The Interpreter (25 page)

It was undoubtedly Barnung who murdered Stauber in Odessa, and hurled the unsuspecting Burke onto the tusk of the dead narwhal on the beach in Klaipeda. I too was on his list. He had not managed to rid himself of me with his therapies, so he had lured me onto the
Toompea
. But he himself had ended up drowned in his own pursuit of the narwhals.

So what had once struck me as a series of machinations now appears something else entirely. It would seem that chance alone brought me here: the ravings of a lunatic, whose path quite simply happened to cross my own, and nothing more; the experiments of a criminal neurologist, and the jealousy of a head of department for one of his subordinates had done the rest. It could have happened to anyone, and it happened to me – though it is undeniable that I was exposing myself to risk by mixing with insane deviants such as interpreters, people with slippery, unformed identities, in whose company sprinklings of the irrational are more likely to insinuate themselves and further crook humanity's already crooked timber. Only among their like could a man be mad enough to want to talk with dolphins, confusing human with animal and imitating everything he hears and sees, from the rustling of leaves to the soughing of wind, from the glassy-eyed stare of a fish to the heat haze hanging over a desert. Even now that I see him every day, I can never remember what he looked like a moment ago, I cannot fix him in my memory. Each time I look at him, it's as though I'm seeing something different: as different, indeed, as a landscape from a tree, or a stretch of sky, or one of his dolphins. He's not a human being, he has no soul, no personality; he is a remnant, something left over from the cosmic slime when it was nothing and could have become anything. I alone among men have seen through him into the gulf from which the world emerged; I alone bear witness, and I cannot share my knowledge with any other living soul.

Today I am known as Tibor Preda, and this name – not my own – is the only one I can still bear. For I am the fruit of a mistake, a monstrous creature which should have died of the poisonous inoculations to which it was subjected. Yet I survived, and the man who engaged in such ruthless tinkering with fate seems to have cast me from his mind; abandoning his researches in midstream, he has condemned me to an existence lived out in a state of suspended animation, a victim of unremitting torment. But sometimes it occurs to me that there might be another, hidden meaning to this anguish, something I shall understand only with time. Perhaps the experiment for which I served as guinea pig is still under way, and this is just a phase, a stage in the metamorphosis I'm undergoing. I'm living in a bell jar, surrounded by particles of unknown substances which are splitting and cohering as in alchemy, able to transform all humanity into cetaceans over the course of a few generations.

At times I thought of going home, of ending my days in a psychiatric clinic, together with my secret. After all, time has passed, and perhaps no one now remembers the Beast of Bukovina. But I am bound to this man by a force which is irresistible; if I strayed from his side, I feel that I'd be lost, sucked into a maelstrom of pain, and utterly, unbearably alone. Still unsure when my time will come, I lack the courage to expose myself to further suffering. Here, at least the days slip by without incident, without my coming to any harm. So far, the vice which was destined to crush me has bitten in vain. I have learned Estonian, and I show parties of schoolchildren and tourists around the dolphinarium; I've been given a green uniform and a cap with a plastic peak with a label saying ‘Interpreter'. Although it was never my intention, I have become one of them; children regard me with awe, mothers give me tips. On Sundays I help the interpreter with the ‘singing' sessions; I hand him the hoops through which he makes the dolphins jump, and the balls that they balance on their snouts. And when I hear their whistling, their lowing, those sounds which, once alarming, have now become so familiar to me; when I see them rising from the water beside their trainer, shaking their heads with that enigmatic smile of theirs, I wonder whether they too, like me, might not be slaves to this man, prisoners of his contagious madness.

Sometimes I even feel homesick for Dr Barnung's clinic and its iron discipline; I realise with amazement that the months spent in that sunny laboratory repeating exercises in Romanian may have been the happiest of my life. Perhaps there was method in his madness; perhaps all that Romanian really did do me good. Somehow, that light, lilting language made my inner rift easier to bear, went some way towards healing the wound I feel throbbing within me in my long hours of solitude – unlike Estonian, which is a stealthy, thorny language, full of barbs, sinking itself into the mind like a fishhook and never letting go.

Quite recently, I have begun to pray; I creep into church of a morning and kneel down with the unbeliever's mild sense of guilt. All I am asking is to understand: if I am being punished, all I ask is to know why. If I am but a trifle batted to and fro by the talons of fate, I ask God for a sign. If he truly is omnipotent, I ask him to free me of this punishment, or to have done with me once and for all. If he can do nothing for me, I ask him to enable me to abandon hope. But, looking at the crucifix on the altar, there in the silence of that lonely little wooden church, I am suddenly struck by the awful feeling that it is I who am a mistake, that all humanity is just an accident, that God himself is a dolphin, up there in his heaven, whistling mockingly at my prayers, flapping his fins and waving his snout in the celestial heights of a watery paradise.