steady decline. If she is allowed to stay, this is what she must accept. What choice does she have?

“If only there was some way for your god to take me, not you,” whispers Hanne.

“In the beginning, I did my fair share of bargaining, too.”

When Brigitte rises, Hanne follows her up the stairs, onto the stage.

In the shadowy light, Brigitte gets down on her knees. “Will you pray with me?”

Hanne follows, huffing as she lowers herself onto one knee, then the other. Her joints ache. Everything aches. The prayer hall is silent, only the sound of children outside. She's on her knees because if she refuses, Brigitte might send her away, and if she asks to whom or what she should pray, to what cruel god who is curtailing her daughter's life too soon, Brigitte might send her away. If she pleads for Brigitte to save herself, she might send her away. So she blinks back her tears and says nothing. What choice does she really have?

The wind drops. The chatter is done. There is a moment of deep silence that seems to open up an enormous space around them, and Hanne looks at Brigitte without the haze of desire. This woman in front of her. The day's golden light pouring down on her clean white robe, her shiny bald head, her gentle eyes.

Brigitte takes both of Hanne's hands in hers. They are linked now, a bridge, her daughter's long, knobby fingers interlaced with her own. Brigitte's hands are calloused and strong, and they are gripping Hanne's. They are breathing in unison, breathing in the voices of the children, the rustle of the wind, the bloom of the fields.

When Brigitte begins to pray in her language, Hanne closes her eyes and listens closely, trying hard to understand.

I
would like to thank
the
following for their generous and invaluable help: my Japanese language sensei, Atsuko Sells, and also Hajime Ohno. I fear I will forget someone, but I'm very grateful to my readers, Ellen Sussman, Lalita Tademy, Elizabeth Stark, Rosemary Graham, Andreas Kriefall, Kate Brady, Michael Munson, Peter Allen, Lyn Motai, Izumi Motai, Tina Pohlman, Barbara Blasdel, and Gene Alexander. A special thanks to Marty Schuyler and Mollie Glick and Katie Hamblin. And in the end, no one deserves more thanks than Peter Seeger, my husband.

Several books were very important to me in my research:
After Babel: Aspects of Language & Translation,
by George Steiner, and
Performing Without A Stage: The Art of Literary Translation,
by Robert Wechsler. Also important were
The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan,
translated
by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani, and
Japanese No Dramas,
edited and translated by Royall Tyler.