The Translator (33 page)

She took her coat, went out into the yard. The wind was increasing, t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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an autumn storm come, or passing overhead. The road was entirely dark, only the occluded moon outlining it, and she began to walk along it, and then to run, knowing how far ahead he was, how far behind she was, but running anyway. The tall roadside trees thrashed their limbs and lost their leaves in great cascades.

The main road was dark and empty too. The way east, the way west.

She stood, breathing hard. Then down the straight road far away she saw two headlights coming toward the place where she stood. As she watched they seemed to come on with awful, impossible speed, the lights of a huge vehicle, roaring. No, the lights weren’t one vehicle but two motorcycles, two that had drifted apart as they came on, fool-ing her. Still her heart raced. They were unbearably loud. They passed by her, one, then the other, both black, and went on down the straight road.

There was nowhere for her to go, nowhere to follow. She went back toward the house, where only the light in Falin’s room was still lit and waiting. She shut the door she had left open. In Falin’s bedroom his quilt was thrown back, his shirt on a chair. She took the shirt in her hands and inhaled its odor; she crawled into the bed beneath the quilt.

She drew her legs up and held his shirt to her cheek as she had for so long held her white lamb. Just please don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him she prayed, to what powers she didn’t know. The wind diminished.

She lay unmoving, and after a long time her heart ceased its banging and she knew, astonished, that she would sleep again.

10.

All that night a storm moved over the Gulf too, and toward morning Cuba was beneath it: rain and wind and the palms wild and the sea coming ashore to cover the roads and wash away the beaches. Cuban and Soviet officers in the northeastern mountain posts watched it through the knocking windows of their command posts, small shacks with corrugated roofs, and wondered how long their equipment would remain functioning. All the MRBMs on the island were now ready to be fired; they lacked only their nuclear warheads, which were stored away from the missile sites and heavily disguised by maskirovka, cam-ouflage, the same word Soviet intelligence used for all misdirection, disinformation, false stories, entrapments. The twenty-four warheads for the R-14 IRBMs remained on the Aleksandrovsk, now rocking in the stirred waters of La Isabela harbor. At about ten o’clock the clouds parted; an antiaircraft unit in the mountains above Banes was alerted that a U-2 had been sighted near Guantanamo. It seemed certain that it was taking pictures in preparation for an attack the following day.

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The officers at the station had been forbidden to fire on U.S. aircraft without orders from the Soviet commander on the island, but they couldn’t reach him; the U-2 would be out of Cuban airspace in just minutes. The officers made their own decision: an SA-2 surface-to-air missile was fired up through the rainy air, found the U-2, and exploded near enough to it to bring it down. The pilot died in the crash.

American plans called for an immediate retaliatory strike on any SAM bases in Cuba that attacked an American aircraft. As soon as the report could be confirmed, the news went to the President. The assumption was that the Kremlin was deliberately intensifying the cri-sis by ordering an attack on an unarmed U-2.

Great feeble angels, long-winged and slow, all eyes. At almost the same moment, though so far from the sun it was still in the dark of the morning, a U-2 from a SAC base in Alaska strayed into Soviet airspace over the Chukotski Peninsula. Soviet MiGs rose to intercept it, and at the same time, in response to the U-2’s call for help, American F-102s armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles scrambled and headed for the Bering Sea. With just a few minutes to go before contact, the U-2

managed to fly out of Soviet airspace: as unintentionally, it seems—as helplessly, as accidentally—as it had wandered in.

No rain fell that night on the University campus, but the leaves of all the trees, yellow elm and hickory, gray-green ash, coppery oak and beech, seemed to have fallen at once in the night: long wind-combed rows of them moving in the still-restless air, dead souls lifted and tossed on gusts.

People were in motion too. Kit crossing the campus from the College Street gate felt them, small eddies or flocks, people coming in from Fraternity Row and from town in numbers, the way they did on class days, hurrying together toward their classes in different buildings; but this wasn’t a class day, and they seemed to be all going one way.

