The Translator (26 page)

Thou wert my son

My childhood chum

This cat; that bum;

Wert my loved one.

She liked the way this all hovered between a sort of language lesson and a sort of declaration of something to somebody. As though she hovered too. Thou wert my son.

Yet Thou wert God

Incarnate Word

Immortal Bird

Death never trod.

She’d maybe have to explain that to Falin; Keats’s nightingale. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down. Wasn’t “tread” the word for what roosters did to hens, what male birds did to female? She saw she’d changed the rhyme scheme, and went back and altered the first stanza to match it, and liked it better: In our tongue now

We must make do

With only You:

We have no Thou.

She lifted her head from her page: a car might have come into the drive in front. Not him though: she could tell. One of Miss Petroski’s church friends maybe.

Who is it wipes

My muddied brow?

Is it Thou?

Is it You?

Was it okay that the first line of this quatrain rhymed with nothing?

She hadn’t known whom these lines spoke to—to no one, she had thought—and now a thickness came into her throat to read what she had written.

Art Thou so low

Or art so high?

I am but I

And then there must be a last line, ending in O; it seemed to exist already—the words of it surely existed, and they were gathering, self-selected, waiting for her to notice them; what she wanted to say to him, but not to him alone. She felt at her tongue’s root the sounds the last line must make; she felt the small solemn pause the reader’s eye or voice ought to take as it crossed the words, and where it would fall; but she couldn’t hear the words themselves.

Well it was just a joke, really, a trick, it was nothing at all. She looked up. There was a man in the garden.

She stood, the notebook slipping from her lap. It was a big man, more fat than tall, and he wore a narrow-brimmed straw fedora and a pale suit; his arms didn’t quite hang at his sides, like some big men he seemed to be holding a suitcase or something in each hand as he walked. He looked around at the growing plants, the wheelbarrow, kicked at something lying in the dirt; then he stepped up to the door and came in without knock-ing. He was all the way through the windowed porch before he saw Kit.

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He had a deep plummy voice, a nice smile, and bright small eyes.

Kit nodded and waited for explanation.

“Didn’t think anyone was here,” he said.

“Then why did you come in?”

He took a few more steps within, looking around himself. “You’re a friend of Mr. Falin’s?”

“Um yes.”

“Hi.” He put out a plump hand to her and without wanting to she came to take it. “My name’s Bluhdorn. Milton Bluhdorn. I knocked on the front door, and I think someone’s inside, but no one answered.”

“Yes. That’s Miss Petroski.”

“Anna Petroski,” he said, looking at her with intense interest, as he had been doing since he came in.

“Yes. She’s . . . she can’t move very much and sometimes she just doesn’t answer. I could go get her.”

“And Mr. Falin’s not in.” He said it the way most people did who didn’t know him: fallen.

“No.”

“And you are . . .”

“I’m—feeding the cats. He’s gone for the whole day. Till tomorrow.”

“You a student?”

“Yes.”

His smile hadn’t altered, but seemed to have become less a smile and more an instrument, a tool of inquiry, like a lockpick.

“You’re a student of his? He isn’t teaching this summer.”

“I was a student of his last semester. This summer I’m studying Russian.”

“What, he’s giving you some tutoring?”

“Not really.”

“Is that allowed? It would be quite a privilege. You interested in poetry? What Russian are you taking?” As he asked this he went around the room, looking at the anonymous furniture, the library books, the Russian typewriter. “Conversation? You doing conversational Russian?”

Kit had decided to stop answering. The blood beat steadily and painfully against her throat. Milton Bluhdorn seemed to take no notice of her silence. The gray cat had come down its path from the ceiling and appeared beside him, rubbing against the leg of his suit.

“He’s a remarkable man,” he said to the cat. “If you were interested in poetry and he took a liking to you, well.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Took, you know, a shine to you.” The lap of his pants was disgustingly wrinkled, the way fat men’s pants in summer get. She wouldn’t forget that. “I like poetry,” he said. “I liked it in college. ‘We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together, head-piece full of straw.’ ” His smile broadened, and he shook his head, as though marveling at himself or the world long ago. “Listen,” he said.

“You need a ride back to town? I can give you a ride.”

“I have a bike.”

“Toss it in the trunk.”

Again she said nothing, yielding nothing, not knowing what her face said. At last he pushed his hat up on his head and nodded. He was still smiling. He turned away and lifted his hand in farewell; then he turned back.

“What did you say your name was?”

Could she refuse to say? Why did she feel that she ought to? “Kit,”

she said, and when he leaned his head closer to her, cocked his ear at her and raised his brows to ask or listen for more, the whole name, she shut down.

“Well tell me something, Kit,” he said. “What do you actually know about this guy?” He opened his hands to include the room they stood in, where Falin was not. “Do you know anything about him?”

Kit thought that she knew more about him than anyone in America; he himself had said so, almost, to her; and at the same time she thought that Milton Bluhdorn knew something she didn’t know, or he couldn’t have asked what he asked. She shrugged, one shoulder, just a little.

“He is,” said Milton Bluhdorn. “He is one of a kind. You know that.

That his situation is. Ah. Unprecedented.”

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“I mean they didn’t kick Pasternak out.”

He studied her for a while as though to see if he’d roused her; he hadn’t stopped smiling. Then all in a moment he seemed to give up on her again. “Okay, goodbye sweetheart,” he said, already turning away, this time to walk out the door and go.

She didn’t move, listening for the slam of his car door, the starting of his engine. And she realized that she had not even asked what he wanted, who he was, and now she could not tell Falin.

“Milton,” she said to him. A light rain fell, the first soft rain in weeks, she had ridden out to the house sheathed in a billowing poncho to find he hadn’t yet returned. She’d waited on Miss Petroski’s porch for his car, unwilling to go in the house again without him. “Milton Bluhdorn.”

