The Interpreter Read online

  ‘I imagine I owe you something,’ she said in a quiet but steely voice.

  I felt ridiculous; I lowered my eyes, desperately thinking of something to say.

  But it was she who came towards me; I caught her smiling a shopgirl’s smile, perfidious yet beckoning. Caressing my sides, she pushed me onto the bed and turned out the light. She dealt with my body’s needs briskly and deftly, while revealing none of her own. Then she pulled the mattress onto the ground and went to sleep on the other side of the room, as far away from me as she could.

  Each evening of our stormy enforced joint adventure, Magda extracted my pleasure from me almost by force, without waiting for me to ask it of her; she fought off my amorous approaches speedily but effectively in the pitch darkness, with me clinging pointlessly to a body which seemed insensible to my touch. I ran my hands over her as though by so doing I would be able to remember it forever. Rancour at her indifference goaded me to resist, to put a curb on my own senses; but I always yielded to her businesslike expertise. A cloud of unworthy thoughts would float through my mind, and I would make a show of driving them away, only to let them resurface when I was back at the wheel, driving along the flooded roads of the Banat. At times I would be bedevilled by a chilling desire to do her harm, to finish the grim work begun by the mechanic on the sawdust-strewn floor of the service station; on other occasions I would dream obscurely of forging myself an existence by her side. In my unbridled daydreaming I would imagine myself with a grey office in a white corridor in the shoe factory building; Magda and I would live in a house exactly like my own, with roses, and a lake; or perhaps in Constanta, by the sea Roxana had described to me and which I’d never seen. But here my daydreaming would be brought to an abrupt stop by the idea of living with an interpreter: I was haunted by the irrational fear that anyone dedicated to that unhealthy profession could bring me nothing but harm. After all, if I was running amok with every police force in the Carpathians on my heels, whose fault was it but that of an interpreter?

  At first light I peered through the shutters to see a dismal expanse of mud: grey houses and office blocks reflected in motionless water. Magda was asleep; my head still full of dreams, in the half-light I thought that the body lying beside me under the covers was that of Irene. My thoughts wandered skywards, lifting me far above that drab hotel, above the town and further still, into an aeroplane, so that the desolate roads I had been driving along were now no more than brownish scribbles in a sea of mossy green. Then, in a flash of clarity amidst the inchoate clouds that were my thoughts, for a moment I saw myself, alone in a strange land, playing the bandit. I looked incredulously at my disaffected body, apparently now cured; I opened my hands and became absorbed in the network of lines I saw there. Were they still my own? I listened nervously to my heartbeat, thinking I detected a new violence in it. Perhaps this recklessness was simply the new form my illness had assumed. In order to escape me, rather than transforming my body, it had transformed itself. Coming up against the dogged resistance of a disordered will, it had tried to attack me in a more cunning fashion; now it was altering my perception of things, seeping into my mind, first squeezing out the less essential substances, those fostering common sense and moderation, then moving on to the juices of consciousness and memory. If, for the moment, I was a mere bandit, perhaps I would soon become an out-and-out assassin, a sadistic torturer.

  It was Magda who aroused me from these thoughts; she had woken up suddenly, and wanted to go down to the reception desk to try the phone again. We dressed in haste, in silence, almost without looking at one another. We crouched down behind the half-open door, then went out into the corridor one after the other. I went down first, but on the stairs I heard the porter repeating the number of Magda’s room, and her name, in tones of some alarm. I sat down on a step and peered into the foyer: two policemen were positioned by the entrance, while another four were preparing to come up the stairs, taking their pistols out of their holsters as they did so; another was keeping an eye on the lift. A police officer in a black raincoat was glowering at the photo in the newspaper the porter had opened up before him. I beat a hasty retreat in order to warn Magda, then, turning round, noticed a little flight of metal stairs by the lift-shaft, leading into the basement. We crept down the metal stairs; above us we could hear hurried steps, doors banging, policemen shouting. We scrambled through a window, ran through the mud to the supermarket carpark and drove off into the blue yonder, amidst a blare of sirens from fire engines and ambulances which were foundering in the puddles and sending murky ripples eddying around them.

