Translator (16 page)

“Eigo ga dekimasu ka?
” Do you speak English, he asks politely.

“
Iie
,” she says. No.

He looks at her, puzzled, then laughs and laughs.

She steps into the locker room. Quickly she strips off her wet suit and changes into her clothes. When she comes out, Moto is sitting in her spot, waiting. His wet hair is combed. Has he known her whereabouts the entire time? And decided to stay away? She tells him about the exchange with the boy.

“That phrase,” says Moto, “is one of the first English phrases that a young schoolboy learns. He wanted to practice and thought you were American or European.”

As they head to the car, she wonders: if not American or European, then what am I?

On their way home, Moto stops at a coffee shop. Even with his wet hair, T-shirt, and ragged jeans, he has celebrity status, as if dipped in gold. Though to Hanne he looks tired, those weary eyes, as if he's played too hard. The young waitress flirts with him, giggling her way through their order. Another woman with perfectly coiffed hair waves hello. A third, who is passing by the shop, rushes in and says she'd love him to come to her dinner party. She stands so her bony hip brushes against the edge of the table, near his hand.

He could have his pick of women, thinks Hanne. Yes, he's moved on and is probably sampling a wide range of women, like fine desserts. Not just Midori. Look at him smiling. He's happy, playful, engaged; all is right in his world. Fifteen years of marriage and the world has opened up for him again. Back in the social whirl.

The proprietor brings him a plate of mochi. “So nice to see you,” he says to Moto. Moto thanks him and scoots the plate toward Hanne.

Moto asks, “You asked about me. What about you, Hanne? You're not married?”

“A widow.”

He looks at her for a long minute. “I'm sorry. Truly sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

Moto sips his coffee, watching her.

She shifts uncomfortably. “Like you, I've moved on.”

Back at the house, she heads to the cottage to hang up her wet bathing suit. When she returns to the main house, Renzo says Moto has left.

“To where?” Hanne says, trying to hide her disappointment.

Renzo shrugs.

She spends the rest of the afternoon working in the garden with Renzo. He's determined to weed it out and plant vegetables—daikon, potatoes, burdock root, lotus root, and radishes. The dirt is dark, rich, suitable for planting. Hanne and her mother used to plant a garden every spring, no matter where they lived. Even if the garden was confined to a two-meter-by-two-meter swatch of poor soil. Her mother was a very determined woman.

That night she helps Renzo cook dinner. He teaches her how to make Japanese sweet potato cakes using cooked sweet potato, butter, sugar, eggs, flour, and a bit of cream. When she inquires again where Moto might be, Renzo shakes his head. “He's a funny guy. He could be with Midori. Or a surprise visit to a friend. Or he might be at the library reading about van Gogh. He says if he could see as well as van Gogh did, he'd be a better actor. There's times he watches me so closely, it's almost like I feel his gaze rub against my skin. Have you noticed it?”

In fact, she has.

“That's a good sign, don't you think?” he says. “He's preparing to return to the stage.”

“I hope so,” she says, thinking of Jiro's return to the symphony. She's aware that she's listening for Moto. And there, she thinks she hears the front door open. She waits, expecting him to wander into the kitchen. But there is no one. A new wave of disappointment.

She mixes the ingredients together and puts cake-size blobs onto a greased cookie sheet. “Can I ask, has Moto always been so unanchored?”

Renzo is at the stove, stirring miso soup. “Unanchored? What does this mean?”

Unsettled, she wants to say, unbalanced, unhinged. “Drifting about. Following a whim.”

He thinks about it. “Yes, I think so. But when he was acting, he was anchored and unanchored. Acting out different characters, so he was drifting, as you say. But anchored to the role of actor no matter what. You see?”

Like Jiro. The wide landscape of human emotion washed over him when he played the violin, one series of notes leading into sadness, another into delight, but always anchored to the violin. He told his wife that when he played he felt fluid, the boundaries of himself evaporating, and he became everything. He was no longer himself, or maybe not only himself. “What a relief for you,” said his wife. “That you have a way to escape this world.”

She goes to bed in a good mood. Overall, she's found no flaws in her translation. Moto is like her Jiro. Late that night, Hanne hears the dog barking. She gets out of bed and steps outside into the cold. A half moon casts light on the frosty ground. She smells the rich dirt from this afternoon's digging in the garden. A breeze stirs and her white nightgown billows around her. She doesn't see the dog anywhere. She's about to step back inside when a car draws up in the driveway. A door slams. He's walking toward her.

