The Interpreter Read online

  ‘Forgive my intrusion!’ she exclaimed in agitated German; I drew up a chair and told her to sit down.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t be doing this, and it certainly won’t do me any good, but I’m at the end of my tether!’

  She was twisting her hands as she looked at me, her knuckles positively white; I noticed that her fingers were unpleasantly yellow, her nails ridged with bony excrescencies. Her breathing was laboured, broken by suppressed sighs, as though she were about to cry.

  ‘Please, I beg of you, speak to me a little in Romanian!’ she implored me, now really on the point of tears.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed; I wasn’t sure that I had heard her aright.

  ‘What do you want me to say?’ I asked awkwardly.

  ‘Whatever you like, but please, just let me hear some Romanian!’ she insisted tearfully. Seated in the middle of the room, her hands clasped between her knees, her over-large tunic hanging loosely from her thin shoulders, she looked like someone awaiting sentence for some unknown crime.

  I didn’t know what to say; all that came to my mind were inconsequential phrases, woefully ill-judged trivialities. Machine-like, I began to recite a text on the human body which I had memorised a few days ago in the laboratory: ‘The human body consists of the head, torso and limbs. The limbs, that is, the arms and legs, are known as the extremities. The head is home to the brain, the tympanum and many other delicate organs; on it we find the ears, the eyes, the nose and the buccal cavity, in which we find the tongue. We hear with our ears, see with our eyes, smell with our nose and taste with our tongue; so the seat of hearing is in our ears, the seat of sight is in our eyes, the seat of our sense of smell is in our noses and that of taste is in our tongue. Within our torso we find important organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, and the large and small intestines. Our body also contains bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Through our veins runs the blood which bathes our body, starting from the heart and ultimately returning to it. We use our hands for the most varied activities; we use our legs to walk. The body may be either well or diseased; all parts of it may fall ill, be affected by one or more maladies.’

  I stopped in mid-flow, struck by the absurdity of my performance. I had spoken as though I was reciting a prayer; in front of me, weeping silently, her shoulders shaking, Mrs Popescu had covered her face with her hands. I didn’t know what to do; I went to the tap and filled a glass of water, but she shook her head when I offered it to her and dried her eyes carefully with her handkerchief. Then she rose hurriedly, rearranged her hair and dabbed at her face with her fingertips.

  ‘Thank you! You cannot imagine what good that has done me! I promise you it won’t happen again.’ She opened the door, peered cautiously into the corridor and hurried away.

  That was how I made the acquaintance of Roxana Popescu, the woman who was to precipitate my renewed search for the interpreter, although I did not know as much at the time. When she came to sit down at table, I saw her in a new light. Looking embarrassed, she flashed me a quick, complicit smile, but avoided my gaze and didn’t say a word to me throughout the meal; she would stare vacantly at each of her fellow diners as they contributed to the conversation, but never at me. Nor did she seem to be taking in Vandekerkhove’s rambling monologue on the aphrodisiac properties of the freshwater crayfish, although she heard him out to the bitter end, nodding at his every word, while the rest of us had already been engaged in discussion of another topic for quite some time. After supper, seeing her lingering in front of the bookshelves, I went up to her.

  ‘How are you feeling, Mrs Popescu?’

  She jumped, then turned as though she were about to move away, but when she did answer me, her voice was hard and detached.

  ‘Better, thank you, even though what I did was a mistake. Please, let’s say no more about it.’

  ‘As you wish, but I must admit that I found your visit rather disturbing,’ I found myself saying, slipping a volume out of the bookcase.

  ‘Forgive me. It was a moment of weakness, nothing more, and let’s leave matters there. I’m here to be cured, and I must try to avoid any further such silliness,’ she said curtly, still not meeting my eye; then she hastily picked up a few books and moved off towards the corridor. Over the following days, however, she relented somewhat; she still looked alarmed and watchful when she came to sit down at table, continuing to peer around before she took her place, as though she were still expecting someone who always failed to turn up. But now she too joined in the conversation, and sometimes shot me a grateful if covert look; she seemed calmer. Occasionally I would glimpse the ghost of a smile playing over her usually unbending features, rising unbidden to her lips and lighting up her eyes before it was edged out by the shadow of some thought, some besetting worry, always the same one, I sensed. I tried to strike up a friendship with her, but although she was now more approachable, she continued to ward off close contact with all and sundry. If she was now more willing to stay on to chat with Mrs Vukobrat after supper, as soon as I approached their table she would gather up her books and stand up to leave; at such moments I would see the signs of a faded beauty lingering beneath the slightly puffy pallor of her features, a strong face struggling to emerge from the ruins but then collapsing wretchedly into a tearful moue, her eyes misting over, her mouth becoming small and bitter.

