The Interpreter (12 page)

Some time later, though, it happened again, this time in the early afternoon. I was asleep in my room after my intensive course in Romanian when I heard a knock at the door. Roxana came in, looking even more agitated than she had on the previous occasion. I was on the point of pulling myself out of bed – I was still half-asleep. I was having trouble focusing and I was flailing around looking for something to pull myself up with. But Roxana grabbed my wrists and pushed me back onto the pillow; then she straightened up and gestured to me to keep quiet; her lips were trembling.

‘This time it's going to be me who does the talking!' she informed me in Romanian, her eyes sparkling.

‘Just get me talking, it doesn't matter what about! Ask me boring questions, anything, just as long as you get me talking in Romanian!' I didn't know what to say; my brain had clouded over, my mouth felt gummy, my throat completely dry. There was something absurd and unreal about her request.

‘What…I mean, have you changed your mind?' I asked, propping myself up clumsily on my elbows.

‘I can't help myself – I need my language, do you hear? I have to speak!' She seemed to relish every word she spoke, savouring each sound until it died on her lips.

‘So, tell me about yourself. Where were you born? What did you do in life before coming here?'

‘I was born in Constanta, on the Black Sea. Until a few months ago I was the director of the town aquarium, I dealt with fish, octopuses, molluscs; my speciality was the reproductive systems of crustaceans, I would rear dozens of them in little glass phials. At first they're like fragile little spiders which would fit on your fingertip. Did you know that a lobster grows a centimetre a year? My favourites are the blue variety – even lobsters may show signs of nobility. I was happy in my aquarium, perhaps a bit lonely, but I wasn't the only one. And then he came along…' She shivered slightly as she spoke, as though she knew that I would find those words disturbing.

I sat bolt upright, suddenly remembering the list of cities I'd found in the interpreter's apartment; Constanta was at the top of those that hadn't been crossed out.

‘Constanta? And who is “he”?' I asked, now more confused and troubled than ever by my strange visitor.

‘No, that's enough! Now I have to stop. Speaking Romanian does me no good at all, it claws at my heart and leaves it bleeding. It…it makes me cry, as you can see. I can't go on like this. Doctor Barnung will put me into isolation. I'm sorry, you're so patient with me, and I'm so cruel and unfair to you.'

She burst out sobbing; broken, disarmed and naked, she was proffering me all her pain. I would have liked to take her in my arms, to hold her close – not in the way that Mrs Vukobrat imagined, but because I felt that we had something terrible in common, something most grand, something we could not name but which loomed over us ever more threateningly.

‘I must go, I'm sorry if I've not behaved very well. This time, I assure you, it won't happen again!' And she ran off, leaving the door ajar. That evening there was no one at her place at table; Ortega told us that she had been put into isolation, with a week's intensive course in Navajo.

Those days brought me back to reality with a jolt: I suddenly remembered why I was there at all. I had the feeling I'd been wasting my time: once again I had the urgent feeling that I must track down the interpreter.

When she returned from isolation, Roxana seemed changed; she was quiet and self-absorbed, as though she were following some new line of thought. Her jacket pocket now bore the doom-ladened white strip which meant linguistic isolation, but her expression bespoke a new-found peace. She no longer looked alarmed or hunted; rather, she seemed at last to have shaken off that obsessive sense of expectation by which she had previously been dogged. She nodded at me affably when she sat down at table; we kept our questions to ourselves, talking of trivialities, giving Vandekerkhove free rein to unburden himself of as much incoherent babble as he liked. After supper, and a brief goodnight to Mrs Vukobrat, who had come to ask her how she was, Roxana went straight back to her room. I waited for a few moments in the common room together with Ortega, then excused myself and ran to the women's corridor. I saw the light under her door, knocked and went in without waiting for any answer. Roxana was taking down her hair, and looking at me in the mirror.

‘What is it?' she asked me brusquely in Romanian.

‘That man. Who was that man?'

