Translator (14 page)

“How long have you known Moto?” says Hanne, taking a seat.

“About five years,” she says.

Well, that fits. Jiro had known Chikako for years. She imagines Kobayashi sitting right here, perhaps in her spot, watching, his blood pressure rising as he felt the making of a scene. Or was this the spark for the novel itself? These two, nuzzling and groping. And in his mind, he's busy scribbling notes for his novel. Midori, meaning green, thinks Hanne, young to the world, fresh, a fresh start. Is Midori the reason for the marriage's demise? The seductress, whose beauty and poise—the droop of the lip can easily be overlooked. Of course last night Moto wasn't swept up in the moment dancing with Hanne; in his drunken stupor, he was pining for his lovely Midori, distraught that this lovely wasn't the one in his arms.

“I'm sure you were talented before you met Moto,” says Renzo, sitting at the head of the table.

What is she? Twenty? Or slightly younger than Jiro's paramour? Why isn't she thrilled at finding another similarity between her Jiro and Moto? Certainly this reveals something about Moto's character: that after his marriage, he is soon in the embrace of another. Because Moto, once the inventive boy inventing worlds in the back yard, has chosen such a fatigued narrative. Both Jiro and Moto using youth to plunge themselves back into life. At least Chikako was a talented musician with a promising career. This Midori seems a bit of a bimbo. Hanne stifles a sigh.

Midori whispers something in his ear and she laughs, or rather giggles, covering her mouth.

Moto puts his head in his hands. “Not so loud. My lousy head.”

“Moto is the great Noh actor,” says Midori. “He's had such great training with his voice, and I've had none.” And now she yields to her drooping lip and pouts. It's a tremendous pout, the lower lip extended in such a way that she manages to convey sex appeal. Out of curiosity, Midori had recently gone to a Noh production by Moto's old theater group. “Moto's replacement is no good. Another ten or twenty years, then maybe. What can I do to get you back to the theater?”

Hanne imagines a whole host of things. All of which involve her creamy, smooth skin.

“When I'm ready,” says Moto, “I'll be ready.”

“Which says nothing,” says Renzo.

“That's right,” says Moto.

Midori laughs.

“I say a lot of things that amount to nothing,” says Moto.

“You're stubborn,” says Hanne.

“No,” says Moto.

“Though you can be,” says Midori.

“I can be a lot of things,” says Moto.

Hanne sits up. She's heard that sentence before. Right after Chikako complained that her kitchen sink was leaking, and she'd have to call a plumber but didn't have the money, and why did she have to deal with this now? Jiro said he'd fix it. In response to Chikako's surprised “You can?” Jiro smiled, “I can be a lot of things.” After that, he grabbed her and kissed her cheek, her neck, and whispered that he loved her, as he slowly unbuttoned her dress.

And, as she anticipated, Moto leans over and kisses Midori on the cheek. He places both hands on the table and, groaning and grimacing, heaves himself up, as if he were made of solid brick. “I've got to eat something,” he says. “Then I'm heading back to bed. See you all later.” He winks at Midori. A signal for her to join him?

A moment later, Hanne hears the hiss and spit of eggs cooking in a frying pan.

Midori laughs. “He's in bad shape.”

“You must be very pleased about this toothpaste opportunity,” says Renzo.

Midori goes on, how this is likely to lead to many other things, great things, ideally a movie, but she'd settle right now for an acting job on a TV drama. She's auditioning for a couple. She'd love to be on the program “Long Vacation,” or “I Want to Be In Love.” She'd accept any role, anything—the wife whose husband is cheating on her, the woman who is sick with some terrible disease and will, by the end of the season, die.

Hanne excuses herself, blaming it on jet lag, and says she needs to lie down.

“Hey,” Moto calls out as she passes through the kitchen. “Aren't you coming in here to help me cook breakfast?”

“Looks like you've got it all under control.”

“Here.” He hands her a glass. “Bloody Mary. It's supposed to help.”

“Thank you.” When's the last time she had a drink in the morning? She takes a sip and hands it back to him.

