The Translator (19 page)

“Zamyatin,” said another man, from across the table, who hadn’t seemed to be following. “Nabokov. Kaf ka. 1984.”

“We had of course read many of them already in samizdat or in smuggled copies, but here they were at news kiosks. Everyone read like hungry man. But as well were appearing work of those who had been sent abroad or who had escaped to other side, and of whom we had heard nothing for so long. Now books of theirs came into country, and were not confiscated; we read Brodsky, Aksyonov. Many others. Riches.”

“Yes,” Kit said. She’d heard about them, the people reading on the trains and crowded streetcars, swapping books and journals, reading two at a time.

“Conferences too,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “Writers discussed whose names had for so long not been spoken in public. It is true.

Falin too. Now we could ask: what happened, what became of them.”

Kit found they had all turned to her.

“You know,” she said, “that he was never found.”

They waited, neither assenting nor dissenting.

“Supposedly it was just an accident,” she said. “A car accident.”

“No accidents,” said a tiny woman whose freckled breastbone barely rose above the table’s edge. “There are no such.”

“I’ll tell you what I know,” she said, not for the first or the last time in that week. “Everything I can tell.”

“First eat,” Gavriil Viktorovich said to her in Russian, and filled her glass. “ ‘Eat bread and salt and speak the truth.’ What we always say.”

The restaurant had begun to fill with parties, waiters pushing tables together and people taking pictures and rising to make toasts that made others laugh or cheer. At one round corner table a group that were surely Americans sat with several Russians in black leather or Italian suits, some with their hair pulled back in ponytails. Their table was crowded with bottles, champagne, Stolichnaya, Chivas. Gavriil Viktorovich saw her look.

“Biznesmeny,” he said to her. “Konsultantye. Our new Gray Gods.”

The meal went on and on without ever seeming to have begun, plate after plate of salty and piquant zakuski, appetizers: smoked salmon, herring, blini with caviar red and black, griby v smetane which she guessed were Mushrooms in Confusion but no, that would be smy-atennye, these were only in sour cream. They poured vodka for her and leaned over to her to take her hand or to touch her and speak: dusha-dushe. Kit remembered her teacher Nadezhda Fyodorovna saying it, striking her breast so that her bangles sounded: dusha-dushe, soul to soul.

The woman next to her turned great smiling dark eyes on her. “I have read many poems of yours,” she said. “Read with great interest, yes.”

“You have?” There’s nothing, no proposal of delight or compliment or vatic prophecy, that will enter a poet’s heart as such a statement does. And here of all places.

“Contemporary American poetry is my speciality,” the woman said, pronouncing it with an extra syllable, like a Briton. “I have read often your poem that begins If you return O my dead, and you will, from your ashes and earth. This is very fine.”

It was “Ghost Comedy.” Kit felt her throat tighten with strange wonder to hear the line in this heavy grave accent.

“This was written 1982?”

“No. It was finished then. It was . . . It took a long time.”

“It is elegiac meter, no?”

“Well almost,” Kit said. “I didn’t mean it to be.” The woman looked at her in puzzlement, or disbelief, still smiling. She was, still was, darkly beautiful. “I mean I didn’t know it was when I wrote it. I found out later, when it was done.”

Return if you can as the ghosts in ghost comedies do. She would see him in a moment at the end of this table, his drowned-man’s hair afloat, his smile that knew everything and nothing. Breaking a real piece of dark bread like Jesus at Emmaus. But his feet bare that couldn’t be seen: she alone would know.

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Gavriil Viktorovich lifted his knife, and rising he gently tapped his glass to get their attention. It took some time, and even when he began to speak not everyone turned to him or fell silent. Kit tried to follow what he said, and understood only when he drew out the envelope that she had given him, the poem Falin had sent to her at the summer’s end. Then they were hushed, and still. Gavriil Viktorovich began to read, the thin old paper trembling in his hand but his voice strong and sweet. When he reached the end and sat, there was no applause or sound or even movement for a moment, as they all seemed to gather again one by one from where the poem had taken them.

“You were lovers, then, in that summer? You and he?”

