My mother wanted me to become a doctor. If not a doctor – then a literary translator. She would start speaking about my future and say with conviction that in our country there were only two “clean” professions – firstly, medicine, secondly, literary translation. She wouldn’t be more specific, so I took it as an axiom.

When she saw that I was hopeless at chemistry and physics and that I showed little interest in biology, she started pushing me towards the second option. She was a schoolteacher, she knew how to manipulate people.

Just one example of her scheming. At home there was a bookshelf up very high where, mother told me, were the books for adults. I was not to touch them until I was old enough to understand them. Of course when I was alone I read them all, to the last page. I was probably the youngest living creature in the world to read the two volumes of “Anna Karenina” and the four volumes of “War and Peace”. I didn’t understand much, but I developed a lifelong habit of reading difficult books.

To interest me in reading books in English (the language I was studying at school without enthusiasm), my mother took me to the Moscow Library of Foreign Literature, recently reopened after renovation. The building was brand new, all glass and steel. In socialist Moscow of 1969 it looked like a miracle of modernity, a temple of light. Even the compulsory Lenin statue was not like the one at school, 3-meters high and gilded, but small, sort of cubist, very chic. And there were no kids, as no-one under 16 could get a subscription.

I immediately felt that I wanted to belong to that world. Even the queue behaved differently from all other Soviet queues: everybody was so polite, so patient, so soft-spoken. They are all translators, I thought. I also thought I understood why translation was a profession second only to medicine in its sterile attire. I demanded that mother take out a subscription for me in her name, then I was allowed to take a book. Not knowing what to order I chose the thickest volume from the display and promised myself I would read it to the end no matter what. Hadn’t I read “War and Peace”, after all?

Unfortunately the book turned out to be “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck. In the beginning I had to write out at least 50 unknown words from each page. I did force my way through it, I had to keep my word, but I’ve never touched a Steinbeck book since then. An adolescent trauma.

The second English book, “Scaramouch” by Raphael Sabatini, was a relief, a treat. I started translating it immediately for a friend who was unlucky enough to have to study German at school. After a couple of pages I found it easier to tell the story in my own words, embellishing it along the way – a premonition of what was to become of me eventually. But at thirteen I didn’t want to be a writer, I wanted to translate.

The real meaning of what my mother had in mind when she called literary translation “a clean profession” and why it was less “clean” than medicine became clear to me later as I was growing up and learning the art of adjusting to the real world.

Here I must digress in order to explain the rather specific position of writers and philologists in the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler was a failed painter. Joseph Stalin was a failed poet.

Stalin must have envisaged his dictatorship as some sort of epic poem, the beauty of which should be admired. And it was admired, genuinely or falsely, voluntarily or otherwise. In any case, no criticism of that great work of poetry was tolerated.

It was bad luck for Russian literature that Stalin thought highly of literature. For him it meant that literature was politically important. The dictator grew up in an era when Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov were iconic figures in Russia, influencing not only Russian literature but the whole of society.

Stalin evidently despised all three of them for their uselessness and even harmfulness. He needed his own socialist Tolstoys. And with his arithmetical practical-mindedness, his endless contempt for human nature, he was sure that he knew how to achieve this goal.

The chaotic and uncontrollable world of literary creation had to be put in order. Stalin directed and organized the process as it was called then.

He put the nightingale in a gilded cage by founding in 1934 the Writers’ Union, which put Soviet authors in a privileged position both financially and status-wise – in return for complete loyalty.

Those writers who didn’t agree to be locked in a cage or who misbehaved were purged or barred from publishing. The majority, though, didn’t mind playing by the rules. By the end of the Soviet era there were some 10,000 registered members in the Writers’ Union. Candidates would conspire for years trying to get there.

When I was a student in the 1970s writing was a coveted profession – but at the same time there was something shameful in it. In Moscow and in Leningrad there were quite a number of informal literary clubs and groups whose members actually took pride in the fact that they didn’t want to be published. Those people would ask about a new name: “Is she a poet or a published poet? Is he a writer or a Writers’ Union member?”

That’s why my mother didn’t want me to become a writer. For her and her milieu it definitely wasn’t a clean profession.

But literary translation was.

Stalin’s directorship of the writing world was awful for Russian literature, which quickly lost all of its previous greatness, but it proved to be a blessing for literary translation.

When authors of talent, even of genius, were not allowed to publish their works or were afraid to write the way they wanted – they turned to translation. Boris Pasternak was secretly writing his “Doctor Zhivago” while surviving on translations of Shakespeare, Keats or Schiller; Anna Akhmatova, banned from publishing her own poems, earned her living by translating Chinese and Korean classics; Mikhail Zoschenko had to translate Finnish prose and he did it brilliantly. That’s what almost all the big guns did – they translated other authors’ works. As a result the school of Soviet translation rose to an incredible height. It had its own stars, even cult figures. A literary translator, even if he was a member of the despised Writers’ Union, was welcome in any underground literary club, even the most snobbish of them.

And still it was less clean than medicine. Here my mother was right again. The rose of literary translation was not without its thorns.

You couldn’t translate just any author you wanted and then offer it to a publisher, no way. There was an undisclosed but widely known list of forbidden and half-forbidden writers, the latter category including the aforementioned Steinbeck for instance. Of all his novels, I think, only “The Grapes of Wrath”, with its description of the hardships of the Depression, was approved for publishing.

And it was always safer to translate a writer who was already dead. With living authors one never knew what to expect. A “progressive writer and a big friend of the Soviet Union” (that was a sort of honorary title) could say something stupid about Czechoslovakia, the dissidents or, God forbid, Solzhenitsyn – and never be published in Russian again.

Anything at all could happen.

There was a Japanese author, Abe Kobo, considered to be undoubtedly “progressive” because he was, I think, a member of the Communist Party of Japan. His prose was very popular in the Soviet Union of the 1960s and 1970s. Translations of Abe made the translator, my professor at university, a celebrity in his own right. Then Abe fell out of grace with the Japanese communists, they reported on him to Moscow, and Abe immediately became a persona non grata for Soviet publishers – a professional tragedy for his translator.

Another thorn was censorship. And I don’t mean political censorship – all dubious authors and titles would have been excluded at the pre-translation stage. No, it was a peculiar sort of censorship called “moral-ethical editing”. There could be no sexually explicit descriptions in a published text. An editor would cross out all the “immoral” scenes, and if it could not be done without ruining the logic of the plot, the editor would urge the translator to “soften the sharp angles”, as it was called.

In the 1980s when I started to work for the magazine “Foreign Literature” all these restrictions were still in force, so, being an editor, I had plenty of opportunity to see how it worked. It was very Victorian, actually. Some things were not mentioned, some words did not exist.

I remember our proof-reader correcting the word “orgasm” to “organism” without the slightest hesitation. The lady thought it was a misprint.

(Oh yes, that reminds me of the most celebrated misprint in the history of the magazine. A typesetter, probably hung over or not quite sober, composed “Marxism de Sade” – instead of “Marquise de Sade”).

So, when I was young, literary translation could not be called an impeccably clean profession. Second cleanest was more like it.

I wanted to translate and to live by translation, but not like that, picking my authors from among the “progressive friends of the USSR” and “softening the sharp angles” afterwards.

So I found a compromise.

The bliss of translation

On graduating from University I did become a translator, and I began to earn my living by practising this trade, but I kept work and pleasure apart.

For money I translated technical documents: scientific articles, patents, licences. It paid well and it was as clean as medicine. And for my own pleasure I translated fiction, books that impressed me and were a challenge for my translation skills. I did not even try to find a publisher, it would have been hopeless and maybe even risky.

For an audience I had my friends. They were unpublished writers and poets, I was an unpublished translator, it was absolutely normal for the time. Besides I had my wife. Her marital duty was read and retype my translations and of course to say what a wonderful translator I was. So my audience was small, but reliable.

I must say that it was the most cloudless period of my whole career as a translator. Pure art unsoiled by greed.

There are a lot of bonuses for someone who translates just for himself. No deadlines, you go as fast as you want and you work only when you feel like working. In later years I learned to translate quickly, sometimes very quickly. It felt like gulping down a bottle of fine wine, splashing some of the precious liquid in the process, because a publisher would be tapping me impatiently on the shoulder.

In the blessed times of Samizdat you didn’t care whether your translation would sell or not, the print-run was determined by how many copies your typewriter could produce. Mine produced four. And when I was sitting down to translate it was leisure, not work.

I loved every minute and every stage of it.

You know that there are different metaphors concerning literary translation. The one most frequently used likens translation to transplanting a foreign tree or flower into local soil while harming it as little as possible. Alexander Pushkin (rather condescendingly, I think) said that translators were the post-horses of enlightenment.

Working on a translation I felt neither like a horse, nor like a gardener.

For me it was more like restoring a work of art, covered by an ugly and irritating layer of foreign language that didn’t let Russians admire it. This work of art was a mosaic. My task was to clean every tiny tessera. They were fragile, very easy to break, so I had to be careful with my brush. Careful but not timid. If you were too cautious you could restore every single piece of the mosaic, but harm its magic. I knew that a translation which was mathematically correct but devoid of the translator’s personality would kill the magic.

With a language so distant from my own as Japanese, translating prose was like translating poetry. Freedom and inspiration were the key words.

Grammar was a trap, an enemy. I know many translations from Japanese where all the weight goes to the last part of a phrase, because in that language the end of a sentence determines everything. The Russian sentence is flexible and loose, putting the stress on the ending makes a phrase sound pompous and heavy. Irony and humor are expressed by other means. Exquisiteness and coarseness function differently. Allusions and metaphors belong to another cultural universe. A translator from Japanese must be very resourceful, sometimes even cheeky.

I found my favourite author almost immediately. He had two irresistible features. First, he was an absolute taboo in the USSR. Second, he was impossibly hard to translate.

I am talking about Yukio Mishima, famous for his style and notorious for his ideology which eventually led him to commit harakiri.

