The Mule Read online

  I sat down again. ‘What language is that?’ I said.

  ‘You’re the translator,’ she said. ‘You tell me.’

  I was feeling better now. The girl was obviously acting weirdly because she had this book in a language she couldn’t understand. Maybe it was an inheritance or a gift from a friend, or something to do with a college course or a newspaper competition. Anyway, she had a book that she couldn’t translate and then, hey presto, she goes to a bar and who does she run into but a translator? That would shake anybody up. Not me, obviously; it’s amazing when you have an unusual job how often you run into people who have need of your skills. I imagine it’s like being a doctor at a party: everybody’s always telling you about their supposed illnesses and showing you their bumps and lumps. With me, it’s almost the same. People ask me to translate the names of foreign foods on a menu, or the name of some classical piece they like. One time this couple asked me to translate a phrase they’d heard on holiday. ‘Everybody kept saying it to us!’ they said. ‘We wondered does it mean “good luck” or “thank you” or something?’ I told them it meant ‘best of health’. It didn’t, it meant ‘screw off’ but I didn’t want to upset them. Later it occurred to me that they might have gone back to the same place next year and walked around smiling and saying, ‘Screw off!’ to everyone they met. It’s hard to judge these things.

  So I wasn’t too surprised that she had shown me the book, but I could see why she might be. Things were fine, and we were getting on. There was no need to be upset at her earlier anger.

  ‘Could we get another drink, please?’ I asked Dan, who by some error of judgement was standing next to us, who were now his only customers. Dan looked at the girl as if he needed her permission and she nodded, a little impatiently. Come on, Dan, I thought, get to it.

  The girl looked at me. ‘Can you translate it? I’m guessing no by the way you’re just standing there and looking into space.’

  I decided to ignore the last part of her remark. ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  ‘Is it in a weird language or are you just a bad translator?’ she said.

  I was actually about to walk away this time when I saw she was smiling. I was pleased; it was an impolite joke but at least it was a joke. I feigned affront. (That’s a phrase I came across in a book I worked on once. I’m glad I finally found an opportunity to use it. In fact, I’m pretty sure that even as I was doing it, part of my brain was thinking, Excellent, I just feigned affront.)

  ‘I’m a good translator,’ I said, looking hurt but also smiling so she’d know I wasn’t really hurt. ‘I speak most major European languages and, as I’m also a student of linguistics, I’d say that I would at least recognise 99 per cent of all world tongues.’

  ‘All world tongues?’ she said, making it sound sort of dirty. ‘That’s impressive. What about dead languages? Like Etruscan and so on.’

  Now it was my turn to be impressed. Not everybody you meet in a bar knows Etruscan. Well, nobody knows it, it’s a dead language as she said. But not many people even know there was a language called Etruscan, let alone that nobody speaks it. I raised an eyebrow to show that I was impressed and said, ‘It’s not Etruscan. It’s not Mangue or Koro. It’s not anything.’

  She looked annoyed at this. ‘What do you mean, it’s not anything? It’s a book, it’s got to be something. Oh wait, is it like that stupid Latin you get on cushions? The one printers use?’

  I had to think about that for a moment. Not much of my job involved cushions. Then I got what she meant.

  ‘You’re confusing two separate things,’ I told her. ‘The text sometimes used on fabrics is the Loqueris poem. It begins with the words Si vis me flere, which means, “If you want me to cry”. But the printers’ text, the one they use when they need random text to fill the page when they’re doing a layout, is called lorem ipsum, which is short for dolorem ipsum, which means “pain in itself”. It used to be done with hot metal but nowadays it’s a computer program, I think. They’re two different things.’

  I was impressed with myself, having made the two connections just from her mistaken assertion. She didn’t look impressed, though, possibly because she hadn’t made the connection herself. In fact, she looked annoyed, so I made a mental note not to show off my knowledge of dead languages to girls and added, ‘But you’re on the right lines. I mean, it’s not Latin, this text, but it could be that the whole book is written in random text. Like filler.’

