The Translator (2 page)

“Passport, please.”

The man in a green uniform with red tabs looked once, twice, three times from her passport picture to her and blew expressively, in boredom or exhaustion. She handed over her visa, and she had the invitation to the conference ready in her bag too, and a little speech prepared; but she was waved on, and when she put her bags before the customs clerk he also wearily waved her on, and she sailed out into the crowded space where everyone was hugging and kissing, old people, children, men in suits; and there ahead was a tall and very thin, very old man, who held up a small sign, a torn piece of cardboard, with her name on it in that same odd orthography, a sign that shook slightly in his hand. His face was infinitely sad and yet his smile was kind, as though he waited to conduct her to an afterlife that was better than she deserved yet not all she might desire. He turned his eyes on her and seemed to know her immediately.

“Good morning,” he said, in English and then in Russian. “I am Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov. Welcome to my country.”

Already she was uncertain she had heard correctly; she replied with a Russian greeting, and he began to speak again in Russian, turning away and pointing toward far parts of the terminal.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s thirty years since I spoke Russian. Is it possible to speak in English, at least at first?”

10

“Of course,” he said with great courtliness. “In English I am not fluent. I am fluent in Russian, Estonian, Polish, French. Not English however, unfortunately.”

“No?” Christa said. “Oh well. You speak it better than I’ve ever spoken any language but my own. Americans, you know . . .”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

He insisted on carrying a bag for her, and she chose the lightest to give him; he led her down corridors and up escalators until they emerged into a vast garage where dozens of ugly black cars were waiting, their motors running. Semyonov looked a long time before locat-ing the one he wanted and waving it forward. A ZIL sedan; Christa could read that name at least. The windows were tinted and the back-seat huge; it smelled of smoke and sweat.

“Vasili Vasilievich is driver for government official,” Gavriil told her. “Once he spent hours waiting for his official to be done with meetings, et cetera. Now, rule is, instead of waiting he is allowed to use this car for taking others. Like ourselves.” He smiled, as though the sit-uation were comical, which it was: the fearsome car, the thick-necked driver, the innocent moonlighting.

When he had done talking to the driver and the car began crawling from the airport with other traffic, Gavriil Viktorovich turned to her, for a long moment only regarding her with his face of tender apology, which maybe meant nothing that it seemed to mean, was just an old Russian’s face.

“So,” he said. “We meet.”

“You know,” she said, “I did answer your first letter. Long ago. I did.”

He made a wonderful elaborate shrug that forgave, proclaimed ignorance, dismissed the question, invoked Fate, all at once.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “What I knew. It wasn’t much.”

“Here nothing at all was known of what became of him in U.S.,”

Gavriil Viktorovich said. “This was our period of reaction, after fall of Khrushchev, after Cuba missiles crisis. Here we withdrew again into our castle, or we were again locked in our closet, however it is put.

Very dangerous once again to talk to foreigners, or about foreigners, or

about past, or the dead. Poets then who wrote about the dead were always saying only farewell to them, turning away to face future, you see.” He was smiling. “The dead had just begun again to speak to us when we stopped for a long time listening.”

“But now again,” she said.

“Yes. Now again we listen. Some of us.”

Vasili bore them through a region of identical concrete apartment and office buildings, a bad idea that seemed to have been given up on lately, idle cranes and piles of building materials that looked as though they had been standing untouched for a long time. It made her think of her father’s apartment. Oh forget it he said when she tried to gather up years-old magazines or wash the windows.

“We have program,” he said to her. “First, to restore his citizenship, which was taken from him. To put up monument perhaps, though where? We don’t know where he was born; he lived in many places.

And many places now gone: homes, schools he was in, places of work.

Gone. As though time ate up these traces of him as it moved along.”

He laced together his long yellow-nailed fingers in his lap. “We would want above all to bring him home. But he was not ever found.”