In the Soviet Union Mishima was considered to be an epitome of decadence, moral corruption and political subversion, a devil reincarnate. We, future japanologists, were not given his books to read, but I remembered from my university literature course the titles of Mishima’s poisonous books. They all seemed to be “hymns” to something awful. The novel “Confessions of a Mask” was a hymn to perversity, the novel “Kinkakuji” was a hymn to destruction, the novella “Patriotism” was a hymn to suicide, and the play “My Friend Hitler” was, naturally, a hymn to fascism. It all sounded so intriguing that I became Mishima’s fan even before I’d actually read his books.

With time I translated all of the aforementioned titles and many more. Mishima taught me many things on the professional level. I shall mention just one of them, the most important one of all.

When I was translating “Kinkakuji” (“The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” as it is known in the West), I had at hand the English translation – very meticulous, authorized by Mishima himself. Everything was impeccably correct – and yet still something was amiss.

You see, Mishima is not a clever author, most of his ideas about life and society would leave you uninterested. Neither is he an especially gifted builder of plots. The story isn’t his forte. With Mishima, the nuances are more important than the ideas he advances; Shade means so much more than Light. But his narration is so elegant, his style so powerful, that it makes up for the banalities and showing-off. There is plenty of shallowness in Mishima’s works, but strangely it only increases the impression of genuineness and beauty. It turns into a melody that I can always hear when I am reading Mishima.

In the English translation this melody was silent.

The saddest disappointments were the descriptions of nature. Mishima is famous for his “landscapes”. Everybody knows that describing skies, meadows and mountains is the hardest thing in modern fiction. It usually looks so unnecessary, so pretentious, so boring. I always miss out those bits when reading. When writing I keep to the golden rule: the shorter the better. “It was raining”, “the sky was cloudy” – and that’s it.

Not so with Mishima. You can actually see what he describes, and landscape is always an important part of his narration. His descriptions of nature can be quite long, but you are never bored.

How does he achieve this, I wondered. And how can I reproduce this effect in translation?

I remember how I tried to translate a fragment describing a sea view from “Kinkakuji”. I did it several times, each time differently, and still I was not satisfied. (There was no deadline, you remember). Then I understood that the secret lay in the sounds. The passage had to be read aloud. It was like a mantra, the combination of sounds and words – the trick was to capture this combination, not the meaning.

And when I translated the passage again, making it sound like a mantra in Russian too, I liked the result.

Then I discovered that every single phrase in Mishima’s books was a mantra. A sentence becomes a mantra when every word is in its exact place and cannot be changed for another word. Every syllable is a part of a mosaic and cannot be moved. It’s like a poem, only in prose there is more oxygen, more air.

In order to make a good translation of Mishima I had to become a Russian Mishima inside. Which is of course easier said than done.

Do you know how Mishima described the process of writing? It feels, he said, as if you have saddled the planet and are flying through the Universe with stars whizzing by and scratching your cheeks.

Well, that’s the picture I tried to imagine before sitting down to translate “Kinkakuji”. Sometimes it worked.

After a while I discovered a very useful trick. Since every good book has a hidden melody you should try to find the closest possible equivalent to it.

I would try to find a melody – it could be anything from classical music to a pop song – that would put me on the same sound wave as this particular text. Before translating a chapter I would listen to this music for a couple of minutes, and then the process of translation usually went almost as Mishima described.

I use this method now, when I write fiction, but in a more sophisticated manner. I have collected an audiolibrary of melodies that put me in a certain mood. Every episode in a book has its rhythm, its colour, its nuance of feeling. So I tune myself in. I have melodies for all shades of emotion: “vague anxiety”, “fearlessness”, “unrequited love”, “not-a-care-in-the world”, “smiling through tears” – anything. Whenever I hear a melody that moves me in a certain manner, I mark it and record it for later use. It does spoil the pleasure of listening to music, but, you know, a writer, no matter what he does, is always on the alert for titbits that could be used in a text. It’s like in Chekhov’s “The Seagull” when the writer Trigorin says: “I’ll see a cloud that looks like a camel and I’ll think – I have to put that in a story…”

I often feel nostalgia for the era when I was a translator and could look at clouds in an un-predatory way. You cannot be a part-time writer. You are a writer even when you sleep. When I was a translator I felt much freer.

This feeling of freedom reached its peak during the Perestroika years when all the ideological taboos were abolished. I was able to publish all the translations that I had done just for my own pleasure.

I was thirty when my first book of translations was published. I knew it would be a big day for my mother, so I hadn’t told her anything – I wanted to show her the book already printed.

We went to visit her, me and my wife. Mother looked at the book, then she looked – not at me, but at my wife – and said something awfully tactless: “You married very well indeed, didn’t you, my girl”. I don’t know what came over her, she had always been a very polite mother-in-law. None of my later achievements impressed her to that extent.

I was a translator for twenty years. In Russia it was like belonging to the clergy or a sacred order. Philologists formed a kind of community with unwritten rules. Some things were just not tolerated. A critic, a translator, a researcher of literature could experiment with writing poetry or fiction, but it had to be serious – that is, sophisticated, dark and respectably boring. Most of the literary awards in Russia go to this sort of writing.

I am often asked why I took a pseudonym when I started writing fiction. The answer is simple. Cowardice.

I was working for a highly esteemed literary magazine, I was a translator with a name. Had it been known that I publish, for God’s sake, crime novels, I would have lost face. So, for as long as possible, I was hiding the fact that Boris Akunin, the new phenomenon of mass literature, was me. Sometimes I had to endure discussions about that filthy profiteer led in my presence by colleagues.

Ever since the truth leaked out I have been treated by part of that community as though I were a defrocked priest.

And this is not a specifically Russian phenomenon. I have a number of friends and acquaintances in the Japanese “Bundan” – as the literary world is called there. Japanese are much politer than Russians – when they are sober. I didn’t even guess that my Japanese friends were also shocked by my transformation, until one of them, a professor and a celebrated translator of Dostoyevsky, called me, over an empty bottle of sake, “a traitor to Junbungaku”.

Junbungaku means “clean literature” in Japanese – as opposed to “taishubungaku”, mass literature.

So, it was about cleanness again.

Shadow’s Mutiny

I shall try to explain why I became a traitor to Junbungaku, why I changed my clean profession for an unclean one.

There were some mitigating circumstances.

As I was approaching 40, not an easy milestone for anybody, I suddenly realized that I had lost the urge to translate. It had become a routine, and that had always been my idea of a senseless existence – when life becomes routine.

I was not moving anywhere. I had reached the peak of my capacity as a translator. I could translate for another 40 years and still be at the same level of skill. This perspective frightened me.

Then I began to notice a new tendency within myself. I would start feeling irritated with the author I was translating. “Come on, these preliminaries are taking far too long, come to the point!” I would think. Or: “That episode should have been devised differently”.

It was neither normal, nor reasonable. It was worrying. My favourite Russian playwright Evgeny Shvartz has a play in which the shadow of the protagonist rebels against its master because it’s sick and tired of following him everywhere and faithfully reflecting all his idiotic movements. The shadow in the play separates from the man and starts a life of its own.

Something like that happened to me.

When I sat down to write my first novel (I didn’t bother with the smaller stuff, like a short story or a novella) I felt very sure of myself. My mood was: “I’ll show you all” – and I didn’t mean readers, I meant other authors.

When I finished it I was immensely pleased with the result – and endlessly surprised when at first nobody wanted to publish the novel and then very few people wanted to buy it.

I was stubborn, I wrote and wrote ‘til the audience gave up. And I was lucky. My fountain started to gush at the moment when a new class, the middle class, was emerging in Russia and they wanted middle of the road reading – not too light, not too heavy. My genre fit in perfectly.

Now, having published about 50 titles, I’ve lost much of my initial confidence. To be honest, I have lost all of it. I suspect (and am being told by unfriendly critics) that I was better as a translator than as a writer.

On the other hand, this dissatisfaction probably motivates me to keep on moving. I tell myself that I can do better, so there is no question of routine. You just have to jump higher. Then one day maybe you’ll fly and feel stars scratching your cheeks.

I should add that my mother never approved of my metamorphosis. She read my novels with a pencil and asked me questions about the plots, she watched screen adaptations and attended theatre premieres, she even collected nice articles about Boris Akunin – but she was never a fan. For her it all was a whim of mine, a temporary diversion. She just had to be patient.

Right until the end of her life, when I visited her on Sundays, she would ask every now and then: “What are you writing now? Is it one of your Fandorin novels again? You should give yourself a break and write something serious…” – And then she’d finish, with a tinge of hope: “… or maybe even translate something?”

Boris Akunin is one of the most widely read authors in Russia, and has been compared to Gogol, Tolstoy and Arthur Conan Doyle. His best-selling detective novels are translated into English by Andrew Bromfield. But in his previous life, Boris Akunin was Grigory Chkhartishvili, a translator of Japanese literature into Russian. He is giving this year’s Sebald Lecture, Paradise Lost: Confessions of an apostate translator, at King’s Place on Monday 4th February. Click here to buy tickets.

Boris, Grigory, Anatoly, Anna. You have written different things under different names; why do you feel the need to change identity when you change your writing style?

I’ll have to answer at some length. Under my own difficult name (Grigory Chkhartishvili) I intended to write “unplayful” texts: non-fiction, essays, articles. “Boris Akunin” was reserved originally only for light stuff like detective fiction, pastiches, fairy tales, etc. But this pseudonym stuck to me so solidly, that after a while I became just “Akunin” to the press and the public. I was interviewed as Akunin and quoted as Akunin – even when I spoke about things unrelated to literature. This I had to accept, but there was another thing to which I could not reconcile myself. There is a price you pay when you succeed in building a “brand”. You become a hostage of readers’ expectations. They want you to write in the same manner, eternally. When I tried to write differently, there would be an outrage: how did I dare shatter their expectations?

So, in order to break free from this web I launched a project code-named “Authors”. Only two people except myself were in the know: the publisher and the editor. I created two virtual authors – Anatoly Brusnikin and Anna Borisova – both of whom wrote differently from Boris Akunin. The man wrote historical slavophile novels (very unlike Akunin, who was known and often blamed for his cosmopolitanism), the woman tried to appear sophisticated. No expectations were disappointed, so both “writers” were a success saleswise. They each published three titles before I got tired of the game and confessed. It was a refreshing experience.

For your new novel, Aristonomy, yet another identity, a union of your first two personas: Akunin-Chkhartishvili. Does this mean you now feel you’ve come full circle, as you’ve mentioned you are now a real writer? What do you mean by that?

