The Interpreter

Excerpt

ONE

Dominique

I was in the dark. Or at least in semidarkness. I always worked best when the light in the booth was dim. So I was in this half-lit makeshift booth, in the semidarkness except for a blue glow from my tiny reading lamp. In the semidarkness, in the makeshift booth in the gray conference hall on Lexington Avenue in New York City.My colleague that day was a spotty Liverpudlian who had once put his hand on my thigh while I was in the middle of a piece of simultaneous translation. I had shifted my position and carried on translating from French to English, spouting forth about the size and hue of tomatoes, and managed after that to avoid his gaze for months. Other female interpreters had reacted more aggressively to his clammy paws and had complained to the International Interpreters’ Association, but I had said nothing. These days, for fear of being struck off he picked at his skin and his cuticles rather than seeking out the thighs of his colleagues.
“You go first Dominique,” he said.
I nodded and pulled my headphones down over my ears. I looked at my watch. Four minutes to go. The delegates were filing back into the hall. Black-, brown-, red-, gray-haired doctors and researchers, all of them sauntering back into the room. I pushed my hair off my face and took a few long deep breaths. Usually the intense concentration of the morning had calmed my nerves and by the afternoon I was raring to go, running closely behind the voice of the speaker, following his rhythm, his intonation, his speed, his tone. But on that Friday the adrenaline was still pumping at the start of the afternoon session. I put it down to stress. I put it down to the effects of my conversation with Anna the week before. Now sitting in the blue glow with three minutes to go before kickoff, through my headphones, I heard not the shuffling of the delegates’ papers, but last week’s conversation that had played itself over and over again in my head.
“He’s bad,” she had said in her almost accentless English.
“How bad?” I had asked.
“He’s bad,” she repeated. “He has ulcers in his mouth. He’s horribly thin. He can’t concentrate. I’m trying to persuade him to take the medication now. He’s told his father about it.” “How are you?” I asked.
“I’m not so great, Dom,” she said. “Not so great. I feel, you know, like you feel when it could be the beginning of the end for someone you love. I feel, I feel . . .”
The line had gone dead.The receiver crackled. My headphones crackled. My colleague prodded me rather too close to my thigh. It was my turn to interpret. Through the glass of the booth I could make out the chairman of the conference limping up the steps. He turned his red fleshy face toward his audience. I swallowed. The chairman cleared his throat too loudly. It hurt my eardrums.I reached for my control panel and adjusted the red volume button. The chairman began. “Bon après-midi mesdames et messieurs, je vous souhaite la bienvenue à la deuxième partie de notre conference.”
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the second part of our conference.“J’espère que vous n’êtes pas trop ensommeillés après tout cet alcool pour apprécier notre prochain orateur . . ”I hope you’re not too sleepy after all that red wine, to appreciate our next speaker.
Dr. Katz came up onto the podium. I looked at the watch Paul had bought me, so that I would “feel” every second I was away from him. The light was too low to see the hands, but I knew I had about twenty-five minutes to go. We worked in half-hour sessions. That was about as far as the concentration would stretch in a stint of simultaneous interpreting. It was tough stuff. Interpreters are more prone to strokes and brain hemorrhages from stress than the rest of the population.
I felt the Liverpudlian staring. I closed my eyes and the words of the speaker kaleidoscoped in and out of mine. He talked of the need to find a cure for the common cold, the number of working days missed because of the virus, the amount of ineffectual medication on the market, the hunt, the chase to be the first to come up with something new, exciting, innovative. He spoke faster and faster. I ran faster and faster behind him. His breathing was shallow. Obviously a smoker. You could always tell when you were interpreting a smoker. The speaker took a sip of water. I weighed up whether there was time to take a sip of mine. I decided against it. I would have fallen a sentence behind him and it was always hard to catch up. The Liverpudlian prodded me again. I looked at him. He pointed to the control panel. It was his turn to take over. I nodded, all the while talking, finishing my sentence, finishing the speaker’s sentence, talking about the advances in his research. I switched off my microphone a split second before he switched on his. A seamless transition from my voice to his. My colleague began to talk. I rolled my neck from side to side, unclenched my fists and vowed to get out of the habit of digging my nails into my palms till they bled while I translated. Some of the delegates turned around to stare at us, startled by the change of voice in their ears. At moments like this they suddenly remembered they were listening to human beings and not to machines. I stood up and carefully pushed open the cardboard door of the booth. I closed it silently and crept out of the back of the conference hall along the corridor to the bathrooms.In the white tiled room I sat down on a low black stool in front of a huge mirror. I looked at myself without seeing, brushed my reddy-brown hair, applied my lipstick and just sat there. Words buzzed in my head, unstoppable as the threatening hum of a circling mosquito. Not the words of the speaker I had just translated, though that would hardly have been unusual. I often heard other people’s words, other people’s voices in my head for hours after I came out of the booth. The feeling is the same as when you have sat in front of a computer screen for hours and for some time afterward the words dance in front of your eyes. But no, these were not the speaker’s words. I just kept on hearing that line of Anna’s, “He has ulcers in his mouth. He’s horribly thin. . . He can’t concentrate.”
