The Translator (30 page)

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The length of it. Yes.

Is this ready to be fired?

No, sir.

How long have we got? We can’t tell, I take it.

No one could say. They said that it could be ready within weeks, or sooner, or might be ready to be armed now. There was also no way yet to know if there were nuclear warheads already present on the island.

The President told his advisers they should be prepared to take out the San Cristóbal site at any time; the missiles couldn’t be permitted and he saw no other options.

Within days it was learned that there were several sites on the island, and on some of them intermediate-range missiles capable of reaching the missile silos of the Midwest were detected. The President’s military advisers now said that only a full-scale strike and an invasion of the island would remove the threat.

The first shipment of Soviet nuclear armaments had in fact already arrived and been unloaded at Mariel, one-megaton warheads for the R-12 medium-range missiles, twelve-kiloton bombs for the Il-28

bombers, and smaller warheads for the cruise missiles. And at that moment the Soviet ship Aleksandrovsk was nearing Cuba, carrying nuclear warheads for the IRBMS.

The world was so beautiful that autumn in the north; it had never seemed so beautiful. Kit had learned the term pathetic fallacy in her Romantic Poetry class—the projection of the poet’s feelings on to insensible nature, the weather or the scenery; nature in poetry expressing human feeling. This weather was the opposite, it was profoundly, wholly indifferent, unconscious, asleep past sleep in its own perfec-tions: as though this time it would last forever, as it never had before.

Kit stayed outdoors as much as she could, not wanting to learn that Milton Bluhdorn had tried to reach her; she sat on the sun-warmed benches of the old college, and the air smelled of fruits that weren’t there, apples and pears and grapes, and she felt the feeling soul drawn out of her into it. It was painful and terribly sad and at the same time she felt an unrefusable delight. She wasn’t eating very much in those 236

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days, unable to go into the roar and the smell of the dining room or touch the bland and nameless foods they heaped on her plate, but she couldn’t afford to buy much more than candies and saltines and coffee, and wouldn’t let Jackie buy dinners for her. It didn’t matter. Not eating made the sweetness more intense, the pain and sadness too: made them sweet in her mouth like her own sweet spit.

On the 22nd of October she saw in the campus paper that Falin would be speaking in the auditorium of the Slavic Languages Depart-ment about Pushkin, and her heart shrank inside her.

“Acourse you can go,” Jackie said. “What do you think, they’re going to give you the third degree over some public event?”

“I’m afraid,” Kit said.

“They’ve forgotten all that,” he said. “I know it.”

“Will you come?”

“Sure. I like Pushkin. Didn’t he write Crime and Punishment?”

There were fewer people in the auditorium than Kit would have thought. She had hoped to slip in a little late into a masking crowd, but there were plenty of empty seats in the tall lecture theater and they were more than a little late. Falin looked up from his papers when they bent down their squeaking seats, and his eyes were wise to them; his smile was for her.

He spoke about Pushkin as she had heard him speak, in her classes and in the nights of last summer; he read the lines he chose in his honey-thick singing Russian voice, and she thought her heart would split. The poems he read from were the ones he had quoted for her: Count Nulin and Feast in Time of Plague and Evgeny Onegin.

“Perhaps because so many ikons, so many churches, were smashed and burned,” he said, “that we made of Pushkin an ikon and a church.

He must express our spirit, must stand for us and speak for us. Indeed he has been made even a hero of the Revolution, with mausoleum of his own, though in this no one has believed, not even schoolchildren, not anyway those who can read.”

The gray hadn’t been in his hair before and it was now; it was the same gray as the shiny bland gray suit he wore, what was that stuff, was t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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it sharkskin? Why would he wear that? A soft knit shirt beneath it, buttoned to the neck. Something has happened he had said to her, not surprised or afraid, but changed.

“So hard to make Pushkin hero. You know what our great critic Belinsky said of Evgeny Onegin, that it was encyclopedia of Russian life. We all were taught to say this. Encyclopedia of Russian life. But he is like encyclopedia only in his even-handedness. All things are alike to him; he does not choose one thing over another; the alphabet of his eyes and his ears alone bring things together, this next to that. He is trivial; even his earliest defenders said this, so exasperated with him.

Everything interests him, everything delights him. He becomes the Tsar’s soldier and also the Cossack that the soldier kills; he delights in death’s energy and meat pies at a feast, little too salty, then some slim-waisted wineglasses too that remind him of his old love, whom he then must address. He is like his heroine Natalya Pavlovna in Count Nulin . . .”

He read, and Kit thought she remembered the lines, when he had tried to make her see what Pushkin saw: Natalya Pavlovna tried to give

The letter all her attention

But soon she was distracted

By an old goat and a mutt

In a fight beneath her window,

And she attended calmly to that;

And three ducks were splashing in a puddle, And an old woman was crossing the yard To hang her laundry on the fence.

It looked like it might soon rain . . .

“This is why Pushkin is our poet,” he said. “Not because he expresses our spirit, d’Roshin spirit: but because he exactly does not.

He is everything that Russia, in his age and now in ours, is not: he cares for everything and yet for nothing in particular, everything gladdens 238

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him, he approves and does not judge. He was dark man, you know: Negro, in fact. He lived short life that ended in disaster. But he shines brightly; the smile of Pushkin is a white light in our darkness, always.”

In the Castle the television was on over the counter, and when Kit and Jackie came in they could tell that almost everyone there was watching it. The East North Street men were all there, all watching. She slipped in beside Saul, and turned to see the President above them, speaking.

“What is it?” Kit asked.

“Cuba,” Saul said.

