Not Interpreted

by Ursula K. Le Guin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

For two years Pramila Gurung believed that her name, in Latvian, was Meitiņ.

It was a reasonable belief. It was what Mrs Liepiņa called her, in room fourteen of the east wing of the Saltbush Gardens aged care home in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, every night when Pramila came in at ten with the water jug and the pad and the cream for her heels. "Meitiņ," the old woman would say, from the pillow, and lift her hand an inch off the blanket, which was as far as she lifted it anymore. Pramila would put the jug down and take the hand. She had worked out early on that the hand was the important part.

Ausma Liepiņa was ninety-six. She had been born in Latvia, in a district called Kurzeme, by the sea, in 1938, and had come to Australia as a child of eleven, and had spoken English for eighty-five years: at school, at the shirt factory, at the bank where she worked for thirty years after the factory, to her husband, who was Australian, and to her son, who was named Peter and lived in Perth. Then, around the age of ninety, the English began to go out of her, the way the tide goes out over a flat beach, so that you look up and it is half a mile off, and what was left on the sand was Latvian. The nurses said this happened. Deb Pearce, who ran the east wing, said she had seen it with Italians and Greeks and once with a Dutchman who had been a sea captain and at the end would only speak to the ceiling, in Dutch, about weather. The first language is laid down deepest. It is the last to go.

So for the last six years of her life, as it turned out, Mrs Liepiņa lived among people who could not understand a word she said, and she knew it, and they knew it, and they managed.

How they managed is worth describing, because nobody wrote it down at the time, and it is the kind of thing that is lost.

---

Pramila had come from Pokhara at twenty-three to study nursing, and had finished the course, and was waiting, as many people wait, for the visa and the registration and the exam that would let her work as a nurse; meanwhile she worked nights as a personal care worker, which is the job of turning people in their beds and changing them and getting them water and sitting with them when they cannot sleep. She was good at it. She had grown up in a house with her father's mother in it, and the grandmother had been the same kind of old as Mrs Liepiņa, the kind who is mostly elsewhere and comes back for short visits, and Pramila had learned there that what such people need from you is not conversation. It is that you be there when they come back.

Over two years she and Mrs Liepiņa had built something between them. An anthropologist would call it a pidgin, though it was smaller than any pidgin, and most of it was not words. There were perhaps forty words in it. Ūdens was water, and Pramila could say it now well enough to make the old woman nod. Auksti was cold, and meant the window. Mamma was a word Pramila did not need to learn. Gaisma meant the light, and, said in a certain voice, meant turn it off; in another voice, leave it. From Nepali, Mrs Liepiņa had learned pani, which is also water, and ho, which is yes, and sutnus, which is go to sleep and which Pramila had never meant to teach her, but had said so often, softly, at three in the morning, that the old woman would sometimes say it back, to Pramila, as if the younger woman were the one who needed to sleep. Which was true.

The rest was hands, and the time of night, and the weather, and the face.

At dusk, every evening, Mrs Liepiņa became afraid. The nurses called this sundowning. It has a clinical description and a list of recommended interventions. What it looked like was this: as the light went out of the window, the old woman would begin to talk fast, in a high voice, and try to sit up, and look at the door, and say the same few phrases over and over. Pramila was on nights, so she only saw the end of it, but the evening carers told her, and some evenings when the day ran late she saw it begin.

What Pramila had found, in her first month, by accident, was a song. She had been humming something of her own, a Nepali song her grandmother sang, while she did the cream; and Mrs Liepiņa had stopped talking and listened; and then, after a while, she had begun to sing, very faintly, something else. It was a short song, four lines, sung twice through, to a tune that went up and came back down to where it started, like someone climbing a stair and then sitting on the top step. Pramila did not understand a word of it. She learned it anyway, by sound, the way children learn songs in church, and after that, when the old woman was afraid, Pramila closed the curtains and sang it to her, badly, and Mrs Liepiņa would correct the bad parts in a whisper and then sing it with her, and then sleep.

That was how they managed.

---

The Language Access Standard came into force on the first of July. It said that every resident of an aged care facility had a right to be understood in the language of their choice, and it was a good law, and it had been fought for for years by people who had watched their parents die among strangers, and it was meant well, and it was mostly done well. It meant, in practice, that a small white device the size and shape of a river stone was put on the bedside table of every resident whose language was not English, and that every carer was issued an earpiece. The device was called a Clearly. It listened. When the resident spoke, the carer heard the words in English in her ear, a fraction of a second behind, in a calm voice that was neither a man's nor a woman's. When the carer spoke, the stone spoke too, in the resident's language, in the same voice.

It also wrote everything down. Every exchange went into the resident's care record as a transcript, which the nurses could read in the morning. And it listened for certain kinds of language, which the trainer, a young man named Callum with a lanyard and a tablet, called distress indicators. When it heard them it logged a distress event. Three distress events in twenty-four hours triggered a medication review.

