The Interpreter by Diego Marani, Judith Landry Page B

look, his face a tissue of wrinkles in the glow of the torches.
    ‘Mr Bellamy, do you want to know how to drive Doctor Barnung mad? It’ll take you a few weeks to learn the trick, but it’s well worth it!’ he whispered, the ghost of a snigger playing across his face.
    I looked more closely at his mocking expression, moving nearer to him so that I could hear what he was saying.
    ‘Take this – it’s a tape in Esperanto,’ he whispered, dropping a package done up with an elastic band into my tunic pocket.
    ‘Listen to it every night before going to bed, for at least a fortnight, or until you’ve learned it by heart. When Doctor Barnung calls you to his study for the hypnosis session, repeat the beginning of the tape to yourself. There’s a good chance that instead of answering his questions during the trance, what you’ll come out with is the contents of this tape – you’ll be able to tell by his face when you come round. Nothing irritates Barnung more than Esperanto; it upsets all his theories! Esperanto doesn’t deal in the unconscious, it doesn’t do identity. So there’s nothing to cure! The moment there’s no language, there’s no mother, and those who don’t know their mothers owe nothing to anyone. We’d all be happy if we spoke Esperanto: like stones, or flowers. We’d be freed of our mad desire to be different from one another, we wouldn’t feel obliged to remember things; we wouldn’t feel we had to change, to go along with the vile blackmailing of time! Imagine that!’
    Naturally, I paid him no attention, but I was amused by the imaginative way in which his spirit of rebellion showed itself; his illness had become so slyly camouflaged as to become unassailable, defying Dr Barnung’s most unforgiving forms of cure, making light even of an intensive course in Seroa.
    ‘The glottologist comes once a month, and then I have to do my exercises like a good boy. But Frau Goldstein doesn’t know Seroa, so on every other Tuesday I can talk gibberish to my heart’s content! I send her smacking kisses and other rude noises down the microphone, and she squints at me and frowns suspiciously. She knows I’m teasing her, but she feels there’s always a remote possibility that my smackers might indeed be Seroan, as rendered in a refined mediaeval Lesotho accent!’
    For all his cast-iron cheerfulness, though, I could tell that Kwiatkowski was suffering. At table on occasions he would seem to withdraw completely, as though he’d lost consciousness and all that remained of him was an automaton, staring into thin air with frightened eyes, hands trembling. On such occasions, we were supposed to call the nurse, but none of us felt like putting the colonel into Frau Goldstein’s clutches; he’d be put into isolation, and we were all secretly convinced that that was the last thing he needed, so we’d carry on talking calmly among ourselves. Mrs Popescu took it upon herself to make sure that he didn’t tip over plates or drop cutlery during his absences, which might last several minutes. When at last he had shaken off the vice-like grip of whatever it was that was making mincemeat of his brain, Kwiatkowski would carry on sounding off in his ringing tones as though nothing had happened; but he knew that he had had an attack, and that we had protected him. Mrs Popescu would whisper something into his ear in Polish, and he’d give us a mild, grateful look. A sort of solidarity had been established around our table; we would protect and help each other, or perhaps simply respect each other. No one tried to encourage the silent Vidmajer to speak; Kwiatkowski himself never tried to rile him, preferring to concentrate his fire on the stolid Ortega, who would take it all with a smile. Together we would handle Vandekerkhove’s blackouts, waiting for them to pass of their own accord, and then we would answer his tortuous questions patiently. We all held Mrs Popescu in high regard; she was very reserved and shy;