Interpreters Read Online Free

that moment – and then he looked up again at the station clock. And suddenly there was my mother coming towards us with a porter pushing a trolley, and the man in the trilby looked at her and then nodded in my direction and said – I remember it so clearly – ‘ So! Hier ist der kleine Käse-Kopf. ’ Do you speak German?
    I don’t, I’m afraid.
    That’s what he said: ‘ Hier ist der kleine Käse-Kopf .’ And he said it with a sort of smile so that for months – for months – I thought he had said something very nice about me.
    What had he said?
    It means ‘little cheese head’. What? What’s the matter?
    Nothing. You laughed.
    Did I? I can’t think why.
    Carry on.
    My mother said, ‘Shake hands with your father.’ And I thought – what father? I don’t have a father.
    Did you think he was dead?
    I don’t think I’d ever given it a moment’s thought. I was perfectly happy with my mother. I really don’t think I ever wondered if I even had a father.
    You never wondered if you had a father?
    No. Is that so very terrible?
    Not at all. Carry on.
    It seems that, one day, he just wrote and sent for us. And so we went.
    And why do you think he sent for you?
    I haven’t got a clue. I asked my mother – much later, of course – but she didn’t seem to know any more than me. Or at least she didn’t want to discuss it.
    Where had they met?
    Is that important?
    I just wondered.
    In Amsterdam. So my mother told me. When he was working there for some German engineering company and she was teaching in a school nearby.
    And they married?
    They did.
    And then what happened?
    He went back to Germany shortly before I was born and had nothing more to do with us.
    Why was that?
    I’ve no idea.
    Did your mother never discuss it? Later on?
    I don’t think so.
    Did he support you?
    He might have sent my mother money, but I don’t know if he did. I never found out why he changed his mind and sent for us. Maybe he was fed up with living on his own. A wife was probably cheaper than a housekeeper. Maybe he didn’t want a Dutch child – a Dutch wife was bad enough – so he wanted me to grow up German. I don’t know. And so there I was in Berlin – a cheese head.
    And how did you feel? About suddenly coming to Berlin?
    Feel? I don’t know. But I was sure everything would be all right in the end. I was sure that my mother would take me home again very soon once we’d spent a day or two with this man she called my father. 

Chapter Two
    Eynsford Park Estate is a tribute to the architectural glory of the 1960s, whose designers favoured the style of building most small children will produce if prevailed upon to draw a house. All that is missing are the sun’s rays and the little black ‘m’s flying joyfully in the sky. When we moved here from a hospital flat in Bloomsbury the cement was still drying; the white paint on the timber cladding still gleamed; the newly seeded grass was only just beginning to clothe the bald verges. Our house, in Tenterden Close, was one of eight built round a circular green. For my mother it was like living in a Sartre play – only one way in and no way out. For us – for Max and me – it was heaven.
    The first thing I notice as I drive into the cul-de-sac are the trees. On the green are three mature silver birches. For a moment I wonder how and when they got there. Then I realise that they are the saplings that used to serve us so well as rounders posts, as home in our games of ‘It’, as poles to grab on to and swing round and round until, too dizzy to stand up, we would collapse, shrieking with laughter, on to the grass. The trees are only a couple of years younger than I am. They have aged rather better.
    I pull up outside number four, eject the cassette and switch off the engine. I sit in the car and look at the back door which, as with all the identical houses round the green, is at the side of the house. And I see the six-year-old me going up to it. In her school uniform –