The Translator

  It seemed like an invitation. He took his overcoat from the back of the chair, and his case, and went out and down the stairs, she following his long stride.

  “So why were you looking at them, those old magazines?” she asked. “Why do they interest you?”

  He shrugged, which didn’t seem to suggest he didn’t know. “To live in any world—in any country—you must know the dreams.”

  “Not everybody dreams of a new refrigerator.”

  “I think in this way,” he said. “Here as in Soviet Union you are promised a better future. Have always been promised. A bright future. After a time this future grows old, and has no power to come about. Yet promise is not forgotten. Stalin famously said long ago: Life is getting better, more cheerful. Then came purges, then fear, then war.”

  The library was closing. They went out under the rotunda with the last stragglers and into the night, which seemed warmer than it ought to be, a sudden warmth, a promise.

  “So promises are not fulfilled,” he said. “But they remain, they can be found. And there remains caught in them the happiness they promised. This precious thing.”

  Happiness. She was silent beside him, her feet falling alongside his, knowing she hadn’t understood.

  “So,” he said, as though he had made himself clear. He had stopped beneath a tall lamp by the path, and drew out a cigarette and lit it with a wooden match. She caught a whiff of its odor, mingled with March night air. He had not bade her good night, so she walked beside him when he set off again.

  “Tea,” he said. “Now I think this place just down there, where once we talked, has just closed for the night. We have been long at our studies. We will go to All-Night Cafeteria, I think its name is. Down and left and further down.”

  She skipped to keep up with his long stride. She thought how easily she could take his arm to keep up; or she could put her hand in his, though her little spidery one wouldn’t fill his. She could: she could change the world just by deciding to do that. Like a general deciding to throw all his forces at a single point, knowing it would change everything, for the better or not for the better at all, and no going back. Take his hand and stop his walking and make him turn to her; and put her face against his coat’s lapel. She would never dare. Just to think the thought made her burn.

  “In June,” he said. “Last year. At graduation ceremonies. Though I had been here but few months, I was asked to sit on the platform, the…”

  “Dais,” she said.

  “Yes, where sat all teachers and professors. And there listened to speech by the president of university. He said to students that they must be true to their dreams. He said it was not so important what dream or goal or hope they had; most important was that they had a dream. That they held on to this dream, through, through…”

  “Through thick and thin?”

  “Just what he said, thick or thin. And I thought that perhaps after ceremony I might take him aside and tell him that after all one dream is not like another. Some dreams we do not wish that people stick to: we hope they are weak, and do not cling to these dreams, that they fail to hold on. A dream that one day this world will be free of Jews. That Soviet Union will be destroyed. That all enemies of the state will be crushed. That only one God prevail everywhere.”

  “Well he wasn’t talking about that kind of dream.”

  “No. Certainly not. I understand. I think how wonderful it is, what wonderful country, that you may speak to young people and tell them to believe always in their dreams, and not be afraid of what those dreams may be.

  “Now. Here.”

  It was called the 24-Hour Grill, in fact, a funny little streamlined submarine powered by the great fan in its backside, lifting the periscope of a tin chimney. She wondered how he had first found this place, whether there was some memory of home for him in it. The heat inside steamed the windows opaque, and the coffee urns and the griddle steamed and smoked too; the place smelled pleasantly of grease and coffee and burnt toast and people’s damp wool. The jukebox was loud:

  Be my be my baby

  My one and only baby

  “Draw one,” called the elderly waitress to the cook after hearing their order. “Drop one.”

  “Coffee and tea,” he said confidentially to her. “The coffee is drawn from the urn; the tea is in the bag, dropped in cup.”

  His coat hung on the brass hook by the booth’s end, and she noticed that in its pocket peeping out was a book, the same hay-green volume he’d had when she met him before, by chance that time. He saw her look, and took the book out, turned it so that she could see the title on the spine: A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman.

  “Was this the book where you found the poem you talked about in class?” Kit asked. “The cherry trees?”

  “No no,” Falin said. “No, I read that poem in a volume of English poems with Russian translations, made perhaps 1920. New English poems; new then. I read it in prison. Many times.”

  “You were in prison?”

  “I was not only in one.”

  “What for? I mean…”

  “Do you know,” he said, “this was first question, often, that our interrogators asked. Do you know why you have been arrested? And many, many people did their best to tell them why. If they did not know, to make guess. Even if there was no reason.”

  She must have gaped, trying to work this out, for he lifted a hand as though to forestall what she might be thinking. “Well, well. They were overworked, you know; they used what means they could. Policemen everywhere do it, perhaps. As though to say to you: I know, but you tell me.”

  “And the poems? They let you have them?”

  “They gave them to me. Among other books. This was in transit camp. After arrest. Before sentence. We read part of every day.”

  “Really? Well. I wouldn’t have thought.”

  For a moment he regarded her as though he were thinking how much he should say to her: as though he measured her. “It was a former institute,” he said. “In 1947 were many, many prisoners. Camps very crowded. Many buildings taken over. In mine we were seven men in room like…like my office here, you know? Every day certain things happened. Take out latrine bucket. Eat, twice, same thing, soup. Inspection. And distribution of books. It must be there was still large library in this place; many odd books given us. Some even explained us to ourselves. Books of history. Poetry in several languages.”

