The Translator (15 page)

She pressed her head into the pillow, her teeth clenched shut on her sobs. She knew now why people can’t leave the graves where those they love are buried, why they want to lie down there and grip the grass, hug the stone: it wasn’t out of any stupid extravagance of grief but just a need to stop this hemorrhaging, to press something into you to stanch the wound. If she could she would go lie down there like an abandoned dog till she died.

Well she could die. She was smarter than she had been; she knew now how tough her body was and how it would fight back. But it wasn’t all she knew.

After a time the pill she had taken, cycling through her brain and soul, ran out or let go; for a while she slept and didn’t dream. When she woke the world was vacant. She left her room, but at the top of the stairs she sat down, dizzy or unable to continue. Marion, come from the kitchen in her apron, saw her there.

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“Your father has taken those two boys to the bus station.”

Kit nodded.

“I wonder if you could help me.”

“Sure. What.”

But her mother said nothing further, only looked up at her, and Kit got up and made her way to the bottom of the half-flight of stairs. Her mother’s smile was more terrible than her grief. She took Kit’s shoulders in her hands, to reassure her, or to steady herself.

“I am just so glad,” she said, “that I found you that day. That I came back and found you that day in the bathroom. I am just so glad.”

In her mother’s embrace Kit felt all the tears that were to come, drawn from a reservoir deeper than she could have imagined. Oh Ben.

She couldn’t die: she had no right to. She had been a bad daughter and she supposed (in the odor of her mother’s perfume and the sound of her weeping) that she would probably never really be a good one.

But she couldn’t die. Not dying was the only thing she could do for her mother, and she would have to do it.

She didn’t need to go right back, George told her that. Surely they’d understand at school if she wanted to stay for a day or two, or even longer. Marion could use the help. But she went back when Monday came, refusing George’s offer of a ride and taking the big smelly bus that stopped at every cornfield crossroads. The weather had changed utterly, and along the rivers the willows were yellow-green. Swollen buds made the trees seem cloudy or vague in the sunlight, as though they were in the process of vanishing, or appearing newly, which they were. Daffodils were even coming out; this part of the state was proud of its daffodils, which were featured on travel posters and city medallions; all along the road there would appear sudden glowing fields of them, nodding together like orchestras, trumpeting silently. It was a long trip.

In the house on East North Street, Jackie wrapped her in his quilt to stop her shivering, gave her boiled coffee and jelly doughnuts, and listened. Max too, in the doorway, and Saul.

“He was stationed in the Philippines, it turns out,” she said, clutching her drawn-up knees. “I don’t remember him saying he was there. But anyway this thing happened with the ammunition, this accident . . .”

“I don’t think so,” Saul said.

“What?”

“Didn’t you say he spent time in Vietnam?”

“Well a while ago. I mean I guess he got moved around.” She knew suddenly that she had better not talk about it anymore. She sipped her bitter brew.

“Well, because,” Saul said, uncomfortable but unwilling to stop, “what we’re hearing is that American Special Forces are engaging with the Viet Cong, that’s the South Vietnamese insurgents, and even with the North Vietnamese army.”

“What do you mean, engaging with?” Max asked.

“I mean fighting them. Having, well, not battles, but. And some Americans are getting killed.” He looked at Kit and not at Max. “Then they ship the bodies back to the Philippines and tell everybody it was an accident.”

Kit stared at him. “How can you say that?” she whispered, amazed.

“How can you say a thing like that?”

“Well that’s what we’re hearing. And this fits. And if it’s so, I think people should know.”

“My God,” Kit said. “You’re saying my brother was killed in a battle.”

“No no,” Saul said, seeming at last to perceive his roommates’ looks and Kit’s horror for what they were. “Not necessarily. I’m just saying, well, it fits.” He lowered his eyes. “You might be able to find out. You might ask some questions.”

Kit struggled free of the quilt, kicking it aside, getting to her feet, wanting out with furious urgency.

“It’s important,” Saul said behind her. “It is.”

