The Translator (37 page)

“What happened a year later?” Kit said, and remembered even as she asked. “Oh God,” she whispered. “1963.”

“Yeah,” said George. “Right.”

She felt stabbed, as though the story or myth she had articulated had caused it to happen, had right now got him shot through the head in Dallas: the sacrificial goat, the tragos of our tragedy. “Oh my God.”

“Fair Play for Cuba,” George said. “Free Cuba Committee. Castro, anti-Castro. Something somewhere somehow.”

It’s not so, she thought, and she took hold of a chair’s back, feeling she might keel over with strangeness: it’s not so, it’s only as though. It wasn’t truth but the economy of metaphor, everything in balance, this side of the mirror with Alice’s side, only reversed: Jacqueline cradling his poor head in her bloodstained lap, just a man dying. And yet also, far beyond where we could see, the Gray Gods licking up the same blood from the same bowl. Satisfied: appeased.

“You remember where you were when you heard?” George asked, t h e t r a n s l a t o r

289

not so much because he wanted to know, it seemed, as to change the subject, or its tendency. “You know they say everybody does. Like Pearl Harbor.”

“Yes,” Kit said. “Sure. I remember.” On the straight road north from the University toward that city in whose suburbs she had once lived with George and Marion and Ben. Yes. That day.

There was a little rain and the blacktop was velvety in the soft light. Kit was driving, Fran beside her searching on the radio for something besides Top 40 or preachers. It was so far only a brief sentence, interrupting the broadcast: the motorcade fired on in Dallas, the President hit.

“It’s probably really nothing,” Kit said. “You know how they get, about every little thing.”

“He’s dead,” Fran said with simple certainty. “He’s dead.”

They listened, waiting for more, going north. Kit had driven back to school that fall in George and Marion’s old Buick station wagon, they had at last got something newer. She had kept it, though she wasn’t twenty-one and had to park it at a garage off campus. Fran had a friend—her best friend, she said—who was singing in the chorus of a road-show company of Camelot that was appearing in that city. Fran longed to see her, it seemed so close; and Kit had said okay, let’s cut and go.

More news, worse. The rain got a little steadier, then seemed to pass.

They went past the junction where a secondary road turned off toward the town where Falin’s car had gone off the bridge; after a time they crossed on a wide causeway the same river, grown great. A river to cross.

The river of Jordan is muddy and cold It chills the body

But not the soul

Kit thought of those lines, and at last began to weep. “Oh my God,”

she said. “Oh poor man.”

290

j o h n c r o w l e y

All my trials

Soon be over

It was a Joan Baez song, one of the terrible bleak songs she cried out so piercingly, at once wounding and healing. Fran had brought the records back from New York and they listened to them over and over, sometimes when drunk hugging the Webcor like a friend and pressing an ear right to the speaker grille. She longed to hear it now.

Hush little baby don’t you cry

You know your mama

Was born to die

He was pronounced dead as evening came quickly on, the darkest time of the year. They passed the city limits, the streets numbered neatly in the hundreds but really just straight roads through the brown cornfields where the crows were arising: you could watch them make for the naked willow grove.

How could this be given to them, how could it, had they deserved it by not knowing that it could be? The farmhouses and garages and flat-roofed split-levels were turning on their lights sadder than darkness.

They came into the city. Kit had laughed, telling Fran she would show her the sights, the high school from which she’d graduated, the church where she was confirmed, the house where she was deflow-ered. But she found she remembered nothing, it was all black streets and the lights of cars and stores, like everywhere.

They found a phone booth and Fran called the theater where the play was, Camelot for God’s sake, and after a couple of dimes reached the hotel and her friend. Kit watched from the car as Fran talked, her head lowered and unsmiling, and she almost wept again.

“She can’t come out,” Fran told her, returning. “Nobody can leave the hotel tonight. Not chorus people anyway. It’s a rule.”