There are two layers of narration in the novel: fictional and quasi-documentary with a significant difference in styles. By using the double name I wanted to say that this book was written by me in both my main capacities – as an author of fiction and as an essayist. Everything I have learned about the profession of writing is there.

What aspects of your previous life as a translator have influenced your work as an author? Do you still find echoes of those texts in your own writing?

Of course I was influenced and even formed by the texts I had read, edited, translated. 90% of all I know about life comes from other books. Many years of translation work are the reason why it is so natural for me to change style and manner – to the extent that I am still not sure if I have a style of my own. So, my experience as a translator was both an asset and a drawback.

Do you think a translation should make it obvious that it is a translation, or should it read like an original work? Why?

Different rules apply to translating poetry, classics and modern fiction. If we’re talking about the latter, I belong to the faction which believes that a translated book should sound absolutely natural and read as an original. The impact on the reader should be the same. The means by which this effect is achieved can be quite bold. I think that a translator should be allowed a lot of liberties. A good translator is not an interpreter, but almost a co-author.

Do you write for the pleasure of writing, or do you have an ideal reader in mind? Does it change if it’s a translation or a piece of original writing?

I write because this is the only thing I know how to do. It’s my way – or rather my Way in the Japanese sense of the word – of understanding things, of self-development, of finding answers to all sorts of existential questions. Pleasure? Definitely – if I am pleased with a day’s work. If not, then it becomes a source of depression. In one word, it’s life, my life.

And translations – I do not do them any longer. For me that profession was left behind in the previous millennium.

What advice would you give to an aspiring translator? Would it be different from the advice to a writer?

Opposite, in fact. I’d tell a debutant author: “Become your real self”. “Forget yourself, become the writer you translate” – that’s what I would say to a novice in translation.

And to conclude, if you could choose any author, from any language, alive or dead, who would you translate, and why?

I would have loved to learn English to the extent where I could translate my favourite Russian authors who are not appreciated enough outside my country. Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, Evgeny Shvarts. This is a dream that won’t come true of course. Not in this life.

“There was only one translator from German to English in all of the New York publishing world.  The translation was so appalling that I paid for a new one myself.”

“How awful,” I said with the required sympathy.  But silently I thought, isn’t one translator enough?

The question pinged around in my brain until a few months later, when I first met my formidable, straight-backed, keenly critical Dutch translator, Jenny de Jong.

“Your book was a nightmare for me,” she said, with what I soon learned was customary Dutch frankness mixed with customary Jenny brutality.  “I translated the whole book from beginning to end, realized that I had it wrong, threw it away, and started over again from the beginning.”

You did what?

“What do you mean,” I said out loud, “you had it wrong?”

Thank god I didn’t tell her, but at that time I imagined that translating a book meant changing the words more or less one at a time from one language to another.  If I’d thought about it a bit more, the total idiocy of this would have been obvious.  Although a hopeless linguist, I did study French for five years in school, and Hebrew as a child in Sunday school, and a term or two of Spanish as an adult.  So I knew, of course I knew, that translation has nothing to do with word for word translation.

“The voice!” Jenny nearly shouted at me.  “I didn’t have the voice right.”  She looked at me (not for the last time) scathingly, with an expression that said, “well, you may be able to write a vaguely interesting book, but you really are a bit thick aren’t you?”

She was right.

What I didn’t know about translation was enough to fill a great number of (very thick) volumes.  It had never occurred to me when I studied English literature at university, for instance, that when Pound “translated” his Cathay poems from Chinese to English, that he didn’t speak a work of Chinese.  Poetic-translations-once-removed wasn’t a concept I had ever really considered.  And now that I’ve been associated with the world of translation for going on decade, and observed first hand the care with which particular translators are matched with particular novels, I have finally caught up with my German novelist friend’s outrage.

These days, I spend a lot of time trying to stay on the right side of my beloved translators, but it’s often in vain.

My second novel, Just in Case, made Jenny very angry.

“First of all,” she wrote me, “I don’t know what you expect me to do with that title.  Can you please in future not give your books names that are impossible to translate into Dutch.  Secondly, I am very disappointed in the draft.  It really does not work.”

She was right.  It did not work.  We had sent it out a bit too early, and it needed that last edit, the last tightening of the screws that often makes the difference between a flabby ineffective novel, and one that’s watertight, airtight, and basically … just … tight.  I went back and worked on it for another month and sent it to back to her, directly this time.

“Well,” she wrote.  “It’s OK now.  But honestly, your continuity!  You don’t mean to tell me that butcher shops are open on Sundays, do you?”

I adore Jenny.  Perhaps it’s the American in me, but if there’s anything I can’t stand in a relationship it’s an excess of politeness (this goes double for my relationship with editors and translators).  No danger of that here.

Since writing my first novel, I have never been able to relax until Jenny reads the manuscript.  If I get her OK (on form, content, title, etc.) then I know the book is OK.  Even if the critics, agents, or publishers don’t agree.

I have, of course, told her this.  In response, she frowns and tells me I’m an idiot.  But I can see underneath that she’s pleased.

Jenny never e-mails me with questions about tricky bits of language.  Which is interesting, because the language I use is a peculiar mix of American and English vernacular, and one of my most frequent copyediting requests is to change a particularly original expression “out of English into a more familiar American usage” – or vice versa.  And more often than not, I have to tell the editor that the expression is neither American nor English, but just something I invented.

“Dear Meg,” wrote my wonderful German translator in regard to There Is No Dog, (another title that drove the translating community to despair), “could you please explain to me what is ‘squishy woo woo?’”

Ah, squishy woo woo.  Well, I explained, it’s sex, obviously.  But it’s not an actual expression, I made it up.  It has overtones of nursery language as in, “woo woo, I can see your underpants” and relies on onomatopoeia in a slightly gross childish way with the word ‘squishy.’

Brigitte Jakobeit, who (based on the number of German literary awards my translated books have won) must surely be a genius of a translator, did not send me the sort of scathing reply I might have had from Jenny.  I received by return mail a simple (dare I say Germanic?), “Thank you.”

It was during a weekend with Brigitte in Hamburg that my understanding of the difficulties that translators suffer expanded exponentially.  She was working on a translation of a well-known and well-regarded best-selling American writer’s latest novel, and I was working on a draft of my latest.  We worked quietly, one room apart.

“Meg!” she called about every ten minutes, and I duly trotted next door to see what the problem was, proud to be able to help with the American idioms.  But what she showed me, time and again, were sentences that made no sense at all in English.

“It’s grammatical nonsensical,” I told her, again.  “It’s just words that don’t add up to anything at all.  It’s terrible writing.  That’s what it is.”

And off she’d go with a sigh.  Squishy woo woo was beginning to look positively benign.

I don’t know my Indonesian or Korean or Japanese translators.  And I do sometimes wonder how my Catalan translator dealt with a character called Justin Case.  But mainly, I sit at home quietly and wait to hear from Brigitte and Jenny, with their separate verdicts, on the quality of the writing and the plot and the number of annoying (and surely unnecessary?) uses of language that simply have no equivalence in Dutch or German.

My regard for them, my admiration and gratitude, has few outlets.  I tell them frequently how much I love them.

And I’ve made one of the main characters in my new book a translator.

I am terrified to show it to either of them.  There is no doubt in my mind that I’ve got the characterisation precisely wrong.

This article first appeared in issue 40 of the BCLT journal In Other Words.

When he was told he was an endangered species, Tristan was somewhat surprised. Nothing in his life so far would have led him to suspect such a thing. He was thirty years old and worked at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, making sketches of the staging and details of the set. His one-bedroom apartment looked out onto the Parc Montsouris. He had a trumpet lesson once a week, and every Sunday morning, as soon as the pool opened, he would swim twenty lengths. Love had been known to come his way, but it was a while since a woman had shared his bed. Some evenings he wished this was not the case, but most of the time he was philosophical, telling himself he would eventually fall in love again. He rather liked the idea of starting a family, not that he had ever done anything about it. No rush.

One Monday morning in spring (it had been a long hard winter, and leaves were just starting to appear), as he was making breakfast (an apron over his suit), there was a knock at the door. The water was percolating through the brimming coffee filter. Tristan looked up. Who on earth could it be at this time? He went and opened the door. Two men were standing there. The shorter one was wearing a white coat, like a doctor or a butcher. The other wore a tweed jacket. There was something very serious about them, but also a sense of anticipation.

BIOLOGIST: “May we come in?”

NARRATOR: …asked the man in the white coat.

Tristan assumed they were from the residents’ committee, or maybe one of his neighbours hoping he would look after their cat for the holidays.

The two men advanced. They glanced around the apartment, staying oddly close to one another, as if afraid of disturbing anything.

BIOLOGIST: “I work at the university.”

NARRATOR: Tristan thought he knew why they had come. A few months earlier, he had submitted an application to teach a course, “drawing birds in flight”. Surely that was why these gentlemen were here. They had come to him. That was a good sign.

TRISTAN: “Pleased to meet you”

NARRATOR: …said Tristan, reaching out to shake hands with his unexpected visitors. The two men took a step back and exchanged embarrassed glances. They refused his outstretched hand.

BIOLOGIST: “I run the biology laboratory,”

DIRECTOR: “I’m the director of the natural history museum”

TRISTAN: “Is there a problem?”

BIOLOGIST: “No, not at all. Your doctor ran some blood tests a month ago.”

TRISTAN: “I was tired, I was worried I might be anaemic. But everything is fine”.

BIOLOGIST: “Actually, the laboratory detected a slight anomaly in your phenotype.”

TRISTAN: “A genetic anomaly?”

BIOLOGIST: “An anomaly for homo sapiens, yes, but not an anomaly in the strictest sense.”

TRISTAN: “I don’t understand. Do I have a genetic disease?”

BIOLOGIST: “No not at all. Let me explain. After discovering this irregularity, the laboratory notified the ministry of health who passed your blood sample on to us.”

DIRECTOR: “It’s standard procedure.”

BIOLOGIST: “After a great deal of cross-checking we’ve found the explanation for this anomaly. You are not a homo sapiens.”

TRISTAN: “I beg your pardon?”

