The Translator

  “No. No, he wasn’t.” She, she herself, had known that he wouldn’t be found as soon as his great pale-green convertible had been pulled up empty from the river, spilling water from every opening. It had been shown on the news again and again. Yet even then she wouldn’t say that he was dead. She hadn’t known, not for certain. She thought there was a period of time, years maybe, that had to pass between a disappearance and the assumption of death; of course that period was long gone by now, gone decades ago. And yet still she couldn’t say I know he’s dead.

  “Hotel,” Gavriil Viktorovich said, sounding relieved. “Pribaltiyskaya. Not splendid but very near to me, and I will be guide. You will have view of water,” he said.

  It was vast, concrete and glass. The rainy gulf was what it looked at or glowered at.

  “You will want to rest,” he said. “Then perhaps come to my apartment, is not far, and we will go to dinner.”

  “All right. Whatever you want.”

  “Many people would like to meet you,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “I have invited small number to dinner. I hope you will not mind.”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  The woman behind the desk spoke to Kit, and then—seeing no sign of understanding—to Gavriil Viktorovich, in a voice imperious and petulant at once. He turned to Kit.

  “Your room is it seems not ready now,” he said. “One hour. Perhaps you would like tea.”

  “I met him at the university I went to,” she told him. The tea before her in a glass: she hadn’t drunk tea from a glass since then, since that fall. “He taught there. Poetry. It was the year after he came. I was nineteen years old.”

  “And you were a poet then?”

  “Oh, well. I’d won a prize. I was supposed to have a, you know. A bent.”

  “And you studied there with him.”

  “I was supposed to begin at the university in the fall of 1961,” she said. “But I couldn’t; something else had happened, something…well, it doesn’t matter, anyway I couldn’t go to school that semester. By then Falin had come to teach at the university in my state; and I’d read about him, in Look and Life.” She saw Gavriil Viktorovich lift his great eyebrows curiously. “The magazines. We were fascinated by people who had, you know, come over: Nureyev, running away from his bodyguards in Paris, we all knew about that. And the people trying to get over the Berlin Wall. And Falin, the poet, who couldn’t bring his poems with him. I didn’t hear about him when he came, but I knew he was teaching there when I went in the second semester to start.”

  “You planned to meet him?”

  “No,” she said. “No. I had sort of given up poetry.”

  “Yes? And for what reason?” He took her glass from her and began to pour her more.

  “Falin once asked me that,” she said: and she knew then that it would not be easy to be here, nor to go on with this story here. For as far in space as she had come she would also have to go in time, or in that dimension that was not either, where they had parted. “I told him I had nothing I could say. And he said that’s what poetry is, the saying of nothing. The Nothing that can’t be said.”

  “Later on, though, you did write again,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. He waited, leaning forward slightly, to show that she had his full attention, or on account of his hearing.

  “Yes,” she said. “Later I did. Afterwards.”

  He still waited.

  “I’ll tell you it all,” she said. “I’m here to tell you it all. All that I know.”

  3.

  It was a university huge even in 1961, a city rising on a piece of high ground pressed up for some geological reason from the surrounding prairie. It was built as a land-grant college, and the original cluster of red-stone buildings in toybox Gothic style still stood under big elms and sycamores. By the time Kit went there, though, these were immured within new concrete dorms and featureless towers that stepped even beyond the little willow-bordered river whose Indian name the early scholars had resurrected and the school song celebrated.

  Kit’s parents brought her down in the family station wagon, its back loaded with her books and a set of Samsonite luggage, battered and marred from the many family moves it had made. Her brother’s portable typewriter too, which had devolved on her, a long-term loan, when he joined the army. He had no use for it. In the service he had no use either for the black leather jacket, lined in cerulean satin, zippered at the sleeves and across the breast, that he had worn only a few times riding his motorcycle. Kit had accepted it, or taken it from him, after he reupped in November. A hostage she held, or an oblation, or just the old slipper that a lonesome dog chews in its master’s absence. She wore it, way too large for her and distressingly strange and barbaric to her mother, who had plucked at the wide shoulders on Kit’s slight frame and almost wept when Kit insisted on wearing it here, to her new school, not as a joke or a gesture but as a coat, to keep her warm.