They sat in the Buick watching the streetlight change.

t h e t r a n s l a t o r

291

“I’ve got to make a call too,” Kit said.

She found the number in the phone book after studying all the Eggerts and trying to remember the car dealer’s name. Carl. What would he sell now that there weren’t going to be any Studebakers? A woman answered after a couple of rings.

“Hi,” Kit said. “Is Burke there?”

There was a little pause; it seemed filled with tears too. “Burke doesn’t live here anymore,” the voice said, hurt or maybe cautious.

“Oh. Well. I’m, I knew him in high school, and well I was passing through.”

“No. He’s got a place of his own now. Over there on Sunset. With Mary Jo and the baby.”

“Oh.”

“They don’t have a phone yet.”

“Oh.”

“So.”

“Okay. Okay, thanks.”

“Well you’re very welcome,” the voice said, brightening strangely at the last.

“Okay,” Fran said when Kit came back. “Okay, I need a drink.”

Nowhere in that state in that year could Kit or Fran drink, but they stopped at a liquor store whose bright sign was reflected upside down in the wet pavement, and Fran turned up the collar of her raincoat and lit a Camel. She went in and in a moment came back, cigarette in the corner of her big mouth and her hands in her pockets.

“No luck,” Kit guessed.

Fran pulled out a flat clear bottle: a pint of vodka. “First thing I saw,” she said. “It helps if you grab something quick.” She uncapped it, drank, shuddered in disgust, gave it to Kit.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Kit said.

“Well. I think I like her a lot more than she likes me. You know.”

“I know.”

“Who was that you called?”

292

j o h n c r o

w l e y

“A guy. The first guy I, you know, made love with.”

“Oh yes?”

Kit thought: Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

There was nothing to do then but go back along the way they came, and they did that, driving south between fields black and limitless on either side, now and then passing the bottle. All along the road the bars and restaurants were closed, or had filled their changeable signs with new messages:

n o m u s i c t o n i t e

g o d b l e s s h i m

“What should we do?” Kit asked desperately. “There should be something we should do now. We can’t just go on, just living, can we?”

Fran shook her head, she didn’t know.

“Should we join the Peace Corps?” Kit cried. “Is that it? Is that what we’re supposed to think of?” She had taken his hand once, she had, and he had said something to her—yes, he had said Falin’s name to her. He had said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. She had spoken of it in a poem, a poem she had burned with the rest.

Now he was gone too, turned away, lost to her and to everyone. She had lost everything she loved, everything that made her herself, and now she was to lose all that she shared with everyone else as well.

A being such as that couldn’t die all in a day and be gone, it would take far longer, wouldn’t it? There would be things he would have to do, to tell us. We, the rest of us, can’t turn back after we have turned to go, but surely he could, for a time. Oh turn back, she thought, turn back, make this not to have happened all in a day forever.

But if he could turn back, if he were able, then she wouldn’t feel this grief, it would be grave and sad but it wouldn’t be this riving grief, and it was. It was no different from any grief: for Ben, for the dead child she had seen for only a moment. They couldn’t and he couldn’t either. And she could speak of none of it, did not dare to call them t h e t r a n s l a t o r

293

back because they would not turn, nor would she be able to bear their faces if they did.

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

She thought: O my dead. If you return, O my dead. The road, blurry with rain and tears and drink, turned softly to recross the river.

She would have to learn. It’s what she was made to do and was all she was asked to do. She would have to learn as he had done, learn to speak: to learn again, as though for the first time, a tongue: though if she began, she knew she would never be done, not ever.

“Yes,” she said to her father. “Yes I remember.”

Before she left Washington to go home where her husband and her youngest daughter awaited her, Kit went down to the Mall on the wonderful new pharaonic subway of the city, and walked to the Vietnam War Memorial.

