As Long as a Life

She comes back the next afternoon because the estate pays by the session, and because she told herself the blank rectangle was nothing — a coincidence of nerves, a translator's fatigue. She has decided to disprove it. The best way to disprove a flinch is to sit still through it a second time. Ollan is worse in the morning light, or the morning light is only more honest. His hands lie open on the blanket as if he has set them down and forgotten how to pick them up. But his eyes find her, and something in them sharpens. "You returned," he says. Marnish. The accent has slipped another notch overnight; *returned* comes out with a soft edge where the consonant should bite. "It's the work." She arranges the recorder, the notebook, the pen. The ritual steadies her the way it always does. "You gave me seven words. I have six. I'd like the seventh — not the sound. The meaning. In Marnish. So I can carry it forward." He watches her a while. Outside, a gull complains and goes quiet. "You want me to translate it for you," he says. "That's how this works. You hold the language. I hold the bridge." "No." He says it without heat. "If I translate that word into Marnish, you will write down the Marnish, and you will be safe, and the word will be dead the moment it leaves my mouth. It only lives while it is untranslated. That is the whole of it." He turns his head toward the window. "You of all people should understand a thing that survives only by not being said." Her pen does not move. She lets the sentence pass through her without acknowledging where it lands. "Then give me the rest," she says. "We'll leave the seventh. You said we might come back to it. Or not." "Or not." A dry warmth, almost fond. He closes his eyes. The older road opens in his mouth again — those rounded, low, back-of-the-throat sounds. She writes fast, phonetic, provisional, refusing to feel any of it, and for eleven words it works. It is only sound. Then he stops, and translates each one into Marnish so she can render it into the third tongue the estate has commissioned, and she does, and it is clean, and she is a window. They reach the end of what he can manage. He is breathing like a man who has climbed stairs. "How long is it," she asks. "The poem. So I can plan the sessions." "I told you." His eyes stay shut. "As long as a life." "That isn't a length." "It is exactly a length." One finger lifts, lowers. "It begins where a life begins and it ends where one ends. The last line is the last breath. When you have that line, the poem is finished, and so is the — " He stops. Not for a word this time. He simply stops, and she understands he has chosen to. "You'll give me the last line when we get there," she says. "No." The word is quiet and absolute, the same *no* he gave her about the seventh word, and she notices it is the only thing he has refused twice. "The last line stays untranslated. Always. You may have every line but that one." "Then the poem won't be finished. The estate is paying for a complete work." "The estate," he says, "is paying for what it thinks it wants." He opens his eyes and looks at her with a clarity that unsettles her more than his fading did. "A poem with an untranslated last line is not unfinished. It is *guarded.* There is a difference. You, of anyone, should feel the difference." She writes the date. She writes the count: eleven lines, plus the six words and the one gap from yesterday. Beneath it she writes, because the file requires a note on scope, *final line: withheld by author,* and does not write why, because he has not said why, because she can see he will die before he says why, and that this is the arrangement. "Why," she asks anyway. A translator does not ask why. She asks it. He is a long time answering. The fog has come up the coast and pressed itself flat against the glass. "Because the line is a person," he says. "And the city has already agreed she never lived. As long as one line of her stays in a tongue no one can read, they cannot take her the rest of the way." His hand closes, slowly, over nothing. "You can translate a poem. You cannot govern a word you cannot spell." Sae looks down at her page. Eleven lines. One gap. One line she has been forbidden before she has even heard it. She has spent her career erasing herself from every text she touched, and here is a text built entirely of the thing she erased. "From the beginning tomorrow," she says. "Slowly." "There is not much tomorrow left in me," Ollan says, almost cheerful. "Bring the recorder anyway." She does not answer that the seventh word has followed her home. That she said it aloud once, alone, in the dark of her flat, to hear whether her mouth still knew the road — and that it did.