  ‘But it’s got to be words, right? It’s got to have meaning.’ She seemed almost desperate now.

  ‘I don’t know that it does have meaning,’ I went on. ‘Here, look at this line of text …’ and I moved to show her the page.

  She grabbed the book off the counter. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I know how I’m acting but this book is important to me and I can’t let it out of my sight. Tell me where the line is.’

  I told her and she read it out loud.

  ‘You see?’ I said, then realised I was talking to a layman. ‘It’s got the word sunt at the end, which is a common Latin verb. You would expect to see sunt in each and every Latin text. But next to it are these two words – la furcheuxne – which sounds like French to me. Except it isn’t French. It’s not langue d’oc or langue d’oil or ancient or modern French or anything. It’s just French-sounding.’

  ‘It could be a place name,’ she said.

  ‘It could be,’ I agreed, ‘although it’s spelled irregularly even for a place name. Anyway, that doesn’t explain sunt, and it doesn’t explain the next word.’

  ‘Which next word?’ she said, peering at the text.

  ‘The one beginning with “I”,’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, trying to read it out loud. ‘Iiiiiiiiii-i-i.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said drily, ‘that one.’ I can be dry when I want to, but sometimes people mistake dryness for sarcasm so I keep it in check. ‘I mean, it could be some Papuan word or an exclamation in some obscure language, but put it next to la furcheuxne—’

  ‘And sunt,’ she said.

  ‘And sunt,’ I agreed, ‘and you’ve just got nonsense. And the whole book seems to be like that. At least with the cushion texts they make sense in small doses, but—’

  Our drinks arrived. I lifted mine and sipped it. Still no spit.

  ‘It’s just nonsense,’ I concluded.

  She looked disappointed, and a bit angry. I sympathised. Here was this random encounter that had promised so much – a translator when one was sorely needed! – and he had failed. Then she brightened a little.

  ‘But what if it’s not in a real language,’ she said, and I stiffened, mentally, because I think I was able to guess what was coming. ‘I mean, a real language, but not one like French or Latin? There’re those books, aren’t there? I don’t know the names.’

  I knew what she meant, unfortunately, and when I looked again at the book, which had a fancy binding and if you ask me a bit too much gold writing on it, I wondered maybe if some bookseller had done a number on her, telling her the book was in a mystical tongue or some hippy thing like that. There are lots of books like that. I shan’t list them here, because I think they’re silly. I have enough trouble extracting meaning from books in my own life without some smart alec coming along and writing a lot of gibberish that a muggins like me might one day have to translate. You know who I feel sorry for? Those poor people who have to render Lewis Carroll poems and Dr Seuss into different languages. I hate books like that.

  I didn’t say any of this to the girl. In fact, I’d kind of forgotten what she just said so I asked her to repeat it. By now she looked exasperated, which I don’t blame her for being, so I apologised and said, ‘I know what you mean, but it’s not my field. I’m a workaday person. A meat and potatoes translator. If it’s real, I can get my teeth into it, but if it’s not real, if it’s in Klingon or Elvish or something like that …’

  She looked suspicious and downcast at the same time, which was a thing to see, like somebody who was sad be
cause she had just been told by a lawyer that there was no money in the will for her, but also wary because the lawyer might be crooked, too. It was a weird look, and it worked on me.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘I could get someone at the publishing house to take a—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thank you, but I can’t. The contents of this book stay with me at all times.’

  ‘Well, how about you scan some pages and print them off?’ I suggested. ‘That way you keep the book and …’ My words tailed off. I knew there was no way she would do that.

  She looked up at me. There were tears in her eyes. ‘Thank you for trying to help,’ she said. ‘You’ve at least cleared up one thing for me. Now I know the words have no meaning, I can stop wasting my time.’

  ‘I didn’t say they had no meaning,’ I said, ‘just that they’re not in any known language. The text as a text is incoherent. Even if you Googled the individual words, it wouldn’t help any. But, as you say, it could be in a fictional language. It could be in some code. I don’t know. There could be all kinds of meaning here.’