After her mother died and she began coming often to be with George, she used to walk the white city in the afternoons, sometimes for miles, while George drowsed in his armchair. And once she came upon this memorial, finished not long before: came upon it without knowing she would, a secret place, an underworld, passage to the land of the dead. She’d heard a lot about it, and yet she was still surprised by how moving it was, not only in itself but because it suggested that we had come at last to know how to remember war. She saw that people touched the glassy stone where the names seemed to float as in a pool, and touched at the same time the fingers of their own hands, saw their own faces reflected within.

Ben’s name wasn’t there. George had already told her it wasn’t. He wasn’t really Vietnam-era, he’d said. Not really.

Sleepy-warm in the late sun then, as it was now. She had sat there a long time, and she had come back often again. She was then writing— not on paper yet—the poem that would become the title poem of Ghost Comedies, and her sitting here and thinking of it would become 294

j o h n c r o w l e y

part of the poem, though she didn’t know that then. Then it was mostly about Marion; mostly it was to make Ben smile.

If you return, O my dead, and you will, from your ashes and earth, Return if you can as the ghosts in ghost comedies do: Unwounded, unrotted, not limbless or eyeless (though fleshless, Invisible till you take form, just a drape or a candle-flame fluttering, A wineglass that rises and empties itself in the air); Come walking through walls in your nice clothes and your uniforms, smiling,

Not to warn or dismay, not with news or reproaches or tears, But only to visit; play tricks if you want to, make love to me, dance . . .

Christa Malone didn’t believe that she had ever been eternity’s hostage, captive in time; she had not been among the unacknowledged legislators of the world. She had proffered no laws; she had not in her poems told truth to power, or spoken to the greater angels of the nations, and she would not. She thought that if the time when a poet could carry a nation’s soul with him was passing in Russia, it had passed long ago in America.

No, she had only mourned her dead, to lighten her own heart; she had succeeded in that sometimes and sometimes not. But she knew this: when we grieve in our lives, we grieve for just the one person, friend, brother, son; but when we grieve for our own in poems, we grieve for all, for every one. It was all she had done, if she had done anything.

She had wept once for Falin, but she couldn’t grieve for him.

Because of him she had been given, or given back, everything: her own being, all that she had lost and done and suffered. Through him she had recovered a way to speak; a home in her own heart; maybe even a world to live in, undestroyed. She would never learn what bargain he had made, or what the powers or principalities were that he had made it with; but she knew that Innokenti Isayevich had tricked them in the end. Like the boy in the story, he kept what he had given away.

t h e t r a n s l a t o r

295

A slanting light was on the mirror-stone of names. She had been gone a long time, she thought, and there was a lot to do; a book of poems to see through the press, and maybe now another poem to make, one beginning to form itself, too far off as yet to be heard: an elegy too, she thought. And a real poem, perhaps, if she was faithful.

She whispered to herself okay, let’s go, in that motherly or fatherly way we forever speak to ourselves, so that we will do what we should or must. And yet for a while longer she didn’t stand and start for home.

Author’s Note

The author wishes to acknowledge the generous help of Julia Titus and, in particular, Professor Tatyana Buzina, who read this work in manuscript and answered my many queries. (All remaining errors, mistranscriptions, and cranberries are my own.) I learned about the lives of the besprizornye from “And Now my Soul is Hardened:” Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 by Alan M. Ball (University of California Press, 1994). The opin-ions about Pushkin expressed by my character I.I. Falin are derived in part from Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin (Yale University Press, 1995).

A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

J o h n C r o w l e y lives in the hills above the Connecticut River in northern Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters. He is the author of
Dæmonomania; Love & Sleep; Ægypt;
Little, Big;
and, most recently,
The Translator.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Praise for John Cr
owley’s
The Translator
“Thrilling. . . . [Crowley] succeeds with what no prudent novel ought to attempt.”

—
New York Times
“
[The Translator]
gives us a world so suffused with beauty that its inhabitants manage to speak in fragments of poetry. . . .

Crowley’s subject matter is grand and serious, involving nothing less than the souls of nations and the transforming power of language.”