Despite Dr. Fischer’s anise-scented breath, he had, overall, a flat unlaundered smell—surprising for a man who wore a crisp suit with a silk tie, and whose thin hair was slick and parted in the middle. The trim fingernails, the closely shaven face, the speckled eyeglasses didn’t fit a man whose last bath might have been in the forties or fifties. Maybe he pressed his clothes without washing them. Or somehow ironed without removing them. I had once read that Archduke Ferdinand died at Sarajevo because he had his clothes stitched to his body and the doctors couldn’t cut the layers of regal wear off fast enough to attend to his wounds. Perhaps that isn’t true, but it wouldn’t be the first time self-mutilation and fashion overlapped.
I saw Dr. Fischer all the time where I worked, a patisserie and coffee shop called The Runcible Spoon. At the time, I was studying video at the Art Institute and working twenty-five hours a week, hoping to save up my money to move, either to New York or LA, I hadn’t made up my mind. Fischer came in regularly and sat alone in a corner bent over papers. None of us had an inkling what they were, and I didn’t ask. He gave no indication that he remembered who I was, and why should he? I’d taken one class from him when I was full-time at Northwestern. Chinese calligraphy. I hadn’t shown much talent. I had handled the brush like a first-grader using a fat pencil. My strokes came out thick when I wanted them thin, and anemic when I wanted them bold. I’d volunteered to run the slide projector that semester, and for this Fischer had given me an A. I couldn’t think of any other reason. Even though most students considered Fischer too cerebral, they still liked him for being easygoing. The truth was, if he remembered your name, you got an A. If he didn’t, he’d give you a B.
The staff at The Runcible Spoon called him Mr. Raisin or, alternatively, Mr. Crispy, because he always ordered “Raisin toast, extra crispy.” No matter how many times I waited on him, he always gave me the same instructions, as though I were waiting on him for the first time. So it surprised me one day when he called me by name over to his table and started talking to me about his work as though we were old buddies.
“What do you think, Rick?” he said, pointing with a nubby pencil to an onionskin manuscript. “Do you think liaison is a better word than rendezvous? These are two country boys going fishing.” He looked up at me with his frank eyes and touched the eraser of his pencil to a front tooth.
I didn’t really know what he was talking about and I couldn’t imagine two country boys having a fishing liaison. “Do they speak French?” I asked.
“No, no, they speak Chinese, of course,” he said, rapping the pencil twice on the tabletop. “But that hardly matters. These are translations. Now which is it? Rendezvous or liaison?”
Fischer sat back in his chair and stared at me. I had other customers waiting and it really didn’t matter to me which word he used. I just wanted to choose the one that would make him leave me the bigger tip.
“Rendezvous,” I said firmly, and saw something fall in his eyes. “Maybe liaison,” I said.
“Are you sure?” he asked. He took a sip of espresso, then set the cup down and began furiously erasing a word on the onionskin paper.
In the next half-hour, things started to get pretty frantic around the restaurant, and I was run from one corner to the next trying to meet the demands of all my customers at once. Why couldn’t my boss schedule enough people for our rushes? That’s all I wanted to know. He knew when the rushes were, and at that moment the place was full, and only two of us were working out front: myself and Gina, who had the counter and the register. And of course, almost every customer thought that every other customer didn’t exist. When it comes to refills, customers, as a lot, can be pretty solipsistic. I almost poured my whole coffeepot on one woman who was getting antsy about her strudel and Kona refill.
“Rick, we’re eighty-sixing the strudel,” Gina confided as she swooshed by me. “I’m making some more Kona and we’re out of cups.”
“Is this your first day as a waiter?” the woman asked me.
I managed to control myself, and dashed to the kitchen and gathered a rack of empty cups. The machine looked like a huge breadbox. It had sliding doors on two sides, one for putting dishes in, the other for removing them. I slid the tray in, pushed a button, and stood back. At first, the machine made a grinding noise, then I heard the sound of rushing water, and steam rose from the cracks of the sliding doors. The steam settled and the grinding halted. This was what we called “the deception cycle.” You had to pay attention with this machine or you could scald yourself pretty bad. Suddenly, steam rose again from the cracks and surrounded me. The water rushed and the rattling was twice as loud.
Gina and I did a kind of ballet out front. I traded her the tray of cups for a pot of freshly brewed Kona. An arm shot out and grabbed me by the elbow.
I dropped the coffeepot and it shattered by my feet. Everyone swiveled around. I regarded the person who had caused me to drop the coffeepot. It was Dr. Fischer, and he sat frozen in his chair, his pencil poised by his ear.