  At that, she laughed. She actually threw her head back and made a kind of bitter, self-mocking sound. ‘Oh,’ she said, and pushed the book across the bar at me, ‘there’s meaning.’

  The book was open at a page of photographs, what they call ‘plates’. There were five black and white photographs. Each photo was of a girl, and in each photo the girl had been killed in a different way – knifed, shot, strangled, drowned, the last one I forget. The girl was the same girl in all the pictures. She was the girl in the bar.

  ‘There’s plenty of meaning, all right,’ said the girl.

  * * *

  After that, I don’t remember very much until we were at my apartment. (‘Flat’ seems too grand a word for where I live, whereas ‘bedsit’ is inappropriate, as I have more than one room.) She was pretty shaken up now and I’d had a couple of drinks more than I might usually have. I remember asking her in the bar if she was OK and she said she was, but clearly she wasn’t. She said she didn’t want to stay in the bar, though, and she didn’t want to go home. And she looked at me as if I had to fill in some puzzle, and finally I got it. So we were at my apartment and she was looking for wine in a cupboard.

  She found some and I opened it. I gave her a glass and she raised it.

  ‘To you,’ she said, and clinked her glass against mine.

  ‘I’ve never had anybody drink a toast to me before,’ I said.

  ‘That’s sweet,’ she said. ‘Sad, but sweet. But I can’t say “to us”, because we just met.’

  ‘How about “to you”?’ I said. It wasn’t the wittiest thing I’d ever said, but it was at least inoffensive. Or so I thought.

  ‘No, let’s not do that. There’s no point,’ she said, and looked sad again.

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I moved over on the settee. She leaned her head on my shoulder.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ she said, and got up.

  I didn’t know how to tell her there was only one bedroom but I reckoned she looked more in need of the bed than me, so I said, ‘I’ll see you.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘aren’t you coming?’

  I stared at her, letting the words sink in.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, trying to sound like women invited me into their beds – into my bed – whatever – all the time.

  ‘Is this your bathroom?’ she said, and walked off, leaving me in a highly confused state.

  * * *

  Women, I have observed, take a long time in the bathroom. I understand this is to do with make-up, and personal hygiene, and so on, but that only applies to getting ready. It’s a start of the day thing, surely. I don’t really get why it doesn’t take a woman a shorter length of time to get, as it were, unready. I mean, if a woman had a false leg, obviously, but at this time of night a woman is only washing her face and cleaning her teeth. I don’t really know. I have limited experience in this area.

  Anyway, she was a long time in the bathroom and that’s why I did it. Or at least that’s the excuse I made for myself afterwards. I was sitting there on the settee, with nothing to do. I couldn’t go to the bathroom because it was occupied (I’m sure married couples use the facilities jointly all the time, but we were scarcely at that stage of our relationship, or any stage). I couldn’t undress because it would seem forward, and anyway, I’d still need to get up again and clean my teeth and wash. And I didn’t want to drink any more. So I put the glasses in the sink and found a stopper for the wine bottle and then I saw it.

  The book was next to her bag. If it had been in the bag, I wouldn’t have done it. I would never open a lady’s bag, or anybody else’s bag come to that. But the book wasn’t in the bag. It was just lying there. She had said only that I couldn’t take the book away. Well, it was in my apartment already. There was nowhere for me to take the book to. I had already looked in it.

  I listened for the sounds of hot water, and opened the book. There again on the page was the jumble of words. It was immensely frustrating. Just when they seemed to make sense, any possible meaning evaporated. It was like language but not, like a fly that disguises itself as a wasp (I mean through heredity, not deliberately. Flies can’t deliberately disguise themselves, to my knowledge). I could make no sense from this brief look. I needed more time. Just a page would do, a page with a good deal of text on it. But I couldn’t exactly rip out a page. That would count as ‘taking the book’ to a more than debatable extent. But there was one solution. It was morally on a knife-edge, but I didn’t care. I just couldn’t stand the temptation. Here was I, a translator, with a book that could not be translated. And I might never see it again!

