Book of Numbers: A Novel (70 page)

Some situations were meetings of four people reading and some situations weren’t meetings but also four people reading. Still other business transpired, like the two bedheads blanking their faces above a twotop whose snidely gliding linens suggested footsie, legwork, crotching. Man with a hirsute Mediterranean goat vibe slumped low to gain traction, woman this pale Dutch scullery maid all gyral and shifting her sheath, neither of them speaking too good the English, the only language besides the shoelessness between them. They’d been adulterating everything. Their pdas mated vibrationally amid cutleries, their respective spouses calling—I had to resist picking up. I had to resist removing their footgear from the surrounding chairs and sitting to offer advice—it’s always better to pick up, feign static.

Then toward the pastryside of the buffet in the middle of the room
was this big burl of a guy by himself, tunic of a tshirt held together by electrical tape, baggy jeans from the nuclear winter collection, sneaks blatantly inspired by better sneaks, fingerless gloves he pounded into the pockets of a skanky nylon windbreaker. Wiccan roadkill hair parted sparsely in the middle hanging limp like two wimpy black anarchist flags. As I passed I noticed the catalog he was reading, the selfie, his, he was studying below his name, and I stopped without even proceeding into the accompanying bionote. There are no words, there is no word, for having translated my own translator.

“No family is intact,” I said, and settled my plate. “No family is intact but the family of the dead.”

“I am sorry,” clipped, gruff, “but your meaning?”

“So you’ve forgotten the beginning of our book?”

He frowned, “That is the beginning?”

“Sure is.”

Then he said, “Indefinitely,” by which he must’ve meant “undoubtedly” or “indubitably.”

“A pleasure, Dietmar Klug,” I said.

He gripped me weakly, then throttled his neard, his neckbeard.

All the significance was already plated: just behind us were Anglo steamtrays of eggs, lipidinous wursts and rashers of bacon, puddings, hashbrowns, beans, mushrooms, tomato hemispheres, and behind that a jointly controlled French and German zone of what would’ve been a continental frühstück if consumed on another continent, the crepes and quark streusels preserved by marmalades and juice and milk selections from venturing into the Asian stations of noried rice, and yet all he’d hoarded was a, I’ll traduce it for him, canapé.

As I chairbacked my tote and sat against it he picked up that plug of kornbrot and shook its mayosmeared hamfleck into his napkin, then took a dainty bite of the stale rusky round to chew over the coffee or tea question, before finally spitting crust in English, “I would have please a Heifeweizen,” which compelled the server to ask not him but me, “Room number, sir?” Trust Aar to cover the cost.

Dietmar, Diet, had to wiggle his seat out and hunch just to face me. “OK, so first it is complete unjust,” he said.

“What is?”

“OK, so first the amount, with schedule. To do the book by one month is two chapters every day, also Saturday, also Sunday, and that is 10 or 12 hours each and I have children. Second, the way it is that we must receive chapters from you each at a time is maybe how other translators work but not myself. To translate I require the complete text at all times to ensure the consistency and also the style. Consistent mood and style. I know you will say you have the editor to take care of that but you do not edit the same way because I do not have the agent to do this for me. I also have things to say about the contract. But wait.”

“I’m waiting, but you’re getting me mixed up.”

“Ja, ja, you mix me up the worse. The title must not be in German the same.
Duskovites
means in German just nothing.
Dämmerung-Kinder
as Schmöker suggested is bad, however, very bad. I will think of the better title for you. I have thought potentials already but we will put in the contract extra if I do that and you use.”

“Again, calm down, you’re talking to the wrong guy.”

“No, I requested to talk with the American publisher because Schmöker would not pass my worries and finally was vengeful of my influence. He said I was to go talk to you directly if I was sure I had a sense. I do, I have a sense. For pertinence this second volume must extend the plot of the twisted horn and to resolve also whether the unicorn can pass between the dimension zippers because in volume 3 it was no but in volumes 2 and 1 it was otherwise and between them nothing was explained about it.”

“I understand.”

“Also for the 10–16 year olds like for my children the erotic pretext of the frozen marquise is not appropriate.”

“Finished?”

“Ja, ja.”

“So you write yourself?” hoping to humor or just waylay his concerns halfway among the condiments, but his beer came.

He muzzled a toast and drank and dripped liberally from his neard, staining the lapels of his windie.

“So what are you translating now?”

He waried, “Truth?”

“Nothing but.”

