The Interpreter Read Online Free PDF Page B

the entertainment pages, underlining the times that films would be showing at strange cinemas, which was her way of letting me know where she would be going that afternoon. Sometimes I had tried accompanying her, picking up my coat and following her; in the car she would talk of trivia, of how the maid had dyed the sheets pink, about how a curtain in the living room had come unstitched and what a bore it was going to be to have it mended. But all of our conversations had the inconsequential quality of those you have on the platform just before one of you gets onto a train. On coming out of the cinema, in the blue light of the afternoon streets, my heart would be weighed down with a sadness heavy as lead. And so, with time, I ended up staying at home alone. I would spend my time in the garden, obsessively tending my roses, as though that were the only way that I could hope to salvage my bond with Irene. At the first sign of an insect on the swelling buds I would rush to spray on insecticide, to spread manure and other nutrients; I would cut off any twig that was out of place, fix climbers to their supports, dig up the slightest weed, pull off dead leaves and pointlessly remove the faded petals. Irene was receding further from me every day, and I could do nothing but be witness to such estrangement. I measured it from time to time, registering the length of her silences, the frequency of her absences, the harshness of her ways; secretly, I hoodwinked myself into believing that the careful registering and measuring of this unknown hurt would ultimately reveal its nature and provide me with some antidote.
    There was a mist hanging over the lake on the day she went away for good; it rose slowly from the water like a poisonous breath, and spread over the city, still bathed in the warm twilight. I had just returned from a week of travelling for work, I was dead tired and I knew I had the airport’s smell of sweat and crowds upon me, but I had no desire to go home. Going up the stairs, I found the living room empty; Irene’s furniture had disappeared; all that remained of the sideboard, the empire-style divan, the Louis Philippe table, were darker patches on the parquet. My own things were scattered all around the room on the floor in the places where the furniture containing them had stood; they now struck me as a brutal résumé of my life with Irene, a scant anthology of what remained of so many years together: a guide book, a crystal vase that had been a birthday present, the television, the hatstand, the transistor radio, a few art books, silver frames emptied of their photographs, an old pack of cards, an ashtray and my collection of jazz records. Irene was in the living room, standing in front of the window, smoking a cigarette, with her coat on. Even my footsteps sounded desolate as I entered the empty room. In the half-light, I couldn’t make out her expression. I put on the lights.
    ‘I’ve put your scientific encyclopaedia in your study,’ was all she said, shielding her eyes from the light, and then she very slowly walked away.
    Out of sheer weariness, or perhaps I mean cowardice, I ended up by signing the request for the interpreter’s dismissal; I felt that my superiors wanted the whole thing out of the way. One May morning I found the same old yellowing file on my desk again; handed around from department to department, it had been growing fatter by the week, filling up with all manner of additional documentation and passed from pillar to post. The moment came when all was safely gathered in; now it was up to me to press the button which would clinch matters once and for all; all I had to do was sign my name beneath so many others on the last dog-eared page. I took the top off my fountain pen and gazed pointlessly at the nib; it had been given to me by Irene when I’d been made head of department, and it was when I signed my name in watery blue ink that I thought I had snapped the link between our destinies, his