The translator, p.21
The Translator, page 21
Tomas asks if she’s checked in with her doctor. Tomorrow, she tells him she’s going to call her doctor tomorrow, though she has no intention of doing so. She realizes she’s resigned herself to speaking only Japanese. English, and all her other languages, they belong to a former life.
He begins talking about holiday plans—Christmas. Does she want to come to New York, or should they come to San Francisco? Or maybe they should meet on neutral territory.
Neutral territory? Are they at war? “It’s only March.” Is it March? She’s not even sure what month it is.
“How about Colorado?”
She sighs. Removes her earrings and necklace and massages her sore toes. For some reason, her good shoes don’t fit her any longer. “Fine. How are the girls? I miss them.”
Then: “Brigitte called and needed money.”
“Why?”
A pause.
“Christ.” Then: “Don’t worry, Mom. I took care of it.”
“What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“Forget it. I shouldn’t have said anything. Colorado. Or we could head to Tahoe.”
“Can I help? How much money?”
“No.” He sighs. “She wouldn’t accept help from you anyway.”
Like a slap to the face. “Why not?”
“Do we have to go over this now? I’ve told you all this before.” He waits for what seems like a long time. “She believes you kicked her out of your life at the very time she needed you most. You sent her off to boarding school when she was so traumatized—that’s her word, not mine—about Dad’s death.”
She doesn’t remember him saying it like that. She doesn’t remember him saying the words “traumatized,” or “needed you most.” She thinks she’d remember that. That strong language. Those loaded words.
She repeats what she’s told him before, what she’s told everyone before—Brigitte was ruining her life. Something had to be done. To protect her. Save her.
He sighs again. “I know, Mom, I know. That’s how you see it.”
She tightens her grip on the phone cord. “What does that mean?”
“Look, you wanted to get into this, not me. She said she needed you and you turned your back. You sent her away. Abandoned her. And it doesn’t matter what I believe. But I warned you not to. I told you she was too sensitive.”
“I thought she’d eventually understand that it was in her best interest.”
“What about when Maria moved away?” he snaps.
Brigitte’s best friend from Russia. When Brigitte was eleven, Maria’s parents separated, then divorced, and Maria’s mother took her back to Russia. Hanne knew Brigitte would be upset, but it went beyond that. Brigitte refused to eat or do anything. One harsh or impatient word and tears spilled from her eyes.
At dinner one night, Brigitte pushed her food around on her plate with a fork and said she had to go to Russia. She missed Maria so much. Hiro said she was fortunate to have had such a good friend. But, Hanne interjected, they weren’t going to yank her out of school for such a trip. She could wait until summer. They’d set up a list of chores for Brigitte to earn the money for the airfare. She could see by the way Hiro looked down at his plate that he disagreed. But he wouldn’t challenge her in front of Brigitte. They’d have their disagreement behind closed doors.
“But I have to go,” said Brigitte, shaking her head slowly, as if acknowledging some unspoken thought.
“You will. But not now.”
Tomas chimed in with a long list of things he wanted, but didn’t get, as if he was trying to console his sister. As he went on, Brigitte quietly pushed back her chair, went to her room, and shut her door. A moment later, she came out and announced that she’d just swallowed a bottleful of aspirin.
Now Hanne says: “She was eleven when that happened. When she went to boarding school, she was fourteen. She was a different girl by then, a very different girl. Once she was at boarding school, everything was fine. She made new friends, so many new friends.”
“She hasn’t spoken to you in six years. How is that fine?” She can hear the fury in his voice. Is it because he’s been made responsible for Brigitte? Bearing the full burden of parenting? How many phone calls has he fielded from Brigitte asking for something, requesting guidance? “Did we live in the same house? With the same person? But I forget. This is what you do. Assign qualities to people so you can approve of them.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Whatever you told yourself about Brigitte then so you could justify sending her to boarding school and believe she’d be fine.”
“What a horrible thing to say.”
He exhales loudly. “Christ, I’m under a lot of stress right now. Forget I said that. Forget the money. Forget everything.” He says he’ll buy her ticket to Colorado and he’ll rent a condo. They’ll have plenty of room. A week together for Christmas. And now he says he must go—a million things pressing.
She sets the receiver down in its cradle and watches the gingko trees flutter their heart-shaped leaves. A gray morning light saturates the room. She sees three small green buds nestled on the high branches of the apple tree. Soon the air will be scented with apple blossoms and summer with sweltering heat. A sign that things do not remain the same. And they haven’t, have they? Things have gotten worse. Brigitte requires money. The word money clattered around in her head last night, along with a steady stream of thoughts—Brigitte needing money, and for what? Medical bills? Car crash? Pregnancy? Money, and how will Hanne earn money if she has no job? But Brigitte won’t take her money.
Still, she pulls out her checkbook and writes a check to Tomas for five hundred dollars. Hardly anything, she knows. For Brigitte, she writes on the memo line, her hand trembling.
Renzo’s car is gone. She makes herself eat breakfast, then heads back to the cottage and stares at her play. What kind of story is it that ends with the main character’s life just fizzling and fading away? Ono no Komachi is banished from the court—and then what? She dies a crazy old woman? She tries to think what this woman could have learned in this abandoned state. Loneliness? The ache of her heart? Or might someone or something come along and cause the poet’s life to take another unexpected turn? She feels a flutter of excitement, but not enough to stop her from lying down on the bed and falling asleep again. Hours later, when she wakes, the dog is a small circle nestled on top of her feet.
Bleary-eyed, she gets up and wanders through the cold, empty house, with Morsel right on her heels. She does the few dishes in the sink, sweeps the kitchen floor. The wind picks up, blowing ghostly notes in the house made of paper walls. She makes herself go outside and sit in the back yard, hoping the fresh air will lift the dark mood that has settled over her shoulders like a shroud. Maybe she won’t stay for the Noh production; she’ll head back to San Francisco. But then what? She still can’t speak any English.
For dinner, she has a bowl of miso soup. She finds a black-and-white TV in the upstairs study and watches the news, not paying much attention, but occasionally repeating random words out loud, as if to hear a voice, any voice—“purge,” “roving,” “stolen,” “new zoo,” “betrayal.” When the drama shows come on, she still sits there, watching flickering images of women and men kissing, shouting, weeping into pillows.
In the morning with the house still empty, she takes the dog and heads out. She’s getting a taste of how old age will be, she thinks, these long stretches of nothing and no one. No. Not old age. Her life now. She briskly walks past the tall grasses.
When her legs are weary, she registers very little except her exhaustion. This is what she hoped for. To wear herself out. Though along the way, a phrase has gotten stuck in her head: I have been forsaken like a memory lost. Over and over it plays; she can’t remember who said it or if she’s remembering it correctly. When she gets home, she and the dog collapse; the dog splays out on the floor, panting, its pink tongue lolling out of its mouth. She flops down on her bed, her legs throbbing. Good, she thinks, too tired to move. There’s nothing she wants to do but lie here. She closes her eyes and sleeps until the sound of a car wakes her. She quickly brushes her hair and heads to the main house.
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.