“I hope I didn’t cause you to do that,” he said.
“Abandon hope,” I told him, and turned to get a mop.
When I returned, I gave him a clean dishtowel, for which he thanked me abundantly. “Liaison was the perfect word,” he added. “You’re not familiar with Chinese idiom, are you?”
He spoke with a thick German accent, actually Austrian, but I understood the nuances of European speech about as well as I knew Chinese. Fischer seemed like an odd combination. “I am not Chinese,” he’d announced the first day of class, enunciating each word in his severe accent, like a German prison guard. This drew a laugh from the students. “I was born in Shanghai in 1930, where my father was the Austrian consul general. I was raised there until the Japanese invaded in 1937. I thought I’d explain this to you early on. Otherwise, you might think I was Chinese, and I certainly do not want to confuse anyone.” And this brought another laugh.
“What are you working on?” I asked, leaning on my mop. It wasn’t that I was interested in what he was doing, though I had been curious in the past. But I was also keenly aware that the woman who’d asked me if this was my first day was staring at me. Let the coffee-addled barbarian go into withdrawal, I thought. I didn’t know why I was still working at the restaurant. I’d been thinking about the Peace Corps lately.
“Poems from the Tang dynasty,” he said. He smiled up at me with a set of teeth that didn’t look brushed. A black seed was wedged between his two top front teeth.
“Let me tell you a secret,” he said. “All these years, Westerners have been reading fakes. Not the real poems by the real men. No one knows the way these men really were but me.”
“Sounds great,” I said.
I was about to ask him if he wanted some more raisin toast, my cue to him that I was no longer his student but his waiter. Some customers, not just ex-profs, forget that you’re not there to listen to them, and have to be politely reminded.
I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned. It was the woman who’d asked me if this was my first day. She carried her coffee cup in front of her like a beggar. “Am I expected to wait all day?” she asked.
Instead of answering her, I sat down at the table with Dr. Fischer. He shuffled some papers out of my way.
“Hey,” the woman said, rapping her cup on my shoulder blade. I pointed to the sign above the register, which read, “If you’re in a hurry, you’re in the wrong place.”
She turned around and walked over to Gina at the register, who gave me a drowning look. I felt sorry for Gina, but I couldn’t help it. Sometimes, you have to make a stand against customers.
THE NEXT day, I received a call from Dr. Fischer inviting me over to his apartment for lunch. He was acting mysteriously, saying he had something important to discuss with me, something about yesterday, and he didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. He whispered like the phone was tapped. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I said sure I’d come to lunch, and took the El from my apartment in Wicker Park to the Loop, changed trains to the Howard, and changed again in Evanston. From my stop in Evanston, I walked about ten blocks to the lakefront apartment where Fischer lived.
We ate in Dr. Fischer’s dining room. The lunch consisted mainly of Korean pickles the colors of Christmas ornaments. This was a pickle sampler—reds, greens, and oranges cut in every shape from julienne to spears.
After lunch, Fischer produced a folder and spread out the contents on the table: a stack of papers, some written in English, some in Chinese. He told me to look them over.
I didn’t know Chinese. I had no idea which translations matched the originals, but I pretended to know, glancing back and forth between them. Even though I couldn’t read the characters, I knew a little bit about them. I recognized the simplest characters, the ones for mountain, river, sun, man, and woman.
One of Dr. Fischer’s manx cats, Vanessa, jumped on the dining table and flopped down on the papers. “Oh well, we can work later,” Dr. Fischer said. It didn’t seem to occur to him to move the cat. The other cat, Sophie, rubbed up against a table leg. Dr. Fischer had introduced them to me the moment I’d walked in.
We went into the living room, where the walls were covered with scrolls and paintings and framed calligraphy. I sat down on a brocaded couch and Dr. Fischer took out his checkbook and started to write a check.
I recognized one of the calligraphic styles on the wall from Dr. Fischer’s slide lectures. The strokes were thin and long and delicate. The lines were straight and unwavering. Black lines frozen or plucked perfectly from thin air. They seemed created by someone who understood absolutes, who knew the distance and length of infinity. They had been done by the Chinese emperor Hui-tsung, who devoted all of his time and money to the arts in his kingdom. As Dr. Fischer had explained in class, the arts had flourished under the emperor, but he neglected everything else, including his military. Eventually, barbarians overran the country, capturing Hui-tsung and bringing about the end of the Northern Sung dynasty. The barbarians imprisoned him in a dungeon, where he spent the rest of his life perfecting his writing style.
Fischer looked up at me and said, “So I gather you’re willing to take on the task at hand?”
