My fingers rest on the keys, stiff with cold. If I keep looking long enough, I’ll see the white start to seek out my wrists, then creep up my arms to my heart. Death: nothing but white, a whiteness that rises. But I won’t do it, I won’t just sit and stare at my unmoving hands; I’ll type, fast, until my veins open wide and death is chased from my fingers, from these beaks pecking away at a tree. Tapping the blind tree trunk, tapping until I’ve built myself a nest—yes, my nest that will hold it all.
How rude of me, Daniel. I’m writing you a letter and I’ve come barging right in with all my stuff, without even saying hello or asking how you’re doing. And I know I’ve waited so long to write. It was touching when you messaged me a few times over the last year, asking how I was, and when I’d have something for you to read.
I suspect you’d be fine if I wrote you a couple of quick paragraphs explaining why I never replied, and why I rejected those one or two big translation projects you offered me without giving a reason. What follows could easily be summarised as “I’m sorry, I didn’t get round to it due to personal circumstances.” You would likely send me a kind reply. Something along the lines of I completely understand, “don’t worry, take your time.” And yet I’m choosing to write you an elaborate letter. I have a sense that, even though you might not be waiting for it, I owe you an explanation for my silence.
I strongly urge you to read this letter right to the end. I’ve kept my silence for a long time, but now I’d like to ask you to give me a couple of hours of your attention. Read these pages diagonally if you have to; just keep going. There’s no one—and I say this without a hint of irony—who can skim like you. It’s not urgent. If you’re busy, put it to one side for now. But once you start reading, please give me your undivided attention.
*
It started when I caught a glimpse of my father in myself. For the shortest instant he was there, looking back at me. It was a pickup measure—an unstressed moment that could easily have been missed, a moment I would later realise was not only part of, but in fact the opening of a strange score.
I’d been asked to speak about Vanya Lavrova, and my translation of her work, at The Moscos, a café where they had decided to spend a whole year highlighting contemporary Russian literature. They wanted to draw attention to writers who have been suppressed since the war. Over a hundred people had booked, probably because a documentary about Lavrova had aired a month prior. Have you seen it? She’s represented as a real cult figure, a martyr, even. Which is understandable of course. What kind of person takes all the printed copies of their poetry collection and jumps into a river with them?
Perhaps some of them had hoped to get some juicy details from Lavrova’s life during my talk. I had to disappoint them. As you know, my main focus has been on her literary legacy. I didn’t write a biography; I only translated her poems. Of course, her verse is closely intertwined with her life, and her suicide adds weight to every word.
During my lecture I zoomed in on a couple of Lavrova’s poems. For two hours I went deep into her language with the audience, pointing out intertextual connections with Pushkin, Nabokov, Pasternak, Akhmatova and other great Russian poets of old. It seems my enthusiasm was infectious, as I got some very interesting questions in the Q&A. Somebody even said I’d spoken so passionately that it had seemed for a moment that I’d become Vanya Lavrova.
After my talk I was about to put my things in a tote bag when I noticed a piece of paper folded in half on the lectern, with my name on it. I unfolded it, and that was the moment, around 9.00 p.m. on 1 September, despite the irreducible time that separated us, that I coincided with my father for a couple of beats.
*
A week after that evening at The Moscos—we were in bed and Lou had fallen asleep—I opened Facebook for a quick scroll. Sometimes I forget that it comes with its own inbox, often with messages from students or alumni asking for help with a translation. I usually ignore them, as I have a work email address with the department that they can write to.
(Dear Ms Solovyov. Thank you very much for your lecture on Vanya Lavrova. I had been looking forward to it. It was my last wish to get to be there. Kind regards, Aline. PS I hope you don’t mind I drew you.)
I’ve wondered countless times since that night what would have happened if I hadn’t read that one message, if it had sunk into the morass of unreads and disappeared into the dark holes of the web.
I snuck out of our bedroom and went to my office. There, under a heap of coats, I found the tote bag with my Lavrova translation, my notes for the talk, and the thing I was looking for: the folded piece of paper with my name on it.
Dear Ms Solovyov. The elegant curls on the capital letters made them look like medieval initials. The whole thing seemed refined, in a way, but childish too. I unfolded the paper and, again, it struck me, just like the first time in The Moscos: that pencil portrait of me.
