How do you translate porla into English? I know this one. Years ago it turned up in work I did, but, as all words are doing these days, it’s meaning has slipped into my past. I go to my light birch-wood shelves and trail my fingers along the folders of past translations. Dust caterpillars beneath my finger. At least five shelves are filled with paper copies from the days before the internet, when the word was ink not a flashing cursor.
Porla. Now I have an easier way to find its meaning. I could cross my office again, press the shallow black button with the horseshoe symbol until the screen glows and type it in. Still these days I don’t work at my computer. I have it at the other side of the office, away from the light that streams in my window reflected on suspended populations of dust hanging above my desk. I could bring up a search page and merely typing the word in would give me its meaning. But I know somewhere in these files I’ve used it before.
I look at the names written on the sides of the folders. They are fabric bound, green or orange for alternate years. The handwritten labels on the spines of those furthest down the shelves have faded. My writing has changed over the years from upright steady characters to bent cowering figures. It could have been in ’82. I crouch down on my heels so my head is level with the second shelf. I used to remember translations I had done and find the passages with special words, even twenty years later, with no trouble.
I open the January folder for 1982. Inside the paper has crisped and thinned with time although out of view of the sunshine it is still white. But I don’t recognise the texts. I try to remember the winter of ’82. Eve must have been pregnant with Viggo, I was painting the bedrooms the colour that is still on the walls. A pale blue like a sky folded over clouds. The water in our well froze for three weeks so we gathered snow like summer flowers in great baskets because that is all we had. We melted it on the stove and scooped steaming ladles of water over one another in the shower room.
I flick through the translations I made all those years ago. Visit Gotland. The Swedish Model. The Collected Works of Stefan Sjöström. I cannot place porla. I go back to my desk and pick up the translation I am working on instead. Medical history: Renal failure, previous stroke, diabetes, rectal cancer, lung metastases. It doesn’t look good. Referred for ECG. 23/12/15. Further down the page the doctor’s notes push for an earlier date so that diagnosis can be made before the doctor goes on holiday. Then lists of drugs and blood test results. A whole vocabulary of science and precision to cover up the dying of a man.
Then I remember Porla. A spring water source near Hasselfors. I translated a tourist brochure about the water. It must have been in the ’90s as I remember we drove down to Gothenburg and stopped on the way. I wanted to try the water, give some to Eve. It was said to have healing properties. Patients were sent to the source to drink the healing water. We left the motorway and took winding country roads up to Porla, the windows down, the breeze ruffling Viggo’s hair, muting his chatter. The visit revealed little other than an industrial bottling plant and stacks of hard plastic pallets piled up on the concrete outside. The old spa was not open to the public and despite the summer’s verdant greenery and warmth on our backs, Eve did not feel well enough to get out the car. I bought her and Viggo some water and we drove in silence back to the motorway. It wasn’t the Porla I was looking for. And it is not the porla I am looking for now.
I put down the medical translation and sit back in my chair. Outside the window everything is as usual. The spring’s warmth has set a pulse in the earth. The branches of the lilacs are responding by producing tiny green leaves at the very tips of their spindly branches. Bluebells dot the earth. A bee whirls towards the window then turns at the last minute soaring upwards. The cranes across the fields honk and bellow, the northern lapwings have returned to trace hysterical patterns in the air. On my desk is a circle burned in the wood, where Eve placed the stove-top kettle. My fingers find their way back to it every day, tracing the ring, round and round, as I think of words that are further and further from my mind.
I read on about the dying man. He had a fall. His wife finds him on the floor by the bed. He recovers with little injury but his fingertips keep tingling and he finds it hard to make a fist. I wonder if their trip to A&E was anything like our trips. The arduous task of explaining to yet another doctor where this new symptom may fit in to a medical history the length of a novel. The man and his wife meet an enthusiastic doctor, revealed in her conscientious notes, deliberate and detailed and punctuated with hypotheses and question marks. The shadows are around his neurological reactions. The humiliating circus tricks to test your brain. Stand on one foot. Now with your eyes closed. Now touch your nose. Tap your palm. Turn your fingers. Screw a light bulb. Almost fun despite the dying.
The next page lists the medications prescribed. A programme of consumption that must require a timetable to remember and schedule. Interspersed by dialysis. Then a cancelled heart operation. Then a final heart attack. Then death. The insurance company needs it quickly so I go over to the dark corner with the computer and switch it on. Wait while it whirrs and groans into blue life. Then type up my translation. Once it is complete I reach beneath the desk and uncoil a cable and plug it into the computer. More whirring. Then all at once I am on the internet, connected to a hundred billion other beings. It doesn’t feel much less lonely.
Viggo was here at the weekend promising an easier life online if I’d just agree to getting leashed to better equipment. Everything would be better with faster internet. I open the mail programme, which takes its time to consider the benefits of opening up. Then slowly type the email, attach the translation and send it off into the air.
In the background, a xylophone of pings cascade into the room. I click on something blinking. A series of emails rattle onto the screen. Mostly automated, coded notifications from modern translation agencies. I used to work with publishers, poets and writers who tiptoed around the language. I could feel their fingerprints in the paper, as if I was holding a mug hand thrown by a potter. Now I receive batches, which are sent to several translators and whoever jumps in first with the cheapest offer gets the deal. I am rarely fast enough. My jobs end up being the last minute, holiday and out of office hours ones. The ones nobody else takes. I ignore them all and switch the machine off again.

***

Viggo has been and gone. I watched him leave from my desk by the window, which needs cleaning. He is suggesting I leave this house and come to stay with him and Vera. I opened the window to see him more clearly as he walked to his car. The broad shoulders, slightly leaning to the right, a whisper of a skip when he walks. He frightened a flutter of coal tits who flurried up out of the empty branches of the lilac. He says I would not have to think of internet or jobs if I lived with them. I could stop working, do what others do post-work. Drink coffee and do crosswords and read books.
I make dinner of pickled fish, boiled potatoes and soured cream and eat it in the green armchair. Eve used to sit here after tea, watching out the window for birds, reading and telling me about her day all at once. The chair has shifted into her shape, curved and soft and worn. I can almost feel her arm beneath mine. The long bones of her forearm and the tiny wrist.
I hear a bang from upstairs. When I get there, I see I forgot to close the window and the wind has caught it whipping it open and banging against the outside of the house. The same breeze has grabbed sheets of paper from the desk and pushed them to the floor.
I put my head and arm out of the window to reach around to bring it back. Across the garden I see the old swing hanging dilapidated in the apple tree. Eve and I squeezed on it together when I first built it, before Viggo. We barely fitted but arms entwined swung beneath the blossom until we fell off, giggling. Then I remember porla is a bubbling, an effervescent murmur. The deep gurgle of laughter you cannot contain inside. That bursts out when you fall off a swing with Eve. It is no wonder I couldn’t recall it as it has been an eternity since I laughed with porla.