  I was driving through a dim blur of flooded fields, the wrecks of floating cars and uprooted pylons, trying to get my bearings, when I heard Magda burst into sudden laughter behind me in the back. I glanced at the rear-view mirror: I thought I caught a glint of ferocity in her eyes, a flash of cruelty.

  ‘Felix Bellamy, now that I’m the accomplice of the Beast of Bukovina, I want to carry out a robbery of my own! I want to see people falling to their knees in front of me, I want to shoot at windows and glasses and mirrors! I want to smell the scent of fear, of blood, of gunpowder! Stop – I want to come in front!’ I heard her shout.

  As the road curved steeply down a long hill, we sighted a service station on the outskirts of Salinta; Magda went in first to ask for directions. Several foreign lorry drivers were camping out in the place, immobilised by the bad weather; their vehicles were parked in the space behind the petrol pumps, wheels sunk in the mud. I burst in a few seconds after her, pointing my pistol at their dull-eyed, weary faces.

  ‘Throw your wallets onto the floor and you won’t come to any harm!’ I shouted. Magda turned away from the counter and walked around among the tables, translating my threat to our astonished crowd of victims in several languages. I heard her speaking German, English, Italian and Dutch, and realised that she must have looked at the number plates of the lorries before coming in.

  That evening, in a hotel in Arad, we read the headlines in the Jurnalul National: ‘Country cut in two by floods – traffic at a standstill’. Then, lower down: ‘Bonnie and Clyde of the Carpathians still up to their monkey tricks with the police – Swiss bandit and accomplice sighted at Oradea – petrol station plundered’. I read the entire article and discovered to my fury that I was being held responsible for Radu’s death as well: ‘Ravaged body of lorry driver from Chisinau murdered by Swiss thug found in Ukrainian countryside’, was how the journalist put it. Below was a passage in italics which I have in my wallet to this day:

  In these difficult times, our hapless country has suffered all manner of woes, from corruption to economic decline, from unbridled pollution to the most savage violence. Having rid ourselves of dictatorship, we deluded ourselves that the worst was over, and that a new prosperity might dawn at last, even in this dismal land. But, given half a chance, the first thing our people do is emigrate, which is their only chance of giving their children a decent future; our orphans are dependent upon charity. We have become a repository of cheap labour for the rich countries, in a word, we export poverty – that is our greatest resource. Everything else must be imported. Except for criminals, that is: our home-grown type is every bit as competent as the imported variety, and certainly more respectful of local customs. Above all, they go about their business in a more mannerly, more elegant fashion, homing in on ministries rather than on highways; using paper rather than guns. Lulled into a sense of false security, the Romanian people still feel that there is some point in going to work; basically, this too is a form of ethical behaviour, and in the long term – all forms of social evolution are slow-moving – some good is bound to come of it. We knew that the Swiss made chocolate and founded the Red Cross, that they were partial to orderly traffic and neat flowerbeds. Now we know that even the snow-clad Alps may breed outlaws of the most murderous stripe. The base individual who is terrorising our roads offends us more by his provenance than by his turpitude; his forays wound our national pride more than they d
o our pockets, because even the poorest Swiss lives like a nabob in comparison to his Romanian equivalent, and if there was one humiliation we had yet to experience, it was that of being robbed by a descendant of William Tell. How many Romanians will Felix Bellamy still have to rob before he amasses the booty he would acquire by robbing one single man in his own country? Why carry on targeting the ill-stocked coffers of failing petrol stations or the grubby wallets of a few lorry drivers when he has friendly dealings with banks and ciphered accounts? Clearly, we’ve entered the age of globalisation with a vengeance, we are part of a game which is no longer under our control. Thus we find ourselves almost regretting our own well-upholstered ministerial thieves; they were almost appealing in their restraint. But looking at it from a strictly economic point of view, what interest would a Swiss thief have in coming here? Of course it must be easier to gull our poor ill-armed police, to dupe our down-and-out secret services, to shake off our ramshackle black Marias with sleek foreign vehicles than it would be to challenge the well-trained, well-equipped Swiss federal equivalent. Felix Bellamy, if you’re a man, take yourself off to Norway or Liechtenstein, and leave us to starve in peace.

