The Interpreter

Simultaneous translation—that's what it was called in his Life—between Arabic and English, French when the Algerian delegates drifted by—he'd been doing that hellish work eleven years now. At the UN annex in Geneva he sat with rather than behind, the booth overlooking the main chamber a glass-and-steel shoebox just wide enough for two chairs and a carafe of water, headsets pinned to his ears and pad on lap he rarely opened. He was among the best. His boss, Helene, had once told him this to his face in that blunt way Europeans sometimes compliment fellows: without warmth, leaving no doubt that she meant it.

The slip occurred in session four of the sub-committee on humanitarian access. The presenter of the amendment to a ceasefire framework was a delegate from a coalition government: Farouk Al-Rashidi—he'd interpreted for him three times before. The room was tired. It was the third day of the conference and for three days in a row now summer heat had bested the building's air conditioning. At one point two of the Nordic bloc's delegates appeared to be half-asleep. A missionary lady was writing in a notebook unrelated to the proceedings. Yusuf understood all of this. He'd spent enough time in rooms to know when nothing was happening.

But something was happening.

It was dense, technical, careful Arabic from al-Rashidi. He walked through some kind of sub-clause that made the difference like a separate report when it came to armed non-state actors who were within the framework and outside of it, and the language he used to denote such parties was a styling which Yusuf has spent eleven years training his stinger–for in this context, precisely, every word was life.

Al-Rashidi said in Arabic: (The amendment goes only on the groups that have officially endorsed the declaration.) Anyone who exists outside this endorsement is subject to existing agreements.

What he was talking about, in English: The amendment applies only to groups that have sanctioned the declaration outright. People who fall out of this endorsement are no longer bound by previous agreements.

One word. Remain. Are no longer.

For the first time in twenty minutes, the English delegate—a sharp, tired woman named Hargreaves who had been doing this since before Yusuf was born—looked up from her notes. She wrote something. The American deputy crouched to his bench-mate and said a brief, private something. A ripple. Almost nothing. The type of thing that, by any record of the session, would appear to be nothing at all.

It was forty minutes later, as he went over his own mental transcript of the session during a coffee break, that Yusuf realized what he had done. He had a mental audit, which Helene thought of as mental gold and Yusuf more accurately described as a curse—he remembered every word he said verbatim for hours afterwards. He could play it back.

He played it back.

He could see into the chamber below, where only a technician was now busy adjusting a microphone stand; and he experienced that particular sickness of a man who has seen something he cannot unseen.

He went to find Helene.

Outside the main hall, in the corridor, she had coffee in hand and was talking to a logistics person. She could tell at once what he was thinking and took herself off.

"Tell me."

He told her. He was precise. It was the only way he knew how to be, using that same precision he used in the booth.

She was quiet for a moment. Ideal Completion Then — "This session is still a part of record in an informal manner. Nothing has been formally adopted."

"Hargreaves wrote it down."

"People write things down."

"She looked up," he said. "She'd been asleep. She looked up."

Helene drank her coffee. More than other women, she was a woman who had the contingency down, who for thirty years had been constantly working that gap there is between what you say and where it goes and what you were given to understand about its significance. She was not dismissive. She was thinking.

You would need to go over to the secretariat and file a fix,' she told me. "Now, before the afternoon session. There's a procedure."

"Will it matter?"

She looked at him. "It will be on the record."

"That's not what I asked."

Her silence was its own answer, though.

He submitted the correction. It was while sitting, addressing the record with the secretariat coordinator—a young man assigned these tasks with a dry, affectless professionalism—that he recounted the mistake and its precise correction; he signed his name on top of it. The coordinator said it would be put on the record and sent around to all delegations before the afternoon meeting. He said it without judgment. It was not the first such correction in conference history, or in institutional parentage. There used to be a process, because it was always necessary to have one.

Yusuf went back to the booth.

After the amendment to law passed in a modified version at 4:40 in the afternoon, al-Rashidi's proposal with regard to equal rights for business owners of restaurants and cafes was accepted. It was impossible to know if Hargreaves's note made any difference, of course. How possibly could he know the whereabouts of the American deputy's whisper? Which made the machinery of these rooms meant to be opaque, and he was above it, behind glass where words entered the room and became part of something that he could no longer trace or salvage.

That night, he came back to a restaurant not far from his hotel and ate alone, ordering something he didn't want to eat in silence as he read nothing—very un-Nick like. He watched the other diners. A couple was celebrating something. Between the plates, papers" was finishing a working dinner for two men in suits. A woman stood across from me on the phone—turned to face the window, and something in her body told me that whatever was on the other end of that line was not good.

Or, he thought: all the mistakes anyone in this room has ever made still exist somewhere in the world. You don't get to recall them. Something they can see, something you will never know.

Paid and went back to the hotel and sat up in his clothes on the edge of the bed for some time.

He would start back in the booth the next day. Session five, morning. Al-Rashidi who is not listed in the schedule. Hargreaves was. With the same flawless touch she always had, he would translate her words into Arabic because it was the job and only the job was open to him now, not redemption or rest, not knowing what his thirty-eight syllables had done or hadn't published.

He was good at this job. He was always going to be good at this. These two pieces of information were going to need to coexist.

Before going to bed, he called his daughter. She lived in Amman with his ex-wife, and she answered the phone herself; that meant her mother was close by but not watching — because she was seven and it wasn't allowed to answer the phone herself, and breaking this small rule thrilled him every time.

"Baba."

"Hey, Habibi."

"I lost a tooth."

"Which one?"

She sounded thoughtful before naming a place with the sincere, anatomical seriousness of a seven-year-old. He asked if it had hurt. And she said, "No it just fell into my sandwich. Gross." He agreed it was very gross. She said the tooth fairy had left her some money and also a note, and he asked what the note said, and she said it said keep smiling (which in her opinion was an extremely boring thing for a tooth fairy to do).

He laughed. The surprised it— the laughing, how it came unannounced, how real it was.

"It is boring," he said. "You're right."

"What would you say? If you were the tooth fairy?"

He thought about it. He stared at the ceiling of a Geneva hotel room, shoes still on, jacket still on and somewhere Hargreaves's notebook contained words he had not said in a place where the air conditioning was recycled decisions and none of that was here.

Id say: this one cost you something he said. "Remember that it once was yours."

There was a pause. He could hear her thinking.

"Well; that's a little boring too Baba."

"You're probably right."

"But it's nicer boring."

He told her he would catch up to early next week. Um-hmm, and then hang on a second she said wait I want my time with you to be worth it in case that's ever an option for the two of us so let me tell you about this show I'm watching now that she went into detail about for five or six minutes which he understood maybe 20 percent of. He said and then what? in the right places. She laughed. She said goodnight.

He put the phone down.

Contrary to what was noted in the record, however, The record was what it was. So it was that the afternoon had gone the way the afternoon had gone.

He slept, not well but he slept.

There was coffee in the lobby in the morning, and Yusuf took a cup and stood by the window and watched Geneva settle into another day — with its trams, with people who weren't here to save anything, who were going to offices or schools or late breakfasts. He remembered what his daughter had said, nicer boring, the couple celebrating in the restaurant, whether the thing they were celebrating would even be around in ten years time and whether it mattered that he wouldn't know.

He was supposed to be in the booth by nine.

He finished his coffee. He put on his badge. He stepped out into the not-summer morning, into the banal machine of consequence that was still alive and running, that had never hesitated, and he would continue to be a part of.

The word had done nothing, and nothing was going to tell him that.

He had to live in that.