The Interpreter (22 page)

A group of boys now sauntered in, with a listless air about them; they sat down in front of us and immediately took out their mobile phones. Shortly afterwards two stiff-looking women appeared in the doorway, looking as if they knew it all; then four gaudily dressed Asian men drifted in, one after the other, with businesslike-looking rucksacks from which they extracted mineral water bottles, coloured pens and large exercise books which they laid out neatly on their desks. The last person to come through the door, with a confident, bouncing step, was the teacher herself, a portly middle-aged woman with red hair and clear skin; she sat down heavily at the teacher's desk, slipped off her shoes and started calling out our names, peering at us from over her glasses and flaring her nostrils, as though she hoped that this would keep them in place. She handed out sheets of paper with various illustrations, and started off by having us pronounce short sentences and ask each other questions; we had to look at the images and link them to one of the words that she was repeating. Burke looked somewhat out of his depth; he made matters worse for himself by trying to guess his question in advance.

‘Mr Bellamy, are you sure that all this is necessary for our purposes?' he whispered to me.

‘I don't know, Mr Burke. But if the interpreter has indeed been through Klaipeda, it will certainly have been to learn Lithuanian. Just be patient, something will come of it, you'll see.'

When we got back to the hotel that first afternoon we were hungry and exhausted; after a bite to eat, I lay down on the bed and slept till evening, while Burke doggedly did his homework.

‘I can't help myself, Mr Bellamy – I have to succeed, even in this. Klaus Burke is doomed to excel, he has to come first. You'll see – I'll get top marks!'

Klaipeda was a soporific place. The leaden expanse of sea gave me a feeling of security; I gave myself over to its protective embrace, but somewhere inside me lurked the feeling that its placid presence might conceal some hidden threat. In the quiet afternoons when I was asleep, with the flat, cold light coming in through the windows, I would dream that the sea too would come in and lap round the foot of my bed. I would wake up with a start, seized by an irrational fear of drowning. At that dead hour of the day, streets and houses seemed on the point of fading away into nothingness, becoming incorporeal. Towards evening the wind would get up, blowing in from the open sea, setting flags and sails snapping; the surface of the water would shatter into sharp little dark waves, which would come to shore as though they were made of oil, without tang or foam. The light, too, would change: the air would become tinged with yellow, things would lose further definition and dissolve into a quivering mirage. The sand would be whipped up from the beach and spin around in the wind, to land on pavements, cars, balconies, café awnings, beating against windows, bleaching the leaves on the trees. It was as though the whole city were about to be slowly engulfed under one vast sand dune and was patiently accepting its fate. Dusk was already gathering when I went down into the foyer, to find Burke poring over his books.

‘Mr Bellamy, did you know that Lithuanian is one of Europe's oldest languages, the last remains of the time when the Baltic and Slav languages merged? It seems that Lithuanian is the language closest to that of the Indo-Europeans. Apparently linguists regard it as being directly related to Hittite!' he said excitedly, pointing to the thick volume he'd got from the local library.

‘That shows we're on the right track,' I answered, still half-asleep, then flopped down onto the chair next to him.

After a week, we decided to go our separate ways; Burke would carry on with the course and I would snoop around town. I also went to the town library and looked through the list of who had borrowed what; I hung around in the reading room of the foreign languages section to see who came in and out; I struck up conversations with the librarians in search of the slightest clue that might confirm the interpreter's presence in the place. I checked the hotels, giving princely tips to the porters so that they'd give me the names of all the foreigners who'd stayed there over the previous month, but all to no avail. The course ended, Burke passed the exam for beginners' Lithuanian with flying colours, but there was still no sign of the interpreter. We made one last attempt by putting an advert in a local paper, asking for a simultaneous interpreter whose mother tongue was Lithuanian but who would be working in a combination of French, German and Lithuanian. On the day it appeared in the
Nasza Gazeta
we stayed in the hotel from dawn to dusk, vainly awaiting a call.

