Translator (22 page)

Midori steps out of a taxi. She hands some money to the driver and saunters up the front path. “I forgot some things,” says Midori. “It's hard living so scattered. Some things here, some things at my apartment.”

Midori smiles coyly at Hanne and slips off her pristine white high heels. Beside them are Hanne's walking shoes. How dirty they've become. A dark stain colors the toe of one shoe and both soles are worn thin. They were new when she arrived, and now they look as if she's trekked thousands of kilometers.

Midori heads to Moto's bedroom. Hanne puts on the tea kettle and sits at the table. A bowl of purple plums is in front of her. She picks one up. An astonishing purple. She rubs her thumb over its smooth, taut surface. Unexpectedly, the image of Moto's chest comes to mind. His robe spilling open, revealing his smooth, hairless chest.

The tea kettle whistles and Hanne brings out tea cups and the pot. Midori is waiting at the table.

“Renzo said you've enjoyed your stay here,” says Midori, biting into a plum. “You know, you do look better. The worry lines have left your face.”

Hanne lets pass the irritation of having a woman half her age assess her appearance. This woman, who in the past barely said a word to her, is now conversing. Perhaps without the male gaze flitting up and down her body, Midori no longer feels compelled to play the sex bomb.

“So Moto is back on stage,” says Midori. “It was just bad karma being used up. Now the good can return.”

Karma, from Sanskrit meaning action. This must be the kind of mystifying talk that has kept Brigitte spellbound over the years. Life assured and reassured, absolved of everything, it's nothing personal, this hardship, this pain. And the implicit guarantee that life will go on and on, the unfortunate or devastating only an incidental event. She can understand the appeal. Maybe if she'd been introduced to this spiritual mumbo-jumbo when she was Brigitte's age, she too would have signed up.

“He's something to behold.”

“I'm sure,” says Hanne.

Midori sets her cup down and leans forward. “Let me tell you a secret. Off stage, he's nothing like what you see on stage. Who could be that way all the time? I'm telling you this so you don't get the wrong idea about him. So many women fall for him and end up disappointed.”

How much easier if this chapter of her life was about a love story. “And you, Midori? You're not disappointed?”

Midori shakes her head emphatically. She says she never knows when she'll see him again. He comes and goes as he pleases. “I accept him for who he is.”

“And who is he?”

Midori laughs, covering her mouth with her hand.

“What's so funny?”

“I don't know. You make it sound so simple. As if you could just say who he is.”

She thinks Midori is being evasive and coy. “Oh, come on. Try.”

She stops laughing and looks directly at Hanne. “No, you try.”

In the morning, when she opens the back door and enters the kitchen, Hanne hears light music trickling over her. Relieved, she knocks on his door.

“Come in.” He's sitting cross-legged on the floor, sorting through his CDs. “I'm sorry if the music was too loud.”

“Not at all.” The silence has been stifling, she wants to say, as if I've been sentenced to solitary confinement. And also: it's awfully good to see you. She'd like to hug him. The simple act of human contact.

“I've got the day off.” Before she can suggest that they do something together—a walk, breakfast, anything at all, he's says he's come to pick up some music to take back to his hotel room. He's in rehearsal from morning to dusk, he says, and he hasn't had one drink since his return. His face is full of color, his eyes bright, shining, his birthmark barely there. It seems his return to the theater has suited him. More than suited him.

“You look good,” she says. “You've found your stage again.” She sits at his desk. “So how is it? Does it feel as if you never left?”

He doesn't answer right away. “It's different. Better. It's like dying and coming back to life. Everything is vibrant, alive and incredibly beautiful, so beautiful you want to weep.”

She pictures Charon carrying Moto across the River Styx and depositing him on the verdant shore of life, shaking his fist at Moto: “Now is not your time.”

“I was walking down the street yesterday and stopped at a puddle,” he says. “The sun was shining and the puddle was glimmering and sparkling. Cars were zooming by, people rushing behind me, but I couldn't tear my eyes away from it. It was holding light and dark, the road beneath it, the clouds and sky overhead. The longer I looked, the more I saw. Not just the road beneath, but the dirt and the rocks and the worms, and above, the birds and the stars, the entire galaxy. I haven't felt this alive since—I can't remember.”

She remembers her ecstatic entrance into the world after the hospital—that was soon gone. She has to stop herself from saying that that feeling won't last.

He looks at her with concern. “Are you all right?”

She shakes her head. “It's nothing. I'm sorry.”

The music is still playing. He waits, and it seems he will wait until she speaks.

