Diego Marani - The Interpreter

Sometimes I even feel homesick for Dr Barnung’s clinic and its iron discipline; I realise with amazement that the months spent in that sunny laboratory repeating exercises in Romanian may have been the happiest of my life. Perhaps there was method in his madness; perhaps all that Romanian really did do me good. Somehow, that light, lilting language made my inner rift easier to bear, went some way towards healing the wound I feel throbbing within me in my long hours of solitude — unlike Estonian, which is a stealthy, thorny language, full of barbs, sinking itself into the mind like a fishhook and never letting go.

Quite recently, I have begun to pray; I creep into church of a morning and kneel down with the unbeliever’s mild sense of guilt. All I am asking is to understand: if I am being punished, all I ask is to know why. If I am but a trifle batted to and fro by the talons of fate, I ask God for a sign. If he truly is omnipotent, I ask him to free me of this punishment, or to have done with me once and for all. If he can do nothing for me, I ask him to enable me to abandon hope. But, looking at the crucifix on the altar, there in the silence of that lonely little wooden church, I am suddenly struck by the awful feeling that it is I who am a mistake, that all humanity is just an accident, that God himself is a dolphin, up there in his heaven, whistling mockingly at my prayers, flapping his fins and waving his snout in the celestial heights of a watery paradise.