Translator (13 page)

“Really?” she snaps back. “I didn't know you were a misogynist and an elitist.”

He laughs again. “This is going to be fun.”

“Oh?”

“You. You're so easy to get riled up. You've got a temper.”

Hanne stiffens. “Funny, none of my friends would say that about me.” The truth is, she rarely sees her friends. And when they do gather, the conversation is usually about the university or problems with their translation projects. Safe topics.

“Maybe I'm seeing a new side of you. Or maybe I'm more honest.”

Coming from him, almost a complete stranger, the comment seems inappropriate.

“Okay,” Renzo claps his hands, a forced cheerfulness to his voice. “Let's turn on the music and dance.”

Miles Davis's “Fat Time Shout” cascades into the room, vibrating the table, the floor underneath her. Renzo slides open the paper walls, and now the eating room flows into the other room, giving them a perfect dance floor, empty of furniture. Renzo shuffles his feet, slowly making his way to Hanne, and extends his hand. “May I?”

“I don't know about this,” she says, laughing nervously. When was the last time she danced? Hiro didn't like to, so it must have been when she was nineteen and lived a year in Paris. A man named Jacques comes back to her. Dark hair, a smooth way of talking, smooth hands and lips, far too beautiful to be trusted with anything, let alone her heart. She didn't give him anything but her hand and body to move around the dance floor, to make love to in his one-room apartment with the red-beaded lamp.

Renzo's eyes sparkle. He's a boy again, moving and twirling her, enveloped in the music, but there's nothing carnal about it. It's like dancing with your brother.

“Now you're getting it,” he says.

But she isn't. It's been too many years, and her body in space is a strange, foreign object. She stumbles along, following Renzo's lead, until the next song, when he swings her over to Moto.

She has no chance to decline because his hand is in hers and he has slipped an arm around her waist, pressing her against his chest, until there is no space between them, his arm firmly clasped behind her. His birthmark is no longer the shape of Montana, but seems to take up his entire cheek. Most remarkable is how they are moving: How are they circling around the room? Not a foxtrot or waltz or anything she can name; they are, it seems, floating an inch off the floor. It's the same silent, fluid motion she witnessed earlier in the kitchen, but now she's experiencing it, as if she's under his skin and now skimming the surface of the world, unleashed from gravity.

“You move,” she says, slightly out of breath, “seamlessly, no heel toe, heel toe, no beginning, no end—”

Despite her failure to find the right words, she keeps trying, tossing word after word after word, until he says in his deep, resonating voice, “
Hanasanai de kudasai
,” Let's not speak.

A shiver of excitement runs through her. They are in the middle of a scene from the book. She remembers it perfectly. Three monosyllabic words, a softened imperative, the intonation, hushed, intimate, spoken close to her ear—they already live inside of her. Jiro said them to his young lover not long after his wife was checked into the hospital. Chikako was cooking stir-fry on the stove and Jiro flicked on the radio. A song came on—something American—and he grabbed her around the waist. They'd never danced before, but he was flush with his new life. As the chicken sizzled in the wok, he danced with her across the kitchen floor, while she agonized out loud about the dinner party in a couple of hours; what if no one showed up? Didn't he see the way the wives of his male friends glared at her, as if to say, aren't you ashamed of yourself? “But don't you see my male friends looking at me with immense envy?” He kissed her earlobe. “I have someone young and beautiful and they do not.” And that soothed her, and she laughed and talked on and on about the things they'd do together, their future, a trip to Florence, until he touched his finger to her lips and said, “
Hanasanai de kudasai.”

When Hanne initially encountered them, she fretted; should it be, “Don't talk,” or “Please don't speak.” “Let's not talk,” or a curt, cold, “Don't say another word,” or simply, “Don't.” She ultimately decided: Let's not speak.

