The Translator (3 page)

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 18

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.

20

“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 from 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.

“What was the poem he asked you to say?” Gavriil Viktorovich asked her gently.

“I could have remembered it if I’d thought a minute.”

“Of course.”

“It was a poem about my brother,” Kit said. “About my brother, come home from the army.”

4.

Because her family moved often when she was growing up, Kit and her brother Ben had grown up more intimate than most siblings. The girls she met in each new school always spoke of their older brothers in tones of profound contempt and disgust, only surpassed by how they regarded younger brothers. It was one of the small divisions that usually began opening between her and them right after the first few easy questions (What’s your name? Is that your bike?) and then widened.

It was because of her father’s job that Kit’s family moved from place to place, from seacoast to desert, sunbaked towns of new square buildings to old cities of mansions and stone churches. Ben had been able to remember a time before they began to move, several staid years spent in an Eastern college town, summer and fall and Christmas, and now and then he would be caught by the smell of blackberries or the creak of porch floorboards and say how it called forth that place, still whole within him. To Kit the places they lived were vivid, but she

remembered them like scenes from novels: separate and poignant and hers, but not her.

What her father did, exactly, she never quite knew. He would joke about it, putting off questions. When Kit or Ben insisted, he would turn grave and frank and explain, in terms that explained nothing. His job was connecting one place to another, he said; he was trying to connect them by connecting their big computers with phone lines, so they could call up one another and talk. It was a network, he said, a network of electronic brains. He talked about computers as if they were a game he played for the fun of it; he collected cartoons from Look and The Saturday Evening Post showing roomfuls of great square machines covered with lights and buttons, and puzzled men in white coats who read out the paradoxical little message that popped out of a slot. It says it won’t answer till we sacrifice a goat to it.

Well then, who did he work for? The children they met wanted to know. Their fathers worked for Studebaker or Sunbeam or Bendix or they were policemen or barbers or sold cars or houses. Oh, he would say, I work for lots of people, there are getting to be a lot of computers, more every day. How many had he connected so far? Well, so far—and he solemnly held out a circle of thumb and finger that said Zero.

And when eight months or a year had passed they would pack and sell the house they had just bought (for some reason they always bought them, made money or lost it, the same money over and over) and in their big station wagon they sailed on. Sailed, skated: Kit felt she skated, over the truths her father knew or hid, the network which lay under their rapid, placid lives like the tangled duckweed and roots down in a frozen pond.

Tall house in an old downtown, a Midwestern city; bamboo-patterned wallpaper, dark polished woodwork. She was ten, her brother twelve. Before anything else, their household gods needed to be brought in, the things that had been put last into the moving van so they could be unpacked first: the percolator and its sister the toaster; their mother’s mother’s chest full of family photographs in crumbling albums, faces their mother progressively forgot the names for; their 24

father’s shoe bag with its pockets for his wing-tips, brogues, golf shoes white and brown, each pair with its shoe trees; the chenille clothespin bag, without clothespins, wherein Kit’s eyeless and grimy stuffed white lamb always traveled, the lamb she’d had since birth, no amount of teasing would cause her to give it up; and the encyclopedia, twenty-six brown volumes to be unpacked and put in order in their own small brown bookcase: this Kit and Ben alone could do.

Maybe it began when Ben had showed her the words or letters on the back of each volume, read them aloud to her before she could read: Annu to Baltic; Baltim to Brail; Brain to Castin; Castir to Cole.

See, he said: This one goes from Annu to Baltic; and she thought that they were places—that you could go from one to another—and that the heavy books detailed these journeys, the lands and peoples, delights and terrors.

The hundred iron fighter-kings of Baltim had armies that rode on iron elephants; but one of those kings had a princess daughter with six fingers on her hand, and a white cat with six toes; she had a garden, and in the garden a lake without a bottom. They would begin to travel from the plains of Annu to the mountains of Zygo and because there was an infinity in between, never arrive. But they would cry out, topping each other; but the trees can sing, and they warn you about the tigers; but the water is warm and the ice ship melts. He thought of dangers, and planned for them; she invented escapes, at the last moment.

Her parents seemed hardly to notice this game, or so she then thought. She was surprised years later to find that her mother had kept a lot of the writings they had done, the drawings and the models, the chronologies and the maps. Most of the work was Ben’s, which was maybe why she had kept it. When Kit took it all from the cardboard box, she felt a strange vertigo: she recognized and remembered these things and at the same time saw them shrivel and shrink; what had once been big and vivid to her became small, and not only in size. He had done it all on little pieces of shoddy paper and card, in colored pencils; he had been just a child. It was like picking up the body of a bird, and being surprised to find it nearly weightless.