  ‘Leave her alone. Believe me, Roxana’s interest in you is not of the kind that you imagine,’ Mrs Vukobrat told me sharply one evening as we watched my sad friend hurry out into the corridor with the nervous lope of a tracked animal.

  ‘I assure you, all I want from Mrs Popescu is a bit of company,’ I said firmly but mendaciously to the old woman as she sipped her herbal tea.

  ‘Roxana has told me all about it!’ exclaimed Mrs Vukobrat, giving me a reproachful look; blushing foolishly, I backed off, embarrassed by the implication that I had tried to take advantage of a sick person and oblige her to satisfy my baser needs. What a misreading of the situation! All I had done was to respond to her entreaties and rattle off some gibberish in Romanian! I didn’t like Mrs Vukobrat; I was irritated by her interference in my relations with Roxana. Noting my animosity towards her, Ortega hastened to inform me of her problems: she was Croatian, from Voivodina, and she had survived a spell in a Serbian lager during the wars in Yugoslavia. During her long months of imprisonment, in order to bear the physical and psychic torture to which she was subjected, she had developed a sort of camouflage reaction: in a word, she had ended up by accepting the thesis put forward by her torturers. She convinced herself that being Croatian was the height of iniquity, that her Croatian identity should indeed be obliterated, dispatched with hatchet blows; she forgot her own language and learned that of her torturers, becoming Serbian in heart and soul. But once she returned to normal life, becoming aware that she had turned into the worst of her own enemies, speaking the language of her people’s murderers and forgetting her own, she attempted suicide, hoping to kill the Serbian tumour which had swelled up within her, strangling the true Ivanka Vukobrat. In the language clinic she had been directed towards an intensive course of Maltese, the language par excellence most foreign to her among the Indo-European tongues; Dr Barnung was using small doses of hypnosis to restore her to her own mother tongue, Croatian. But she was old, her mind had been rendered inflexible by the terrors of the lager, and hopes of a recovery were extremely remote. Hearing her story failed to make me feel any more kindly towards Mrs Vukobrat, though after her reprimands I was nonetheless careful not to renew my approaches to Roxana. I remained courteous and friendly at table, always ready to engage in conversation should she show any desire to do so, but as soon as the fruit plates were cleared away and the vases of dried flowers replaced on the refectory tables, I would bid her a demure goodnight and leave her to a tete-a-tete with her old friend, without making the slightest attempt to intervene. She seemed relieved that I had withdrawn from the fray, and would give me what seemed to me a grateful look, which
further convinced me that perhaps Mrs Vukobrat had been right – she had no interest in me. I would go off to listen to Ortega’s chatter, or listen to a little music, gazing up at the square of starry sky above the courtyard.

  At the beginning of February we found the courtyard piled high with snow, its chill glow spreading into the rooms and reflecting the sun’s light. The nights too were lighter now; from my bedroom I could see the moon sail by in the sky as though through the porthole of a spaceship, its oceans taking on the form of faces I seemed to recognise before falling into the cloudy embrace of sleep. I often woke up with the strange impression that I could hear voices, or some noise in the room, some distant shout that had made its way across the ether and had come to die within these walls. I even went as far as checking the cupboard and bathroom, rummaging around under the bed, without the faintest idea of what I was looking for. I ended up by thinking that all that light must have disturbed my sleep; I pulled the curtains to as best I could and stopped thinking about it. It was at that time that Kwiatkowski disappeared; he failed to turn up for supper for several evenings on end; then Frau Goldstein spilled the beans.

