The Translator (17 page)

“Our hope is to publish all, as it was—I think—meant to be; one tale, or novel in verse maybe you would say, though consists of many fragments. I have tried to transcribe, to edit.”

He put them before her and she touched the pages. The paper was dry, unresponsive.

“Has never been entirely translated,” he said. “Perhaps someday you might . . .”

“No,” she said, and drew her hand away, and clasped it with the other. “No. Not now, when all of you can have them. No.”

He tended the little pile, straightening and smoothing. “Nothing is like it in Russian poetry in this century,” he said. “There was Russian writer who called himself Grin, who would not write realistic social stories, who conceived imaginary land, Grinland, where marvelous things could happen; he died young. But Falin’s country in these poems was not another country, no, but one inside or alongside this one. Inhabitants of his land seem to know of this one but do not think about it very much, as though it was unimportant to them. Example.

They have city, some stories are set there, called Manitograd, and it is apparently located in or on side of Stalingrad, and the name Stalingrad is mentioned, but only as name for unknown or imaginary place.”

“Maybe it was slang they used,” she said. “He said they had their own words, their own language.”

He was nodding. “Manit is beckon,” he said, and with his hand made the gesture, waving her gently toward him. “To lure, perhaps.”

Beckonville. The Russians had just changed the name of Stalingrad back to what it was before, another grad or gorod, what was it.

“In early poems of Gray Gods,” Gavriil Viktorovich said, “this world of Falin is spoken of as small. Perhaps, yes, like world of child-gangs to 128

our big society, with its own rules and laws and language, secret names for things. But as poems go on, world of Falin expands. Speakers in poems now can take long journeys in this other world, which has its own transportation system, they travel to other cities, they petition officials who have offices and powers not like ours but little bit like, they try to be heard in government buildings, which are big, very big, go on forever.

“Then, at last, this world opens further, to greater realm, beyond-human realm of powers, powers maybe reflections of earthly ones, maybe not; maybe they are originals of earthly ones, who only reflect them. In their own great shut offices, you see. Endless. These are perhaps those Gray Gods for whom all the poems are named.

“And yet, and yet. No matter how far out it reaches, world of Gray Gods, it can suddenly become ordinary once more. As camera might change its focus, we see that we are nowhere but in dump or ashpit in Soviet city, to which besprizornye have come from trains or however they have come; where they have made shelters, to keep warm by fires of ash dump; and watchmen come to drive them away, and winter coming on. Then this moment passes, like hallucination. And great epic story of gods and journeys continues.”

When winter was deep, Innokenti went out from the station’s under-ground with the others to the yards to get aboard trains bound for the south, for Georgia, the Crimea. Some would go as far as Baku and Samarkand. How did they know which ones to board? Surely Innokenti didn’t know. How could they take such a small child with them, how did he endure it, how did he learn not to fear, and how long did learning take him?

The smaller you were, the more places there were to hide on a train.

The smallest could ride in the dog boxes or storage compartments underneath the cars, curled up out of sight; sometimes though the conductors shut and locked the boxes, not knowing there were children inside who would be trapped unable to move for hours or days, or

sometimes knowing very well. If you were strong enough to hold on you could ride farther under, on the rails, just above the tracks, the endless wooden crossties flicking hypnotically by just below your feet or your face; if you slept you could lose your perch and fall under the cars. One boy that Innokenti knew had fallen into the roadbed and lay facedown still and bleeding while the cars passed over him, one, one, one, one, a hundred: he was blind in one eye afterward and his cheek always drooped, but he could tell this story. It was easy to get into coal boxes but the air was suffocating, thick with greasy coal dust, and you carried a nail or a spike to bore a hole to breathe. There were even places inside the engines, crannies and spaces inches away from the pistons and thundering wheels, hotter even than the steam pipes of the station basement. When the train stopped the firemen would cry out to see children crawling from the engines all black and skinny as devils: Chort!

Maybe it was then he learned invisibility, riding the trains.

In the south somewhere he lost Teapot, or was lost by him, anyway he never saw him again. In his poems a person like Teapot disappears forever only to appear again, always returning in new guises and with new employments, but those are poems. He was taken in by another gang, older boys and girls of practiced cruelty. He begged for them, having still the trick of weeping whenever he needed to and having grown as yet not much larger, his nice clothes tattered and irremedia-bly soiled and his shoes stolen and replaced with two mismatched ones much too large, but still the good little boy could be seen beneath, and he did well.

In another colder city they lived in an ash dump that ran along a railroad spur line; there were fires burning always, and a derelict freight car collapsed on a siding where the older children made a home. The younger dug caves in the clinkers or slept in heaps under salvaged boxes or broke into sheds, or sat out and cried. During the day they went out into the city, to the markets and the streets, to beg; at night the older children went out to steal or to sell stolen things or themselves. Sometimes they returned with vodka or candy or cocaine, 130

to be distributed according to rules they made up: one older boy Falin remembered named Chinarik or Cigarette Butt, with a withered arm like Stalin’s, particularly liked this game.

Once they brought back with them a child, a psy or greenhorn, and talked about how they might get money for him, ransom money. After a while the boy began to cry and struggle and tried to get away, and said he would tell; they tried to make him shut up but he wouldn’t stop, and they killed him. Innokenti was one of them.

“I was set guard,” he said. “To watch for mil’ton or yard police. What I was told.”

“Did you see? What they did?”

“I saw.”

They held him down and hit him, and to make him stop crying they stuffed his mouth with ashes. They held him until he stopped writhing. Then they took all he had, his shoes, handkerchief, coat.

“They did that?”

“We did that. We.” He tapped the gray ash from his cigarette against the ashtray, which had the college’s seal on the bottom of it. “You see,”

he said. “I have had child, born with illness, and before she grew I was taken away to camps, and never saw her more. I think of her every day.