In the drawing, I had deep grooves in my forehead and dark nasolabial folds which seemed to enclose my face in brackets. I’d always thought I didn’t look like my father at all, but I could see the resemblance here. It was unmistakable. Had someone been scrutinising me during the talk, or did they do the drawing beforehand? How could somebody who didn’t know me capture me so accurately and even see through me to my father?
I’d only partly taken in the drawing at the café and, perhaps due to the happy excitement of that evening, had stashed it away before I’d had a proper look. But it became clear to me now that the portrait really had unsettled me that evening and that I’d drunk away my disquiet in the foyer.
“You all right?” Lou groaned when I slipped back into bed next to her.
“Of course. Just thirsty.”
Nestled under the covers, I reread the Facebook message on my phone. It had been sent the night of the event from the account of someone called Aline Verstraeten. When I clicked through to her profile I landed on an empty page with a black cover photo and no profile picture—just the standard grey silhouette.
*
That night I wrote Aline a short reply: Thank you for your message, and thank you for the beautiful portrait. I’m not sure what you mean by “my last wish,” but I hope nothing serious is going on. Best wishes, May Solovyov. I deleted the word “beautiful,” as I could hardly call myself beautiful in that drawing.
The next day I saw the message was marked as read, but she hadn’t reacted. I put the portrait into my folder for personal letters, and with that, I intended to file the whole matter away.
I had a busy period in my department. One of my colleagues was on sick leave and, in addition to teaching my own modules for the BA in applied linguistics, I’d been asked to take over her translation strategy module, for the MA in literary translation. In my first lecture to the master’s students I talked about the difference between source-language- and target-language-oriented strategies. “In a source-language-oriented strategy, the translator conforms as much as possible to the language in which the work was written. In a target-language-oriented strategy, they give more space to their own language.” I thought it would be a breeze to teach this module, but I quickly snapped to attention when a student asked: “Could you say that a target-language-oriented translator is really kind of trying to be a writer?”
Daniel, do you remember the last time we met, in that little café right next to the publisher’s, a couple of weeks after my Lavrova translation was published? You asked me why I didn’t try writing a book of my own. You probably don’t remember my reaction; you talk to so many writers and translators.
I told you that I’ve always been fascinated by novelists who can lose themselves in a story for years on end, and construct a parallel universe to retreat to whenever they want. I’ve always listened with amazement when writers talk about the way the language takes the reins and the story writes itself, about how they feel like scribes who simply need to record the things their characters whisper in their ears. I told you I could imagine something of the sort, but had never experienced it. Nobody whispered in my ear. There was nothing in me that needed to be written.
I told you that I love nestling in other people’s lines, in the furrows they’ve ploughed in the white landscape of the paper. And as I was saying this, I realised I hadn’t come up with that image myself—I’d read it somewhere else. See, I thought: what’s even really mine?
That conversation came back to me when the student asked me in class whether some translators are really trying to be writers themselves. I said that even as a target-language-oriented translator, you always remain under the surface of a text, that it’s important never to impose your own voice. I described how free I feel thanks to the givenness of the story, which allows me to surrender completely to the words. I cited the English writer Nancy Mitford, who said, “I do love translating, it is the pure pleasure of writing without the misery of inventing.”
I also told my students that nobody comes as close to a story as a translator; you penetrate its microcosm, and in some cases you even come closer to it than the author did. I told them that I consider teaching to be a form of translation too: a teacher translates subject matter for students. Teaching translation might just be the ultimate form of translation—translation squared.
Perhaps I should, instead, have let them see into my heart and told them the truth of the matter: that I inherited my fascination for Russian literature from my father, and that I harbour the illusion that, by translating poems, I can get closer to him. And that I’d recently come to realise that translation actually takes you away from the original text, too, and that teaching, this translation of translation, exiles you even further. In that sense, the whole process had landed me quite far away from my father—that man at the window in our living room, looking at the snow in our little front garden, and mumbling a poem by Vladimir Vysotski. This white blots out the limits, that’s how it started, and it never ended. He had the horizon in his eyes, because he too was stuck in a translation: our little white front garden was probably the blandest possible transcription of the landscape of his childhood.
