Self's deception - By Bernhard Schlink & Peter Constantine Page 0,106
the haze that covered the Rhine plain dampened the sounds rising from the city. Our steps were loud, heavy, and cumbersome. I felt tongue-tied.
Quite suddenly and spontaneously Leo began telling me about interpreting. She hadn't yet completed her studies, but for years had helped out with sister-town meetings between small German, French, and English communities. She spoke about mayors, priests, association chairmen, and other dignitaries, of the lives of the families that had put her up during these meetings. She mimicked the pastor of Korntal's Swabian attempts at English, and the pharmacist from Mirande who had learned German on a farm in Saxony as a prisoner of war. I laughed so hard that my sides hurt.
“It all sounds nice and fine, doesn't it?” she said, looking at me distressed. “But have you ever thought what interpreting really means? Inter is Latin for cutting between two things, plunging into, slashing through. And pretium means punishment, retribution, just deserts. That's what I've been trained for: slashing and punishing.”
“Nonsense, Leo. I don't know what the exact etymology is, but I'm sure it's not that. If it had such a dark origin, why would it have become the term for the harmless activity of translating the spoken word?”
“You think translation is harmless?”
I didn't know what to say.
Leo arranging and rearranging her things on the table in the prison, speaking of herself as a stranger, holding her hair under my nose, saying wild things about interpreting—what was I to think? She didn't wait for my answer, but went on talking. By the time we got back to the car, she had given me a full lecture on her theory of translation that I didn't understand, and when I'd asked whether this theory came from Professor Leider, she filled me in on his strengths, weaknesses, and habits, and also on his wife, secretary, and colleagues.
“Do you have a particular hairdresser in mind?” I asked.
“You choose one for me, Gerhard.”
Ever since I've lived in Mannheim, I've gone to a barber in the Schwetzinger Strasse and been satisfied. He has grown old along with me, and his fingers tremble, but the few hairs on my head don't challenge his capacity. He'd never do for Leo, though. I remembered that on my way to the Herschelbad I always passed a salon shining with chrome. That's where we'd go.
The young hairstylist greeted Leo as if he'd met her at a party the day before. Me he treated with the elegant respect befitting whatever I might be: her grandfather, father, or elderly gentleman friend. “You can wait here if you like,” he said to me, “but perhaps you might prefer to return in about an hour?”
I sauntered over to the Paradeplatz, bought a Süddeutsche Zeitung, and read it at the Café Journal over an ice cream and an espresso. In the science section, I learned that cockroaches lead warm and caring family lives—we wrong them by abhorring them. Then I saw the bottle of sambuca on the shelf behind the bar. I drank one glass to Leo's health, another to her freedom, and a third to her new hairstyle. It's amazing how a shot or two of sambuca can make the world click into place. An hour later I was back at the salon.
“One more minute!” the Figaro called out from behind the partition, where he could see me, but I couldn't see him. I sat down. “One more minute and we'll be ready!”
I know that women leave salons looking quite different from the way they go in. After all, that's why they go there. I also know that afterward they are usually miserable. They need time—they need our admiration and enthusiasm. Any snide or critical remark, let alone a sarcastic one, must be avoided at all costs. As a daring Indian brave must never show pain, a daring participant at the premiere of a hairstyle must never show shock.
For a second I didn't recognize Leo. For a second I thought that the young woman with the buzz cut was someone else, and so dropped my attentive, enthusiastic expression. By the time I recognized her and quickly reinstated it, it was too late.
“You don't like it?” she said to me in English.
“Oh, no, I do! There is something strict and piquant about you now. Yes, you remind me of the women in those French existentialist movies of the fifties, and at the same time you look younger and more tender, more delicate. I—”