The music is still playing. The way Moto is smiling, humming in her ear, running his hand along her back, says to her he's not too upset about his divorce. What's it been? Over a year since his wife left? He's just like her Jiro. But her thoughts are interrupted by a vision of Brigitte. Brigitte dancing with that man, that first young man, and earlier in the morning before Brigitte left for school, her face had been drained of color, her eyes dull, but dancing with that young man, her face was lit up, dazzling like a bright star. That moment right before Hanne told the young man to get out, right before that, Hanne stood there captivated and bewitched by her lovely daughter. She couldn't remember the last time Brigitte had looked so beautiful, so happy. Now she wishes she could crack open that moment again, tell that to Brigitte, “My, you look stunning,” instead of scolding her.

Hanne realizes Moto has stopped dancing. His eyes seem to be full of tears. What's happening? “Are you all right?” she says. “Do you need to sit?”

She glances over at Renzo, who is lost in his own fog.

Moto's arms hang limply. He opens his mouth, as if to say something. He is, in fact, crying. Her breath catches. Before she can ask him anything else, he rushes out of the room.

It's too late to call a taxi, Moto is holed up somewhere, and Renzo confesses that this time he is too drunk to drive.

She follows Renzo outside to the guest cottage. It's fully stocked with everything she might need—toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, lotions, even a terrycloth bathrobe. “It's not much,” he says, “but you'll have privacy.”

A small white Scotty dog prances around his heels. Renzo introduces her to Morsel, who was in the other room during dinner so as not to disturb them. He lights the wood-burning fireplace, shows her the bathroom, the fresh towels, then excuses himself. “Good night. I've got to put this head on a pillow.”

The guest cottage contains solid, clunky pieces of furniture: a Western-style bed, a nightstand, a lamp, an empty chest of drawers, a hard chair. She sits at the sizeable polished oak desk and opens the drawers; full of blue pens, and a pencil, sharpened to a fine point. Oddly, a woman's shiny green pantsuit with silver buttons hangs in the closet. She checks the label—Ann Taylor. Perhaps this is what these two brothers do: bring home foreign women.

She gazes out the window. Outside, only darkness, tar black, no streetlights, no gas stations or bars or cafés, not even a car passing through, as if this is the center of the earth. What happened to Moto? She felt like she stepped into a scene from the book during that dance, but was then abruptly tossed out. She tries to remember how Kobayashi wrote the scene between Jiro and Chikako, but the exact words are lost to her. Her overall impression was that Jiro was swept up in the moment, swept up in love with Chikako.

She sits on the edge of the bed. Maybe Moto was overwhelmed with joy instead of love, because how could he possibly be in love with her after one meeting?, and that joy moved him to tears. But she sees in her mind his quivering lower lip, his sad, dark eyes. Maybe while he was dancing, he remembered acting and the stage and suddenly missed it. Maybe she's making something out of nothing. He did seem like someone who was prone to emotional swings, and after all, in that scene Jiro was with Chikako and Hanne is nothing like that young woman, so why on earth would Moto be swept up by her?

The dog is scratching at the door. She finds Morsel on the stoop. The dog bounds inside and sits in the middle of the room, watching her, thumping his tail on the floor, waiting—for what? Cold air rushes into the room, crowding out the heat. She shuts the door and stares at Morsel. Shivering, her teeth chattering, she gets into bed, and Morsel jumps up with her and turns around and around, as if trying to grab its tail, then settles at the foot of her bed, a perfect circle. She has never liked the idea of dogs on beds or, really, dogs in a house, shedding their fur, polluting the air with their gamey smell. Her first impulse is to push it off. “Itte,” she says, go. She points to the door. But after a few more tries, she gives up. Through the heavy blanket, the dog's body heat warms her feet and she quickly falls asleep.

She wakes, unsure where she
is. Sunlight blasts into the room, and the walls blare bright white, telling her she has a hangover. Not since her fall down the marble stairs has her head throbbed this badly. And now Morsel is flitting around the room, leaping onto the bed, jumping to the floor. She untangles herself from sweaty sheets and pulls one leg and then the other over to the edge of the bed. When she finally stumbles to the door, Morsel darts out, as if on fire.