She went that way too. She’d awakened in the dawn light in Falin’s bed, and had not dared or wanted to lift the phone from its cradle.

She’d left the empty house and walked in the frost to town, so strangely weak she had to stop now and then to rest, until she came to the All 260

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Night Cafeteria. She sat there with a coffee, thinking of nothing, wondering at the pain in her throat. Was she really sick? Her head felt not light but heavy, made of mud or stone; when she rested it on the cold plastic tabletop and closed her eyes, the waitress shook her awake, and told her not unkindly that she couldn’t sleep there, which maybe people did a lot, and she got up and found a quarter to pay with and went up toward the University.

Many people were running, or hurrying as though not to miss something. They were becoming a crowd, rivulets flowing together into a stream and flowing faster. The earth rose up a little there, between the student center and the science building, beyond which lay the central axis of the campus, a broad way starting at the auditorium and lined with the newer buildings. That’s where the crowd was going, following the paths or pouring over the grass and through the leaves. Kit came to the top of the rise and saw what it was: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the other groups were marching, a little band with signs.

Kit could just hear, like a plea repeated, the marchers’ voices, and the cries and shouts of the people around them, moving with them and pressing on them, a gauntlet they passed through. There were no more than twenty or thirty of them.

She went down that way, drawn along. There was Saul Greenleaf, in the front, and Rodger in a jacket and tie and his porkpie hat. Max was in back keeping the group together. Black-and-white cars of the University police were pulled up along the route, their lights revolving and their radios emitting staticky communications louder than the protesters’ chants. Up on top of the auditorium Kit could see watchers and the tall tripods of cameras with long lenses, men with binoculars.

She thought of Milton Bluhdorn. Jackie had said it would do her no good to be here: did he know it would be like this? Photographers scooted along the march route too, and some of them looked like news photographers, and some of them didn’t.

She felt a tug at her sleeve, and pulled away, threatened. It was Fran.

“Unbelievable,” she said in cold scorn. “Can you believe this?”

It seemed that in a short time the furious crowd would fall on the t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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demonstrators and beat them or worse. Kit and Fran went down the slope, hurrying as everyone hurried.

“You can think what you want,” Fran said. “You can say what you want. But this is ludicrous.”

A sign that read Hands Off Cuba was torn from someone’s hands and ripped to pieces to awful cheering.

“Who are these people?” Fran said. “College students? They’re red-necks.”

“Fran.”

“Well you hear what they’re saying? ‘Commies go back to Russia.’ I mean come on.” She tossed down her cigarette and stepped on it.

“Dopes. Know-nothings.”

They pushed through the mass of hecklers and yellers that undu-lated along the march route until they were at the front of the crowd and keeping pace with the marchers. And without ever exactly choosing to, they became marchers, as though sorted from the crowd by a sorter that recognized only two kinds, if you weren’t one you were the other. Someone she didn’t know linked arms with her. Saul saw her and grinned, amazed, alight, unafraid she thought, or maybe not. A tall athletic guy was bent into his face, speaking curses meant just for him it seemed; on the guy’s crewcut head was a novelty straw hat dec-orated with church keys and a little sign that said Lets Raise Hell.

“Where’s Jackie?” Kit called, but Saul had to turn away to face his opponent.

It was what Kit had forever most hated and feared, to be pointed at and stared at and mocked. In the Passion story when she was a kid it was this that hurt her most, that the crowds mocked Jesus and spit on him. But she felt none of that now. She could see and assess the crowd around them as though they were etched. Almost all were men, many wearing their fraternity sweatshirts and their varsity jackets, some of them though in blazers and ties, with American-flag pins in their lapels and wolfish grins, not guys who got to be part of a mob very often and seeming to be enjoying it. One guy who bore down on them wore the button that the SANE women had worn, the three white lines on 262

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black, but when he came closer to Kit—so close and yelling so loud that she could see the fillings in his teeth—she saw that on his button the white lines were formed into a great swept-wing bomber, and beneath it were small letters that spelled DROP IT.

