The interpreter's booth at the Hallvard Summit was , by common consent , the only room in the building where anything of consequence happened , and Ilse Marquand had occupied it for eleven years without once being mentioned in a communiqué . This suited her . Interpreters , like good plumbing , are noticed only when they fail , and Ilse's professional vanity , such as it was , consisted entirely in never having been noticed .
She had , over those eleven years , developed a private taxonomy of silence . There was the silence of a delegate who has lost his place in his notes , which lasts roughly four seconds and is accompanied by the small percussive sound of paper . There was the silence of simultaneous translation itself , that half - second lag between a sentence being spoken and its arrival in another language , which laymen mistake for hesitation and professionals know to be the width of the world . And there was the third kind , the rarest , which Ilse had encountered perhaps a dozen times : the silence in which a speaker , having said something he cannot retract , discovers in real time what it means .
It was this third silence that fell at 14 : 52 on the second afternoon , when the Minister for Maritime Affairs of one delegation , a tall , courteous man with the slightly embattled dignity of someone whose portfolio nobody at home could define , concluded a lengthy intervention on fishing quotas with a sentence that , in his own language , was an idiom of mild exasperation , and in literal translation was an unambiguous threat .
Ilse heard it . She heard it in the original , with its shrug of weariness , and she heard , a fraction of a second later , its other possible life in the language she was about to speak . The two versions lay before her like a fork in a road she had a quarter of a second to choose between . Fidelity to the words would be a betrayal of the meaning ; fidelity to the meaning would require her to say something the man had not , strictly , said . Either way , somebody would be entitled to feel deceived .
What she did instead has since been described , by the one colleague who understood what had happened , as the longest pause in the history of the booth . It lasted , by the recording , one and nine - tenths of a second . In that interval the Minister , hearing nothing in his earpiece and glancing up at the glass , caught the interpreter's eye , and saw in it not reproach , nor panic , but something closer to a question . He heard , perhaps for the first time , his own sentence as a stranger might hear it . He cleared his throat , and said , in his own language , " That is to say , we would find such an outcome deeply regrettable , " which Ilse rendered at once , with evident relief , into a phrase that nobody in the room would remember by dinner .
The summit concluded without incident . The communiqué , drafted at three in the morning by people who had stopped reading what they wrote , spoke of constructive dialogue . The Minister retired two years later and took up watercolours . Ilse continued in the booth for a further decade , and was never , to the end of her career , mentioned anywhere .
She did , however , keep one souvenir : a note , passed through the booth's hatch during the afternoon coffee break , in the Minister's angular handwriting . It consisted of a single word , in her language rather than his , with a small , careful drawing beside it of a fork in a road . The word was " Thank " . He had , she assumed , run out of time before the " you " . She found that she preferred it that way , and understood that he had known she would .