Noor's Diagnosis

I want to be accurate about the order in which Noor Kassab took us apart, because the order was not an accident. She has been doing this to me since we were twenty-eight, and she always starts with the small thing.

She came on the twelfth of December, on the six o’clock from Berlin, into a city that had been dark since half past three. We were on page one hundred and ninety-six of three hundred and eleven. We had four working weeks behind us since Turin and we had settled every reading in chapters four and five, and I had begun, privately, in the part of my head where I keep schedules, to believe we would hand the thing in a fortnight early.

She was coming to the study on the Friday at half past ten. At nine that Friday morning, over the second coffee, I gave Elodie my sentence for the day, and it was a coward’s sentence and I knew it while I was saying it.

“I’ve told four people in Madrid that I’m here until March,” I said, “and I haven’t told any of them what I’m doing after March, and I noticed myself not telling them.”

She did not translate it, and she did not answer it, which is the rule. She wrote something in the margin of page one hundred and ninety-seven that had nothing to do with page one hundred and ninety-seven, and put her pencil in the groove, and we went on.

So that was the state of the room when Noor came up the twenty-two steps at half past ten with her coat over her arm and her reading glasses already on her head.

She stopped inside the door. She looked at the desk, and the two lamps, and the crossword with the biro in the fold, and the cardigan over the back of the reading chair, and the box, and Elodie and me on either side of one oak slab like two people who had been assigned to each other by a court.

Then she walked over to the reading chair, picked up Giulia’s cardigan, folded it in three, put it on the arm, and sat down.

Elodie made a sound. It was not a word.

“It’s a cardigan,” Noor said.

“It’s been there since September.”

“Yes. I know. That’s what I’m telling you.” She put her glasses down onto her nose. “Sixty-one years old and you two are keeping her like a crime scene. Where are the pages.”

· · ·Scene break

She read for an hour and fifty minutes.

I want that on the record as well, because nobody else had done it. We had each been reading our own text and the Italian, and Renzo’s colleague had been reading the Spanish against the Italian, and Renzo had been reading the English against the Italian, and in eleven weeks not one person had sat down and read the English and the Spanish against each other, side by side, as two things made out of the same object.

Noor has translated Giulia into German for nineteen years. She reads four languages properly and argues in three. She is also, since the codicil, the only one of Giulia’s translators who has been given nothing at all to do, because the codicil says English and Spanish and says nothing about German, and the estate has not commissioned her, and she has been too proud to ask Renzo and too fond of Giulia to let it go. She did not mention this once. It was in the room the entire time she was reading.

At twenty past twelve she took her glasses off.

“Nineteen,” she said.

Elodie looked up. “Nineteen what?”

“In the first hundred and twenty pages there are nineteen sentences where your English and your Spanish are the same sentence. Not equivalent. Not both defensible. The same — same length, same place where the weight falls, same refusal to explain. You have both done the identical strange thing nineteen times without consulting each other.”

“We read it aloud together,” I said. “We’re working from one text. A degree of convergence is—“

“Mateo.”

“—is entirely predictable.”

“It is not remotely predictable. I have done this for nineteen years.” She put her glasses on the desk. “Do you know how often that happens between me and Elodie when we’re on the same book? Twice. Not twice a book. Twice.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Outside it had begun to do the thing Edinburgh does at one o’clock in December, which is to consider getting dark again.

“Page eighty-eight,” Noor said. “The coffee for one person. Apposta. You have ‘on purpose’. You have a propósito. Both of you had four better-sounding options and both of you took the flat one and put it at the end of the sentence where it lands like a dropped shoe.” She looked between us. “Neither of you told the other you were going to do that.”

“No,” Elodie said.

“No,” I said.

“Right,” said Noor, and wrote something on the back of her boarding pass.

Then she said, “How does the second half work?”

“How does it work in what sense,” I said.

“In the sense that I have read the first hundred and twenty pages and I can see the shape of a book with a hole in the middle of it, and I want to know whether she filled it.” Noor turned the typescript round and ran a finger down the edge of the block, the way you do with a deck of cards. “She told me in Berlin, in June, that there was a chapter nobody was going to see until it was finished. She said it twice, on two different evenings, and the second time she said it as though I had disagreed with her, which I had not.”

“She said that about every book,” Elodie said.

“She said it about this one in June and she died in September.” Noor squared the pages and put them back. “You’ll come to it. I’m only telling you it’s coming.”

We went to lunch.

· · ·Scene break

She cooked in Giulia’s kitchen that evening, which nobody had done since September either, and she did it without asking permission, and Elodie stood in the doorway for about four minutes before she could come in.

Renzo arrived at eight with two bottles and a folder. He and Noor argued for half an hour about a German word she had used in 2019 that he has evidently been carrying around since he was twenty-eight, and he lost, and took it well, which he does not do with us.