  “How did they choose them?”

  “Oh they didn’t. Guards could not read such things, mostly. They only took from shelves.” He laughed, as anyone might at a funny memory. “There is no doubt this was a mistake. But giving us books kept us quiet. You see, totalitarian state—even if they wanted it to be so, there were many holes. Holes everywhere, large and small.”

  “So you read.”

  “Sat and read. As far from my fellows as I am from you. Two hours, until light was too weak.”

  “Then?”

  “Sit. Talk. Argue. Go out for interrogation. No sleeping though. Not allowed in day.”

  She felt a strange grip in her insides, a shiver across her breast. “No,” she said.

  “You learned to sleep eyes open.”

  “Yes.” She looked down into the muddy brown round of her coffee. When she looked up again she found he had not ceased regarding her. He had not said what he had been arrested for; for nothing, for poetry. She wouldn’t ask. She opened the book; it fell open to a page he had bent it to, she thought. He saw what page it was and began to speak, looking at her, saying the lines as though he were discovering or inventing them, and for her.

  “From afar, from eve and morning

  And yon twelve-winded sky,

  The stuff of life to knit me

  Blew hither: here am I.

  Now—for a breath I tarry

  Nor yet disperse apart—

  Take my hand quick and tell me

  What have you in your heart.

  Speak now, and I will answer;

  How shall I help y
ou, say;

  Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters

  I take my endless way.”

  He sat back. Their submarine moved through the deep. As he spoke, the place had grown strangely silent, attentive; or it seemed to Kit that it had. Now the music and the talk and the clatter of dishes poured apologetically back in, around her and him. It seemed a long time too before he spoke again, or as though no time passed.

  “Now perhaps you will tell me,” he said, taking the book gently back from her. “Why you have such interest in me.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Such interest that you would enjoy to follow me all this evening.”

  She froze. Once when she was twelve she had been caught shoplifting: something, nothing, a candy bar, a lipstick. The saleslady’s hand on her wrist, a sudden roar in her ears. His face, though, showed nothing but simple interest, his eyes alight, as they always were.

  “I didn’t actually,” she said. “I mean I wasn’t really…”

  “Was there,” he asked, “something you want to know?”

  She shook her head.

  “Nothing? Well if you say so I will not ask further.”

  After what seemed to her a long moment she spoke, almost too softly to be heard: “Where did you learn English? Did you just teach yourself, or…”

  “Oh no. In school,” he said. “English was popular subject. I was prize student. Many Russians who write earn living in translation.”

  “I thought you studied drafting.”

  “Language too. A gift.”

  She tucked these things away. “When you came here,” she said. “Did they make you come alone? Were they not going to let any of your family leave with you?”

  “I had no family left. I’m sure that if I had, then no, they would not have let them come.”

  “You have no family now?”

  “My parents are dead. I was their only child.”

  “No wife or kids,” she said with a sense of trespass.

  “I had for short time a wife,” he said. “With her I had one child.”

  Kit nodded, alert, afraid now of how far she had gone, what door she had knocked on.

  “Girl,” he said. “She contracted disease—the name I know only in Russian. Bone disease, of which she died. I do not know what year. I was then in prison.”

  “And her mother was…”

  “Dead by then too. Died, 1942.”

  “In the war.”

  “In Leningrad, in the siege. While I was in army. She starved to death.”

  Kit, without willing it, made a moan of pity and horror, and covered her mouth.

  “So in answer to your question,” he said. “Same question asked by U.S. embassy in Berlin. No I have no family. Parents dead. Wife, dead I am told. I had child, and she died.”

  He was so still. Kit almost spoke. She almost said: I had a child too. She was certain that he waited for her to speak, and she felt every reason not to speak give way within her. I had a child too, and he died.

  “I,” she said, and the world bent toward breaking. But then she said nothing more.

  9.

  In May every year the nuns of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd changed from black to white, appearing at daily Mass one morning all changed, or almost all. It was comically encouraging, as though they had turned overnight into fat brides or friendly ghosts, choosing to discard their harsher aspects even as the girls of Kit’s “class” got bigger. It wasn’t so. Some of them were harsh in black, even cruel, and stayed that way in white. Some were harsh toward the sins the girls had committed, but kind too because of their own charity, kind especially toward the girls they thought were innocent. Most of the girls claimed to be innocent: wronged or fooled. Some of the nuns believed some of them.

  Kit’s mother wrote her twice a week (calls weren’t allowed except in emergencies), brief bright letters in her blue-black hand. Often she stuck in little encouraging things she clipped out of magazines or the newspaper, poems or strip cartoons, not related directly to Kit’s situation but to Troubles in general and how to bear them, things that brought acrid tears sometimes to Kit’s eyes, not for the thin sentiments themselves but at the thought of her mother cutting them out, thinking of her, seeking some consolation for her.

