The Translator

  The next week, after a talk with George and Marion, and another with Father Conklin at Little Flower Church, he went on his black bike to the recruiting office on Courthouse Square and did whatever he had to do (she wanted to ask him, make him tell her every detail so that it would be hers as well as his, as she had made him describe his dates and his road trips, but just to show him the depths of her desolation she hadn’t).

  He would (he had told her this much) stand and take a vow, his right hand raised, a vow he could not then get out of unless he turned out to have been lying to the army in some way in order to get in, about his age, or his criminal record or whether he was a member of the Communist Party or another subversive organization. And then they would tell him to take one step forward, after which he would be declared to have obeyed his first order without question, and would be a soldier.

  She lay on her stomach on her bed, the blind half-drawn and the room hot and dim and smelling of varnish. She wondered (though the wonder never quite rose over the limn of hurt consciousness) how she would ever be able to do anything daring or good ever again. She would never again dare to go down to the muddy end to get what she wanted or needed, and if she did she would crush it and lose it. Everything, everything in the world; what everyone had that she didn’t know how to get, or even to want.

  She hadn’t moved when she heard the bike come back in the late afternoon, approaching down the far highway and still only a wish, then turning onto the long drive, then loud, day-smashing, beneath her window. When he cut the engine the noise raced through the air, homeless for a moment, before dissipating.

  “Why are you here?” she asked him from the top of the stairs.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Are you in the army?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why did they let you come home?”

  He had hung up his jacket, and turned smiling to her. “You weren’t listening,” he said. “I didn’t think you were. I explained it to the folks. If I sign up now, I get a month’s leave right off the bat. I don’t go in till September. Special deal.”

  She looked down at him looking up at her. She hadn’t listened, had hid in her room for the last two days.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “I promised a while ago I’d teach you to drive. That would take about a month. Does that sound good?”

  She would not exult or unbend or giggle or do anything stupid. Nothing he had done or offered warranted that. September was far away, but it was already coming closer, closer now by a minute than when he had made his offer. “I’m not old enough to get a permit,” she said. “Not till January.”

  It was another of those objections that he didn’t deign to hear. He only stood smiling, and waited for her to come down the stairs. And soon she did.

  5.

  Once again it is May and the walls of my house have grown thin

  And the windows where I wait and watch are wide open.

  How high it is up there where the tops of the trees are speaking sign

  And the swallows are turning, white bellies, blue backs, in the sun!

  Before any human eye has seen it, before even mine,

  They see the jonquil-colored taxi at the court’s end turning in.

  Now rejoice, all you Courts and Drives and Circles bearing him on!

  Now lift up your heads oh you Gateses and Flynns

  And be you lifted up oh you houses of Wozniaks and Paynes!

  Cast off your junipers and dismiss your stone foundations

  And rise up into the heights of the new air like lost balloons!

  In her room in Tower 3, she beat out the lines with two fingers on Ben’s typewriter. The secret, for her alone to know, was that hidden among the many rhymes and half rhymes and slant rhymes that ended them there was one unsaid: the name they were all intended to rhyme with or against. She tried as she typed to remember May: not the last lost May but the May before that, back before. And she could not. But she remembered the poem, she only needed to string the lines like beads, or like the balls of an abacus, to make them come out right and add up.

  See: they have given him back his eyes in exchange for their gun,

  The one they made him carry; but his clothes are still olive and dun,

  The color of wet fallen leaves, and the bag he has brought with him

  Buckled and strapped and long enough to stuff a dead child within.

  He hadn’t actually been wearing his uniform when he came home, nor did he come home in a taxi; George had gone to the bus station to get him, and Kit had been at school and only seen him when she rushed into the house, having run home from the bus, hot in her wool skirt and sweater, dropping her books on the floor of the hall.

  Once again it is May and the walls of my heart have grown thin

  And the tall small windows are lifted up so my princeling may come in.

  She wrote a note and put it and the poem in an envelope and carried it out into the day, now turning gray and hostile, the snow freezing again as the sun went down. In the Comparative Literature Department on the third floor of the liberal arts tower, the secretary pointed to the wall of pigeonholes where mail for professors could be left. And there it was, with a little typed paper slipped into the brass frame: I. I. Falin. There was nothing else in the box. She saw him, Falin, just turning to come out of the chairman’s office, nodding a farewell, as she slipped out the door.

  When she returned to Tower 3 she found that she had a roommate. She was sitting on the unused bed smoking a cigarette, in a wrinkled khaki raincoat, her bags around her, as though she were waiting for a train.

  “Aha,” she said, looking up at Kit’s entrance and smiling reluctantly.

  “Aha,” said Kit. “I wondered.”

  “Yeah well,” the other said, not quite an apology, but not quite in annoyance either.

