The Translator (34 page)

Kit sat huddled on the bench by the great doors where you could sit to pull off your galoshes or overshoes, which were not allowed in the halls and stacks.

“Kit,” Fran said, studying her. “Are you sick?”

“I don’t know.”

“How long since you ate?”

“I forget.”

Fran nodded. “I do that,” she said. “I fainted once in Saks.” She sat beside her. “Listen,” she said. “What happened. With Falin.”

“I saw him,” Kit said. “Now, just now, out there. I have to find him.

I have to.” She bent over, feeling she might fall asleep here, again, on this bench. “My throat hurts so much.”

“We’ll go eat,” Fran said. “Hell with those people.”

In the Castle the arguments were continuing; Max came in with an entourage of questioners, not all of them angry, and he sat to talk with them. Saul and Rodger came in too, warily.

“Sit,” Fran said. “What do you want?”

“Just a sec,” Kit said.

Taking hold of the backs of booths she made her way to the phone t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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in the back, in its little wooden house that had long ago lost its door.

She called his office at the liberal arts tower but there was no answer there, the office closed on a Saturday. She called the operator and asked for the number at his house, not expecting to be told it.

“Falin,” she said, and spelled it, and the operator told her what it was, Orchard 9-5066, not secret at all. She dialed, almost unable to turn the worn dial plate with her finger, why so weak. She listened to the Princess ring. Ben had told her that actually the ring you hear isn’t the one that’s heard or not heard in the room you call: just an illu-sion.

After a long time she hung up.

Fran stood by the booth where Saul and Rodger sat. “All those people,” she was saying. “It’s like they want it to go off. Like they’re tired of standing on the edge, and they want to jump. But that can’t be. It just can’t.”

“1914,” Saul said. “War fever. The workers all joined the armies of their countries. Even though it was in none of their interests. Even though they knew it. They just did it. As though they were sleepwalk-ing, or possessed. They weren’t even drafted. They volunteered. They were called, they went.”

“1914 is a date in history,” Rodger said. “This isn’t gonna be, if it doesn’t stop.”

“Saul,” Kit said. “What happened to Jackie, where is he.”

Saul looked up at her and thought a moment. “He’s gone,” he said.

“That’s the short answer. He said he had some emergency business. He threw some clothes and things in his car and left early this morning.”

For a time she only stared at them, at Saul and Rodger and Fran, thinking she could no longer understand what was said to her. The voices of others came to her loud and resonant like noises made under-water but not seeming to be speech. Where had Jackie gone? Why would he go? “Do you have a car, Saul? I need a ride somewhere.”

“Jeez, Kit. I don’t. I came in with Rodger.”

“Rodger,” Kit said. “It isn’t far. Just out West North Street. I just can’t walk, I can’t.”

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“Kit what are you doing, what are you doing,” Fran said, clutching her brow.

“I just want to go out and see,” Kit said. “I have to see.”

“I think you should go to the infirmary,” Fran said. “I really think.”

“No.”

“I’ll go there with you.”

“Rodger,” Kit said.

Rodger regarded her, touching the tips of his long fingers together.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, “I am not ready to go riding a scooter through the west end of town with a white girl on my jumpseat. Arms around my waist. This ain’t Greenwich Village, girl.”

“What if we waited till after dark,” she said.

“Oh,” Rodger said. “Oh sure. After dark is good.”

She looked at them. She wanted to say that if she could get there, she would just wait alone, wait until she learned something, until she knew something. She saw though that they had ceased to look at her or at one another, that their eyes were drawn to something behind and above her, first Rodger’s and then the others’, and the sound on the television above the counter was just then turned up, and the hubbub faded. Kit turned to see what they all saw.

A police car, lights revolving, attended on a truck poised on the bank of a river, its big tires planted like feet. From the truck a cable ran, thrumming with effort as it was winched in; and what it drew up from the river, what it had caught with a heavy hook, was a car: a big new convertible. It was pulled by inches up and out of the river, and water poured from it as it rose, from the insides over the doorsills and out from under the crumpled hood.