"So it's not just translation," Callum said, at the training session in the staff room, to eleven carers who had just finished a double shift. "It's actually a safety tool. A lot of these people have been trying to tell us they're in pain for years. Now we'll know."

That was true too. Pramila thought of Mr Sandoval in room nine, whose hip had been broken for two days before anyone found out, because he had been saying so in Spanish.

---

The first night, she came into room fourteen at ten as she always did, with the jug and the pad and the cream, and the white stone was on the bedside table where the day staff had set it up, glowing a soft green.

"Meitiņ," said Mrs Liepiņa.

"Little daughter," said the voice in Pramila's ear.

She stood still, holding the jug.

The voice added, after a moment, as if it had noticed her stopping: "Diminutive. An affectionate form of address."

She put the jug down. She took the hand. "Hello, Mrs Liepiņa," she said, and the stone on the table said something in Latvian, in its neither voice, and the old woman's eyes moved from Pramila's face to the table and stayed there.

Nobody had spoken Latvian to Ausma Liepiņa in perhaps thirty years. Her husband had not known it. Her son had been raised in English, as children of that generation were, to fit in. The Latvian community in Adelaide was old when she was young, and was gone now, mostly; the hall where they had held their dances was sold. So the language had been, for six years, something that came out of her and went nowhere. And now it came back.

She talked to the stone for two hours.

Pramila sat on the chair by the bed and held her hand and heard, in her ear, in English, a life. A house near the sea with a red roof. A grandfather who kept bees. A night in October when her mother woke her and dressed her in two coats, one over the other, and they went down to the harbour with one suitcase and a feather pillow tied up in a sheet, and got on a ship that was full of soldiers and people with suitcases, and the ship went out in the dark, and in the morning there was no land. Germany. A camp, a long time in a camp, long enough to go to school there, with a Latvian teacher, in a wooden building. Another ship, a very long voyage, very hot, and a place in Victoria called Bonegilla where there were huts and gum trees and the English lessons, and her mother crying at night because of the heat. Adelaide. The shirt factory. The bank. A man named Ray, who was kind and who taught her to fish. All of this out of order, and much of it in the present tense, so that the voice in Pramila's ear said "We are on the ship. It is very dark," and then "Ray has caught a bream, he is so proud," and then "Mamma, where is the pillow," as if all of it were happening now, which, in room fourteen, it was.

Pramila had known none of it. She had known the hand, and the forty words, and the song.

At midnight the old woman stopped, quite suddenly, and looked at Pramila as if she had just come in, and said "Meitiņ," and the voice said "Little daughter," and Mrs Liepiņa said, "Sutnus," and closed her eyes.

The stone did not translate sutnus. It had been set to Latvian, and it did not know what to make of a Nepali word in a Latvian mouth. In the transcript, Pramila saw later, it appeared as [unrecognised].

---

The second thing that happened was the distress events.

Pramila heard about them from Deb, at handover on the third morning, Deb with her reading glasses on top of her head and the tablet in her hand.

"Fourteen's flagging," Deb said. "Every evening. Five, six, seven events. It's put her up for review." She turned the tablet around. "Have you seen what she's saying?"

Pramila had not, because she worked nights and it happened at dusk. She read it now. The transcript was very clear. They are at the river. Hide the children. Mamma, they are coming, they are at the river. Don't open the door. Hide the children. Over and over, between six and seven-thirty, while the evening carers, who were Filipino and South Sudanese and one Irish girl on a working visa, tried to calm her, and the stone translated their kind useless words into Latvian, and she went on. They are at the river.

"The GP's recommending quetiapine," Deb said. "Low dose. For the evenings." She did not like it; Pramila could hear she did not like it. The Royal Commission had been about exactly this, years ago, old people kept quiet with drugs; Deb had been nursing then, and she still talked about it. But the review was the review. Three events in twenty-four hours, and Mrs Liepiņa had had nineteen.

"She is afraid when it gets dark," Pramila said.

"I know she's afraid. That's what the thing's saying."

"No," Pramila said. She did not know how to say it in English; she did not know how to say it in Nepali either. "She is afraid. And then she is not. There is a way."

Deb looked at her for a while over the tablet. She was a large woman with a smoker's voice who had not smoked in twenty years, and she had run the east wing for eleven, and she was not a fool.

"Write it in the notes," she said. "The free text bit. Not the dropdowns. Write exactly what you do and what happens. If it's in the record, the GP has to read it."

---

That night, after the old woman was asleep, Pramila did a thing she had not thought to do before. She sat on the chair in the dark with the earpiece in and sang the song, very quietly, the four lines twice through, the way she had learned it by sound; and when she finished, she said to the stone, "What does that mean?"

The stone said, in her ear, "Singing is not interpreted. Would you like me to transcribe and translate the spoken text?"

