Translator (4 page)

She's never out at this hour. On the days she teaches Japanese, she's in the classroom. On the days she doesn't teach, she rises early and goes for a long walk, then hurries home and gets to work. As she heads down the sidewalk, Hanne sees herself, a woman in a blue swing coat, her eyes watering, the rims pinkish red from the constant cold wind. In the distance is the white dome of City Hall. She didn't intend to head this way, the opposite direction of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it's been years since she's been inside, where she and Hiro were married. A civil ceremony, one is conducted every half hour. It wasn't the least bit romantic, but it was cheap and quick, and they didn't need anything more because they dwelled in a bubble of passion.

They met during her last semester of graduate school at Columbia. She was studying at the library, and at some point she looked up and saw a Japanese man sitting across from her, the desk light dancing in his thick glasses. His round face, the stubble encircling his soft, gentle lips. His eyes were playful, full of delight. He dressed well, with a blue-and-white striped suit coat, a white shirt, and no tie. That first electric charge when their hands brushed, reaching for the same book, the title of which she can't recall. “Sumimasen,” he said. She told him in his language that she, too, was sorry, but not that sorry. It was completely out of character, and she was about to apologize again, earnestly, but his face lit up with the most glorious smile, a smile just for her.

He was a chemist, in the United States on a full scholarship. He also spoke fluent French and loved Japanese literature and poetry.

“I can help you with your Japanese,” he said, reaching over and touching her hair. That first gesture, so full of impulsive desire.

They ended up at a hotel that first night. But he wasn't wealthy and neither was she, and they both had dorm rooms and roommates, so their spot became the library basement, beneath the stairwell, a hidden storage room. No sign on the door, the room was musty and stuffed with discarded old chairs and tables covered in white sheets. At the level of the sidewalk, a dirty window let in murky light. They could hear footsteps above them and muffled voices, as if the world existed above their heads and they'd sunk, with all the other forgotten things, underwater.

Though the door locked from the inside, they couldn't be sure no one possessed a key, so they rarely exchanged words, rarely made a sound. There was that, the thrill of possibly getting caught. But also him, his hunger for her, the way he tasted her. And more surprising, her hunger for him. She didn't know she had that inside, a consuming craving that once sated needed only moments to reignite. As the hour of their meeting approached, her entire body quivered with anticipation, as if every cell yearned for his body.

Two lives, for months she led two lives, a studious, driven student, and in the dingy storage room, stretched out on the table, his hands and mouth electrifying her, she became something she'd never been before.

Those early months of the courtship, he fervently pursued her, writing her a steady stream of haiku. She'd reach into her drawer and find one. Or open the refrigerator or a cupboard. Once she found one in her shoe. For the longest time, she carried one in her purse,
Water in the brook/No chill in the soft spring air/ Time to wet our feet,
along with a pair of his thin black socks. She loved him, and even if that love eventually faded, it never disappeared completely. Brigitte was wrong when she accused Hanne of never loving him, not loving anyone.

Now she climbs the stairs to the second floor, where they were married. It's as she remembered. Sunlight streams in through the large windows, onto the white marble floors, and the light bounces up, illuminating the white walls and ceiling. If such a thing as heaven exists, she thinks it should be like this–so light, so airy, except for the muffled sound of a man shouting, bringing her quickly back to earth. She opens a big wooden door and there he is, a short, squat man shaped like a bowling ball, bellowing into a microphone. Though she'd prefer a quieter place, rows of wooden pews are nearly empty, inviting her to rest her sore feet.

In the front of the room, eleven men and women sit in a half circle, each with his or her own microphone, waiting for the squat man to end his tirade. City officials of some kind. She doesn't follow local politics, nor does she intend to now. She has a bench to herself, she's only one of a handful of people in the audience. Three appear homeless, with reddened, weathered skin, torn clothing, and rumpled bags of belongings beside them. One is stretched out on the bench, sleeping, his boots unlaced, his socks covered in dirt. Another sits, his chin on his chest, eyes closed. He could be twenty, he could be sixty.

