You May Speak

Mireille Dorsainvil was paid, and paid well, to say exactly what powerful men told her to.

"—and I will not be told, from this rostrum or any other, that my people must be patient, by governments who have never once in their history been asked to wait for anything."

Mireille said it in a man's anger with none of the man's volume. That was the craft. The fury went into the verbs and the timing, and her voice stayed low and level in the headset of every delegate on the floor who did not have French. Below the glass, the President of a small republic whose name she would not say aloud outside this booth had put his prepared text face down on the green marble and was speaking to the General Assembly as if it had personally stolen from him.

He had been on page four of eleven. The booth had the script, highlighted and tabbed, and it was no use to her now. Hilde slid it aside without a sound and laid a clean pad in its place, in case of numbers.

"You speak to us of reform," the President said in French, and Mireille said it in English a second and a half behind him, "you speak to us of reform as if reform were a gift you bring in a box. We have reformed. We reformed after the coup, and after the flood, and after the earth itself—"

He stopped. Nine hundred people in the Hall stopped with him. Mireille held her breath in the silence, because in the booth you never filled a silence that belonged to the speaker, and then he started again, quieter, which was worse.

She dropped her voice with his. Quieter meant closer to the microphone, so she went closer too, and the delegates listening in English heard a tired man instead of a furious one, precisely when the tired man arrived. She rendered his proverb as a proverb and not as a translation of one. She caught the figure he gave for the debt, and Hilde had already written it on the pad and underlined it twice, and Mireille said it without looking down. When he said merci and walked away from the rostrum without waiting for the applause, she said "Thank you," and gave it exactly the weight he had given it, which was none. Then she pressed the cough key, took off the headset, and put both palms flat on the desk.

"Twenty-two minutes," Hilde said. "The text was fourteen."

"The text was a hostage note. He ate it." Mireille rolled her shoulders back until something at the base of her neck let go. "Did you see the Deputy Secretary-General? She did the thing with her pen. The little tap. Tap, tap. That's diplomatic for somebody please shoot me."

"I saw."

"And the man from the Nordic group fell asleep on the flood. Right on the flood. Somebody should tell his mother." She reached for her water, found it empty, and kept talking while she stood to refill it from the jug on the shelf behind them, which was a thing you could do in a booth only if you were five foot seven and knew exactly where your elbows were. "Also, the whole second half of the Hall had their headsets off for the first four pages, and then he goes off-script and every single delegate is fumbling for channel two like it's a fire drill. I love it. I love when they need us."

Hilde looked at her over the reading glasses, which hung from a thin chain and spent most of the day halfway down her nose. She was fifty-six, square and freckled, with wiry grey hair cropped so short it looked like an opinion. In six years of sharing a glass box the size of a closet, Mireille had learned that the look over the glasses was a paragraph.

"What," Mireille said.

"Nothing. You were very good."

"I'm always very good. That's why they put me on the heads of state and put the new boy on the Fifth Committee." She sat, crossed her legs, and smoothed her skirt over her knee. The skirt was charcoal wool, cut close from the waist to just below the knee, with a back vent she had had taken up half an inch, and the blouse above it was ivory silk with a soft bow at the throat that she had untied at eleven and never retied. In the glass she could see herself faintly against the gold of the Hall: the pressed black bob with its hard side part, the small gold hoops, the deep brown of her own face lit from beneath by the console lamp. She looked, she thought, like a woman who had everything handled. She had looked like that for years. It was the best interpretation she did.

The next speaker was a foreign minister reading steadily in English, which went out to the French channel from the booth next door and meant the two of them were off. Hilde unscrewed a thermos of the sour tea she had drunk for as long as Mireille had known her. Mireille unwrapped a granola bar and told her, with gestures, about a delegation aide who had tried to get into the booth corridor that morning with a garment bag and a passionate belief that it was a shortcut, and she did the aide's accent and then the guard's, and then her own face at the moment the garment bag unzipped itself on the stairs. Hilde laughed silently into the tea, as she did every time, with her shoulders.

The day went on the way high-level week went on, which was all at once and forever. Another head of state, prepared and courteous. A prime minister with a cold. A closed-door breakfast readout that someone had forgotten to send the booth, so that Mireille had to take the names of four ministers cold and get all four of them right. At three there was a long statement in French about fisheries so dense with numbers that Hilde wrote a whole column of them, and Mireille read it off the pad in the clean, even voice she used for numbers, the one delegates told her supervisor they could fall asleep to and wake up knowing the tonnage.

Between turns she talked. She talked about the canteen and its heroic commitment to beige. She talked about the young interpreter on the Arabic booth who had a crush on a Canadian security officer and was going to do something about it, Mireille could feel it, before Friday. She did the Deputy Secretary-General's pen. She did the man from the Nordic group waking up. She did the President's proverb again, in French and then in English, to show Hilde how she had turned it, and Hilde nodded and said ja and wrote nothing down.

At a quarter to seven the last speaker of the session left the rostrum. The lights in the Hall came up a stop, and the room below them loosened into the sound of nine hundred people standing at once. Mireille wound her headset cord into its figure eight, and Hilde clicked the thermos shut and did not get up.

"Mireille."

"Hilde."

"May I tell you something I noticed?"

"You're going to anyway. You have your noticing face on."

Hilde took her glasses off and let them drop onto the chain. Without them her eyes were a pale, washed blue, and they were always kinder than Mireille was ready for.

