A Clean Instrument

The estate car sends a driver who does not speak on the way up. Sae is grateful for it. She has learned that most people, given a stranger and forty minutes, will try to hand her a piece of themselves to carry, and she is not in the business of carrying. She translates. There is a difference, and the difference is the whole of her. The house sits above Marn where the fog thins, close enough to the coast that the words for salt and wind must have worn smooth here generations ago. A woman named as the estate's coordinator meets her at the door and says, in careful civic Marnish, that the poet is lucid this afternoon. *This afternoon* is offered like a fragile object. Sae understands. She has read the file. Ollan is dying of the illness that unwrites — not the body first but the second tongue, the acquired one, the language he built his whole public life in. It goes mid-sentence now. He reaches for a word and finds the shelf empty. "You were chosen," the coordinator says, "because you have no first language to defend." "I have no first language at all," Sae says. It is the sentence she leads with, always. It reassures clients. A translator who has already lost her own mother tongue is a clean instrument — nothing of hers can leak into the work, nothing bends the meaning on its way through. She is neutral the way a window is neutral. People pay for the window. The room smells of paper and something medicinal underneath. Ollan is smaller than his photographs, propped in a chair by the light, and when he turns his head she sees him do the arithmetic every dying person does with a new face: *how much of this will I remember by evening.* "They sent the empty one," he says. In Marnish. His accent is fraying at the edges, the vowels loosening. "They sent a translator." She sets her recorder on the table between them, then her notebook, then her pen parallel to the notebook. Order is a kind of armor. "The poem is not in Marnish." He says it as though warning her off a cliff. "It is not in anything your dictionaries hold. It is in Vist." She has not heard the word before. She writes it down. *Vist.* Four letters and already she can feel that it will not sit still inside the Marnish alphabet. "Then you'll give it to me line by line," she says, "and I'll render it. That's the work." He watches her for a long moment. Then he closes his eyes, and something changes in his mouth — the shape of it, the muscles finding an older road. When he speaks again it is not Marnish, not anything adjacent to it. The sounds are rounded and low and they come from further back in the throat than the civic tongue ever asks for. She does not understand a syllable. That is normal; that is the job; she waits for him to stop and translate his own meaning into a language they share so she can carry it into a third. He speaks seven words. On the fifth, her pen stops. She does not decide to stop it. Her hand simply refuses the next stroke, the way a hand refuses a hot surface before the mind has named the heat. The word he has just said — she does not know it. She is certain she does not know it. It belongs to no language she has ever studied, and she has studied more than most living people. And yet. Something in her chest has stood up, the way you stand when someone calls a name across a crowded room, half a second before you understand it was your name. Ollan opens his eyes. He has been watching her hand, not her face. "You know that one," he says. Quietly. Not a question. "No." The word comes out too fast. "I don't know any of them. That's why I'm useful." He does not argue. That is worse than arguing. He lets the silence hold the shape of what she said, and the shape does not fit, and they both hear that it does not fit. Outside, the fog moves against the window, patient as water. "Write nothing for that word," he says at last, gentling, as if she were the ill one. "We'll come back to it. Or we won't." He reaches for his cup, misses, tries again. "There is a lot to come back to. The poem is long." A dry sound that might have been a laugh. "It is exactly as long as a life." She looks down at her notebook. Six words rendered in her neat provisional shorthand, and one gap where the seventh should be — a small blank rectangle she has left without meaning to, the way you step around a hole in the floor you didn't know was there until your foot found the edge. A clean instrument does not flinch. She writes at the top of the page, in Marnish, the date and the word *Vist* and, beneath it, nothing. Then she says, in her steadiest voice, "From the beginning, please. Slowly." And Ollan begins again, and Sae writes, and does not look at the blank rectangle, and cannot stop knowing it is there.