The Translator (29 page)

“Hi.”

He turned, and his face filled with pleasure but not surprise to see t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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that it was she. He had a blackened bone-handled kitchen knife with which he was cutting tomatoes on a flowered plate. He rose as though he meant to come and embrace her, but she stopped before she came close to him, and so he paused too, still smiling.

“Tomatoes,” she said. Her hands behind her back. “Nice.”

“Yes. They are now ripe. So huge and red, so generous. Not potatoes yet.”

“Something’s happened,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“You know?” she said.

“I know that something has happened. While we wrote poems and tomatoes grew.” He sat slowly again, and showed her with a hand that she should sit opposite him. But she still stood.

“What?” she said. “What happened?”

“Kyt,” he said. “I am very glad to see you. I am so very glad.”

She sat then by him, uncertain, feeling that she was already betray-ing him, that if he touched her she would poison or taint him; but when he put his hand on her shoulder it calmed her. He didn’t say anything, only waited, and she told him what had happened, the dean and Milton Bluhdorn and the questions asked her. As she spoke he withdrew his hand from her.

“And he asked these things of you to learn—to learn what?” he asked. “What is suspected?”

“That you might be connected to, to. Your old country and the leaders there. That you might be still on their side really.”

“You mean what is called asset of theirs.” He cut a wedge of the big beefsteak and salted it from a glass shaker.

“Called what?”

“In capitalist countries, so called. Assets are friendly or helpful ones, people or institutions willing to do secret work. They ask if I am Soviet asset. Not American asset.” He said it lightly, dangerously. “Assets of course can become liabilities, move to other column of books. If they are exposed or become for any reason useless.”

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“What then?”

“Well. You must remove liabilities. Profit and loss. KGB also knows this well, though not by capitalist accounting.”

“You aren’t, are you? Some kind of . . . agent.”

“Ah. But not all agents are secret. And not all secret agents are spies.”

“But you aren’t,” she said. “You aren’t any of those.”

“Kyt, you know what I am.” He closed his hands together and spoke in Russian: “Vechnosti zalozhnik u vremeni v plenu,” he said, and now she knew enough that she could recognize it, the poem of Pasternak’s that he had long ago recited in his class. “Poet, take care, watch well,”

he said. “Do not sleep, for you are Eternity’s hostage, kept captive by Time.”

She shook her head, helpless, helpless before his resistance to what had happened, as though he thought it was a game: not a dangerous one like Jackie talked about, played for keeps, but one you could win just by talking, by words.

“Who is he?” she asked. “Why did he come here?” She asked because she could not ask another question: Who are you? Why did you come here?

“Perhaps he is not one thing,” Falin said. “It may be he is one thing here, another thing elsewhere.” He didn’t smile now. “Perhaps they do not know entirely what their mil’ton is. The great right hand cannot always know what the little left hand is up to.”

This meant nothing to her. “I had to touch him,” she said. “I had to shake his hand, he made me.”

“Ah,” Falin said. “A good sign. In my country a good sign. The agents of the state never touch the hands of those they intend to destroy. Never.”

He got up, and went to where his garden began, the big blowzy potato plants brown-edged and hairy-limbed. He’d said once that in Russia he’d known someone who kept supplies of potatoes in his cel-lar: a high official, he said, a party leader. She remembered that, and in horror she thought that now she would record all that he said and t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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did, without willing it, helplessly. And as though he overheard her think this he turned to her, rubbing his bare arms, seemingly cold even in the sun.

“Kyt,” he said. “I must say this now. Not easy to say. It has become dangerous that you should be nearby me. You must from now on stay away.”

It was, somehow, what she had known he would have to say no matter what he felt. She didn’t hear what he said so much as drink it, a terrible caustic liquid that burned her as it entered, burned her out. She wanted to beg him, beg him to forgive her or to withdraw what he had said, and because his eyes hadn’t changed, were still as open and full of calm pity as always, she thought he would surely see it, or hear her thought. But she said nothing to him.

“I will drive you back to campus.” He came to the table and picked up a shirt that lay there.