“Scheiße, other series. You test me that I do not tell but I have read the contracts.”

“This isn’t a test. Trust me to trust your discretion—just moneywork, then?”

“Ja, ja,” he laughed, “translation is for money. Dress and feed two girls with only English.”

“What would you choose to translate, if the money weren’t an issue?”

“Truth again?”

“Try me.”

“I like translating what I do, the Americans, romane, sachbücher, fiction like not fiction. It is not much, the work, you can even put it all into a computer the syntactics are so basic.”

“American books are written by computer.”

“The series we do is written for children but it is the same as the books for adult, the same identical differentiality, no?”

“Difficulty?”

“Quatsch, quatsch. It’s not very much at all.”

“So the dream is being lived?”

“Or once again if I retire and do not die I will write poesie,” and then he was assessing all around us again, and the ceiling too, as if he were inspecting the sprinkler system.

I said to change it up, “What room are you in?”

“Gallus neighborhood.”

“Do you come every year to the Messe?”

“Every month and every week and day it is like I go to this stumpfes Messe, because I live here.”

Translation, by repetition, “You live here as in Frankfurt?”

“Ich bin ein Frankfurter. Sie sind ein Hamburger.”

The beans and mushrooms were already ladled away, and the tomatoes followed. My mug was cold but the servers were disinclined to refill it, the frühstück hall was sparse with late and sluggard headaches, all the guests who’d make a differentiality today had gone, frühstück hours would be over in 10 or so minutes by the cheapo digiwatch my companion kept switching between his wrists and already even the occupied tables were being bussed.

Last chance, “
Keine Familie ist ganz
—you remember?”

“A book?”

“A book you did. About Jews, the Shoah. American. 2002, this would’ve been around.”

“I did at that time but also before many books on Juden.”

“Which was your favorite?”

But he was lost to me, “And now if not the books for children it is many books on Islam.”

“This one was special. To me at least.”

“The Juden books I don’t know.”

“Don’t hold back.”

“They are wrote to not be read I think.”

“Just bought, you mean? Guilt purchases?”

“I mean—no, no,” and he rubberbanded his hair back, “that they are wrote by writers who do not live today for readers who read who are not the people today with the problems,” and picked his scalp, “totally not like life, or like nothing has happened between the war and date of publishing,” and peeled a scab, “my English is not so good to conversate—identität ist nur rassismus, ein buch für juden ist kein buch für den menschen,” and he reeled in his chair—definitively, undoubtedly, indubitably, perturbed.

“A shame you feel that way.”

But he jumped up and backhanded smacked himself, his watch imprinting buttons.

He yelled, “My life is fuck—it fuck—scheiße, I am sorry fully, apologize fully, I never meant to do not,” and he covered his mouth with his hands.

“Please.”

“I hope I did not insult because this is a job I require and the series is wunderbar and Crown to me and Mrs. Janet Dofts at Crown Books has been wunderbar.”

“Of course, of course.”

“This is living money for me.”

“Obviously, no offense.”

But his jaw convulsed, “Two girls, one translator, Dietmar Klug.”

He turned, I sat, as the waitstaff bared the table and plied its cloth.

\

As I slung my tote through the lobby and out, litzened doormen doffed their laureled caps.

Danke, guten tag.

It was a dank gutted tag, no sun toward noon. I wended around polygonous planters, barrier hollies unberried. Men adjusted wool blends, their tieknots the size of the Kaiser’s scrotum. Women long and thin lightered long thin flavored cigs and exhaled into their phonecalls. Deathmasked Hungarians. Serbs or Croats, unplaceables or just Danes. Their scents were cloved smoke, buffet borborygmi, and olent Hofbrand unguents, and the languages they conferred in were all, or none—Euroenglish, Euronglish spraying like water not from the fountain, drained beyond the colonnade. And I was the only American among them—the only American to still be dawdling the day away with a fair on.

I followed the delegates from the smaller lesser nations of smaller lesser languages through the Platz der Republik, a dull hub of officespace like deserted barracks, bunkers exhumed. Every Mercedes M-Class 4×4 ever made rolled by, windows up. The access to the Messe was meshfenced and coned between signs indicating the airport, Lufthansa billboards vandalizing the orisont tethering inflatable jets. The forecast called for a 100% chance of flurried schedule sheets and complimentary bookmarks.