  She forwarded Ben’s letters to Kit also. Sis, he called her in his little penciled missives, guarded and cool. Saigon was a beautiful city, sort of French and tropical at the same time; the people were small and amazingly beautiful, all of them. There was a cult here that she could join, that was all for freedom and independence and worshiped Victor Hugo as a messiah. He was kept busy by his duties; he was learning to build bridges and dig wells and lay water pipe. He had been out to the Delta, and was going up into the mountains where there were tribes as different from the Annamese as Indians were from white settlers.

  She looked up Vietnam in the encyclopedia in Our Lady’s classroom (Vas-Zygo) and studied the pale photographs of columned buildings under palms, men in white European suits, delicate country people in comical triangular hats, rickshaws, rice paddies. Long ago, long before.

  She answered Ben’s letters, wrote long ones for his short ones; she wrote him letter after letter, and when she was through writing them she tore them each in slow pieces, the small cry of ripped paper.

  Ben—You can see the sea from the windows of this place, and the girls look out the windows like the princesses of Sorc, but they can’t leave or go down to the water or the shore; they can’t be seen. Soon a long battleship with black sails and a hundred oars is going to come in sight, and there will be a face painted on its prow with hot vengeful eyes, and it will beat into this harbor on a summer stormwind cold as snow, no it won’t, not for me. But God damn it’s hot in here.

  Ikhnaton—It’s going to be a girl, and she’ll marry a little puppy of a boy, who will die even younger than we do, my brother; and he’ll be buried with all his golden toys, and be dug up one day; and afterwards everyone who dug him up and took his stuff will die in awful and complicated ways; which is why you should not believe in One God and marry your sister.

  —Nefertiti

  Ben, you know there’s a group of girls here who are called the Virgin Mothers because they are the ones who won’t tell who Did It to them. The nuns don’t call them the Virgin Mothers, but that’s what the girls call them. I am one of them. I think maybe one or two of the Virgin Mothers don’t even really know they Did It or what It is that got them here. I am one of them. You know what, they give us all (not just the Virgin Mothers) these long shapeless flannel nighties and make us wear them, I brought my terry-cloth bathrobe (yours actually) and they won’t let me wear it, and you know why? Because it has a belt. Think about it. There was a girl here once who hanged herself with the belt of her robe, and they’ve been scared ever since. They worry too much. It won’t let you kill yourself, It wants to live and won’t let you kill yourself. I wish I could have my terry-cloth bathrobe.

  She never told George and Marion who it had been; she couldn’t really understand why they even wanted to know, why it preyed on them not to know, made her mother weep and her father rage, as though the need to know arose from some deep-down biological part of them that lay below where they thought or even felt. What could it matter who it was if she wanted nothing further to do with him? If they just thought for a second they’d see that. She made them swear not to tell Ben about it at all, which of course they weren’t going to do. They weren’t going to tell anyone anything, they stayed up late night after night (Kit in guilty anguish imagined them) thinking of what to tell people that would betray nothing. And from now on forever Kit would have this not to tell, to those people and to Ben and to the people of her future, in which she didn’t believe.

  Marion stopped weeping, though, when Kit refused to be put into the hands of nuns. Her eyes got fierce and her voice low and for the first time in her life Kit was afraid of her. Well just what did you think you’re going to do? Do you think you’re goin
g to have it here in your bedroom? Do you think there are a lot of other things you might like to do about this, a lot of choices you have to make? A terrifying piece of female wisdom was being passed to her, she knew: prematurely, and in a rage, a knowledge as unforeseen and as inescapable as the biology but worse. Who did you think was going to take you in? What kind of life did you think you’re going to make from now on? George made her hush and they went out of Kit’s room together, again, leaving Kit to lie alone unmoving and listening to her heart. (A long time afterwards, after Marion was dead, George told Kit that he had suggested going down to Puerto Rico and getting it over with, and Marion had refused to think about that. Just would not think about it, George said. He and Kit were eating oysters at an oyster bar in D.C. then, wet little formless things the bartender freed from their shells with a short sharp knife.)

  She never once thought of telling Burke, though there seemed to be an injustice in that, in leaving him unknowing. It was as though she saw a winning move for him on the board they both sat at, and wouldn’t tell him, and let him miss it. Only it wasn’t winning; just knowing.

  The nuns of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, their pamphlets said, devoted their lives “to reclaiming those whom society defiles, and then rejects with scorn.” They had expanded into a maternity hospital for the daughters of middle-class Catholics and some worthy poor girls, mostly not defiled or rejected, just in deep trouble. Some never wept, some never stopped. The stony-eyed ones scared Kit, but she envied them and tried to empty her heart too as theirs seemed empty.

  One of them was a long-boned black girl, a Virgin Mother who crossed herself with her big slow hand but never prayed aloud. Maybe because Kit was quiet too, this girl chose her to talk to, Kit nodding when she couldn’t understand. One night she told Kit who the father of the child she carried was: her brother, the same who had just come to visit her. Slim long arms and legs like hers and yellow watchful eyes half-lidded. He had brought her gum and comic books and left after a silent hour for a nine-hour bus ride home.