“No,” she said, “no,” and she got up and backed away from him as though he meant her harm in coming toward her. “No it’s okay. It’s not so far.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“No,” she said. “No.” She turned away from him, thinking that if now she went out of his yard, she didn’t know how she would reach town and the university again, or why. She didn’t turn back, though; she went out and to the road again, and down to where it met the main road.

She had let him say those things, she had let him put her out and had said nothing.

Down the road toward town in the stillness and sun she could see Jackie’s Volkswagen pulled over on the shoulder in a tall tree’s shadow.

8.

It had fallen, it had been dropped, but the effect was nothing like anybody ever said it would be. There had been the sudden universal energy-flash covering the earth, and the great cloud-ball too (in hiding she had seen or known this) but silent: and when she came out she saw that it had changed everything and yet destroyed nothing. Everything that she remembered was gone, all the buildings and the houses and roads and the high-tension wires and telephone poles, the plowed fields and the farms and the people; instead there were only green-blue forests and a living wind that moved their leaves and showed the silver undersides. Still silent. Even the ground had been altered, into low hills and valleys, where before it had been plains.

She went down in wonder into the glens, and the way was easy, though there was no path. I’ll kill you if you tell me there’s a reason for this, she said to Ben, who followed behind her, just out of sight. I’ll kill you if you say you know. Then, as she thought of what she had said, and wanted to unsay it, she saw that in the grass there was an animal, like a t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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cat but not a cat, and it seemed to be having some kind of fit: its mus-cles tensed and writhing, its wide eyes piteous. When she came closer, though, she saw it was made not of flesh and fur but of grease or clay, and the life in it was caught in this matter, and the eyes were blind.

And as she bent to study it in repulsion, she saw Ben beside her turn away from her and go away; and though he still smiled she saw that his flesh was white and wasted, his neck thin as rope, his legs hardly able to support him, and she knew she had been wrong about everything.

Fran was shaking her awake.

“You okay?” Fran asked her. “You okay? You were making this moaning.” Her eyes were piggy without her glasses on and her hair was tangled seaweed. “It was awful.”

For a time Kit only looked up at her. Then she said: “I had a bomb dream.”

“Oh God,” Fran said.

Kit lifted herself to her elbows. The world was real, solid, but also somehow tentative, able to go either way. “What time is it?”

Fran read the time from her big wristwatch, which she wore sleeping, something Kit couldn’t do. It was late. They both had early classes; they had stayed up late talking, passing back and forth their stories; Kit had told about what had become of her that summer, not all of it though. Still filled with the dream-feelings she had felt, of wonder and relief and then awful understanding, she struggled to rise and dress and get ready.

They went out past the dining hall that smelled repellently of eggs and soured milk, and into the bright still day.

“So you never told me,” Fran said. “Are you going to keep on working with him? Falin. Like you were doing.”

“No.”

Fran stopped to light a Camel. “Did you have sex with him?”

“No,” Kit said, after a moment.

“Did you want to?”

“Yes.”

“Did he know you did?”

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“Yes. I think.” There was so much now she couldn’t say, would maybe never be able to say, that this hardly seemed a secret at all. “He said it was hard not to. But he said it’s not what he’s for.”

“Not what he’s for?” Fran asked.

Kit shrugged. “It’s what he said.”

“And did he say,” Fran asked, “what he is for?”

“And how ’bout you?” Kit asked. “Did you?”

“Did I what.”

“Have sex. This summer.”

Fran flicked the end of her cigarette with a thumbnail. “Depends on what you mean,” she said. Kit saw that though she looked only at the way ahead, following her big nose, she smiled a little.

They went up the steps of the student union and waited in line for coffee. Fran bought the New York Times and opened it by her cup. “I heard a viola joke,” she said.

“Oh yes?”

“If a guy comes into a bank with a violin case, everybody gets nervous, because they think maybe he’s got a tommy gun in there, and he’s going to take it out and use it.” She studied Kit solemnly as she spoke.

