The Interpreter Read online

  I glanced in Kwiatkowski’s direction: sitting bolt upright in front of the laid chessboard, he was twiddling a bishop between his fingers as though it were some delicate insect which had just alighted on his hand.

  ‘The most difficult person at our table is undoubtedly the Belgian, Vandekerkhove. He just can’t help himself; he ruins every conversation with ill-judged remarks, picking on insignificant details, and since no one pays any attention, he ends up talking to himself. But that’s certainly to do with his illness,’ Ortega confided sotto voce, eager to carry on, assured of my interest by my look of curiosity.

  ‘Vandekerkhove is bilingual, but he can’t distinguish French from Dutch: when he finds himself among French speakers he talks Dutch, and vice versa. His ego has learned to solve this problem by mimetic behaviour: unconsciously sensing that the language he’s using is not the one that’s needed, but incapable of putting things to rights; he translates one word after another as he talks, and the result is incomprehensible bluster. Barnung is trying to cure him with an intensive course in German; he’s trying to ferry his identity to safety on the raft of an emergency language; only when Vandekerkhove’s identity is secure will he be able to proceed to the reconstruction of his two native tongues. But it seems that he’s resistant to this cure and is learning a bastardised German; you’ll hear it when you talk to him. It’s a German that’s been translated from something else, but Barnung can’t find out what from, not even with hypnosis! It seems that by now Vandekerkhove is translating from some buried language of his own, one that he doesn’t even know he knows, and in which he takes refuge in moments of stress.’

  ‘And what about the other one?’ I asked my well-briefed informant, referring to the third member of our dining-room coterie, the one who had been sitting in silence to my left.

  ‘Vidmajer? He’s a Slovene who grew up in a German-speaking community deep in the Argentinian pampas. The first time he left home to do his military service, he lost the power of speech. I think that the cure that Doctor Barnung has devised for him is his last hope; he’s doing an intensive course in Spanish, with German as back-up. But he’s still as silent as the grave; all he can do is repeat the phrases on the beginners’ tape, and they’re not much help in civilised conversation!’

  Ortega seemed gratified by my expressions of amazement; he lowered his eyes and stretched out in his armchair, clasping his hands over his stomach.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, watching the fake twins busying themselves around the billiard table; the card-players had quietened down, a cloud of purple smoke rising above their table. The two opera singers were smiling at one another, putting their cards down with ceremonious little bows. Ortega picked up some newspapers, leafed through them distractedly and replaced them in the rack.

  ‘May I offer you a digestif?’ he asked me after a pause, summoning the waiter; I accepted his offer readily and drank to my hospitalisation in Dr Barnung’s clinic of linguistic therapeutics with a glass of Jägermeister.

  I was the only patient doing an intensive course in Romanian. The following morning I went into the sun-filled laboratory, sat down in the front row and slipped on the headphones, while the nurse threaded up the spool.

  ‘Just breathe normally – at first you’ll just be listening, trying to give yourself over to the sounds. Then you can start repeating them, but only when you see the red light go on.’ I did as I was told. I half-closed my eyes, and when at last I heard my own voice resonating, I hardly recognised it: those soft consonants, those lingering vowels startled me, took me out of myself. The session went on for two hours, and when it ended I felt as though I was awakening from a drugged sleep; I was breathless and exhausted. The nurse accompanied me back to my room, lowered the blinds and handed me a bottle of green liquid.

  ‘Gargle with this for at least two minutes – it’s sulphurated water. Then go to bed – what you need to do now is sleep. In the afternoon we’ll have a session concentrating on breathing and intonation; I’ll see you at six, in the gym, and that will be it, for today. Tomorrow we’ll start on the supplementary German.’