  The university had chosen for Kit a roommate who was also starting her freshman year in the second semester, and who was also a year older than her class: she related this to Kit with what seemed a grudging satisfaction. Her name was Fran. She was from New York City, and had come here for the music school, because, she said, it was world-class and she hadn’t got into Juilliard.

  “What do you play?” Kit asked.

  “Viola,” Fran said, with a wonderfully gloomy enunciation, as though she were answering a different question (What are you in for? maybe). And there by her feet was indeed a violin case, but too big. “I might do philosophy instead though,” she said. She dragged deeply on the cigarette, and let the thick smoke out her mouth to be drawn up her nose—what Kit had heard called a “French inhale.”

  “I don’t mind starting late,” she said. “It means at least you’re not in a Class of. You know, like Class of 1965. We’re not.”

  “Why are you?” Kit asked. “Starting late, I mean.” As soon as she said it a hard hollow opened in her breast, for it was evident that if Fran told her story, Kit would have to tell hers.

  Fran shrugged. “My parents took me to Europe for six months,” she said levelly. “They had decided to get a divorce, and wanted time to be with me. To, you know, be a family for me.”

  “Oh.”

  She stubbed out the smoke. “They had this whole plan they thought was secret. Of course I knew. They announced it, the divorce, at the end of the trip. In Amsterdam.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’d just been to Anne Frank’s house.” She shook her head in grave contempt. “It’s all right. I hope they’ll be happy. I never want to go back there, though.”

  “Europe?”

  “Amsterdam. Cold and gray and the damn canals and the damn rain.”

  “Amster, Amster, dam dam dam.”

  Fran looked at her and after a moment’s puzzlement laughed, seeming to surprise herself by doing so, or to be amazed at Kit for causing it. “So what about you?”

  “Ah,” said Kit, shrugging, know-nothing.

  “What are you going to be studying?”

  “Oh, I don’t
know. I didn’t come with as much as you.”

  “What courses are you taking?”

  “Well, French,” said Kit. “Psychology. World Literature, and you know, Composition. And a course in poetry.”

  “Writing it or reading it?”

  “I think both.”

  “You a poet?”

  Kit shoved her hands into her pockets. Like Fran she hadn’t taken off her coat.

  “Oh that reminds me,” Fran said. “You got a phone call. The proctor or monitor or whoever she is put a note under the door.” She pointed to the pink slip on the desk Kit had claimed. A professor had called to tell Kit she was welcome in his class, but (the note read) he hadn’t said what class it was.

  “So,” Kit said, crumpling the note and grinning with radiant glee (she knew it, but not why, not why she was doing this at all), “you going to take your coat off?”

  “You first,” Fran said.

  Many people loved poetry enough, it seemed, to sign up or show up for Falin’s class. It was held in a seminar room in the liberal arts tower, a building lacking, as yet, a name, many alums being tempted with the honor, none of them biting so far. The windows were wide and the sun on the snowy prairie dazzling. People sat at every place around the oval table and perched on the registers and stood in the back leaning against the new green blackboard. Falin appeared among them—his magician’s trick of suddenly being there without having been seen to arrive—and looked at them all, amused and maybe a little alarmed.

  Kit gave him the form he had to sign, granting her permission to take the course, and he took it without acknowledging her, maybe having forgotten her she thought; he puzzled over it a moment and then uncapped a fountain pen and signed it with childlike slow exactness. Kit realized that he had left behind not only his language but his alphabet, and had had to learn another.

  He sat down among them, taking a place a student vacated, and placed a cheap new portfolio of imitation pigskin on the table before him; opened it, took out class cards and a record book, a pack of cigarettes and a box of wooden matches. He seemed to have no self-consciousness, no consciousness of being the object of their attention, fascination even. “I am asked to speak to you of poetry,” he said. “I would have liked to talk only of poetry written in the language you know best, but that would be English, which I myself do not know so well. Also the University wished that you learn something of poetry of other languages, of Russian, which I do know well, but German and French too. Here is a packet or package of them which we will read, one for each of you, which later I will hand around. Because one reason for education is to learn more deeply about what you already know, but another reason is to learn a little about what you do not know at all; and perhaps one day, when you meet these poets again in their own lands, you will not be wholly stranger there.

  “Now.

  “Since we will be together long while, I thought we should come to know one another. We might begin now to introduce ourselves, in this way: I will ask you each to say a poem that has meant something to you.”

  He looked around at them, maybe the faintest curl of a smile to his mobile mouth, his hands laid one over the other now and unmoving: Kit had noticed before how large they were, long strong fingers and jutting wrist bones. They were all silent, maybe trying to decide if he actually meant what he said, or if maybe he meant only that they should name a poem, or a poet, they had liked or read; knowing he hadn’t, though, and that they would have to recite poetry, if they could, before their fellows and this personage.

  “We will perhaps start on my left,” Falin said.

  “Okay,” said the student on his left after a moment. She was a pretty moon-faced blue-eyed girl of a kind there seemed to Kit to be a lot of in the world, cookie-cut, but sometimes very different inside, she knew. “I like this one:

  “I’m nobody! Who are you?