That night I slept very fitfully; I had the feeling I was suffocating, and opened the windows several times to air the room. The sky was dark and starless; a heavy mist was advancing slowly over the sea, spreading into the streets and covering everything with what looked like heavy dew. Towards dawn, a huge cruise ship sailed silently past the town and berthed in the harbour at the end of the bay, the thousand lights of its decks reflected brokenly at the water's edge, sending a watery dazzle over the walls of my room. I went back to bed and, after much tossing and turning, fell into a troubled sleep. I thought I heard someone fiddling with the handle of the door, and tried to arouse myself from my drowsiness to go and check, but then decided it was just another of my hallucinations and went back to sleep. The dawn light was at last filtering in through the shadows of my tousled sheets, my head ached, my eyes were burning, my breathing was heavy and laboured. I decided to get dressed and go and get a breath of air. The hotel was still sunk in sleep; the lift was standing empty at the top floor, its light falling gloomily on the wall. I eavesdropped outside Burke's door and was about to knock, but decided not to wake him and took the stairs. The restaurant was still in darkness, but the foyer smelled of smoke and liquor. I breathed in the damp, salty outside air with a sense of relief, then crossed the road and went to the jetty where the cruise ship was moored. The funnels were still smoking, and deep in the depths of its iron hulk I could hear distant engines throbbing. A lone lorry was shunting around, its headlamps slicing through the violet air; a few shivering passengers were already on the deck of the cruise ship, watching the outline of the city gradually emerging from the mist. But suddenly, rather than clearing, it became thicker; a salty wind blew in from the sea, and the city was enveloped in ragged spray. I retraced my steps and went absent-mindedly down to the beach rather than back to the hotel. I could hear the waves lapping gently on the shore; I went down the steps and let my feet sink into the sand. In the distance I could just make out the vague outline of the landing stages at the tourist harbour; rather than floating, the boats rose out of the glassy water as though they were somehow attached to the sea floor, their masts oozing plump drops which fell almost silently onto the deck floor. I walked down to the waterline and stamped my feet in the wake of a lingering wave, sinking my stick into the sand to see how firm it was and leaving deep, soft footprints, then watching them disappear as the water swept over them. It was then that I saw them, like a mirage: a few metres from the shore, half-sunk in a muddy pool, lay dozens of black narwhals, their spiral tusks pointing towards the sky. Some were twitching their tails, others lay there motionless, as though dead. I left my shoes on the sand and waded towards them, thigh-deep in water. In the meantime, other people too had become aware of their mysterious presence, and were running in the same direction. Now I was standing right by their huge, wrinkled, shell-encrusted bodies. They did not seem at all alarmed: they looked at me sadly with their moist eyes, moving their upper jaws set, like a nose, with their single pointed tusk. A silent crowd had gathered on the shore, but few people actually approached the creatures. One of those who did was an elderly man with a thin red beard, who was wearing waders; he was considering the scene with a sorrowful air.

‘Are you a foreigner?' he asked me in German, staring at the elegant windcheater with which Burke had provided me. I nodded.

‘This is the third time this has happened this spring. No one knows how they come to land up here; they don't come from around these parts, yet dozens of them end up stranded here,' he said, extending his arms in a puzzled gesture.

‘Will they die?' I asked.

‘A few will survive until the turn of the tide, but they clearly suffer from being stuck here; they wave their tusks around and moan piteously – you can hear them right in the centre of town. But yes, most of them will die. Then the waves bring them ashore; they get stuck in the sand, like great black stones, and have to be carted away by bulldozers, because they make a terrible stench,' he said with a look of utter disgust. I followed him towards the shore, dragging my feet in the sand.

‘The strange thing is, they're all male; only the males have that tusk. And they're all young; it's as though a whole generation had lost its sense of direction and started wandering through the Baltic, looking for a way out towards the Arctic!' He paused, as though pondering the matter.

‘They're not afraid of humans; they let themselves be touched,' he went on; going up to one of them, he drew his hand over the dark skin of its back, sheathed in a layer of glittering sand. The narwhal gave a weary shake of its tail, lifted its tusk and sank back into the stagnant shallows.

‘Have you seen them fight?'

I shook my head.

‘They clash their tusks together like sabres and fight endless duels. I've caught them at it on occasions, in the ice floes, outlined against the rose-pink wall of the arctic ice, when there's no wind and it's never dark – it's a rare sight. They heave themselves out of the water black as pitch, and in that endless silence you can hear their tusks rattling like branches in the wind!'

I looked towards the throng of animals, now vanishing into the mist; some of them had ceased moving, and were gradually sinking into the sand.

‘Can you smell that smell? They smell of seaweed, of the depths, of a cold, dark world where man has never set foot!' he went on, staring at me with an expression I could not fathom. Then he waved me a mournful goodbye and wandered towards the creatures furthest off, at the far side of the shallows; feeling they had sufficient water around them to make a getaway, they were flinging themselves this way and that, leaping about frantically in their efforts to reach the open sea.

Cold and bedraggled, I plodded up the beach, then sat down and rubbed my numb feet before putting on my shoes. A sudden burst of blinding sunlight pierced through the mist, lighting up the doomed landscape with a surreal gleam; floating there on the hushed surface, the narwhals took on the appearance of one single, gigantic beast, its back bristling with barbs. As though it had registered this similarity, the crowd on the beach let out a unanimous gasp; the shells embedded in the creatures' skin now caught the glancing light and sparkled like shards of glass; even the damp sand lit up in a fitful glitter.

