The Translator (20 page)

Marion asked her to clean out her room before she went back, and to throw out all she could; in the apartment where they would be living there would be no attic, no basement where the archives of years could be stored. So she went through her things, judging quickly and harshly, pulling out her high school notebooks, prizes, pictures of girls

she would never see again with rash and unfelt protestations of eternal friendship written over them, and throwing them toward the wastebas-ket in a kind of rage: knowing already where this was leading.

Three black folders in the left-hand drawer; a composition book with marbled cover; some loose sheets of blue-lined school paper and pages torn from spiral notebooks. Her handwriting changing as she grew older, her preferred ink color too. Drafts with more crossed out than left alone; final copies typed on onionskin. She could hold it all in one hand easily. Almost none of it had ever been seen, except by her.

There would be times, when she was much older, that she would wish she could go back to that evening and take it all out of her hands, the hands of that child, and make it safe, whatever it contained, how-ever unworthy to be saved: times in which it seemed to her that she had nothing, nothing but her self to care for. But she couldn’t go back, and it was all carried to the wire incinerator near the garage, and thrown in to be burned up with waste and old newspapers, with Time and Life.

She came back through the kitchen, where Marion was wrapping and packing glassware with the grim efficiency of long practice, and sat at the end of the plaid couch where George was watching TV. She didn’t feel cleansed, or shriven; not naked, or unburdened, or as though she had suffered a wound self-inflicted; not anything. She felt nothing. But for a long time she watched the gray figures come and go on the screen without actually perceiving them.

“Here’s your pal,” George said.

President Kennedy was speaking. To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go if the bombs begin to fall would be a failure of responsibility.

There were scenes of people passing city doorways that were stamped with a special hex sign; in the basements down below were piles of dry food, containers of water, medicines. It looked hopeless and sad.

“Look at this guy,” George said. A man stood in a tubular space like 154

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a sewer pipe or a submarine, his private shelter; it had cost him fifteen hundred dollars to build, and he had stocked it with bottled beer, a rifle, and a 1939 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nuclear war would set the world back a generation, he said, and these books would tell him how to live, back then.

They were there, she could see their brown backs in their case behind him.

She could do that too. All she needed.

“So you think they’re going to drop it?” George asked her.

“No,” Kit said. “It would be too stupid. Just too stupid.”

“Uh-huh.” He crossed his arms, grinning as though her answer was the one he expected. “Well, I hope to God you’re right.”

“You don’t think I am.”

“I think it’s about fifty-fifty.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think that.”

Kit had once had bomb dreams: she knew no one who grew up in those days who didn’t have them, dreams of mysterious and total desolation, or the oncoming of disaster like a huge wind or wave rising without warning, at which you woke. Rarely the event itself, which maybe even dreams could not imagine: only just after, or just before.

There was a time when she had refused to sleep, afraid that in the anti-world it would come again, that huge hollow that opened in the world, or in her heart. To comfort her, Ben had told her about the DEW Line: far in the north, ringing the continent, there were radar stations watching day and night, and no bomber from Russia would ever come that they wouldn’t see; and so we’d be warned, and we could hide.

He was right that it was the inexplicable suddenness that was the fearful part. She would lie in her bed, eyes on her night-light, thinking of the dew line, which she thought of as somewhere so far north that no dew fell: like the timberline, above which no trees grew. Hoping they were awake and listening.

She didn’t believe it would fall, not anymore. She didn’t think about it falling: at least not awake. But she also knew that it didn’t mat-

ter what she thought or believed; and maybe her inability to imagine a future for herself, to imagine what her life might someday contain (a husband, children, work), was because of its falling, in the future: the shock wave of it so final that it not only blanked out everything that followed but reached backwards too, to the moment of her sitting here, empty and still.

When she went back to the University she brought the square mahogany Webcor record player that had been a joint Christmas gift for her and for Ben, and all the records she had bought for herself and for him since then. The bitter machine smell, unique to it, that arose when the lid was lifted was home, and winter. A little haiku-like poem of that year was about it:

Black ivy by the window

Beaten by cold rain.

Inside, Brahms.

She brought her bike too. It was a long walk from the barrackslike dorms of the Language Institute to the center of campus and the town, she told George, helping him tie it to the car’s roof; she’d need it. It was her first and only bike. Ben had made her learn to ride, saying he’d just leave her behind when he went to the park or the natatorium if she couldn’t keep up, and she had made George answer an ad for a bike in the Lost & Found/Swap & Shop column of the paper. Fifteen dollars was all it cost, a bike like no other in the world, which made it (she felt) fit for her alone. It was a Schwinn English—styled like the ones you saw in European movies, only made (it seemed) of iron pipe; it was heavy as hell, Ben laughed aloud when he tried to take it from the back of the station wagon when they brought it home. The handbrakes had been at some time swapped for a standard back-pedal, and the whole thing had been repainted bright blue with what appeared to be house paint. But the seat was narrow, smooth black leather, and the 156

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tires were slim and delicate like a thoroughbred’s withers, and Kit loved it like a pony from the first.

“Do other students use bikes these days?” George asked doubtfully, untying it now in the cracked parking lot of the Institute dorm compound. The summer heat was already intense.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “No, not many. I don’t care.” She’d bought a lock for it, which George thought was funny, and which in the end she never used.

“Like summer camp,” George said, looking around. Long gray one-story buildings, lettered A, B, C on their faces, the parking lot, and some sycamores that had grown tall since the buildings had been thrown up, just after the war, for returning soldiers crowding into the University. It was like the army, not camp. They both thought it, but neither said it.

