The Interpreter (11 page)

Naturally, I paid him no attention, but I was amused by the imaginative way in which his spirit of rebellion showed itself; his illness had become so slyly camouflaged as to become unassailable, defying Dr Barnung's most unforgiving forms of cure, making light even of an intensive course in Seroa.

‘The glottologist comes once a month, and then I have to do my exercises like a good boy. But Frau Goldstein doesn't know Seroa, so on every other Tuesday I can talk gibberish to my heart's content! I send her smacking kisses and other rude noises down the microphone, and she squints at me and frowns suspiciously. She knows I'm teasing her, but she feels there's always a remote possibility that my smackers might indeed be Seroan, as rendered in a refined mediaeval Lesotho accent!'

For all his cast-iron cheerfulness, though, I could tell that Kwiatkowski was suffering. At table on occasions he would seem to withdraw completely, as though he'd lost consciousness and all that remained of him was an automaton, staring into thin air with frightened eyes, hands trembling. On such occasions, we were supposed to call the nurse, but none of us felt like putting the colonel into Frau Goldstein's clutches; he'd be put into isolation, and we were all secretly convinced that that was the last thing he needed, so we'd carry on talking calmly among ourselves. Mrs Popescu took it upon herself to make sure that he didn't tip over plates or drop cutlery during his absences, which might last several minutes. When at last he had shaken off the vice-like grip of whatever it was that was making mincemeat of his brain, Kwiatkowski would carry on sounding off in his ringing tones as though nothing had happened; but he knew that he had had an attack, and that we had protected him. Mrs Popescu would whisper something into his ear in Polish, and he'd give us a mild, grateful look. A sort of solidarity had been established around our table; we would protect and help each other, or perhaps simply respect each other. No one tried to encourage the silent Vidmajer to speak; Kwiatkowski himself never tried to rile him, preferring to concentrate his fire on the stolid Ortega, who would take it all with a smile. Together we would handle Vandekerkhove's blackouts, waiting for them to pass of their own accord, and then we would answer his tortuous questions patiently. We all held Mrs Popescu in high regard; she was very reserved and shy; strangely enough, she was the one person of whose illness Ortega had told me nothing, and I never had the courage to ask. Rather than suffering from any psychic ill, she seemed oppressed by some shadowy fear, remote by now, but which would sometimes loom up again and put her in a state of high alert; then she would become red in the face, and hot, as though from fever, her breathing would become laboured and she would look around her as though seeking someone. She hardly ever stayed on in the common room after supper; she would never join the group of patients who went to read in the library, though she would sometimes stop to talk to Mrs Vukobrat, to drink a herbal tea or have a game of dominoes; and she never missed the Thursday-night piano recital, when she'd always sit in the front row, eager and attentive. The moment the music stopped, before the small audience had begun to rise to their feet, she would leave the room almost at a run. I'd noted the yellow strip on her jacket pocket indicating Romanian, and wondered what her problem could possibly be; like me, she was forbidden to speak her mother tongue. One afternoon I was resting in my room after my intensive German course, prior to attending a hypnosis session, when I heard a knock at the door; I thought it must be the nurse who would be taking me down to it, but it was too early. What I saw in the darkened corridor was in fact the delicate silhouette of Mrs Popescu, gesturing to me fearfully to let her in.

‘Forgive my intrusion!' she exclaimed in agitated German; I drew up a chair and told her to sit down.

‘I know I shouldn't be doing this, and it certainly won't do me any good, but I'm at the end of my tether!'

She was twisting her hands as she looked at me, her knuckles positively white; I noticed that her fingers were unpleasantly yellow, her nails ridged with bony excrescencies. Her breathing was laboured, broken by suppressed sighs, as though she were about to cry.

‘Please, I beg of you, speak to me a little in Romanian!' she implored me, now really on the point of tears.

I sat down on the edge of the bed; I wasn't sure that I had heard her aright.

‘What do you want me to say?' I asked awkwardly.

‘Whatever you like, but please, just let me hear some Romanian!' she insisted tearfully. Seated in the middle of the room, her hands clasped between her knees, her over-large tunic hanging loosely from her thin shoulders, she looked like someone awaiting sentence for some unknown crime.

