The interpreter, p.26
The Interpreter, page 26
“And isn’t it also true that you have not once seen your husband, Mr. Choi, since the day you stabbed the girl in your store, almost three years ago?” The INS attorney fixes her gaze on Mrs. Choi for a few seconds, and then turns to Judge Williams. “Your Honor, I have no further questions.”
The INS attorney spoke the truth on her cell phone earlier. Judge Williams’s ruling is only a formality. Relief was never a possibility. Deportation had begun the minute she stabbed that girl. She should’ve known better. Immigrants are not Americans. Permanent residency is never permanent. Anything can happen. A teenage thief on one unlucky night. A pair of INS informers eyeing your store. A secret murder that is not so secret anymore. And Suzy, sitting across from the INS attorney on the twelfth floor of the INS building, about to translate a deportation sentence for a Korean woman exactly her mother’s age.
When Judge Williams announces the removal date, Suzy chokes. Her voice is suddenly gone. She inhales deeply and then swallows once, twice. All faces are on her. Then she hears it again. The quiet murmur from Mrs. Choi.
Namuamitabul Kuansaeumbosal.
It’s the Buddhist chant Mom used to utter when Suzy got sick. It always made her feel better. A lullaby. A dead woman’s song.
23.
“HELLO, this is the Interpreter Hotline Services.”
“Hello, this is a message for Korean interpreter Suzy Park.”
“Hello, Suzy Park, please report to Job Number 009.”
She presses “Delete” after each message. It is no longer possible. An interpreter cannot pick sides. Once she does, something slips, a certain fine cord that connects English to Korean and Korean to English without hesitation, or a hint of anger.
For the past three days, the phone kept ringing while she lay in bed. Michael, pleading into her machine. Even in her deepest dreams, she heard his sighs. He would fume, demand that she answer. Then, half an hour later, a softer, sweeter, Suzy, please. His calls stopped overnight, which could mean only one thing. He must be back in Connecticut. Even Michael would not dare calling his mistress during a Thanksgiving dinner.
A half-dozen messages have been left by Detective Lester. Suddenly he is eager to get to the bottom of the case. With each call, he seems increasingly confident that he is closing in, although the three ex-KK suspects are still claiming that it was a setup. He has no doubt that he could convict the gang of firstdegree murder, although he seems unaware of their link to the Korean grocers. He never lets Suzy in on her parents’ backdealings with the INS, or with the police.
The girl from the accountant’s office has called more than once. “Grace is missing,” she squealed into the machine. “Grace still hasn’t come by to sign the papers. Please call us back as soon as possible.”
What is curious is how unmoved Suzy is, how unmotivated she is to pick up the phone. Instead, she is overcome by sleep. Her insomnia seems to have been miraculously cured. All she does now is sleep. No cigarette break. No water break. In between come those voices trailing off into the machine, voices from far away, voices belonging to dreams. The dream of the interpreter who no longer remembers her language.
“Hello, Miss Park?”
A woman, with a Jersey accent.
“Hi, this is Rose Goldman. I’m not sure if I have the right number.”
Ms. Goldman. The English teacher subbing for Grace. Suzy reaches for the receiver.
“I hope I’m not calling at a bad time. I thought I’d just leave a message. I was sure you’d be gone for Thanksgiving.” She must realize that Suzy, like Grace, has no family. “Oh, Koreans don’t celebrate our Thanksgiving, please pardon me. I have so many Korean students, I should know.” Ms. Goldman seems embarrassed at having been caught alone on Thanksgiving, although she is the one who called.
“Have you … heard from Grace?” Suzy asks, unable to shake off the persistent fatigue.
“No, not yet. But with Thanksgiving and all, the school’s out until next week anyway.”
Suzy is not sure why she is relieved. No news must be good news. Or is it?
“But yesterday, I remembered something. It’s really nothing, but it bothered me. I don’t know why, just a silly little thing.”
“Yes?”
