The Fourteenth of March

— Between ourselves, says Rouvière. Honestly. He isn't going to make it.

Salomé's hands are at chest height. They have not moved.

— We're supporting him for six months because the file comes from the chamber of trades and we have an agreement with them, but in my report I wrote unfavourable. Nine employees on that cash position, it doesn't work. It's nothing against him, mind. It's the father's file. Anyway. Don't put it to him quite like that, you know.

He sits back. He takes up his normal voice again, the one used for things that can be said.

— So there we are. We're supporting you for six months.

And he turns to Yanis, with an end-of-appointment smile.

Salomé has four seconds.

She knows exactly what she has to do. There is no technical hesitation, no grey area, no textbook difficulty: it is the most documented situation in the whole profession, the one she has made twelve cohorts work on, the one that comes up in the examination every other year.

You translate. Everything. Including the fact that he leaned in. Including “don't put it to him like that”. And then, if you wish, you add, in your own name, one sentence and one only: I should tell you that I translate everything said in this room.

It takes eleven seconds. She has timed it, once, in front of students.

Yanis is looking at her. He is waiting. He has both hands resting on his card wallet, and he is waiting to be given back what has just been said.

Her own hands are still in the air.

What happens in that second, it will take Salomé two years to be able to name, and even then: it is not pity, it is not cowardice, it is not even kindness. It is a calculation, and the calculation is very fast and very complete.

She thinks: that isn't information, it's a mood.

She thinks: the useful fact is six months, and the six months is true.

She thinks: if I translate that, he walks out of here knowing that a man who has never seen him work wrote “unfavourable” on his file, and he will do nothing with it, because there is nothing to be done with it.

And she thinks, right at the bottom, in the place she will not look at until the hardest chapter of her life: I can spare him that.

She signs.

— The file went to committee last week. The bank is supporting you for six months.

There.

It is done, and it took four seconds, and nothing at all happened. Nobody shouted, no alarm went off, the floor did not move. Rouvière puts his papers away. A printer starts up in the corridor.

Yanis nods.

— Six months, that's until September.

Salomé translates for Rouvière, who says yes, until the end of September, and that they will review it then.

— And after September?

— We'll see where you are. If the order book is good, we'll talk about a seasonal credit line.

Salomé translates.

She translates correctly, word for word, with the precision that has been her reputation for nineteen years. She does not get a single sign wrong. Her voice is steady, her hands are clean, her rhythm is good.

The appointment runs on for another twelve minutes.

There is a question about the instalments on the equipment loan, another about key-person insurance, a third about the accountant's certificate that will have to be supplied before the thirtieth of April. Salomé notes the deadline in her notebook, as always, because she knows she will have to look up “key person” before Thursday.

At ten to three they come out.

The airlock door makes its airlock noise. Outside there is sun, a March sun that warms nothing, and two men in high-visibility jackets relaying a pavement thirty metres away.

Yanis stops at the kerb and takes out a cigarette he does not light — she has noticed for three weeks that he takes one out and puts it back, every time, since some date she does not know.

He looks lighter than when he went in.

He signs:

— Six months is good. I thought they'd say three.

Salomé nods.

This is not interpreting. Nobody is asking her to interpret, there is no hearing person left, there is no assignment, they are two people on a pavement. She is free to answer whatever she likes. She is free to say: listen, there's something I have to tell you.

She is even free to do it tomorrow, or Thursday. It is not too late. It is not irreversible. There are fifty ways to put a thing like this right within twenty-four hours, and she knows all of them.

— With six months I can take the two apprentices in June, he signs. And the new moulder. Without that I wouldn't have dared.

She feels something shift in her stomach.

— You've got time to think about it, she signs.

It is the first sentence she has spoken in her own name since the file began. Eight words. A piece of advice. It is already a second breach and she does not even notice it.

— I have thought about it, he says. Since February, it's all I do.

He puts the cigarette back in the packet and the packet in his pocket.

— Thank you, he signs.

— For what?

He shrugs, and makes that gesture of his, one that is not really a sign, a way of indicating the whole space between the two of them and the building behind.

— For translating everything. The others tidy it up.

He crosses the road.

Salomé stays on the pavement for a long moment, with the noise of the pneumatic drill thirty metres away, and watches a man of forty-six walk off towards his van, standing straighter than when he arrived.