The Translator (25 page)

“Far,” she said. “Far forward.” She said it without actually choosing to say it. She’d said the other things in the same way: she’d actually left no number at all with the proctor, that had simply exited her mouth when she opened it and winged toward him. “Go,” she said.

He drove her no farther than their grove of trees above the fields.

The weather had changed; the sky was so clear that the stars within it seemed to stand at varied distances from earth, some near, some very far. Kit climbed to the broad hood of the car and stood, feeling the heat of the engine rise beneath her skirt and the breeze move it.

“You can see farther over the earth from up here,” she said.

“How far?” he said. He rested against the car door, lifting a starlike glowing cigarette now and then to his lips.

“Very far.”

“Forever? To the ends?”

“No,” she said. “Because of the earth’s curve. The earth is curved, but vision is straight.”

“Easy to bend vision,” he said. “Easy as tossing a ball, or shooting an arrow. Just let it drop.” He showed with a hand.

“You can?”

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“What do you see, then? How far?”

“Well. Looking eastward. I see . . . What are those flames, that orange flare?”

She closed her own eyes. “That must be Gary, or East Chicago,”

she said. “The mills, the refineries, burning off gases. They do it all night, high in the air. What else?”

He turned. “Northwestward. Is a city on the plain,” he said. “Many crossing streets, marked with lights, like drops of dew on spider’s web.”

“That’s, um. That’s got to be St. Paul,” she said. “Those lights. Or Duluth.”

“Southwestward too. Another.”

“Des Moines,” she said. “Tulsa.”

“Beautiful,” he said, in his Falin voice, another word of his she would hear ever after. “Beautiful.”

“O Beautiful for spacious skies,” she said. “For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain.”

“Is this verse of your own? Or once again common song?”

“O Beautiful,” she said, “for patriot dream, That sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears.” She was never able to say or sing those lines, those hopes, without her own eyes sparkling. Undimmed by human tears: reminding you of tears, human tears, even while denying them. It was unbearably sad. She looked down to where he stood below her; she lifted her arms, and he opened his, and she leapt into them. He caught her, held her a moment suspended between the hot earth and the cool sky; and when her feet were on the ground he didn’t take his hands from her waist.

She lifted her face to him, sure she had guessed right, so certain of it that the little tight hand that had seemed to grip her heart all day let go of it at last, and it beat hard and wildly.

It was a long blind kiss, but then he ended it, with a breath like a sob, and laid his cheek, his rough cheek, against hers. She tried to turn him toward her, nuzzling, her hands on his shoulders. He drew away and looked down at her. How could his face be so alight in nothing but

starlight, she could read it as though it were day: great-eyed and plain like an archaic Greek head.

“I’m staying with you tonight,” she said.

“Kit,” he said.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said. “It’s not like I’m a virgin.”

“But I am afraid,” he said. “You make me so.”

“Well you just . . . You need to get over that.”

“Kit,” he said again, and seemed to ponder—not what to say but whether he would say it. “I do not think it is . . . what I am for.”

“Oh jeez,” she said. “Not what you’re for. Well, what.” She swallowed, or tried to; her throat was tightening with the onset of a deep embarrassment or shame. She turned from him, crossed her arms.

“Is not what you want,” he said.

“You don’t know what I want.”

“Perhaps what you do not want. Perhaps I know this.”

“How?”

He didn’t answer, and she wouldn’t turn to look at him.

“You would like to go back?” he said.

Without speaking she went to the door he opened for her, and got in, her arms still crossed protectively, and looked at the night. The east-ern sky had paled, and now an amber moon, comically huge and full, rolled up as if with a soft exhalation that could be heard. Big moon, big car, summer night, green corn. How could she have been fooled?

“So I guess, what,” she said. “You think of me as a daughter? Is that right?”

She said it as sarcastically, as fiercely, as she could, turning to face him. As soon as it was said, she heard it herself as he would, as he must; and she clapped her hand to her mouth, too late. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh I’m so sorry.”

“No,” he said. “Not daughter, no. I would not think so of you.”

“How could I say that, how. I’m such a . . .”

“No, no,” he said. “No.”

His hand covered hers where it lay on the car seat, his hand large and real and cool.

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“Yes,” he said. “No reason to go there. She is fast asleep now, your guardian there.”

“Oh no,” Kit said, shaking her head. “I bet not.”

“Oh yes. And in her hand her beads, what do you call these . . .”

“Rosary.”

“Rosary: of green jade. She has not slept without this since day she took First Communion. Believes she could not sleep, if it were lost.”

“Will it be?”

“Yes. Of course.”

He drove them back to his little house and let them in with a key; she hadn’t known him to lock his door before. In the lamplight lay the work they had done that day. She sat on the couch and he made sweet tea. They hadn’t spoken further.

“Now Kit. Here is tea.”

She let the steaming glass sit before her on the low table. She never in her life drank hot tea except when she was sick; tea was to her the drink of solitude and recuperation and a house of blankets, an inner watch kept on a bad tummy or a migraine. Marion gave her tea and aspirin when her periods hurt or devastated her as they did sometimes.

She felt that now: on watch over her body. Because of the tea but not just because of the tea.

And maybe he was right. Maybe it was closed, and wouldn’t have opened. But you couldn’t know, and she had been ready at least to knock: to open to his knock, or try.

With his glass of tea he sat beside her on the couch. She didn’t look at him.

“Do you know,” he said. “It is not easy to say what I have said to you.”

“I don’t know what’s easy for you. Everything seems easy.” She covered her mouth again, stupid again. “I don’t mean that.”

“Anyway not easy to say no to your invitation. So frank too. That I should be one of your lovers.”