She takes two aspirin, showers, dresses, and heads to the main house. What she needs is coffee. A few chickadees are hopping along the stone path, and the trees are stubbornly bare. As the house comes into view, she sees it is still dark. She enters through the back door and steps into a house of silence. Both Renzo and Moto must be asleep. She quietly shuts the door and returns to the cottage.

What day is it? It feels like she's been in Japan for weeks. She has a suspicion that her fall down the stairs not only affected her languages, but her sense of time. Though she'd never tell her doctor that, for fear he'd imprison her at the hospital for a litany of more tests. And they'd find out she suffers from headaches a lot more often than she let on. Well, she won't go back to the hospital. She doesn't care if she's putting her health in danger; her health was in far more danger being cooped up in that hospital and her apartment.

In the back yard, Morsel is running in circles for no apparent reason. She lies back down and naps. When she wakes, she's disoriented again. Only a few minutes have passed, but it feels like hours. She throws cold water on her face, calls her message machine at her apartment. Nothing. She rings Tomas to let him know her whereabouts.

“How are you feeling?” he says.

On the yellow blouse that she wore last night, she sees a big stain near the collar. What is it? Soy sauce? Red wine? “Fine.”

“Where are you staying?”

“With friends.” She pauses. “I met Kobayashi at the conference. There was a bit of a confrontation.” She tells him what happened.

“What's going to happen to your translation? Have you heard from the publisher?”

She's surprised that she hadn't even thought about it. “I'm sure it's all a big misunderstanding. Kobayashi was drunk. He misread a passage and since we were both at the conference, it was convenient to complain to me.” She stops herself from saying, and convenient to publicly humiliate me.

She steps into the bathroom, takes off her blouse, and tries to scrub out the stain.

“Some Japanese newspaper is probably going to write about it,” he says. “If Kobayashi hasn't already spoken to your publisher, they'll soon find out they have an unhappy author on their hands. This doesn't sound good to me. Where are you again? Are you sure you're feeling all right?”

“I'm fine. Perfectly fine.” She tells him where she is. “I thought I'd meet this man, Moto. Judge for myself.”

“Why? What does it matter?”

“Moto is here and I want to see, to explore for myself what kind of man he is. Though I know what I'll find, what I'm already finding. That he's Jiro. The Jiro that I translated.”

“Who's Jiro? What are you talking about? Are you sure you're all right?”

“And I know what you're thinking, but it's not just a matter of pride, Tomas, it's my work. It's everything. It's what I do. Who I am.”

She hears Morsel scratching at the door.

“Is it safe? I mean, is this man, Moto, safe?”

The stain appears permanent. Since she has no other clothes, she will have to wear a stained blouse that is now wet. “Of course.” He's also exasperating, she thinks, and intriguing and handsome, just as she knew he'd be.

“I think you should head back to San Francisco and check in with your doctor.”

“Oh, I don't think so. Not just yet.”

“This could jeopardize your health.”

“It won't. Besides, this won't take long,” she says.

Tomas sighs again. The wind picks up and the branches from a nearby boxwood whack the window. Outside, the sky is doing a changing-of-the-guard, with the last bit of murk leaving and now there is steel gray. He tells her he's heard nothing from Brigitte. “I wish I'd never gotten that call about her being in the hospital. It's agonizing to hear that and then nothing. But,” he says, “you know all about this.”

Even before the long silence of six years, Hanne endured days of silence. On the weekends, she was off doing some sort of church-related thing. On the weekdays after school, Brigitte would return to the apartment and immediately head to her bedroom and shut the door. Hanne would set aside her work and stand outside Brigitte's door, debating whether to knock. The couple of times she did, Brigitte was sitting on her bed, knees drawn up to her chest, arms folded. She said she was studying. But often there were no books in sight. The way she looked at Hanne, those sad eyes. Hanne could see Brigitte was trying to hold back the tears. She learned that if she asked Brigitte too many questions, her daughter said nothing; if she was quiet, her daughter might speak. A sort of game, Hanne thought. When Brigitte was little, they played actual games, crossword puzzles, Scrabble, dominoes, cards; and now it was playing a game that involved guessing all the rules. Hanne missed the days when Brigitte was little, always asking “Why?” Eyes shining with curiosity.

