An Interpreter in Vienna | Introduction

Cher Grégoire et Julie...

Marie Thibaut is a new interpreter for the French government in Vienna. Despite strange locals and diplomats alike, she is enamored by the promise of the utopian city. But Marie’s life is complicated when she attempts to be someone important and encounters strange historical crossroads. She enters the Viennese spy world and becomes disoriented in cultural exchanges and uncanny experiences.

Will Marie’s mind succumb to phobias, layered meanings, and isolation or will she persevere and find the right allies with whom she may do good in the world? Marie tells this tale as a long letter to her employer, Grégoire Lefebvre, and his wife Julie in an attempt to clear her name in the hours before mysterious Josef arrives at her door…at the threshold where she believes one of them will die.

An Interpreter in Vienna is a response to Graham Greene's The Third Man and a psychological thriller serialized on The Matterhorn each Saturday.

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An Interpreter in Vienna

Kathleen Clare Waller
©2024

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Interpreter

noun: a person whose job is to translate what someone is saying into another language

Also: a person who performs a piece of music or a role in a play in that clearly shows their ideas about its meaning

Guildenstern: No…no…not for us, not like that. Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over…Death is not anything…death is not…It’s the absence of presence, nothing more…the endless time of never coming back…a gap you can’t see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound…

            —Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1967

I am the interpreter. I quickly change languages before your eyes and I transpose what I read and what I see into an act. Others see my work as a simple translation of foreign tongues that will soon be cured by computers. It is a drama I cannot always control; my behaviors are iterations of my surroundings. I read everything, not only books and films but also the streets around me and the people who inhabit them. All of these things are interpreted through me…

I live in the in-between, in the ellipsis. I play with words, turn them on their heads.

This art is invisible. Nobody sees me. It is only powerful if the observations and creations can be enacted.

I just wanted to be something more. I wanted to be somebody.

This desire, it nearly killed me.

Vienna, 2019 [photo by the author]

Grégoire et Julie Lefebvre¹
Am Modenapark 16, tür 32
Wien 1030
ÖSTERREICH / AUSTRIA

June 28, 2020²

Cher Grégoire et Julie,

Please read this in entirety before you make any judgment on my actions. I am waiting for Josef to arrive but have a couple of hours to tell my story while he is on the train from Budapest. If you are reading this, then one or both of us is dead. I will write to you in English in case you may need to use this in wider circles to clear my name.

There is nowhere for me to run. You both know how dangerous he is. I have decided to face this problem and hopefully protect some people, including yourselves. As someone who is alone, I don’t have much to lose. Except for Ishmael, I guess. Perhaps you can look after him, too, in that case? If you have this letter and Ishmael is in my apartment, please rescue him.

My soul has become a dull rock turned hard by fear. I don’t feel like myself anymore. This past year here has changed me so I don’t even recognise my face in the mirror.

I guess more than avoiding wider judgment, writing this down is an act of absolution for myself. The account attempts to peel off layers of filth that seemed to surround me in Vienna like a thickening toxic steam.

I seek words when I feel this way. Trying to orient myself back to who I am.

Sometimes I like to look up words when I feel anxious. I guess it’s the way some people look out from the mountains or at a painting in a museum.

Not just look them up, really investigate them. I check out the etymology, the different possibilities for pronunciation, the evolution of usage…words are alive. What I’m writing here; it’s a part of me but it also lives on its own, ungoverned by the mortal clock you and I face.

When I’m working among languages, there’s even more left for interpretation. Maybe that was my pharmakon³, my remedy and my poison. The joy of these linguistic exchanges and deceptions blinded me from the related dangers.

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I’ve got to go back to the beginning. I mean, when I arrived in this strange city. Everyone told me it was the best place in the world to live. Maybe that’s true if you keep to yourself or at least ignore anything out of the ordinary.

I need something to take my mind off of this imminent threat; I’m all alone in this apartment with Ishmael who is curled up on top of my feet. Maybe one day you can read this and understand why I had to kill this man. The police won’t believe me. From unspoken fear, they ignore anything to do with the East and, anyway, they already think I’m crazy. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Murder is the only logical and ethical act. We’ll all be saved from his danger.

Please promise me you will read this before you make any judgments and you will get this into the right hands when needed. You are the only ones I still trust.

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To be continued…

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1. See Henri Lefebvre.

2. From New Zealand History: “The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo (the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina) on 28 June 1914 eventually led to the outbreak of the First World War.”

3. Plato, Derrida — see discourse. I also devoted a podcast to this topic in December 2023 (episode 39).