DANIEL FOUND himself in what looked more like the lobby of a fashionable old hotel than the entrance to a health clinic.
He was met by a young woman wearing a well-cut light-blue dress and shoes with a slight heel. The way she was dressed, her straight posture, and her smile made him think of a stewardess. She introduced herself as a “hostess.”
She appeared to know who Daniel was straightaway, and whom he was there to visit. She asked him to write his name in a green ledger, then showed him to some armchairs grouped in front of a magnificent open fireplace in the art nouveau style. The wall above was adorned with a crossed pair of old skis, with stuffed animal heads on either side: an ibex with enormous ridged horns and a beard, and a fox with its top lip pulled back, baring its teeth.
“Your brother will be here shortly; I’ll go and tell him you’ve arrived. My colleague will take your luggage up to the guest room.”
Daniel was just about to sit down when a blond man in a short-sleeved steward’s shirt and tie appeared and took Daniel’s suitcase away.
“But I’m not staying. I’m going on to a hotel later,” Daniel protested. “Can’t I just leave my bag down here for a couple of hours?”
The man stopped and turned round.
“Which hotel are you going to?”
“I don’t really know. The closest one, I suppose. Can you recommend one?”
The woman and man exchanged an anxious glance.
“You’ll probably have to go a fair distance,” the woman said. “Most of the hotels up here in the mountains are health resorts. They have their regular guests and are usually booked up months in advance.”
“But there’s that village down in the valley. Isn’t there anyone there who has a room to let?” Daniel wondered.
“We don’t recommend that our visitors stay in the village,” the woman said. “Has anyone offered you a place to stay there?”
She was still smiling, but her expression had hardened slightly.
“No,” Daniel said. “It was just a thought.”
The man cleared his throat and said calmly, “If anyone does offer you a room in the village, just say no. Politely but firmly. I suggest that you stay in one of our guest rooms. That’s what most visitors do. You can stay a few days; we’ve got plenty of rooms at the moment.”
“I wasn’t planning on that.”
“It won’t cost you anything. Most relatives live a long way away, so it seems reasonable for us to let them stay here a few days. So people have time to settle in a bit and can spend time together in a more natural way. You’ve never been to Himmelstal before?”
“No.”
The man, who had been holding Daniel’s suitcase in his hand throughout this conversation, appeared to regard the matter as settled.
“Perhaps you’d like to see your room and get unpacked? We can take the elevator over here,” he said, leading the way across the thick carpet.
Daniel followed him. Maybe, he thought in the elevator on the way up, it wasn’t a bad idea to spend one night here after all. It was getting toward dinner, and he wasn’t looking forward to chasing round trying to find a room nearby late at night.
The guest room was small, but bright and pleasantly furnished. There was a vase of fresh flowers on a white painted table, and the view of the valley and the mountaintops in the distance would have matched any tourist’s expectations of a holiday in the Alps.
Himmelstal. Heavenly valley. A beautiful name for a beautiful place, Daniel thought.
He washed in the basin and changed his shirt. Then he lay down on the bed and rested for a few minutes. It was a good-quality modern bed, extremely comfortable; he could feel that at once. He would have liked to stay and have a nap for an hour or so before seeing his brother. But the hostess downstairs had already told Max he was here. He could sleep later.
In the elevator down to the ground floor he realized what had been so odd about the conversation he had had a short while ago. He had been aware of it the whole time he was talking to the man and the hostess, but hadn’t been able to put his finger on it: They had been speaking different languages. He had addressed them in German, seeing as he assumed that was their mother tongue, and they had responded in English.
He was so used to switching between different languages that he had hardly noticed. It had just made a slightly jarring impression, a sort of disconnect.
He had always found languages easy. As a child he had spent a lot of time with his maternal grandfather, who was a linguist. He and his mother used to eat dinner with his grandparents pretty much every day. While his mother and grandmother did the washing up in the kitchen, Daniel and his grandfather would go off to the large tobacco-scented study.
Daniel loved sitting on the floor leafing through books full of pictures of Egyptian tomb paintings, Greek sculptures, and medieval engravings, while his grandfather told him about languages that were still alive and languages that were dead. How languages were related to one another just like people, and how the origins of words could be traced far back in time. Daniel thought this was absolutely fascinating. He was always asking his grandfather where different words came from. Sometimes he would answer at once, and sometimes he would look the words up in a book on his desk.
To Daniel’s astonishment, he realized that the words he used and took so much for granted were considerably older than he was, older than Grandfather, older than the old house with its creaking wooden floors. They had traveled a long way, through different countries and ages before suddenly landing in Daniel’s little mouth like a butterfly on a flower. And they would continue their journey long after he himself was gone.
