The Translator (24 page)

Once, God and the Devil contended for Rus, and the Devil won.

Going happily to collect his prize, the Devil found the way barred. God had decided that after all the Devil could not have the souls of the people. All else he could take from them, but not their souls.

The Devil complained that it wasn’t fair, and God admitted that (thank God) things aren’t always fair.

So the Devil set himself up in state, and demanded that the people of Rus come before him, and each deliver up to him the thing he loved best. In his rage at having been cheated he was most exacting, and Death sat at his side and kept the books.

The Devil took from the miser his money, from the Tsar his triple crown, from the Patriarch his staff, from the mother the love of her child. One by one they came before him and went away weeping and sorrowing.

At length one young lad came before him who appeared to have little to yield up. The Devil demanded of him what he loved best, whatever it was. The boy pleaded to be spared; he offered to give the Devil anything else, even the sum of all that he had.

Take his clothes and his hat; take his felt boots, and he will walk barefoot in winter; take the sight of his eyes.

No, the Devil wanted none of that; he would be put off with no substitutes. He wanted what the boy loved best. And what was it?

At last the boy told the Devil what it was.

A song? the Devil asked.

It’s my own, the boy said weeping. My very own song I have made.

Well, the Devil said, let’s have it.

Begging and weeping were no use, and so at last the boy lifted his voice and sang. For a time everyone ceased bewailing to listen. The Devil listened, his clawed hand cupped behind his ear.

Even Death held still to hear.

Mine, said the Devil when the song was done. Mine forever and ever. Next!

The boy hung his head in grief and went away.

But not so long afterward, among the poor people of Rus from whom so much had been taken, that song began again to be heard. The boy had fooled the Devil, and had still kept what it 186

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was he had given away: for that’s the way it is with a song, as everyone but the Devil knows. The boy sang the song in the deserted roadways and in the villages from which every beloved cow had been taken. And by and by, in the woods where no flower grew and in the empty churches and even in the desolate courts of the Tsar, the little song could be heard, a song about nothing that filled the eyes with tears and the throat with joy to hear.

So the people of Rus had a song at least to comfort them in those days. But still life was very hard, since the Devil had taken every other thing that anyone loved away. And in the end, of course, one way and another, he got a good number of their souls as well.

She looked up. Falin stood nearby, his hands in the pockets of his pleated slacks. She hadn’t heard him come in. Without any warning, her eyes filled with tears, and the light glittered and swam.

“You must hate them so much,” she said. “For . . . for what they took, for all that they took.”

“No,” he said, “no no,” as though he knew why she had said this, knew just what she meant. “Some I despised. But when you hate, you touch. I wanted not to touch. You know in my poem ‘Bez’ are ones who hate. Ones who can never take their fingers from those throats.

Now come.”

She took his hand, cool and dry, and stood.

Once, he had written out from memory a part of his poem “Bez,” to show Kit how it worked. The lines made her think of his wife, how she had starved to death in the siege of Leningrad. Had she been one of those who couldn’t help hating? Would Kit have been one of those, who died of hate, whom the Devil got in the end?

I will do without bread: they think I cannot but I can.

I will do without, and raise my hunger like a child; And from it I will breed a little cat.

From my empty mouth and bowel I will produce it A cat who feeds on hunger as on bread

And by doing without, that cat will grow greater than any tiger Its teeth of steel spoons and knives a-clatter, and its black breath of hunger

And it will consume all those who thought I could not do without.

So she said: but the cat when it had grown Ate her and her abnegation up

And so was satisfied, and so died.

4.

When his apartment on the edge of the prairie grew too hot, too much a kuznitsa he said, a smithy where they labored together at the forge, they would go outside, walk to the end of the road under the sycamores, whose leaves seemed a burden too great almost to bear; or they sat on the wide rough steps of his apartment in the cool shadow of the house and watched the sky turn turquoise with slow solemnity, or welter uneasily and ponder what it would do next.