“She’d have wanted you on the German,” he said to her at one point, not looking at her.

“She would. It isn’t your fault, it’s the codicil. Your mother wrote a document about two people and forgot that other people existed.” Noor put a dish down harder than the dish required. “She did that in life as well. I loved her. She did that.”

Renzo left at nine. At the door he said, “Buona notte, and Elodie, query eleven is still open, and I want the answer before Christmas, not after it.”

Then it was three of us and the table.

Noor made coffee in Giulia’s machine, which sits on the counter and which neither of us had touched in eleven weeks, and while it was going she said, with her back to us, “Whoever did the flowers knew she hated lilies. I’ve been meaning to say that since September. There was not one lily in that church and I noticed it from the second row and I thought: somebody in this building was paying attention.”

“That was Mateo,” Elodie said.

Noor turned round.

“Was it.”

“He rang the church as well,” Elodie said. “They wanted to read the thing about the valley of the shadow and he got them to read the Montale instead. He did the seating. He rang Berlin about your flight.”

I had not known she knew any of that. I had done all of it from a hotel room in Stockbridge in four days, with a list, because there was a list to be made and I am good at lists and it was September and somebody had to be.

“Well,” Noor said, and turned back to the machine. “There you are.”

And then, because she is who she is, she did not let it be a nice moment.

“I’ll say the thing now,” she said, “because I’m here for two more days and I’d rather not spend them working up to it.”

“Noor,” I said.

“You’ll want to hear it. You won’t want it said, but you’ll want to have heard it.” She put three cups on the table and sat down. “I read a hundred and twenty pages of a novel about a marriage that ends because neither party will say a true sentence out loud, translated by the two of you, sitting in a dead woman’s flat, and what I saw was two people agreeing, nineteen times, in two languages, about exactly where the silence goes. You are magnificent at it. It is the best work either of you has ever done.”

Elodie had gone very still in the way she does.

“The book is doing, on paper, everything the two of you refused to do out loud,” Noor said. “I’d find that humiliating.”

The coffee machine finished behind her and clicked, and nobody moved to it.

“She didn’t leave you a book,” she said. “She left you a room. The book is what she used to get you into it.”

· · ·Scene break

Elodie went home at half past ten. She said four sentences between the table and the door and none of them was about the evening, and one of them was about query eleven, and I put her scarf into her hand because it was on the chair and she would have gone down twenty-two steps without it.

I walked Noor to her hotel on the far side of the square. It had stopped raining and started again in the four minutes that took.

“You could have said that to me on my own,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You said it to both of us in a kitchen.”

“Because separately you’d each have taken it away and made it into a private matter and managed it beautifully, and in a week it would have been a thing you’d each decided about.” She had her hands in her pockets. “I wanted it in the room. Now it’s in the room and neither of you can pretend the other one didn’t hear it.”

At her door she stopped and said, “She stayed with you in Madrid. The spring before last, when she came down for that Prado thing and the reading.”

“Ten days.”

“She rang me from your kitchen. She said your flat was the tidiest grief she had ever been in.” Noor shrugged, in a way that meant she had not decided whether to repeat it for two years. “I didn’t know what she meant. I thought she was being Giulia.”

“She generally was.”

“Yes,” Noor said, “and she generally also meant it. Goodnight, Mateo. Tell Elodie the nineteen is the real number. She’ll have decided by now that I inflated it.”

· · ·Scene break

I did not go back to Stockbridge. I walked down to the corner where Elodie’s bus stops, which is not on the way to anything, and she was still there because the buses in December are a matter of hope, and she looked at me and did not ask what I was doing there, which I noticed and was grateful for.

We stood under the shelter. Somebody had written a footballer’s name on the glass in marker.

“I organised the funeral flowers,” I said. “I have never once organised what I felt about anything.”

The rain did the thing it does on a bus shelter, which is to make a noise disproportionate to the amount of rain.

She did not translate it. She did not say it back to me in Italian, where she would have had a better verb, or in English, where she would have improved it. She did not tell me it was not true, which would have been kind and would have been a lie, and which about four hundred people have said to me since September in one form or another.

What she said, after a while, looking down the road at nothing, was: “That’s two.”

“Two what?”

“You’ve had two today. One at nine over the coffee and one at eleven at night in a bus shelter.” She pulled her scarf up over her chin. “The rule says one.”

“Then take it out of Thursday’s.”

“I’m taking it out of Thursday’s,” Elodie said, and her bus came round the corner with its windows steamed up and nobody upstairs, and she got on it, and she did not look back through the glass, which I would not have been able to do anything useful with anyway.

I walked home the long way, along the water, in the rain, past the lit windows of people who had said out loud, that evening, in their own kitchens, whatever they had felt at the time.

Noor was right about the nineteen. I checked it myself the next morning before Elodie arrived, going through both texts with a pencil, and I found twenty-one.

I did not tell either of them.