The audience drifted for a moment on the receding tide of her voice, then roused themselves and applauded. At the same time, they began to do all the things people do when the hold of a crowd relaxes and releases them back into their separate bodies, sitting up straight, stretching their legs, arching their backs, craning their necks, clearing their throats.
To Karolina Fischer, the events coordinator of the Literaturhaus, the squealing and screeching from the chairs was intolerable. It was like the cacophony that arose when you walked into the House of Tropical Birds at the Tiergarten. But before she could start going over the whole saga of the chairs in her mind, something distracted her. She noticed that the woman next to her was wearing some kind of safari suit, and that the khaki tunic had tiny patches of leopard skin scattered over it at random, triangles and parallelograms with loose flaps and tabs that suggested they had a purpose that was not simply decorative, like storing bullets or securing a water bottle or a bush knife.
As the applause drained away, the members of the audience began to do many other things with their hands, patting their knees, straightening their skirts, winding off scarves, pushing back cuffs to glance at watches, folding the creased and sweaty programmes they had been holding and putting them in their handbags, retrieving the crisp progammes they had put away in their handbags and smoothing them out on their laps, fumbling in the pockets of the jackets hanging over the backs of their chairs for tissues, cough lozenges, antacid tablets, lip balm, cleaning their glasses on the tails of their shirts, rubbing their palms together, covering their yawning mouths. Nearly all of those who were on their own checked their cellphones for messages; nearly all of those who had company turned to their companions to exchange stored-up observations.
The young man who was attending his first literary reading said that it was fascinating, he was enjoying himself very much, but the way he said it made his new girlfriend wonder whether he was telling the truth, and anyway how could you enjoy something that was so sad, even if you couldn’t follow the exact words?
Prof. Ziegler scratched the inside of her thigh, although it was not really itchy any more, and then turning to survey the room behind her caught the eye of an old student of hers a few rows back. He mouthed an enquiry after her health and she smiled and nodded and mouthed that she was fine, fine.
Andrij Leonenko took out a small red notebook with a spiral binding, turned to a clean page and, shielding it from view with his free hand, jotted down a phrase that had come to him ten minutes earlier and might be the first line of a poem: ‘You read with your eyes closed.’
Horst Grundmann leant over to his wife Sylvia and asked her whether she had remembered to let Bertram know about Thursday, and she said yes, he’d said it was no problem. And then he leant to the other side and said to Florence that Maryam had read superbly, and Florence said yes, it had been very good.
Rolf Backer, the commissioning editor from Kleinbach, a tall man who usually covered his shaven head with a soft felt hat that made him feel (and he hoped look) like a writer himself, but which he had checked at the cloakroom out of consideration for the people sitting behind him, remarked to his companion Theo van Roosbroeck, a Belgian political theorist who had written about the militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that Akello was a brave girl, and Theo replied that she was pretty too, although she’d had the stuffing knocked out of her, understandably so, and they agreed that it was a terrible thing that had happened to her, but that she’d overcome adversity in a way that was truly inspiring. To himself, Theo noted that people in Europe were tired of stories like this, sad as they were, and wondered whether his friend Rolf might not find it easier to market someone who gave the impression of being less resigned to her fate.
Three people who had other arrangements for the evening and one who’d decided he’d had enough listening for one day slipped out of their rows, excuse me, thank you, and headed for the exits. Two people immediately put something — a coat, a spindled programme — on the empty seats to discourage someone else from sitting there. The student who had been leaning against the wall at the back quickly took the nearest vacated seat with nothing on it, noted that the shiny plastic still retained the imprint of the departed backside, and for that reason did not like the residual warmth she felt through the fabric of her skirt.
The poet Leonenko took out his notebook for the second time and wrote ‘Reader, open your eyes’ and after that a question mark in a circle, like a copyright notice. Earlier that week, his very first poem had been accepted for publication in Die Horen and his editor there had told him not to be scared to write things down. Every poem started with a single word.
Meanwhile Hans Günther Basch passed behind Maryam Akello, who had taken her seat again at the table. He reached out to squeeze her shoulder, in passing, but thought better of it at the last moment and instead squeezed the cushion of her chair. He put his copy of Zucker down on the lectern with the passages he intended to read flagged in yellow. He raised the microphone stand, and then dropped it and raised it again, as if he were measuring the difference in their heights, and then he puffed into the mesh bauble once. He took off his glasses and put them in the breast pocket of his jacket. His reading glasses with their pointy Brechtian frames were already hanging around his neck on a chain. He waited for the room to settle.
Without his glasses, the room looked shapeless and steamy. He thought he saw Horst and Sylvia with their heads together, and then Maryam in the front row. No, of course, it couldn’t be Maryam who was on the podium, it was Anya. No, no, not Anya, what was he thinking? Anya was in the book, she was dead, or rather translated from the dead. It was Florence.
Of the one hundred and forty-five people who happened to be watching Hans Günther then, eleven noticed the momentary bewilderment that crossed his face as he glanced at Maryam Akello and then at the audience, tucking in his chin as if he were afraid of being hit, and they put it down to nerves or irritation at how long the room was taking to come to order.
He remembered sitting at his kitchen table a few days after Maryam’s visit, with the manuscript open beside his laptop, inputting the revisions they had discussed. He was working through the grimmest passage in the book — it was among those he was about to read — where she described the murder of her sister. This had to be perfect. Even after every second word had been changed and changed again, he wondered whether the tone was right, whether he had captured the original, whether the depths of feeling in it had found some resonance in his own language. As he turned to a new page of the manuscript, he saw a note in red ink. No one but Maryam had touched these pages: she must have written it while he was out of the room. He looked closer. She had added a line in the last paragraph about the sugar. There were his questions in penciclass="underline" Is this really what you want to say? Did your English translator understand properly? Is there not a softer phrase? There was the note in blue ink he had written to himself in German at the end of the discussion, when she appeared to agree with him that some things were better left unsaid. And then there was this new line, her final word on the subject, written in blood in the narrow margin. A judgement.
An expectant hush drew him back into the present. For a moment the silent room felt like a clearing in the forest, cloven in two by the shimmering stream of the aisle. He became aware of the heads of the audience like moss-covered rocks, and the thoughts condensed above them like mist in the early morning, and then the trees beyond the window, receding into the dark. With both hands, he lifted the dangling glasses from his chest, placed them squarely before his eyes, and began.