BIOLOGIST: “You belong to a different sub-species.”

TRISTAN: “Do you mean to say I’m not human?”

Version One:

BIOLOGIST: “You are human, but a close relative of present-day man. You belong to the group homo sapiens insularis, a sub-species which lived on the islands between England and France. We thought it had completely died out.”

DIRECTOR: “The last known specimen dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. We have one of his arms in a jar at the museum.”

TRISTAN: “Bloody hell!”

DIRECTOR: “As you have no living relatives…”

NARRATOR: (Tristan’s parents had died shortly after his birth and he had no aunts or uncles)

DIRECTOR: “…you are almost certainly the last individual of this sub-species of hominid.”

TRISTAN: “Are you telling me I’m some kind of ape?”

DIRECTOR: “No, you are a sub-species of human, which itself is a species of ape.”

TRISTAN: “But I’m normal. I’m not physically different from anyone else.”

BIOLOGIST: “The difference is minimal. You have a slightly broader forehead and your ears are a little more pointed.”

TRISTAN: “Does this mean I won’t be able to have children?”

BIOLOGIST: “No, it will have no bearing on your capacity to reproduce. Although your children will have lost any links with your sub-species, because this genetic profile is passed down through the mother. Your children will be like any other homo sapiens.”

DIRECTOR: “Which means that you are an endangered species.”

TRISTAN: “But I’m just like everyone else.”

NARRATOR: (in fact, this was one of the reasons his ex-girlfriend had given for breaking up with him)

BIOLOGIST: “You may well think so. We are seldom aware of what we really are. And this is the sort of data that we can only ascertain through scientific analysis. We need to study you.”

Version Two:

BIOLOGIST: “You ain’t like one of us homo sapiens, see.”

TRISTAN: “Do what?! Leave it out, will ya?”

BIOLOGIST: “You’re not quite up to it, mate. Different sub-species, innit.”

TRISTAN: “You trynna tell me I ain’t hooman, guvnor?”

BIOLOGIST: “Course you’re a bloke. But we’re more like Hugh Grant to your Carey Grant, know what I mean? You are what is known as an homo sapiens insularis wot lived on them islands between Blighty and Frogland. We had thought that your lot were brown bread.”

DIRECTOR: “We ain’t seen one of you since eighteen hundred and frozen stiff. We’ve got his arm, in a bottle.”

TRISTAN: “Bloody hell!”

DIRECTOR: “As you ain’t got no family, you are abso-bleedin-lutely the last of these apes.”

TRISTAN: “‘Ere, you callin’ me a monkey?”

DIRECTOR: “Nah, mate, keep your hair on, you’re a geezer, which is like a chimp: chimpangeezer.”

TRISTAN: “But I’m norrrrrrmal. I don’t look no different from no-one else, do I…?”

DIRECTOR: “The difference is tiny [hand gesture] Head like a klingon, couple of Mr Spocks.”

TRISTAN: “So… zat mean like… I can’t ‘ave no kids?”

BIOLOGIST: “No mate, it don’t mean you’re gonna be firing blanks. It’s like, your kids won’t ave nuffink in common wiv your lot. It’s passed down through ‘er indoors, innit. Your kids will be real men just like all the uvvers”

DIRECTOR: “Meaning, you’re the end of the line, mister!”

TRISTAN: “I ain’t nuffin special, you just ask my ex-girlfriend.”

BIOLOGIST: “That’s what you think. It’s a funny old world, but leave it up to us boffins. We’re gonna give you a right MOT, mate.”

Version Three:

TRISTAN: “Say what?”

BIOLOGIST: “Technically you’re classificated in a separate subspecies.”

TRISTAN: “Whoooooooooooooo…..You tryin’ to tell me I’m some kinda alien?”

BIOLOGIST: “You are indeed a man. But a man on a different branch of the human family tree. You, my friend, are homo sapiens insularis. This subspecies…uh…proliferated on some…uh…some I, uh…islands between England and France, and we were under the impression it was no longer extant.”

DIRECTOR: “Last one a y’all we‘er caught was runnin’ around back in the eighteen hunderts. Museum still got one a his arms… … in a jar!”

TRISTAN: “Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet…”

BIOLOGIST: “Now, in consideration of the fact that you no longer have any living relatives, you are definitively and conclusively the last specimen of this particular hominid subspecies.”

TRISTAN: “Wai, wai, wai, wai, wait. Are you sayin’ I’m a monkey?”

BIOLOGIST: “No, you are a species of human, which in and of itself is a species of ape.”

TRISTAN: “Hoooooooooooold up, boss…I ain’t no freak. I’m a regular guy!”

BIOLOGIST: “The contra-distinctions are infinitisimal. Your super-orbital ridge is slightly more pronounced and your ears are kinda pointy.”

TRISTAN: “Well, no shit…You sayin’ I can’t have no kids?”

BIOLOGIST: “No, it’s got nothing to do with your reproductatory capacitencacity. However, your progeny will no longer be, uh… comprised in this uh… group. It’s a particulararity transmitted matralinearly. Your progeny will be classified homo sapiens like everyone else.”

DIRECTOR: “Basically you’re a goner!”

TRISTAN: “Well hold up, hold up now…I’ont look no different from nobody else.”

BIOLOGIST: “That may be your intro-perspective of the situation. We are rarely cognizant of our actuality. These are all details only extensive verificatory analysizing will allow us to validate.”

DIRECTOR: “We’re gonna study you, boy!”

Tristan (who voted in every election, diligently completed his tax return and took care never to break the law) agreed to help science. He rang work to say he would not be coming in, and followed the two scientists to the hospital. They took all sorts of tissue and fluid samples, subjected him to fitness tests, x-rays and scans. They studied his eyes, his teeth and his reflexes. Tristan made a docile and mildly amused specimen. All this scrutiny made him rather proud. They measured things. They weighed him. Nothing could be overlooked. He answered a series of verbal questions (with electrodes placed on his head), and filled in dozens of pages of questionnaires. When it was over and he was dressed again, the two scientists thanked him and shook him warmly by the hand. Tristan thought he would never see them again. He left the hospital with a spring in his step.

[But …]

–

Group translation from the BCLT summer school, 2012

Produced by Ruth Clarke, Moira Eagling, Marion Fairweather, Joe Fallowell, Roland Glasser, Selin Kocagoz, Jennifer Machlachlan, Andrea Pakieser, Chris Rose and Tom Russell.

Group leader: Adriana Hunter.

In the presence of and in consultation with the author.

With thanks to the Institut Français for their support.

–

Translated from the Spanish by Anne Scott, Chris Lloyd, Lindsey Ford, Lisa McCreadie, Lucy Greaves, María Natalia Paillie, Melanie Mauthner, Patricia Colombo, Phoebe Taylor & Rosa Shaw

With the collaboration of Anne McLean & Daniel Gascón, and with thanks to New Spanish Books for their support.

–

Regional variations

The Cardiff version (Chris Lloyd)

The Bloody Cat

That Raquel brung the bloody cat home when they’d done a couple of years together, like, after they’d gone up Rome. She’d looked at the cats up some grotty shandy van dump and reckoned they was well lush. He couldn’t stand animals and he was proper put out having one in the house. I won’t lie to you, it was the smell that done it. He called it The Bloody Cat so he wouldn’t have to admit it was real. He told that Raquel its hair hurt him. She was having none of it. She packed him off up the iechyd but they told him it never. He tried telling her they’d got it wrong, mun, but that Raquel went arri arri: she reckoned it was like all them times she thought she was pregnant. He told her he’d heard that cats done you mental and he showed her some stuff by some bloke who knew. That Raquel laughed at him and told him it might trew him off or send him twp, but not both like. He just had to learn to be neat with it, and you can’t really blame the bloody cat for them going Jack. Tidy.

The Scottish version (Lisa McCreadie)

Yon Cheet

Raquel brocht yon cheet hame aifter they hud bin thegither fir a couplae year, aifter a wee jaunt tae Rome. She wis keekin at yon cheets in the wrack an’ was blitherin’ aboot hoo weel-farrant they wir. He wisnae much fir ainimals an’ couldnae hack huvin’ yin in the hoose. It wis baufin’! He jist cawed it Cheet, cause he widnae gie the wee besom a nem. He telt Raquel the hair fair goat up his neb – she widnae huv it but. She threapit at him tae get away tae the doctor’s bit they wir like naw. He telt her yon prees mustae bin malafoustert bit she wisnae glaikit like – it wis like thae lassies that kid oan they’re oan the road. He telt her he’d readen that cheets sent daft an’ eikit an airticle screevit by some gleg speirin’ oot yon chat fae America. Raquel jist lauched again an’ telt him yon cheet micht mek him neesh or send him doo-lally – no the baith of them but. Mickle by mickle, he goat uised tae it an’ tae tell ye the trowth, it wisnae yon cheet that buggert them.

The South East London version (Lindsey Ford)

The Cat, innit

Raquel went and brought a cat back home when they’d been together for a couple of years, just after they’d got back from a nice little holiday in Rome. She kept watching the little blighters going about them ruins, and wouldn’t shut up about how they were ‘bare nice’. He’d never been one for animals himself and bloody hated having one in the house. The smell got on his tits. He just called the thing Cat cos he didn’t reckon it should have no personality. He said to Raquel he was allergic to animal hair. She reckoned he was chatting shit. She sent him to the doctor and the tests said there was fuck all wrong with him. He said they’d messed ‘em up, but she just took the piss and said he was like one of ‘em birds wot pretends they’re knocked up. He said cats can make you go schizo, and showed her this thing by some American bloke what’d written about it. Raquel just laughed at him and said it might make him sneeze or go mental, but not both at once. He got used to it in the end, and to be fair, it weren’t the cat what broke ‘em up.