“Look at you in this moonlight,” says Moto, smiling. “What a shame my English is so lousy. Everything I can think of saying is a cliché.”

She smiles. “Best to remain quiet, then.”

“Your hair, with the moon stroking it, looks like black glass. Your gown glows like a sun ray. Your skin—”

“Okay. Enough,” she says, laughing. When she turns and he follows her into the cottage, she feels her old recklessness dust itself off. Lust, yes, he's a very attractive man. Before Hiro, before marriage, she had plenty of sex for the sheer pleasure of it. Another appetite of the body was how she saw it. She reaches for his hand, a warm, firm hand that grips hers. Lust, she thinks and also curiosity—does he make love like Jiro?

He's smooth, his chest hairless, as sleek as a stone. Like her Jiro. Moto smells of alcohol, but what does she care. A morning spent with him, and now the slow burn of desire has somewhere to go.

His hand finds the curve of her lower back, guiding her to the bed. “Not so guarded,” he murmurs in her ear. She turns him around, kisses him, feels the fullness of his lips, of him, tastes the bitterness of beer. He kisses her neck, fingers, until, restless, she pulls him on top of her. He takes his time, until she's quivering under his fingers.

When they're done, they lie in each other's arms and listen to Morsel howl. Moto joins in.

“Stop, you'll wake Renzo,” she says, laughing. She picks up Moto's hand and fiddles with his fingers. It's how she imagined sex with Jiro. Intense, passionate, playful.

“Spoilsport.” Grinning, he slips back into his clothes, bows low. “I depart.”

“Until we meet again.”

He heads out the door. The bed is too small for the two of them. Besides, she'd rather sleep alone.

Outside, the weather is running
itself through the tree branches, with the day gathering into a dense dull presence of rain clouds. Before she heads to the house, she makes the bed. How unexpected, she thinks, untangling the sheets, noting the wet spot. A nice unexpected, she admits, though she thinks it shouldn't happen again. She's here to observe, not become involved in something.

It's early morning and the house is astonishingly cold. She buttons her sweater and steps into the eating room. Moto is there, busy sewing a button on a white shirt. Thankfully, he's turned the heat on full blast. He offers her hot tea.

“You're up early,” she says, cupping her hands around the mug.

He has a voice-over gig and has to go to Kurashiki to record it. “I'm trying to look halfway presentable,” he says, holding up the shirt.

“Another talent of yours?”

Renzo is the one with sewing skills, he says, but he has gone to Kojima to look at a tansu and visit friends.

“I'd like to hear you,” she says. “It sounds interesting.”

He shrugs, finishing a button. He snips off the thread. “Not much to it.”

It seems last night will be folded up, tucked away, forgotten. For the best, she thinks, sipping her tea. “Renzo really hates these voice-overs, doesn't he?”

“I suppose.” He points to her sweater. Two buttons are missing. How hadn't she noticed it? “I think I have a match,” he says, digging through his box of buttons. She hands it to him. He threads his needle, shaking his head and smiling, his birthmark bunching up like a pretty rose. “Renzo has this idea that our parents and all our ancestors, all the way back to the beginning of time are watching our every move and I'm disappointing each and every one of them.”

She smiles, thinking of her mother's expression—a mixture of expectation and disappointment. “Isn't it a given that we disappoint our parents?”

He reaches over and touches her hand. “A pleasure, last night.”

She nods. So it won't be forgotten. Might it happen again? She finds herself unexpectedly hoping it will.

“So does that mean your children have disappointed you?” he says.

More rain clouds must have blown in because the room fills with a brownish light. She tells him about Tomas. Responsible, intelligent, driven, a good father and husband. “I could go on and on.”

“And Brigitte?”

She's startled that he remembered her name. To hear someone else say it out loud, it makes her feel as though Brigitte is present, sitting at the table with them. “She's on her own path. Isn't that what every parent wants? A child who is out in the world, doing what she wants to do?”

He leans forward with his elbows on the table, as if trying to get underneath her words. He's waiting for her to say more, and the silence elongates until she feels the need to say more.

“For years she wanted to be a translator. Then it was a veterinarian, then an emergency medic, then a poet, and then the Peace Corps, then I forget. There were so many iterations of possible careers, I lost track. And she could have done any one of those things. A million other things too.”

“A girl with many interests,” he murmurs.

“That's one way to put it.”

“How do you put it?”

“Oh, I don't think about it anymore. We haven't spoken in a long time. Six years.” That last part came out fast.

A pause. “That sounds hard.”

“In the beginning, but one learns to carry on.”

