Translator (20 page)

No. She couldn't.

“Sure you can.”

“No, I don't think you understand. I can't.” Her eyes teary.

Someone had to be stalwart, a pillar. Someone had to remain steadfast and firm. Someone had to push, sometimes push hard. And wouldn't that rub off on Brigitte? Make it all feel less impossible? That's what Hanne told herself. But now she wonders, is that what Brigitte needed? How well did Hanne understand her role in Brigitte's life? If Brigitte's anything like Moto, Hanne's prodding wouldn't have done any good.

Moto swims to shore. Shaking his hair, spraying water everywhere. There's his lean, powerful body, his strong chest muscles and arms. Normally, she'd feel the stirrings of desire. Moto wipes his face, beginning at his forehead, pulling his hands down over his eyes, his chin, as if rubbing off a film and the real Moto—the one missing nothing—might emerge from underneath. But it's the same Moto, with shadowy circles below his eyes. He wraps a white towel around his waist and heads in his floating gait to the locker room.

She sits in the warm sand and waits for him outside the locker room.

His hand is on her shoulder. He's dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and he sits beside her. “You didn't swim?”

“No. For some reason, I didn't feel like it.”

He smiles his leonine smile. “Watch out, Hanne. You're going to become a good-for-nothing like me, wasting away your talent, the stage disappearing in front of you.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

Renzo announces he's going to have a dinner party tomorrow night. A farewell party for Hanne. Oh, dear god, no, she thinks. He'll invite his good friends. They'd love to meet her. He's at the eating table, surrounded by cookbooks, and he's riffling through pages of colorful fish dishes and soups.

“You needn't go to the trouble for me,” says Hanne, taking a seat at the table. She's in no mood for parties, for anything festive. She is exhausted just thinking about meeting a group of new people. The cheery façade one must hide behind.

“No trouble at all.” He puts on his glasses, then takes them off again. “Let me propose something. With your perfect Japanese, maybe you'll think of moving here? Many interesting people live around here.” He pauses and smiles slyly at her. “And you seem interested in Moto.”

It seems Moto has told him nothing about her translation, about Kobayashi's book. “You misunderstand.”

“Moto is a good man. He's just in a slump right now.”

“It's presumptuous of you to be arranging your brother's life.”

The dog sits beside her and whines. She finds her coat. Renzo, it seems, is not done trying to persuade her; he's at the door in his coat and scarf, holding the leash.

Outside the air is cold. The trees seem taller, with their tips lost in the clouds.

“I've served as go-between for a number of very happily married couples,” he goes on, pulling on gloves. “As you grow older, you need a good companion.”

How exasperating! “I'm sure you don't mean—”

“Let me finish. I'm a good ten years older than you. I've crossed some of the territory you're about to enter. It's hard to grow old alone. Your friends die off or become ill and are no longer mobile. Your children are involved with their own lives, as they should be. I've learned to keep my loneliness in check with several female companions.” He gives her a quick smile. “But an intelligent, cultured woman such as yourself requires much more from your relations than I.”

In truth, she requires very little. Her handful of friends are just as busy as she is—or once was. After Hiro died, she had a fling with a visiting professor from Denmark. When he left, that was the end of it—though it was promised otherwise, they never wrote to each other, never called. And a two-week affair with the archeologist from Brazil. Oh, there was a certain pang for weeks afterward, and the circling of the question—what if he'd stayed? What might have been? But those questions eventually subsided. There is the relationship with her David, but really, if something more meaningful was going to come of that, it would have happened by now. It's become a matter of convenience.

They pass by the field of new cherry trees, branches with little green leaves. A crow flies by, calling out to the emptied sky. The dog stops and looks up, then begins to track the black bird.

“Besides, Midori is a diversion,” he says. “She's not a suitable match for him at all.”

Hanne shoves her cold hands deep into her pockets. “In whose opinion? I'm repeating myself, but it seems to me Moto has a say in the direction of his life.”