‘I don't know who he was. It may seem strange, but he never did tell me his real name. It started as a game: each day he'd invent a different one. He used to come and visit the aquarium, then we started to meet each other on the beach. Don't imagine I was a total ingenue. I'd been in love, I knew a thing or two; but he took something from me that no one else ever had. Oh, similar things had happened to me in the past, sometimes I went for months unable to visit certain parts of the city because they reminded me of some lost love, unable to hear a certain song because it would make me cry. As a little girl, certain smells had the power to make me feel unbearably nostalgic; even today, the acrid smell of tar from newly laid asphalt gives me gooseflesh – and only I know why. But with time I've learned to protect myself; now I know how to retrieve whatever gets burned in the pyre of my love. For instance, I know now that it's better always to fall in love in the same spot: placed on top of each other, memories don't have enough space to burn, they die without leaving any bad smell behind them, and all that is left of the pain is an empty shell. So I thought I'd be able to emerge from this befuddlement unscathed as I had from the rest. What could this man take from me that I hadn't already lost? How many others had I not already mourned, standing at sunset by the sea, wandering alone through the sunset-streaked sand of a September evening, or along the windswept roads in the winter, when snowy roofs stand out against the dark sky? But the one thing that had never been at stake was my language, and it was that that this man was studying – he already spoke it so well that he took it from me! Now every Romanian word I speak is a torment I inflict upon myself, but it's also a spark in whose glow I can glimpse the marvellous time when he and I shared one single tongue, and I can't shake off the false hope that such sparks might rekindle that fire. Instead, though, each time I sink to ever greater depths, and then it's a huge struggle to come back to the surface. But now that I'm here with my head just above water I feel the call of the abyss, pulling me down; and I no longer have even my language for salvation, I can't even call out my name, because he's taken it from me!'

Roxana burst into tears, then, proceeding from tears to fury, she began to tousle the hair she had just been so carefully combing. I gripped her firmly by the arm in an effort to restrain her, but she fought me off with surprising strength, and it was only when I let go of her and retreated towards the door that she quietened down. Throwing herself on the bed, she lay there motionless, her mouth quivering, looking up at the ceiling with bloodshot eyes. ‘Did you know that the Navajo also speak with colours?' she carried on after a brief pause, her voice still hoarse from sobbing. ‘Sounds have a colour, because according to the Navajo the world was born from four coloured clouds. Scholars have even coined a specific term for the Navajo's coloured sounds: they call them
pigmemes
, a combination of pigment and phoneme. So in Navajo, for instance, whiteness is masculine and blackness is feminine, because all things are born of black, and all return to this same blackness when they come to die.'

I drew a chair up to the bed and sat down, taking her hand.

‘Please, calm down, just try to forget about all that; stop tormenting yourself. In fact, why don't we speak German?' I suggested.

‘No, please…Let me speak just a little more Romanian. For me, this will be the last time.'

At the time, I did not know what Roxana meant by those words. She apologised for having fought me off so aggressively, but it was I who felt mortified at having yielded to her entreaties. I felt responsible for the sudden worsening of her condition, and for the intensive course in Navajo to which she had been subjected.

‘Don't worry! A little Navajo has done me good,' she reassured me with a smile. ‘But I've got a question for you too: what makes you so interested in hearing about him?'

‘I know him; he worked for me, but it would take too long to explain,' I answered evasively. It was then that I was suddenly seized with the fear that Irene too might have met the same end as Roxana, and might even now be locked up in some psychiatric clinic, victim of who knows what form of madness.

‘Do you know where he ended up?' I asked, returning to the matter in hand.

‘He was on his way to Odessa; I don't know what he was going to do there.'

‘That's the second city on the list!'

‘You too know about the list?'

‘Yes. What does it mean?'

‘That's something I've never been able to understand. He was always rewriting it – on tram tickets, on restaurant bills, on newspapers. He'd recite it aloud all the time, like a mantra.'

I waited until Roxana fell asleep before leaving her; there in the moonlight, her face at last looked serene. I went back to my room, found my bag on top of the cupboard and stuffed my things into it. I was lost in a maze of thoughts, and it was a long time before I fell asleep. The following morning I went to Dr Barnung's study to take leave of him, and his clinic too. He received me without a word and had me sit down in the armchair in front of his massive desk; the bright sunlight lit up our faces, setting the little glass medicine cupboard at the end of the room ablaze as though it were a sacred reliquary. The cat was crouched as ever on the windowsill, licking its paws; a few snowdrops had pushed up through the soil in the garden.