“My daughter.” Why is she telling him? There's nothing he can do, that anyone can do. This is her burden, her cross. “There seems so little I can do for her. I feel so helpless. I've made so many mistakes.”

He comes over to her, folds himself around her.

Is this part of his coming back to life? Or hers?

“She'll find her way,” she says, wanting to believe that, wanting to pull herself together.

He runs a finger from her throat to her breast bone, his touch full of appreciation. Wordlessly, they drift over to the bed into the tumble of blankets and sheets that fold around them like waves. His fingers spill all over her, unbuttoning her blouse, her skirt. She hesitates only a moment before unzipping his trousers. He lifts her hair and kisses the back of her neck, her mouth, tentative, then more insistent. She's nearly forgotten the part that's alighting, heating her body. He's saying something, wiping the tears from her face.

Coming up out of it. Something along the way awakened and now swells inside her. An ache that catches in her throat. They lie in bed on the smooth white sheets, the smell of sex in the air. The shade is pulled down, the room dark, and the world feels like a vast emptiness, only the two of them left. He strokes the inside of her arm. She closes her eyes to stop them from watering.

“Here,” he says, and hands her a tissue.

Not passion for him. She's overwhelmed by a deep, raw longing for Brigitte.

In the morning, the ache for Brigitte has lodged in her chest.

“Oh, Hanne, you look so beautiful and sad,” says Moto.

At his urging they head to the pool. She swims in the ocean, which she's learned is always kept a steady 26.1 degrees Celsius. When she gets out of the water, she lies on her beach towel in the white sand and listens to the waves roll onto shore. As Moto predicted, she finds herself thinking the waves are real, as well as the ocean, the sand, the warm breeze ruffling her hair.

Moto comes out of the water and kisses her cheek. She feels a foolish happiness. She asks him to tell her again what it's like to come back from the dead. The words well up inside him and spill over to her. Him, wanting her to experience what he is experiencing, and her, listening greedily.

She closes her eyes and drifts. Her throat is dry. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. Where is her water bottle? She looks around, trying to get her bearings—she's at the beach, Moto is swimming again, the waves are gently rolling in, palm trees waving in the breeze, and a girl is sitting beside her in the white sand.

The girl's knees are drawn up to her chest, and she's staring at Hanne. Her black hair is tied up in a ponytail, she smiles shyly. She must be ten or eleven, thin limbs, toenails painted seashell pink. Is this the sister of the boy who asked for a pen? She hands Hanne a paper origami crane and scampers away. On one of its blue wings, there is writing in English.
A pine tree pines for you.

Another memorized line of English learned at grammar school? The girl has already vanished in the crowd. Probably hiding, watching Hanne's reaction, giggling. She reads the line again. Her head pounds, not like it did after the accident. The throbbing is in the back of her head, as if someone threw a ball from behind and smacked her. Was she struck by something as she dozed? Or last night, sleeping in Moto's arms, did she dream something hit her and as the fake beach has become real, so has her dream?

She puts the crane on her towel. Then picks up her book, Shakespeare's
Macbeth
in Japanese. She found the book in Renzo's library and tucked it into her bag, thinking she'd spend the day reading. But the book is so poorly translated that she finds it impossible to read without re-translating it.
Life's nothing but a dark shadow, a poor player fretting on stage. And then it's over.
She can remember the original sentence from secondary school:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more.

She picks up the girl's handwritten note again. “Pining,” she says with immense effort. Her ear perks up. She says it again. The pursing of her lips, followed by a puff of air, a sound gliding upward to the front of her mouth, the tip of her tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth, her soft palate relaxing, letting the air pass through her nose.

“Pining,” she whispers. “Pine. Pining. Pines.”

She stands up and tries to get Moto's attention. He's charging back and forth in the water. She looks around to see if anyone heard her; if there is someone she might speak to. “Hello,” she says to no one. The segment of her brain right beneath her forehead is pounding. “Hanne Schubert. My name is Hanne Schubert.”

She is speaking English.

She walks to the water and swims out to him.

Is it all back? She recites memorized passages of
Macbeth
out loud. The words come slowly, but it seems that her entire cartload of English has returned, intact. How hard she worked to master this language. She remembers a teacher with chestnut hair writing an English word with white chalk on the blackboard—though she can't recall which classroom or what country—and she is at her scratched wood-top desk, hungrily copying it down. After the final bell, rushing home, not stopping at the candy shop, because she'd assigned herself more vocabulary, more exercises to do. The Germanic-based words came easily, so she concentrated on the elegant Latinate words. English soon became her preferred language. A language of action, of power, of agency, with its verb usually located at the beginning of the sentence, she used it all the time, instead of her German. Soon, English words came to her more quickly than German or Dutch. She hears herself explaining to her mother, “It's the first global lingua franca, which means the whole world is open to me. I can travel anywhere, live anywhere, become anything, and one day I'll move to America.”