The Geordie version (Anne Scott)

The Moggie

Wey, Raquel brout the moggie yam when thed bin a couple er yer in cohoots after getin back from a holider in Itilee. Shid bin lukin at aall the moggies warkin aboot the roons and kept sain how bonny the were. Eed neva bin a lad fer animals like, and hated havin a manky moggie in the hoose. Ee cudent stand the friggin pong. Ee ernly eva caald it moggie cos ee refused to aalow it a personalitee like. Ee telt is lass that ee had an alergee te animal hair. Not on yer Nellie, she wasent havin eny er that, so she mayd im gan to the docta and ya na wot?, the tests cyem back negative. But he telt a theyd got it aall wrong. Raquel scoft and sed ees alergee was like one o them, ya na, imagineree pregnencees. Ee sed eed red that moggies cud mayk yer gan schizo and ee even got oot an articul writtin by sum cleva American bugga, who must have nan wot ee was on aboot. Wey, wor lass just split a sides laafin and sed the moggie might mayk im sneeze or even drive im roond the bend, but not aall at the same time like. Ower time ee got used to it, and ya na wot?…the manky moggie had nowt te dee with the acshual breyk-up!!!

–

Translated from the Spanish by Anne Scott, Chris Lloyd, Lindsey Ford, Lisa McCreadie, Lucy Greaves, María Natalia Paillie, Melanie Mauthner, Patricia Colombo, Phoebe Taylor & Rosa Shaw

With the collaboration of Anne McLean & Daniel Gascón

With thanks to New Spanish Books for their support.

Author’s note: For the workshop Anne McLean and I chose two very short stories. One, “El gato”, has several different tones, but I’ve always thought of it as a sort of song that combined humour and melancholy. “Tatuaje” has aspects of a tale of a summer romance told by a numbskull. There were some worrying moments in the workshop: at first, it felt as if they were taking an x-ray, and at times the situation resembled one of those dreams when you show up to class naked. But I’m very happy with the result. And the experience allowed me to see what was important in the texts and see the merit in options I’d previously discarded. Of course, a translator is the most careful reader a writer can have. Being the object of such attention is so flattering and thrilling that it’s almost embarrassing, but I think what most struck me was the spectacle of language and all its nuances (the translators in the group were from various parts of the world and different generations and this enriched the texts in English, as well as provoking the odd headache). I’ve learned things about rhythm, about accuracy, about passionate preoccupations with words. I’ve always liked the kind of people who introduce strangers at parties. In the workshop I had that feeling, and I felt fortunate that such a group of people should offer their talents to helping me talk to other guests at the party.

I look at your face: so pale, so peaceful, and I’m conscious of that old, familiar feeling and am suspicious of it, even as I feel it. I ask myself how it is that I feel nothing except this closeness. Even now…

I’ll never be able to explain this feeling to anyone else. I ought not to feel it, considering all that has happened, considering the future, my future. Yet it is what it is, and I’m slowly learning to live with this emotion, which seems to have outlasted everything else.

For the first time, I am standing alone in every sense of the word: physically, mentally, emotionally. But this time too, my feeling, your feeling, the very feeling that I have here and now with your face in front of me seems to overcome, to block out my every fear. All that remains is this immense closeness, this gentleness.

I don’t know how it is that you’ve always made me feel this gentle closeness; for no emotion can really be gentle, when gentleness is something that doesn’t last, that appears like a pin prick and then vanishes into nothing. But my gentle feeling does last, it’s different, it’s more enduring than anything in my life. And I gave up trying to question it long ago.

And so I’ve come to sit here, a few days before my departure. I sit on your beach, my beach, where we used to swim out into the cold water. I sit here in the sand, now cool and damp after two days of rain. Soon I will cut off my hair, and face new thoughts and the cool wind bare-headed. And with each strand that falls I’ll grow lighter, more weightless and perhaps freer, too. I sit here in our cove, where no one but us ever ventured, because it seemed like such a cold, harsh place, I sit here where I first tried to offer you my love, but you could not yet accept it, here where we spent so many hours, morning and evening, after you had learned to speak again, where we so often whispered our secrets, our promises, our wishes and plans to the sea.

I sit here. I look at you, and I feel the primal ecstasy of our closeness, I dance this ecstasy on the grave of loneliness, for to me closeness is nothing other than a renunciation of every form of loneliness, a victory for all elemental, Dionysian cravings.

I am gentle, as soft as wool, and inside I am silky smooth, just as if I were a baby, a foetus, safe and warm, much-wanted and untouched by the world.

You told me so many times that I had forgotten who I was and perhaps you were even right. And perhaps when I was with you I never knew either. Perhaps I only realised when I stopped fighting this gentleness in me, perhaps only when I had eaten my fill of it, I don’t know. But I know that I am not you, not any more. And I don’t fear this realisation, any more than I fear the loneliness, the silence, the questions that will come after all of this, that might be encompassed by the word future. I will have to cry. I will have to disgorge everything I have consumed and no one will hold my hair back for me then, I know that too.

But what does that matter now?

I look at your face. You are beautiful. You are still incredibly beautiful, and I have to smile. I look at your face and think: thank you. Thank you for that gentle closeness and that cruel distance. And now I relinquish that closeness, even though I can never share this feeling with anyone again and so sooner or later it will inevitably die.

I look at your face.

–

“Shall I take you home?” he asked, and I shook my head. We went to his hotel. He undressed me and carried me into the bathroom. He ran a bath and put me in. The water wasn’t warm enough, and I whimpered. He rubbed shampoo into my hair and rinsed off the foam. It stung, and I wailed. I asked for more alcohol; he refused. At some point I pulled him down to me and kissed him. He let me, and got wet. I was aroused and indifferent; something in me was crying out to forget all the rules. Even though I was so drunk, I realised the morning would be terrible: I knew that was when I would come crashing down. Now I was still falling, it was a wonderful feeling, as if I were flying, as if there were no gravity; sooner or later I would hit the ground and shatter into a thousand pieces. Maybe there would be nothing left at all.

Every night I had spent with Ivo had been like a battle. I don’t know how, in my drunken and exhausted state, I was able to summon up such strength, such an appetite for this fight. In his seedy hotel bed.

I took him, I took his body, I conquered his brusqueness, his feigned nonchalance; layer by layer I stripped them away.

I gripped his hands, and my lips roamed across his groin, his chest, his navel. He refused, as he had always done, to accept gifts. But he had no choice. I brought him off with my hand, watching him as I did it, watching his tired face, his half-closed eyes and his slightly parted lips; seeing him battle with himself, how alone he was in this battle, and how he finally gave in and found a brief, painful release in my hand.

We lay next to each other for a long time without speaking. Then he sat up and looked at me. I lay there, naked, still dazed, trying to collect my thoughts.

“What will you do?” he asked, putting his forefinger between my legs.

“I’ll tell you what you want to hear. But I won’t go with you.”

“I just want us to remember. That’s all I want.”

“What for?”

“To stop this, to put an end to these battles. I like the way you’re looking at me now, as if you know more than I do, as if you know all the things I can never know, just because you’re you.”

I spread my legs and waited for him to lie on top of me.

“But I don’t like the fact that you’ve forgotten so much, things it’s impossible to forget. Or you act as if you have.”

He lay on top of me.

“The fact that you cling to this guilt, that you won’t let go, that you stand in your own way. There are still some things we have to find out together. Because no one else can, or wants to. You know that.”

I took him inside me, and it hurt.

“Don’t you? I often think about that afternoon, Stella. I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother lately, and that maybe it was wrong not to ask any questions back then.”

He started to move faster and I raised myself up slightly, so that he had to look at me, look at me again and again every time he hurt me. I moved towards him and put my fist under my back to prop myself up.

“I’ve been trying to make my fucking peace with it, but somehow I just can’t seem to do it. And you know what I ask myself, Stella, shall I tell you?”

His voice shook and he began to breathe faster.

“I ask myself what the fuck it is with us two. You’re such a smart-arse, why in God’s name didn’t you see it coming, that we should have had it out early on, fought it out, talked it out, fucked it out.”

He wrapped his arm tightly round my neck and pressed me to him. I freed myself from his embrace and pushed him away.

“Why did we break off in the middle of things, of life, of the fucking sex, why did we break it off? Maybe we could have found some peace, we’d have had the climax of our lives, right? I mean, maybe then we’d have had this crappy normality that means so goddam much to you! We could have had it for ourselves, your fucking normality!”

He pressed me up against the headboard and screamed in my face, screamed that I’d had no right to ruin his life, first to take everything, demand everything and then walk away, disappear into my fucking normality; that I’d destroyed his peace of mind and made him homeless, he couldn’t stand himself any more, and it was my fault, my fault. Me with my affectations and my propriety, my fear of facing what had happened. That there was no substitute for a childhood, that there was no substitute for love, no substitute for life, your own life.

And he kept on pushing me against the headboard; my back was hurting again, like it did the first time we slept together. His anger made him rougher, and my body groaned, gasped and thrashed as if in a fever, and yet, and yet I didn’t give in; I even felt a perverse relief, a moment of absolute emptiness and truth.

–

It was growing dark when I went out into the garden to breathe in the sea air, and discovered Salome by the fence, her cigarette glowing. I went over to her, without saying anything. She didn’t say anything either and gazed into the distance.

“Shall we go for a walk?” I suggested. I could tell she had something on her mind. She nodded and started walking, and we found ourselves heading for the beach. We sat down on the cool stones and looked out onto the dark, silent sea. She started throwing pebbles into the water. I did the same and we both burst out laughing.

“You don’t like me, do you?” she asked all of a sudden, not looking at me.

“What makes you say that? It’s not like that.”

“All right then. I was wondering what’s wrong.”

We sat there in silence for a while, neither of us knowing what to do. She turned to me again. “I’ve got a child as well,” she said, staring at the ground. “A son. He’s fifteen. Lives with his father in Germany. He’s in IT. We were married for a long time but Lado was always… but he married Nana, my best friend. We were neighbours, Lado and me, we grew up together. I was fifteen the first time he kissed me. On the street, on the way to a birthday party…and I thought it was me he’d love. But Nana was different, she was training to be an actress and was from one of the best families. She had everything. Lado wanted her. I knew even before he told me. She could have had anyone but she goes and chooses him. Life’s funny like that sometimes, isn’t it?”

She wasn’t so much talking to me as to herself.

“She didn’t really even know him that well. She had just started her degree and was a rising star. She had it all. And what was I supposed to do? I mean, he was my boyfriend after all. I’d always been there for him, I knew everything about him and Nana, she was the spoilt little princess. Her father was in the KGB. She didn’t have a care in the world. He idolized her. She was his little ballerina. That’s what he called her.