I leaned forward, resting my arms on my legs. Then I straightened up and sat back in the couch. “What exactly is it?”
“Translator,” he said, blinking. “I thought you understood.”
I put my hand to my chest. “But I don’t know Chinese.”
“Let me tell you a little bit more about my project,” he said, and he put aside the checkbook, face up on the coffee table, which was an oval of glass supported by twisted limbs of polished black wood. I glanced at the amount, seventy-five dollars, written in a hand that was equal in beauty to the way Fischer made his Chinese characters. “The poems you’ve been reading are from the Tang dynasty,” Dr. Fischer said. “They’re among some of the most famous poems in Chinese. Poems by Li Po, Tu Fu, Po Chu-i.” The Po of Li Po and Po Chu-i, he pronounced Bye. “Surprisingly, they’ve never been properly translated. Do you know why that is? This might shock you.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. But Dr. Fischer leaned forward and locked me with his eyes as though I understood completely, and was just playing dumb.
Dr. Fischer settled back in his chair. “Many of the Tang poets would take excursions to the country together, something like Chautauquas.” Dr. Fischer must have seen the blank look on me because he rolled his hand in front of his face and added, “A conference, a get-together. You understand?
“Would you like some anise seeds?” Fischer asked me. “They make a wonderful breath freshener.” Fischer smiled, and dipped his hand into the bowl of anise seeds on the table. He tilted his head, opened his mouth, and trickled the seeds in. “What’s bothering you?” he said after a moment.
“Nothing,” I said. “I thought you might be bothered by the fact that I don’t read or speak Chinese.”
“Bothered?” Fischer said. “I’m delighted. If you knew a word of Chinese I’d ask you to leave and bill you for lunch. Still, it’s important for you to look at the originals. We must learn to respect the text even if we don’t understand it.”
Fischer grabbed the blue bowl of anise seeds and set it in front of me.
“Waley, Anderson, and the others,” Dr. Fischer said. “They’re little schoolgirls. Even contemporary Chinese scholars ignore the truth.” He looked at me blankly, then opened his mouth wide, and a single sharp laugh burst out as if an animal had been trapped inside him. The laugh startled me and I dropped anise seeds on the coffee table. Fischer looked at them and waved his hand. He laughed again and I laughed too.
“As in Greek society of the same time, love, spiritual and intellectual, was reserved for men, and the Tang poets, when they went away together, wrote love poems to each other. These are the poems that survive, but they have been bowdlerized.” He squeezed one of his hands like he was getting milk from a cow’s udder. “In some cases, the mistakes are innocent. We have to understand that the poets disguised the sex act in metaphor. It’s obvious enough, but most translators choose not to see. A fish leaping, a musical instrument, the braiding of hair. And of course, there aren’t any personal pronouns in Chinese, so who is to say the speaker is addressing a she instead of a he?”
I didn’t have an answer for that, but then I’d only taken one semester of Chinese calligraphy.
“I have one more question,” he said, craning his neck and regarding me solemnly. “You’re not gay, are you?”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Sorry?” he said. “Why apologize? You’re much better off. And I prefer it this way.” Still, he looked slightly disappointed.
He preferred that I didn’t know Chinese. He preferred that I wasn’t gay. He preferred that I didn’t know anything about poetry. So what were my qualifications?
Fumbling with the folder of calligraphy, I closed it as though it were a criminal file on me.
“There’s a mistake,” I said.
“Where?” Dr. Fischer asked, leaning forward.
“I mean, between us,” I said.
Fischer took a breath. “Undoubtedly. There always is.”
“Maybe I’m not the person you want.”
Fischer waved his hand like he was clearing smoke.
“Will seventy-five dollars do? Keep track of the time you spend on these and count up your hours. I’ll pay you seventy-five dollars per hour, if you find that reasonable.” His cat had left the din-ing-room table, and so he gathered up his translations in a manila folder and handed them to me.
An hour. Seventy-five dollars an hour. I reeled. “What do you want me to do?” I asked weakly.
“Make changes. Make lots of changes. I’ll see you in a week,” and he let me outside.
That night, I lined up a dozen translations on the kitchen table and read them through several times. They were attributed to twelve different poets from the Tang dynasty, but they all sounded alike. A typical one was by the poet Wang Chih-huan:
Waiting in Vain for My Friend Wu
Woodcutters go back and forth
with their saws
felling one another’s stout timber
The barbarian moonlight
Excites upward-leaping fish
along the banks of the Ch’u River.
Twin hills swell wide—
Moans fill an orchid-wood boat.
And still, because you promised,
I wait,
plucking the one-stringed guitar.