*
It was a Tuesday, a couple of hours before my second class on the master’s course, when I received another message from Aline Verstraeten, this time in my work email inbox, without a subject. (Dear Ms Solovyov. I would never have imagined that I might receive a response from you. My heartfelt thanks. I do hope you didn’t feel like you had to reply. To answer your question: yes it is, but that’s for the best. I have come to terms with it. Kind regards, Aline.) This message was enclosed in brackets as well.
Though I hadn’t thought about her for days, I recognised her name right away. But I had no idea what she was talking about. What was for the best? What had she come to terms with? I wondered if I should react, but then an email popped up from a student with a flurry of questions, and I had to finish preparing my lecture too, which was why, by evening, Aline’s email had sunk into the depths of my inbox.
A couple of days later I got another email from her, again without a subject line: (I’m scared. There’s a gang in Wijlen, and I’m not the only one they’re after. I want them to leave me alone.)
I combed through a list of names of my students and alumni, but didn’t find her name. Based on the curly way she’d written my name on the folded piece of paper, she could well be fourteen years old, but would a child draw such a striking portrait?
Hi Aline, I don’t know if I’m the person you’re looking for. I’m May Solovyov, translator and teacher of Russian translation studies. Did you mean to write to me? Who or what are you scared of? Who are ‘they’? If criminal activities are involved, of course you’d be best off contacting the police. Best wishes, May Solovyov.
She answered within a minute: (Dear Ms Solovyov. I can’t. Kind regards, Aline.) I got straight back to her too, and that was the first time, despite the distance between us, that we were connected in the moment, me in my little office at the university, which Lou had long ago spruced up with some plants in macramé baskets, and her, this Aline Verstraeten, god knows where. Why can’t you? Here’s a link to the police website. You can call them, but there’s an online contact form too. Best wishes, May Solovyov.
I waited a little longer, assuming that she was still there on the other end, but I didn’t get an answer until the next day, in the form of an empty email with the subject line: (I can’t. I’m too afraid.)
I wrote that I’d received an email without a body and asked whether she’d accidentally deleted the text. Again she replied at lightning speed: (No.) No explanation, no context. Hi Aline. Honestly, I don’t know what you’re asking of me. Could you elaborate? Best wishes, May. PS If for some reason it’s difficult to communicate via email: every Tuesday afternoon, between 3:00 and 5:00 p.m., I have my coffee in the square at The BarBarian.
I’d already pressed send when it dawned on me that this gave her a green light to transition from our virtual encounters to one in real life and I don’t know why I did that, Daniel, but there was something about her messages which both intrigued me and had me deeply worried from the start. Why was she seeking me out? And above all, perhaps: how was it that she had seen my father in me?
Every Tuesday afternoon I sit outside The BarBarian; in winter too, as they have an awning and free-standing patio heaters. I love the predictability of the setting. I have my regular table and I know I don’t need to order for The Tache to bring me what I want: a ‘regular coffee’. The café is right by my department and it’s a student hangout too. I’ll sometimes have a drink there with a colleague, and there are always students who prefer to talk in person; I prefer to meet them here rather than in my office, where I want to work undisturbed.
The outside seating area gives you a view over the bustling square. A squat little man walking his slender greyhound; a group of toddlers in high-vis vests gripping the handles on a stretched-out plush caterpillar; two students carrying a mattress on their heads, sunk so deep into the foam that it looks like the mattress has four legs; an elderly couple each holding one side of a gift-wrapped hula hoop and looking very proud, like they’re showing off a supersize wedding ring—on any weekday afternoon, this square will treat you to a parade of human diversity.
After my indirect invitation, Aline had sent me a short reply: (Sorry, that won’t be possible. Firstly: I don’t drink coffee. And secondly: I can’t talk.) I’d wanted to reply, Can’t you have something other than coffee? And what do you mean, you can’t talk? As far as I’m concerned, you don’t need to, you can write, but in the end I didn’t write back. I’d been very forthcoming already for me, to somebody I didn’t know at all and who hadn’t actually asked me anything concrete, who had initially just thanked me for my talk on Vanya Lavrova and who, perhaps out of gratitude, had drawn a portrait of me in which I, probably by pure coincidence, looked very much like my father.