“Keep the women in the center!” Saul yelled back at his shrinking group. “Keep the women in the center, men on the outside!” The marchers had ceased their chanting, Peace Now and Hands Off Cuba, it was obvious that it just goaded the crowd around them dangerously; but the women who walked with Kit and Fran, arms now more protec-tively linked than before, started to sing. They sang, amazingly, in Latin: Dona, dona nobis, dona nobis pacem.

It was a round: one took up after the other had started, kept on after she ended. Fran laughed aloud, apparently she knew what they were singing, she right away began singing along in a loud hoarse voice perfectly on key, and Kit sang too when after a moment she got the little tune: Dona, dona nobis, dona nobis pacem, pacem, the women’s voices cycled.

Then through the marchers and the shifting crowd coming and going, Kit saw Falin.

He was just turning from looking elsewhere, and now his look passed over the marchers and the others with interest and something like delight. It seemed he didn’t recognize Kit in the mass of them, though she felt the instant of his look toward her like a stab of wonder.

“Then it’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“What’s okay?” Fran said.

“It’s him,” Kit said. “Falin.”

He was coming closer to them, it seemed. Kit was about to call out to him when he turned away, looking elsewhere. In a second she couldn’t see him anymore. But just before the crowd closed around him she saw—she thought she saw—that his big pale feet were bare.

No. Where had he gone? There was no way to turn back, no way to leave the little group of marchers now, Kit was carried forward by all of it without a choice. She untangled herself from Fran and the women and stood still while the others passed by her, until the rear guard t h e t r a n s l a t o r

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caught up with her and Max came close, his arms wide to keep them moving, like a shepherd.

“We’ve got to break this up,” he said. “Somebody’ll get hurt.”

“Max.”

“Get up and tell Saul and the people in front. We’ve got to break it up. Go do that.”

She went back up along the edge of the marching group, too tightly and defensively bound together now to pass through. When she came to the front she saw that Saul was less certain too than he had been, and that ahead the opposing crowd was coming together in a wall that wouldn’t let them pass. “Where’s the cops?” she heard him say. “Now where’s the cops? Free speech, people. Free speech. Land of the free.”

In a minute the march would not be a march any longer, it would be a huddle of victims, the ones in the rear were pressing already against the slowing front rank. Almost all their signs were gone. Then, just as their forward progress was about to stop altogether, Saul stepped quickly out ahead and turned to face his group, walking backward like a drum major. With both hands he waved them to the right, off the main way and onto the walks of the campus.

“Okay, quick!” he called out. “Keep on, keep together! We’re going to end this at the library! Everybody hear? Pass that on! At the library steps!” All the while waving them to the right and on. They did go faster too, almost broke into a run, and for the first time Kit felt fear, that they might run, and what might happen to them then. But they didn’t, even though the crowd around gave an awful cry of rage and tri-umph to see that they had given up and were getting away.

But what had happened to him? Kit thought. What had he done, where had he gone?

The library was open. At the steps Saul and Max ushered them all inside, medieval outlaws claiming sanctuary; a few though stayed outside to deal with the crowd—Saul, whose chest was heaving maybe from the unaccustomed exercise, and Max, unperturbed, hands clasped behind his back and even smiling when Kit went by him into the dark silent inside. For a moment she felt it had grown suddenly not 264

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dark but black, and her feet lost touch with the floor, as though it melted to liquid; then she felt someone take her arm, and steady her.

“Okay?”

“Yes. Yes. Okay.”

How long did they hide there? The librarian came to speak to them more than once, hushing them and telling them, which they knew, that the library was a place of study and work, not conversation and mingling. Someone was crying. Time passed. Above their heads, all around the base of the rotunda, were words printed in gold: A Good Book Is the Precious Life Blood of a Master Spirit. The doors kept opening to show the day and admitting more of the demonstrators, and also those who had bones to pick with them, their voices dropping to hiss-ing whispers, until the librarian chased them away too.