“It's not good enough. And neither is this voice-over business.”

“Maybe that's the life he wants right now.”

Listen to her! Defending Moto, his right to wither and waste away.

He shakes his head vigorously. “I won't stand for it. He's an extremely talented Noh actor.”

“He's a grown man. Listen, Renzo. If you keep at him like this, he might refuse your company.” She was going to add “for years and years.”

“He must use it, not only for the family's sake, but his. It's what he must do in this lifetime.” He tears off a piece of grass, rolls it into a ball, throws it. “In another life, he can do something else.”

So this is how fate is administered: This life can be circumscribed and made miserable because it's one of many lives. Freedom comes another time. “Let me guess. You didn't choose to be an antique dealer.”

“No. Nor did I choose my wife, may her soul rest in peace. I grew to love her, but my real love was a young girl I knew in secondary school. Atsuko Tsukiyama. I can still picture her, her white school socks pulled above her knobby knees, her long black braids. Every time she rocked back on her heels, my stomach swooped. But she was promised to someone else and we went our separate ways.”

“How sad.”

“Not sad,” he says, smiling, showing off his stained teeth. “The Japanese have a saying: ‘The shade is part of light.'”

d

Before the guests have even been seated, Hanne is bored. By the fifth time she's been asked “What do you do for a living?” she has become crotchety. “Nothing. I do absolutely nothing. I'm just taking up space on this increasingly small planet.” Which elicits nervous laughter.

Renzo sits at the head of the table with a woman his age, stroking her hand and cooing something in her ear. One of his many female companions? They seem enraptured with each other, sealed off from the dozen other guests. Hanne is drinking too much sake, suffering through a lecture by a store manager on the perils of perishable goods. She's watching the lecturer's cigarette wobble in his fingers, when Moto stumbles in halfway through dinner, unshaven, wearing a sloppy grin and an expensive navy blue suit, a white shirt, and a gray tie. His arm is draped around Midori's shoulder, as if he needs to be propped up.

Of all the places, Moto staggers to a spot right across from her. Next to him, Midori's lithe body folds like a fan.

This, too, feels like a scene from the book. She thinks about Kobayashi sitting here, trying to capture the mood, the details, the tension in the room. It feels overwhelming, nearly impossible. The task of a writer. A fresh wave of shame washes over her.

Moto waves at her.

“Looks like the party started a while ago for you,” says Hanne. “Maybe yesterday.”

Moto loosens his tie, then slowly pulls it off, slithering it along the back of his neck. He drops two ice cubes in a glass, then grabs the bottle of whiskey and with shaky hands pours it to the rim. Tipping it back, he keeps his free hand on Midori's shoulder, as if to claim her, or steady himself from falling over, then sets the glass down with a flourish. His birthmark is now a long streak of angry red. His eyes look glassy, faded, remote. “Rough day,” he says in slurred Japanese.

“And you want to make it rougher?” says Hanne.

He gestures toward Midori. “This one? She's not looking out for me.”

Midori laughs. Or rather giggles, putting her hand over her mouth.

“She's the one who got me drunk,” he says. “Glass after glass. The wicked girl is trying to take advantage of me.”

He puts one hand over his eyes to mask a glare, imagined or otherwise. The other hand clutches his sweating drink. Midori slaps him on the thigh. Midori gets the role of the bad girl; Hanne, mother. Hanne refuses to play along. Turning to the man on her right, she introduces herself.

Midori says she has to go to the powder room. She gets up and sways down the hall, balancing herself by extending both arms out to the side, her fingertips brushing the wall. The man sitting beside Hanne strokes his dark mustache and tells Hanne he sells rice. Owns a rice shop in town. “You eat rice? You should eat rice. Come by my shop and buy rice. It's very good, grown in the North.”

She's leaving in two days. If she has time, she'll come by. How can she politely and forever leave the table?

Moto is staring at her, no longer smiling. Beseeching her—to do what? “Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“Anything. Anything at all.” He leans forward on his elbows. “You.”

