There was the van Oosterwyck; the Marienbad couple; a framed broadside of her lecture at the University of Chicago. For once, they did not appease her as she hurried to her bedroom, where she tried to intercept sleep before her thoughts carried her out of sleep’s range. But finally she sat up, and complying with an impulse, took down the French text of the first book of Brun’s she had ever read, which was also the only one someone else had translated. She had never read the book again, yet named it in interviews as the origin of her interest in translating Brun. Now she felt it as a lapse that the characters weren’t an artist’s model and a mechanic, as she’d remembered them, but a ballerina dancing “The Sleeping Beauty” and an Indochina War veteran. In the past, she must have been oblivious to the succinct ability of such markers of identity to “sow danger” and “open depths.” Tonight, reliving the poised critique of the woman at the conference, she could not catch sight of the characters’ inner lives through the thicket of their ramifications.

Now dead rose canes were
the headstones of the working class. The building they entered was multistory concrete with the remnants of yellow paint.

She fell asleep near daybreak, and awoke to a social worker knocking at her apartment.

“I understand you’re a translator,” the social worker said, jamming his clipboard through the door as soon as she opened it. His wide stance and sturdy neck gave him an aspect of readiness. On his clipboard she saw a printout from a volunteer database.

She let pass the moment when she would have said, “Literary. French.” Her microscope was discredited. She said, “I’ve never interpreted.”

He said, “Here’s your chance for experience.”

They took the bus to a neighborhood that was slapdash fifty years ago, built in haste to house factory workers during World War II. Now dead rose canes were the headstones of the working class. The building they entered was multistory concrete with the remnants of yellow paint. The corridor had neither carpet nor linoleum, but a relief topography of carpet glue. Thus Katya was baffled when the apartment door opened and she stepped from the disintegrating hall, into an intact, tranquil space. “Take your shoes off,” said the social worker.

His client wore a Dallas Cowboys shirt and a flowing flowered skirt. She was young, and with her shoulders thrust back, looked alert and durable. Two girls flanked her, keeping close to the circle of her skirt. Behind them was a polished coffee table and a sofa with a rose print: furniture not new, but sufficient.

The woman, Patience, offered them the couch, then sat opposite in a folding chair. The two girls settled on their knees on the floor, but Patience nudged the less little girl and said something not in English or French. The girl answered in the same language and went to the kitchen.

“Voulez-vous une tisane?” asked Patience.

The social worker began his preamble, explaining that where the refugee agency left off, there city and state aid began; Katya stabbed at interpreting “food stamps” and “job training.” She wavered between impersonating him — repeating his very words — and transposing his first-person statements into the third person. She tried the first and was effaced by it: interpreter as dictaphone. She said, “I need to confirm your personal data and get information on your skill set.” When the girl returned with herbal tea, Katya silently accepted it.