I hurried back to the hotel; I wanted to wake Burke up and take him to see the beached narwhals. But there was a message for me from him at the reception desk:

Still stiff with cold and bewildered by the message, I stared idiotically at the porter, who in his turn was giving me a puzzled look.

‘What time is it?' I asked out of the blue.

‘A quarter past ten. Breakfast is over, but we could still serve you some coffee,' he hastened to assure me, as though he could read my thoughts. I folded up the note and leaned wearily against the counter; nothing would have been more welcome than a cup of hot coffee, its smell wafting towards me from the jugs on the trolley by the window. I was hungry and tired from my long walk; I could have sat down in the foyer and waited quietly for Burke's return. But my head was spinning, as I now had another worry.

‘Is there anything wrong, sir?' enquired the doorman solicitously.

‘No, everything's fine,' I said distractedly, then ran out of the foyer and leapt into the first of the taxis parked in front of the hotel.

Perkelos Gatve was a quiet residential road which began just beyond the mouth of the harbour canal, below the last cranes in the goods yard, to continue along the coast and on into the woods. Number forty was a small villa with an unfenced garden, set back a little from the road; it was surrounded by an unkempt lawn dotted with thorny bushes, sloping gently down to the shore. I waited for the taxi to drive off, then walked up the sandy path to the door, which was on the right side of the house; I rang the bell, but there was no answer. Total silence, except for a rustling of leaves. After a few minutes, I rang again, then went to peer in through the small window which gave on to the street, but all I could see was a dark wooden chest of drawers and a divan upholstered in some pale material. I checked Burke's message – I was at the right address. I inspected the back of the house, the side facing the sea, where there was a tradesmen's entrance; I knocked and found it was open, so I went in.

‘Is anyone at home?' I called, and immediately found myself in the living room I'd seen through the window. It was furnished like the cabin of a ship, with brass lamps hanging from brightly painted beams and gleaming doorhandles. All in apple-pie order, not a speck of dust. It smelled of ammonia and well-oiled rope; a clock in a copper case ticked on the chest of drawers. In the kitchen I heard the buzz of a fridge; I opened the door – it was empty, but immaculate. I went back into the living room, which was dimly lit by such light as made its way in through a little porthole of coloured glass. A wooden staircase led to the upper floor; the handrail and banisters were carved with elaborate motifs connected to the sea, and small glass cases containing weirdly shaped shells hung from the wooden walls. I went up cautiously and found myself in a large studio which took up the whole floor, the end wall occupied by a nautical chart of the Baltic Sea; on a console table between the two windows stood a small model of a sailing ship bearing the Polish flag. Behind a table strewn with books and maps, almost the whole of the opposite wall was occupied by a sophisticated sound system; I was intrigued by the two large spools, placed behind a glass panel, and the sound boxes, protected by thick chunks of foam. The only remaining empty space, I noticed, was occupied by a document set in a gold frame, which proved to be a diploma – awarded by the University of Heidelberg to Mirko Stolojan, a simultaneous translator whose languages were Russian, Latvian and Lithuanian. Overcome by sudden weariness, I sat down in the leather armchair in front of the sound system. I was sweating profusely, though from exhaustion rather than emotion, and my throat was strangely dry. Through the porthole I could see the dark mass of water, heaving like a slab of steel, sending ripples of white light over the walls of the room. Since it was right there in front of my nose, I pressed the button on the sound system, setting the spools in motion. At first it gave out a dry whirring noise, then the sound of waves on the seashore and distant engines; then suddenly there was a voice, perfectly loud and clear. I recognised it – it was that of the interpreter, speaking in German, in the typically distant tone adopted by such professionals. I noted the awkward way the sentences were stitched together, the tail ends left loose, then suddenly if clumsily tidied up and made to fit together. Another voice was audible in the background, probably that of the original speaker, but I couldn't make out what language he was speaking; the words seemed to me short, three syllables at most, with the stress on the penultimate. He must have acquired it relatively recently if he had such trouble translating it. I carried on listening, and then I heard his voice changing, becoming deeper and taking on a syncopated rhythm, with mangled single syllables and incomprehensible combinations of diphthongs. Then I recognised the wheezing, rasping, gurgling sounds given out by the uvula when the throat muscles become constricted. If in some ways similar, those sounds were also different from those which I myself produced when I was having one of my convulsions. I thought the effort involved might have explained the difference. I listened on, until the sound lost all resemblance to any human voice and became just a whistle, rising and falling, elusive and mysterious. I saw him in my mind as he had been that last time by the lake, and it occurred to me to wonder whether indeed that tape might have been recorded in that very place, on just such a wild night. I wound back the spool and put on another, then another; all they contained were whistling, lowing sounds, a slow repeated twittering interspersed with a low buzz. No trace of a human voice, as though he had ceased to speak once and for all, and was now simply howling.