He smiles, crossing his arms in front of him. “Sorry. You'll need to drink more than that.”

“You're a bad influence. Last night, and now this.” She hears herself. Is she flirting with him?

He grins. “Good. I mean, I'm glad I'm a bad influence. I'm determined to make your visit memorable.”

And is he flirting with her? But there is Midori calling for him. Hanne takes her drink, gives him a little wave, and heads out to the cottage. She sits at the bare desk and stares at the dog sleeping outside in the grass. So long ago, it seems, she was fretting over words,
dry, dried up, drying
. What she's feeling is relatively new: that most of her life is behind her, no longer ahead of her. Unlike Midori, she doesn't have a thousand options, a huge expanse of possibilities. It's called getting older, she says to herself, and she doesn't particularly like it.

She has a vague sense that this feeling also has to do with her encounter with Kobayashi. It's one thing to see his name on a piece of paper; it's quite another to see him in the flesh. She can picture him now. His hunched, bony shoulders, his dark eyes, his frown, smell his whiskey breath, feel his fury. A human being who thinks she sabotaged his art.
I am ashamed.

Over the years, she's narrowed down her options, finally confining herself to a small island, the art of translation. Her work, what she's deeply cared about, devoted herself to like a faithful servant, and sacrificed so much for—Kobayashi feels she failed miserably at it. How can that be? If, indeed, he read it, how could he have such a skewed reading? It matters, Tomas, she composes to herself. It matters because if I find that I've successfully translated Moto onto the page, then the itch of doubt will be gone. In her mind, she can see Tomas raise an eyebrow, as if to say: doubt? Yes, doubt, Tomas. That Kobayashi would make such a scene, spewing his accusations in public for everyone to hear, his charges are not so easily dismissed.

She lies down on the hard bed but can't sleep. Something is nagging at her. She showers and heads over to the house. Inside, she hears the slurred words of the singer Tom Waits, who to her ear sounds like a drunken derelict, his voice trampled by cigarettes and alcohol and who knows what else. She knows him because Brigitte used to listen to him too.

In the big empty room, where last night they floated along to music, Moto is stretched out on his back on the tatami mats. He's reading a book and listening to the dreadful music, his head propped on a pillow. She glances at the book's title:
Dead Souls,
Gogol's unfinished novel. An English translation. Of course Kobayashi took artistic license, changing superficial details, but Jiro never read anything but the newspaper.

“You can read English?” she says. “And you like Gogol?”

He leans over, turns the music down. “Yep. And I speak fairly good English. I'm full of neat tricks.”

“I'm envious.”

He raises an eyebrow.

She tells him what had happened, the fall, the loss of her first languages. She doesn't mention the hospital or the surgery or much of anything else, so by the time she finishes, it hardly sounds like anything at all.

Still, he murmurs, “All the things one can lose. Would it help you if I spoke English? Maybe it would jar something loose.”

How kind of him to offer. “But that's asking too much of you.”

“If it makes you feel better, I get to practice my English.” He tells her that long ago he had an American girlfriend, so his English isn't too shabby.

“If it's not too much trouble.”

He studies her. “I offered.”

She takes a seat at the table and asks who translated his book. He shows her the name on the title page. “Nabokov approved of the Bernard Gilbert Guerney translation,” she says. “Nabokov said the plot didn't really matter, it was the writing, which in Russian reads much more like a poem than a novel.”

“I forgot,” he says. “You're a translator.”

He speaks American English, not British, and his cadence and rhythms are quite good.

“What are you working on now?” he says in English.

You, my friend. “I'm in between projects,” she replies in Japanese.

She tells him about her play, and he mentions the Noh play about Komachi.

“Yes, I've read it. I plan on doing something very different.” She points to his book. “When you're done with it, I'd like to hear your opinion of this translation.”

He glances at the book. “I don't know if I'll finish it.”

“No? Why not?”

He shrugs. “I might lose interest.”

“But you're more than halfway through.”

“So?” he says, smiling faintly. Watching her, he closes the book and sets it down on the floor.

“It seems you've already devoted so much time to it. It'll be a waste just to quit.”