The full force of his dark gaze is on her. Wide awake now, his drunkenness vanishing like a disguise, he's filled with ferocious intention. “Tell me something. Tell me something I don't know about you.”

How dizzying! One moment he's unreachable, lost in a haze of alcohol; the next, he's swooped in on her, and the rest of the room evaporates. Moto is waiting. “I'm used to being in many worlds at once.” To her own surprise, she is complying, telling him something secret, something very much her own. “Not the real world,” she says, gesturing her hand to the guests, “but I found solace in the world of language. In my mind, I used to glide from one language to another to another. It reminds me of the way you effortlessly glide around the room. To my ear, languages have always sounded like songs. I remember when I first heard someone speak English. A nanny of mine. Oh, how beautiful! I wanted to learn to sing like that—not to converse with her, though I was soon able, but to make those sounds. And when I heard French, Japanese, on and on, it was the same impulse. We all need to stand in awe of something, don't we? To feel that burst of astonishment. To become it, even if it's a moment.”

He is regarding her, it seems, with piercing attention. Is that why she goes on? Flushing herself out?

“In Latin, translate comes from
translatus
, to carry over, to carry across. Something written in language A is carried over into language B. I always imagine a bridge in which language A is traveling over to meet B. Sometimes when I'm translating, the languages blend together in my mind, and when I hear this, what gets carried over isn't a grandiose idea. The songs merge together and what is brought forth is a new song. Such stunning and mysterious harmony. That probably sounds silly, but it's the closest I've come to believing in something more, something other than this, something of awe that humbles me. Not a god, but a sound.”

It's what she used to keen her ear to, not one language or the other, but the melding of sound, a gestalt of sound.

“Can you sing?” He is hovering less than a meter from her.

“You mean really sing?” She laughs. “I need to be a lot drunker than I am now.”

For a moment, he does nothing. Then with both hands on the table, he pushes himself to standing. He takes a deep breath, filling his lungs, his chest opening, his face expanding, and begins to sing in English an old Dean Martin song, “Under the Bridges of Paris.”

His voice circles around her, sweeps her up, vibrating her teeth, her skull, and something deep inside relaxes, opens, and blossoms. His voice sounds like three voices at once—a deep baritone rumbling below a streaming tenor, and, rippling through it all, a high C tenor. She glances at Renzo, who is beaming, as is everyone at the table, radiantly beaming and they all look so beautiful.

But the song abruptly stops. “To flatten your belly in two weeks, try Pounds Off, the liquid diet,” he says, in a completely different voice.

Midori, who must have come into the room during this performance, shrieks with laughter and applauds. Moto, sitting now, begins to sing, “London Bridge is falling down, falling down—”

Renzo frowns. The guests quickly return to their private conversations, as if nothing had just happened. As if just a moment ago, they had not been privy to an astonishing performance.

Moto, with a blank gaze, slurps his miso soup.

“You have a wonderful voice,” says Hanne, “when you choose to use it.”

He swallows. “Thanks for the backhanded compliment. I'll remember that.” His tone is good-natured. If she didn't know better, she'd think he was happy, the loss of his wife behind him and now ripe with good life, a beautiful woman, delicious food. But now she knows better.

“Tomorrow is your last full day here?” he says.

She nods.

“I've got a big day planned for us. We'll start early,” he winks at her.

Midori murmurs something in Moto's ear. He waves his hand as if shooing away a pesky bug. He shovels in spoonfuls of rice, then together Moto and Midori rise. Midori gives Hanne a small wave, a quick, triumphant smile. Then they are gone.

It's Saturday morning and Moto
is nowhere to be found. Renzo calls Midori. Yes, they left together. He dropped her off. He said he was going to see a friend, an old friend. Who? She doesn't know. Renzo makes more calls; no one has seen him.

“He was going to spend the day with you,” says Renzo. “He told me so.”