“Do you know the worst thing about it? The thing I can never forgive her for? She never let on that she’d done anything to hurt me, not once. Then came the marriage and the baby, a girl. You should have seen her, how pretty she was. People would stop and stare when they saw her out with the baby. And she asked me to be godmother – Maia’s godmother – and I said yes. I said yes, and I shouldn’t have. I looked after the baby while she was on stage and he had his own stuff to do. That little girl was the child I never had, my little sunshine. They would often go on tour and Maia would stay with me. Maia loved me. And called me mummy.”

She paused and then started throwing pebbles into the water again. Ripples formed and little fish appeared. It was disturbingly quiet around us.

“That was also when I joined the party. Me and Lado, we were two of a kind. I wasn’t sure what he was after. Nana was becoming more and more of a stranger to her husband as her career took off. She was not made for that time of unrest and upheaval. Her father lost his job as a KGB official. Nana was scared of the changes, the stuff that Lado was working on. Then Lado got sent to prison, a scandal in her eyes.”

“And then?” I dared to ask.

“Then? Then she started having an affair.”

“An affair?”

“With a Russian soldier. She met him through her father who used to work in Moscow.”

“And?”

“And. What else can I say? He was called Aleksei, he was from Moscow and worked in the administration in Sukhumi. A boyish guy with sticky-out ears. He was about twenty-five, I think. Nana was just sick of the police searching the house, of visiting the prison, his friends from the Party hanging around the house. It wasn’t her fault, she wasn’t the kind of Georgian woman who was happy to wait on forty of her husband’s friends day and night serving up hundreds of different dishes. It wasn’t her fault she fell for the boy. He was helpful, came from a good family, knew a lot about theatre. And she was worried about her father who’d fallen out of favour. She never really loved Lado anyway. Out of all her admirers he made the best impression on her, the way he worshipped her.”

“And you, what did you do?”

“I married an old school friend who’d been chasing after me for years, who I had never taken seriously. He was patient, he was so tolerant, he never blamed me. He even made friends with Lado. And he wanted to start a family, have a child. In the end, I did the same to him that Lado did to me. Like I said, life is funny. And we lost everything. The war took everything from us – jobs, houses, everything we owned, our goals, our hopes, our dreams – all gone in a flash. Lado was in Tbilisi. I was worried. I knew if Lado found out about his wife’s affair, there’d be trouble, and I helped Nana – yes, I helped her cover it up. I was her alibi. I wanted to protect Lado at the time, I didn’t really care what happened to Nana. I couldn’t understand why she was doing it.

“Nana didn’t believe there was a war on in our country until the first bomb fell. She was always saying it was just men playing games. She would meet her Russian secretly in the hotel where he was staying.

“And then the shooting started. And didn’t stop. Lado was in Tbilisi, my husband and son had already gone back to Russia to his family and I was stuck in Sukhumi with Maia and Nana. The first refugees had already left Abkhazia for Russia or Tbilisi. Even when there was still a chance to go, we didn’t want to. I didn’t want to because I was waiting for Lado and she didn’t want to because she thought her Russian hero would protect her. He was there to liaise with the separatists and to send strategic updates back to Moscow. I don’t know whether he did or not. All I know is he was a lovestruck young guy who found himself caught up in something that had got out of hand and that he couldn’t control. We were stuck there for nearly six months. In Sukhumi. By that point she was already pregnant with Buba. We had moved to my small flat because the Kanchelis’ house was too big, too provocative, because everyone knew who it belonged to. All of a sudden Nana was with the enemy. For the Russians because her father had gone over to the Georgians in the end, and for the Abkhazians because her husband was fighting for the Georgians, and for the Georgians because her mother was Abkhazian. Towards the end she barely said a word. She’d sit there for hours staring out of the window and wouldn’t even talk to Maia. Now and then she would slip out of the flat and disappear for a few hours. And every time I would expect the worst, that she might not come back.

“Lado didn’t return until just before Sukhumi was taken, before all those people died. He kept begging his wife to get out, to go to Tbilisi, to take Maia away, but Nana said she would die if she had to leave her mother, her town, that her family’s reputation would keep her safe and protect Maia. That may have been true in 1992 but just a few months later, everything was torn down, burnt to the ground, murdered, forgotten. No one gave a damn about your reputation any more.

“Just after Buba was born, in the winter of 93, Lado came home and told us we had to leave the country. Just before everything went to hell. Lado was stationed in Gali then and even so, he only just made it to Sukhumi. It was a terrible time and it only got worse. He told us that we absolutely had to leave town in two days, because the city was going to be blockaded. After Buba was born, Nana seemed like a different person. She dressed in her best things, she wouldn’t breastfeed the baby, she’d disappear for days and then turn up half-drunk. I guessed she was living it up at Russian parties and following Aleksei around like a dog on a lead. Lado had set everything up for us. His people would pick us up at dawn and take us to Batumi by helicopter. From there, we were supposed to go on to Tbilisi. I already had a plane ticket from Tbilisi to join my husband and son. Lado made me swear that I would force Nana and Maia to get into the car if I had to, that I would do whatever it took to get us all out of the city. He drove back out of town, he had to get back to his men, so that he could bring them into the city that night. So that they could start shooting, set fire to city hall, so that . . .” Salome sighed.

“I stood there with three bags and watched Nana putting on a nice dress for the night before our departure. Lado had said they were going to pick us up at seven in the morning. I was holding Buba and Maia was howling, maybe she sensed something was wrong. I asked Nana why she was getting all dressed up. She said she needed to say goodbye to him, she had so much to say to him, she had to tell him that it had been wrong to sleep with him while her country was going to the dogs, that she couldn’t be with him while her husband was fighting on the other side, that she couldn’t sit there chatting with him about theatre while his country was supplying her country with weapons.

“And so I said: ‘Go on then, I know you have to do it, I’ll look after the kids, but please, you’ve got to be back here by five.’ And she said: ‘I’ll be back in two hours at the latest.’ Then she kissed my hand and was gone. She didn’t come back. Three o’clock, four, five. She didn’t come. I was so nervous I could hardly breathe. I woke Maia, picked up Buba and went out into the street. Nana’s mother lived nearby, I frantically rang the doorbell and pressed Buba into her arms. Suddenly Maia started to scream and shriek, shouting that she didn’t want to stay there, she wanted to stay with me. She got completely hysterical. She was usually so quiet and good. I had no time to lose, so I just picked her up and ran. The grandmother was shocked and frightened, she wanted to know what was going on, and I said I’d be right back for him. I ran off with Maia in my arms. I ran to the hotel where he was staying. They weren’t there. I searched the streets. It was dark and there wasn’t a single streetlamp that hadn’t been smashed out. I ran along the promenade.

“I knew that Aleksei was often at the army post in the old theatre that was now being used as headquarters. Nana had mentioned it once. So I rushed over there. I thought if I have Maia with me, we won’t be in any danger. We won’t seem like a threat and they won’t harm us. The city was sleeping, it was such a peaceful morning, and if it weren’t for the bullet holes here and there in the housefronts, you might have thought it was the dawn of an ordinary day.

“A young Abkhaz was on duty outside and I spoke to him in his language. I asked for Aleksei. He looked me up and down, then ordered me to wait at the entrance and went inside. I didn’t know at the time that all the soldiers had been summoned to the base in the night because everyone expected things to escalate. Everyone knew what was coming. Then he came back and said Aleksei wasn’t there. He’d left in a car two hours ago, the soldier said. I started to cry. I wanted to know if he’d been on his own. He must have felt sorry for me and went inside again to find out. When he came back he said, no, his wife had been with him. His wife, he said. What wife, I asked. Nana, his wife, he repeated. I begged him to find out where they’d gone. He kept saying he didn’t know anything about it, and to get rid of me he told me Aleksei would be there at nine in the morning. So I should come back at nine. At nine! Then we’d never make it out of the city. I must have started screaming and the sight of me set Maia off sobbing. I couldn’t believe she’d left me, us, her children behind. After everything she’d said about the Russian, about herself, she couldn’t have forgotten it all just like that. Something must have happened. I don’t know. I still don’t know to this day. We hurried back. I couldn’t leave the city without Nana. I had to put the grandmother and the children in the car and let them go without me. I had to stay and find Nana.

“I was about to turn the corner, but just before the house Maia stopped in her tracks and began to scream at the top of her lungs. I asked what on earth the matter was. I tried everything I could think of to calm her down. I’d never seen her like this. And then she told me. She said that she’d told her daddy about it. She’d told him. She told him that mummy had another boyfriend. She’d go out with him sometimes and he wore a uniform – a different one to daddy’s. He’d sometimes give mummy presents, mummy kept him secret and never brought him home. She would stay awake and watch him dropping off mummy in his car and that…

“I looked at her in horror and before I could even comfort her, she pulled away from me and ran as quickly as she could down the road. And then, at that moment, a large military vehicle with a Russian number plate came round the corner. It looked like the car Aleksei sometimes drove Nana home in. Maia ran after the car. She yelled out for her mother and ran and ran. Before I could turn around and chase after her, she had already taken a shortcut, jumped over a fence and ran out in front of the car. They couldn’t break in time. I heard the screech of the tyres on the tarmac. And I could no longer Maia. Someone screamed and my legs gave way. It was the guys who called themselves the peace troops. Even before I reached her I knew she hadn’t made it. Her head had smashed against the ground. I had no idea she knew about it all…

–

Group translation from the BCLT summer school, 2012

Produced by Ruth Ahmedzai, Gisela Boehnisch, Jonathan Bridges, Elizabeth Catling, Charlotte Collins, Helen Harding, Fiona Hayter, Ruth Martin, Kate Roy and Maria Snyder.

Group leader: Katy Derbyshire.

In the presence of and in consultation with the author.

With thanks to New Books in German and the Goethe Institute for their support.