  ‘He’s had an attack; it’s serious, he’s got to do an intensive course in Seroan until further notice. Doctor Barnung even thinks he might have to be transferred to a psychiatric hospital,’ she explained to us in hushed tones, then left the room. We’d seen the last of the colonel at table, and we all suffered from it; conversation languished, Ortega no longer had anyone to tangle with. Even Vidmajer would glance up from his plate and cast a bewildered look around the room; Vandekerkhove could no longer engage so satisfyingly in his ramblings; he no longer had a foil, and he soon ran aground, repeating himself like a stuck gramophone record, stuttering over the last disordered words of a speech of which he’d lost the thread.

  Roxana too missed Kwiatkowski; she had a blank look about her, though her air of habitual guardedness seemed less pronounced. But she was clearly more deeply troubled by something else, and I could not imagine what it was. She no longer went to chat with Mrs Vukobrat after supper, no longer attended the Thursday recitals; she would rush up to her room without even saying goodbye to her friend, who would be waiting for her in her usual armchair with her glass of herbal tea steaming before her on the little table with its fussy doilies. Roxana, my mysterious friend, had changed beyond recognition: she no longer talked to me, not even at table; she scarcely glanced in my direction. Mrs Vukobrat too was surprised by this development and would cast me inquiring looks, to which I would respond nervously with a quick shake of the head. Roxana even seemed to shun me when it came to our therapeutic activities; each afternoon, at the end of the intensive course in German, in order to avoid being alone with me in the corridor, she would make some excuse to have herself escorted back to her room by the nurse, looking at me out of the corner of her eye as she crept off, as though afraid that I might follow her. In the gym she always tried to find a place as far from me as possible, and she was always the first to leave her desk and scuttle off when the bell rang.

  Some time later, though, it happened again, this time in the early afternoon. I was asleep in my room after my intensive course in Romanian when I heard a knock at the door. Roxana came in, looking even more agitated than she had on the previous occasion. I was on the point of pulling myself out of bed – I was still half-asleep. I was having trouble focusing and I was flailing around looking for something to pull myself up with. But Roxana grabbed my wrists and pushed me back onto the pillow; then she straightened up and gestured to me to keep quiet; her lips were trembling.

  ‘This time it’s going to be me who does the talking!’ she informed me in Romanian, her eyes sparkling.

  ‘Just get me talking, it doesn’t matter what about! Ask me boring questions, anything, just as long as you get me talking in Romanian!’ I didn’t know what to say; my brain had clouded over, my mouth felt gummy, my throat completely dry. There was something absurd and unreal about her request.

  ‘What…I mean, have you changed your mind?’ I asked, propping myself up clumsily on my elbows.

  ‘I can’t help myself – I need my language, do you hear? I have to speak!’ She seemed to relish every word she spoke, savouring each sound until it died on her lips.

  ‘So, tell me about yourself. Where were you born? What did you do in life before coming here?’

  ‘I was born in Constanta, on the Black Sea. Until a few months ago I was the director of the town aquarium, I dealt with fish, octopuses, molluscs; my speciality was the reproductive systems of crustaceans, I would rear dozens of them in little glass phials. At first they’re like fragile little spiders which would fit on your fingertip. Did you know that a lobster grows a centimetre a year? My favourites are the blue variety – even lobsters may show signs of nobility. I was happy in my aquarium, perhaps a bit lonely, but I wasn’t the only one. And then he came along…’ She shivered slightly as she spoke, as though she knew that I would find those words disturbing.

  I sat bolt upright, suddenly remembering the list of cities I’d found in the interpreter’s apartment; Constanta was at the top of those that hadn’t been crossed out.

  ‘Constanta? And who is “he”?’ I asked, now more confused and troubled than ever by my strange visitor.

  ‘No, that’s enough! Now I have to stop. Speaking Romanian does me no good at all, it claws at my heart and leaves it bleeding. It…it makes me cry, as you can see. I can’t go on like this. Doctor Barnung will put me into isolation. I’m sorry, you’re so patient with me, and I’m so cruel and unfair to you.’

  She burst out sobbing; broken, disarmed and naked, she was proffering me all her pain. I would have liked to take her in my arms, to hold her close – not in the way that Mrs Vukobrat imagined, but because I felt that we had something terrible in common, something most grand, something we could not name but which loomed over us ever more threateningly.