"You have talked all day," Hilde said. "Since eight this morning. In the booth, on the mike, off the mike, in the corridor. You have been the President and the minister with the cold and the girl in the Arabic booth and the guard and the Deputy Secretary-General's pen." She folded the arms of the glasses closed. "And I have been listening, because it is the job and I cannot stop. You have not said one word today that was yours."

Mireille opened her mouth to answer and found a joke sitting there, ready. It was a good one, about how that was the job description, and she could hear exactly how she would deliver it. She didn't.

"That's not—" she said, and stopped, because she didn't know what it was not.

"Maybe I am wrong." Hilde stood, tucked the thermos into her bag and patted Mireille's shoulder twice through the silk, the way she did when Mireille had nailed a hard passage. "Go home. Eat something not beige."

Fort Greene at nine was warm for late September and smelled like somebody on the block was grilling. Mireille climbed the stoop of the brownstone, let herself into the parlor-floor apartment she had bought four years ago after one very good year of freelance summits, and stood in the dark of her own front room without turning on the light.

It was quiet. It was a quality of quiet she paid for. The windows were double glazed. The radiator had not come on yet for the season. She heard the refrigerator in the kitchen and a car door on South Portland and nothing else.

She stepped out of her flats. She did not change. She stood at the long window in the ivory blouse and the charcoal skirt with her stockinged feet on the cool floorboards and looked out at the plane trees, and for no reason she could name, she ran the day back from the beginning, the way she ran a speech back sometimes on the subway to see where she could have been faster.

She went through every sentence she could recall. The President: his. The fisheries: theirs. The four ministers' names: theirs, correct, verified. The canteen joke: a joke she had made, in some form, every September for six years. The girl in the Arabic booth: a story about someone else. The aide with the garment bag: a story about someone else, in two borrowed accents. The Deputy Secretary-General's pen: an impersonation, which was just interpretation with the sound turned up.

She went further back. The barista at the cart on First Avenue: medium, oat, thank you. Her supervisor: yes, I've got the Wednesday slot. The doorman at the Secretariat: morning. She kept going and found only other people's lines, or lines so worn they might as well have belonged to anybody, and somewhere around Monday she lost her nerve and stopped looking.

Her phone buzzed on the hall table. She knew who it was before she picked it up. There was only one person who called at nine-fifteen at night.

"Alò, Manman."

"Ah, pitit mwen." Her mother's voice arrived in Kreyòl as it always did, all at once and already halfway through something. "I saw you. Well, I didn't see you. I saw that man, the President, on the news, and they had the English underneath for your Uncle Réginald, who pretends he doesn't understand French when it suits him, and I said to him, that's Mireille, that's my daughter's voice under there. He didn't believe me. Was it you?"

"It was me."

"I knew it. I told him." A clatter of pots. Her mother was always cooking when she called, even when there was nothing to cook. "Ou manje?"

"Wi, Manman. I ate." A granola bar at eleven. Most of a sandwich somewhere after two.

"You didn't eat."

"I ate a little."

"Come Sunday. Your cousin is bringing the new baby. You'll hold her and you'll eat."

"I'll come Sunday." She would. She always did.

Her mother talked, and Mireille listened, and answered. The baby's name, which everyone had opinions about. Father Joseph's knee. The price of plantain on Church Avenue, which was criminal, a crime against the diaspora, somebody should interpret that at the United Nations. Mireille laughed where the laugh went. She said wi and non and ki moun? and li fou in the right places, and she heard herself doing it with the same easy, exact timing she had given the President of a small republic that afternoon, and it went through her like cold water.

She was rendering her mother. She was listening for what the sentence wanted and giving it back, quick and warm and perfectly shaped, a second and a half behind.

"Mireille? You're quiet."

"I'm tired, Manman."

"Ki jan ou ye, vrèman?" How are you, really. Her mother asked it every call, and every call Mireille said m byen, I'm fine, and tonight she stood at the window with the words already in her mouth and could not remember the last time she had said a sentence, in any of her three languages, that nobody had handed her first.

"M byen," she said. "Just tired. I'll see you Sunday."

"Sunday. Bring nothing, I have everything. Bring bread. Bondye bon."

"Bondye bon, Manman."

She put the phone face down on the table and stood there with her hand on it.

After a while she went into the bedroom and turned on the lamp by the bed, and in its light she unbuttoned the blouse from the throat down and let it slide off her shoulders, and unzipped the skirt and stepped out of it, and hung both on the same hanger the way she always did, the silk over the wool. In the mirror on the closet door she was a tall, straight-backed woman in a slip with a sleek bob that had not moved all day. She looked at the woman and waited for her to say something. The woman looked back and waited too.

The card was in the top drawer of her dresser, under a stack of conference badges from Vienna and Nairobi and Geneva that she kept for no reason. Heavy cream stock, no address, one word pressed so deep into the paper she could read it with her thumb in the dark. A friend had put it into her hand at a dinner in June, with a dry little remark about writing down what was true and hearing it read back, and Mireille had laughed and kept it and, a week later, at one in the morning, called the number underneath.

The appointment was Saturday at two. She had booked it in July. She had nearly cancelled it in August, when a friend's wedding gave her an excuse, and again in the second week of September, when the high-level schedule came out and gave her a better one, and again this morning in the car on the FDR, with her thumb over the number, rehearsing a perfectly courteous message about a conflict she did not have.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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