Moto sees her and swims toward her. When Hanne announced her intentions, her mother snapped: “You're no genius. If you want a chance at any of those possibilities, you better work harder than everyone else. You've got to prove yourself worthy.”

Now a vision comes to Hanne, but not one of possibilities. She sees herself clearly—a woman living in San Francisco alone, in bed by nine, awake by six, a brisk walk, a purchase of a coffee, a hot bun, back to her silent apartment to work (what work?), a light supper of dark bread, prosciutto, brie, and a bowl of udon, in bed again by nine. So stark! So dull! So dull because she centered her life on the narrowest of perches; there she is, her former self in her king-size bed, a middle-aged woman fighting off a hot flash and the bed suddenly looks like a white raft, the anchor pulled up. She's adrift with the wreckage that is her life, floating out to sea.

But she's not there, she tells herself. She's here. And there are still possibilities. She need not settle for her old life.

“Good morning, Moto,” she says in English. “So very nice to see you.”

The Noh Theater is a
stately red-brick building, a former textile mill from the nineteenth century where silk was once woven into bolts of beautiful cloth for kimonos. The machines are long gone, replaced by tiered red velvet chairs nailed to the floor in a semicircular ring, their attention riveted on the stage. The stage is essentially empty. No curtain separates it from the audience, nothing is hidden—glassy wood floors, only a backdrop of a painting of an old gnarled pine tree. Over the main stage, four pillars support a roof, which looks like it once belonged on a Shinto shrine. It is Japan's version of beauty, everything stripped to its essence.

Renzo points to the bridge on the left that leads to the main stage. That's where Moto will enter, he says. “We watch as he moves from the real world to the stage. See the green curtain at the beginning of the bridge? Behind that curtain, there's a room where he looks at the mask until he can summon the spirit of the character.”

Summons the spirit of the character? She feels the momentum of curiosity stir: How does he do that—and get it right?

Someone calls out to Renzo. He excuses himself and trots across the theater to a group of his friends.
the great noh actor is back,
that was the headline in this morning's local newspaper, which Renzo cut out and proudly announced to her that his parents and ancestors were rejoicing in their graves. Renzo is shaking hands with a whole crowd of people, a big grin on his face. Moto is clearly the draw, the reason the theater is packed and buzzing with excitement. She watches Renzo, who is nodding and smiling. She has yet to tell him that her English has returned, though her other languages are still off in an anteroom of her brain. Does she think that if he knew, he'd have sent her back to San Francisco? Not permit her to see Moto perform? But if that's true, why does she feel a growing apprehension as the time approaches for the plays to begin?

She finds a seat near the front, on the aisle, and skims the program.
Moto, who has appeared in over 2000 productions,
a Japanese treasure,
on and on.
A Noh play depicts one sweeping emotion that dominates the main character. As in life, words often fail to adequately express emotion, so Noh fuses music, dance, costume, song, and mask.
She glances through the texts of the plays; though most Japanese already know the plays, the text is provided for people like her, word-bound, because even native Japanese-speakers don't understand the words sung by the actors and chorus.

Before she can read the first play, the lights flick on and off. Renzo scurries over, takes the seat beside her, and squeezes her hand. “Here we go.”

Four musicians shuffle onto the stage. The theater darkens and a flute fills the theater with a spectral sound. Minutes later, drums join in and a rhythm emerges, the flute flinging off light, airy notes, and the drums thudding low. But before the rhythm becomes predictable, the tempo changes, one drum beats faster, more insistent, demanding. She settles into it, but then it changes again—a beat goes missing, as if it found something better to do.

The music lulls like a habit, then disturbs. But given time, even the unexpected becomes predictable. This goes on for a while, a long while, and she listens, anticipating the disturbance, guessing when the music will change, guessing right nearly every time. Soon this game becomes tiresome. She looks around to see who's fallen asleep. On the other side of the aisle, a gray-haired man's chin is pressed to his chest; the slow steady rise and fall of his shoulders keeps its own beat. Someone two seats in front of him has assumed the same pose. She closes her eyes. She hears Renzo's raspy exhale. She listens to that. Then back to the music. Renzo's exhale, the music. Back and forth until she's sliding through memories, one after another, landing at her old desk, once her mother's, made from the sturdy boards of a German cargo ship. As she worked, Hanne used to rub her fingers against the grain, back and forth, the good years, thick and pronounced; the bad years, barely discernable to her fingertips. But her fingers knew and she heard the hum underneath her translation, a bad word choice, a good choice, a bad, a good, imprecise, perfect, horrid, perfect, dreadful, dreadful that diamond stud in Brigitte's left nostril that provoked and gleamed and dared, dared Hanne to say something, anything about it. “You're only fourteen,” said Hanne, trying to use a level voice. “Get that thing out of your nose.”

