To Say, Not to Translate

Ollan dies on a Thursday, at the hour when the light in the estate goes the color of paper left in a drawer. Sae is there. She does not do anything for it. There is nothing a translator does at a death. She sits and she watches the hand. The count runs down to the end the way she has been dreading — not with a stop but with a slowing, three, a longer pause, two, a pause that goes on past where the next beat should fall, and then does not resume. The stair reaches the bottom of the wall. His fingers open, not around anything this time. Just open. She holds them until they are cool enough that holding them is only her own hand now, carrying the count for both of them, the way a language held by one mouth is already half a coffin. The estate nurse says the word she has instead of *soon*, which is nothing, and makes her calls. Sae goes into the room where the six lines are and sits with the seventh gap and does not reach her foot toward it. She calls Deri. She does not say *he's gone*. She hums, once — three, a pause, two, and low beneath it the tail she has carried twenty years to keep and twenty years to bury — and stops. On the other end she hears him understand. Then she hears something she has not heard him do before. He hums it back. Not taps. Hums. The syllable in his own mouth, the thing he has spent his life recording so he would never have to hold, carried now across a phone line into her ear where a living mouth is required. "There are two of us," he says, when he has said it. "For as long as we say it, there are two." "There's one holder of Vist," she says. "There isn't one anymore." "No." She looks at the page on the table, the whole date in her own hand, and beside it the thing she wrote: *I can give her back or keep her safe. I don't think I can do both.* She has read it every night since and it has not become smaller. "He told me to make everything loud except the last line," she says. "I thought that meant the poem. I think it meant the choice. He didn't tell me which way. He just told me not to make it quietly." Deri is silent in the way that is not empty. She picks up the six lines. She reads them into the phone — not for Deri, not for the archive, but because a language lives by going to a living ear, and there is one ear left that will not turn the sound into a shape and file it. She reads the count. She reads the syllable in every place it falls. She reads all of it the way Ollan asked, loud, and when she reaches the place where line seven would go she stops, and lets the missing stair be missing, out loud, into the phone, so that even the gap has a witness. "That's the poem," she says. "Everything but the line I promised him." "You haven't decided," Deri says. "You've held the promise. That's not the same as the choice." "I know." Her thumb finds the base of her thumb. "But I know something I didn't. If I speak the last line, I make her findable, and I stop being able to hold the refusal, because there'd be nothing to refuse. And if I keep it, I hold her safe, and she stays a hole in a drawer forever. Both of those give her to the Bureau. One as a record. One as a silence they own." "Yes." "There's a third shape." She hears herself say it the way she said it once before, on a Friday, into this same phone, before she knew what it would cost. "There's always been a third shape and I've been too afraid of it to see it as anything but a fork." "Sae." Careful. "Don't build one that isn't there because you're tired." "I'm not translating the last line," she says. "And I'm not leaving it silent. I'm going to say it. Not translate it — say it. In the tongue it's in. Out loud, to a living ear. That doesn't file her. It doesn't classify. It just means the name is held by a mouth again, and a held thing can't be a *do not hold*." The line goes very quiet. "That's not translation," Deri says at last. "No," she says. "It's the other thing. The thing you and I have been doing badly with our hands for two weeks." She looks at the page, at *Whose*, unanswered, and does not answer it there either. It does not need the page anymore. "I'm going to have to relearn enough of my own tongue to carry hers. I know I won't get the year back. The words come, the memories past the line don't. Deri — I know that. I'm doing it anyway." She hears him decide, and again it does not sound like praise. It sounds like a man who has just realized what he will have to keep his hand closed on now. "Then there'll be two mouths," he says. "Yours and — " He stops. He does not say *mine*. He says, instead, the thing that is harder: "Tell me when. I'll learn the count from you. Properly. Not from watching." When he is gone she takes out the page. Under the date, under everything, she writes, small and even, in the hand that does not shake: *He's gone. I'm not going to translate her. I'm going to learn how to say her.* Then she opens the book of her own buried tongue that she has not opened in twenty years, to the first page, where the words are the ones a child learns first, and she begins — badly, aloud, into the empty room — to count.