And yet, as I sat outside The BarBarian the following week correcting translation assignments, her emails were on my mind, and I was waiting for somebody to arrive at my table at any moment and introduce themselves as Aline Verstraeten. But she didn’t show up, and no Aline appeared at my table the week after either—and so she sank out of my awareness once more, to the edge of oblivion.
*
On a sunny autumn day in early October, a little over two weeks after our first email exchange, I suddenly noticed a girl wearing an orange woolly hat in the middle of the square, looking in my direction. I realised I’d seen her the week before as well. Although I appeared to have subconsciously registered her presence, she hadn’t caught my attention.
Then she lowered her gaze. I read some more of my book, looked up at her again, and again she looked away. When I saw that she was still there half an hour later, I suddenly knew beyond doubt that it was her. I waited until she looked my way again and this time I tried a little wave, but I didn’t get a reaction. She kept her hands in the pockets of her baggy olive jacket.
*
She was still there, with her shoulders hunched and her gaze on the floor, close to the bins. She was wearing a big rucksack. I paid The Tache and made a beeline to her. Her body language showed that my bold move had startled her. I slowed down, and when I reached her, I said, ‘Hello. You wouldn’t happen to be looking for me?” I reckoned she was no older than eighteen. She was slender and her skin was pale, as thin as Japanese paper.
The girl didn’t answer and kept looking at her shoes. I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it. “Oh, I’m sorry, I think I made a mistake. I thought because . . . Never mind, sorry for the confusion.” I wanted to turn and go, but I hesitated. “Are you all right? I mean, I was sitting outside the café over there and noticed you standing here for some time. If there’s any way I can help?”
Then she started trembling. It wasn’t a brief shudder; her entire body was shaking. I looked around, searching for this poor creature’s owner, but nobody on the square seemed to have lost anyone.
“Are you Aline Verstraeten?” I asked, gently. No reaction. Of course, she’d written that she couldn’t talk. Perhaps she was deaf and mute and she couldn’t hear me. I touched her arm and when she looked up, startled, I stuck up my thumb with an inquisitive expression. Silly, in hindsight. She collapsed into herself again, still shaking. I didn’t have a pen and paper so I opened a new note on my phone: Are you Aline Verstraeten?
Night had started to fall. It was half past five already, the shops would close soon. The Tache started stacking his outdoor chairs. I stretched out my arm to show her the screen. She gave it a cursory glance, turned around, and then the girl who had stood there for over half an hour just marched off.
Daniel, it’s hard to believe that it’s only been a little over a year since I was standing there near The BarBarian. So much has happened. I won’t saddle you with pointless anecdotes; I only want to tell you what’s necessary to show how deep her roots have grown in me, how quickly she started to live inside me and me in my thoughts of her—to show you that she’s the reason why I haven’t written to you until now.
You must know about my terrible memory. I often forget I’ve met people; the cracks in my mind are so wide in places that entire people can slip through them. But my time with her has stayed with me intact, precisely as it happened. I can see it play out before me like a heavily saturated film, filled with long static shots and close-ups. I can slow it down effortlessly in my mind and replay the events in slow motion. Including images that aren’t necessarily meaningful, but which become so when I zoom in on them, like that moment when, right before she disappeared from the square, she glanced back and saw that I saw her.
*
“I think I’ve met her.”
“Who?”
Lou was chopping vegetables for dinner.
I’m amazed how efficiently she can run a knife through a vegetable. When she cooks she’s a warrior, with a tea towel draped over her shoulder, her mouth twitching with determination. Sometimes I have to tell her, Take it easy, honey, that leek’s been dead a long time!
“Aline.”
“Who?”
“That girl who did the drawing, Aline Verstraeten. Oh, I forgot to tell you! She also wrote that she’s being harassed and not just her, but it isn’t clear by whom, it was all so vague, so I thought: I’ll let her know I’m at The BarBarian on Tuesdays, maybe she doesn’t like email and needs to tell me something.”
“That’s strange. So you saw her?”
“I think so.”