The transformation of Cuber into an important strategic base, by the presence of these large, long-range and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction, constitutes a threat to the peace and security of all the Americas. He had that air he always seemed to Kit to have, that he was somehow only pretending, no matter how earnestly he spoke; as though he knew better, knew how it would all come out. This sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside Soviet soil is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the sta-tus quo which cannot be accepted by this country.

“Not like our missiles in Turkey, huh,” Saul said. “Or Italy. What the hell does he think.”

Kit looked over all the upturned faces, the students and the others, the two Greek brothers who ran the place, all looking and listening.

We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced. He said that he was ordering a strict naval quarantine around the island of Cuba, and ships would be stopped and shipments of offensive weapons turned back; he said that there would be continued surveillance of the island, and that if work was found to be going forward on the missile sites, then further actions would be necessary, and that he had ordered the armed forces to be prepared for all eventualities. The United States, he said, would regard a nuclear missile launched from t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. And then for a moment he turned his pages and gazed out: gazed at us, though of course he couldn’t see us.

The path we have chosen is full of hazards, he said. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead—months in which our patience and our will will be tested. He called upon Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles immediately. He said our goal was not peace at the expense of freedom, but peace and freedom. God willing, he said, that goal would be achieved.

He said Thank you and good night. And after a moment he was gone.

There was a soft swell of voices then in the place. From somewhere came a spectral wail or moan of grief or terror, and people turned in their chairs or on their stools to see who had made it. We had all been so afraid of this, for so long; we had been so sure it would happen, so sure it couldn’t.

“Bastards,” said Max softly. “Sonsa bitches.” Rodger put his hand over Max’s where it lay on the table.

“Gotta remember,” Jackie said. “They’ve been firing off those bombs for twenty years. So far the world’s still here. I mean this might mean war. But it don’t mean we’ll necessarily get hit.”

“Of course we will,” Saul said. “In the first exchange. Those missile silos to the west. That’s exactly where their missiles are aimed. The firestorm will reach at least as far as this. Easily,” he said. His small thick fingers circling his glass were still. “Easily.”

“So it’s the end,” Rodger said. “It is, after all.”

“It’s not the end, necessarily,” Jackie said; and he glanced at Kit, as though she should not hear these things, too young or vulnerable.

“Well if it ain’t the end,” Rodger said, “it’ll do till the real end comes along.”

“I have to go,” Kit whispered to Jackie, and she slid from the booth and went to the back and into the little toilet and the wooden stall with the scarred walls varnished a hundred times. Jim + Jean 4 Ever. Bobby I Love U. Jackie had told her how the scratchings in boys’ toilets were 240

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all about sex; these were always about love, eager hopeless love. She had thought of writing John Keats 1⁄2 + Easeful Death. In a heart car-touche, struck through by an arrow.

Death.

What she knew, all of a sudden and for sure, was that she wouldn’t hide. No matter what, she wouldn’t go down into the shelters they had made to put people in. The shame of that would be worse than the death they were going to inflict, it was like the shame she felt hiding under her desk in grade school, hands clasped over the tender back of her head, her butt in the air with all the others, while Sister watched.

No never. She would stay up on the earth’s surface and wait.

She knew something else. She had wondered if, when death came near her, she would in her fear want a priest, if she would ask for forgive-ness. And now death was near and she knew she wouldn’t: Death couldn’t change her back to what she had been, or the world either. I am myself alone. If she were sent down then into his hell, well fine: better to be there than to grovel, to beg or praise. Praise for this? No not for this.

She found herself weeping, though; she pulled off a length of rough paper from the roll and pressed it to her eyes and blew her nose. She didn’t want to die; she wanted the world not to die, or be so wounded it could never recover. She wanted to live.

That night, twenty-two American interceptor aircraft went aloft in case the Cuban government reacted to the President’s speech with an attack on Guantanamo or the arming of missiles or the liftoff of the Il-28 bombers. The Soviet ships in the Atlantic received orders from Moscow to ignore the blockade and continue on course to Cuban ports. Polaris nuclear submarines in port went out to sea. The President signed an order, National Security Memorandum 199, authoriz-ing the loading of multistage nuclear weapons on aircraft under the command of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. United States forces went from the worldwide state of alert that was code-named DEFCON III up to DEFCON II. DEFCON I meant war.

. . .

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The next day on East North Street, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee held what Saul called an emergency executive meeting to decide how to respond to the blockade of the island. The President had called it a quarantine, but it was a blockade, Saul said, and a blockade is an act of war, plain and simple, and it was obviously not going to be the last one either. The committee members spent the day calling other campus groups and trying to get a united front together to go into the streets in a mass public demonstration against the blockade. They couldn’t get a campus meeting place for a rally, not being a registered student group, but at last got an offer from a Unitarian church to hold their meeting there on the following evening. They got the Young People’s Socialist League to run off announcements on their mimeo machine and Jackie and the others went around in Jackie’s car tacking and taping them to lampposts and walls; they were mostly torn down as soon as they went up.

On television they showed people emptying the shelves of super-markets, buying canned food and bottled water, and guns and ammo too. Eighty-four percent of those polled said they supported the President’s action. One in five said they believed it meant the beginning of World War Three. But mostly people went on doing what they had been doing; they got up and went to work and went to class and in class went on talking about Shakespeare and quadratic equations and the rise of the middle class. Kit wrote notes into her notebooks and walked across campus listening to the carillon at noon and went to the library.

And always she felt the depth of the sky above her, maybe being severed right now by the missiles coming. There was no poetry or knowledge or wisdom that could master or face or even survive it, it was hopeless: Pushkin’s smile as useless against it as any other weapon, any at all.