  I fell asleep instantly, and slept as I had not slept for months; I awoke thoroughly refreshed, my mind clear as a bell. At lunch, I was alone at table; the nurse told me that my companions had already eaten. Taking a couple of books from the library, I went back to my room, but fell asleep again. There were about a dozen of us in the gym, taking various preparatory language courses. I noticed someone wearing a red uniform and nodded in their direction, but the red strip on my own jacket pocket caused people to lower their eyes after initial interest. In unison, after the nurse, we repeated voiced consonants and more or less open vowels, and ended with an exercise in tone, based on a Chinese ideogram painted on a panel hanging from the ceiling. Those three syllables echoed inside my head throughout the night, and I awoke at dawn with the sensation that I had been engaged in non-stop sleep-talking.

  There were others with me on the German course: Vidmajer, Mrs Popescu and one of the fake twins. It was only on Tuesdays that I would meet up with Ortega, and here our exercises were less monotonous: we had to repeat prose passages or bits of rhyming verse which I ended up knowing by heart. After those first days in the laboratory, I also had several sessions of linguistic hypnosis, under the supervision of Dr Barnung himself. He sat me down in a special studio with soundproof walls, all painted black, with daylight filtering in through a skylight of frosted glass; three series of Altaic diphthongs were played through a loudspeaker, and I had to repeat them until I fell into a trance, then he stood behind me and questioned me in French. I never knew what he hoped to discover with those sessions, but each time he looked thoroughly satisfied with the result.

  Six weeks went by in this way. Romanian was making some headway in my brain, and I also began active language sessions, when I had to answer a series of questions using the vocabulary I had memorised. I was now beginning to feel strangely serene; I saw learning Romanian as my salvation and, as things were going, salvation did indeed seem to be within my grasp. All that I had to do was speak, keep speaking, and allow my voice to lead the way. Just as Dr Barnung had foreseen, words were carving out sure banks between which the juices of my brain could flow without mingling, the backward-flowing waters of distress and fear now far from the pure sources of my new-found thoughts. Right from the very first sessions, my crises became less frequent and ultimately almost ceased altogether, though I was still surprised by the occasional attack, particularly in the morning, when I woke up. ‘That is when linguistic awareness drops its guard,’ the doctor explained to me. ‘Emerging from the night has always been a problem for man. In the void of sleep, consciousness loosens up, the ego loses its weight and rises through the air like a balloon, becoming reunited with the vague pulse from which it came; and at that moment all that keeps our paltry identity in place is a thin plastic film. That’s why, when you wake up, the first thing you must do is speak; any language whatsoever, even French, will immediately restore your identity to you, sickly though it may be. Words, your own voice, which distinguishes you from a billion others, will pull the fragile bubble of your identity back down to earth like a stone.’

  After these sessions, I would spend many hours in total solitude, and this too did me good. The solitude I experienced in Dr Barnung’s clinic was of a completely new kind. No longer was I wandering down dark galleries which I feared to explore; now I was borne through light-filled halls in which I found traces of an earlier consciousness. I visited rooms furnished for all the Felix Bellamys who had never elbowed their way into existence, but whom I carried within me, unformed, irresolute. I sank into visions not my own, which yet belonged to me, with a familiar aura to them; I rediscovered pains experienced and never completely dulled, a secret birthright of lives unfulfilled. In a word, in Dr Barnung’s language clinic I felt myself happily unwell, assured of total recovery. Glimpses of a new identity were opening up before me, burgeoning in secret in the furthest reces
ses of my mind; thanks to Romanian, it was becoming less shadowy, brushing gently up against my mind. The doctor warned me that I must be certain of having reached its furthest roots before I tried to eradicate it. But I could also choose to let it take my place, I could pour myself into it through the channel opened up by the Romanian language. After two months I was actively speaking the language of the unknown Felix Bellamy who was reawakening within me, and a shiver of fear and excitement ran through me when I thought of the day when I would have to choose which of the two to be.