‘Mr Bellamy, your cure is not yet complete. By interrupting it, you are jeopardising all that you've gained so far. The sense of security by which you are currently pervaded is purely illusory, it is due to the daily salvo of intensive courses you are undergoing – it is not, how should we put it, self-generating. The beneficial effect of intensive Romanian is not sufficiently strongly rooted within you, it cannot yet sway your character. As soon as you abandon the daily gymnastics which support it, your language will once again fall into disorder. You're courting trouble, Mr Bellamy!'

His solemn tones rang out like a threat, and he looked me long and intensely in the eye.

I arrived in Odessa one dark night at the end of February; a freezing wind was blowing, sending the dry snow swirling around like dust, heaping it up along the runways and hurling it against the hangars and the parked cars in the icebound fields. I chose a hotel at random from among the leaflets in the airport hall, and got into the first taxi to hand. We drove through vast squares filled with snow-covered lawns, with dark stone monuments towering above them, then through the wide streets of the centre, where streetlamps shuddered in the wind, sending dark shadows over the crumbling stucco facades of the old palaces. My hotel, the Krasnaya, was described as overlooking the sea, but I could not make out any water when we arrived at a modern building set somewhat back from the road. I found myself in a cold, ill-lit foyer, draped with heavy purple hangings; a few couples were sitting in armchairs in the bar. To the other side of the glass partition, a waiter was laying the tables in the restaurant; the clock above the reception desk was chiming eleven. A smell of deodorant sprayed over musty fabric filled the air. I saw that that evening I would be eating alone, with no one else to talk to, and I suddenly felt nostalgic for Dr Barnung's clinic and for my table of eccentric fellow patients. I would have preferred to talk to Vandekerkhove rather than endure that solitude. What I now saw before me was no longer the smiling vision of a life to come, but once again a yawning chasm, splitting off into a thousand narrow galleries. I realised that Dr Barnung had been right: I was not cured and, once away from the Romanian laboratory, my wound was beginning to bleed again. I was seized by a sense of panic and struggled to prevent myself crying out; I felt suddenly powerless, rooted to the spot, paralysed by the expanse of time that was opening up before me like some foul intestine. I went into my room without even turning the light on, in order not to see the table in front of the window, the cupboard and the chair and the bedcover of dismal printed cotton. I lay down on the bed and tried to sleep but after a bit, to my total consternation, I was seized by a convulsion, the first I'd suffered for a long time. I leapt to my feet, trying to contain myself, taking deep breaths to lessen the spasms, but the usual senseless words, the usual mangled sounds gurgled up from the diseased depths of my being like a tainted wave, and all I could do was spit them out. When at last the attack was over I lay down again, weary and dazed; I wrapped myself up in the clammy covers and fell asleep. Over the days that followed, things got worse: the rhythm of my linguistic ravings quickened, and sometimes I would fall prey to strange dizzy spells. Infinite anguish was raining down upon me from measureless heights.

Despite my malaise, I persisted in my search for the interpreter, though I had not the faintest idea of where he might be, and faced with that boundless city I began to lose heart; my legs felt heavy, my heart sank like a stone. Yet somehow I felt that my man was not far away, and that sensation quickened my impatience, excited my already frayed nerves; bereft of Dr Barnung's beneficial mumbo jumbo, I felt that only with the interpreter would I find relief. I could scent his presence in the air; sometimes I thought I saw his face in the crowded streets. Some irresistible force was driving me on and, against all reason, I yielded willingly to its call. Within me, someone who was no longer me, but not yet someone else, wanted to know where that man had ended up, and was using my body to achieve his aim, but Dr Barnung's tapes were no longer there to keep him at bay. Sometimes, within me, I felt that the metamorphosis was actually taking place, I felt that ‘other' surfacing under my skin; I would touch my face and find shapes I didn't recognise, sudden wrinkles and lumps I hadn't felt before, but when I ran to look at myself in the mirror I would find my face unchanged, merely alarmed by those inexplicable hallucinations.