We sleep side by side, like a married couple, but with a thin wall between us. I pity myself the most, not being able to sleep, I haven’t seen her. Perhaps it’s now I’ll get the feeling, I often get this feeling that I’m lying on my own deathbed, time passes so quickly. But it’s not yet. I’ll see the woman for the first time tomorrow, my last day here, she’s a bundle of clothes on a gurney, but so far I’ve only seen nurses going in and out of her room with frying pans. Bodil, who is the closest I’ll get to having a big sister, said that the frying pans are bed pans. The woman is dying in the mornings as well, and in the middle of the day, when I’m forced to rest on my bed, or on the floor with my legs on top of or under the bedside table for variation. I’ve learnt that here, how important it is to balance rest and activity. Death is hardest to deal with at night, maybe because falling asleep reminds me of slipping away.

I’m woken by a crash, open my eyes, in the dim light I can see the contours of the knots in the panelling. ‘Did you hear that?’ I say, without daring to move, a friend lies behind my back, on the opposite side of the little room, two other friends in the room across the corridor. ‘No,’ she says. But then why is she awake in the middle of the night? Cautiously, I turn over onto my left side, switch on the bedside lamp. The bed has collapsed at one end, so she’s lying with her head on the floor, legs in the air, looking at the ceiling. She acts like nothing’s happened. But.

This isn’t happening now, I’m not a little girl who’s brought friends to Nanna and Grandpa’s summerhouse, I’m lying like some old person in a nursing home, in the far west of the country. I should’ve been a young student in another city, I should’ve been more in the middle of things.

The cows have been up for a long time, shouldn’t the radio come on soon, I want to drown out the dying woman’s next coughing fit. A voice forces its way out of the speaker, talking about a new Jewish museum, despite the tragic history of the Jews, they have a fantastic sense of humour, it’s been a great help to them. “What’s the difference between a Rottweiler and a Jewish mother? The Rottweiler lets go in the end.” But.

It’s still a long way off, I’ll wake up every morning longing for death, I’m not sick, just ugly, the world will soon see how ugly I am, and I wish I were a Jew in a concentration camp, hungry for life. Schopenhauer, who got so angry with a man, an unknown man, simply for being ugly, punished for nothing, his whole life. He stood up from the cafe table, went straight over and knocked the man down. But.

I get up and turn off the radio, can’t face or don’t dare listen to it, I have to shield myself from sounds, I’m going to be a good patient like the others, always careful not to crochet too much, have too long conversations, take too many steps, read too much at a time. I’ve been given time off from my studies to get better, I’m going to get so much better during this stay and I don’t understand why I just get sicker and sicker each day. I rang several times through the autumn to make sure that I would get a place, and the support-group-lady said yes, and that I didn’t need to ask anymore. She told me about the stairs up and down to the dining room, there was a lift but it made a lot of noise and some of our programme would take place in another building, fifty metres away, could I manage that? ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Besides, it’s a while till November, I’m sure I’ll be much better by then.’ I understood from her silence that she thought I was suffering from delusions, and I remembered how before football I’d call the trainer and would always have to apologise that I still couldn’t make it. ‘But I’ll definitely come next week,’ I’d say. In the end the trainer asked me to stop calling, just like this lady. I felt stupid, wondered if they weren’t missing me. ‘Just come when you can Kjersti,’ he said, that was years ago.

‘Playing for the men’s national football team has always been a dream of mine,’ I told them over breakfast, I dream so much whenever I manage to fall asleep and can’t help myself from sharing it with the others, it’s so strange to see people every morning. No one is interested in other people’s dreams, only those who think the dreams mean something, that they say something about your personality, and they’re the people you should watch out for. ‘But now my day dream has become my night dream as well,’ I continue, ‘the daydream has followed me into my sleep.’ When I need comforting, I deliberately daydream that I’ve scored the winning goal and I’m being borne aloft in triumph by a team of strong men, Mathea will dream about the same thing, that she’s being carried around on the grass, she’s always found the idea of being carried appealing. But.

I don’t know who Mathea is yet, and I don’t know if these memories from the nursing home can be trusted, the nausea and the hunger, the pain like a nail in my eye, the old ladies who want me to pull up their support tights, old men who ask me to buy porn magazines, the smell of rotting bodies and doses of medicine, hidden behind a haze of accordion music and cakes for dessert and the ear-splitting noise of the TV in the corner, the old people have to have the volume so loud, so that they get all the news from the real world, the world is another place, and so very far away. Could it be that all I remember is the fear that this won’t help, that I’m not doing it well enough, that I’ll never be a computer engineer.

I received a letter informing me that dressing gowns were obligatory, Mum’s bought me a long yellow one and I look like Big Bird walking between the showers and my room.  I lock myself into what looks like a prison cell, this stay marks the true beginning of my isolation, my disappearance from the outside world, the lonely grave of Paula Schultz, a coma she was going to lie in for four years. My re-emergence into the world will also begin with a stay in prison, but somewhere other than this.

I take out the birthday present for the woman I’m too big to pretend is my older sister, her birthday is the day before mine, my birthday is tomorrow. I hope Bodil remembers. She knocked on my door, after I’d been sitting for hours alone in my room, for fear of arriving late I’d come a day before the others, and I realised right away that Bodil was ill and that she would come to mean a lot to me. She was already something more, more than this first encounter. She gave me a poem by the woodcutter poet, to console me when I wasn’t able to come along to the accordion evening. There are moments when all words are grey, when sorrow is an autumn sight; a withered rush frozen fast in the river ice. Years from now, after my first real interview, I’ll send the poem to the journalist, desperate to show him that I’m a human being. But.

Before I came here I was reading about paragliding and rafting, this place is a Mecca for extreme sports. I’ve rafted before, I’m not actually the kind of person who lies really still with their legs on top of or under the bedside table, I’m a person who rafts. The spray in my face as I balanced on the edge of the inflatable boat, paddling as hard as I could, the Australian guide shouted ‘left!’, but Erik, on the opposite side of me, thought he shouted ‘right!’, and when he slammed into my shoulder with his full weight, I went over the side and ended up in the river. I disappeared down the rapids, on my back keeping my legs up so as not to get caught in the rubbish on the bottom, bikes and prams people have discarded, you can drown that way. I wish it had been me that Erik knocked overboard, it should have been me, I was the one he loved and I should have been the girl under the water. But it was another girl, my heart friend, her name is Hanne.

‘I’m sure this will do the trick, dear,’ Erik’s mother said, November had arrived and with her words echoing inside me and my luggage in tow, I stood at the train station. Many hours later I arrived at the Mecca for extreme sports, I was no longer thinking about rafting and paragliding, just how I would get to the nursing home, there were no taxis at the rank. I am strong, and I had a map, but this was a lot further than my mailbox, and I thought about the long, shaky train journey I’d just made, all the words in the audiobook, with each word I became more and more afraid there were too many of them, and I thought about how little I’d slept, I got up at five in the morning to get there in time, I thought that the others must already be getting to know each other.

My worries drove me on, like a whip, dragging my suitcase over the gravel toward the main building, outside there was a people carrier with some really old people inside. The man in the wheelchair, left on the stairs, fear showing in his face like a mask I could just take off, the waving hand like a broken branch in the wind, but no words, why didn’t I go over and tell him that they hadn’t forgotten him. You are not forgotten.

‘The others are coming tomorrow,’ said the reception lady. ‘Nothing’s happening today.’ On the way up to my room I saw shrivelled people drowning in chairs that were far too big, carcasses creeping hunched-over along the corridors, one palm flat against the wall, as if to convince themselves that they were still there. I shouldn’t really be here, I was so happy to be here, why am I always so sad. Anne Mari and I could have been twins, had it not been for the fact that I only have two younger brothers, she studies in the city nearby, but she couldn’t visit me. Her life is so full it’s nearly overflowing, our lives are moving in opposite directions and maybe that’s why I need to call her my twin sister.

I sat down on my bed, I don’t know if it was the white walls or the far too colourful curtains, or the people dying, as we all are, or just that no one was happy to see me, it doesn’t take much to knock me off balance. I had to explain to the reception lady who I was, that I’d be living here, she thought I was a visitor at first. She handed me a room key without looking up, and when I asked whether there would be any meals during the day, she said that dinner had come and gone, they eat so early in the country. Dad calls me a bottomless pit, Mum says “my starving daughter”, I turned away, the receptionist was already looking in another direction.

–

Group translation from the BCLT summer school, 2012

Produced by Marta Eidsvag, Paul Garrett, Rachel Hand, Tim Hansen, Sean Kinsella and Mahala Mathiassen.

Group leader: Kari Dickson.

In the presence of and in consultation with the author.

With thanks to NORLA for their support.

We stop at a convenience store in Shinchimachi.

Mental shutdown? It had been too early to use the term, too soon. Inside were more goods on the shelves than I had imagined would be there—things for sale. Even cigarettes, which I had heard were one of the hardest items to find in the affected areas, were being sold as usual. And masks, which I was concerned would be hard to get, were plentiful in many varieties. In the car park in front of the store, I looked out toward the ocean. So did the others. Still three kilometers away, there was no sign of the shoreline. But there was a tower, most likely the thermal power plant. The parking area was bathed in a clear light, like that of early summer. Just three hours ago it had felt like winter, and now it felt like summer. Time is swaying, I thought. Time is in disarray, I thought. The sky was overwhelmingly blue, my shadow cast sharp against the ground. Black. The temperature was now above ten degrees. Ordinary vehicles were travelling up and down Route 6, and the store had a steady stream of customers. Locals. “Let’s go,” I said to the other three. It was a few minutes after we left the convenience store. On our right, to the east as we went north, the destruction of the tsunami appeared out of the blue, sudden as an ambush. No, not appeared—it was just there. With the scars from the earthquake. The map showed a river here, which suggested the huge tsunami had surged upstream. We turn right off of Route 6. It is at the intersection by Shinchimachi Town Hall that it finally hits us, all of us, I think—mental shutdown.

What does a tsunami destroy?

