By now, many of the listeners had decided that Maryam Akello was not a good reader, but their attention did not waver. Listening, like reading aloud, is an art. The silence was more than polite: it expressed the general feeling of the audience that Sugar was a good book. This was largely thanks to Horst Grundmann, whose article some of them had read in Die Zeit the week before, publicising the reading and the series it inaugurated. All of them, with the exception of a student who had arrived late and was leaning against the wall at the back beside the TV camera, had also just heard Prof. Grundmann’s introductory speech and so they had some idea what the reading might be about even if they did not understand. Having first set out the aims of the Writers under Fire initiative, and thanked the partner organisations and sponsors in the city government and the private sector, he had gone on to tell how Akello and her sister had been abducted from a village in northern Uganda by the Lord’s Resistance Army and carried off into slavery in Sudan. After much suffering, she had miraculously escaped and ended up in the refugee camp at Koboko, only for this place of apparent refuge to come under attack by rebels. Once again, she was lucky to escape with her life. With the help of Christian missionaries, she had reached the United States, which she now regarded as her home. Sugar, published there with the support of UNESCO, had been an unexpected success. It was unusual, Prof. Grundmann said, for such a dark story to become a bestseller, but no one who read it could fail to be moved by the spirit of the writer, which was bathed in light. The German translation by Hans Günther Basch, one of the finest practitioners in the field, was the fourth foreign-language edition, and half a dozen more were on the cards.
Throughout Grundmann’s speech, Akello had sat immobile. She understood no German, and there was no simultaneous translation this evening, but she had a notion of what her host was saying because he had thoughtfully sent her the gist of his speech in an email. Although her face appeared open and frank, it was turned slightly to one side and her gaze was averted, as if she were watching something in the corner of her eye. It seemed to several people on the opposite side of the auditorium, including a young poet in the fourth row from the front, that her heavy-lidded eyes were actually closed.
Behind the lectern she appeared to be even smaller than she was, scarcely more than a girl. When she reached for the microphone it shrieked and she pulled away as if a placid dog had snapped at her. A technician, crouching so that he would not obscure the view of the audience or the cameraman even for a moment, slipped in from one side, expertly adjusted the stand to bring the mic close to her mouth, and slipped away.
Prof. Ziegler, who had spoken briefly to Akello in the lobby fifteen minutes earlier, and twenty other members of the audience who had heard her being interviewed on the radio the day before, expected her to say a few words in English. In fact, she had intended to read from the English translation. But when they’d met in the café of the Literaturhaus to discuss the order of proceedings, Prof. Grundmann proposed that she read in Acholi instead and Hans Günther supported him. It was an opportunity for her to use her own language, they said, to speak in her own voice. It was important for the audience too, hearing the cadences of the original would open their minds to another world. She would be free to speak English afterwards, of course, when she took questions from the floor. Nearly everyone in Germany spoke English. So now, once the microphone had been adjusted, she simply tapped her typescript on the top of the lectern, producing two discreet hammer blows that called the gathering to order, set the pages down and began to read.
In the moment when the sheaf of papers was visible above the lectern, seven people in the audience assessed how thick it was and thus how long the reading might last. Yet the calculation was not a sign of impatience or boredom on their part, nor was there any indication of this on the part of anyone else. The room was silent and attentive. It was, thought Annemieke Vogel, who was reporting on the event for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, unusually silent for such a large crowd. Perhaps it was the effect of this slight woman and her whispery voice. Someone coughed quietly into a fist, a chair squeaked, and the audience seemed to suck in its belly and lean closer.
That soft, synthetic squeak ran like a skewer through Karolina Fischer, the events coordinator of the Literaturhaus. She remembered again a board meeting at which she had argued, in vain, that plastic seat covers were impractical (she could not say vulgar). But no one had taken her seriously. She had been made to feel petty, glances were exchanged, there she goes again. She’d had a point though. Usually it was not too bad in a crowd this size, which shuffled, rustled, coughed and scratched sufficiently to drown out the childishly obscene noises of the cushions, but in smaller gatherings it was embarrassing. Especially if the book was a serious one and there were no opportunities for laughter to break the tension. She would raise the matter at the next meeting. The chairs were three years old, they could replace or reupholster them now without appearing wasteful.
Intent though he appeared to be on the reading, as befitted a translator, Hans Günther Basch was studying the footwear of his friend Horst Grundmann, which the angle of his head had placed in his line of vision. Leather hiking boots with rubber soles. The man was a famous walker, always tramping through a forest or over a hill, restless and indefatigable. He would come back from a hike flushed and triumphant, with moss smeared on the seat of his pants and hillocks of snow on his toecaps, and tramp mud up and down the corridors of the Department to show that he had been abroad, that he was not some desk-bound egghead afraid of the outdoors. There was something embedded there in the treads of his boots, a brand name probably, in an oval frame. It really did look like a brand, like a sign you would burn into the hide of a cow. It was a sole that would make a deep impression in a flower bed beneath the window of a vicarage. Basch didn’t have the stomach for the hard-boiled private eyes the publishers were always pressing on him, but he liked the old-fashioned ones like Hercule Poirot and Father Brown. As he watched Grundmann’s boots swivelling on their heels — big feet, perhaps a 48, he thought — he wondered how often a footprint helped to catch a thief or a murderer. Did they really fill them with plaster of Paris and present them in court? There was probably some synthetic modern substitute, like resin or silicone. These days everything was a gel. Footprint, one said, although strictly it was a shoeprint, a soleprint.
While he was thinking this, Hans Günther’s eyes wandered to the glass wall that ran down one side of the room. There had been quite a bit of argument about that between the board and the architect. It would make the space cold, they said, especially in the winter. But the architect had argued that a place like the Literaturhaus needed to be open to the world, it was part of the symbolic logic of the building, and she was right, people often passed by outside during a reading and that sense of life going on, of the city outside, made the words on the page seem more vital. Not that there was anyone out there now: just the cold square covered in snow and the avenue of beeches with their skinny trunks and naked limbs.
Some familiar word, a husk of sense in the granular outflow of Maryam Akello’s reading, snagged Basch’s attention and he became aware of her voice again. What was that word? It sounded like magic or make-believe. A foodstuff. Some kind of millet? He remembered discussing it with her. She had come to see him at his apartment to iron out the problems with his translation. He’d cleared a space among the books and papers on the kitchen table, which was never used for eating at, and opened his working manuscript between them. It was stuck all over with notes and queries on yellow Post-its and they’d spent the entire morning going from one to the next. She had the Acholi typescript in a box file beside her, but she did not refer to it once. Perhaps she knew the text by heart. On the chair beside him lay the published English edition, also laden with notes in green, and the French one bristling with blue, but they did not open them either. While he raised his doubts and asked his questions, she pored over the German version as if she understood it, and he made notes and revisions on the manuscript with a pencil or a fountain pen, her English explanations and his German equivalents, often shadowed by question marks. The discarded Post-its, covered with deletions and options, heaped up in an ashtray at the corner of the table.