I didn't know what to say; all that came to my mind were inconsequential phrases, woefully ill-judged trivialities. Machine-like, I began to recite a text on the human body which I had memorised a few days ago in the laboratory: ‘The human body consists of the head, torso and limbs. The limbs, that is, the arms and legs, are known as the extremities. The head is home to the brain, the tympanum and many other delicate organs; on it we find the ears, the eyes, the nose and the buccal cavity, in which we find the tongue. We hear with our ears, see with our eyes, smell with our nose and taste with our tongue; so the seat of hearing is in our ears, the seat of sight is in our eyes, the seat of our sense of smell is in our noses and that of taste is in our tongue. Within our torso we find important organs such as the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, and the large and small intestines. Our body also contains bones, muscles, veins and nerves. Through our veins runs the blood which bathes our body, starting from the heart and ultimately returning to it. We use our hands for the most varied activities; we use our legs to walk. The body may be either well or diseased; all parts of it may fall ill, be affected by one or more maladies.'

I stopped in mid-flow, struck by the absurdity of my performance. I had spoken as though I was reciting a prayer; in front of me, weeping silently, her shoulders shaking, Mrs Popescu had covered her face with her hands. I didn't know what to do; I went to the tap and filled a glass of water, but she shook her head when I offered it to her and dried her eyes carefully with her handkerchief. Then she rose hurriedly, rearranged her hair and dabbed at her face with her fingertips.

‘Thank you! You cannot imagine what good that has done me! I promise you it won't happen again.' She opened the door, peered cautiously into the corridor and hurried away.

That was how I made the acquaintance of Roxana Popescu, the woman who was to precipitate my renewed search for the interpreter, although I did not know as much at the time. When she came to sit down at table, I saw her in a new light. Looking embarrassed, she flashed me a quick, complicit smile, but avoided my gaze and didn't say a word to me throughout the meal; she would stare vacantly at each of her fellow diners as they contributed to the conversation, but never at me. Nor did she seem to be taking in Vandekerkhove's rambling monologue on the aphrodisiac properties of the freshwater crayfish, although she heard him out to the bitter end, nodding at his every word, while the rest of us had already been engaged in discussion of another topic for quite some time. After supper, seeing her lingering in front of the bookshelves, I went up to her.

‘How are you feeling, Mrs Popescu?'

She jumped, then turned as though she were about to move away, but when she did answer me, her voice was hard and detached.

‘Better, thank you, even though what I did was a mistake. Please, let's say no more about it.'

‘As you wish, but I must admit that I found your visit rather disturbing,' I found myself saying, slipping a volume out of the bookcase.

‘Forgive me. It was a moment of weakness, nothing more, and let's leave matters there. I'm here to be cured, and I must try to avoid any further such silliness,' she said curtly, still not meeting my eye; then she hastily picked up a few books and moved off towards the corridor. Over the following days, however, she relented somewhat; she still looked alarmed and watchful when she came to sit down at table, continuing to peer around before she took her place, as though she were still expecting someone who always failed to turn up. But now she too joined in the conversation, and sometimes shot me a grateful if covert look; she seemed calmer. Occasionally I would glimpse the ghost of a smile playing over her usually unbending features, rising unbidden to her lips and lighting up her eyes before it was edged out by the shadow of some thought, some besetting worry, always the same one, I sensed. I tried to strike up a friendship with her, but although she was now more approachable, she continued to ward off close contact with all and sundry. If she was now more willing to stay on to chat with Mrs Vukobrat after supper, as soon as I approached their table she would gather up her books and stand up to leave; at such moments I would see the signs of a faded beauty lingering beneath the slightly puffy pallor of her features, a strong face struggling to emerge from the ruins but then collapsing wretchedly into a tearful moue, her eyes misting over, her mouth becoming small and bitter.

‘Leave her alone. Believe me, Roxana's interest in you is not of the kind that you imagine,' Mrs Vukobrat told me sharply one evening as we watched my sad friend hurry out into the corridor with the nervous lope of a tracked animal.

‘I assure you, all I want from Mrs Popescu is a bit of company,' I said firmly but mendaciously to the old woman as she sipped her herbal tea.