“No. No, he wasn’t.” She, she herself, had known that he wouldn’t be found as soon as his great pale-green convertible had been pulled up empty from the river, spilling water from every opening. It had been shown on the news again and again. Yet even then she wouldn’t say that he was dead. She hadn’t known, not for certain. She thought there was a period of time, years maybe, that had to pass between a disappearance and the assumption of death; of course that period was long gone by now, gone decades ago. And yet still she couldn’t say I know he’s dead.

“Hotel,” Gavriil Viktorovich said, sounding relieved. “Prib-altiyskaya. Not splendid but very near to me, and I will be guide. You will have view of water,” he said.

It was vast, concrete and glass. The rainy gulf was what it looked at or glowered at.

“You will want to rest,” he said. “Then perhaps come to my apartment, is not far, and we will go to dinner.”

12

“All right. Whatever you want.”

“Many people would like to meet you,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “I have invited small number to dinner. I hope you will not mind.”

“No. No, of course not.”

The woman behind the desk spoke to Kit, and then—seeing no sign of understanding—to Gavriil Viktorovich, in a voice imperious and petulant at once. He turned to Kit.

“Your room is it seems not ready now,” he said. “One hour. Perhaps you would like tea.”

“I met him at the university I went to,” she told him. The tea before her in a glass: she hadn’t drunk tea from a glass since then, since that fall. “He taught there. Poetry. It was the year after he came. I was nine-teen years old.”

“And you were a poet then?”

“Oh, well. I’d won a prize. I was supposed to have a, you know. A bent.”

“And you studied there with him.”

“I was supposed to begin at the university in the fall of 1961,” she said. “But I couldn’t; something else had happened, something . . .

well, it doesn’t matter, anyway I couldn’t go to school that semester. By then Falin had come to teach at the university in my state; and I’d read about him, in Look and Life.” She saw Gavriil Viktorovich lift his great eyebrows curiously. “The magazines. We were fascinated by people who had, you know, come over: Nureyev, running away from his body-guards in Paris, we all knew about that. And the people trying to get over the Berlin Wall. And Falin, the poet, who couldn’t bring his poems with him. I didn’t hear about him when he came, but I knew he was teaching there when I went in the second semester to start.”

“You planned to meet him?”

“No,” she said. “No. I had sort of given up poetry.”

“Yes? And for what reason?” He took her glass from her and began to pour her more.

“Falin once asked me that,” she said: and she knew then that it would not be easy to be here, nor to go on with this story here. For as far in space as she had come she would also have to go in time, or in that dimension that was not either, where they had parted. “I told him I had nothing I could say. And he said that’s what poetry is, the saying of nothing. The Nothing that can’t be said.”

“Later on, though, you did write again,” Gavriil Viktorovich said.

He waited, leaning forward slightly, to show that she had his full attention, or on account of his hearing.

“Yes,” she said. “Later I did. Afterwards.”

He still waited.

“I’ll tell you it all,” she said. “I’m here to tell you it all. All that I know.”

3.

It was a university huge even in 1961, a city rising on a piece of high ground pressed up for some geological reason from the surrounding prairie. It was built as a land-grant college, and the original cluster of red-stone buildings in toybox Gothic style still stood under big elms and sycamores. By the time Kit went there, though, these were immured within new concrete dorms and featureless towers that stepped even beyond the little willow-bordered river whose Indian name the early scholars had resurrected and the school song celebrated.

Kit’s parents brought her down in the family station wagon, its back loaded with her books and a set of Samsonite luggage, battered and marred from the many family moves it had made. Her brother’s portable typewriter too, which had devolved on her, a long-term loan, when he joined the army. He had no use for it. In the service he had no use either for the black leather jacket, lined in cerulean satin, zip-pered at the sleeves and across the breast, that he had worn only a few times riding his motorcycle. Kit had accepted it, or taken it from him,

after he reupped in November. A hostage she held, or an oblation, or just the old slipper that a lonesome dog chews in its master’s absence.

She wore it, way too large for her and distressingly strange and barbaric to her mother, who had plucked at the wide shoulders on Kit’s slight frame and almost wept when Kit insisted on wearing it here, to her new school, not as a joke or a gesture but as a coat, to keep her warm.