She laughed at that. “Oh sure,” she said. “My lovers. There’s only

been one. Not even one. I mean, technically, but.” She stopped, and looked into her glass.

“Was it,” he said, “this blond boy you go with?”

She shook her head minutely, not wondering how he knew about Jackie; she had got used to him knowing things he shouldn’t.

“Someone else you loved.”

She shook her head no again.

“Is it perhaps,” he asked, “one of these things about which you think you can say nothing?”

She nodded, so slightly it might not have been seen in the lamplight; but he saw.

“He was then . . .”

“He was just somebody,” she said. “Not anybody. He was hardly even there. It was just, like, a minute.”

“Perhaps to himself, though, he was there. A somebody.”

“I spose.” She thought how in the mess and blood and the dawning cold of its being over, of its having really been done, Burke had leaned close to her and said to her I love you: as though it were a precious thing, a jewel from inside him that he was obliged to yield up and was yielding up. Hearing it had been even stranger than the touch of his.

What on earth had he thought? What did he think now? What is it, the mystery of it, once inside it did you ever get back to the outside again?

Nothing to say, nothing she could say. She was surprised to feel wet-ness on her cheeks. Old Goofy Glass. She wiped them rapidly with her hands.

The nameless cat leapt up suddenly from the floor, she hadn’t seen it come near and here it was. She put her hands on it and so did he and it looked with its demon eyes from her to him; and then folded itself up.

Kit told Falin about Burke.

She told him about her brother, and how he had joined the army; she told how he had come home at Christmas, and what had happened 198

about her child, and about the Blue Blades, and he took her wrists in his hands as though he had known all along. She told him of Ben’s death and his burial and the lie they had perhaps been told. Sometimes she stopped for a time and slipped again into silence and the gray cat’s fur and its purring. He waited and said nothing till she went on. Telling it she saw that she believed it was all one story, a web knot-ted at every point, and that at the center of the story was her own blind stupid willful wanting, black spider that had caused it all. And she saw too (she learned it here on this night, in this telling) that one day she would know better. She would know that it wasn’t one story but many, many many, not all of them hers.

“You must one day speak of these things,” he said.

“I did. I just did.”

“In poems,” he said.

But she didn’t reply or assent.

Past midnight he brought her a thin coverlet and a pillow to put beneath her head on the couch.

“I’m still angry with you,” she said. “Really.”

“Yes.”

“You spoiled everything. My whole plan.”

“Yes. Now sleep.”

“Will we ever?” she asked him.

“I do not know what you mean.”

“I mean be lovers.”

“We are. We will be now always.”

She didn’t say more. He kissed her brow: touched her brow with his lips for a long time, which seemed like an answer, an answer that wasn’t yes or no. He covered her.

“Don’t you go,” she said. “Stay right here.”

“I will not go.”

“Just don’t.”

“No. Kit. I will not.”

He didn’t: he stayed with her as she slept; she knew, because it was late in the night, near dawn almost, when his leaving her side awoke her. She opened her eyes and turned to see the door of his bedroom open, and the tall shape of him, like a being not in a body, against the gray light of the far window.

5.

The house that Falin lived in was owned by an old woman, Anna Petroski, who had lived in the main house all her life with her brother till he died and now lived there alone. She had a condition of some kind, Kit never learned the name, that kept her from walking or grasping things except with great effort. Her brother had cared for her, and though he was gone she managed to go on; she was tall and stooped and broad-shouldered, with long arms that looked strong though they weren’t. In her house she moved around in an old wheeled office chair, pulling herself across the floor by handholds worn paintless by her progress. Old women from her church came to help, and Falin shopped for her sometimes. He once brought Kit into her part of the house when he paid his weekly rent, and she watched the old woman move around her kitchen in her huge slippers and flowered housecoat; she kept rags in various places to help strap a pot handle or a knife to her hand. Falin counted out bills, licking his thumb in a way Kit had never seen anyone else do and making jokes or remarks in Polish that

made Miss Petroski smile; she watched Kit sharply though, with a small glittering inquiring eye.

The cats around the place had been her brother’s, and she seemed to disdain them. They had found or made their way under the eaves and out above Falin’s ceiling, where they hunted mice or the little fly-ing squirrels that nested there, and down through another gap into his kitchen, dropping to the top of the refrigerator and to the counter and the floor, where Falin fed them.

“I will be gone a day and a night,” he said to Kit as he filled the cats’

cracked saucers. He was going to the state capital, where the offices of the Case Columbia Foundation were, a couple of hours’ drive away, where he would stay the night; she was to come to feed the cats, and after sundown water the garden. “It won’t be too much trouble?” he asked. “You have too much work?”

“It won’t be any trouble.”

He seemed harried or distracted, as though embarking on a long journey unprepared. The Case Columbia Foundation, according to Jackie, had been responsible for getting him the job he now held; had paid him a salary while he awaited an appointment, and helped him in other ways maybe too. He avoided Kit’s questions about why he was driving so far to talk to them.

He was already gone when next day she came to his house after her classes. His house was empty, and almost all that had made it his was gone with him—including the poems and manuscripts that had accu-mulated on the card table.

Empty. Kit sat on the couch; her couch. His absence was rich around her. She took her spiral notebook and a pencil from her bag.

Since morning she had been thinking of a poem, or some verses any-way; for the first time in months, toying with lines and trying to perfect them. The idea arose as she studied her Russian, practicing her pro-nouns, her familiar and respectful forms, lost for so long to English. In our language, we have no thou.

She shed her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her. The blinds were drawn, the house dim and hot.

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We have no Thou

And must make do

With only You.

What people didn’t realize about their old thou and thee was that those were actually the familiar forms, the intimate ones; now they had that air of long-ago politeness and formality, but it was really the other way around.