  We were now hell-bent on thievery; Magda took an insane pleasure in it, as indeed did I. After each strike, she’d leap into the car holding her breath in her trepidation, fear and excitement written on her every feature; then, as soon as we were at a safe distance, she would burst into laughter, banging her fists on the seats in jubilation and shouting out curses. She had persuaded me to let her hold the gun, and I felt she cut a stylish figure when she planted herself at the counter, legs apart, gripping the weapon with both hands. I trusted her; I sensed that she had an innate love of danger, but that she also knew how to change course rapidly if circumstances required it. I didn’t even resent the fact that she would waste cartridges by shooting at windows and electronic games. She was capable of carrying out robberies entirely on her own, and I let her have her head; all I could do was follow her – it was she who was now the ringleader.

  One afternoon we stopped in a small town near the Hungarian frontier, eating hamburgers in the car. The weather was strangely mild; on the rust-coloured hills, at the edges of muddy fields the odd bush was becoming white with blossom. A misty plain stretched out to either side of the road, an unforgiving landscape touched with spring. I opened the car door and breathed in the pungent smell of a canal.

  ‘The train to Cluj stops not far from here. Your things will still be in the hotel. You can tell the police the whole story; your clients from the Bistrita factory can testify that I held you prisoner,’ I suggested, turning to look at her. A light wind lifted her hair.

  ‘Is that what you want, for me to go?’ she asked, her mouth full of hamburger.

  ‘That’s the only way you can save yourself,’ I said quietly, looking away. Still chewing, she gave me a suspicious stare, then screwed up the greasy paper and threw it out of the window.

  ‘Save myself? What from?’

  ‘From a future you don’t deserve. From me, from the death sentence I’m dragging behind me!’

  ‘No one will save me from this hour of the afternoon, when the light hurts your eyes and it’s too early to sleep, but too late to get out of bed. The towns are empty, the houses are sad and quiet, all you can hear is ticking clocks. Have you ever made love at this time of day? It’s a disaster.’ At these last words, a cold note crept into her voice.

  ‘They won’t keep you in prison for long.’

  ‘It’s not prison I’m afraid of. I was born in prison. How can I describe the utter bleakness of a courtyard cut in two by a washing-line, of gravel which screeches when you trample it, of the nuns giving me reproachful looks because I’m making the gravel cry, and I’m crying myself, which is tantamount to insulting their generosity?’

  A fixed, blank look had come into her eyes; she was savouring those words as though they’d been a long time in the making.

  ‘You could go back to your job,’ I insisted stubbornly, trying to distract her from her gloom.

  ‘Job? What job?’ she asked mockingly.

  ‘I thought you said you were an interpreter? Weren’t those people in the factory your clients?’ I asked in bewilderment.

  She bent her head and glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, resting an elbow on the top of the open window.

  ‘Ah yes, an interpreter…or a whore. It depends on the day. But everyone’s a client! And I can enchant the lot of them in this or that language, because I speak them all!’ She burst into dirty, vulgar laughter; the more she laughed, the more her laughter sounded like crying in disguise. I turned on the engine to cover the sound and drove on as fast as I could among the slow-moving lorries, which flashed their lights at me in annoyance as I wove between them.