  Are you nobody, too?

  Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!

  They’d banish us, you know.”

  “It’s Emily Dickinson,” she said. “There’s more I don’t remember.”

  Falin nodded, regarding her or what she had said in a kind of plain wonder, then turning his gaze to the boy next to her, who passed the glance along with a shrug to the one next to him. This one said: “All I can think of is one by Swinburne,” and he began it:

  “When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces

  The mother of months in meadow or plain

  Fills the shadows and windy places

  With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain…”

  He was a small guy with a red crewcut growing out raggedly and a spray of childlike greenish freckles across his nose; one button of his button-down shirt was undone and his glasses a little askew.

  “And the brown bright nightingale amorous

  Is half assuaged for Itylus

  For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces

  The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.”

  Kit thought of him reading these lines so often that they had lodged in his memory, and found herself liking him. He began on another stanza before running out or growing embarrassed; seeming to shake free of a little trance.

  The baton was passed, or refused mostly with shrugs or giggles, which seemed to interest Falin as much as the poems or bits of poems recited. Kit wondered if the other kids felt like what they seemed to her, prisoners summoned out of dungeons and ordered to speak, who had almost forgotten human speech. A beaked storky guy with a bobbing Adam’s apple recited in a weird basso:

  “The moving finger writes, and, having writ,

  Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

  Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”

  Many nodded when another girl began, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and though she didn’t seem to be one who had gone down many less-traveled roads, you couldn’t know that, which was maybe what this exercise was for. Then it was Kit’s turn, whose mind was empty, there were no poems in her except her own, the one she had given him: it stood in the way of all the others she knew. Falin waited.

  “Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,” she said. “That’s…well, it’s what I remember right now. It’s Baudelaire, and it means I am like the king of a rainy country.” The line had appeared on her French placement exam, this glowing sentence among the ordinary requests for directions and statements of fact, opening like a casement. She’d had a hard time moving past it. “The next lines are, I think, like this: Riche, mais impuissant; jeune, et portant très vieux. Rich but powerless; young and yet very old.” She stopped, for she found her eyes had filled with tears and her throat trembled: because of the poem, and because she had remembered it, but for more than that. She seemed to see that country, to which a long time ago she had been able to go so easily, where rain was as exquisite as sun, where pain and even boredom could have the same golden weight and worth as joy or triumph.

  “Anyway,” she said, ceasing, embarrassed and abashed. “Sort of like that. There’s more, but.”

  Falin was looking at her, leaning somewhat forward over the table toward her. She would later think that he seemed often to listen by looking as much as by hearing. He said: “This is an English word, ‘rainy’?”

  “Sure,” Kit said. “Sure. A rainy day.”

  He lifted his head as though remembering that yes, he knew this locution. “Rainii,” he said softly.

  No one else was willing to speak, and Falin spread his great hands on the table.

  “Very well,” he said. “In exchange for yours, here is one.”

  He began to speak in Russian, in a voice entirely different from the one in which he had spoken before, sounds that don’t exist in English, complex fluid vowels and strange soft consonants drawn out impossibly: it was as though he sculpted the poem in the middle of the air with broad steady strokes of rhythm and rhyme. Kit didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh aloud or to moan in am
azement.

  He finished, seeming to settle again, a hawk that had just roused and beat its wings. “This,” he said in his usual—or was it his American?—voice, “is quite famous poem in Russian, poem of Pushkin, known to everyone who reads, as perhaps some poems you have repeated are known to everyone here.” The students were still, and did not look at one another. “I cannot tell you what it says, not at all exactly, because meaning so much resides in Russian words; this problem we will talk much of. I will tell you though something of what it is about.”

  He looked within, as though marshaling again before him the lines he had spoken.

  “He says—Pushkin—that the poet, until he is summoned by the god Apollo to sacrifice to him, is afraid, confused, immersed in the world and its troubles; his lyre—poet’s instrument—is still muffled, his soul is wrapped in sleep. And of all the world’s worthless children, he is most worthless.

  “Until he sings.”

  He let them think about this, or anyway said no more for a long moment.

  “Well, I will tell you something of myself,” he said at length. “Because it may be that some of you have come chiefly to have look at me, someone who has come from so far away and from somewhere so—strange to you.

  “Okay.

  “My name is Innokenti Isayevich Falin. I was born and grew up in the city of Leningrad, at that time Petrograd, before that St. Petersburg. My father was an engineer, I his only child.”

  He picked up and put down again his cigarettes; took his fountain pen from his pocket, and put it back.

  “When very young I liked poetry, nursery rhymes as you say; I was very intent on these, and I like them still today. But for a long time I showed no further interest in poetry. When I went to school I wished to be engineer like my father; but this was not possible. I became instead a drawer; not an artist but a drawer of plans, for machines…”