“Mil’ton,” he said, and smiled. He stood bareheaded in the rain. He had got his car’s top up at least, it was darkened with wet like the shoulders of his suit. “When I grew up with the lost children this was one of the words we had. Mil’ton was policeman. As you might say cop, or copper.” He took her hand and raised her from the porch step, led her around the house. “And he seemed to think no one would be in the house?”

“Miss Petroski. He knew about her.”

“But not in back. Not here.” He let them in.

“He said he didn’t think there was. That he didn’t expect anyone to be here.”

Falin’s eyes moved around the dark little apartment, maybe looking for something that should be there and was not, or something that might be there that shouldn’t be. Or maybe they weren’t searching or seeing at all, only moving while he thought. “Well,” he said. “If he expected that I was not to be here, he must have known where I went.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means,” he said, and then nothing for a time; he seemed to gather himself from a scattering or diffusion, slowly, a piece at a time, to reform himself into the person she knew. “It means that we should do our work for today. Means nothing more. Perhaps he will come again, Mil’ton the policeman. And we can ask him.”

He put down his black case of imitation leather, unzipped it, and took from it with care the folders of his poems and her drafts, and arranged them on the table.

“I can’t,” she said.

He turned to her, and Kit saw something she hadn’t seen before in him. She had hardly ever seen him even surprised, and now for just an instant he seemed shocked, bereft. She felt it like a stab: that she could hurt him, and had.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have finals to study for. My course. These are the last days.”

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. Certainly. You will do well.”

“I hope.”

“But still much summer is left.”

“I have to go home. I promised my parents. Anyway I’d have no place to stay.”

He looked down at the poems, hers and his.

“My parents,” she said. “They’re in a new city. Without . . . well, without their family.” Bez: without.

“Yes. Yes surely.”

From the bag she carried, her leather purse she had slung around her body like a tiny postman’s bag as she rode, she took two small books. “I brought these for you,” she said, just as she might to anyone, though her throat already trembled when she spoke and she wouldn’t try to still it.

He took them from her. One, new, with a bright cover, was The Wizard of Oz. The other was Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, her own copy from childhood. She’d carried it with her to school in the winter, and she had come to believe she would 208

knew now she would go on, and would need things to carry that would stay the same. But she had brought it for him.

“The girl who goes through the mirror,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “You have to read it. You’ll see.”

He held them, one in each hand, regarding her as though she were a puzzle, or an unknown. She thought of Ben at Christmas, holding his two books, Pascal, Baudelaire. Je suis comme le roi d’un pays plu-vieux. “Can you tell me something?” she said.

“Perhaps,” he said. He looked older, the stubble dark in the deep furrows by his mouth.

“Are you,” she asked then, just a whisper, “are you in some kind of danger?”

“No,” he said. “No new danger, no.”

“Because,” she said. “If you are in danger. I know there’s nothing at all I could do. But I’d do anything I could.”

“My dear,” he said, “my dear love. You have done already. More than I can say. I cannot ask you more. I will not.”

“You can. Anything.”

He said nothing, only went on hearing and seeing the world, and her; she could almost feel it all as he did, see herself as he did: almost but not quite.

Not at all maybe.

She picked up her crumpled poncho. “I have to go,” she said.

He lifted a hand to stop her. Then from the small pile of papers before him he withdrew, one after another, her translations, the first drafts in pencil and the typed versions, themselves marked over. He squared them up and held them out to her.

“They’re yours,” she said, shocked. “They were for you.” But he only went on holding them until she came and took them.

“I want you to keep them,” he said. “Will be safer with you.”

She took them, and he opened his hands to her like a question; and unthinking, still holding the poncho in one hand and the sheaf of papers in the other, she embraced him. He held her a long time, kissed

her cheek and her cool brow, her mouth, her tears. She knew—she knew by now—that there really can be a person, one at least, that you can embrace as easily and wholly as though the two of you were one thing, a thing that once upon a time was broken into pieces and is now put back together. And how could she know this unless he knew it too?

It was part of the wholeness, that he must: and that too she knew. With her he was for a moment whole, they were whole: as whole as an egg, and as fragile.

6.

“Mad,” said George.

There was a toylike breakfast nook in the new apartment, where George and Kit sat; George buttered toast, for himself and for her too, as he had done when she was little. “M-a-d, mad. It’s the new concept.

Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD.”

As usual Kit was uncertain how to understand what he said, whether he was teasing her or letting her in on a secret she’d better listen to.

She only stared, and shook her head a little in incomprehension.

“Simple,” George said. “It means that if either side initiates an attack, the other side guarantees it will respond in kind and in toto. You make it certain that the response will come even if your command and control centers are knocked out and your leaders are dead and even most of your people are dead. You make it a standing order that can’t be countermanded: if they let fly, we let fly, automatically.”

“So if they . . . so if we bomb them, they have to bomb us back, even though that means the end of everything and there’s no winning?”

“That’s the concept,” George said. “I mean you can see the logic.”

“So that’s why we can’t protect ourselves?” That was where the talk had begun, why with computers or something we couldn’t know about attacks and prevent them.

“Right. It upsets the balance, queers the deal. If we, or they, started to build defenses against ICBM attacks, which is theoretically possible, and the other side got wind of it, they might feel they had to attack; because once your defense system is in place you can send off your missiles and destroy their country—you’ve got the capacity—without them being able to destroy you back.”

“Oh my God.”

He nodded, pleased, and held out his hands as though between them he held the perfect and irrefutable logic of it. “It’s like two guys standing up to their knees in kerosene, aiming flare guns at each other.