“Do you remember how I told you that I found it odd that her boyfriend was in the music business?” Rose Goldman sounds almost bubbly now, like a suburban housewife flipping through her copy of Redbook. “I finally remembered why. I remembered some kids saying that he was missing a finger on his right hand. And being a musician—although, now that I think about it, he could be a producer or something—but a musician with a missing finger is a bit strange, don’t you think?”
They once each cut off their little fingers to honor their brotherhood, copying that crazy Yakuza ritual.
Closing her eyes, Suzy counts to three before firing the question: “Was it the little finger he was missing?”
“How did you know? Yes, that’s what the kids said, like those famous gangsters in Hong Kong movies!”
DJ.
The last member of the Fearsome Four.
The one who split on his own after the gang’s breakup.
The one smuggled into the country through the KK’s adoption fraud.
An orphan, with no ties in the world but for Grace.
DJ was supposed to have been deported in November 1995, right around the time of her parents’ shooting. Perfect timing, being sent back to Korea right after the crime. But, then, how is it possible that an ex-gang member who’d been deported reappears five years later, flaunting his BMW, picking up Grace after school? Why would Grace disappear with him? Why did Grace call Detective Lester out of the blue?
What was it that Detective Lester had said? It’s got KK fingerprints all over it. The way they do away with their enemies. The exactness of the shooting.
But the gang claimed that they were set up. They said that her parents were already dead when they arrived at the scene. According to Kim Yong Su, the grocers had never ordered KK to kill. If neither the ones who hired the gang nor the gang themselves had murder on their minds, is it possible that the murder might have been committed by someone else, with an entirely different motive? Someone intimate with the gang, who knew about their mission on that morning in 1995, who was not afraid to frame them? Yet who would have been clever enough to come up with such a plan?
The brave one. Someone so righteous that eliminating them would’ve been a necessity.
Suzy recalls the other clever setup. Maria Sutpen and her daughter, Grace, and a doll, Suzie, a cozy family portrait in her parents’ final house. The little girl seemed happy, as neither Grace nor Suzy had ever been. It is an odd way for things to turn out. Their final house in America given away to a stranger. A half-blooded Korean woman, Dad would have balked. Since when do you care about their wishes? But what they had wanted was not Montauk, not Damian, not Michael, not mistress Suzy, not Christian Grace, definitely not a gang member with a missing finger.
Suzy begins pacing the floor. The cigarette smells of gasoline. She stubs it out instantly. She glances at the ashtray filled with barely smoked cigarettes. Then it comes back to her.
He won’t crawl back to her. Definitely a changed man.
Grabbing her bag from the kitchen table, she pulls out a thin volume of stapled sheets, 1.5 Generation, the student magazine from Fort Lee High School. She flips the pages and finds the photo of the car that belongs to the “dude rich enough for Miss Park,” BMW M5, the same kind she’d seen parked outside Santos Pizza this past Saturday. Running to the closet, she rifles through the coats on the rack. Which one did she wear on that rainy day? Then, in one of the pockets, her fingers close on a crumpled piece of paper. She beeps the number and waits by the phone. It takes no more than a few minutes. These women waste no time getting back to clients. Even on Thanksgiving Day, which means absolutely nothing to an aging Korean prostitute.
“Mina here, someone beep me?” Her voice sounds noticeably husky, which must be her professional tone.
“Hi, I met you the other day,” Suzy stammers.
“Hey,” the woman cajoles in a low whisper, “don’t be shy. We’ve got girls for all kinds of clients.”
“No, no, no, that’s not it.” Then, hesitantly, “This is … Maddog’s girl.”
“Who? Oh, I remember now.” Her voice sinks.
“Johnny …” Suzy says nervously. “When you said that he was a changed man, did he, by any chance, also change his name?”
“Jesus, is that why you beeped me?”
“Sorry, it’s important.”
“What does this have to do with you?” She sounds irritated, yawning loudly into the receiver before answering: “Of course Johnny’s not the real name, no one in this business uses a real name, you think ‘Maddog’ is real?”
The BMW. The gang connection. The room salon in Queens. She does not even have to ask the next question.
“Did he use to call himself DJ?”
