What Does Not Get Translated

In six weeks, she has counted.

She was not counting, at the start. Then one Tuesday, at the accountant's, somebody said “you'll tell him we need the January statements” for the fourth time in an hour, and Salomé began making marks in the margin of her notebook, out of discipline, the way you read a meter.

Six weeks. Thirty-eight times.

It always comes in the same order, and it is almost always well meant.

The first level is tell him. “Tell him the file is incomplete.” The person turns towards Salomé, speaks to her, looks at her, and meanwhile a man of forty-six waits for somebody to get round to dealing with him in his own appointment.

The second level is he. “Does he understand what I'm saying?” “Has he banked with us long?” The he is harder than the tell him, because it displaces the person: he is no longer someone you talk to, he is a topic of conversation, and he is in the room.

The third level is the tone. People speak louder. They over-articulate. A woman at the URSSAF did both at once, leaning forward, separating every syllable — HAVE - YOU - RE - CEIVED - THE - LET - TER — and Salomé translated with perfect evenness, because it is not her job to render the performance, and because Yanis could see the performance perfectly well on his own.

She corrects it every time. It is part of the work, it is called reframing, and it is done in one sentence, without reproach.

— Please address him directly, I translate everything.

Out of thirty-eight times, thirty-one people corrected course. Four said sorry and started again two minutes later. Two were so embarrassed they no longer dared look at anyone. And one, an inspector from a training body, answered Salomé — looking at her, of course:

— Yes, well, madame, it saves time.

That day, Yanis laid his hand flat on the table, once, without violence. Then he signed, very calmly, and Salomé translated:

— The time you save there is time you are taking off me.

It took the inspector three seconds to understand, and he understood.

That is the work. Three hours a week.

The rest is words. Salomé has kept a file for eleven years, a two-column table where she notes what to look up before each appointment. For this case she has added forty-one entries in six weeks: security interest, moratorium, trade payables, receivables assignment, moulder, mortise and tenon, cross grain, residual moisture content, occupational health, fitness with restrictions.

Some signs exist and are settled. Others do not, and then you fingerspell, then you suggest, then you watch the deaf person decide — because it is his decision, not the interpreter's. Yanis invented a sign for “trade payables” on the second Thursday: one hand holding, the other pulling. They kept it.

It is one of the few places where they make something together, and Salomé is careful not to enjoy it.

On the fourteenth of March, at two o'clock, they have an appointment at the bank.

It is the third. The first two went well, in the sense that nothing happened: opening a business account, handing over a forecast, an application for support filed by the chamber of trades.

The branch is on the avenue, with an airlock door and low armchairs. Yanis arrives at ten to, in a jacket, with a card wallet he holds in both hands. He has shaved. Salomé registers it and does nothing with the information.

Monsieur Rouvière is fifty-five, has a loosened tie and is three appointments behind. He is a business account manager, which means he carries ninety files and knows about a dozen of them well.

He starts properly. He looks at Yanis. He puts his questions to Yanis.

— Last year's turnover, we're at six hundred and forty thousand, is that right?

— Six hundred and thirty-eight.

— And you're keeping the nine employees.

— Yes.

— That's a lot.

— That's what it takes to get the work out.

Rouvière turns his pen over. He looks at the screen, scrolls through something, and Salomé sees his face change register: he moves out of the interview into something else.

— Right. Listen. The file went to committee last week.

— And?

And that is where he does it.

Salomé sees it coming half a second before, because she has seen that movement hundreds of times and it always has exactly the same shape.

He turns his upper body. Not towards Yanis: towards her. He leans forward twenty centimetres, puts his elbow on the desk, and lowers his voice — he lowers his voice, in a closed office, with only one other hearing person in the room.

He lowers his voice because that is the gesture you make to say a thing that must not be heard, and because he has not yet understood, at fifty-five, that in this room the voice has nothing to do with what is heard.

Salomé has time to think three things.

The first is professional: I translate everything, including the fact that he is leaning in.

The second is a sentence from her second-year course, the one she says every autumn to thirty students: the aside does not exist. Nothing spoken in the room is outside the room.

The third arrives a fraction of a second later, has no business being there, and is the only one that will weigh.

He buried his father five weeks ago.

— Between ourselves, says Rouvière.