Brigitte stood in the doorway, expressionless. Hanne was so tired of the fighting, the sniping. Hanne looked at Brigitte's unwashed greasy hair, her dirty white T-shirt, her baggy sweatpants. How had her daughter become so thin? So unkempt? To herself she quoted Keats, “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.” Why must Brigitte forsake everything she's been given, that Hanne labored to give her? Out of love, mind you, to show you your wealth of possibilities.

Renzo bumps her elbow. Hanne opens her eyes. A whispered apology. No one new on stage, nothing has happened. She stares at the stage. Friends had often insisted she see a Noh production—you know the language, of all people, Hanne, you'd appreciate it. She doesn't understand a word. Why did she let Brigitte's physical appearance bother her so much? A faulty assumption that slovenliness meant laziness and the puncturing of her nostril meant disrespect. It all seems so mortifyingly trivial now. How small of her to care how Brigitte looked. How unkind, how unloving, because Brigitte—she's thinking of Moto's three-day stupor now—must have been trapped in grief over the loss of Hiro. And in need of Hanne. Not her firm hand or harsh rebukes. Or banishment across the country. That's how Brigitte saw it, according to Tomas. Hanne abandoned her in her time of need. And what did she need? Something far more generous, Hanne sees that now.

Hanne tries to concentrate. The music changes, the flute is gone. As she stares at a musician's shiny white shirt, her mind drifts again; then out of nowhere, the image of a white bowl of blueberries being rinsed under tap water. The tap water comes out orange brown. Rust in the pipes. What memory is this?

The flute rejoins the drums, like a wisp of a woman weeping.

Blueberries in a white bowl. How to translate that? In a white bowl, blueberries. Blueberries. In a white bowl. A bowl of blueberries. Her mind rearranges the words until finally she sees herself, seven or eight years old, sitting on the sun porch eating a bowl of blueberries, doing a crossword puzzle. Her father sat next to her smoking his pipe, the air filling with the scent of cloves, his lips kissing the pipe stem. The faucet ran in the kitchen, and from her parents' back bedroom a radio played something slow. Hanne put a spoonful of sweet berries in her mouth and bit each one separately, telling herself to remember this moment, sitting in the warm air, next to her father, her mother inside, humming something sweet in German, remember life could contain this extraordinary happiness, and that it would eventually disappear. Later, she looked back at herself and marveled at her clairvoyance. Soon after that bowl of blueberries, she and her parents moved again. She remembers weeping, “I don't want to go.” Which was dismissed with silence. She was once again taken away from her few friends whom she had so patiently and carefully courted.

Compared to what has previously occurred, what follows on stage is a frenzy of activity: eight men file onto the main stage, carrying colorful fans, and sit with their legs tucked beneath them. Expressionless, their faces reveal nothing.

With a swish of silk, an actor finally steps onto the bridge in a black robe patterned with white squares. He wears the old man's mask, with a wrinkled, gray complexion, a topknot of gray. His white-socked feet skate along the floor, his upper trunk slightly ahead of his lower, as if there is an invisible force urging him along. It's Moto's manner of moving—is it him?

The old man on the bridge raises his arm and the chorus begins to chant. “Yo! Oh! Oh!” The voices fall at the end of each of the sounds in a monotonous cadence. And then more sounds, incomprehensible with the dragged vowels, the strange enunciation that resembles the chanting of an ancient Greek tragedy. She can't make sense of it, as if she's been sent to a foreign country and doesn't speak the language, and there is no hope of learning it.

The old man skates back and forth on the bridge, as if the air has currents that sweep and circle him. The chorus chants its gibberish and minutes go by, though it feels like hours. Finally, another actor emerges on the bridge in the mask of a young woman. The actor sings something in a low monotone voice. Except for the mask and costume, she's no different than the other actor. Her song, if it can be called that, is a shredding of words into their fundamental elements of sound and air. Hanne gropes for something, a word. It must be archaic Japanese. She steals a glance at Renzo. He's smiling, nodding, visibly enjoying the performance.