“If a guy comes into a bank with a viola case, everybody gets nervous; they think he’s probably got a viola in there, and he might take it out and use it.” And on her face, after a long moment, another small smile dawned. Kit laughed as much to see that as at the joke. Fran shook the pages of the paper, lifted her cup by the body and not the handle, and drank thirstily.

“Oh God,” she said. “Speaking of the bomb.” She folded over the page and scanned it. “Here’s Ken Keating saying the Russians are putting missiles in Cuba.”

“Who’s Ken Keating?”

“He’s our senator. I mean New York’s. He says they may have MRBMs in Cuba. These names, how can they call them BMs, it’s so bad.”

“What are they?”

“Medium-range ballistic missiles.”

“With bombs?”

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“He doesn’t say that. He says they could have. And they could reach as far as Washington and Indianapolis. He says.”

She lifted her eyes to Kit. “We’d lose Indianapolis,” she said.

Kit gathered her books. “I’ve got to go. So do you.”

“This is such shit,” Fran said with sudden vehemence, folding up the paper furiously, and Kit couldn’t tell what the words were directed at.

When she went to the Castle later she found them reading the same paper, Max and Saul and Rodger, drinking coffee too except for Saul, who drank only water.

“And how does Keating come to know this?” Saul asked, one of those questions he asked because he already had the answer. “Someone is feeding him this stuff, because the public has to know it. We have to know that those pesky Cubans have Soviet missiles pointed at us. So when the strike against Cuba comes we won’t be shocked.”

“But do they have the missiles?” Max asked. “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Saul said. “Kennedy doesn’t know. He’s making a case. That’s all.”

“It matters,” Rodger said. “It matters if they stomp on Cuba and missiles get fired. That’s the end.”

“How can they find out if they have them?” Kit asked. “They hide them, don’t they?”

“Spy planes,” Saul said. “U-2s.”

“Cratology,” said Max, and everyone looked at him. “Hey, their word,” he said. “It means being able to tell what’s coming out of the hold of a ship by the shape and size of the crate. Cratology.”

“Okay,” Saul said. “Here’s what Dorticos said yesterday at the UN.”

He looked at Kit: “He’s President of Cuba.” He read: “If we are attacked, we will defend ourselves. I repeat, we have sufficient means with which to defend ourselves; we have, indeed, our inevitable weapons, the weapons we would have preferred not to acquire and which we do not wish to employ.”

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“Man,” Max said. “That sounds like a warning.”

“That sounds like a threat,” Rodger said.

“What does that mean?” Kit said. “Inevitable weapons?”

“Inescapable, unavoidable,” said Max.

“Maybe a mistranslation,” Saul said. “Maybe he meant something else.”

“Ultimate,” said Rodger. “The end.”

All the reconnaissance flights over the island of Cuba had in fact shown nothing so far, and had been given up out of fear that a plane might be shot down, causing a diplomatic incident. It was agents on the ground who reported the long trailer trucks bearing tarpaulin-covered cargoes moving through the town of San Cristóbal in the west: trailers so long that they couldn’t negotiate the streets of the little town, and knocked down telegraph poles and chipped the walls of tabernas as they ground around corners. Something was going on, the agents said: from San Cristóbal to Palacios and up to Consolación del Norte there was activity, Soviet military movements, something big. The CIA dismissed these reports, but the Secretary of Defense pondered them, and brought them to President Kennedy; and the President ordered U-2 surveillance to begin.

The weather over the Midwest was preternaturally clear, but it was the season of autumn storms in the Caribbean. Not until October 13

was the sky cloudless enough for a successful overflight of the San Cristóbal triangle; the resulting photographs showed a Gods’-eye view of the newly stripped earth of San Cristóbal, and there, the photo intelligence officer said, were the trailers and their cargoes. How do you know this is a medium-range ballistic missile? the President asked. (He had recently had the office he sat in equipped with recording devices; the switches were in the kneehole of his desk, and he had turned them on; years later we would listen to him thinking.) The length, sir, the intelligence officer answered.

The what? The length?