“That’s it. Tower 3,” said her father, the University map spread out over the steering wheel. Central one of a group, almost identical, like three pyramids in a row in Egypt. The lone and level sands stretched far away. Kit hated and feared it immediately. Only when they had parked the wagon and hauled her stuff up the elevator and opened the door to her room did she see that, although dreadful to look at, it was wonderful to look out of. A last watchtower, facing the plain brown west and the evening; the river’s little oxbow, peach-colored like the sunset sky.

All of that too was fearful in its melancholy but didn’t make her afraid.

“Well,” her father said again.

“All yours I guess,” said her mother, looking into the closets. One of Kit’s fears had been of the roommate she might get, creepy doppel-ganger of some kind or cold and imperious. She had had enough of roommates at Our Lady, other souls too near hers.

Leaving her belongings there still packed (her mother wanted to fill the cunning built-in drawers of blond wood and hang pictures, but Kit wouldn’t let her), they drove around the campus until it was too dark to see. (“‘The Old Wishing Well in its grove of oaks has long been a tra-ditional spot for marriage proposals,’” her father read from the guide-book. “Gee. Must be a long line come June.” And Kit saw her mother frown and put a silencing hand on his slacks.) Then they drove down into the little town, to the one big old hotel, and had dinner. A cock-tail? Ma glanced for approval at Dad and said, “I’ll have a grasshopper.”

Dad ordered a martini, and when it was brought he pushed it toward Kit. “Back on track,” he said to her, and a big hard lump suddenly rose in Kit’s throat, that only a swallow of the awful pale drink dissipated.

Late that night she awoke in her new narrow bed as though she had 16

heard a whisper in her ear, and when she sat up, she could see that outside the window snow was falling fast and thick.

Registration for second-semester classes was held next day, in the great Romanesque field house, toward which students pressed, slogging through the uncleared snow and churning it to slush. The boots to have, Kit could tell, were those stadium boots with fur collars, white polar bear or gray kitten: her own Capezios, and her feet, were icy wet.

Inside, banners in the University colors hung from the iron rafters, and the tall barred windows lit the dusty air in columns. Sawdust, now wet too, was spread over the dirt of the floor and the markings of the running track. Rows of long folding tables had been set up, above which signs were hung announcing what classes could be signed up for at each station.

Like a bazaar, Kit thought. The hum of talk and activity arose into the height of the old building, up to where calling sparrows darted amid the rafters. As an incoming freshman, Kit was told she had first to be photographed for her identification card. Signs and monitors guided her into a roped-off area where a portrait camera and lights were set up.

“Card?”

What card? The proctor or assistant neatly fingered it out of Kit’s packet. We were all getting used to these oblong punch cards then, one corner clipped, their rows of perfect rectangular holes. You were not to fold, spindle, or mutilate them. There was a comb there, and a mirror, for her to use. Kit stopped still for a moment, unable to move forward, reminded for no good reason (the big camera, the harried proctor) of Our Lady. All through the coming year in her ID photo she would see in her eyes what she had seemed to see at that moment when they were taking it. Hunted: or not hunted, caught.

She exited that area, permitted now to wander in the busy souk. She thought maybe she’d toss away the list of sensible choices she had worked out with the freshman adviser, and instead go over there, sign up for Introduction to Music Theory, or Uralic-Altaic Studies. But she

went meekly and stood in the right lines, English Composition, the advanced French course she had tested into, a Psychology course (her required-science choice), World History I (from the Stone to the Middle Ages), Major Works of Western Literature I (Homer to Cervantes).

Down the table from where she signed up for Composition, a line pressing toward a harassed young man threatened to break up into a crowd: people apparently trying to sign up for Comparative Literature 401, The Reading and Writing of Poetry. The anxious students in their duffel coats and canvas bags, white breath coming from their mouths in the unheated building, made Kit think of people in Russia lined up to buy something scarce, toilet paper or salt fish.