The newest structures formed a quad, or tetrad—four halls numbered consecutively, 1 and 2 projecting from a concession terminant in screeningroom, a massive A/V ark whose presence and purpose demonstrated the lack of confidence bookpeople have in their product—why read? why not just grab a seat in the theater and conk out?

Halls 3 and 4 were of architectural interest, roofed in gently sloping metal dunes. Impressions: each mirroring metal wave resembled an abdominal segment of a robotic roach, a cuttlefish’s iridescent cuttlebone, or a toucan’s beak cast in dental amalgam, an armoring scute of an armadillo, while the total effect was that of a multizeppelin crash, or a mashup of the Decepticon mothership Nemesis and the Autobot derelict planet Cybertron, from the animated TV series and liveaction movies, respectively, of
Transformers
.

Not just four halls—on the back of the backpage of the schedule was a map—everything was a mirroring. My fellow Americans were all in Hall 8, apparently.

Halls 5 through 8 inclusive reminded me of malls, best measured not in square meters but in parsecs. I walked through them and sidestepped their conveyors. I walked between them, and there was Frankfurt’s skyline, like apocalypse does Dallas. Your friendly neighborhood global banking headquarters—Deutsche Bank’s logo of a blue square slit diagonally has always read to me like the desolate vagina of a war widow.

She was being positioned, canted, bolted, this survivor of the gender wars, arm up, arm down, legs spread wide as if to imply a corresponding wideness of taste—a mannequin of Charlotte, whether her first name or last they’d only posted that, the first female printer in history. Paris, reign of Francis I. Alongside her pose was pasteboarded a polyglot factsheet about homosexuality and publishing. Friedrich Koenig, no umlaut for him, invented the first nonmanpowered, but steampowered, press, an unwieldy replica of which anchored the display. The Asians, despite all their advances, their innovation of paper and ink and styli before Europe, were underrepresented, inevitably. Theirs was just another but scanty polyglot boardtext noting all their innovation of paper and ink and styli before Europe. Clay and wood and bronze. Lead and tin and antimony. Samples. Gutenberg and his moneylenders were dummied prominently, don’t doubt.

The translation’s typography was blackletter Textura, Fraktur, the spelling unstable, incunabular: “Johanes.” Mainz was referred to as “the once rival of Frankfurt.” Once upon a time. Snobs. The installation featured animatronics, rather inside the cases were Poles and the murmurs reverberant from behind the plastic sheeting were in Polish responding to yelled German. They were running late. They were running with screwdrivers to tighten the screw on a press. It was the same as the oil principle, the crushing of seed, nut, olive. Smithing. Gemcutting. Platen. Windlass. Gutenberg’s father, Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, was employed by the ecclesiastical mint. My speculation, exactly. Chirography, typography, money mania. A coin is minted by mold, the metals are poured into it, and an image is stamped on the surface. Given that a nickel now is just a quarter nickel, it’s strictly the image that coins the
worth, glyphs of tetrarchs and portraits of feudal royalty, with time becoming kitschy graphics of livestock and wheat. Given that paper’s still paper it’s the scripting that authenticates the bill, the signatures of presidents or primeministers, treasurers, reserve chiefs. Pecuniary inscription being a residuum of the regent’s seal or signet ring, the guarantor of authorship and so, of authority. Sphragides, sigilia, specie and fiat currencies, movable type, all systems of writing to date, in each instance an arbitrary materiality is forcibly impressed with transitory value. Proof of identity. Colophons of self. I told the registration guards my name was Aaron Szlay, and though I’d left my pass back in the room I could show them my swipecard in its sleeve with that name on it. They consulted their list, credentialed me, couldn’t have been nicer.

I entered under scaffolding. Let history record that in my lifetime most major public spaces were being renovated and not many ever utilized their main entrances.

Stamping through literatures familiar and not. Books everyone in America who reads has already read, now finally new again in translation. Books that nanocosm of literate America will pretend to be familiar with, if given the opportunity. The same book in multiple editions, the memoirs of a writer, his wife, her lover, of some kidnapped juvenile who grew up to become the first democratically elected female CEO of Muslim Africa, each language’s copy cut into the shape, the mapshape, of the land in which that language obtained, the books arranged to puzzle Europe. They were cutting the final books, the jigs and jags of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, with saws. Still on the schedule was when they’d gather the 10 thickest volumes published since last fair and toss knives at them or shoot them. As if to determine the densest. A banner tugged taut, into an expressionless mouth: this year, the fair’s theme was either the Future of Books, or the Books of the Future—sometimes with German all I get are the nouns.