He invited her to stay for lunch, but her guardian was waiting for her at the hotel. They had to meet a photographer from Der Spiegel, and then they were leaving that very evening for Osnabrück, where she was doing a reading at the Felix Nussbaum Museum tomorrow, and so he walked her to the station at the end of the block and made sure she got on the right tram.
They parted cheerfully, anticipating a reunion soon enough when the book was published, but as he walked back home a dark mood settled over him. His legs and his heart grew heavy. He had held this feeling at bay all through the long months of work on the translation, forcing himself to keep his professional distance and focus on the job at hand. Meeting her in person, sitting with her at his kitchen table with their knees practically touching, had closed the space between them. It was unspeakable, what had happened to her; it could scarcely be imagined. Yet she had made something of it, she had written it down, without a trace of self-pity. He climbed the stairs to his apartment, and everything made him sad: the bicycles with their training wheels on the landings, the rubber overshoes in three sizes at the front door of the downstairs neighbour, like an illustration from The Story of the Three Bears, the sheen of the wooden balustrade under his hand, the glimpses of rooftops and chimneys through the windows. When he shut his front door behind him there were tears in his eyes, but he swallowed the sob pushing up in his throat. He could not weep when she herself was so composed. It would be an insult. Was it strength, this self-possession of hers? Or had something been undone in her, permanently disconnected, short-circuited? She gave away so little. It was as if she had told the story and kept it to herself at the same time. As if she had concealed it precisely by sharing it.
It’s a waltz, thought the young woman who had arrived late, as Akello came to the end of another page, peeled it over and went on. One two three, one two three.
Four of the page-counters estimated that Akello had reached the halfway mark and that she was now on the downhill slope.
Prof. Ziegler got an itch under her thigh but could not scratch it without annoying the woman beside her, who had already given her several cautionary glances. She was reminded again of poor Edward Sheldon, lying immobile on his catafalque in his Upper East Side apartment, unable to move a finger. He was lucky to have a squad of minders to minister to his needs, she thought, to have night nurses and cooks, and the money to pay them. But the word ‘lucky’ troubled her in relation to someone so direly afflicted. How frustrated he must have been. And then she wondered how he had passed water and whether he had bodily urges and what he did about them.
The young man who had come with his girlfriend read the blurb on the back of the book, which he was holding for her; she wanted to get it signed afterwards. He wondered what life was like in Uganda now and whether there were wildlife reserves there.
Florence Lawino, the author’s guardian, the only person in the room who heard Akello’s voice falter as she began to tell about the murder of her sister, slipped her hand through the gap between two buttons on her blouse and touched the scar on her own stomach.
Something else came back to Hans Günther. It was later on the day of her visit, when he was clearing up the kitchen table, that he came across the ashtray full of Post-its. It was like a little bonfire and he felt like putting a match to it. But that was absurd. He stripped off the first of the notes and looked at it. ‘Resurrected?’ it read in his blue pen. And then in pencil the word she had suggested: ‘translated’. And then in blue again: ‘brought back, raised, revived?’ He always had other ideas. That was the problem with translation: there was always another possibility. Which made her suggestion doubly difficult. Why had she said ‘translated’? Translated from the dead. As if death itself were a language, the source language, and translation a matter of faith. Suddenly the whole enterprise felt hopeless. He opened the English version and read the phrase to himself again: brought back from the dead. It made more sense. Then he picked up the French version but did not open it. It had one of those unfussy French covers of clean white board upon which floated a picture the size of a playing card; a cross section of sugar cane in close-up, cut off between the earth and the sky. He gazed at it in despair.
It would have intrigued Hans Günther Basch to learn that Florence Lawino, whose hand caught his attention as it stirred beneath the fabric of her blouse, had a life story every bit as harrowing as her charge’s. But she had never spoken about it outside the counselling room, let alone written it down. The two of them had journeyed independently to America, but they had been placed in the same foster home because their stories were so alike. They discovered that they had grown up in villages not far apart in the Gulu District. Florence too had been abducted, she had even been in Koboko a few months before Maryam, but had left before the rebel attack. She was a little younger than Maryam, but she had become her guardian nevertheless.
She had heard Maryam speak or read at scores of briefings, conferences and workshops. In the beginning, the telling of the story, which was so like her own, left her feeling exposed, sometimes angry, but she got used to it and these days it hardly bothered her. She thought every day about what had happened to her and these memories were more vivid than any scene that could be conjured up in words by someone else. In any event, it was different here, on this evening, with Maryam reading in Acholi while the trees stood aghast behind the glass with their feet in the snow. It was as if Maryam was speaking only to her.
As she listened to the story, so familiar she could recite parts of it by heart, her hand moved along the livid blanket stitch of scar tissue. With her middle finger she followed the ridge from her navel to her hipbone, tracing each of the eleven stitches, first the part above the slash and then the part below, while in her mind she passed down a corridor, trying the doors on one side and then the other, and found them all locked.
There were no clues in Akello’s reading to indicate when she might stop: the listeners could not judge whether a passage was rising to a climax or falling to a resolution, and so their attention was not modulated by the usual sense of anticipation that accompanies a reading in a familiar language. She gave nothing away, neither speeding up nor slowing down, and never once looking up from the page. Again Andrij Leonenko, the young poet in the fourth row, had the impression that her eyes were closed and she was reciting from memory. She turned the pages so precisely, rolling back one after the other with exactly the same gesture and without licking her finger. When she did stop it was not abrupt but final, given the same flat emphasis with which she had begun. She did not smile or say thank you. She gathered up her papers, squared them once against the lectern and went back to her seat.