Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [104]
“True.” He smiled again, looking quite happy. Then he took Charlie’s shirt from her and walked around toward the kitchen while changing into it. He took another towel from her and toweled off his head. “Thanks. Here, can I put this in your dryer? Down in the basement, right?” He stepped over the baby gate, went downstairs. “Thanks Anna,” he called back up to her. “I feel better now.” When he came back up, the sound of the dryer on behind him, he smiled again. “A lot better.”
“You must have liked this woman!”
“I did. It’s true, I did. I can’t believe I didn’t get her name!”
“You will. Want a beer?”
“You bet I do.”
“In the door of the fridge. Oops, there’s the door again, here come the rest.”
Soon the Khembalis and many other friends and acquaintances from NSF filled the Quiblers’ little living room and the dining room flanking it, and the kitchen beyond the dining room. Anna rushed back and forth from the yellow kitchen through the dining room to the living room, carrying drinks and trays of food. She enjoyed this, and was doing it more than usual to keep Charlie from doing too much and inflaming his poison ivy. As she hurried around she enjoyed seeing Joe playing with Drepung, and Nick discussing Antarctic dinosaurs with Curt from the office right above hers; he was one of the U.S. Antarctic Program managers. That NSF also ran one of the continents of the world was something she tended to forget, but Curt had come to the talk, and liked it. “These Buddhist guys would go over big in McMurdo,” he told Nick. Meanwhile Charlie, skin devastated to a brown crust across wide regions of his neck and face, eyes brilliantly bloodshot with sleep deprivation and steroids, was absorbed in conversation with Sucandra. Then he noticed her running around and joined her in the kitchen to help. “I gave Frank one of your shirts,” she told him.
“I saw. He said he got soaked.”
“Yes. I think he was chasing around after a woman he met on the Metro.”
“What?”
She laughed. “I think it’s great. Go sit down, babe, don’t move your poor torso, you’ll make yourself itchy.”
“I’ve transcended itchiness. I’m only itchy for you.”
“Come on don’t. Go sit down.”
Only later in the evening did she see Frank again. He was sitting in the corner of the room, on the floor between the couch and the fireplace, quizzing Drepung about something or other. Drepung looked as if he was struggling to understand him. Anna was curious, and when she got a chance she sat down on the couch just above the two of them.
Frank nodded to her and then continued pressing a point, using one of his catchphrases: “But how does that work?”
“Well,” Drepung said, “I know what Rudra Cakrin says in Tibetan, obviously. His import is clear to me. Then I have to think what I know of English. The two languages are different, but so much is the same for all of us.”
“Deep grammar,” Frank suggested.
“Yes, but also just nouns. Names for things, names for actions, even for meanings. Equivalencies of one degree or another. So, I try to express my understanding of what Rudra said, but in English.”
“But how good is the correspondence?”
Drepung raised his eyebrows. “How can I know? I do the best I can.”
“You would need some kind of exterior test.”
Drepung nodded. “Have other Tibetan translators listen to the rimpoche, and then compare their English versions to mine. That would be very interesting.”
“Yes it would. Good idea.”
Drepung smiled at him. “Double blind study, right?”
“Yes I guess so.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Drepung intoned, reaching out for a cracker with which to dip hummus. “But I expect you would get a certain, what, range. Maybe you would not uncover many surprises with your study. Maybe just that I personally am a bad translator. Although I must say, I have a tough job. When I don’t understand the rimpoche, translating him gets harder.”
“So you make it up!” Frank laughed. His spirits were still high, Anna saw. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along.