Within minutes she picks up the thrust of the man's argument. He's engaged in a debate about whether to pass a resolution urging the city to condemn the actions of Norway, which killed four whales, despite a global moratorium and protests. Apparently, the outer fat of the minke whale is a delicacy in Japan, where it is eaten raw.

It seems there's no getting away from Japan, and it's a short leap in her mind from Japan to Jiro. He liked to imagine what music would go best with whatever was going on. She remembers him saying
Every situation, every person has a melody playing, even if you can't hear it.

“If we pass this, we're jeopardizing our city's reputation of tolerance,” says a pock-faced official.

“If we sit here and do nothing, we are condoning it,” argues another. “Each member of the Board of Supervisors knows we are a city that takes a stand. And this is an easy one: we are not a city that supports killing whales.”

She closes her eyes. It isn't long before the city officials become nothing but voices, voices that have vacated their mortal bodies and now swirl in the ether. On and on about the resolution, dead whales, live whales, dollars lost, dollars gained. She no longer feels her body with its aching legs and a thudding heart from the climb up the stairs. She is just a disembodied and blissfully emptied mind. Suspended in this slumberous state, she lets herself enjoy a voice that must have roots in England with its soft “ah,” and rich vocabulary; to hear “labile” in a public forum, who would have thought!

Something tickles her hand. She opens her eyes. A young woman in a pin-striped suit is handing her an agenda. They are only on item two and there are twenty-four items on the list. Street repair, menu labeling at chain restaurants, road closures, a resolution urging people not to buy eggs produced by caged hens. Everything must be debated, dissected, interpreted.

She buttons her coat and steps into the hallway, where a throng of people, a hundred or more, have gathered, and they all seem to be heading in the same direction as she, toward the marble staircase down to the lobby. Where did all these people come from? There's no defining characteristic—young, old, she hears Mandarin, English, Cantonese, French, Thai, and someone with an Australian accent—perhaps a tour of the building? Or another meeting just adjourned? She's never liked crowds and considers waiting for the great mass to descend ahead of her. But she's had enough and wants to head home. Perhaps now she'll find some spark in her young Komachi.

She enters the flock. People are ahead of her, beside her, behind her, pressing in, the space between her and another almost nonexistent. The crowd is dense, streaming along, taking her with it. She feels claustrophobic, the air is suffocating and hot, the same air everyone else is breathing, inhaling, exhaling. If she could, she'd back up and remove herself from this mob. She remembers that Jiro hated crowds, too. It was one reason he didn't visit his wife in the hospital as often as he planned; it took four different subways, all of them jammed with people. And now that line that bothered her comes back.
What you once loved lies there, inert, sucked of all its juices because you forgot it.
He didn't forget her. That wasn't it at all, despite what his lack of visiting and new love affair might have indicated. How could Kobayashi have written that? It seems an instance, one among many, in which the author didn't really know his character. Authorial intrusion, she thinks it's called. She's imagining Jiro jammed in one of the Japanese subways, bodies pressed against him, elbows digging into his ribs, as she takes another step down the stairs, but her foot finds no purchase. Only air.

And now she is falling.
A young woman turns, her eyes wide, mouth open, “Oh!” someone cries out, and the sound echoes off the walls. A pink shirt flits by, a shiny black purse, other heads turn, a pair of brown sandals, gray gum stuck on a stair,
Catch yourself
, one arm in front of her, her hand, she recognizes her long fingers. It's the only thing in front of her, how can that be? And people parting like the Red Sea, clearing the way for her to crash cleanly and fully. Yes, let the middle-aged fall. It's her hand that breaks the fall, and her forehead, as it slams into the white marble edge of a step.