11.

It must have been near dawn. The little town where that iron bridge arched the river was a couple of hours to the north, on the way, though not the main way, to the capital. Up there the sudden storm had poured a great slew of rain across a narrow band of prairie, flooding streams and washing out dirt roads. The car in the river had only become visible after floodgates downstream were opened at morning and the river’s level fell. It might have encountered another vehicle on the bridge; police said tire marks and a scattering of broken glass were visible there where the guardrail was depressed, but nothing was certain. There were plans for a full search of the river, but the authorities said that the rapid flow resulting from the downstream gates being opened could have carried a body very far. Police recovered items from the river that they said might have been discarded by a man trying to swim ashore: an overcoat, an empty briefcase, shoes.

That was all that was said in the Sunday-morning papers that Fran 268

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brought to Kit in the student infirmary. There was the picture of the convertible being drawn up out of the river, and the picture of Falin when he arrived in West Berlin the year before. One year, almost two.

There was another picture on the front page of the same paper, and on the front page of a Chicago paper that Fran had also brought. The little group of demonstrators, looking not only few but small, sur-rounded like damned souls in a Brueghel hell by the contorted crowded faces of their tormentors, yelling or laughing or cursing at them. Most of their signs already gone, except for one that read Hands Off and didn’t seem to be about Cuba at all. Pro-Cuba March Meets Massive Opposition. Kit in the front, in her leather jacket: her eyes looking away, as though just then catching sight of something, something not part of this conflict at all.

“He’s not dead,” Kit said. “He isn’t. I know it.”

“Well then why, where,” Fran said. “I mean come on.”

The doctor came down the row of beds to where Kit lay. The infir -

mary was old and small and strangely smelly, the iron beds in an open row. Only one other was occupied, a boy who seemed to be weeping, weeping, face into his pillow.

“How’s the throat?” the doctor asked.

“Okay,” Kit said. “I guess.”

“Doesn’t hurt to swallow?”

“It never did. It just hurt.”

The doctor put his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “The tests are back. You have mononucleosis. You know what that is?”

“The kissing disease,” Kit said. “Mono.”

“Well you get it from more than kissing. I mean you can get it in more ways than one. It’s just an infectious disease.” He bent over her and with warm dry hands felt the underside of her chin, the sides of her throat. “The pain comes from swollen lymph nodes that are producing the white blood cells to fight it off. There’s a number of nodes right along here. They don’t usually get as swollen as yours, though.”

“Is that why she fainted?” Fran asked.

The doctor shrugged, a little shrug, as though he knew no more t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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than anybody. It hadn’t been he who had been here when the University police car brought her; only nurses and a student receptionist. She couldn’t make them leave her alone, they made her answer questions and show her ID card and then undress and put on a cotton robe, they took blood, they put her into a narrow bed and drew the curtains around it. Sleep, they said, but she said she wouldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, and she started to tremble again as she had before she fell down in the Castle, as though shaking to pieces. She tried to get out of the bed and a nurse held her with a strong hand and another brought a paper cup with a red pill in it, a capsule like a little shiny gout of blood.

It was the same pill that the nuns had made her take the first night at Our Lady, when she had not stopped arguing, not stopped shaking. It was like a little death; she knew it, and she took it.

While she slept motionless and dreamless in the University infirmary a message began to be transmitted by cable from General Secretary Khrushchev to the President of the United States. It was broadcast publicly over Moscow Radio at the same time. The weapons which you describe as “offensive” are in fact grim weapons, the message said. Both you and I understand what kind of weapons they are. It went on to say that in order to give encouragement to all those who long for peace, and to calm the American people, who, I am certain, want peace as much as the people of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government had decided to dismantle the weapons that the United States objected to.

They would be crated and returned to the Soviet Union. The only condition placed on the offer was that the United States give its solemn pledge not to invade Cuba.