  “That’s it. Tower 3,” said her father, the University map spread out over the steering wheel. Central one of a group, almost identical, like three pyramids in a row in Egypt. The lone and level sands stretched far away. Kit hated and feared it immediately. Only when they had parked the wagon and hauled her stuff up the elevator and opened the door to her room did she see that, although dreadful to look at, it was wonderful to look out of. A last watchtower, facing the plain brown west and the evening; the river’s little oxbow, peach-colored like the sunset sky. All of that too was fearful in its melancholy but didn’t make her afraid.

  “Well,” her father said again.

  “All yours I guess,” said her mother, looking into the closets. One of Kit’s fears had been of the roommate she might get, creepy doppelganger of some kind or cold and imperious. She had had enough of roommates at Our Lady, other souls too near hers.

  Leaving her belongings there still packed (her mother wanted to fill the cunning built-in drawers of blond wood and hang pictures, but Kit wouldn’t let her), they drove around the campus until it was too dark to see. (“‘The Old Wishing Well in its grove of oaks has long been a traditional spot for marriage proposals,’” her father read from the guidebook. “Gee. Must be a long line come June.” And Kit saw her mother frown and put a silencing hand on his slacks.) Then they drove down into the little town, to the one big old hotel, and had dinner. A cocktail? Ma glanced for approval at Dad and said, “I’ll have a grasshopper.”

  Dad ordered a martini, and when it was brought he pushed it toward Kit. “Back on track,” he said to her, and a big hard lump suddenly rose in Kit’s throat, that only a swallow of the awful pale drink dissipated.

  Late that night she awoke in her new narrow bed as though she had heard a whisper in her ear, and when she sat up, she could see that outside the window snow was falling fast and thick.

  Registration for second-semester classes was held next day, in the great Romanesque field house, toward which students pressed, slogging through the uncleared snow and churning it to slush. The boots to have, Kit could tell, were those stadium boots with fur collars, white polar bear or gray kitten: her own Capezios, and her feet, were icy wet.

  Inside, banners in the University colors hung from the iron rafters, and the tall barred windows lit the dusty air in columns. Sawdust, now wet too, was spread over the dirt of the floor and the markings of the running track. Rows of long folding tables had been set up, above which signs were hung announcing what classes could be signed up for at each station.

  Like a bazaar, Kit thought. The hum of talk and activity arose into the height of the old building, up to where calling sparrows darted amid the rafters. As an incoming freshman, Kit was told she had first to be photographed for her identification card. Signs and monitors guided her into a roped-off area where a portrait camera and lights were set up.

  “Card?”

  What card? The proctor or assistant neatly fingered it out of Kit’s packet. We were all getting used to these oblong punch cards then, one corner clipped, their rows of perfect rectangular h
oles. You were not to fold, spindle, or mutilate them. There was a comb there, and a mirror, for her to use. Kit stopped still for a moment, unable to move forward, reminded for no good reason (the big camera, the harried proctor) of Our Lady. All through the coming year in her ID photo she would see in her eyes what she had seemed to see at that moment when they were taking it. Hunted: or not hunted, caught.

  She exited that area, permitted now to wander in the busy souk. She thought maybe she’d toss away the list of sensible choices she had worked out with the freshman adviser, and instead go over there, sign up for Introduction to Music Theory, or Uralic-Altaic Studies. But she went meekly and stood in the right lines, English Composition, the advanced French course she had tested into, a Psychology course (her required-science choice), World History I (from the Stone to the Middle Ages), Major Works of Western Literature I (Homer to Cervantes). Down the table from where she signed up for Composition, a line pressing toward a harassed young man threatened to break up into a crowd: people apparently trying to sign up for Comparative Literature 401, The Reading and Writing of Poetry. The anxious students in their duffel coats and canvas bags, white breath coming from their mouths in the unheated building, made Kit think of people in Russia lined up to buy something scarce, toilet paper or salt fish.