After some effort—that back-and-forth motion—the two actors finally make it to the stage. She peeks at her watch. An hour! Something should happen now. But the actors glide and whirl, waving their fans, the monotonous beat of the drums, the moaning vowels. There seems no point. It's akin to watching someone cook, fold laundry, read the newspaper, on and on, until the day dims and dies out and it's time for bed. There is no crescendo; nor, she suspects, will there be one. Closing her eyes, she wills herself to think of something pleasant.

Swimming, of all things, she finds herself in her mind swimming. The waves are choppy, the water ice green-blue. She's floating, drifting, staring at the cloudless blue sky. When she turns on her stomach, there's no sight of land, blue sky and ice green water—how did she float so far? Moto appears beside her. He nonchalantly nods hello.

How did we get out so far? she says, trying to keep fear from her voice.

He shakes his head. Don't know.

Which way is land?

He shrugs.

Which way are you going? she says.

This way.

Why? She hopes he says land, safety, she'll be safe if she follows him.

Current's going this way.

She must have dozed because when she opens her eyes again, new actors populate the stage, different costumes and masks, but it might as well be the same play. The same movement, the same dull droning of words. Is Moto on stage?

The play grinds on. During intermission, she's supposed to rave to Renzo about the stunning costumes, the captivating dances. Thankfully, Renzo is surrounded by friends who are doing just that. She overhears someone say Moto has yet to appear.

She steps outside, hoping the fresh air will ease her irritation and wake her up. Rain floats down, a soft misty rain. How little space between things, she thinks, growing more agitated and annoyed. Every single building abuts another building, and the sidewalks are so narrow that people must crowd, bump shoulders, jostle and almost collide, murmur apologies, and the alleyways are crammed with more shops, more signs, more carts and vending displays, more and more people.

She steps back inside and waits in the lobby. Before the lights turn off, she reads the title of the fourth play,
The Bridge to Nowhere
. It's a new play, not part of the traditional repertoire. Bare bones of a story: a woman's son runs away to the big city to seek his fortune, only to end up living on the street. She turns again to the front of the program.
Noh is the display of yugen or quiet beauty.
A nebulous, mysterious word, she thinks. “Yu,” she knows, means dark, phantom-like, and “gen,” subtle and profound.

When the lights flicker, she sighs and returns to her seat. An old man comes onto the bridge. Him again, she thinks, rolling her eyes. She looks around. The audience is Japanese, and they are, for the most part, alert now. Possibly even enjoying this. She couldn't feel more alien in this moment. Arrogant of her to profess that she understands the Japanese. One of their oldest art forms and she doesn't have a clue. Then she thinks she hears the word “depraved.” She decides the old man is depraved and perhaps deranged because of the odd angle of his mouth, with its slackened lower jaw. He, too, moves in that strange way, which, by now, looks familiar, so familiar that she wonders if she began walking now, walking right out of here, she'd float along in the same manner.

More time passes before the second actor appears. Again it takes a while to make out a single word. “Beggar.” He's the beggar. Then she hits gold; in quick succession, she hears “clouds,” “mist,” “obscure.” A speck of satisfaction surges, and she tries to draw it out, savor it.

Now there's the haunting music to contend with. Again she's lost the lexicon. One of the drums sounds like raindrops hitting a steel roof. Is it supposed to signify rain? It probably means absolutely nothing.

Her only consolation: after this one, there's only one more play, then she can leave.

The air suddenly turns charged. The theater swells with the stillness of stunned absorption. She opens her eyes. The theater is silent except for the rustle of silk as someone moves on the bridge in the same stylized fashion as the other actors, but not like the others because he's barely moving at all, yet there's a force to his being, a magnetism that grabs and holds the eye, her eye.

She sits at the edge of her seat, her heart pounding. It's Moto, she has no doubt. Wearing a sumptuous robe of bright gold, embroidered with orange and red fans. His mask is smooth, with arched eyebrows, and his mouth slightly open, revealing white teeth. Black strands of hair fall in curls on his smooth forehead. She recognizes the mask, that of a beautiful young boy. He looks like the embodiment of purity, of innocence, of vulnerability.

“Look at him,” whispers Renzo, a white shine to his voice. “Do you see him?”

Moto glides over to a post along the bridge and gazes at the actors on the main stage, his mouth at a palsied slant. He seems to be emoting longing. But how? He's wearing a mask. Raising his arms over his head, he opens his mouth, or so it seems, and out comes metal scraping against metal. Is he beseeching the beggar? The old man? What does he want?