The Survivors

She woke up fighting in Spanish – something about a missing necklace at the hotel. At least she thought it was Spanish – could’ve been Italian, or Portuguese, but was probably gibberish. Her ex-husband told her that she talked in her sleep, often in mangled languages. He became good at recognizing them.

“You were dreaming in Hungarian and Japanese again,” he’d say.

When she had nightmares, she yelled in gibberish, or made deep, animal growls, and he’d shake her awake.

Nothing bad had ever happened to her in another county – she’d never been cheated, or robbed, or even given poor directions. But her mother had been a paranoid woman, and had raised her to be afraid of strangers, to be afraid of other countries. Johanna became a translator not because she had an astonishing “ear for language,” but because she wanted to quash her racist upbringing. And yet, she still dreams that the foreign cleaning lady has stolen her pearls. It’s a nightmare.

My God, the dreams of the privileged.

She could not fall back asleep, so she made herself tea, and sat alone in her kitchen, and wondered what she was doing here, alive, on earth.

A year ago, Johanna had been assigned to a Chinese diplomat, visiting the Middle East. Three days before the trip, she was enjoying a beer on her friend’s balcony when the brick façade crumbled, and the support beams detached, and the balcony fell twelve feet. Her leg was shattered, and she needed reconstructive surgery.

She phoned the translation agency from her hospital bed, and the Chinese diplomat was assigned to her younger colleague, Ian, who still hadn’t fully grasped Cantonese, but whose Mandarin was superb.

“It’s the same damn language,” she’d said to him over the phone, while high on morphine, still in shock from the fall. “Besides, he’ll speak English.”

Ian had been to the Middle East many times before, but always as a translator for businessmen whose endeavors he found trivial, who made cultural faux pas, whose attitudes were sometimes repulsive. He’d never been on a diplomatic mission.

“Listen, I wanted to ask you,” Ian’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Do you ever lie when you translate? Do you omit things, or even make changes? If it will save negotiations?”

“Snap out of it!” Johanna said. “You’re not there for peacekeeping.”

Ian’s father spoke Arabic and Kurdish. Ian was also completely fluent in Farsi, Hebrew, Turkish.

“It’s perfect for you,” Johanna remembers saying. “You’ll be fine.”

But they weren’t fine. Eleven days into their trip, Ian and the diplomat stepped inside a café for a cold drink, and the place blew to pieces.

Ian’s body was never recovered, but the Chinese diplomat woke up in the hospital, leg torn off, but completely fine otherwise except for perpetual ringing in his ears and a massive headache. And the only difference between Ian and the diplomat was that they were at opposite ends of a table, only a few feet apart.

Johanna often thinks about that: that the width of a table is the difference between complete obliteration and survival. That the Chinese diplomat woke up in a foreign hospital, in a foreign country, without a leg, without a translator. That the dead translator could’ve – should’ve – been her.

Ellen, Ian’s wife, is a petite woman with curly hair that she keeps short. Before Ian’s death, she’d bought an outrageous pair of orange, asymmetric-framed glasses. Normally a happy person, these glasses look ridiculous on her now.

Three days a week, Ellen attends a support group for young widows, at a church near her house, and the glasses seem so outrageous, so offensive, that she leaves them in the car. As a result, she’s never seen the faces of the other women. She knows them by their voices, and by the shape of their hair. At first she was afraid of bumping into things, of spilling her coffee, of walking into the men’s washroom. She was afraid that her squinting would be interpreted as a glare. But now she likes it, this blurred version of the world.

Most of the women are wives of soldiers, and they especially like Ellen because Ian’s death represents what their husbands were fighting for. Their husbands were fighting the bad men, like the men who blew up the café, and Ellen doesn’t correct them: she doesn’t tell them that Ian was in a different country than where their husbands were stationed. They use Ian’s death as a justification for the war, and Ellen tries, she really tries, not to get angry when they do this, when they find meaning in his death.