Could this be it? Surrounded by gawking strangers, her corpse at the bottom of public stairs on public display? Her life doesn't pass in front of her, instead, she's firmly grounded in this moment, the shrieking, shouting, the hardness of the marble steps smashing into her arms, her hips, her nose, the taste of blood—she's still tethered to this life—and now she recalls a warm summer afternoon in the community pool, Hiro looking at her, smiling, as if he'd never seen anything so beautiful, with both children clinging to her shapely mother body, still heavy from pregnancy, her son's arms wrapped around her neck, and she's breathing his sugary breath, and her infant daughter in her arms, babbling something softly, patting the water, smiling at Hanne, her big toothless grin. A perfect moment. She wishes she could stay in this memory forever.

Hanne is stretched out on her back. Faces hover in a circle above her. A boy with big blue eyes. A woman whose front teeth rest on her lower lip. An old Chinese woman wearing all gray, her face expressionless, as if she's seen this before, and much worse. Suddenly a man's face zooms toward her. Beads of sweat on his upper lip. Dark sideburns. Dark nose hairs.
His eyes are close-set, unnervingly so. “Don't move,” he says, his breath reeking of garlic and cigarette smoke.

An imperative.
She tries to sit up, and when she can't, attempts to understand why she's on the floor. This is not where she should be. She knows that. What is she doing here? “She's bleeding . . . hurt. A woman.” But nothing hurts. Liquid streams from her nose, down her cheek, pools into her ear. The circle of faces still above her.
But she can't right herself. The world is tilting. The man with sideburns is squatting beside her. What does he want? He's saying something to her. Telling her something, his horrible breath assaulting her.
Get back.
She can't get her mouth to shout,
Move back!
She hunts for that perfect moment again, the water, her children when they were young, Hiro, but it is gone.

When Hanne first opened the
door to the new apartment, Brigitte had stood there, glued to the carpet in the dimly lit hallway. Hanne stepped inside and opened the blinds. She liked this apartment, a space with so much light and so high up, as if she were living in a cloud. And it was convenient, within walking distance of Brigitte's middle school. When Brigitte finally crossed the threshold, she wandered around and around, as if she was lost in an enormous department store and couldn't find the exit. Boxes were everywhere, nothing unpacked, the furniture huddled in the center of the rooms, waiting to be assigned its rightful place. Brigitte's footsteps echoed in the emptiness.

On her fourth lap through the apartment, she stood in the living room, her face crestfallen, and gestured to the wall of window. “The people down there don't even look real.”

Hanne got to work, unpacking a box of books. Their old house had been snatched up the first week on the market. Though they weren't legally separated, Hiro was firmly and happily ensconced in his new apartment, a bike ride away from Stanford. Tomas was away at college, and now Hanne and Brigitte must forge something else.

“It feels like a hotel. And it's cold here.” Wrapping her arms around herself, Brigitte said she missed their old house with its big green lawn, the porch swing where she liked to read, the old-fashioned stove, the garden in back, the banister staircase—

“We have to make it a home,” said Hanne.

Brigitte's long black hair hung like two gloomy curtains on either side of her face. “It won't ever feel right.”

“You'll get used to it,” said Hanne, thinking of all the places that as a girl she'd had to call home.

“Why can't I live with Dad?”

Hanne could feel herself becoming impatient. Hiro had said he expected to be too busy with his research to have Brigitte live with him. He'd see Brigitte on weekends and every other Wednesday night for supper. He was on the verge of a major discovery, something that would shake the world of chemistry. For years he'd worked to reach this point.

“And after I do that, you'll fall in love with me again,” he said, half kidding, but his eyes looked tired.

It wasn't as simple as that. No explosive event, no hair-tearing affair or sudden falling off a cliff out of love, the end was more insidious. By the time Hanne noticed the huge gap between them, it had calcified into something other than a marriage.

In the beginning, he worked all the time, a brilliant dreamer caught in the dream of a Nobel Prize. Wasn't that what his professors whispered to him during graduate school? You're on to something, Hiro. Keep at it. His research had something to do with protein degradation.