“So why you bothering me if you know the answer?” She is about to hang up when Suzy jumps in.
“What did Johnny do to cross Maddog years ago?”
No response. Silence at the end.
“Did Johnny tip off the cops this time?”
Anything to provoke an answer.
“Where is he now? Did he run off with Mariana?”
“Mariana with Johnny?” The woman lunges. “She would never! That bitch treats him like a dog.” The woman is seething. She seems to have been holding back for years. Over a decade of unrequited love. “He wouldn’t dare go running off to her now. What more does he want? I give him the car, I give him his Armani suit. He’s a fucking fool. Always Mariana, Mariana, even after I packed him off to Korea to get him away from her. All he talks about is how she’s the victim, how she needs to be saved, how she’s all alone. But what about me? What does he think I’ve been doing all these years?”
Suzy stands motionless, feeling the blood suddenly draining from her face. She is still holding on to the receiver, long after the woman hangs up. It takes a while for her to walk to the futon and climb between the sheets, facing the wall.
DJ, or Johnny, whatever he calls himself.
Was it him? Was it all for Grace?
And Grace?
What did she know?
How much did she know?
Why did she run away with him?
“Fuck them,” her sister chortles from the top bunk, sucking on a Marlboro. She is terrified, watching the door through which Dad might storm in at any second. “They’ll never catch me, ’cause they don’t want to.” She wants to sneak one of her sister’s cigarettes too, but she is only fifteen, still the younger one, still the one who never breaks rules. “Do me a favor, empty this for me, would you?” Her sister pokes her head from above, carefully handing her the full ashtray. A black plastic ashtray, which, upon emptying, reveals a cluster of white dots on its bottom. Seven stars in a circle. A secret code. A girl by the name of Mariana.
Through the metal window-guards is the rain, the relentless rain. And the red tip of the cigarette.
One day, if you find yourself alone, will you remember that I am too? Because you and I, we’re like twins.
24.
“MEET ME BY SUNFLOWERS.”
A thirtieth birthday, suicide to spend it alone, Caleb insisted. “It’ll be tattooed on your calendar, like the stupid sweet sixteen or the last date of your virginity!” Suzy had been inclined to stay home. She could not get out of bed. A celebration seemed impossible.
November 24th. The day after Thanksgiving. The Metropolitan Museum seems even more crowded than usual. It’s been years since she was here last. The Met had always been Damian’s territory. He had been a consultant for its East Asian Wing. He would come here whenever the mood struck, would retreat into one of its myriad rooms and disappear from Suzy. She would never accompany him. This was the world he kept separate from her.
She did not mind. He had thrown away everything for her, she thought. It seemed enough that they were together. It seemed enough to know that he would be with her from now on. She had jumped at the chance to play his young bride. She sat patiently and waited for him all day. She cooked elaborate Korean dishes. She threw on skimpy red lace and moaned harder each time she felt his attention drifting. Yet, once the initial shock of their escapade wore out, interminable silence hung in its place. Four years. It took her parents’ murder. It took their death for the two of them to finally give up.
Damian contacted her just once after she moved out. It came during the second year of her living alone. “Suzy, enough,” he commanded quietly into the machine. She did not pick up the phone. “Isn’t this what you wanted after all, to be free?” He had no doubt that she would come back to him in time. He knew that she had nothing else. And she would have if she could. She wanted to, more than anything in the world. But on nights when she cried in her sleep, on mornings when she woke missing his arms around her, she heard gunshots, the tumultuous explosion of two exact shots.
Now the police have behind bars suspects who might have pulled the trigger, who might have wanted to pull the trigger, who might be filling in for the real murderer.
The guard points to the second floor. European Paintings. It’s the nineteenth century she is looking for. Past the Grand Staircase, buried among the glorious pastels of Cézanne, Renoir, Seurat, Monet, are van Gogh’s mad strokes against the wall. From the crowd gathering in front, it is easy to spot Sunflowers.
“Hey, birthday girl, you look not a day older than twenty-five!” Caleb exclaims from the wooden bench in the middle of the room. Twenty-five, Suzy’s age when she first met him.