“How?”

“The way one does. Life isn't beyond mending, Moto. As you know.”

Minutes go by, it seems. The wind picks up, rattling the windows. Her right leg feels incredibly hot. She must be too close to the heater. She shifts, but still her leg is burning. And now her stomach aches, as if it's shrunken into a tight fist. His gaze is fixed on the fish tank behind her. His birthmark is an intense red, almost in the shape of a crescent moon. “She sounds like an artist, your daughter,” he says, as if speaking to himself.

“I suppose. There was that phase of poetry.”

“That's not what I mean. She sounds like she's struggled to find her place in the world. Sensitive people are like that. When a way of life isn't working, you have to get rid of it. The alternative is to feel a part of you, a big part has been forgotten. Eventually it just dies off.”

Hanne feels slightly disoriented. Is he trying to tell her something about himself? Or does he suddenly claim to have special insight into Brigitte? “You didn't struggle to find your place.” She says it as a statement, not a question.

“No. But that was just damn luck. The path chosen for me by my parents was the right one.”

“And now?”

He shrugs. The light drains completely from the room, as if the day has rolled by in an instant and now it is evening. She watches him sew a new button on her sweater. A feeling of apprehension sweeps over her.

“Were you and Brigitte ever close?” he says.

Why is he so interested in her? What's he fishing for? “When she was little,” she says. “Back then, she loved languages and, as you know, that's my forte.” In her mind, she sees Brigitte, with pudgy baby-fat limbs, hears the pitch of her voice as she wrapped her mouth around German. How hard she'd grip Hanne's fingers, as if she never wanted to let go. Hanne tells Moto about their birding expeditions. “But,” she takes a deep breath, “she made things hard for herself by dwelling on her problems. Or perceived problems. Or other people's problems.” She almost says she took every little thing to heart. But stops herself. She hears Moto's explanation from the other night as to why he might not finish Gogol's novel—how his heart might lose interest. Is that why he's intrigued by Brigitte? Might he hear an echo of himself? “I tried to help her, instill some hardiness. Some fortitude. Life is rarely easy, as you know.”

When he says nothing, she finds herself telling him about the time Brigitte found a mangy gray kitten rummaging through their garbage can. She must have been eight years old, and she insisted that she keep it. Its mother had been hit by a car. The big black birds were in the street, picking at it. She had to take care of the kitten. From the moment she held it, Brigitte worried that it, too, might die. “I don't want it to die. Will it die? What can we do so it will never die?”

Her anxiety was endless, but Hanne refused to lie. She told Brigitte that just like all living creatures, the cat would eventually die, but they'd give it a good life and when it came time, give it a proper, dignified burial in the back yard. That solved nothing. Brigitte continued to fret and Hanne wouldn't budge. Hiro was no help. He was teaching more classes at Stanford, and during the week he was sleeping in the spare bedroom of one of the other faculty members, driving home only on the weekends. Tomas, who was sixteen at the time, finally cornered Hanne in the kitchen. “God, mom. Tell her someday that cat will go to sleep for a long time. Just tell her that.”

“I won't disrespect her like that.”

“Dad does it. Whenever Dad drives by a dead animal on the road, he tells Brigitte it's sleeping.”

“Oh, hell.” She scoffed. “How weak, how cowardly, how—”

“It works.”

Hanne refused. Brigitte wasn't a baby.

The cat soon died of distemper. Hiro took a week off from his classes and spent his free time with Brigitte, who was inconsolable. They went out to lunch, to the museum, the movies. Hanne and Hiro fought about it.

“You're sending her the wrong message,” said Hanne. “You're teaching her to wallow when something difficult happens.”

“I'm not sending her any messages. I'm just being with her.”

“You're not considering the consequences of your actions. You're encouraging her to be spineless. To fall apart when something hard happens. That won't serve her well in life.”

Hanne suggested getting a new cat, but Brigitte wouldn't hear of it. You can't just replace one with another. How could you think like that? She loved that kitten. Eventually Brigitte stopped all her language lessons and spent every afternoon at the animal shelter. Hiro had suggested it. Her job was to feed the cats and clean their cages. But soon the tasks went beyond that, to walking the dogs and helping the veterinarian administer shots. Her dream changed from becoming a translator to a veterinarian. She planned on saving all the hurt and abandoned animals in the world.

When is the last time she has told that story to someone? Or even thought of it?

“She sounds very tender,” says Moto. “To realize that everything will perish. To fear the death of something or someone you love so much.” He shakes his head, as if amazed by her depths. “So wise.”

