We worshipped Our Author, and when she sent us an email telling us her masterpiece was done, we canceled our plans and packed our bags and flew from our cities to Warsaw, where, bedraggled and ecstatic, we took the train into town and boarded the bus for Białowieża.

It was our seventh pilgrimage to the village at the edge of the primeval forest where she lived. She had always lived there, five miles from the Belarusian border. She loved that forest as much as we loved her books, which, without a fraction of a second’s hesitation, we would have laid down our lives to defend. We treated her every word as sacred, even though our whole task was to replace her every word.

We arrived on September 20, 2017. It was a new moon, but the stars of the northern hemisphere transformed her slim sinuous home, converting the oak strips on the convex walls into quicksilver that momentarily held the frenzied shadows of the forest, slickening their inextricable shapes, and then engulfed them.

There were eight of us. Swedish was new, handsome as a red deer, and we knew at first sight that he would be her favorite. Not only because of the prestige of his language, a conduit to her inevitable Nobel Prize, but also because of his saunter, his stance, that gratifying invitation in his hot blue eyes. Because somehow, that evening, Our Author’s unshakable husband, Bogdan—whose lust worked like kerosene on her authorial imagination—wasn’t there.

With Bogdan gone, she was different from how we’d ever seen her. She was ghost-white. Her eyes were black holes, and it hurt to look into them directly, like we were being torn apart. So we kept our eyes on her crossed arms, but even her arms weren’t her arms anymore, exactly—more like twigs half inhumed by her too-heavy, sludge-colored dress. Her neck lacked the onyx amulet she’d been given by her grandfather, the local black magician; without it, her collarbone jutted out like it wanted to break.

She didn’t say much; she said nothing about Bogdan. We chalked up all these departures from our routine to the toll of finishing a magnum opus. We felt certain we could help her. Not only because of Swedish, but because we always had. Now we’d have to: Besides Bogdan, we were the only ones she truly trusted. If he was gone, that meant that all she had was us.

That night we simply tried not to tax her. Soon we adjourned to our usual rooms, while Swedish stayed downstairs, with her. We assumed she’d catch him up on our traditions, which we would teach him, too, over the coming weeks. We’d learn in turn that he had expert knowledge of much of what was hidden in the forest, underground networks, electric, that we never even knew were there, although we had always belonged to them.

The staircase was a spiral of oak that dawn brought back to life; the third step up had a knot that brought good luck. On the third floor, Serbian and Slovenian shared the bedroom with the slanted ceiling and the skylight, two twin beds, and the balcony overlooking Belarus; English occupied the second-floor suite with the sleek tiled stove and private shower, a glass case in the middle of the room; German got the cot in the winter garden, where he’d sleep beneath the upside-down constellations and the Czech chandelier, surrounded by prayer plants and ferns.

[Note from the translator: Now is as good a time as any to address the elephant in the room: This is a fictional version—a wholly and completely fictional version—of a translation summit that I attended in 2017. That summit was also attended by this author, Emilia Martini, who for some reason—for reasons I will never understand—later chose to write this fictional account not in her native Spanish, but in Polish, a decision that resulted in each of her original sentences becoming a kind of tiny haunted house. Angered by her efforts to forget it, the spirit of Spanish comes whooshing through the walls of every paragraph, breaking plates and continually flicking the light switch, creating an atmosphere of wrongness and scaring the shit out of everyone’s dog. By correcting word order and register, my translation aims to exorcise the neighborhood.

Since trust is crucial to every stage of the translation process, I want to reassure the English-language reader that none of these corrections was ever motivated by my extreme discomfort with my character—that is, the English-language translator who is but one of many outlandish (patently fictional) characters in Emilia Martini’s creative writing exercise—although she is unrecognizable to me (Alexis Archer, trans.).]

That night our sleep was heavy, and when she roused us in the morning at four, our dark march toward the strict reserve bled back into our dreams. We passed through an expanse of weeds that reached up to our knees. The birds at that hour were deafening, mustering the forces of the sun. Rumpled from our journeys, our clothes soaked up the dew.

The strict reserve was the most protected part of Białowieża, off-limits to the public. But nothing was off-limits to Irena Rey. At its entrance she turned and pressed her trigger finger to her mouth. Then we all turned in silence to look out over the field. A pale halo on the horizon revealed pine islands, pinkish, awash in a web of fog; the field was filled with tiny starry flowers. We stood stock-still. The field responded to our quiet in kind, and, satisfied no one was following, we went in.