The Translator (11 page)

She came upon him on a March night taking his long strides across the old campus, and she followed not far behind, ready to turn away and be no one that he knew if he turned toward her, if he felt her glance on his back and his high head, which he wouldn’t, because it was so light, so nonexistent. She lost him, though, from being too carefully inattentive, and she slowed uncertainly; she could see down all the lighted paths, he couldn’t have gone far.

He was gone, gone entirely, vanished.

She walked on toward the library, feeling an Alice feeling of having been put in the wrong by a being who didn’t follow the laws of physics.

Then she found she was walking right toward him: he stood before the library, and he was talking to a slim dark woman, or rather listening to her talk, she seemed distraught or upset somehow, she talked and shook her head and almost seemed to tremble: and then as Kit came close, almost too close, unable not to, the woman pressed her cheek against his coat.

Kit couldn’t walk on or she’d pass right by them, but if she stopped or turned abruptly away she’d catch their eye, she knew it. She fell in behind two students going up the steps into the library, and went in too, nothing else she could do, feeling the scene she had witnessed go on behind her, precious and lost.

Now what. She moped in the atrium for a time, peeked out the doors when they were thrown open, but there was nothing to see. She couldn’t go back out, for fear he and the woman would be still there, having decided to sit on one of the benches there by the library. She had no chores to do here. She walked in the reading room; she climbed the stairs; she went to the sepulchral toilet on the second floor that no one ever used.

She walked back through the periodicals room and saw him sitting at a table and reading. His coat over the back of the chair and the green-shaded light on his book as though he had been there for hours.

She moved closer to where he sat, going carefully up between the open periodical shelves filled with bound journals, till she found a gap wide enough to see through, see the room and him.

One elbow on the table and the L of his finger and thumb support-ing his chin. Slowly and infrequently his other hand turned a page, but the rest of him was very still. What was it he read? She could sense his eyes moving over the big pages, absorbing what he looked at. She stood on her toes to see.

It was an ad, a double-page spread: a huge purple Nash Ambassador of 1955 or ’56, passing diagonally through the white space, gleeful dad at the wheel with hat and pipe. She knew what car it was because Ben had taught her all the cars of those years, all the distinctive grilles and taillights.

He was reading a bound periodical, Life or Look or Colliers. He turned another page: a story of sea rescue; a mom and her new refrigerator; a bottle of Scotch. Don’t spill a drop, that’s Old Smuggler. Was he practicing his colloquial English, learning to be an American?

She walked back down the stacks and came out behind the row of tables where he sat, careful to stay just barely in motion, and not stare, so that no student in his line of sight would puzzle at her, and awaken his notice. He turned the page again.

Kit had sometimes thought heaven would be like the reading of an endless, or eternal, big slick magazine. Always interesting and unde-manding, a new page to be turned whenever boredom threatened, to reveal something welcomed and unexpected: new things to desire, but not seriously; new beautiful movie stars or homes you might be or live in; moving stories of children far away, of dangers or bad weather, but not where you were; always more silly or witty ads and clear-eyed people looking right at you and brief cute anecdotes, no end to it ever.

Happiness.

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It was as though he were feeling or thinking just that: feeling what she felt, looking at the same magazine she had looked at five years ago, the cars and dresses by now already replaced by different ones. Maybe it was she he was trying to understand.

She actually laughed to think this stupid thought, and he looked up and saw her.

“Hi,” she said or whispered, still laughing a little.

“Miss . . . Malone,” he said.

“Kit.”

“Kyt.” He folded his hands in his lap. She had to lean close to him so that their talk wouldn’t disturb others. “I do not need to ask why you are here. To read books. Poetry.”

“No,” she said. “Actually.”

“Not I either,” he said. He folded shut the huge book, big as a Guten-berg Bible, with a smack that caused heads around the great room to lift and look. “Enough,” he said. “Time for tea, and a smoke. Yes?”

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 stud-ies. 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 84

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. Police-men 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.”

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“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 you, 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 shoplift-ing: 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 . . .”