The rest of the poems were even worse. There wasn’t anything poetic about these translations. They were crude and laughable, and even if Fischer was correct, he should have left them the way they were. If people didn’t want to see something, there was no way to force them to see it. One was titled, “Wang Wei Remembers the Daisy Chain.” Another one was called “Golden Showers at the Temple of Heaped Fragrance.” The worst, though, was “In Farewell to Field Clerk Han Going Home: A Song of Bodily Fluids.”
I studied the first poem but didn’t have the faintest idea what I was supposed to do with it. Tentatively, I scratched out the word excites, and tried to think of a substitute. I wasn’t sure why I didn’t like the word. In fact, the more I looked at the word, the more it seemed just fine. Who was I to change around Dr. Fischer’s words, even if I did think it was a stupid poem? I didn’t respect the translation, much less the original.
I looked at the poem again. I wrote the word gooses in place of excites, then crossed that out and settled on strokes.
But whoever heard of ancient gay Chinese poetry? If what Fischer said was true, people would have known about it long before now. Maybe the whole project was a ruse. Maybe the old boy had a thing for me. A year earlier, a professor had shown up naked on the doorstep of one of his students in the middle of the night. He’d banged on her door and demanded a nightcap. The professor had been forced into early retirement. Things like this happened all the time.
Doesn’t it bother you at all that he’s stringing you along like this? I thought.
But he’s paying me.
That was enough for one night. I put the poems away, and the next day I cashed Dr. Fischer’s check.
FISCHER LED me to the dining room like he was a general and I was a scientist working on a top-secret project. Everything looked the same as before. The papers seemed untouched. The plates of food were still there as well, though browner and with a large cloud of flies surrounding them.
“What are your suggestions?” he said.
“I don’t have any,” I said.
“Nothing?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Nothing is a suggestion, too, I suppose,” he said. “Just as inaction is a form of action. Let me see the folder,” and he reached for it, but I pulled it away.
“No,” I said. I had second thoughts. Maybe I’d acted brashly, bringing over the poems without having worked on them at all.
“No?” He arched his eyebrows and regarded me suspiciously. “Let me see the folder.”
I handed it to him. What else could I do? They were his poems. He regarded the top poem silently for a minute, his hand cupped over his chin.
“Dr. Fischer,” I said. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t say it. Looking at him, I just felt pity. “I’m terrible,” I said finally. “Can’t you see that? I don’t understand why you want me. Yesterday I went to the library and spent half the day poring over Waley’s translations and Anderson’s. They seem fine to me.”
His face darkened and he looked at me with astonishment. He flipped from one page to another.
“‘A misty rain comes blowing with a wind from the east,’” Fischer announced suddenly. “Isn’t it obvious what this refers to? Here, you’ve missed it,” and he pointed to one of the translations.
Fischer leaned uncomfortably close and read over my shoulder. Even if I had been able to understand what he was talking about, I still couldn’t have concentrated.
I didn’t see it, whatever he was talking about, but nodded.
Fischer pointed to a poem called “Taking Leave of Wang Wei.” I recognized the name Wang Wei. He was one of the Tang poets, too.
“This was written by Wang Wei’s lover,” Fischer told me.
“‘I will turn back home. I will say no more,’” Fischer recited. “‘Iwill close the gate of my old garden.’”
Dr. Fischer explained the image to me. This time, I couldn’t hide my shock and I laughed. “You can’t say that,” I said.
“Of course not,” Fischer said, and smiled. “What do you sug-gest?”
“It sounds fine the way it is. Garden. Why can’t it just be a garden?” I bent over the manuscript and pointed at the word as though I had to prove it actually existed. “I just don’t see it,” I said.
“You can’t ignore it,” Dr. Fischer said.
“Why does it have to be that way?” I asked. It was a garden. It said it was a garden. It didn’t say anything about body parts.
The poem seemed fine to me without making something sexual out of it. It seemed like a simple poem about two friends saying good-bye, nothing more. And if it wasn’t, I didn’t have to know.
He started clearing the food-encrusted dishes from the table as though he’d just noticed them, as though I weren’t there. He stacked them up and the cloud of flies broke up and then converged around his arms.
“Dr. Fischer,” I said.
He didn’t turn around to look at me, but kept stacking plates. “This is my work,” he said. “These are my translations.”
I didn’t know exactly what to say. It occurred to me that it mattered. Until now, the poems hadn’t seemed important. I thought that it was me. Actually, I hadn’t gone to the library. I hadn’t looked at anyone else’s translations. I’d told him that so he’d think I was hardworking, but he seemed appalled.