He had retained this respectful delight in language. He studied classics in high school, then went on to study German and French at the university, and eventually got a job as an interpreter for the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg.
Using his own voice to express another person’s thoughts and opinions, which often completely contradicted his own views, stimulated him in a strange and exciting way. If what was being said had a strong, emotional charge, spoken language wasn’t enough, and he would use gestures and facial expressions to convey the message of the person whose words he was interpreting. Sometimes he felt like a puppet with someone else’s hand inside him. As if his own soul had been pushed aside. He heard his voice change and could feel himself using facial muscles he never used otherwise. Ah, he would think in fascination; so this is what it feels like to be you!
Occasionally, when he finished interpreting a particularly intense discussion, there would be a little gap before he landed back in himself again. For a few giddy moments he would experience what it felt like to be no one at all.
On several occasions he had been mistaken for the person he was interpreting for. People who disagreed would be abrupt and offhand with him, because they regarded him as an extension of their opponent.
The reverse was also true: that sympathy for the person he was interpreting for would spill over onto him as well. He suspected that this was how he had managed to arouse the interest of the woman who later became his wife.
Emma had been a lawyer, specializing in international environmental law. Daniel’s job had been to interpret a conversation between her and a German expert in water conservation, a stylish middle-aged gentleman with a very definite erotic appeal. While he was interpreting, Daniel had a strong sense that he was merging into the German, to the point where in an almost creepy way he felt he knew what the man was going to say before he spoke.
Emma, too, seemed to have regarded them as one and the same person, because even after the man had left she carried on discussing water conservation with Daniel, as if he had been the person she had been talking to, rather than his shadowy mimic. Several times he had to remind her that he didn’t actually know anything about water. But the conversation was under way by then. They moved on to other subjects, went to a little Italian restaurant, and then, rather drunk, they went back to her hotel room together. A couple of times while they were making love she jokingly addressed him as “Mein Herr,” which rather unsettled him.
Even after they were married Daniel had been unable to shake the idea that his wife had gotten him mixed up with someone else, and that she was constantly disappointed when reminded of her mistake.
Then he discovered that she was being unfaithful with a biologist from Munich, and they got divorced.
The year after the divorce Daniel had suffered a mental breakdown. He didn’t really know why. He had gotten over the divorce surprisingly quickly and thought in hindsight that it had been the right thing to do. He was well regarded within his profession, he had a good salary and lived in a modern apartment in the center of Brussels. He had short-term flings with career-oriented women who were as uninterested in a serious relationship as he was. He didn’t really feel he was missing out on anything, until one day when everything changed from one moment to the next, and he realized that his life was utterly empty and meaningless. That all his relationships were wholly insubstantial, and that the words he expressed in the course of his work belonged to other people. Who was he really? A glove puppet who performed tricks for a few hours each day and was then tossed in a corner. He was only alive when he was interpreting, and that life wasn’t his, it was borrowed.
This shattering insight had struck Daniel one morning when he was on his way to work and had stopped at a newsstand to buy a paper. He stood there with the money in his hand, as though he’d been turned to stone. The clerk asked which paper he wanted, but he couldn’t answer. He put the money back in his pocket and sank down onto a nearby bench, exhausted. He had an important job that day, but work suddenly felt quite impossible.
He was on sick leave for two months. For depression, according to the doctor’s note. But he realized it was about something more than that: terrifying clarity. A revelation of an almost religious nature. Like converts who had seen the light, he had seen the darkness, and it had given him precisely that sense of an absolute truth that he had heard such people describe. The shabby veil of existence had been yanked aside, and he had seen himself and his life exactly as they were. The experience had come as a shock, but at the same time he was deeply grateful for it, and the thought that he might have gone on living a delusion made him shudder.
Daniel had resigned from his interpreting job, moved back to his hometown, Uppsala, and gotten a temporary job as a language teacher in a high school. The pay was obviously much worse than his previous job, but it would do until he worked out what he was going to do with his life.
In his free time he played computer games. World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto. To start with it was just a way of passing the time, then he started to get drawn in. The grayer his real life became, the more vibrant those fictional worlds seemed. The classroom and staff room became waiting rooms where he would spend impatient hours, reciting verb conjugations like a sleepwalker and engaging in small talk with his colleagues. At the end of each working day he would close the blinds in his small, one-room apartment, switch on his computer, and immerse himself in the only life that could make his pulse race with excitement, his brain flash with ingenious insights. When he stumbled off to bed in the small hours, exhausted by hard fighting and breathtaking escapes, he was always surprised that he could feel so strongly about something that didn’t exist, when what did exist made so little impression on him.