“Are you annoyed about something?”
“No, why would I be? Look … I’m sorry. I’m just a bit out of it. Haven’t had my coffee yet.”
“Oh, good. You just gave me this look …” she trailed off, confused but also relieved. “I thought something was wrong.”
“Nope. Everything’s fine.”
After breakfast, I went back to my booth and continued listening to Anna, but this time more attentively. I started wondering when she would get to her arrival in England, to her time at the Centre. Vague theories would form in my head and then evaporate. In the break, I sat in the palm-shaped hollow of the old tree in the courtyard, and it enveloped me protectively. From there, I surveyed the people around me. The staff members, I suddenly felt, were watching me from the corners of their eyes as they passed, flashing looks at one another afterward. Did they know I’d been in the staff quarters the night before? That I’d read that email?
And then I let myself think the terrible thing: Did they have something to do with Anna’s death? Maybe because she’d broken one of their precious rules, they’d had to “bump her off.” After all, if the Centre had nothing to do with Anna’s death, why would Shiba lie about it or be paying for the funeral? The more I asked myself these questions, the more I felt the staff members’ gazes boring into me, until I worked myself into a panic, my heart beating hard and fast, the grip of the tree tightening around my body. I scrambled out and went back to my room, washed my face, and tried to calm myself. When I came back out, I no longer felt quite as surveilled and thought maybe I’d just been receiving those strange glances because of my own panicked state. My head was a fog, and my disturbed sleep from the night before wasn’t helping. I went through the motions for the rest of the day while another part of me buzzed like static. And although I was able to keep the panic at bay, a nauseating question throbbed dully in the background: If they were somehow responsible for Anna’s death, would they kill me, too, if they knew that I knew?
That night, I slept badly again. My dreams of the seaside and fresh bread continued but were interrupted and warped by other images. I dreamed of a helpless child crying out for me, but it was too dark to see who. I dreamed that Adam broke into Naima’s flat and kidnapped Billee. I dreamed that Shiba and I were running hand in hand through the Centre’s vast garden while being ferociously pursued by one of the venomous plants, which had escaped its chicken wire enclosure and grown large, drooling plant legs.
As a result of these disturbing dreams, I was in an even worse state the next day. At one point, red eyed and blurry headed, I was sitting on my cushion in the meditation room when I saw Shiba through the window that faced me, leaning against the old oak tree. She was facing away from me and reading a book. I gazed abstractedly at the back of her head, trying to concentrate on my breath until, finally, my body softened. Then, I blinked and suddenly saw a pair of eyes, staring at me from the back of Shiba’s scalp. In the next instant, the entire back of Shiba’s head had morphed into my own face. The shock almost made my heart stop, before I realized all that had happened was that the sun had gone down, turning the window into a mirror, and what I’d thought had been a blink had probably been a quick doze. The confusion of that innocuous moment made me question my state of mind. I wasn’t sure what to believe anymore and was grateful that the next day would be my last. At the Centre, I mean.
Before I left, Shiba and I sat down for a chat beneath one of the weeping willows. We made some small talk for a while before I said, very casually, “I’m excited to see Anna again.”
She was silent.
I continued, “It’s been so good hearing about her life. And now, I’ll be able to speak to her in her own mother tongue.”
Shiba responded after a pause, “We don’t allow interaction between Learners and Storytellers.”
“No? Why?”
She paused again before answering, “It just … confuses things.”
“Well, I mean, she works here, right? So, I’ll probably bump into her anyway the next time I’m here.”
“Anna doesn’t work here anymore, actually.”
“No?”
“Like I said in Brighton, she’s been unwell. And she’s quite old. She’s decided to retire and … go back to Russia.”
This time, I was the one to pause. I paused for so long that I saw Shiba give me what I interpreted as a nervous glance.
“I hope she’s happy there,” I said finally.
“Me too.”
We said our goodbyes soon after, and I was given back my phone and other belongings. A car was waiting outside to take me back to the station. As soon as I got in the vehicle, a great relief washed over me. Finally, I would be home. And I could speak Russian now. My disorienting last few days had not taken away from this gift, nor from the precious infusion of warmth that Anna had given me. That was what really mattered. I would go home and continue on with my life. Yes, I thought, as the unbearable tension in my body dissipated, the wisest thing to do would be to put the matter to bed. The email, I decided, was inconsequential. Shiba had told me in Brighton that Anna was in the hospital. She had probably passed away then, and presumably Shiba had thought it too upsetting for me to know about this while listening to the tapes. That’s the reason she hadn’t said anything. This theory, I felt, was as good as any.
As for the part of me that insisted there was something more, well, I would let it continue its mulling. But I wasn’t going to tell anybody what I saw, and I definitely wasn’t going to do anything that could get Shiba into trouble. I would just put the cover back on the box, just as I had with Jugnu the chick. I would pretend I had never read that email that I could not understand, nor betrayed Shiba’s trust by breaking into the locked door. And if there was a mess to be cleared up, well, someone more capable than I could do it.
And so I went home, reassured, ready to start thinking of what to translate next.
SEVEN
I returned home to a barrage of emails: offers and requests, invitations and deadlines. It was the kind of inbox I’d once dreamed of having but now found cumbersome. I also sensed that this kind of work wouldn’t cut it right now, that the only way to keep my curiosity at bay was to totally immerse myself in a new translation. And so, I refused all invitations and told the subtitling company I was going to take a break from work. Then, I asked the publisher I’d worked with on Songbird whether he’d be interested in a Russian translation. He responded the same day, saying that of course he would, that he didn’t know I spoke Russian and what a dark horse I was turning out to be. I had to look up the phrase.
For someone so interested in language, I have these strange gaps in my vocabulary from, perhaps, not having grown up in England, or maybe willful ignorance. Other British words that I don’t understand: palaver （Is this like pulao? Like when people say, “Stop making a khichri out of things”？）， public school （which, I think, means private school, but private school also means private school）， knobhead （which I’d assumed came from the knob in doorknob, like the way we say dhakkan or tubelight in Pakistan, but Adam told me knob meant penis）。 Oh, also, can’t be arsed, which I’d always heard as “can’t be asked,” which makes more sense. I used it all the time until I realized it was actually arse, meaning ass, which I still don’t understand and can’t be asked to look up.