  III

  My life in the clinic slipped by almost imperceptibly, my anxieties pleasantly blunted by a serenity whose origins were all too clear to me, and which did not in the least surprise me. Everything in that place was the fruit of some form of artifice, of some complex intellectual fabrication; I too felt myself to be a concocted being, devoting myself to my illness as to some vice which I had learned to cultivate with skill, and from which I could derive the greatest pleasure, while fully aware that I was proceeding down a path of creeping addiction, although to what I could not say – perhaps simply to the architecture of the place, so secluded, so much itself, more fitted to housing the members of some orgiastic sect than a community of sufferers, or perhaps to the intriguing company of such weird people, prey to irrational machinations, morbidly devoted to their sufferings, flaunting their traumas, however horrible, with pride. Magnetic and awesome as he was, Dr Barnung himself held a secret attraction for me; indeed, his very presence in the common room after supper filled all of us with excited alarm. He rarely visited the various therapy departments, and his appearance always caused something of a stir; one section would compete against another, talking up his visits, obsessed by interpreting their meaning. Fridays were particularly tense, because hypnosis sessions were held on Saturdays, and the doctor would pass among his patients with an air of gravity, like a priest among his acolytes, as though calling for concentration, dedication, a deep, sincere commitment to his healing powers. We acclaimed him wordlessly – all that we did was buzz with sheer excitement, clustering around him as he passed, expressing our mute submission. We were putting ourselves in his hands, giving ourselves over to his arcane knowledge, not in order that he might cure us, but so that he might help us to preserve, intact, the illnesses that he himself had entrusted to us. Delicate and fragile as rare plants, they grew within us, sucking away at our will; we did not yet know it, but gradually they would take on our features, replace us, and it would be we who would disappear, as unexpectedly as the burning of a fever, a tightness in the chest, a passing twinge.

  Over those first weeks, I came to understand that illness makes people more corporeal; I felt myself to be all body, and looking at myself in the mirror, beneath the transparent film of my epidermis, I felt I could see my organs functioning – swollen glands, purplish in colour, hard bulbs, pockets containing something granular, unpleasant to the touch, veins turgid with dark juices – everything in me was visible. In the grid of my brain I could even follow the intricate course of my thoughts, their rapid flicker behind my eyes, brief flashes partially obscured by my brainpan.

  Ortega had been right – Colonel Kwiatkowski was extremely warm-hearted, although eccentric. He took a shine to me and would ask me to join him after supper for a game of chess, although that was just a blind – what he really wanted to do was talk.

  ‘Believe you me, Mr Bellamy, you don’t come here to be cured, but to wallow in your illness. Languages are not a cure, they are a drug! I knew a patient who was doing preparatory Russian, a green uniform, in a word, who learned five languages for no reason at all, and none of them Slavic! No, he learned Italian, German, Danish, Greek and English. Doctor Barnung had diagnosed maniacal psychosis, to be cured with an intensive course of Italian, with German as a support language, as usual. After having learned Italian to perfection, he could have been discharged, but he asked Barnung for a few sessions in Greek: to strengthen the basis of his Italian, he said. The others followed, and over time the cure became a drug. I myself haven’t heard from him for months, but in the gym they’re saying that he’s managed to wangle himself an isolation course in Japanese! Clearly, a man like that is not interested in a cure!’

  I listened to Kwiatkowski’s stories in fascination and amusement, even when Ortega was standing behind him, shaking his head with a mournful smile. One evening the colonel suggested a stroll in the courtyard. To get rid of Ortega, he had involved him in a game of cards but had then slipped away, leaving his place to Vidmajer. It had just stopped raining; a cool breeze was blowing, scented with leaves, and Kwiatkowski’s few hairs were rippling over his head, making him look even odder than ever; he walked with his usual martial bearing, his hands clasped behind his back, his chin thrust forwards. As soon as we were alone, though, in the crystalline evening light, he gave me an agitated look, his face a tissue of wrinkles in the glow of the torches.

  ‘Mr Bellamy, do you want to know how to drive Doctor Barnung mad? It’ll take you a few weeks to learn the trick, but it’s well worth it!’ he whispered, the ghost of a snigger playing across his face.

  I looked more closely at his mocking expression, moving nearer to him so that I could hear what he was saying.

  ‘Take this – it’s a tape in Esperanto,’ he whispered, dropping a package done up with an elastic band into my tunic pocket.