Ellen is not sure she likes these women, but she goes every week to satisfy her mother who has threatened to stop babysitting if Ellen doesn’t attend the support group, and if she doesn’t see her therapist, and if she doesn’t eat her dinner. And Ellen relies on her mother now, who comes at 6 in the morning to care for the children while Ellen runs. She runs, and runs, and runs for hours, and she leaves her children with her mother because she doesn’t feel like taking care of them anymore.

Before Ian’s death, Ellen had read a story somewhere – in a magazine? on the BBC? – about a Palestinian whose son was killed by Israeli soldiers.

Or was it was the other way around?

Or was it an Iraqi killed by Americans?

He was Palestinian, she’s certain: a young boy, killed by Israeli soldiers while riding his bike. An accident. And the story goes that when the father found out, he didn’t cry, he didn’t scream, he just ran. He ran around his house and he didn’t stop for an entire day and night, and into the next day. The imam tried to talk to him, his friends, his wife, his own mother – no one could get him to stop running. He refused food or water. They feared he’d die of exhaustion. He circled his house until there was a trench in the earth, and the trench got deeper, separating him from the rest of the world.

Ellen completely understands this man. She thinks about him often, while she runs. She understands the need to run. The need to make treads in the ground. The need for physical pain. The need for clenched teeth, and clenched fists, and knees so swollen she limps, but she gets up the next morning and does it again. The need to push the body to its limit. The need to run all the anger out of you. The desire to die of exhaustion, because this, perhaps, is easier than dying of a broken heart.



When they made love, Ian would talk to Ellen in other languages.

“Don’t tell me what it means,” she requested.

She liked to imagine all the dirty things he was saying. He could be talking about nothing – she didn’t care. She decided Finnish and Japanese, though romantic, were too mild. Slavic languages drove her crazy. A few words of Russian at the right moment, and she’d climax.

Before Ian left for his trip, he kept repeating a word she’d never heard before.

“What was that?” she’d said afterwards.

“Arabic. It means –”

“Don’t tell me!” she’d laughed.

Now she wants to know. She concentrates while she runs, accessing the regions of her brain, trying to sound out the word. She reads the Arabic-English dictionary. It started with a “Thaa”? No: with a “Yaa?” It sounded like two words? The dictionary search is impossible, yet she spends the evenings reading it, trying to recover the word.



The children look like Ian. She tells her therapist this.

She tells her therapist they want to “write daddy letters and send them to heaven so he’s not lonely.” She doesn’t know who has given them this absurd idea. She doesn’t believe in God, and doesn’t believe in heaven, but she lets the children write the letters anyway, then doesn’t know what to do with them. The envelopes pile up. She imagines herself mailing them to “heaven.” She imagines the perplexed postman. She imagines the letters thrown out in the mailroom, or recycled, or opened and read aloud to postal workers at lunch. Writing the letters comforts the children, so she lets them continue. She says, “Yes Daddy reads them. Yes he’s not lonely anymore.” Is she a bad mother? She isn’t sure.

She tells the therapist the word “pain,” is useless. For example, she describes the pain when, the other day, her son built a model airplane and the expression on his face looked exactly like a picture of Ian, when Ian was a boy. Or that her daughter translated a book: just sat down and read the English sentence, then repeated the sentence in French, then in Spanish. She seems to have no trouble doing this, even though she’s only ten.

She tells the therapist that – of course! – she loves her children, but she’ll be feeling better, and then she looks at the children with their nose like Ian’s, and their eyes like Ian’s, and their face shaped like Ian’s, and she’ll feel pain. There is no word for this kind pain. Maybe there is, in some other language.

After the explosion, the diplomat wakes up in a foreign hospital, in a foreign country, alone. He is not afraid. He is pissed off. Why hasn’t his government sent someone? And where is his translator? Then he remembers the explosion, and he worries about the translator who has been so kind to him over these difficult days. When the doctor arrives, the diplomat asks him – in English – about his translator. Is he okay? The doctor explains that the diplomat was brought to the hospital by his limo driver, but he was alone, no one else was brought with him.

Then the doctor explains that his leg is missing.

The diplomat is on so much morphine he hasn’t realized this, about his leg. He pulls the covers away: sure enough – his leg is missing below the knee.