She once overheard her teenage daughter tell someone on the phone, “This is where my mother lives. I don't really live anywhere. I don't have a real home anymore.”

At dinner, Hanne said she expected more from Brigitte. That she'd given up far too easily. “If it doesn't feel like a home, change it so it is.”

“I haven't given up. It's just the way it is,” said Brigitte. “It's the way it feels to me.” And she stretched out the word “feels” as if it were a foreign word that Hanne didn't understand.

Hanne let the implicit jab go. She suggested Brigitte try harder. “If you quit, you have only yourself to blame.”

“That's always your answer. What if I told you it's not a home because Dad isn't living here? How can I change that?”

Now Hanne says to Tomas, “When she's ready to call you, she will. That's the way it works.”

When she heads to the main house again, she sees the warm glow of a light on in the kitchen. Renzo is in the eating room, reading the newspaper. “Good morning,” he says, setting down the paper.

“Good morning.”

“I guess we all got carried away last night,” he says. “I apologize for Moto's behavior.”

“Oh, don't. I enjoyed him. I really did. I'm usually the one who instigates the verbal sparring. It was nice to have someone else do it for a change.”

He pours her coffee. “Well, you're a rare one, then. Say, if you're not in a rush to get back home, why don't you stay a while? We'd love to have you.”

“I don't want to be a burden.”

“You're not a burden.” Since he's retired, he loves having company and entertaining. What better way to spend one's time? Over the years, because of Moto's position, whenever Moto came to town, Renzo would host a dinner party. That's why they had built the cottage—to house visitors.

“It's so kind of you,” she says. “Maybe a couple more days.” But she won't stay on without paying him something.

“You can stay as long as you like. And there's no need for payment.”

“It's so beautiful here. I didn't know Japan still retained some of its natural beauty.” She means it. She thought she could never live in the country, too slow, too boring, but this place reminds her of her childhood years in Switzerland, so much space saturated emerald green and burnt umber. The hills lined with pines and dense conifers. If she had had good years of childhood, it was in Switzerland, where she and her mother spent hours together. Her mother would wake up and ask “What should we do today?” Together they'd hike the hills and mountains, traveling through clouds of flower scents. Now Hanne says she might go for a walk. “Is Moto still sleeping?”

Renzo smiles. “He's a man who loves to dream. Nothing can wake him when he's dreaming. He dreams even when he's awake. When we were boys, after school we'd play for hours in this very back yard. He'd make up entirely different worlds.” A jungle, the moon, they scavenged for berries or fought off demons and ghosts. For hours, they were dogs, cheetahs, birds, warriors, never small boys with mud on their scraped knees, never something as ordinary as that. “I couldn't come up with half of what he did.”

“You mean he has an active imagination.”

“No, I mean dream. You know how a dream can feel real, as real as reality. He has this way of making his dream real for you. It's like entering another world.”

She's sure Renzo is exaggerating. He is enamored of his brother despite the strained interaction she saw last night. Regardless, Hanne never had that deep capacity for dreaming or imagining. The closest she came was setting out alone in the forests, listening to birds and trying to identify them from their songs and calls. Tomas wasn't inclined that way either, but Brigitte spent hours inventing with her best friend, Maria. Maria, who moved from Russia and was placed in Brigitte's third grade class. Maria and Brigitte. They looked alike with their black hair in braids and pale skin and bright red lips. Hanne heard them more than once whisper in their knot of intimacy that they could be twins. Separated at birth and thank goodness they found each other.

