The Interpreter Read Online Free PDF

the French channel first, leaning forwards to observe the interpreter in the next booth whose voice I was hearing: he too was leaning forwards slightly as he spoke, clenching and unclenching his fists as he did so, but his facial expressions did not follow the intonation of his speech, as if the voice that was speaking did not inhabit that body but was simply passing through it, using its vocal cords, its lips, its palate in order to become sound. I looked at his eyes and saw in them a kind of blindness, a fixed, blank, inhuman look, as though he were seeing the unspeakable and could not look away. That cold world I had just glimpsed filled me with fear. I pushed back my chair, turned the knob and listened for a moment to the German. Then I happened upon some unknown language, the merest burble of sound that echoed in my ears, singsong and sugary, possibly oriental. The next one I came upon was harsher, syncopated and unyielding. I turned the knob again, and heard a female voice pronouncing gummy vowels, which seemed to get stuck on her palate, those of a flabby, boneless language, as though set in transparent gristle. My mind on the interpreter’s weird ideas, I was foolishly trying to understand languages I had no knowledge of, breaking down words and syllables, intrigued by the thought that it might be possible to find some feature shared by that swarm of jumbled voices. Could there really be any link between them? I fantasised that I might be the person to track it down. I, who knew nothing of languages and hated anything I couldn’t understand. I abandoned myself to such fantasies and, lulled by the warm female voice I had in my ear, my thoughts wandered back to the pictures of primitive men in my old school books, Egyptian hieroglyphs under a drawing of the pyramids. A vivid image of my German teacher, set between screeching monkeys and brightly coloured parrots, his lapels spattered with chalk from the declension-strewn blackboard, now swam into my mind; he was pointing his finger at me, pronouncing my name with his annoying accent. I hung the earphones back on the hook and left the booth with a distinct sense of unease. I shook my head, slightly ashamed at having entertained those absurd thoughts even for a moment, at believing that there might be a grain of truth in the interpreter’s abstruse theories. No, that man was sick, and had to go – for his own good and for the good name of our institution.
    The days that followed were radiant with sunshine; the sky was filled with light until late evening. I would go home on foot, enjoying the warm air, still ringing with birdsong; I would listen to the wind rustling in the new leaves of the trees in the park, the hooting of a distant ferry on the lake. As I walked, through open windows I could see laid supper tables, lit rooms and televisions. In front of my own house I would pause for a moment before going in; pushing open the door, I would invariably dream of finding everything as it once was: the light on in the kitchen, a bunch of fresh flowers in a vase in the hall of a Tuesday, the smell of floor polish of a Friday, the tapping of Irene’s heels as she came to meet me, a favourite record playing in the living room. Each time in fact, I found a different sort of change, and I had to decipher ever unknown signs to work out the circumstances in which I would find my companion: she would emerge from a shadowy sofa or a room where she had been waiting for me, gazing from a window, lost in thought; she would join me in the kitchen, often barefoot; she would rest her elbows wearily on the table and watch me eating, peering out at me from under her fringe. Sometimes I would catch her still asleep, completely dressed, one leg hanging over the edge of the bed, her handbag still on her arm. On weekends she got up late and would eat no more than a bite of the croissant I had bought her from her favourite bakery at the end of the road; she would leaf through the papers for