No place to go. She sat down on the edge of the couch and embraced herself. Something unbearably sharp hurt her heart: How could they, how could they, she thought, not knowing what she meant by it, whether she meant Saul’s cruelty to say that to her, or Ben’s lie to 114

her, that he wouldn’t shoot anybody, or those soldiers who came with his body, who were his friends, who knew.

“Kit,” Jackie said, and sat beside her.

Ben hadn’t slipped into death, as anyone could, no he had fought his way there, into that blackness and nonexistence; pressed on in, armed. Oh please let it not be so. Let him not have lied to her, the very last thing. If they had lied, if he had, they took even her grief from her, and left her nothing.

Two days of classes had gone by, and Kit was required to bring absence excuses, signed by her proctor, to each teacher whose class she had missed. Instead she stuffed them in her purse and forgot them. One she did think she had to hand in, but rather than to class she brought it to the liberal arts tower, thinking she would put it in his mailbox as she had her poem at the beginning of the semester. When she passed by his office, though, he was standing in the doorway, apparently just leaving. Seeing her, he opened the door wider for her and showed her in.

“I wasn’t in class last week,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “Again asleep?”

“No. Not asleep.” She pulled from her pocket the green form and gave it to him. He unfolded and read it, sitting down at his desk. The room could have been anyone’s: there was no sign that he alone occu-pied it.

“A family member?” he said.

“My brother.” He looked up from the form. “An accident. Far away.” She hoped he wouldn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t speak.

“I think I might have to drop your class, though,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He refolded the green form. “Why do you say this?”

“Oh,” she said. “I guess I found out I don’t love poetry enough.

Anymore.”

He got up then from his desk and pulled a chair close to his and indicated it with a hand. She sat reluctantly.

“Six weeks now left in this semester,” he said. “Too late to drop. You can only fail.”

She crossed her arms and hid her hands in her armpits. “Can I ask you something?” she said.

He nodded, unsurprised.

“When your daughter died,” Kit said, bargaining hard within herself not to cry, her throat not to tremble, “well how did you . . . how did you stand knowing that. Knowing what had happened.”

“I was far away.”

“Still. When you learned. When you thought about it.”

He thought, or was quiet. Then he said: “Where was he, your brother, far away?”

“The Philippines,” she said. “In the army. There was an accident, they said. Something—some shells or something—blew up.” The dark wave made itself known within her, but didn’t rise. “That’s what they say. They brought him home.”

Falin rested his chin in the L of his index finger and thumb, as she had seen him do in the library. He went on looking attentively at her, and in that time of silence the air in the little room seemed to be with-drawn and replaced, a little cleaner or clearer.

“Did you,” Kit said then, “ever write about her? Your daughter.”

“There are children in my poems who die,” he said. “Who are hungry, who are lost, who are hurt. But of these I knew many.”

“Many?”

He seemed to consider how he might say more. “You know,” he said. “We lived, in that country, in times of terrible things. Not for a short time, but for long years. There was hardly a person to whom these things did not happen; even to those who sold everything—their souls, their loved ones—so that the terrible things would not happen to them. There was no safety.”

“So if things like that were so common, then you . . .”

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“No, no,” he said, as though he knew what she thought. “No, you did not get used to it. Only you ceased to be surprised. And you did not have the pain to yourself: you did not look around yourself and say Why should they be happy and I have this; how can they walk in the sun and smile and not know what I know.”

She gripped the hankie that, just in case, she had taken out.

“All those I was with in camps, they had children, wives. No: I am wrong, not all. Many had lost all even before they came.”

He moved a paper minutely on the desk.

“I was, myself, a lost child,” he said, and lifted his eyes to her again.

“A homeless boy. I do not remember my mother or my father. And as I lost them, so too did they lose me.”

“I thought you said your father was an engineer.”

“Yes. I said so. I believe this to be so.” He regarded her puzzlement for a moment. “I do not remember my father,” he said. “But from my first memory, I could say this sentence: My father is an engineer. A name the others sometimes called me was Engineer.”

