The grandmother said something that made the bride laugh with her mouth full.
Across the table, the groom waited. He had a piece of ribbon stuck to his sleeve and kept brushing it without looking down, so that each attempt secured it more firmly to the damp wool. The interpreter could have removed it. Instead she laid her hands beside her unused knife.
“She says you must look after each other.”
The bride stopped laughing.
That was the interpreter's mistake: making it solemn. A grandmother might say such a thing, but not with that crooked finger pointed at a man's trousers.
“Is that all?” the groom asked.
“An expression. It doesn't carry across.”
He nodded, grateful to have been spared a joke about his sexual capabilities. He was a schoolteacher from the capital, where the mountain language was allowed in songs but not in lessons. Every child could perform it beautifully without knowing what was being sung.
The interpreter herself had once taught songs. After the winter closures she had taken work at hotels. Conferences paid better than weddings, but conferences required her to put on headphones and say only the sentences that arrived already approved on the screen. At a wedding people would sometimes forget her occupation and offer her food.
The grandmother spoke again. She had one tooth in the lower jaw, which appeared to bear the whole burden of her amusement.
“I know that word,” said the groom. “I heard it at the checkpoint.”
The bride's father reached for the wine, then set the bottle down without pouring. At the next table the hotel's liaison officer was eating the little sugared almonds one at a time. His jacket hung on his chair. Even without it, everyone knew where he worked.
“Several words have a similar sound,” the interpreter said.
The grandmother took the bride's wrist. She repeated her sentence slowly, with the patience she might have given a child trying to thread a needle. The word came twice. First a small room attached to a house; then a condition of being left alone inside it. The old language made no distinction. You could build it or ask for it.
The interpreter had last said it aloud to her husband, years before they separated. He had been standing in the bathroom doorway while she tried to vomit. She had not meant liberty. She had meant shut the door.
The groom turned to her. “Was she talking about politics?”
“She's talking about marriage.”
“Then tell me.”
The bride looked at the liaison officer. He had found a cracked almond and was using a fingernail to work the sugar out of it. She looked back at the interpreter, who had been paid in advance, who could leave as soon as the speeches were finished, who would not have to eat breakfast in this family tomorrow.
“She says,” the interpreter began, “that you must build your wife a room where you cannot hear what she is doing.”
The groom laughed. Then he glanced at his new wife and made the laugh smaller.
“What would you do in there?”
“Sleep.”
The grandmother slapped the table. Some wine splashed onto the interpreter's cuff.
“And what is the word?” he asked.
The interpreter said it. Her voice caught on the second syllable, making it sound like a question. She said it again.
Two tables away, a waiter dropped a spoon. Nobody turned towards the sound. The liaison officer was watching them now, the bare almond held between his finger and thumb.
The groom tried the word. He made it harsh, with the consonants of the capital. The bride corrected him, not quietly. On his third attempt the grandmother nodded.
Music began at the far end of the room. The hotel band had mistaken the pause for the end of the speeches. A man in a satin waistcoat offered the bride his hand and she stood, rearranging the skirt beneath her chair before stepping free.
The interpreter touched her own wet sleeve. She was trembling, and the trembling disgusted her a little: the room had been spoken, nothing had been built.
“Will you translate the next speech?” the bride asked.
“Of course.”
“All of it, please. My brother can be very rude.”
Then she went to dance, leaving the interpreter with her chair angled out from the table and the groom still practising, under his breath, how to ask for a shut door.
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