“Not that wise. And not that tender.”

“No?”

She takes a deep breath. “It's a commonplace story. A girl hits teen years and rebels. Drugs, most likely. Sex. Nothing I said or did mattered. She could be cruel.”

Her teen years came, unfortunately, at the same time Hanne's husband died, she tells Moto. “We weren't living together at the time. The decision was mutual, but Brigitte, I think, blamed me. If only he had been living with us, if only we'd been there, we could have saved him. Called an ambulance. Rushed him to the hospital. Maybe that's true. Maybe it isn't. But after that, Brigitte was lost to me. I became the enemy. The hated one.” She doesn't tell him about the many nights she heard Brigitte crying in her room. How at first Hanne tried to console her. When she couldn't, she tried to ignore it, hoping it would subside.

“I felt the best thing for us, all of us, was to carry on. Hiro would have wanted that, I think. Not pull her out of school, not grant her a leave of absence, a stretch of idleness. All those things she wanted. What would she have done? Just mope and sulk around the house some more? Get into more trouble? A girl of fourteen can easily meet with ruin. I was teaching Japanese and translating, the equivalent of full-time work. I couldn't monitor her. She was failing school. Refusing to study, cutting class, hanging out with the wrong crowd. I don't know where she met these boys. She wouldn't listen to me. In the end, I suppose, she found a way to take her leave of absence.”

She stops. How out of character, going on and on. Why is she laying out her life story before him? As she picks up her tea, she sees a slight shake of her hand. To her surprise, she feels like she must say more—as if she's trying to convince Moto of something.

“She's a very bright girl and she was throwing her life away. I couldn't just stand idly by. I located a boarding school for her. A very good school. Perfect for her. It was the right thing to do. She didn't want to go, of course. Her friends were in San Francisco, not Connecticut, where the school was located. I didn't find that hard to understand,” she says. “But I
did
find it hard to understand why she made such a mess of her life.”

“The heart can be a mysterious thing,” he says quietly. He hands her back her mended sweater.

She makes herself stop. Enough airing of dirty laundry. They sit in the quiet for some time, and it feels as if he's still listening, threading through his mind everything she has just said. No longer smiling, he looks in deep concentration. The fish tank gurgles and bubbles, as if they've fallen deep underwater. Hanne has the urge to grab her coat and head out, anywhere, but now it's not only her leg that's hot. She feels feverish, nauseous. “I'm suddenly not feeling very well.”

“You don't look well.”

“I think I need to lie down.”

“Let me help you.”

He takes her arm and helps her out to the cottage. She slips off her shoes and, shaking uncontrollably, climbs into bed. He leaves and comes back with hot tea, a tray of rice crackers, and aspirin.

He places his hand on her forehead. “You're burning up.”

“I feel foolish.”

He opens the bottle of aspirin and hands her two. She feels like a child as he holds a glass of water to her lips. “Now rest.”

“I'm sure it's nothing serious. Please just go about your business.”

She's in bed for four long days. Renzo and Moto take turns bringing her food and herbal drinks. She tries to put on a cheery face, but in the back of her mind she's worried her decline might have something to do with her fall. The doctor warned her there might be unforeseen complications. He couldn't guarantee anything. So here she is, drifting in and out of sleep. Babbling in a feverish state. Sweat pearling on her forehead. Staying here far too long and requiring so much from them. So weak, it's an effort to lift a glass of water. Sounds are amplified. Sometimes it seems like the dog is barking directly in her ear, even though when she opens her eyes, Morsel is nowhere in sight.

A doctor comes and determines she has the common flu. She should feel relieved. It has nothing to do with her brain. Still, she is concerned. She can't remember the last time she had the flu or even a cold. That part of being human, she always thought, didn't apply to her. The doctor says she is to rest and get plenty of fluids. Whenever Moto or Renzo appear, she apologizes. For herself. For this inconvenience. For imposing. As soon as she is better, she will leave. They will never have to see her again.

“If you apologize one more time,” says Moto, “I'm going to make you stay for another five weeks.”

“But you didn't intend for a visitor to stay for so long, let alone become so demanding.”

“People get sick.”

“But this isn't what you signed up for.”

“So?”

He pours her a cup of tea. The smell is horrible, a mix between boiled grass and underarm odor. “Chinese herbs. I use them all the time. Can't hurt.”

“Surely they can.” In an effort to be a good patient, she drinks it. “It's horrible.” She puts the cup on the nightstand and gulps down water to cool her burning throat.