  It was all gone, though. The graduate student was trying to explain: the class was filled.

  Kit finished her list, getting from each station a punch card to be handed in the first day of class; then she and jostling numbers of others (her forehead was growing damp and her heart beat hard) were pressed through a passage where cashiers from the registrar’s office awaited them. When it was Kit’s turn, and she had laid down her hand of cards, her bill was totted up. At seven dollars a credit hour it came to ninety-one dollars, plus a ten-dollar lab fee for Psychology, where she would be doing what, exactly; and Kit put her hand into her crowded big pockets for her money. Her father had taken her to a bank and opened her an account, but because his check would take days to clear he had also given her an envelope of cash with which to pay her tuition.

  And it wasn’t there. Not in her brown handbag either. The folded plastic checkbook was there but not the heavy fat envelope. She put down on the cashier’s desk her cascading class materials and handouts, syllabi, lists of recommended reading, and searched her pockets again. Oh God nope.

  What was awful in that year was how every bad surprise or scare seemed to be one with all the others, all of them recurring at once within her in a flow of blinding freezing panic: caught. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Around the cashier’s patient folded hands were displayed several checkbooks from various town banks, which you could use if you had forgotten to bring your own. As though hitting on the right plausible lie at the last minute, Kit pulled out her own checkbook, unclasped it and flattened it with a hand, and filled in the first virgin oblong, number 0001. “Okay,” she said again, and ripped it from its fellows.

  The envelope of money was back in her room, it had to be: she could see it, lying among the bedclothes or on the floor, she tried to feel in advance the relief and exasperation she would feel when she found it.

  Then down to the bank and deposit it.

  She couldn’t find it in her room either, though. Lost somewhere between here in her room and the cashier’s table. Somewhere between morning and noon, lost along the way.

  She sat on the narrow bed. At Our Lady you weren’t allowed to use your bed during the day. If they’d allowed it, half the girls would have done nothing but lie there.

  Retrace your steps: she heard her father’s voice saying it. She pulled herself erect and retraced her steps, down the hall and stairway and out into the quads amid students who had not lost all their money.

  In the field house, the bazaar was over, the set being struck. Men in overalls were pushing, with brooms absurdly huge, the masses of the day’s waste paper into great heaps. She thought of fairy tales, impossible tasks that magic helpers taught you how to do. The workmen’s voices echoed like faint song, and there was almost nobody else in the building; someone far off in an overcoat, looking at a book. But the tables were still in place, and the signs above them. She decided to go back to each, and stand in the lines she had stood in. French. Phys Ed. Psychology. At each station she walked forward studying the remaining litter.

  English Composition. This was basically stupid and hopeless. Lost money is one of the things that doesn’t return: even she knew that much. It had been so much, though, more cash than she had ever held in her hand at once. Why did that give her hope? A disaster so great was just too rare, too unlikely: following on all that had happened to her. Just too sad, statistically.

  Eyes on the way she walked, she only suddenly became aware that she had come up on the man standing reading in the window light: aware of his galoshes, unbuckled. Then his hound’s-tooth overcoat, collar turned up. His hair, thick black and upstanding but so fine it seemed almost to move in the random airs of the place, like undersea grasses.

  That long V of a face, at once gaunt and tender, merry and haunted. There are so few photographs of him, none at all of him as a youth. The one used over and over was the one taken that first day in Berlin: harsh as an interrogation, it made him seem wary and weary and maybe harmed. Smiling though: this smile Kit saw.