It took her a moment, a moment out of time, to realize that the woman beside her had spoken to her in Russian, and that she had understood. Lyubovniki: lovers. She had asked Falin then what the word meant, if it meant what it means in English. And what in English does it mean? he said; and she had tried to tell him.

“No, no,” she said. “Not then. But yes a little later. Or maybe not. I mean . . .”

The woman waited for more, an answer. The great violet lids closed over the globes of her eyes and rose, and then again.

“Lyubovniki,” Kit said. “It means you, well you slept together, isn’t that right?”

“Right. Yes.”

“Well I don’t know,” Kit said smiling. “I’m not sure. I know it sounds crazy, that you could be not sure.”

“Like a dream?” the woman asked. “Or—how do you say this—a spell.”

“A spell,” Kit said, still smiling helplessly. But it didn’t seem to her that what happened on that last long October night was a spell he cast over her. It was one he lifted: a spell she had been under for a long time, that he broke to let her out.

At the corner table a disagreement had arisen; voices were getting loud. People were turning to look. Kit thought that among the Americans were one or two who had been on the plane with her, though

probably they were only like those men. Were they afraid? The Russian biznesmeny arose suddenly in a group and filed out, glancing around themselves as if they might be challenged, or applauded. They passed where Kit sat; she thought she could smell cologne.

“You see,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “We go from country where nothing could change, to country now where every day everything is different. Interest in writing now is not what it was, even one year ago.

Even writers are not so interested. Other things to think of. Everything becomes important, or nothing.”

“Monye now is everything,” the tiny old woman opposite Kit said.

“Like those lesser angels, as Falin writes,” he said to Kit. “In her dark time Russia was kept alive by the poets, the true poets. Perhaps now in the new time they will pass. They will cease to be souls, or persons, and become only books.”

He slowly tucked back into the inner pocket of his shapeless coat the envelope that contained Falin’s poem. “It may be we will lose him again,” he said. “And it may be that this time he will go where truly no one can find him.”

The restaurant was quieter, chastened or abashed. The Americans left at the corner table looked into their glasses or at one another.

But it couldn’t be, Kit thought: it couldn’t be that a nation’s lesser angel could be driven out, banished, for good. There could be no justice and no order on the earth if that were so; no power, however great, could do that.

Child, never forget that this too is so. Had that child been she, had he spoken to her and her alone, to warn or to explain? And did he know she wouldn’t discover it till she came here—here, bearing with her his fourteen lines—so long after that year in which they might have been lovers, the year the world didn’t end?

ii

1.

When her first semester at the University was over in May, Kit collected her grades (they were sent home too, on little slips printed for the first time by a computer): a B+ in Psychology, A’s in the rest except for her A− in Falin’s class: the highest grade he gave anyone, she learned.

Fran wanted her to come to New York with her for a while, stay at her mother’s apartment on Riverside Drive, go hear some music, sit in dark coffeehouses in the Village. But Kit had to say no (Fran nodding solemnly as though she expected nothing more); had to go home for a while, spend time with George and Marion, if her plan, her new plan, was to come off.

“You are crazy about him,” Jackie said when she told him about the plan. “Maybe just crazy altogether.” He wished he could be around the University in the summer, instead of working; taking some courses, getting some credits maybe toward his second major (economics) or maybe just some education courses, something to fall back on.

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“Like a sword,” Kit said.

She packed her paperbacks and her papers and Ben’s letters, Ben’s typewriter too, hers forever now (it would be in her attic thirty years later, in its case), and the clothes she’d brought, which seemed now to belong mostly to somebody else: she had lived the semester in three sweaters, her straight skirts and Capezios, and the black ballet leotards and tights that Fran had got her mother to send out from New York.

The rest filled her laundry case, amazing contraption of beaverboard and canvas straps. Marion had carried this case with her to Vassar, and the ghosts of old postage were still perceptible on it. Back then you filled such a case with your laundry and belted it up, then turned over the little address card in its windowed holder, and back it went for Mom to empty and fill again with washed and ironed clothes smelling of home.