Given his inebriated state last night, Hanne doubts he remembers anything from then. By late Saturday afternoon, Renzo takes a deep breath and tries the hospital. No one has been checked in under that name or description. A dismal atmosphere falls over the house.

If Hanne harbored a grain of hope that she translated Moto correctly, it is now gone. Jiro—the Jiro she thought she knew—would never disappear for hours and hours on end. Even when he fantasized about picking up and escaping his life, the Jiro she translated bore the burdens of responsibilities to the very end, once a month dutifully visiting his wife in the institution.

Hanne has crossed over into unknown territory.

“I'm sure he's fine,” she says. She pictures him asleep in the car, or worse, the car plunged on its side in a ditch. “We could drive around and look for him. Why don't we do that?”

Renzo sits hunched over, quiet.

“I'll make some calls. Give me a list.”

When Brigitte left with the young man and didn't come home by evening, Hanne called all her friends. Had they seen her? What did they know about this young man? Some smoky character with a sly grin. No one would tell her anything, though she sensed they knew. For hours, Hanne drove up and down streets looking for Brigitte, through the Tenderloin, along Market Street, the Mission District, passing drug dealers and prostitutes and runaways, and Hanne's heart beat so fiercely, she feared it would burst. At home alone, she couldn't sleep. She sat at her big window and stared out at the cold city cloaked in darkness, her reflection silently staring back at her. When Brigitte finally came home the next day, with her two new tattoos, her glazed-over eyes, Hanne said “I've been up all night. Just who do you think you are?”

“No one you want to know.”

“You're right,” she snapped. “Not like this.”

Brigitte looked at her, as if deciding whether Hanne really meant it. Then turned and went to her room and quietly shut the door. It seemed, after that, that a sheet of glass was forever between them. Brigitte firmly out of reach.

If she could take it back, if Hanne had taken Brigitte into her arms, told her she was frightened she'd lost her, frightened of receiving a nightmarish call that her daughter had been found in a ditch, a back alley, a dumpster. She couldn't lose one more thing.

Renzo clasps his hands together, almost as if he is about to pray.

The dog wants out. She stands on the back porch and watches Morsel run frantic laps around the yard. At some point Renzo comes over and stands beside her. The light makes the dew on the grass sparkle, and everything looks stunning except Renzo's face, with sunken cheeks, as if life has been chiseled out of him.

“Midori,” he says, his voice wobbly. “A bad influence. Her lineage is farming.”

Hanne doesn't reply. She's in no state to argue and neither is he. In the old apple tree, a group of birds bicker. Renzo frowns and for a long time says nothing. He hands her a list of phone numbers, then announces he's going to dig up the milkweed along the back fence. He can't just sit around anymore. Renzo marches to the fence and slams a hoe into the hard dirt.

She heads to the cottage and makes phone calls. No one knows anything. For a long time, she just sits, unable to do anything except listen to the steady beat of the hoe. Where is Moto? Would he have gone searching for his ex-wife? What does someone like Moto do? She thinks of Brigitte; how far did she run away? Her eyes wander over to her notes.

Months go by, Ono no Komachi can no longer afford the baths every day, and her silky black hair turns limp and oily, woven with strands of wiry, unruly gray. Whoever dares to sneak out of the imperial court to visit her doesn't do so to gaze upon her features, only to hear her poetry. But who would dare? Who would step outside the gates? No one. For whoever crosses over would return with the stench of her humiliation woven into his clothes.

And why was Ono no Komachi expelled in the first place? Hanne knows now how she'll write it in her play. A poem, maybe a series of poems that failed to please the court. Her mistakes cost her a way of life.

Hanne pushes her papers away. The dog starts barking and Renzo yells at it to shut up. Renzo is as irritable as she is. She needs to distract herself in order to calm down. She opens an anthology of Komachi's poems.
Iro miede utsurou mono wa yo no naka no hito no kokoro no hana ni zo arikeru.
She's drawn to the phrase in the center:
hito no kokoro no hana ni zo arikeru:
she translates it first as “the heart of man, like a fading flower.” Then translates it again, “a flower that fades, like a man's heart.” Or “a single flower fading, like the heart of a man.”