Afterwards, he has terrible night sweats, and pain, and suffers from phantom limb. He is flown back to China where he receives an operation. He is interviewed by government officials about the explosion. He learns that the translator had a wife, and two children. He is angry.

He has survived. He learns to walk with a prosthetic leg. He does not take time off work. He carries on.

After her balcony fall, Johanna recovers in the hospital. She is released a few weeks later after her spine has been checked, and her test results have come back, and her drugs have been prescribed. There is no one to pick her up from the hospital, and no one to push her wheelchair. Her ex-husband is traveling, she has no children, and her only friend – the one whose balcony fell – is in much worse shape than she is: a collapsed lung and an insurance company refusing to pay for the treatment. Johanna would call someone from work but realizes, suddenly, and with such clarity, that no one really likes her. Could this be true?

And so she takes a cab by herself and it is the cab driver – a stranger –, and her neighbor – also a stranger – who carry her up the steps of her porch. She assures them she is fine – totally fine, and thank goodness there is a bedroom on the main floor, and no need to worry because her sister is coming this evening – not true: she doesn’t even have a sister. She watches the cab drive away, and her neighbor go back inside, and she closes the door, and looks around her empty apartment. She takes a sleeping pill, then takes three. By now she has heard about the explosion. She knows that they haven’t found Ian’s body. She knows it could’ve been her. She is alive instead: why?

The day of the bombing was particularly hot, and when the chauffeur picked them up at six in the morning he was already sweating through his suit. The air conditioner in the limo was not working, but there was no suitable replacement vehicle. There had been a discussion about sharing limos – putting the diplomat with his superior, the Ambassador. No, the drivers decided that was a bad idea: the previous day, they’d caught the Ambassador and the diplomat arguing. They discussed putting the diplomat in a cab – a cab! That idea was quickly squashed. They did not alert the government liaison, for fear that they’d lose the contract.

The chauffeur equipped his limo with several water bottles and a small battery-powered fan taken from his kitchen. By mid-afternoon, the heat was unbearable.

“Can we stop here? Just for a moment,” the translator had asked.

The driver saw that the diplomat’s skin was red and sweaty. Empty water bottles on the seat. Earlier that morning he’d been motion sick.

“This is a bad neighborhood,” the driver said. “I’ll take you somewhere better,” and it was the better place, the suggested place, that had blown to pieces while the driver stood across the street, smoking.

And all he could think was that maybe they’d left, and he hadn’t seen them come out of the café. Maybe they were at the car – they weren’t. Maybe they were wandering the street – he couldn’t see them. And when he ran into the café – still on fire, still full of smoke, his worst fears were confirmed. He found the Chinese diplomat unconscious. He could not find the translator.

On the anniversary of the explosion, on the other side of the world, two women have coffee. There is the width of a table between them.

One of them feels pain. It is a different pain than the pain of her husband’s death, which is different than the pain she feels when running, which is different than the pain she feels when she looks at her children, which is different than the pain she feels now, sitting with her husband’s colleague, who is still alive.

She struggles to remember a word.

“Ya bourn … Ya bourn …”

Johanna leans in, a million languages floating in her head.

“It’s Arabic,” Ellen says. “Ya …bourn …”

“Ya’aburnee?”

“Yes. That’s it. What does it mean?”

Johanna hesitates, because there is no English word for this – not even close, but Ellen’s face is lit up and full of hope, and this is the only thing the translator has to offer.

“It’s a beautiful phrase, said to someone you love. You can’t bear to live without them, so you hope – you wish – that you’ll die first. It means, ‘You bury me.’ It’s a request.”

Like a man about his lover
Like a man about his family
Like the Palestinian about his son.

And now the pain Ellen feels is different again: it is bittersweet, because Ian got his wish.

The survivor has a reoccurring nightmare: a memory. He steps out of a hot limo, and is led by the translator, into a café. It is not air conditioned, but the window is open, and there is a breeze.

“Let’s sit a moment,” the diplomat says after they’ve ordered, because the thought of getting back into the limo is too awful.

He is about to sit down in the chair near the aisle.

“It’s cooler beside the window,” the translator says in perfect Mandarin. “Please, I insist. Sit over there, where there is shade.”