Fischer disappeared into the kitchen and I heard him turn on the kitchen tap. I felt very thirsty.
Fischer walked into the dining room again. He pulled out a checkbook and a silver pen from his smelly jacket. “I want to pay you for today.”
“For what?” I said. I shook my head. Dr. Fischer looked at me blankly. I pointed toward the kitchen. “May I have a glass of water?”
“There’s bottled water in the refrigerator,” he said.
The kitchen was covered with paintings and framed examples of calligraphy. I recognized another style from Dr. Fischer’s slide lectures. If it was an original, it was hundreds and hundreds of years old. And priceless.
“Is this an original?” I asked.
“Do you like it?” he said, seeming to know which painting I referred to.
“It must be worth a fortune,” I said.
I opened the refrigerator door. The light didn’t turn on. The smell almost knocked me over. Most of the food was unidentifi-able. There were several things wrapped in foil and a large bowl covered with green fuzz.
I shut the door, but the smell didn’t subside. It engulfed me as I walked through the kitchen in search of a glass. I opened a cup-board and saw a box of saltines and three boxes of Mystic Mint cookies. That was all. There was no other food around. Plenty of glasses and plates, but nothing to fill them with. I checked every cupboard, every drawer.
I put my glass under the tap and let it run, testing the tempera-ture with my finger. I filled the glass with cold water and drank so fast I had to stand there for a second and catch my breath. Then I filled it again and took my time.
I went into the dining room.
“Dr. Fischer,” I said. “Why did you choose me?”
He paused and said, “Choose you for what?”
“For this. Translating these poems.”
“Because you have a good ear, because you are honest, and because you are . . . American.”
“How could you know I’m honest?” I said.
“At the restaurant. You speak bluntly. I admire that.”
“But how could you tell I have a good ear? I just ran the slide projector for you.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Fischer said. “It is your sensibility I wanted.”
“You don’t know my sensibility.”
“You were in my course. You were the boy who ran the slide projector. If my memory is correct, you earned an A.”
“You gave just about everyone an A, Dr. Fischer.”
“Here,” he said, handing me the check he’d made out. “Please don’t cash it until Tuesday.” I didn’t take the check. With a kitchen like that, I was amazed that the previous check had cleared. He didn’t have enough money for clothes. He couldn’t afford food.
Fischer’s cat Sophie jumped in his lap and he began to stroke her.
“I’m afraid you will be insulted,” he said slowly, as though addressing his cat. “You see, you were the clumsiest calligrapher I’ve ever taught. You held the brush as though it were a meat hook. People see what they want to see. I am not so concerned about making these poems beautiful, but I want the true voices of the poets to be heard, even if I must peel them of all metaphor. In other words, my intent is to strip these poems of the subterfuge. If they are not obvious to you, then who will they be obvious to?”
What was he saying? That I was an oaf? I had appreciated the class, respected the work. So what if I didn’t understand how to hold a brush, if all I was good for was advancing slides in a carousel?
“You said I was perfect.”
“You were perfect,” he said simply. “You couldn’t handle the brush, but I thought you were sensitive. You gave a strong oral presentation. Do you remember?”
It was a video actually. I remembered. I did it back when I was sure what I was going to do with my life. The video was based on a famous Chinese poem. It showed a chair, a simple chair with a broken leg. The chair was in an empty white room and had toppled over. The camera panned around it as a woman’s voice recited the English translation of the poem. As the poem was recited, the chair was slowly repaired, invisibly. First the leg was fixed and then a rich purple paint started to climb the legs to the back of the seat.
The poem was about an emperor whose enemies killed his favorite bride while he was away from the palace. His constant brooding for her turned the state into ruin, and so the people went to a Taoist priest, who was able to “summon spirits by his concentrated mind.” The priest, searching for the woman among the pavilions and towers of the air, finally found her. He brought her back to earth in the form of a golden throne. Sitting on his throne, the emperor was strong and content, but when he was away from it, he could do nothing. And so he sat on the throne until his death, possessed by the spirit of his bride.
“I remembered this,” Dr. Fischer said. “That’s what I remembered when I asked for your help. Now I see you’re a poseur, a dilettante. This is far worse than someone without ideas. You have good ideas, but you’re afraid of them. I doubt you’ll ever do anything with your life. I thought you would. I was sure of it.”
He was right. Now I would have laughed at that emperor. I would have joked lewdly about him sitting on his wife. Or I would have told him he was sitting on a chair, nothing more, nothing less. How had this happened to me?
Fischer handed me the check, but I put my hand up.
“Take it,” he said.