What is a faded heart? One without passion? Without lust? Buried in grief? Is this what's happened to Moto? How does one revive such a heart?

Sunday morning, Moto still has not returned. Midori hasn't seen him. No one has. Renzo wanders through the house, his hand covering his mouth, up and down the stairs, as if Moto might magically appear in a room where he's already looked.

On his fourth time up and down the stairs, Hanne tries to quell her own panic. “Has this ever happened before?”

“No,” he says sharply. “Something is wrong. Something bad.”

There's nothing else to do but postpone her flight. Renzo is in no shape to drive and she must do something. They have been so gracious with her, she must return the favor. But it's more than that—she's surprised how much she cares about Moto, how worried she is about him. A worry that seems to trump all her other concerns. She drives Renzo around, stopping at Moto's usual spots—the restaurant along the canal, the pool, the library, the bars, the coffee shop, theater—no one has seen him.

Neither she nor Renzo feel like eating supper. Renzo fills a glass with whiskey. The dog seems to sense something is wrong and keeps tucking his tail between his legs and whining.

“Where else can we look?” she says.

Renzo shakes his head. “Nowhere.”

“Might he have gone to Tokyo? Who does he know there?”

“Everyone. I don't know.”

“His ex-wife?”

“No. That's over.”

She says she's going to drive around again. Renzo doesn't do anything, just refills his glass.

The sky is a blanket of stars, and the air smells like cut hay. She drives to town, past the karaoke bars, searching for his shiny black Mercedes. What's next? Flyers posted to telephone poles, inside store windows, and in train stations, a grainy black and white photo of Moto, underneath in big bold letters,
missing
.

When she returns to the darkened house, it is past midnight. She traipses around the side of the house, through the dew-covered grass to the cottage so as not to wake Renzo. As she gets ready for bed, she realizes she's waiting for Morsel to scratch on the door, but the dog never arrives. It takes her hours to fall asleep. When she finally does, she has nightmares in which she is running through the fields, searching the tall grasses for a body.

Monday goes by. Renzo calls the hospital again. Nothing. He is convinced Moto has been in a terrible car accident. It won't be Moto who appears at the house, but police officers with bad news. Hanne can barely get down a piece of dry toast. She spends most of the night half awake, listening, feeling helpless. At some point, she stands at her window. The sky is filled with frozen stars. Come on, Moto. Gather yourself and drive yourself home. Come drunk through the front door, bash into the Buddha, cause a ruckus, it won't matter because you're home.

Early Tuesday morning, she hears a car groan into the driveway. There's no grand entrance, a key in the front door and he stumbles into the foyer, as if he'd stepped out for milk.

“He's home!” says Renzo from his room upstairs.

Hanne is already at the front door. “You're here.”

What she does not say: Where have you been? Do you know how worried I've been? She hunts for some sign of contrition.

Moto slips off his shoes and tosses them near the door.

He doesn't look well. Deep blue circles beneath his eyes, a heavy sag to his face and eyelids, and a crease—a new wrinkle?—cuts through his birthmark. It's back to the shape of Montana, but now it's sliced in half. His face looks too lived in, as if he's spent the last few days living out a thousand lives.

Renzo is all over Moto, a mix of joy, exhilaration, anger—“Where were you? Why didn't you call?”

“I'm so glad you're all right,” says Hanne.

They stand in the foyer. Moto raises his eyebrows, as if to say: what's the fuss about? He went to a friend's house, he says. He fell asleep.

“For three days? You must have been drinking and blacked out. When is this going to stop? Lazy! That's what you are. Lazy and a drunk! I was worried sick! I thought you were dead. How could you make me worry like this? You are so selfish!”

Moto looks like he's about to say something, but then walks away.

“Where are you going now?” Renzo follows right on his heels.