"Yes."

"Please say it again, without singing."

So she said it, the syllables she had carried for two years without knowing what was in them, like a bag carried for someone else; and the stone thought about her accent for a moment, and then gave it to her in English:

The sun went down behind the hill,
behind the hill, behind the birches.
Little sun, where will you sleep tonight?
In the sea, little daughter, in the sea.

There was a note, after. Probable source: Latvian folk song (daina), mythological cycle. The sun (Saule) is addressed with diminutive forms. Some words uncertain owing to pronunciation.

Pramila sat in the dark and thought about the sun going down into the sea, and about a child in two coats on a ship in October, going out in the dark, with no land in the morning.

The Latvians, she read later on her phone, had collected their songs in the century before last, when they were not yet a country and their language was not the language of the people who owned the land. Hundreds of thousands of them, written by hand on slips of paper and sent in from every district where Latvian was spoken to one man in Moscow, who sorted them and put them away in a cabinet he had made for the purpose, with seventy drawers, arranged according to the life of a person: birth, childhood, courtship, marriage, work, death. The cabinet is in Riga now. People go to look at it. It is not a large piece of furniture. You could not tell from looking at it that a people had been kept in it, the way you keep seeds in a dry place over a bad winter, so there would be something to plant.

Pramila did not know whether her song was in it. She thought it probably was. She thought there were probably several thousand songs about the sun going down, and that Mrs Liepiņa's mother had sung her this one, on the ship or in the camp or in the house with the red roof, and that it had gone into her very deep, deeper than the English and nearly as deep as the fear, which was why it could still reach the fear when nothing else could.

None of this was the kind of thing that went in the dropdowns.

---

She wrote in the free text, in her careful English, sitting at the nurses' station at four in the morning:

At dusk Mrs Liepina is afraid. She speaks of soldiers at a river. I believe this is from 1944 when she leave Latvia with her mother by ship. When it is dark she is less afraid if: curtains are closed (she says auksti), the light by the door is on and the big light is off, someone hold her right hand, and someone sing the song. The song is a Latvian song about the sun. I can teach it to evening staff. It takes 2 minutes. After the song she usually sleeps. I have done this for 2 years and medication was not needed. Please consult night staff before review. P. Gurung PCW.

Then she thought, and added: Also she understands the Clearly but she is very tired after. Maybe not more than 1 hour a day. And then she deleted that, because it was not hers to decide, and then put it back.

---

Deb read it. The GP, who came on Thursdays and was young and overworked and decent, read it too, because Deb stood next to him while he did. He did not start the quetiapine. He wrote trial non-pharmacological intervention per night staff, review two weeks, which is what doctors write.

For the trial to work, the evening carers needed the song. So on Friday Pramila came in two hours early and stood in room fourteen at five o'clock with Grace from the Philippines and Abuk from South Sudan and the Irish girl, whose name was Siobhán, and taught them four lines of Latvian by sound, the way she had learned them. They were all bad at it. Siobhán was the worst and laughed at herself. Mrs Liepiņa lay on the pillow and watched them with an expression nobody could read, and the stone on the table glowed green, and in the transcript for that afternoon, between 17:04 and 17:20, there is a long series of entries that read [singing — not interpreted], and one entry in the middle, where the old woman, unable to bear it any longer, says something sharp in Latvian, and the stone renders it, in all four of their earpieces at once, as: No. Not "saule." "Saulīte." Little sun. She is little. Say it properly.

They said it properly.

---

It worked, mostly, for the time she had left, which was not long; it was the winter after that she died. Some evenings it did not work, and on those evenings she was afraid until she was too tired to be afraid, and the stone logged it, and the events went up the chain to wherever they went. Nothing works every time. The law was not repealed and should not have been. Mr Sandoval in room nine got his hip seen to within the hour the next time he fell, because he said so and the stone said so. The law did that, and it was a great deal. Peter came from Perth once, in the spring, and sat with his mother for an afternoon with an earpiece in, and heard her talk about the house with the red roof, which he had never heard about, and went out to the car park afterwards and stood by his hire car for a long time without getting in.

But in the evenings, when the light went out of the window and the old woman began to look at the door, whoever was on would close the curtains and turn off the big light and take her right hand, and sing, badly, in a language none of them spoke, a song about where the sun goes at night; and Mrs Liepiņa would correct them in a whisper, and sing it with them, and sleep.

The Clearly heard all of it, and wrote down what it could. On the last night, the record shows a carer's voice at 21:52 saying "Hello, Mrs Liepiņa," and the stone saying it again in Latvian, and the resident saying a single word, which the stone gives as Little daughter; and then, at 21:53, a word the record shows as [unrecognised]; and then, from 21:54 until a little after ten, one line:

[Singing. Latvian. Not interpreted.]

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ab Ursulā K. Le Guin per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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