She, too; she wasn't so naïve as to assign all blame to him. She was caught up in her own dream. In this way, they were very much alike, driven, ambitious, pushing themselves. Before children came along, there was time at the end of the day to find each other again. But the practical took over, with carpools and cooking and cleaning and laundry and carpools and cooking and cleaning and laundry, and when she bothered to look up, he wasn't there, or only half there, a mist of himself. From that distance, he lost his brilliant sheen for her; as did she for him, she supposes. The absentminded yes or no, trailing off into nothing, their sentences becoming as minimal as their marriage. It was no one's fault; it was both their faults.

“You know, your grandmother and your great-grandmother had to endure—” Hanne said to Brigitte.

“I know. I know.”

For months and months in Brigitte's room, there was nothing but a bed and desk, not even a rug on the hardwood floor. She refused to hang anything on the walls. Her bedroom at the old house had contained bits and pieces of the world that, for some reason, caught her eye. On their hikes, Brigitte would pick up pinecones and bits of eggshells and branches shaped like letters, a K, a T, smooth rocks, a papery fragment of a wasp's nest, a red cellophane candy wrapper. But Brigitte had thrown it all away when they moved and her room remained painfully bare. And her window was always partly open, so on cold days her room was freezing.

So many times Hanne stood at the doorway of her cold bedroom, staring at the blankness, restraining herself from hanging something—anything on the walls. Or she'd wake on a Saturday, thinking she'd take Brigitte shopping. Let her pick out things—anything. But so many times she'd wake to find Brigitte gone. Out for a walk, she'd say when she returned late afternoon. She liked to walk the city to get a sense of things. Or she rode the bus to watch people or the sunrise at Ocean Beach. The light is different at the beach, Brigitte would say. She wanted to be able to look at the horizon, to feel the expanse of the world. They'd argue about it; a young girl out alone, you're not safe, Hanne scolded. But it never did any good. Never stopped Brigitte.

A year later on a warm Saturday afternoon, Hanne drove down to Stanford to deliver Hiro a box of his dusty books. She was hoping to have a serious talk about their marriage. Was there any chance at patching it back together? She missed him. He'd been the great love of her life. She kept turning to tell him something, consult with him, seek his counsel and was startled he wasn't there. He knew her best. Hardest were the nights, to sleep without his steady, patient breathing. But there would be no talk. She found him dead on his kitchen floor. He'd been chopping an onion when he had a heart attack.

“He never should have moved out,” cried Brigitte. “If he was living with us, we would have found him and saved him.”

Who knew if that was true? When Hanne found him, the coroner said he'd been dead at least twelve hours.

Brigitte had been struggling in school, and was soon failing nearly every subject. The news didn't come from Brigitte, who had turned herself into a private world of one. The principal called. He recommended counseling or therapy. And how would Hanne pay for that? Hiro might have been brilliant at chemistry, but he was lousy with finances. And Hanne wasn't much better. If Brigitte's grades didn't improve, the principal was afraid he'd have to expel her. Might drugs be involved? Had Hanne seen any signs?

Signs? With Hiro gone, Hanne had taken on more work to pay the bills, including Tomas's and Brigitte's tuitions. She supposed Brigitte complained of being tired all the time. In the morning, it was hard to get her out of bed for school. When she finally did rise, she pulled on whatever clothes were lying on the floor. She rarely brushed her hair, and her skin took on a waxy look, probably from not being washed enough. But the signs Hanne saw were the dark pouches under her own eyes, the sag to her cheeks, her dull, lifeless skin. Working all the time, when she came home, she barely had enough energy to eat before she fell asleep. Only to wake up and do the whole thing over the next day. Driving to work one morning, Hanne fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the road and plunged into a ditch. Luckily she didn't hit anyone. She escaped with only a cut to her forehead from the steering wheel.

One afternoon she came home from work early to find music blaring, and Brigitte draped around an older boy. They were swaying in the living room, and Brigitte was wearing one of Hanne's thin, strapless party dresses, a plunge in the front, revealing only the possibility of womanliness. In bare feet, her toenails painted blue, her not-yet-woman body was pressed against that young man, a sly look in his eye and a flare to his jaw. He looked sixteen, dressed in raggedy blue jeans, his hair gelled and standing straight up, like an electric fence.

