Eight Months

The service occupies two and a half offices on the third floor of a nineteen-seventies building, with carpet that has seen four managements and a coffee machine that requires a blow to the left-hand side.

Anouk Perrey is fifty-two, has a whiteboard covered in time slots in erasable marker, and the permanent look of someone who has just put the phone down.

— Liaison work, she says. Eight months. Three hours a week, on average, and I do mean on average, because there will be weeks of six.

— Eight months with the same client?

— On the same case. It's a business taken over after a death. There'll be the notary, the bank, the accountant, the URSSAF, occupational health, probably the labour inspectorate, and two or three things nobody has planned for.

Salomé looks at the board.

— Thirty-four weeks, she says.

— Thirty-four.

— Anouk, we don't do that.

— I know we don't do that.

They look at each other, and there is nothing to add, because they both know the argument and they both know the reality.

The argument: you rotate. You do not let an interpreter settle into somebody's life for eight months, because in the long run you stop hearing the words and start hearing the people. You know the case better than the professionals do, you anticipate, you fill in the gaps, you become useful — and the day you become useful, you have stopped being an interpreter.

The reality: there are eleven of them for the whole department.

— Who else have you got? asks Salomé.

— For Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, with legal and accounting vocabulary, available until November? I've got you. I've got Maud one week in three. And I've got Béatrice, who goes on maternity leave on the thirtieth of April.

— And if I say no?

Anouk puts the marker down.

— If you say no, I bring in outside cover appointment by appointment. That means a different interpreter every time. That means the gentleman explains his inheritance to somebody new every fortnight, and that at the bank they'll make him repeat his turnover three times while the interpreter hunts for the sign for “security interest”. You know perfectly well how that goes.

— Yes.

— Well then.

Salomé looks at the file. Two pages. The name, the workshop address, the date of death, the provisional list of appointments.

Kessler Yanis, born 3 May. Profoundly deaf from birth. French Sign Language as first language. Joinery, nine employees, Vénissieux.

Nine employees, one hundred and eighty thousand euros of trade debt, and a man who buried his father five weeks ago.

Not your problem.

That is the sentence she has said to herself three times a week for nineteen years, and it is the most professional sentence that exists in this profession. Not your problem. You are not a social worker, you are not a friend, you are not an adviser. You are a channel. A channel does not worry.

— I'll take it, says Salomé.

Anouk writes without looking up.

— Thank you. Tell me if it starts to get long.

— It's going to be long, it says so right there.

— That isn't what I mean.

She looks up, this time.

— Tell me if it starts to get long.

Salomé takes the tram at twenty to six, and rereads the file standing up, one hand on the rail.

What she does not tell Anouk, and what she does not quite tell herself yet, is that she did not think about it. She said yes in a second, at the precise moment she read the line “death of the father — February”, and she constructed the reasoning afterwards, very fast, while Anouk was talking about Tuesdays and Thursdays.

She knows why.

A deaf man of forty-six inheriting a business from his hearing father. A father who ran that workshop for forty years, who hired Momo thirty-one years ago, who signed every contract, spoke to every banker, made every phone call.

She knows exactly, without having set foot in that workshop, what is going to happen. She knows there will be suppliers asking to speak “to somebody”, customers who hang up, an accountant sending emails to the old address. She knows she will be told twenty times, she, in the same room as him: could you explain to him that.

She knows it because she grew up inside it.

Her father repaired industrial sewing machines, rue Sébastien-Gryphe. He was good. He had customers. And when a sales rep came to the workshop, the rep addressed the nine-year-old girl.

She also knows, and it is harder to admit in a crowded tram, that the person who read that two-page file was not entirely an interpreter. It was a nine-year-old girl in a pleated skirt who recognised something.

The tram crosses the bridge. There is the Rhône, and rain on the Rhône, and beyond it the roofs of the Guillotière.

Salomé puts the file away in her bag.

She has nineteen years in the profession, she teaches professional ethics two days a week to master's students, and she has just accepted, without a second's hesitation, a thirty-four-week liaison assignment she should instinctively have refused.

She does not think about it once all evening.