  ‘I must go, I’m sorry if I’ve not behaved very well. This time, I assure you, it won’t happen again!’ And she ran off, leaving the door ajar. That evening there was no one at her place at table; Ortega told us that she had been put into isolation, with a week’s intensive course in Navajo.

  Those days brought me back to reality with a jolt: I suddenly remembered why I was there at all. I had the feeling I’d been wasting my time: once again I had the urgent feeling that I must track down the interpreter.

  When she returned from isolation, Roxana seemed changed; she was quiet and self-absorbed, as though she were following some new line of thought. Her jacket pocket now bore the doom-ladened white strip which meant linguistic isolation, but her expression bespoke a new-found peace. She no longer looked alarmed or hunted; rather, she seemed at last to have shaken off that obsessive sense of expectation by which she had previously been dogged. She nodded at me affably when she sat down at table; we kept our questions to ourselves, talking of trivialities, giving Vandekerkhove free rein to unburden himself of as much incoherent babble as he liked. After supper, and a brief goodnight to Mrs Vukobrat, who had come to ask her how she was, Roxana went straight back to her room. I waited for a few moments in the common room together with Ortega, then excused myself and ran to the women’s corridor. I saw the light under her door, knocked and went in without waiting for any answer. Roxana was taking down her hair, and looking at me in the mirror.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked me brusquely in Romanian.

  ‘That man. Who was that man?’

  ‘I don’t know who he was. It may seem strange, but he never did tell me his real name. It started as a game: each day he’d invent a different one. He used to come and visit the aquarium, then we started to meet each other on the beach. Don’t imagine I was a total ingenue. I’d been in love, I knew a thing or two; but he took something from me that no one else ever had. Oh, similar things had happened to me in the past, sometimes I went for months unable to visit certain parts of the city because they reminded me of some lost love, unable to hear a certain
song because it would make me cry. As a little girl, certain smells had the power to make me feel unbearably nostalgic; even today, the acrid smell of tar from newly laid asphalt gives me gooseflesh – and only I know why. But with time I’ve learned to protect myself; now I know how to retrieve whatever gets burned in the pyre of my love. For instance, I know now that it’s better always to fall in love in the same spot: placed on top of each other, memories don’t have enough space to burn, they die without leaving any bad smell behind them, and all that is left of the pain is an empty shell. So I thought I’d be able to emerge from this befuddlement unscathed as I had from the rest. What could this man take from me that I hadn’t already lost? How many others had I not already mourned, standing at sunset by the sea, wandering alone through the sunset-streaked sand of a September evening, or along the windswept roads in the winter, when snowy roofs stand out against the dark sky? But the one thing that had never been at stake was my language, and it was that that this man was studying – he already spoke it so well that he took it from me! Now every Romanian word I speak is a torment I inflict upon myself, but it’s also a spark in whose glow I can glimpse the marvellous time when he and I shared one single tongue, and I can’t shake off the false hope that such sparks might rekindle that fire. Instead, though, each time I sink to ever greater depths, and then it’s a huge struggle to come back to the surface. But now that I’m here with my head just above water I feel the call of the abyss, pulling me down; and I no longer have even my language for salvation, I can’t even call out my name, because he’s taken it from me!’

  Roxana burst into tears, then, proceeding from tears to fury, she began to tousle the hair she had just been so carefully combing. I gripped her firmly by the arm in an effort to restrain her, but she fought me off with surprising strength, and it was only when I let go of her and retreated towards the door that she quietened down. Throwing herself on the bed, she lay there motionless, her mouth quivering, looking up at the ceiling with bloodshot eyes. ‘Did you know that the Navajo also speak with colours?’ she carried on after a brief pause, her voice still hoarse from sobbing. ‘Sounds have a colour, because according to the Navajo the world was born from four coloured clouds. Scholars have even coined a specific term for the Navajo’s coloured sounds: they call them pigmemes, a combination of pigment and phoneme. So in Navajo, for instance, whiteness is masculine and blackness is feminine, because all things are born of black, and all return to this same blackness when they come to die.’