Her room. Now and then through her life there would be places like this for her, places that looked like confinement and poverty or at least austerity but which filled Kit with a rich sense of possibility, welcomed her and made her heart’s doors open as though to the same room’s original, inside. The varnished wooden floors and window frames, crooked window propped open with a stick; and the black fan with three silver blades and a twisted cord of black and white; and the iron bed and thin mattress, the Celotex walls where the amber rectangles of old Scotch tape remained; and the wooden desk, and the gooseneck lamp.

“Christ,” said George. “And how much is this costing, again?”

“Scholarship, Dad.”

“No air-conditioning? God, I remember . . .” But what he remembered, army stories, he didn’t say.

Down the hall were the showers, smelling of damp zinc and mildew, private stalls at least for the girls, who had only one-third of one of the three buildings, and only one girl to a room. Kit sat on her bed. She had a wicked impulse to apologize to George for her strange choice, for herself as girl, as young person, as strange spirit, just to make sure he understood it thoroughly. Instead she said, “It’s okay.

Really. It’s what I wanted. Thanks.”

“Well,” George said. There were dark circles under the arms of his Dacron shirt, and his bald forehead gleamed. “If we can’t have what we want, I’m glad that at least you do.”

She got up and hugged him.

“Now you have to come to us when the program’s over,” he said, holding her tight. “Before fall semester.”

“I will.”

“You have to come home.”

“Yes,” she said. “I promise. I will.”

2.

First there was the alphabet, which even when she had memorized it and listened to the teacher and the tapes over and over still seemed to Kit when she looked at it to be mute. She could hear a sentence in English or even French just by looking at it on the page, but these she never could: at best she heard a dim mumble, as though the sentences were spoken by someone with a mouthful of cotton. Not so when Nadezhda Fyodorovna spoke them aloud: then they became a kind of vocal acrobatics, her red-painted mouth moving in ways that Kit was sure hers never could as she produced the long, long sounds of the language, at once ludicrous and beautiful.

Today the weather is cold.

Saturday the weather was cold.

Tomorrow the weather will be cold.

It has been cold for a long time.

Nadezhda Fyodorovna was small and solid, her too-black hair in a tight bun, her hands red and marked with psoriasis; as she listened to her students she stroked one hand with the other, secretly tending to them, the fingers searching and scratching. Kit followed their motions, sometimes losing the thread of the lesson. Nadezhda Fyodorovna lifted her hand in a magician’s gesture and let her gold bracelets clash together; she plucked gently at the rattling beads around her neck.

How had this woman come here? Why was she here, doing this, looking at them all with this look of hope and anger?

Her fellow students were mostly air force enlisted men, on a special course. They didn’t know why they had been assigned to learn Russian, but it didn’t seem to bother them at all; they said they’d be told eventually, and meanwhile seemed pleased with light duty.

They were like Burke Eggert, like Ben, confident men who took their work as seriously as though it were play, at which they actually worked hard, playing one-hoop basketball on the cracked concrete with a kind of furious gaiety till the green evening began to fade from the sky and the ball grew invisible. They were big eaters who drank milk at breakfast and made themselves peanut butter and jelly sand-wiches after they’d consumed their hot lunch, stuck their hands in their pant tops and belched gratefully. They wore no uniforms; knit shirts and madras button-downs, pressed khakis, white socks and loafers or desert boots. But beneath their shirts, like the Miraculous Medal on a beaded chain that Kit had worn for a while as a child, were their stamped steel tags. Ben’s had been returned to George and Marion.

After supper on the Saturday night of her first week of classes, Kit pushed her bike out to the street that led away from the Language Institute housing. It was slightly downhill from the crest on which the University was built to the center of town, and she coasted much of the way, aloft in the still-sunny evening, late June, the checkered shade. At 160

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the center of town she turned on North Street as she had with Jackie in the first week of the winter semester.

This was what the bike had been for all along. Though she didn’t build futures for herself, sometimes she could see one, a vivid moment that was to happen to her, and sometimes it really would happen; and this moment on her bike on North Street going west out of town was one.

The road looked different burdened with roadside brush and over-arched by heavy-leaved trees, but this had certainly been it. Her legs prickled with sweat. Blackberries were ripening in the fearsome tangled briars along the road, canes springing higher than her head. And that was the house, more modest and much more weatherbeaten than the house she had glimpsed in the winter but the only candidate; she turned into the dusty driveway, where a new car was parked, a big convertible in two nameless shades of green. Kit dismounted and dropped the bike. The silence was deep, the cicadas warning her; she walked around the front of the house, where the blinds were drawn, through a stand of lilacs, to a broad backyard.

He was working in the garden, feet bare, cuffs of his blue serge pants rolled up and a sleeveless undershirt dark with sweat. He waved a greeting, smiling, making Kit think of Soviet farmers in photographs.

The Family of Man. Dusting his hands on his pants, he came to her.

She greeted him in Russian, feeling suddenly foolish; and he returned it to her, graciously. He offered her his hand, seeming to be unsurprised somehow but delighted: her own hand felt crushed within the heat and strength of his. She smelled him.

“Kyt,” he said.

“I came out to see you,” she said, not having meant to say that, having meant to say that she was out and about and just happened to be passing. He nodded and spread his hands as though to offer her what lay around them: his part of the house, with its jalousie or screened porch; a picnic table of gray wood; the brown yard and brick path. The garden.

“What are you growing?” she asked.

“I am not growing,” he said. “Ah. What have I planted, you are asking. Yes. Well.” He took her hand, and led her to the neat rows, where green things were coming up, rows of this kind, rows of that. “I have tomatoes, cabbage,” he said. “Here. And carrots. Potatoes.”

“Potatoes?” She knew of no home gardeners who grew potatoes, but how many had she known? She thought of Marion, bent over her cucumbers and radishes, one eye closed against the rising smoke of her Pall Mall.