“Hi, how was home?” Suzy slides by his side, kissing him once.
“Rick told me we’re finished if I ever bring him home again.”
“Oh no, was it that bad?”
“Brutal. The funny thing is, they actually liked him. My mom even went on to say that she thought he was prettier than Boy George. It was Rick who couldn’t stand her. He said that she reminded him of Sally Jesse Raphael. I guess it was the glasses.”
Suzy smiles, picturing Caleb’s mother with her oversized red plastic frames.
“I had to rush back anyway to get ready for the opening. The artist is the newest British import. The next generation of the Sensation kids. He gobbles up classics and whips out blasphemous installations. A mannequin replica of one of Ingres’s ladies that slowly turns into Princess Diana puking. A Botticelli painting where all the boys are sucking the Pope’s dick. This time he’s on to Sunflowers.” Caleb turns to Suzy, rolling his eyes. “Personally, I don’t see the appeal. I’m so bored by blasphemy.”
Van Gogh’s sunflowers look almost morbid. Not the usual perky, happy yellow faces, but a close-up of two withering heads, as if in torment. Beautiful, yet haunting. The madman’s last reach for the sun.
“In Chelsea, no one gives a shit about the real thing. Everyone’s just dying to know what new offense is about to be committed against the masterpiece. Except Vincent practically invented blasphemy. Look at his strokes, look how he twisted Impressionism senseless!” Glancing at the group of Japanese couples who are now following their tour guide to the next painting, Caleb continues, “In college, I was the only art major totally obsessed with Vincent. Everyone thought I was so passé. You fall in love with van Gogh, you study him in Painting 101, you copy Starry Night for your first assignment, but you don’t obsess over him. While they all moved on to Mondrian, Beuys, Duchamp, I stuck loyal. Even now, Starry Night blows my mind. His cypresses make me weep. I used to read his letters every night before going to bed.”
Suzy is suddenly struck by the image of the sky-blue bowling jacket Caleb always wore when they lived together. It had “Vince” stitched above its right pocket. She had assumed that it belonged to a former boyfriend. Strange how long it takes to know a person. Yet somehow reassuring that a person could have so many secrets.
“His letters? So that’s what you were doing when you used to keep your lights on until dawn?” Suzy asks, half laughing.
“No, honey, I did other things too.” Caleb winks before continuing. “But I used to read his letters religiously. They’re painful. He was so damn alone. He wrote to his brother Theo almost every day. He told him every single detail of his life, down to the exact color of the sunset he’d seen that evening, the price of the paper he was writing on, the angle of his fingers gripping the pen. He was so needy. He begged women for love. He latched on to Gauguin for friendship. He threw himself into a painting frenzy. He even turned to God.”
“God?”
“Vincent covered the whole nine yards. Studied theology, did the Evangelical bit, taught the Bible. But he didn’t quite make it. He didn’t fit. His loneliness was too deep, it really couldn’t be helped.”
So alone, so incredibly, desperately alone.
Something begins to break down inside Suzy. Something she has known almost from the beginning.
“Why was he so lonely?”
But the answer is there already. They are like twins. Suzy and Grace.
“Who knows? He was mad for sure. But there were other things, like his family, for example. His parents, his uncles, his siblings, including Theo. They sheltered him. They found him jobs, paid his rent, sent him paper and brushes. They had a strong hold on him, and Vincent was dependent and hated himself for it, although his family was by no means at the core of his problems.”
“Then why write to Theo?”
“That’s what makes those letters so fascinating. He felt suffocated by his family’s love, and yet he couldn’t help being a part of it. He choked Theo with his daily reports. There was a certain boundary he never learned. The suffocation he felt might’ve had something to do with it. No boundary with anything, with his family, with himself, even with something as common as sunflowers. Look at how he paints nature! His flowers are unique because there’s absolutely no distance from the artist. For him, they’re all the same, the self-portrait, the local postman, the sunflower. It’s fun for us to sit back and analyze them, but for Vincent it must’ve been hell. You can only drive yourself crazy if you have no distance from the world.”
