The Translator (12 page)

“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 88

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 big-ger. 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 espe-cially 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 situa-tion but to Troubles in general and how to bear them, things that 90

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 going to have it here in your bed-room? 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 92

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 mater-nity hospital for the daughters of middle-class Catholics and some wor-thy 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.

“He took off me what he want, that’s all,” she told Kit. “Ain’t nobody ever going to do that to me again. I’ll cut their throat.” And she opened the pack of Juicy Fruit he’d brought her, and gave Kit one.

She stopped writing to Ben, stopped reading and writing altogether.

She sat huge and indolent in the dayroom and talked with the others about what it was going to be like when the great eggs they all carried began to crack. Sister said it hurt, yes, but that afterwards they wouldn’t remember; it’s a blessing, she said; maybe if we remembered all the anguish we wouldn’t be able to face ever doing it again; God’s kind enough to blot out all that part from our memories, and leave only the joy.

That was the worst horror Kit could think of, the final cruelty, that she wouldn’t remember. What was suffering if you couldn’t remember it? She was determined she would. He wouldn’t cheat her out of that who had taken so much from her: she wouldn’t forget.

But they were all so young: their first child in every instance, and they developed complications, or struggled through hours and hours of labor, prolonged by drugs that lessened pain and contractions both; they cursed and pressed down and sweated and prayed and called for their mothers as shot soldiers do. So much to remember, and she would remember too, but only by saving it in words, which dried up and grew light over time like leaves. And the pain passed from her anyway, just as Sister said it would.

Finally they gave up on her and cut her open to get out the child. It was a boy, and he had a grievous hole in his heart and an incomplete intestine. He was baptized, and lived only a few hours.

She didn’t think of it as grieving. She knew that in some places women tore their garments or cast ashes on their heads in grief, but she wasn’t thinking of them when she cut her hair off with shears taken from the sewing closet. She cut and cut, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror above the line of stained sinks. She had started thinking incessantly about sharp things, about broken glass and scalpels and the blades of the big kitchen disposal, into which now and then on kitchen duty they would toss a broken drinking glass and then duck down for fear of flying shards and listen to it be eaten, crunched and then ground and then whirred away to nothing. That was all she thought of while she cut.

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She could still walk only with difficulty. The nuns had told her how to care for her wound and how she should do no lifting and she stared at them not even nodding yes. She wanted to say I wish it was you who died and not him. She made them call her parents and have them come to get her immediately. Stay and rest, rest they said but she couldn’t rest, couldn’t sleep, and if she did sleep couldn’t wake. Hours before George and Marion were to arrive she went out into the hall with her Samsonite bag and sat on a bench there, as far from the deliv-ery rooms and operating rooms as possible.

“Pixie,” her mother said, touching her ruined head. “You remind me of somebody, with your hair like that. I can’t think who.”

That was all. They took a plane and then drove home from the city airport across the farmlands. It was October and smelled of fruit and the first days of school. At first they kept her between them in the front seat, but at a gas stop she said she was tired and got in the back alone.

Her mother tried to tell her stories of home, activities, relatives she’d heard from. Nothing more. They arrived home. “Here we are,” said Marion.

It ought to have been not only possible but easy to say, to tell them that she was so hurt inside, that she had almost died there, that she felt entirely alone and unbearably crowded at the same time, that she was sorry and afraid. But she couldn’t speak, and was somehow not even aware that she couldn’t. What was the name of the thing that kept her, poor ghost, from speaking? The words were the words and there was no prohibition on saying them. She has looked backward sometimes on herself sitting in her room in that house, on her bed, knees drawn up to her chin, and wanted to say to herself Just go tell them what’s in your heart; speak, and they’ll answer.

Grief laid too deep for speech might have been written down in poems; she’d used to believe that was how poems came to be. But she had lost or surrendered that, not even thinking about it, a traveler who’s forgotten a bag on a bench in a city he won’t return to, unable to remember even what it contained. For a time she went on reading poems, and would sometimes write down a bit of someone else’s. But

such a tide as moving seems asleep Too full for sound or foam When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

Wasn’t it they, though, George and Marion, who should have spoken? Shouldn’t they have found some way to ask? Sitting on either side of her at the kitchen table or in front of the TV, in rooms too warm for Kit, they seemed to be clothed in impenetrable wrappings or wadding of kindness and goodwill, but unable to feel or be touched through the thicknesses. No: no, it wasn’t their fault either. After a month’s silence they made an appointment for her with a psychologist, Dr. Biencouli, in a stuffy office downtown whose waiting room was decorated with things from the sea: a big aquarium, and a fisherman’s net, in which balls of colored glass were caught.