Interpreters Read Online Free PDF

and picked up the card. ‘Haven’t you had one from here?’ he asked, turning it over.
    ‘It probably arrived after I left for England. If it arrived at all. I only seem to get about one in three things through the post.’
    ‘Orvieto.’
    ‘Spain.’
    ‘Italy, actually.’
    ‘I knew that.’
    ‘Of course you did.’
    ‘I did .’
    ‘Here, shove up.’ Max sat down next to me, then stretched out and lay with his head in my lap, his bare feet dangling over the end of the sofa. ‘Tell me a story,’ he said, shutting his eyes. He put on his best BBC documentary-maker voice. ‘ Tell me about your time in Africa. Ouch! No pinching. Go on. Tell me something.’
    And so I described the reddish-brown scrub, the vast baobab trees, the women in their bright batik wrappers and head-dresses harvesting chilli peppers. I told him about the gaggles of little girls in faded cotton dresses and worn flip-flops, who would run into our compound on their way home from school to play with Susanna, picking her up and tying her to their backs or bringing her toys made of plastic bottles or old Coke cans when she grew too big for them to carry around. I told him about the hours I spent in the villages, watching, listening, recording, writing.
    ‘Supper’s ready, Max.’ Francesca stood in the doorway.
    Max rolled off the sofa, stood up and stretched. Francesca gave me a sad half-smile as she led the way to the table.
    ‘This smells great, Frannie,’ said Max. ‘I’ll miss your cooking when I move. You should come too. There’s a lot to be said for communal living. Really. Ask my sister. That’s what she’s studying.’
    ‘Don’t,’ I warned Francesca, who looked as though she was about to cry as she busied herself serving up a steaming vegetable stew and home-baked bread. ‘I can’t think of anything worse, myself. But Max swears by it. He thinks it’s the way forward and we should all do it.’
     
    A car horn sounds behind me. I look in the mirror and see a woman in a white Volvo estate gesturing towards the house. I am blocking her drive. I start the engine and edge forward a couple of yards. She parks outside the double garage and gets out of the car. She is dressed in her gym kit and is carrying a bottle of water. I watch her as she walks up to the front door and lets herself in. I see her pick up the post from the floor of the glass porch. She pauses for a moment to look at me, then goes inside. 

II
    And so there I was in Berlin – ‘the cheese head’ as he used to call me, when he called me anything at all. And I didn’t understand a word anyone was saying. Not one word. I simply couldn’t believe it, the first time he hit me.
(SILENCE)
    He hit you?
    No one had ever hit me before. Or even shouted or said anything unkind. I remember that I’d only been in Berlin for about a week. And he pointed to some envelopes that were lying on the hall table and told me to do something with them. I picked them up but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. So I asked him to repeat what he’d said – he could understand Dutch perfectly well. But he just walked over to me and hit me on the back of my head. And I dropped the envelopes and he hit me again. ‘I forbid you to speak Dutch in my house,’ he said. That was the first and last thing he ever said to me in Dutch. And so I had to learn German pretty quickly. You learn everything pretty quickly if the alternative is the back of your father’s hand.
    Did your father hit you often?
    And you learn everything pretty quickly if all the children at your school jeer when you sit on the boys’ side of the classroom because you don’t understand what the teacheris saying when she tells you to sit on the girls’ side. And if they all make fun of your accent and if they all hate you – the teacher and the pupils and the shopkeepers – because you’re from Holland and they hate the Dutch.
    Did your father hit you often?
    He’d summon me into his study. It was always