‘Roxana has told me all about it!' exclaimed Mrs Vukobrat, giving me a reproachful look; blushing foolishly, I backed off, embarrassed by the implication that I had tried to take advantage of a sick person and oblige her to satisfy my baser needs. What a misreading of the situation! All I had done was to respond to her entreaties and rattle off some gibberish in Romanian! I didn't like Mrs Vukobrat; I was irritated by her interference in my relations with Roxana. Noting my animosity towards her, Ortega hastened to inform me of her problems: she was Croatian, from Voivodina, and she had survived a spell in a Serbian lager during the wars in Yugoslavia. During her long months of imprisonment, in order to bear the physical and psychic torture to which she was subjected, she had developed a sort of camouflage reaction: in a word, she had ended up by accepting the thesis put forward by her torturers. She convinced herself that being Croatian was the height of iniquity, that her Croatian identity should indeed be obliterated, dispatched with hatchet blows; she forgot her own language and learned that of her torturers, becoming Serbian in heart and soul. But once she returned to normal life, becoming aware that she had turned into the worst of her own enemies, speaking the language of her people's murderers and forgetting her own, she attempted suicide, hoping to kill the Serbian tumour which had swelled up within her, strangling the true Ivanka Vukobrat. In the language clinic she had been directed towards an intensive course of Maltese, the language par excellence most foreign to her among the Indo-European tongues; Dr Barnung was using small doses of hypnosis to restore her to her own mother tongue, Croatian. But she was old, her mind had been rendered inflexible by the terrors of the lager, and hopes of a recovery were extremely remote. Hearing her story failed to make me feel any more kindly towards Mrs Vukobrat, though after her reprimands I was nonetheless careful not to renew my approaches to Roxana. I remained courteous and friendly at table, always ready to engage in conversation should she show any desire to do so, but as soon as the fruit plates were cleared away and the vases of dried flowers replaced on the refectory tables, I would bid her a demure goodnight and leave her to a tete-a-tete with her old friend, without making the slightest attempt to intervene. She seemed relieved that I had withdrawn from the fray, and would give me what seemed to me a grateful look, which further convinced me that perhaps Mrs Vukobrat had been right – she had no interest in me. I would go off to listen to Ortega's chatter, or listen to a little music, gazing up at the square of starry sky above the courtyard.

At the beginning of February we found the courtyard piled high with snow, its chill glow spreading into the rooms and reflecting the sun's light. The nights too were lighter now; from my bedroom I could see the moon sail by in the sky as though through the porthole of a spaceship, its oceans taking on the form of faces I seemed to recognise before falling into the cloudy embrace of sleep. I often woke up with the strange impression that I could hear voices, or some noise in the room, some distant shout that had made its way across the ether and had come to die within these walls. I even went as far as checking the cupboard and bathroom, rummaging around under the bed, without the faintest idea of what I was looking for. I ended up by thinking that all that light must have disturbed my sleep; I pulled the curtains to as best I could and stopped thinking about it. It was at that time that Kwiatkowski disappeared; he failed to turn up for supper for several evenings on end; then Frau Goldstein spilled the beans.

‘He's had an attack; it's serious, he's got to do an intensive course in Seroan until further notice. Doctor Barnung even thinks he might have to be transferred to a psychiatric hospital,' she explained to us in hushed tones, then left the room. We'd seen the last of the colonel at table, and we all suffered from it; conversation languished, Ortega no longer had anyone to tangle with. Even Vidmajer would glance up from his plate and cast a bewildered look around the room; Vandekerkhove could no longer engage so satisfyingly in his ramblings; he no longer had a foil, and he soon ran aground, repeating himself like a stuck gramophone record, stuttering over the last disordered words of a speech of which he'd lost the thread.

Roxana too missed Kwiatkowski; she had a blank look about her, though her air of habitual guardedness seemed less pronounced. But she was clearly more deeply troubled by something else, and I could not imagine what it was. She no longer went to chat with Mrs Vukobrat after supper, no longer attended the Thursday recitals; she would rush up to her room without even saying goodbye to her friend, who would be waiting for her in her usual armchair with her glass of herbal tea steaming before her on the little table with its fussy doilies. Roxana, my mysterious friend, had changed beyond recognition: she no longer talked to me, not even at table; she scarcely glanced in my direction. Mrs Vukobrat too was surprised by this development and would cast me inquiring looks, to which I would respond nervously with a quick shake of the head. Roxana even seemed to shun me when it came to our therapeutic activities; each afternoon, at the end of the intensive course in German, in order to avoid being alone with me in the corridor, she would make some excuse to have herself escorted back to her room by the nurse, looking at me out of the corner of her eye as she crept off, as though afraid that I might follow her. In the gym she always tried to find a place as far from me as possible, and she was always the first to leave her desk and scuttle off when the bell rang.