I found myself now translating the words into French. Sitting on the stool in the ladies room and whispering to myself, “Il a des plaques dans la bouche, il est affreusement mince . . . il n’arrive pas à se concentrer.” You idiot, I thought, what use is this?
Someone flushed a toilet. I realized I had been out of the booth for more than ten minutes. You never did that to your colleague. You never stayed away for more than ten minutes. He might want you to look up a word. He might be having a coughing fit and need you to take over. I ran back down the corridor, tiptoed into the conference hall, and slipped back into the booth.It was lighter now. They had pulled back the heavy purple velvet curtains at the side of the hall. I could see the Liverpudlian clearly. He had been attacking his face viciously while he had been working. He turned and gave me a dirty look. I looked away and sat down.I opened my medical dictionary. Reams and reams of medical vocabulary in four languages. I tried to read a page every night before I went to sleep. “You ought to read something a little more steamy,” Anna said to me once and threw a copy of 91?2 Weeks onto my duvet. “Read it,” she said. “You might learn something.” I read it. I learned and we laughed about it. That was before Mischa’s ulcers.The Liverpudlian was going at it fifty to the dozen, leaning back in his chair, his feet up against the desk, one toe poking through a hole in a grubby sock. He sounded to the untrained ear as if he were translating fluently. It was only the initiated who would have realized he was ill-prepared and making mistake after mistake.I ran my eyes over the conference documentation. However well you prepared yourself, however many hundreds of words you learned in readiness for a medical conference there was always a phrase that would trip you up. But I had a head start. My father was a doctor and the names of drugs and illnesses had been the vocabulary of my youth. “Dad,” I had said, the night before on the phone from New York to London, “Dad, can you explain to me a bit about viruses?” He had laughed and said, “That’s like me asking you to teach me Italian in a phone call. Look, fax me the documents and I’ll try to explain things to you in context.”“I can’t,” I said.
“You can’t?”“You know this stuff is always confidential.”“I’m your father,” he said. “If you want help you’ll just have to trust me.” “I’ll think about it, Dad,” I said.I didn’t fax the documents. I stood in my apartment with my finger on the green start button of the fax machine, about to transmit, and changed my mind. “Confidentiality,” screamed the Interpreting School director in my head. “Confidentiality. Break your vow of confidentiality, get caught, and you are out. Your vows are as solemn as the Hippocratic oath, as sacred as the nun’s marriage to Jesus. What you learn in that booth must stay there or else your career is at an end.”I could hear the Liverpudlian getting a little out of breath. I tapped lightly on the desk in front of me, caught his attention and raised my eyebrows. We interpreters quickly learned the nonverbal code, the language which we speak while we are talking. The raised eyebrows meant, “Are you struggling? Shall I take over?” He shook his head. There was a certain shame in handing the microphone to a colleague before your stint was over. It was like ending a sprint before you reached the finish line. He made it, panting to the last word. The audience applauded the speaker. The Liverpudlian switched off his microphone and spluttered into his gray handkerchief. I felt repulsed.The chairman stood up to make the closing remarks for the day. I was on. Mike on. Headphones. “Focus, Dominique, focus.” Miss a word and you have missed the train. It had been a long day. I was tense and tired. My colleague shoved a note under my nose. “I’m off,” it read. Against the rules to leave me there alone, even if it was the last speech, but I didn’t care. I gave him the thumbs-up sign and he was gone. I was more relaxed with him out of the way. The words tumbled out of me. I was spurred on by the finish line. “Ladies and gentlemen, I think you’ll agree we should also say thank you to our team of interpreters. They’ve done an excellent job and it’s been a grueling day.”
I leaned back exhausted. I always found it amusing and slightly embarrassing when I had to translate praise about my own work.I should have felt nothing but relief. The day was over. Thousands of words had flowed through me into thin air. My grotty, spotty colleague was gone. I ought to have walked out of there with a spring in my step. I ought to have rushed out into the streets of Manhattan. Instead I sat very still in the corner of my booth and waited for the delegates to file out as they had filed in. I could see no one but still I felt as though I were not alone in the room. My headphones were on the desk in front of me. I heard faint voices coming from them. I picked them up. There were clearly still two or more people in the room talking. One of them had forgotten to switch off their microphone. I could hear them speaking in hushed tones, but I couldn’t see them. Part of the hall was out of my line of vision. I reached for the control panel. I turned up the volume and held the headset to one ear.“. . . quite by chance,” said a deep male voice with a Southern drawl.“You don’t stumble on these things by chance,” said an older voice and coughed a smoker’s cough.“They did with penicillin.” “Billions of dollars are invested . . .” for a moment my headphones crackled, “. . . hiv every year, my young friend. No one, not even he, could find a quasi-cure by chance. Anyway, what makes you think it could work?” I stiffened.
“The other day. In his lab I saw it for myself. Cells that should have been riddled with the disease holding their own. Couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“And he’s told no one?”
“No, just me. He’s a loner. I think I’m his only confidant.”
“And you reckon he’s credible? Worth backing?”
“I reckon he’s a genius. But modest with it. Never brags. I can’t say it’s conclusive, but I’m damn sure he’s onto something. I think he’ll be persuaded to come with us.”

