The Translator (21 page)

“Yes, potatoes,” he said. “For soup in winter. They are also easy, you know. Put potatoes in ground; cover a little; soon more potatoes. Like magic. Why they conquered the world.”

She noticed how many of his crops were root ones, that wouldn’t be ripe till late.

“Ah but they last. Any Russian knows. I knew high official in Leningrad. In autumn he must have his potatoes. Hundred pounds. In basement. Then, good winter, no matter what.”

“He couldn’t get potatoes in winter?”

“Oh yes. Even when others could not. But old habit. You know.”

She laughed, thinking of officials in American cities with potatoes stored in the basements of their apartments, safe till spring at least.

Maybe someday.

He gathered his tools, apparently done for this day, and put them in a wooden wheelbarrow. “I am very glad to see you,” he said. “But why are you here and not far away at home?”

“Summer school,” she said. “You know I started late. I’m trying to catch up.”

He nodded, regarding her. “And studying what?”

“Russian,” she said.

At first he only looked at her in mild puzzlement; then a kind of illumination filled his features, which vanished into a laugh, of delight or triumph or something else she couldn’t name. “Russian,” he said.

“It’s an intensive course,” she said. “All day every day.”

“To speak or to read?” he asked.

“Well both.”

162

She shrugged. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know. I like languages.

Maybe I’ll be a spy.”

“Aha.” He gestured toward his house, inviting her to it, still regarding her, still smiling. “Come in. Have tea. Lemonade. Tell me what poems you have written.”

“I told you,” she said. “I’ve given up writing poetry.”

“You would not be first to have tried that and yet not succeeded,” he said. “Certain people give up poetry but poetry does not give them up.”

She said nothing in reply, and that was a reply, which he seemed to accept. He pulled open the squeaking screen door.

The porch was dark after the still-bright day, paneled with pine, and there was a davenport or glider upholstered in plaid canvas; pictures on the walls with no reason for being there or anywhere, dim views of unreal places, sad clowns. He took a flannel shirt from a hall tree, seemed to consider it, thought better of it. He was larger indoors, his white skin shadowed with black hair and his dusty feet.

“Your fellow students,” he said. “Also spies? Is this why they study?”

“I don’t know. They say they don’t know. They’re soldiers.”

“Perhaps only to read Pushkin.”

“Or Falin.”

He bent to the kitchen sink to wash: she watched him rapidly and efficiently scrub his hands and face, splash water on his head and neck and arms, and she knew he had done so for years in places without baths or showers; like an American of another era, a farmer or settler or miner, making do. For no reason she knew, a hot pity arose in her.

He toweled himself with a ragged and colorless thing that hung by the sink, and pulled open the refrigerator. “Lemonade,” he said. “Or tea with ice, American invention, very nice.”

“Either,” she said. “You pick.” She walked into the living room, divided from the kitchen by a half-wall; she peeked into a little bedroom, where a lumpy bed was spread with chenille. There were shelves meant for display of knickknacks that instead held small piles of books, all library books as far as she could see, and a folding card

table that was a desk. Otherwise there seemed to be nothing of him here at all; if he left tomorrow no one would know he’d been here.

She sat on the couch. He brought her a glass of lemonade. “Now,”

he said. “You must say truly why you come to this university, this hot place, in summer, to study such hard language.”

“I needed something to do,” she said. “Something hard to do.

Something that was all the time.”

He waited.

“I wanted not to be at home. There’s no one at home. My parents are moving. I like it here.”

She sipped the drink. It was violently sweet, as though concocted for bees, or hummingbirds. “Also,” she said. “You.”

“Me?”

“You said to me once,” she said, “that your poems could only be read, that I could only really read them, if I learned Russian . . .” His head was shaking No and he had raised a finger to correct her, but she went on: “And so I’m going to, so I can.”

“I said that in translation they are different poems. Good or bad. Not that in other languages they did not exist.”

“I wanted to read them as you wrote them,” she said, and lowered her eyes. “That’s all.”

“Well,” he said. “Maybe someday. In six weeks, no.”

“No, of course.” She had begun to feel stupid, having brought a gift that wasn’t wanted, wasn’t even a gift.

“In any case you have given up poetry, you say. So.”

“I’ve only given up writing it. Not reading it. Not . . .” She almost said not needing it.

“A language,” he said. “It is a world. My poems are written for the people of a world I have lost. To read them I think you must have lived in my world—my language—since childhood, and grown up in it.”

“How will your poems get to them now, though? Your new poems, I mean. Who will bring them back there?”

He only went on looking at her frankly, holding his glass in an oddly un-American elbow-cocked way; and for the first time she saw the 164

him out. In almost every way that could be enumerated it was better to be here than there, she knew that; and when she thought of him she imagined an angel fled from a comical terrible hell, a sulfurous won-derland of cruel illogic from which he had escaped untouched and unharmed. But they had known what they were doing, what a vengeance they were taking.

“Would you,” he said, “enjoy to read a poem of mine, with me?”

“Yes,” she said, and her heart filled. “I would.”

For a long moment he still stood, as though his question and her answer had not been said. Then he went to the card-table desk and picked up some sheets of yellow paper, written, she saw, on both sides, in pencil and in ink, much of it crossed out. With these he came and sat beside her on the brown couch.

“The poem is called ‘1937,’ ” he said. “It is a year.”

She nodded, as still as though she watched a brave but wary animal come close. He began to read. Though his eyes were lowered to the paper he seemed to speak from memory, and sometimes his eyes closed as he spoke. It wasn’t the big strange voice with which he had read Pushkin; it wasn’t Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s incantatory exactness; but it was more than plain speech too, the rhythms more clear and hard-struck than they would be in a poem read in English, iambs stepping gravely forward. She could hear them. She even recognized a few common words, night, bed, star. She bent her soul toward his voice as though she might be able to translate what he said by will alone, or by desire.

