8
It was a while before I got my bearings. I’d taken a lot of sleeping pills the night before—to be expected, given the date—and was now having trouble orienting myself. I had been awoken by jackhammers. The noise invaded my bedroom through the open window along with the fine sea breeze.
I padded barefoot onto the deck to make sure that the world outside of my apartment still existed. It did. The sun burned in the sky, old ladies and gentlemen marched toward the beach, cars honked, and the renovation of the house at the end of the street was in full swing. My neighborhood was in a permanent state of noise. In the morning the heavy cleaning trucks arrived, followed by construction, hammering, drilling, and later the buses, cars, and Vespas. And the passersby contributed their fair share.
I went back in to shower. I’d forgotten to turn on the boiler and the water was cold. I dried myself off, went to the kitchen, dissolved an aspirin in a glass of water, and made Turkish coffee. I took Elisha’s photo from my wallet, leaned it against the wall, and lit a candle in front of it. I often looked through his photos, and in my mind reexamined every second of our last night. Why hadn’t I woken up earlier? How could I have prevented his death?
This photo had been taken in Morocco, during our sole, but long, trip together. Elisha was smiling into the camera. My face was buried in his hair. Looking at the photo I smelled him and clearly saw the texture of his skin in front of me. In a tea house, I had asked a man with a mouth full of gold teeth to take a picture of us. The man immediately identified himself as a tour guide and tried to talk us into a guided tour. I politely declined while Elias was busy adjusting and double-checking the settings on the camera. I dissolved another aspirin in water, quickly got dressed, and left the apartment.
The conference was organized by the French embassy in a hotel not far from my apartment. I hurried along the beach promenade toward the hotel: the sea and blue beach chairs to my left, to my right towering hotels, built in honeycomb design. The street was crowded with taxis and Vespas. I arrived sweaty and out of breath, opened my bag for the security check at the entrance, and was let in. I picked up my badge at reception and went straight to the booths.
I’d been booked on short notice, as a replacement and after lots of back-and-forth. As a result, I was nervous as hell. I introduced myself and the two other interpreters—the one for Hebrew and one of the English guys—shook my hand. As it turned out, the head of our team was nowhere to be found and neither was my booth colleague. More and more interpreters showed up. Nobody knew anything and it was only a few hours until the conference was set to start. We didn’t know where the organizers were, nor did we have the documents or even the order of the speakers. My palms were slick with sweat.
My colleagues stood in a circle, looking very relaxed, assuring me that this conference would be a cakewalk. Among them a few legendary interpreters. My shivering intensified. A colleague grabbed my elbow and pointed to a man walking toward us, whistling. Our head of booth had long slender limbs, closely set eyes, and frameless glasses. His whole presence was somehow disarmingly amiable, even though I knew that this was an illusion, as he was famous for his choleric fits. He introduced himself, handed out the documents, and assigned us to our booths. When I asked about my booth colleague he smiled mischievously and said, “That would be me.”
“What an honor,” I said and swallowed hard.
“We’ll see about that,” he said. “You’re our youngest colleague and if I’m not mistaken, this is your first time working for us. I’ll keep an eye on you. You have to know that this will be a pretty easy event. It’s only about cultural exchange. Nevertheless, focus and hand over immediately when you start to struggle. I expect the utmost professionalism!”
From my booth I observed the room. Only three people were listening to the Russian channel. That calmed me down a little bit and I returned my attention to the speaker, watching him gesticulating on the video screen.
I was supposed to interpret the opening address of the French cultural attaché before the first coffee break as well as the initial part of a talk by a professor emeritus on Jewish identity in French literature after 1990.
When the attaché began speaking my heartbeat accelerated. I was convinced my three listeners would hear it as well. But the attaché spoke slowly and used the first fifteen minutes to welcome the majority of the audience by name. Afterward, he read out the names of the speakers and the titles of their talks. Both were also displayed on a second video screen. When he started talking about the purpose of this conference my booth colleague tapped me and took over. I felt like I’d just been f*cked over.
Half an hour later, I got to take over again. The attaché was still talking, slowly and deliberately, interspersing jokes that I translated quite freely into Russian. My listeners smiled. The speech was not very challenging and I interpreted at a suitable pace. My boss’s face relaxed. When polite applause for the speaker set in, he even left me alone in the booth for a minute. The professor, on the other hand, didn’t make life easy for me. Despite the fact that the subject of his talk was contemporary literature, his choice of words was antiquated. And he delivered the speech at a breakneck pace.
The air in the booth grew increasingly stuffy. Suddenly I was an entire sentence behind and my colleague kept writing technical terms on his pad and pushing them toward me. But all I needed was a short pause—as my speaker cleared his throat I spoke even faster into the microphone and caught up.
After the coffee break had been announced we both exhaled. The head of booth even smiled at me and asked in French, “Where did you study?”
“In Germany.”
“Not bad at all. You’ll definitely get there.”
Then he went off to the dining hall and I locked myself in a bathroom stall for the entirety of the lunch break.
When I got home that night, I was dead tired. Paralyzed with exhaustion. The candle in front of Elisha’s photo had burned down. The concrete mixer outside was still running.
My mother had left a message on the answering machine. They’d gone to the cemetery and had placed a stone on the grave for me. I should call her back. That day Elisha’s death had become something final—a fact that left no room for hope.