Nearly every night, they called each other to decide what to wear to school. Brigitte insisted that Hanne buy her a pair of shiny black Mary Jane shoes just like Maria's. Bright pink headbands pulled their hair from their faces. They read the same books, watched the same movies, they refined the art of common interests. It reminded Hanne of the girl world that had remained closed to her growing up. She was happy for Brigitte, pleased she had gained entry. And she approved of Maria, who was articulate and looked you right in the eye when she spoke.

After school, Maria came over and they did their homework together at the kitchen table. Then they'd spend hours in Brigitte's room, in their tent, a card table covered with an old plaid blanket, and pretended to be characters from a book. Hanne bought Brigitte costumes—a green elf outfit, a pink tutu, a red boa, a big felt hat. Hanne overheard them talking about magic and spells and how to defeat an evil wizard who lived at the top of the mountain. “You have a wonderful mind,” she'd tell Brigitte later. And Brigitte would look at Hanne, puzzled. It just came naturally to her; there was no need to marvel.

Hanne once heard Brigitte tell Maria that her father used to be in the circus. An expert trapeze artist who traveled to Russia and met Maria's mother. “That's how we are twins,” said Brigitte, “my father is also yours.”

“You shouldn't lie to your friends,” Hanne said later.

“I was just pretending.”

“It didn't sound that way to me.”

“Maybe you weren't listening right,” said Brigitte, her voice soft.

“If people can't take you for your word, you're not worth much.”

After that, Brigitte closed her bedroom door and Hanne couldn't hear a thing. She regrets that now. She wishes she had picked a different time, a different way to teach Brigitte about the power of words. How flimsy they can be, how indelible.

Renzo is still talking about Moto. How those long afternoons spent in the back yard conjuring up different worlds were perfect preparation for his life as an actor. “To become anyone—a man, a woman, a young girl, a dying old man, a ghost.”

“You think that helped him?”

“I do. Absolutely.” Then he says “Except he can't seem to do that now.”

Late morning, when Moto still hasn't woken, Hanne heads outside for a walk. Fog has rolled in, and it looks as if the sky has inverted and she's among the clouds, unable to see anything but shadowy shapes. Even the sounds of cars, birds, the occasional barking dog are slightly distorted.

She hopes by the time she returns to the house, Moto will have risen and be eating. Jiro rarely deviated from his ritual of white rice and a bowl of miso soup, with bits of tofu floating in it. Black coffee, the newspaper—sports page first, then the front page—and when his wife was still living with him, he'd kiss her on the cheek, a quick “See you soon,” before heading off to the symphony. What will Moto's routine be?

Indeed, Moto has risen, and he's not alone. As Jiro found himself many mornings after his wife was gone, Hanne returns to find Moto sitting at the table with a sylph. Smooth-skinned, her long black hair coiled at her neck, she is demure in a way that seems purposely designed to seduce. Petite, she is caught between adolescence and womanhood, but to Hanne all the Japanese women look this way, even the so-called chubby ones.

Moto introduces her to Midori, a fellow voice actor.

Here, she thinks, is Moto's Chikako. “A pleasure,” says Hanne, bowing slightly.

Hanne feels Midori size her up as women do, a quick inventory of features, redeeming and otherwise, and then dismiss her.

“Didn't you do a commercial recently?” says Renzo.

“Bubble bath,” she says, smiling proudly.

Midori and Moto sit side by side, the young woman nearly nestled into his arm. Like a child seeking warmth or comfort from her daddy. She supposes every country has the phenomenon of a sugar daddy.

Though Midori's sugar daddy looks pretty worse for the wear. His face is puffy from last night's drinking, and strands of his hair are floating out to the side, charged with static electricity, a salt-and-pepper dandelion puff.

“Moto taught me everything I know about my voice,” she says, her tone flirtatious, her smile beamed on Moto. She wears a tight white top. She must be the owner of the white high heels in the front foyer. And maybe the green pantsuit in the guest cottage closet. The room smells of her jasmine perfume. Her only flaw is a slight droop of her lower lip, as if she's contemplating a pout but can't quite make up her mind.