But I have this one too, this boy, and of him too I think every day. They are both my dead children, and they will not go.”

Not long after that, maybe because of that (and now he began to remember such things, causalities, the order of events, at least a little), the ash dump was swept by the authorities and the children rounded up and processed: Innokenti Isayevich entered the system. He was fed hot soup and given new boots not much better than his old ones, and then put aboard a special train, a sanpoezda, “sanitary” train; he had his hair cut off and was dunked in disinfectant as the train rolled, picking up as it went other besprizornye. He had a ticket sewn to his coat with his surname and the city he had come from, it wasn’t his name but a name someone thought she heard him say, and he would have it ever after. Many of

them didn’t know their names; some of them refused to say them. They were given new names, common names or the names of film stars or heroes of the Revolution, Mikhail Kalinin, Len or Ninel or Vladilen, Ulyanova or Tsetkina or Elektrifikatsiya. At stations they would be off-loaded into the care of the local officials, who put them in detskie doma.

If there was no one to meet them, or detdoma was already full, or there was no detdoma, they would go on, or be left in the station or the street.

“Sometimes detdoma was not so good as street,” he said to her.

“Hundreds try to get in; as many try to get out soon. Stay till food is gone, run away. I ran away. Not once only.”

“And after that?”

“Go to market. Beg. Ride on trains. I found other friends, as we did then. I knew then the rules of how to live, how to make—what— alliances, and make myself valuable to others. I could beg, though I was perhaps not so pitiful as once. I lived. At last, arrested again, for theft. Sent to prison. Then released to new detdoma. This time to stay.”

He put out his cigarette: she watched the strong square wrist; did his hand tremble? How much we can stand, she thought: how much, after all.

“That was first place in all my life I knew where was,” he said. “Ah no: I don’t make myself clear. I mean I learned only there that world is round, where on it I am; where I stand.”

“They had teachers?”

“Here, yes. Khar’kov. A labor commune; we worked and learned.

There were books. Not like the others.”

“Was that what happened to the others, the kids you knew?”

“No. Most not. There were so many, you know: most not. Streets, markets, trains. In the end many, many were sent to camps. You see, aim of reform, rehabilitation, was soon given up; they were by then only young criminals, hooligans, human waste. They were sent to mine gold or coal, make roads, dig canals.”

“Prison camps.”

“Lageria, yes. Camps of slave labor, men and women building new land, new world. Novy mir.”

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“But not you.”

“Not then.”

“Well how did you, how . . .”

He had stood, restless; he went to open his office window to the spring, and Kit felt the stale air of the room pushed aside, the cool sweetness on her cheek. “Many of us who were lost,” he said. “They knew only to fight, or to run away. They could not learn to eat with fork and knife, some of them; they could not listen to any command, could not sit still, not remember what happened yesterday or guess what might happen next. This had become of them. And then further things were done to them, which they could not run from, which they could not fight.”

What he was saying now was hard for him to say: Kit could see.

“I knew,” he said. “I knew. Not to run; to listen. To be not seen when looked at; to be seen when I chose; to speak, to agree, to seem. I did not learn these things; if I would have to learn, I would not have been able. If I had not been able, I would not now be here, telling this to you, Kyt Malone. I would not be here.”

13.

“I thought about it, what he told me,” Kit said to Gavriil Viktorovich.

“I thought about it all the time. I guess I needed something to think about, just then, and he . . .”

“Yes.”

“He offered that. He must have thought it would help me. And it did help.” She looked down at her hands; she turned the ring on her ring finger. “I wanted to write about it, what he told me, when I published the book, my book, the first one, with his poems in it. But by then I didn’t know if what I remembered was so.”

“It is already more than I knew,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “I knew that his name was not his own. He told me that.”

“He said he thought that his father was an engineer. He said it was all he knew of him.”

“Yes?”

“He never told you that?”

“No. We were not then in habit of asking after families. It was not 134

done to look into family trees, do you say this in English, family trees?

You did not know who might be found peeping out from leaves, you see? A priest, perhaps, or former noble person, Tsarist policeman. No.

You were New Man, no forebears; if they could not even be discovered, well, all to the good.”

“So you knew he didn’t remember his parents.”

“No. Not that either. I thought he had family. There was story, I forget now; parents separated by war, or maybe gone pioneers to north. I cannot remember. I remember he received letters. He said so.”

She turned the ring on her finger, thinking. “If he went to that camp,” she said, “the one that was run by the secret police, could he have known boys there, boys who maybe later on . . . Well, I guess I don’t know what I’m asking.”

“That such persons would later help him; see that he got better treatment? Perhaps even intervene at the end, when he was sent away?”

“Well maybe.”

“Or that perhaps he himself . . .”

“Oh my God.”

Gavriil Viktorovich piled up his small collection of Falin poems, got up, and with painful care put it all away again. “In all places and times we humans have believed in luck,” he said. “So perhaps this was all.

Luck and his courage. But we ceased to believe in many things in time of Gray Gods, and luck was smallest thing among them.”

He turned to face her, and he was smiling. “Well. Now these days at last we can look, in KGB records; they have been opened, some at least, like—like tombs. And so far there is nothing of him there.”

Nothing. Kit didn’t know if she felt relieved or defeated. “Do you know why he was sent to the labor camp, after the war? I mean what his supposed crime was? Is that something that can be found out?”

“He never told you?”

“No.”

Gavriil Viktorovich shook his head slowly. “Perhaps in future we can know. Not now. Not today. Wherever his name appears in records,

it seems only to make more mystery; and such records are few. They are very few.”

He tugged down his jacket, and dusted his hands. “Now you will excuse me,” he said. “I will dress for our dinner.” He made her a small bow, and went behind a flowered curtain that divided his apartment in two.