It took a few days to realize that it had been flooded here. Maybe ten days or more. By the time we arrived, I think things had been pretty much cleaned up. At any rate, at least one road was functional. Free of debris. And I, the four of us, never saw any bodies. Not even the body parts we were prepared to see. The sense of force was overwhelming. The scene was too vast. It’s all been washed away, I thought, an obliterating force. There were no words… it was more than a sensation, it was a blow. Disgusted for seeing the view as a spectacle, I felt the urge to spit on myself. Air raids, I thought. A bombsite. It was like being slapped in the face. Wartime. I said to someone, this is a wasteland. Someone who wasn’t there. Maybe to the heavens. Crushed cars, overturned cars, cars full of debris. We got out of our car with its Kashiwa license plates. We got out and walked. Toward the shoreline. The eastern edge of Shinchimachi. A fishing port. Torn up asphalt. Bent steel. We saw broken slabs of concrete, strata of construction normally hidden. We saw buildings with only their steel frames remaining. Can I call them buildings? They had virtually no structure left. There was a helicopter overhead. It must have been a coast guard helicopter, since I learned a few days later that their divers had been conducting searches. For missing persons. For bodies. The stillness drowned out the din of the helicopter. There was a breeze coming off the water. Small groups of crows circling together above us gave an occasional caw. Carrion crows. There were also larks, but despite their warbling, everything was hushed. Not a gull in sight. We reached the beach. What used to be the beach. There was a woman’s handbag. A hand mirror.

The Pacific was calm.

–

During my journey, a character from an earlier novel of mine appeared before me and began to speak.

Picture this, he said.

I was sixteen. Not driving yet. Not yet, but soon. Soon, illegally of course, but not yet. My bike was my only way of getting around. So I cycled everywhere. Every day. I would ride through the woods, along logging roads, and then into the marshland. I rode right through. Through the wet. Every day, at the same time. This was training, after all. I rode that bike to the charcoal-burning shed, in the hills. My family knew where I’d be. I had no business with the shed itself. It was the open area outside the shed I was interested in. There I had collected lengths of bamboo of a certain thickness, together with brushwood and straw. All part of my training. I had this wooden box that served as my training equipment. Sometimes I would fill it with dry gravel. Other times I would pack it with pebbles from the stream.

The purpose? To toughen up my hands. The eight fingers of my two hands not counting my thumbs. To turn them into lethal weapons. Over several years I did this. I forget how many.

I would listen to the sounds of the box. To the crunch, or to the jab, ja-jab, jab of my fingers stabbing deep into the pebbles. Like I said, I’d been doing this for years.

But this day when I was sixteen I remember. 

It wasn’t an ordinary day; it was somehow special. I remember looking up and seeing hawks. Four of them, wheeling, circling, each on its own. Then, when I looked down, there stood my sister. She’s pregnant now. She’s nine years younger than me, so she had to be seven then, attending elementary school. She had her knapsack on her back. It was yellow.

The yellow stands out in my mind. Canary yellow. She must have been on her way home from school. Her way home, needless to say, didn’t include this barely travelled road through the woods, so she must have come here to play, hang out on her own. Maybe she was making believe she was a forest animal, who knows. Anyway, there she was, suddenly where I was. My sister always walked home alone.

She hadn’t said a word for years, not since she was four. I think she resolved to stop speaking as an act of aggression, and she stuck to it. But this was no ordinary day; it was special. I was sixteen. Four hawks circled above. And then, out of the blue, here was my sister, knapsack and all, standing by the shed and staring at me.

She watched as I performed my routine, struggling to toughen my hands, to render my fingertips lethal. Didn’t say a word, of course. She stepped toward me. Still didn’t say a word.

She takes my hand. My right hand.

She strokes my palm, and then rubs each of my fingers.

“Hard,” she slowly says. It took her dozens of seconds to get this one word out. It took all of the physical strength in her little body just to say it. “Hard.” It took so much strength that her knapsack slipped down her shoulders. I was stunned. I was so taken aback that it was a minute or so before I could say anything at all. And then I began. Mumbling. Something about us being born. Something like, “Us, the three of us siblings, all of us. We got born.”

–

As I wrote this, time and again I felt the reality of the news cutting into my heart.

What comes next I didn’t see on TV. I read it in the paper. On April 25^th the city of Koriyama announced it was going to remove the top layer of soil from the grounds of twenty-eight kindergartens, elementary and middle schools. Disposing of the soil in which radiation had accumulated. I didn’t know it when the story ran, but I soon learned the heavy machinery had moved into the elementary school where I spent six years. I picture it: bulldozers tearing up my school grounds. Tearing up, tearing away

– 

Group translation from the BCLT summer school, 2012

Produced by James Almony, Polly Barton, Daniel Bradley, Jonathan Lloyd Davies, Morgan Giles, Tets Kimura, Marion Kinoshita, Hart Larrabee, Jonathan Rankine, Mari Seaword and Asa Yoneda.

Group leader: Michael Emmerich.

In the presence of and in consultation with the author.

With thanks to the Nippon Foundation for their support.

Gustaaf Peek’s Dover focuses on Tony, an illegal immigrant from Indonesia who works in a Chinese restaurant in Rotterdam. One day his boss, Mr Chow, orders him to drive a group of newly arrived immigrants to a number of destinations around the country. Tony hasn’t driven for years and doesn’t know his way around the Netherlands at all.

In the second town he couldn’t find a parking space. He’d found the right street, but there were cars wedged in on both sides. Tony drove round and round waiting for someone to leave. He felt cold and clammy and realised it was a long time since he’d had anything to eat or drink. He ran out of patience and stopped right in front of the building. He jumped out, rushed up to the door, rang the bell. Nothing happened, so he banged on the door. Back to the van. Key in the lock, doors open – a car stopped behind him – he slammed them shut. The driver, a man, made a show of looking at his watch. The door of the house opened. A woman, drying her hands on what looked like a tea towel. Tony waited for some kind of signal. The woman said something he didn’t understand, but just stood there, the tea towel in her hands. Tony opened the doors and saw startled faces.

– Everything OK. Who’s next? Go, go!

Another three stood up, holding their bin bags, and got out. The car behind started hooting. Tony kept his back to it. The woman said something, the men answered. Doors shut. The clutch slipped, the van lurched, but didn’t stall. Two left. Rotterdam. Home.

He’d been driving non-stop for almost five hours. The old man and the fat guy would probably have done it faster. He was starting to feel faint. Five hours without food or drink. No breaks. Bladder about to burst. His city was close now. He had to get to the centre. Thuds from the back. He looked over his shoulder and saw fingers pressed against the window. A flushed face made Tony jump. Suddenly the man threw up against the glass. Tony’s hands stumbled over the wheel and the van swerved. Tony looked back at the road and regained control. A quick glance over his shoulder. The retching man’s face against the vomit-smeared window, the other man stretched out on the floor. He had to stop. Three hundred metres further on: clattering flags, garish signs advertising petrol and fast food. Tony took the exit.

The petrol station had a car park. Tony looked for a quiet spot in a row closer to the grass. He couldn’t make his mind up, he was running out of spaces.  A car with the boot open, a father, stretching with his hands in the small of his back, a woman, two children. Tony slammed on the brakes, stopping behind the family. He ran to the back, opened the doors. The human stench had been smothered by the reek of exhaust fumes. Tony pulled the first man out and dragged him to the grass. He was still breathing. Behind him Tony heard the other man getting out of the van.

– You OK?   

It was the father he had seen.

– What’s that smell? What’s up with him? He doesn’t look too good.

Tony tugged at the sick man’s shirt, buttons fleeing his panic.

– Everything OK. No problem.  My friend, too much drink.  Dumb.

Laugh it off.  Stupid friend.  Ha ha ha.  Tony knew what it looked like. The sweat on his face, the sick men. All too different. 

– Everything OK. Wake up soon.  Always like this.

– John? John!

A woman some way off. The mother.

– Are you coming?  The kids are ready.

The father looked hard at Tony.

– Always same. Wait till girlfriend see. 

– Are you going to take all day?

Tony fanned the unconscious man’s face with his hands, laughing. 

– I’m coming!

The father walked off. Tony grabbed the man by the shoulders and shook him.

– Wake up, wake up!

The man was breathing, but wouldn’t come round. Tony sensed someone standing next to him.  He was shoved aside and stood up to let the other kneel in his place. One word kept coming back. The man’s name, Tony guessed. Cars were driving past. He tried to block the two of them from view. The man on the ground coughed twice – the other one looked up and nodded – Tony helped carry him to the van.

– I’ll leave the back open.

The doors would bang, but the men needed the fresh air and he knew they’d stay put. He got into his seat and looked over his shoulder. They were both sitting with their backs against the sides of the van. Tony turned the key, gave way to a lorry. Dizziness and Mr Chow’s face. He was almost home.

In the second excerpt, Mr Chow has sent Tony to the UK to work in a restaurant he owns in London. Tony is making the crossing in the back of a lorry and is headed for Dover. 

Like everyone else in the container Tony shouted and hit the unhearing walls. He felt strangely free. Shielded by darkness, he could vent his anger. His fists hammered the invisible barrier until they were hot and numb. Realising nobody could hear him, he shouted names only he knew, the secret words he would never dare unveil in the light. He couldn’t keep it up for long, it felt like his screams were strangling him. He coughed and pulled back his shoulders to make room for his lungs, but it was as if his insides were sticking together.

He had to give up.  He scraped his nails over the places he had branded on the invisible wall.  Suddenly he remembered he wasn’t alone.  He could no longer hear people crying out, but beneath the loud drone of the ship, echoes of breathless moans.  His path was blocked.  Instinctively he held his arms in front of his body, he had to kneel, scrabble forward, shove legs away from him, everyone else seemed to be lying down, he felt backs, arms, shoulders, the shock of skin, edges of faces, he groped towards the emptiness beyond them.  He needed to get away.

As soon as he felt alone, he sank down, but whatever position he adopted, his breath faded, he heard himself suffocating. The heat of his clothes was smothering him. He tore open his wet shirt, kicked off his shoes, stretched himself out, desperate, as if trying to breathe through his skin. It didn’t help. The noises he was making were also coming from all around him. He made himself small again.

There was something wrong with his head. He kept nodding off. Arms around his knees, he struggled to stay awake. His head was too light, it felt hollow. His fingertips were tingling. He had to lie down. Legs drawn up, he made a space for himself. He squeezed his eyes shut.

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Group translation from the BCLT summer school, 2012

Produced by Anna Asbury, Remi Adike, Peggy Birch, Vivien Doornekamp-Glass, Antoinette Fawcett, Brendan Monaghan and Alex Valente.

Group leader: David Colmer.

In the presence of and in consultation with the author.

With thanks to the Dutch Foundation for Literature for their support.