  It all came to a tragic end one morning at dawn in Timisoara. For reasons of security we had decided to sleep separately, in neighbouring motels just outside town, not leaving our respective rooms during the night. We wanted to try to get into Yugoslavia, but we needed another car; we’d been travelling in the same one for two days now. We’d driven into the outskirts of town; I’d got out of the car at the corner of a low building and positioned myself in a doorway, prior to forcing the first wretch who came out to hand over the keys to his car. Magda was waiting for me on the other side of the road with the engine ticking over, ready for a getaway if anything went wrong. We were surrounded by a sea of blocks of flats where lights were gradually going on, revealing bare kitchens, unmade beds, women in dressing-gowns. A factory siren hooted in the distance; a train was rattling by to the other side of a bedraggled field. Then I saw a light come on in the hallway, and flattened myself against the wall. But just at that moment two fast-moving cars appeared at the end of the road, driving without headlights; I heard the roar of their engines before I actually saw them. Magda noticed them too late; she was trying to drive over to me, tyres screeching, but she got wedged under the protruding trailer of an oncoming articulated lorry. The two cars placed themselves crosswise, trapping her completely, and blue lights started flashing; another police car appeared almost silently from a side street. It drove up onto the pavement, scraping its underside as it did so, then onto the patch of grass behind the building, becoming all but lost in the tall weeds. It could only be me they were looking for. On the road, car doors were banging shut one after another. People were shouting; chrome weapons were glinting in the cold dawn light. Four or five policemen were positioned to the sides of the cars, peering cautiously in the direction of their prey. People were now coming out of the blocks of flats, gathering in curious groups on the pavement. I had hidden under a parked car, but now I slithered out and joined the group of onlookers who were gathering around the cars. In the ensuing chaos, although I was trying to keep clear of the fray I found myself being jostled to the front. The policemen were now right in front of me, and it was at that moment that I caught sight of Magda coming into the middle of the road. She was holding her hands above her head and walking in the direction of the cocked pistols. The policemen were conferring by means of shouted messages; as soon as they were sure she was not armed, two of them fell upon her, thrusting her arms behind her back, putting them in handcuffs and shoving her in the direction of one of the police cars. It was then that we saw each other, my face just a foot away from hers. Dazzled by the headlights, the crowd pushed forwards for a better view, while the police tried to disperse them, fending them off with truncheons. Nobody noticed the glances Magda and I exchanged. I shall never forget that last smile she gave me – it even had a touch of sweetness to it, as though she wanted to express her thanks. What for, I do not know. Who knows who or what Magda really was, and what became of her.

  Profiting from the confusion, I pushed back through the crowd and slipped between the cars in the carpark until I was at the back of the block of flats; the police car, I noted, was now driving away. When the crowd began to disperse I walked across the grass and down the escarpment, climbe
d over the fencing and onto an open wagon which was moving slowly along the tracks in front of the goods yard. Stretched out on the rough planks jolting noisily beneath me, I stared at the yellow horizon; plunging backwards through time, I was reminded of that freezing morning in Odessa. As though the days of my Romanian forays had never existed, I suddenly realised that I must get back to Dr Barnung’s clinic – as soon as possible.

  I arrived in Belgrade one Sunday afternoon. I looked for a hotel and bought a rail ticket for Munich the very next morning. Before getting on the train I also purchased a suitcase, some clothes and a spongebag. At the station I just had time to dash into a barber’s, and when I looked at myself in the mirror in my wagon-lit I thought I looked the perfect commercial traveller. At the Austrian frontier Tibor Preda’s passport aroused the suspicions of a diligent customs officer, who examined it at length and radioed his superiors, but Radu’s friends must have been true professionals, because he could finally find no fault with the little green document for which I’d paid five hundred dollars. After inspecting my luggage with minute care, he could do nothing except wish me goodnight, close the door to my compartment and climb down from the train.

  The nurse at the reception desk told me that Dr Barnung was away at a conference and would not be back until the end of the month. I glanced through the glass partition into the corridors – same old lino, same old light wooden furnishings. Yet everything seemed strangely different. I asked to speak to Frau Goldstein.

  ‘One moment, please,’ said the nurse, picking up a phone. The red-haired woman who came towards me in the porter’s lodge was a complete stranger to me.

  ‘Are you Frau Goldstein?’ I asked in amazement.

  ‘What is it you want?’ she asked curtly.

  ‘I’d like to see Mr Ortega,’ I said, equally brusque.