He lifted his head. She smiled at him and lifted her hands helplessly. “Nothing,” she said. “Not the vaguest idea.”

He nodded. “It tells of a young man who says he has—how do you say this—has come of age; and so now he will pack a small bag, suitcase, to put under his bed, as his father before him also did.”

“Okay,” she said cautiously.

“This was such common thing, you see, everyone understands. You expect that perhaps secret police will come, can come at any time; you

will not be given much time, and will perhaps be not in condition to think clearly, what to take, what you will need.” He nodded, smiling, it’s true. “So the wise ones, they packed small bag, small enough to carry a long way; in it, warm socks, felt boots, tobacco, a book. A photograph. And this bag placed ready under the bed.”

“Oh.”

“In the poem the man thinks of his father and mother, who slept in their big bed near his for decades; every night beneath them the small bag waiting. While they slept, while they . . .”

“Yes.”

He read the lines in Russian. “So now the son has grown up, the new generation, and the wisdom of the father descends to him, you see, and he has packed bag of his own. And what shall he put in it?

What shall he try to carry if he must go?” He read again, and she seemed to hear a list, a catalog. “The innocent yat, among those who perished the most discreet. Some smoke of north, or northland, which is well known to him and to his father. Their city, caught in snow-puddle or snowmelt, never to fall or, or.” He stared earnestly at the lines, his lips moving; then he shook his head and laughed. “No it is meaningless. Or I cannot. Cannot find equivalents.”

He put the paper down on the couch between them and showed her. “You see here. The innocent yat: yat is that small letter, there. It was a useless, a redundant letter in Russian alphabet; after the Revo-lution, language was reformed, and that letter was got rid of.” He tapped it. “Terminated. Liquidated. And it was discreet, said nothing, of course.”

He was laughing again, in some kind of paroxysm of frustration, as though he were being tickled. “Look, look. Some smoke of the northland, known to him and to me. This is easy, everyone knows. Northland is name of popular type of cigarette. It seems both father and son smoke this kind. But also smoke of chimneys of far northern camps, prison camps, everyone knows.”

She thought she understood then, that he had shown her these things so that she would know he was right: she could never understand 166

j o h n c r o w l e y

his poems, they couldn’t be changed like money. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I see.”

“It’s very hard.”

“Yes. Well. It’s interesting.” She got up, went to set her glass by the sink. “I’d better be going back. I have a, you know. Curfew. And lots of homework.”

He got to his feet. “You must go?”

“Yeah. I guess.” She shrugged, and turned away suddenly from his look; outside, beyond the darkening porch and the garden, the evening was changing from gold to blue. He opened the screen door for her, and together they walked around the house to where Kit had left her bike.

“May I ask you something?” he said.

“Yes sure.”

“Will you come back?”

A soft seawave lifted her. He had spoken as though what he asked might be hard to grant him: as though he knew he might be refused.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will. Yes.”

“We might read again.”

“If you want to.”

“Perhaps you will go for a ride with me,” he said. “In my car.”

They had come around to where it was parked, the two-tone convertible gleaming as though wet, its heavy chrome turned pink with sunset.

“That car is yours?”

“Yes. It is new.”

“I can see.”

“You like it.”

“Well.” She regarded it; it seemed, like all its kind, to be preening, smirking, inviting. “It’s kind of large.”

He went to lean against the door, as though posing for a picture. Kit, remembering Jackie’s Beetle, wondered if like the wizards who once hid their souls in gems or in trees, men now hid their souls in cars,

which then were like them. Or which disguised them: as this one surely did.

“When would you like to come again?” he said.

“When,” she said. “Well.”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Can you come tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And will you?”

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “I can and I will.”

He said he would come and get her, but she didn’t know how that would look, and told him no, she liked to bike. She changed after her dinner, putting on a shirtwaist dress of dotted swiss; thought of wearing her linen shoes with the little heels too, but that meant stockings, and suddenly feeling foolish she put on smudged white sneakers over her bare feet. She wished her legs were tanned; what was wrong with her that she looked always like she’d just climbed out of a cave or a rain barrel. And a red sore right in the middle of her shin, where had that come from, didn’t she even notice when she banged herself bloody.

She licked a finger and rubbed at the scab.

He was waiting outside his house, in the front yard by his car; he wore sunglasses though the sun was low.

“Ride I promised you,” he said.

“If you want,” she said.

“Good.” He pulled open the heavy door for her and when she was in he slammed it shut; went around the back of the car, long trip, and to the driver’s side.

“So did you get a license?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“You’ve driven cars before?”

“Trucks. In war. Easy.”

He drove his car as though it were a truck, carefully putting it in gear, backing around and out, turning with caution onto the road. He 168

j o h n c r o w l e y

held the ivory steering wheel with both hands, constantly working it, as an old person does. They crept along.

“Which way?” he asked her at the highway.

“West,” she said. “Away.”

“In Russia,” he said, “east is away.”

The corn was tall and green on either side of the road, but far in the middle of the fields they could see where an acre of ground had been raised above the rest, and on it a small stand of trees left to grow, whose name she didn’t know when he asked. A dusty road went out that way, drawn right along the section line, but then bending around and up to the knoll’s top.

They got out there. Because for so far in all directions the land was flat and mostly uninhabited, they seemed to be very high. Not any nearer the tremendous clouds piling in the west, though, which were dizzying to look up at, like skyscrapers. There was a lick of breeze, lifting her skirt, then no more.

“Silos,” he said, pointing to far twin towers, midnight blue for some reason and not red. “This word I learned from your poem of last year.”

“Oh?” She felt a sudden small self-consciousness, as though he had brushed against her.