Hanne tries to interject. “We're going to have breakfast—”

“A goddamn glass of water,” says Moto, turning to confront his brother, who almost runs into him.

“Next time you can tell me where you're going,” says Renzo, barely able to keep his voice level. “That's the least you can do.”

“Why?”

“You don't want my help? Fine. You'll lose it all. Everything. See if I care. But you'll hear our parents and our ancestors crying out from their graves.”

Moto rolls his eyes and heads to the kitchen.

Out on the patio, Renzo can't sit still. He paces back and forth, picks up clippers, sets them down. “What's wrong with him? Is he sick? On drugs?”

“It's a difficult time for him,” she says, just talking, trying to fill the charged air with something else. “His wife, his employment. It's hard for him to stay engaged with the world, let alone carry on the day-to-day. You must go easy on him.” She can hardly believe she's saying these words. In another life, she was Renzo shouting the exact same things.

Moto spends the entire day in his room. Renzo presses his ear to the door. A low rumbling of a snore. He's sleeping again! How can that be? Three days of sleep and he needs more? Renzo paces back and forth in the front dining area. Finally he says he's going out. He can't stand it. Did you see how he looked? An old man, he looks older than me, cries Renzo, picking up Morsel and cradling him like a baby. “Last night I had a nightmare that Moto went to sleep and never woke up.”

After Renzo leaves, the silence is stifling. The house, as always, is freezing. She sits at the table and turns on the heater, waiting for Moto to wake, wondering: what worlds whirl under his eyelids?

When, an hour later, Moto is still asleep, she finds the keys to his car and drives in a downpour to the grocery store. The least she can do is stock the refrigerator. As she pushes the cart up and down the aisles, her brain feels like mush, each thought straining through mud to make its way to the surface. What do they need? What's wrong with Moto? Seaweed, salmon, more rice, what else? Is he sick? He misses his wife so much he's making himself ill? Drinking himself into a comatose state? Fallen into depressing despair? She goes round and round the grocery store, as if hunting for something, though she has no idea what it is.

When she gets back, she hears dreary music with lyrics repeating,
Life is so boring
,
Life is so boring,
coming from Moto's room. She knocks lightly.

“Come in.”

She pokes her head in. “How are you feeling?”

In the murky light, he's sitting up in bed, wearing a flimsy blue robe, his bare chest partly exposed. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them wide. His deep-set eyes look even deeper and his face is sweaty, pale. He makes a strange sound, like a swallowed breath.

She's not sure when Renzo is returning, she says, so she'll cook dinner tonight. “If you have any special requests, let me know.”

She's never been inside his bedroom. It isn't the smell of sleep in the air or the rustle of his sheets that stir her as he adjusts himself on the bed. Lining his walls are more than two dozen masks. Red, blue, green demons with bulging eyes and horns, an old man with wrinkles, a gray beard, his hair tied up in a topknot; a man, his mouth partially opened, as if he's about to laugh or cry, another man with a white complexion, wide-eyed, who looks like he's seen a ghost or is a ghost; then a row of women—a young woman, with a broad forehead, high arched eyebrows and full cheeks, a middle-aged woman, her lips taut, her forehead wrinkled, and an old woman, her face lined, a quiet dignity.

Expressions of horror, despair, alarm, they seem alive, about to speak. As if they held the spark of life. How do you wake up to this and feel all is right with the world?

“You look like you should eat something now,” she says.

He nods slowly.

She brings him a bowl of miso soup and brown rice crackers. With a trembling hand, he sips a couple of spoonfuls of soup, eats a cracker. “Just wanted to drown this sad old heart,” he says.

“Have you tried speaking to your ex-wife?”

“In the early months. Every day. Then she told me to stop calling,” he says, rubbing his eyelids. He is back to speaking English, which she takes as a good sign. At least he has the energy for that.

Hanne doesn't know what to say. “Moto,” she says, her voice gentle, “you can't hold on to her forever.”