“Tornado weather,” she said. Along the gray fence of posts and wire that separated his yard and garden from the fields beyond, the gray cat crept as though in fear, its fur upstanding and its eyes wide.

“Tornado. This is storm we in my country do not have.”

“Really?”

“Not tornadoes. They are American storms. We have groza, burya, we have such round storms, how do you say, yes. Not tornadoes.”

“Not American though really,” she said, “only Western. I mean I

think sometimes they happen in other parts of the country, but mostly they’re here. Tornado Alley they call this area. Look.”

From the black-sheep clouds hung a few small woolly twists: tornadoes being born. She thought she could smell them; she hugged herself and shivered in the heat. Why did fear feel so exhilarating when it blew coldly in you like stormwind? Her father had always been afraid of tornadoes, hated summers in Tornado Alley; maybe because his mother had used to gather all her children up during storms and crowd them into a closet to pray the rosary with her and wail at every thundercrash. Once Kit dreamed of a tremendous box, a sky-high cab-inet divided like a shadow box, in whose divisions young tornadoes could be safely kept, as in pens. A gift for her father.

“They are terribly destructive,” he said.

“Oh yes.”

“There is a French dish,” he said. “I have read of it. Tournedos. A dish of beef.”

“This would be a different dish,” she said. “Scrambled eggs. Or maybe hash.” The wind was rising a little, teasing. “There are whole towns that get blown away. Russiaville, a tiny town near where I lived.”

He looked at her and she shrugged, yes really it’s true. “Russiaville; they said it Roosha-veeo. No more Russiaville. All gone.”

Just as she said this a white shatterline of lightning crossed from sky to earth in the west toward which they looked. They both counted their heartbeats till the thunder growled, awakened, and rolled away as though muttering to itself.

“Oz,” Kit said softly, as though rhyming with it. Then that name too had to be explained to him. The child blown away by a tornado from her farm in drab gray Kansas to a wonderful new land of magic and possibility. And all she wants is to go home again.

“Oz,” he said.

It was dark as night now, and the wind rose. There might be hail.

“Let’s go inside.”

The gray cat flitted between his legs when he opened the door, and 190

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ran ahead of them to leap up on the couch, its yellow eyes alight. The cats around the place, a black one, maybe two, and a tiger, weren’t his but his landlady’s, and yet they seemed to prefer him or his rooms. My lovers, he called them. Lyubovnitsy. The gray allowed Kit to take it in her lap.

“I suppose you have lovers,” she said. She thought of the woman she had seen him with, the one who wept and spoke to him as though in prayer or confession, and pressed her cheek to his coat. “Real ones.”

“You do suppose?” he said.

She looked only at the cat in her lap. “Ones that talk.”

“Ah, these have that advantage, that they do not talk. They need not talk that way that lovers must.”

“What way?”

“The way all lovers talk. You know.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only know before.

Before people are lovers, I mean.”

“After, the same.” He propped his head on his fist and looked down at her. “What do they talk of. They say each other’s names. They describe each other, too. To each other, you know?”

“No.”

“They never tire of it. The hair, the eyes. Never tire. They ask each other questions, endlessly, to know more. What do you love, what do you need, what is favorite poem, favorite color.”

Kit drew a cigarette from his pack and held it between her fingers.

“My favorite color,” she said. “Is the color in a bottle of Coke when you lift it to the light and the light falls through it. That dark bright red brown.”

He laughed.

“Really. Sorry.”

“The color of your hair,” he said. He put his hand on her hair, his fingers in the curls. “The color exactly.”

She shut her eyes, to feel his hand so strangely light on her. “What do you love,” she said. “What are you afraid of, what do you need.”

She lay still, seeming to have become something other than flesh, elec-

tricity maybe or pale silk, and wondered what she would do, what would become of her, if he were to answer.

“I need you, Kit,” he said.

