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hands it to Grace, who sidles down the ward to a telephone—reluctantly, because by now she doesn’t want to miss anything. And it is at this moment that our patient, as if roused from a bad dream, sits bolt upright with all his tubes in him and demands in the coarse and graphic manner of his native Kinyarwanda
fuck my mother what is wrong with me
and why did the police drag him here against his will?—which is when Hannah, in an English weakened by emotion, asks me to interpret the
precise words
she is about to say to him, not adding or subtracting anything, Salvo, please, however much you might wish to do so personally out of consideration for our patient—
our patient
being by now a paramount concept to both of us. And I, in a voice equally weakened, assure her I would not presume to embellish anything she ever said, regardless of how painful it might be to me.
    ‘We have sent for the Registrar and he will come as soon as he can,’ Hannah is pronouncing deliberately, while also pausing in a more intelligent manner than many of my clients to allow me time for my rendering. ‘I have to inform you, Jean-Pierre, that you are suffering from an acute blood disorder which in my judgment is too advanced for us to cure. I am very sorry but we must accept the situation.’
    Yet there is real hope in her eyes as she speaks, a clear and joyful focus on redemption. If Hannah can handle news as bad as this, you feel, then Jean-Pierre ought to be able to handle it too, and so should I. And when I have rendered her message as best I can—
precise words
being somewhat of a layman’s delusion since few Rwandans of this poor man’s standing are conversant with such concepts as acute blood disorder—she gets him to repeat back to her via me what she just said so that she knows he knows, and he knows he does too, and I know both of them know and there’s no fudging of the lines.
    And when Jean-Pierre has gruffly repeated her message, and I’ve again rendered it, she asks me: does Jean-Pierre have wishes while he waits for his relatives to arrive? Which is code as we both know for telling him he will very likely die before they get here. What she doesn’t ask, so I don’t, is why he’s been sleeping rough on the Heath and not back at home with his wife and kids. But I sense that she regards such personal questions as an intrusion upon his privacy, just as I do. For why would a Rwandan man want to go and die on Hampstead Heath if he didn’t want to be private?
    Then I notice that not only is she holding our patient’s hand but she’s holding mine too. And Grace notices it and is impressed, though not in a prurient way, because Grace knows, as I know, that her friend Hannah is not given to holding hands with just any interpreter. Yet there they are, my calf-brown, half-Congolese hand and Hannah’s authentic all-black version with its pinky-white palm, both of them entwined on an enemy Rwandan’s bed. And it’s not about sex—how can it be, with Jean-Pierre dying between us?—it’s about discovered kinship and consoling each other while we’re giving our all to our shared patient. It’s because she’s deeply moved, and so am I. She is moved by the poor dying man, even though she sees such men all day and every day of her week. She is moved that we are caring for our perceived enemy, and loving him according to the Gospel she’s been brought up to, as I can tell by her gold cross. She is moved by my voice. Each time I interpret from Swahili to Kinyarwanda and back again, she lowers her eyes as if in prayer. She is moved because, as I am trying to tell her with my eyes if only she will listen, we are the people we have been looking for all our lives.

    I won’t say we held hands from then on because we didn’t, but we kept our inner eyes on each other. She could have her long back to me, be stooping over him, lifting him, caressing his cheek or checking the machines that Grace had fixed to him. But every time she turned