When I got my phone out to show Lou our thread, I saw the new message: (Dear Ms Solovyov. Sorry. I’m a tree that stands alone and my surroundings can’t be mapped.)
*
The same orange hat, the same olive anorak, the same girl, the same square, one week later. Again she kept her eyes riveted on her shoes, as people strode right past her on all sides. I parked my bike at The BarBarian and watched her for a while. She must have felt it, because she looked up at me, then nervously lowered her eyes again.
I hadn’t answered her latest email, because I didn’t know what to say, but perhaps also because I took Lou’s advice to heart. “Try to be careful,” she’d said, and it hit home, because I was usually the one to advise caution.
This might have been a turning point, Daniel. I could have decided not to allow her into my life. All I had to do was unlock my bike, ride off, maybe stay away from The BarBarian for a few weeks and leave any future messages unread. I’d remember this for a while and maybe trot out the story with colleagues or friends, under the category of “strange encounters,” and that would be that.
But perhaps I was overestimating myself. I might have gone beyond that stage already—part of my mind already colonised, and incapable of circumventing her. We’d long passed the pickup and prelude and had established multiple leitmotifs: that orange woolly hat, the green baggy raincoat, her tense body, her fixed stare, her frayed moccasins.
“Hi Aline.”
She didn’t react.
“Hey, Aline,” I said, louder this time.
She sprang to attention, as if I had yelled at full capacity.
“So you can hear.”
No reaction.
“I mean, in one of your messages you wrote that you can’t talk, and so I thought, maybe she can’t hear either, but it seems you can hear me, or you wouldn’t have jumped.”
“ . . . ”
“I got your last email, but I didn’t know how to respond. It’s a nice image, the tree and the surroundings that can’t be mapped. I mean: it’s sad but beautiful.”
She kept staring at her shoes. Her rucksack seemed to weigh a ton. It had a little stuffed elephant dangling from it.
I lit a cigarette and lingered next to her. I hardly ever smoke, but in her presence I would smoke more, at first mainly to fill awkward silences, and then later as a form of pressure. The longer she kept silent, the more I smoked; the tighter she kept her mouth shut, the deeper I inhaled. I manipulated her with my health. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I walked over to a bin to stub out my cigarette, and when I returned, I said, “I’m going to ask you a couple of yes-or-no questions, and all you need to do is nod or shake your head, all right?” My pedantic tone irritated me, but I didn’t know how else I could get a conversation going.
“All right?” I repeated.
Then she gave me a nod, so slight I almost missed it. The tiniest little nod you could imagine. It was the kind of nod I would become incredibly clued into over the following months. All the jarring movements in the city, the cargo bikes rumbling past over the cobblestones, the swerving cranes, the gaggles of yammering schoolkids, they were all lost on me, but that little nod of her head, I never missed it.
In the following months, I became highly adept at reading her—not just her nods, but every subtle change in her body. Her shakes of the head, her lopsided smiles, her shrugs. Body language had never stood out to me in others; I’d never seen them as things that could distinguish one person from another. My friends and family members, did they usually nod with their heads upright, or slightly tilted? Lou, for instance, how did she nod? I’d been with her for ten years, but I couldn’t bring to mind the way she nodded in any detail.
If you were to ask me what it was exactly that characterised Aline’s shrug, it would be hard for me to describe. Let’s say it was curt, a little jerk up and down, like it wasn’t something she could control, but it was something that happened to her. The same applied to her other movements. The trembling seized her. The sobs washed over her. Even her rare little smile, which, yes, I would eventually desire to bring about, seemed to be imposed from without.
I often found myself thinking: she is a closed book; nobody can read her like I can. I’m a professional translator, and hence a trained reader—didn’t García Márquez say that translation is the deepest form of reading? I also had quite a lot of time on my hands, relatively speaking. I wasn’t stuck in a nine-to-five job and, although I was often busy translating and teaching, I always had time to sit next to her on a bench on a weekday, ask her a question and calmly wait for her to nod.
These thoughts only crystallised later. During that first encounter I was confused, more than anything, and this girl, who looked as forlorn as a trembling reed far from a riverbank, who saw my father in me—I hadn’t the faintest idea what in the world this girl wanted from me.