He doesn't answer, just smiles as if he knows something she does not.

Without warning, a memory of Brigitte comes to her. An argument with Brigitte, who wanted to quit her French lessons. She had decided she didn't like French anymore and wanted to learn Mandarin. Hanne had just picked her up from school, and Brigitte rushed to the car with an armload of library books about China. Her fourth-grade class had begun studying China and Chinese history. “They invented the compass and paper and printing and when I get older, I want to travel there and maybe live there,” she said, her eyes the hue of thrill. With the extra hours freed up if she quit French, she'd study Mandarin. She smiled shyly at Hanne. “And that's a language you don't know, is it?”

But to walk away from five years of French lessons. It seemed so rash, so impulsive. Her French teacher called her his best student. All those hours spent learning verb tenses and nouns and sentence structure and exceptions to the rules.

As she drove home, Hanne lectured Brigitte about the often-grueling nature of life, how it's far more difficult than she might ever imagine, and she needed to learn to persevere. “When your father, brother, and I set our minds to something, we don't give up,” she said. “No matter the odds or risks or difficulties. It's gotten us where we are today, and that's no small feat. Other people meet with hardship and tread no further. We forge ahead. You have to decide what kind of person you want to be.”

“I'll probably be both,” said Brigitte.

Hanne didn't know if Brigitte meant it, or she was just trying to be infuriating.

Moto is still smiling at her, as if he's thinking “So you've found me lacking. What are you going to do about it?” And he's still looking at her, studying her, as if he wants her to know he sees right into her, her views, her judgment, and is amused.

“I can't do something if my heart isn't in it,” he says.

“So you give up when things become difficult,” she says.

“I didn't say that.” He still has that smile, though bigger, as if he's even more amused than before. “I've enjoyed many things that are difficult.”

The tea kettle whistles. Moto tucks his knees to his chest and rocks himself onto his feet. Instantly, he is on his feet. In a million years, she couldn't do a move like that.

Hanne and Brigitte had argued about her quitting French lessons all the way home and into dinner. No, she's not remembering right. Hanne lectured and Brigitte sat there stone-faced, not saying a word. Finally Hanne forbade her to quit French. If she wanted to take up Mandarin, she'd have to find a way to fit it in. And now she sees her daughter slumped in her chair, her face pale, shoulders rounded, a posture of exquisite dejection. How cruel, how unrelenting Hanne was. And the worst thing about it is that she can still hear the excitement in Brigitte's voice as she bounded into the car and said she wanted to study Mandarin, the excitement that Hanne ultimately crushed.

In the kitchen, Moto takes the kettle off the burner and opens cupboards, finding the canister of green tea and two cups. A stack of dirty dishes in the sink diverts him. A rarity: a Japanese man his age who serves tea and does the dishes. He rolls up his sleeves and scrubs hard at the stuck food, and, when he finally removes it, puts the wet dish in the dish rack.

“Do you miss acting?” she says.

“Do I miss it? Not particularly.”

“Years and years of acting and you don't yearn for the audience? The lights? The thrill of performance?”

He starts in on another dirty white plate. “I guess I've fallen out of it.”

Fallen? Like falling out of a habit? A dream? Perhaps he doesn't know the English word for what he's trying to say. “What does that mean?”

He's running the sponge around and around, as if considering her question. “Or maybe it released me. I don't remember it,” he says slowly. “I can remember how to move and dance and sing. But I can't feel it anymore.”

Moto sets the plate in the rack, then puts his hands under the faucet, letting the hot water run on them. Steam rises up, fogging the window above the sink.

“Has that ever happened to you?” he says. “Something you once loved with every cell of your body is sucked of all of its juice?”

If anything, her work holds her even more firmly in its grip. If someone called her up right now and offered her a translation project, she'd jump at it. “I can't say it has.”

He turns the water off and says, in a soft voice, “Are you happy, Hanne?”

How quickly they've moved from being mere acquaintances to something familiar, intimate, and most likely contentious. “I'd love to have my language faculties back. But I won't let myself complain.”