“The others?”

“The lost children. Besprizornye. There were many of us. Tens of thousands. No, more: a million. Millions.” He smiled, maybe at her wonderment. “Another name I had among the lost children was Monashka, the Nun.”

“Nun?”

“Perhaps I was delicate child. Innocent.” His smile was teasing for a moment, then gone. “I don’t really know why they called me that. I have forgot much. I do not know for sure where I was lost, and I do not know why.”

“But you also said you grew up in Leningrad with your parents.

That your parents were dead. That you were an only child.”

“Yes. I lied when I said that.”

Kit, shocked, couldn’t respond. He was telling her he had lied. No adult had ever told her such a thing. They had lied, many of them had— telling her about the world or God or other things—and sometimes she had guessed and sometimes not. But never had one admitted it.

“I first appeared on earth in a train station in a northern city,” he said. “It was beginning to be cold, winter. I perhaps was seven or eight or six years old. I was abandoned there, or by chance separated from whoever was to take care of me. It was very common.”

“You first appeared?”

“I mean I remember nothing before that. I mean that there I begin to remember something that may be told.”

“No father or mother?”

He shook his head.

“Well . . . what happened? I mean . . .”

“You would like to hear?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder why.”

She said nothing.

“I must say: it is not always easy for me. Not easy to remember, not easy to tell.”

“Okay,” she said. “Well.”

“You will know more about me than I have revealed in this country before,” he said. “You’re not afraid?”

“Why should I be afraid?”

He didn’t answer. He took from his pocket his cigarettes—they were Herbert Tareytons, with the jaunty little man in antique formal dress on the pack—and put them on the desk; he opened his coat and tipped back the office chair, stretching out his long legs. “Very well,”

he said. “And in exchange for my story, if you think it worth it, I will ask of you one thing. All right?”

“All right,” she said, and she wasn’t afraid, though her throat was tight and painful. “What is it?”

“I ask that you not drop my class,” he said. “That you stay till end.

That you not fail.”

She shrugged, and looked away. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “I can make it up someplace else. The credit. It’s okay.”

He said nothing, as though she had said nothing: and she looked up at him.

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“It’s only a course,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“To me, yes,” he said. “That you are not there. That I do not see you there. Yes. It matters very much.”

“It does?”

“It does.”

It was as though she stepped off an unseen edge and fell, only not down but up. He had been thinking about her. He had been thinking about her when she wasn’t there, just as she had thought about him, who he was, what he was. He had been thinking about her, and maybe for the same reasons too, reasons she had no name for.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll do that. I’ll stay. Till the end.”

12.

Wherever it was, in whatever city, it was a vast and crowded station.

Through its high windows the sun made great solid bars of light in the dusty air that were vertiginous to look up at: he remembered that.

Before that day or moment, nothing: a sensation of warmth and light, a golden orange, a white lace curtain, that might have been earlier, and might have been home.

Who it was that took him to that station; how he lost her, or him, or them; whether he was separated by chance from parents or uncles or schoolmates—nothing of that persisted. He didn’t know if he was an only child, or just the only one who was lost. Had he been set down on a bench there and told to wait, by a parent or a sibling who was then swept away in the crowds, pushed aboard a train still calling his name (that he remembered, his name and patronymic, of these he was sure).

Or did someone just leave him there, hoping for the best, someone headed elsewhere (stay here Innokenti and don’t move and I’ll come back), to the Polish border or the Crimea or Central Asia, anyway far 120

away and unwilling or unable to carry him? How had he lived, not knowing?

He didn’t remember coming to understand that something was wrong and whoever had brought him there was gone. Maybe he had come to that conclusion at last, and got up from his bench and started searching, thereby maybe losing himself certainly and finally, no matter if he or she or they who had told him to wait there had come back at last to collect him. All that was supposition. The first person he clearly remembered knowing—the earliest he could find by searching backwards—wasn’t a parent or any other kin, it was Teapot.