  Kit nodded to him, smiling too in response. Near him the banner of his seminar, The Reading and Writing of Poetry, still hung, as though he waited here for latecoming customers.

  “Are you,” she said, and then rapidly discarded several ways of going on, are you the famous poet, the Soviet poet, Mr. Falin, Professor Falin, Comrade Falin, that guy who you know. “Are you teaching that class?”

  He looked at the sign, and nodded.

  “It sounds interesting,” she said. “How, I mean, who all can take it?”

  “Anyone who loves poetry enough.” One word Kit could always remember him saying was poetry. In his voice the vowels seemed to run or stream over the rocks of the consonants to pour away at the end in one of those double I sounds only Slavs can make.

  “How much is that?” she asked.

  He laughed, as though, unexpectedly, she had got his joke. “It’s small class,” he said. “That’s all.”

  She lowered her eyes momentarily, as though abashed, and saw that the toe of his black rubber boot pointed at a paper oblong half buried in the sawdust. It signaled to her as soon as her eyes fell on it, yes yes here I am, and she bent and picked it up: still fat, still full.

  “Oh my God.”

  He watched as she slid the bills from within. “Lucky,” he said, smiling.

  “It’s mine,” she said. “I lost it here.”

  “Oh yes? It would have been more lucky if it was not yours. Yes?”

  She laughed in relief, thinking how many had stepped on the envelope, trudging forward as the line moved.

  “I’d like to take your course,” she said suddenly.

  He looked from her to her money, as though she meant to bribe him. “And what year are you?”

  “A freshman.”

  “Ah well.” His eyes were the kind that, in looking, seemed to have no purpose but to admit: not probers or perceivers or hunters but only portals. “Is difficult.”

  “I’m taking French Poetry 330,” she said. What was she doing? “A poem of mine was published. I could show you.”

  “No need, no need,” he said, and turned to go.

  “I mean it,” she said, but he had thrust his hands into his overcoat pockets and was walking away. Then he stopped, and turned again to her. “What poem?” he asked.

  She had to think a moment what he meant. “Well it was only published in a student book.”

  “And?”

  “It was called ‘May’.”

  He said nothing, only regarded her, and she realized that he was waiting for her to recite it. She felt like Alice before the Caterpillar. “I don’t know if I can just. Say it.” The poem might be unretrievable, like a lot of things f
rom the other side, from before.

  “Ah,” he said, not in reproach or dismissal—those feelings were her own—and saluted her again as he turned to go.

  But why had he been there anyway, in that empty field house? She was sure he hadn’t been there earlier. What was he doing there, standing by her money as though on guard, waiting to point it out to her?

  “He was strange and wonderful man,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “He had ability to appear suddenly behind or beside you when you had not seen him approach. At school forming up for exercise or games, I would be sure he was late and would receive reprimand, and a moment later he would be there, just as the roll was called, alert, calm. Where he had come from?” He looked wildly around himself to show the confusion he had felt, and lifted his hands in surrender, who knows. “I asked him how he comes by this ability to appear and to disappear, and he told me it was easy, and I could do it too: I needed only to practice invisibility, as he had.”

  “Invisibility?”

  “Now you must understand that in those years we all desired invisibility. We wanted above all not to be noticed. Or if noticed to be taken for standard model citizen. Our disguises did not always work very well, of course. But Falin. He was most undisguised man. His head always high and his face so, so provoking, frank and open. And yet he said to me Be invisible: and he was, and could be. I think it was because he was without fear.”

  “Do you think he was?”

  “Those who live on the fear of others can sense it, you know, just as predator senses prey; and since he had none, their eyes just passed over him as though he were tree or telephone pole, of no interest, not there…. One fear only he had, I think: that they would touch him, soil him—that they would find somehow means to make him one of them.”

  Kit thought that if this was so then there had come a time when Falin could no longer go unseen: when he had ceased to believe, maybe, that he could. She had been with him then. And he hadn’t hid, or run away. He had stood forth.