Home. Kit sat in the lounge, waiting again for her father to come

and carry her and her bags home.

Her parents were moving again. This time back East, outside Wash-ington, D.C., where they had lived years ago, and where George would (he said) be designing bomb shelters for computers—“electronic bomb shelters,” he said, smiling at a joke that only he could get. Marion looked out at her June garden, and the pretty mosaic table she had made especially for it, in grief and exasperation. Kit was exasperated too: why did her mother always think they were going to stay where they went, when they never did? And only that night, in her own old bed and in the suffocating warmth and familiarity of being home again, did she see that it wasn’t the garden or the house that Marion was torn to leave behind. Her son’s grave was here, in this city, in the raw new part of the old Catholic cemetery, and always would be.

They treated Kit like visiting royalty, taking her out to dinners and movies and even on trips to points of historic interest, as though unwilling to stay in the house. When they were home George made them play Scrabble or casino; or he put LPs on his new stereo system, an engineer’s dream all in separate parts—a glowing amplifier, four speakers, the massy turntable on its weighted base. George slipped the

records from their paper jackets as though they were delicacies, turning them skillfully by their edges with his long white fingers. And got his wife up out of her chair to dance.

Kit and Ben had always found this music their father loved hilari-ous, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berrigan; it seemed to be played by cartoon animals, the singers to be kidding. But it had that jingle-jangle sweetness that made George take his wife’s hand and pull her to her feet.

“See, you don’t have to go to college to be rich and have a big life,”

George said, squiring Marion around the room. “Look at these guys.

Most of them didn’t finish high school. Hell, grade school.” Each of his phrases was marked by a turn. Marion’s eyes were closed, her neat little feet seeming to be propelled by his. Kit wondered what that felt like, to be certain and swift and surefooted because your man was. She could almost hear their hearts beat together, like it said in these songs: to beat as one. They’d always been like that, she thought, George and Marion; opposites matching, fitting together the way only opposites can, like the two magnetic Scotties that click together, the black one and the white one. The best of friends. How much could that make up for?

They couldn’t get over Ben, no more than she could: but maybe if they could always have these moments, these moments when they couldn’t tell one from the other, then maybe they wouldn’t need her so badly.

Meanwhile her letter had come from the Language Institute; Marion handed it to her incuriously along with other mail from the University. Kit made sure the offer was what she hoped it would be, and as they waited for dinner at George’s favorite long low steakhouse on the highway she told them what she was going to do.

“Russian?” her mother said, as though it were basket weaving, or sexology. “Why on earth.”

She told them about the Institute’s summer program, the scholar-ship money she’d been awarded, the intensive study. She’d be able to catch up, she said; with these hours and some more hard work she’d be able to graduate with her class, her true class, the Class of 1965. Still they looked at her, fingers on the stems of their drinks.

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“No. It’s just the University.”

“Believe me,” said George. “It’s DoD money, honey. Just like mine.”

It was the first time Kit had ever heard him say what his money was.

She worked out what DoD must mean. “Okay,” she said. “So?”

“Well what would you do with it?” Marion asked. “I mean.”

“Okay,” Kit said. “I talked to this person, she’s taking this same course. She said that the National Security Administration . . .”

“Agency,” said George. “The National Security Agency.”

“Agency. They need people with Russian. And the CIA. Lots of government places. Government bodies.”

“Well,” said Marion.

“You know I’ve always been good at languages,” said Kit. A silence fell again. Kit decided not to say that on her own application she too had expressed interest in the CIA; it had seemed the right response, to win their favor. Marion’s brows were knitted (it was this face of Marion’s that would always illustrate that funny phrase for Kit), and George studied her acceptance letter as though for hidden water-marks. It must have been (Kit only thought this later on) like a Catholic family who’ve been told their daughter has decided to be a nun: hard to find grounds for objection. And maybe because they thought that what she was doing was somehow a tribute to Ben, to his impulse to service, or to George, they couldn’t fight her for long. For once, like Ben, she had thought of everything. It was the first time she’d ever made and executed such a plan, and it would be a very long time till she did so again.