I started to shake, sitting there trapped in that booth. A little at first. Then harder. I was afraid they would feel the vibrations of my movements. Mischa, I thought. The ulcers. The swallowing. The wasting away. There’s a way out. These voices in my ears, they have the answer.
I was thinking so loudly, I almost forgot to listen.“Follow his progress,” said the older, smoker’s voice. “And for God’s sake make sure he keeps it under wraps till we get our act together and we can bring him on board. Land me this one and I’ll back you to the hilt.”
“Trust me,” said the deep Southern voice and laughed a deep and heavy laugh. The conversation stopped abruptly. Someone had switched off the microphone. I dug my nails into my palms and waited. I heard movement. I shoved my papers into my briefcase. I crept out of the booth, I walked out of the side door, I burst into a run along Lexington Avenue. I ran and I ran, past Fifty-third Street, Fifty-second, left on to Fifty-first, past Third Avenue, Second, First, into Beekman Place, shouting to myself, “Anna, Anna, tell Mischa, there might be a way!” I rushed past the doorman and pounded up the stairs to my apartment. I went straight for the telephone on the kitchen wall beside the fridge. I dialed Anna’s number from memory and suddenly I froze. A voice in my head was screaming at me. “Your vows of confidentiality are as solemn as the Hippocratic oath. As sacred as the nun’s marriage to Jesus.”

Excerpted from The Interpreter by Suzanne Glass. Copyright © 2003 by Suzanne Glass. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.