In the Atlantic the Soviet ship Grozny stopped and was reported to be standing still. It was afternoon in Moscow, morning in Washington when the message had been assembled and translated. The generals and the Secretaries of State and Defense gathered to study it. The admirals and generals urged caution and the Air Force Chief of Staff demanded that Cuba be invaded anyway, everything was in readiness: but the President overruled them. He ordered that no air reconnaissance missions be flown that day.

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An aide to the President said later: Everyone knew who were the hawks and who were the doves, but today was the doves’ day.

Kit and Fran went out into the Sunday sun. The world was still before them, as it had been the day before and the day before that, which seemed like a kind of miracle: that there should be students walking in groups and in pairs, and at noon the ringing of the University’s famous carillon. Fran groaned and held her ears as they walked.

The strangest idea, Kit wanted to say to her. Fran I have the strangest idea, I can’t even say it. But not even that much could she say.

What she thought was that maybe he was supposed to disappear.

Maybe it was supposed to look as though he had died, but he hadn’t, he had gone on. She knew this was possible, that people who were in danger could be made to disappear, or seem to have died, when really they’d been helped to escape, helped to safety. But how could that be?

There was no escape; he had already escaped. There was no place left that was safe.

Jackie would be able to tell her, tell her that she was nuts, to calm down. Or maybe not. He had gone too, without a word.

At nightfall a telegram was delivered to her, that had made its way to the campus and to her tower and her room. It was in a yellow envelope with a cellophane window. She took it from the proctor who had signed for it, an object she had never held in her hands before.

“Open it,” Fran said.

It was just as in the movies, a paper with typed lines of capital letters stuck on and the dots between phrases that meant stop. It was from George and Marion; the picture of Kit in the front row of the demonstrators must have appeared in their paper too.

t h r e e q u o t e s c o m e t o m i n d o n e m y c o u n t r y m ay s h e a lway s b e r i g h t b u t r i g h t o r w r o n g m y c o u n -

t r y t w o i d i s a g r e e w i t h w h a t y o u s ay b u t i w i l l d e f e n d t o t h e d e a t h y o u r r i g h t t o s ay i t t h r e e i s t h i s t r i p n e c e s s a r y l o v e m o m d a d t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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She slept most of the day and night. In the morning she found in her mailbox a postcard, mailed on Friday, a picture of the carillon on campus. The message said only I’m sorry. Will write later and explain.

It was from Jackie. He hadn’t signed it but she knew.

The short answer is, he’s gone. That’s what Saul had said to her when she asked. The short answer. She felt a kind of warning tremor begin deep within her. She thought of the kitchen at East North Street, when Saul and Fred were pretending that Fred was an FBI agent. A joke. But there had to be one, they said: wherever two or three are gathered together in my name. And when she had agreed to spy on Falin, Jackie had been there, outside the dean’s office, appearing by chance but not by chance. And she had told him everything after that, everything she learned.

She crushed the card into her pocket. The tremor within her had risen to a kind of roar like the roar she felt in her head and breast when she awoke from shocking dreams. She set out across campus. The morning was white with cold.

The dean of students was just arriving at her door as Kit reached it too. She tried to avoid Kit, pretending not to have seen her coming up the steps behind her, but Kit called out to her. “Excuse me. Wait.”

“Well?” the dean said.

“I have a question,” she said.

For a moment the dean said nothing. Breath came from her red mouth. Then she let Kit through the door and went to the office, Kit following. The secretary’s desk was empty, her typewriter shrouded and her lamp off.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can tell you,” the dean said. She sought amid a huge bunch of keys for one that would open her own office door. “Just like you, I’m waiting for news. I’m afraid though that we’ll have to prepare ourselves for the worst.”

“I was wondering,” Kit said, coming into her office behind her uninvited, “if you could find Milton Bluhdorn. He might know something. I think he might know something.”