Hanne watched him finger a curl in Brigitte's hair, before sauntering out the door.

It seemed it was only a couple months later, and there was another young man, this one slightly older, already a smoky creature. Hanne could see on his old jeans pocket the faded outline of a pack of cigarettes. That time Brigitte stormed out with him. She came back the next day, her clothes smelling of cigarette smoke and alcohol, a tattoo on her left arm of Munch's
Der Schrei Der Natur
, The Scream of Nature.

Brigitte stood there, hands on her hips. “Why are you looking at me like that? It's all meaningless. I've heard you say that before. Don't deny it.”

Hanne saw another tattoo on the tender inside of her daughter's wrist:
I wonder why it hurts to live.

With her grueling work schedule, Hanne could only do so much for her daughter. Hanne located a boarding school, the Dover Academy, in Connecticut. It specialized in languages and had a rigid discipline policy: no alcohol, no drugs, the administration conducted periodic room checks and random urine tests and provided counseling. Homework done on time, lights out by 10:00
p.m
. It was the right thing for Hanne to do. Brigitte was very bright, but she needed help, much more than Hanne could give her, to guide her through this rough patch. Hanne used the money from the sale of Hiro's apartment, took out a second mortgage, and paid the first year's tuition. What she'd do after that, she didn't know. It didn't matter. She'd save her daughter somehow.

To pay for the steep fees, Hanne took on more work. She landed a prominent job translating a new Japanese author. Her translation was highly praised, which led to more work. She taught ten Japanese language classes a week. She buried herself in work.

Brigitte eventually settled in at the school, and Hanne didn't receive any calls of complaints, no threats of expulsion. When Thanksgiving arrived, Brigitte said she wanted to go home with one of her new friends. Her friend lived an hour away.

Hanne was pleased her daughter had so quickly made a friend. “Well, then Christmas,” said Hanne.

When Christmas arrived, Brigitte said she wanted to stay for the winter interim session. Ice skating, skiing, and Mandarin. Hanne didn't even have to pay. Brigitte had applied for a scholarship and got it. You're considered a parent suffering from financial hardship, she told Hanne. Hanne sensed it would make no difference if she protested. Brigitte wasn't coming home.

Hanne flew to Connecticut for a visit in January, but school was in session, so she barely got to see Brigitte. And when she took Brigitte out to dinner, Brigitte invited two other girls to accompany her. Hanne's questions were answered with one-word responses or silence. At dinner, the three girls ordered the most expensive thing on the menu—lobster—and spent the rest of the evening whispering and giggling to each other, as if Hanne did not exist. When Hanne touched her arm, Brigitte moved it away. At least Brigitte seemed happy otherwise, if not with her.

During the summer, Brigitte told her she got a job at the summer camp at her school teaching basic Mandarin and Japanese. Later Hanne found out this wasn't true. She worked in the cafeteria serving food and had acquired a boyfriend. Hanne eventually stopped asking Brigitte to come to San Francisco for her holidays.

Then it seemed Brigitte was off to Dartmouth. Her third year, she took a leave of absence, supposedly to do volunteer work, building homes for Eastern Europeans. The next thing she heard, Brigitte had left the organization, dropped out of school, and joined some religious group.

Brigitte made contact with Tomas and told him where she was. At the time, Brigitte hadn't invoked her demand for confidentiality. That was to come later. After dragging the information out of Tomas, Hanne flew to France, then drove to Cologne, to an old monastery owned by a group sometimes called the Higher Beings, other times Higher Thought. Hanne came on the pretext of delivering boxes full of Brigitte's things.

“Brigitte doesn't care about objects,” said a dumpy woman in a flowered dress who helped run the spiritual group. “They hold no meaning for her. Things,” the woman said, not bothering to conceal her disdain, “are not of any concern to her. Or to us.”

As for seeing her daughter, that was impossible; Brigitte, who'd changed her name to Nivedita, was on retreat. For how long? Possibly years.