When she opened her eyes he was not smiling. She didn’t doubt what he said, not then or ever after; but after a moment she said, “Why?”

“To save my soul,” he said. “Or perhaps only my life.”

Another flicker of fire around the world, and then a pause, and then nearer thunder.

“Why did you say that?” Kit whispered. “What did you mean?”

He was sweating, big drops standing at his brow line and along his lip.

“I’m doing all I can,” she said. “It’s just such a hard language . . .”

He shook his head quickly, no no. He said nothing more, though she went on listening. She knew that he didn’t answer her because he couldn’t, because for the first time—she thought it was the first time— he didn’t know or didn’t have the words, not yet.

He laid his arm along the couch’s back, which made a hollow for her at his side, and cautiously she entered it, turning into him as though within him or within the circle of his arm were a big far country, whose border only she had so far crossed: she was coming to know how big it was, and that she probably never would go very far within it.

“Rain,” he said.

The storms that rolled over the land unhindered in that month didn’t cool it; it would seem to Kit later on that nowhere she had ever been, rain forest or desert or Asian city, was ever as hot as that Midwest plain could be on a July night when the sun bloodied the west and the tem-perature did not fall and wouldn’t fall till the dark of the morning. On such nights they drove his convertible into town, to eat at the nearly empty restaurants and go to air-conditioned movies. She took him to see Cocteau’s Orfée at the art theater. They were almost alone there.

Beautiful Orpheus in his nice suit received messages from his Muse 192

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over the car radio; Falin laughed lightly and crossed his legs impa-tiently. Only when the Angel of Death took Orpheus to the Under-world, passing through the mirror (a lovely obvious silly trick), did she feel him quiet and attentive beside her.

“Alice,” Kit whispered.

“Who is Alice?”

“She went through a mirror. Shh.”

Chic
Mme.
Death, like a Vogue model in her black sedan, escorted by two black motorcyclists: and Orpheus looked back at Eurydice in the rearview mirror. Kit heard Falin make a small noise, of apprecia-tion or maybe not.

“I do not much like such grandiosity,” he said afterward. “Eurydice is to me better image of poyt. She who must stay, who cannot return.”

“But nobody can.”

“Yes.”

What he liked better was big expensive Hollywood soap operas, where people lived in houses slung over California ravines or on rocks by the turbulent sea, who were architects or surgeons or best-selling authors, whose wives suffered from too much love or too little, wept and brooded, hardly noticed the glamour of their surroundings or their glossy sports cars or their living rooms larger than churches. For these Falin sat still, his mouth open a little and the portals of his eyes wide; she thought of him as feeding on the rich otherworldly colors, the emerald grasses and pastel coordinated furniture and huge bowls of delphiniums and roses. Like the people she read of who had been hungry in childhood and then ever after hoarded food and had to have more than they could ever eat. But then she thought of him in the library turning the pages of The Saturday Evening Post with the same attention, and what he had said. Happiness.

“Happiness,” she said. She took his arm as they went back to his car, as she often did now, unafraid to, certain it was hers to do, a gesture without force compared to what they had already done together and would do.

“Now you must return to dormitory,” he said.

“No,” she said. “Not tonight. I signed out.”

“What is signed out?”

“It means I told them I wouldn’t be in tonight. I told them where I’d be, and gave them the phone number. You have to do that.”

Her curfew at the Language Institute was the same as the dormitory’s, ten o’clock on weekdays, an hour later on weekends, but super-vision was lax; the one older woman in the program who had agreed to proctor the others seemed to enjoy letting her few charges slip in late, get away with infractions, greeting Kit at the door in pajamas and curlers, an eyebrow raised, tapping her foot but smiling too like someone in a movie where nothing really mattered.

“And where,” he said, “did you say you would be?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “They won’t call.” He hadn’t started the car. “I just don’t want to go back,” she said. “Not for a long time.”

“Where then instead of back?”