  ‘Listen to it every night before going to bed, for at least a fortnight, or until you’ve learned it by heart. When Doctor Barnung calls you to his study for the hypnosis session, repeat the beginning of the tape to yourself. There’s a good chance that instead of answering his questions during the trance, what you’ll come out with is the contents of this tape – you’ll be able to tell by his face when you come round. Nothing irritates Barnung more than Esperanto; it upsets all his theories! Esperanto doesn’t deal in the unconscious, it doesn’t do identity. So there’s nothing to cure! The moment there’s no language, there’s no mother, and those who don’t know their mothers owe nothing to anyone. We’d all be happy if we spoke Esperanto: like stones, or flowers. We’d be freed of our mad desire to be different from one another, we wouldn’t feel obliged to remember things; we wouldn’t feel we had to change, to go along with the vile blackmailing of time! Imagine that!’

  Naturally, I paid him no attention, but I was amused by the imaginative way in which his spirit of rebellion showed itself; his illness had become so slyly camouflaged as to become unassailable, defying Dr Barnung’s most unforgiving forms of cure, making light even of an intensive course in Seroa.

  ‘The glottologist comes once a month, and then I have to do my exercises like a good boy. But Frau Goldstein doesn’t know Seroa, so on every other Tuesday I can talk gibberish to my heart’s content! I send her smacking kisses and other rude noises down the microphone, and she squints at me and frowns suspiciously. She knows I’m teasing her, but she feels there’s always a remote possibility that my smackers might indeed be Seroan, as rendered in a refined mediaeval Lesotho accent!’

  For all his cast-iron cheerfulness, though, I could tell that Kwiatkowski was suffering. At table on occasions he would seem to withdraw completely, as though he’d lost consciousness and all that remained of him was an automaton, staring into thin air with frightened eyes, hands trembling. On such occasions, we were supposed to call the nurse, but none of us felt like putting the colonel into Frau Goldstein’s clutches; he’d be put into isolation, and we were all secretly convinced that that was the last thing he needed, so we’d carry on talking calmly among ourselves. Mrs Popescu took it upon herself to make sure that he didn’t tip over plates or drop cutlery during his absences, which might last several minutes. When at last he had shaken off the vice-like grip of whatever it was that was making mincemeat of his brain, Kwiatkowski would carry on sounding off in his ringing tones as though nothing had happened; but he knew that he had had an attack, and that we had protected him. Mrs Popescu would whisper something into his ear in Polish, and he’d g
ive us a mild, grateful look. A sort of solidarity had been established around our table; we would protect and help each other, or perhaps simply respect each other. No one tried to encourage the silent Vidmajer to speak; Kwiatkowski himself never tried to rile him, preferring to concentrate his fire on the stolid Ortega, who would take it all with a smile. Together we would handle Vandekerkhove’s blackouts, waiting for them to pass of their own accord, and then we would answer his tortuous questions patiently. We all held Mrs Popescu in high regard; she was very reserved and shy; strangely enough, she was the one person of whose illness Ortega had told me nothing, and I never had the courage to ask. Rather than suffering from any psychic ill, she seemed oppressed by some shadowy fear, remote by now, but which would sometimes loom up again and put her in a state of high alert; then she would become red in the face, and hot, as though from fever, her breathing would become laboured and she would look around her as though seeking someone. She hardly ever stayed on in the common room after supper; she would never join the group of patients who went to read in the library, though she would sometimes stop to talk to Mrs Vukobrat, to drink a herbal tea or have a game of dominoes; and she never missed the Thursday-night piano recital, when she’d always sit in the front row, eager and attentive. The moment the music stopped, before the small audience had begun to rise to their feet, she would leave the room almost at a run. I’d noted the yellow strip on her jacket pocket indicating Romanian, and wondered what her problem could possibly be; like me, she was forbidden to speak her mother tongue. One afternoon I was resting in my room after my intensive German course, prior to attending a hypnosis session, when I heard a knock at the door; I thought it must be the nurse who would be taking me down to it, but it was too early. What I saw in the darkened corridor was in fact the delicate silhouette of Mrs Popescu, gesturing to me fearfully to let her in.