  So I made my way over to my computer station, and turned on the printer, which contains a scanner. I clicked at the keyboard until the computer woke up, and looked for the scanner icon. I clicked on it and waited for it to acknowledge my request. And then I picked up the book and, opening it at the page I’d first seen in the bar, placed it on the scanner. The icon flashed at me that it was ready to go. I closed the scanner lid carefully on the book.

  ‘Bastard!’

  The girl was screaming at me and striding towards me too. She smelled of steam and soap and she was really angry. I couldn’t speak. What had seemed like a rational argument for making a copy of the pages now looked in her eyes, I could see as surely as if I were looking through them, like a gross invasion of her privacy. She pulled the book out of the scanner and looked at me with eyes full of rage and hurt.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ I said.

  She didn’t reply. She just clutched the book to her chest and went back into the bathroom.

  I could hear her dressing, and speaking to someone on her mobile phone. I just stood there, feeling awful.

  * * *

  I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been a huge fan of dreams. They’re confusing and too many things happen and none of them makes sense and when you try to remember them, half the time you just remember the odd detail, like there was a talking cat or you were drowning. I don’t like dreams and I don’t hold with the Freudian idea that a big tower means something erotic and all that. I don’t see how you can analyse something that makes no sense at all.

  Take that night, for instance. What with the girl and my foolishness with the book, a logical person would say that any dream I might have would be about the events of that evening. But the dream I had that night was nothing to do with the girl, or the book she showed me, or anything at all that I could see.

  I was in some sort of large open space. It was a bright sunny day. Far off I could see some trees, and the silhouettes of people. There was nothing else there. I had the feeling that I was in the middle of a big city. I sat on the bench for quite a while. I looked around me a few times, but nothing happened. I was about to walk away when I woke up. I defy any psychiatrist in the world to analyse that dream and make the least particle of sense from it.

  I certainly wasn’t going to be spen
ding any time looking up dreams that day, because I had woken up with a pretty nasty hangover. I don’t drink a lot, even though I do go to bars. And I’d had two martinis, and some of a glass of wine. Outside, delivery men were swearing at each other as they emptied a lorry. There was a loud banging coming from somewhere. And I could hear rap music coming from a car parked down below.

  But more than the hangover, I woke up because all through the grey waking hours I had been subconsciously needled by something just under my mental radar. I’m sure you get the same feeling. You know there’s something ‘on the tip of your mind’, as one of my writers put it. (Actually, if I can be allowed some immodesty, what she wrote was less interesting in her own native tongue. I put some spin on it, which can be risky for a translator. Authors don’t like the fruit of their creation to fall far from the tree, as it were.)

  I lay there in bed, trying to remember what it was that was needling me. It wasn’t meeting the girl, or her showing me the book, or even those photographs. It wasn’t her being angry, although that was pretty upsetting. Then I had it. It was what she said when I was walking her to the ground floor after she had gone into the bathroom to call a cab. I know that sounds weird, after what had just happened, but when she came out, she just said, ‘I don’t want to be mugged on top of all this,’ and asked me to walk her down to the street. She didn’t say anything else, so I picked up my keys in case I locked myself out and we went.

  It was cold outside, I remember, and she was wearing a coat that looked like two black sheets of rumpled cloth crossed over each other. It was such a big coat that when I opened the taxi door for her to get in, it took her a while to get herself all into the cab, as though the coat were the wings of a bat. It also muffled her words so I had to strain to hear what she was saying.

  ‘Don’t look for me,’ she said, ‘but don’t forget me.’

  And before I could say anything to that, the cab drove off. I stood for a moment as it disappeared into the late-night traffic, hoping it might stop and she’d get out and walk back towards me in the big black bat coat, but she didn’t even turn her head.