The Translator (7 page)

“Well haven’t you been paying any damn attention?” he asked in mock astonishment. “The man has appeared in every national magazine and the local rag too. A story about his vegetable garden. And that’s where he lives. Right back there.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe we should go visit,” Jackie said thoughtfully. “I can recite poetry. I can recite most of ‘Little Orphant Annie’ by James Whitcomb Riley.”

“Sure, let’s.”

He made a sudden U-turn in the road, plenty wide enough for the toy car and completely empty.

“No!” Kit said.

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“No? No?” He spun again, bouncing off the frozen shoulder to take them around again to face the way they had been going. “Now you see you have to make up your mind,” he said with equanimity. “We can’t be spinning here like a damn bumper car.”

“I never meant it,” she said.

“I’m happy to do whatever you like,” he said. “Just give me that little advance warning.” He looked at a wristwatch on a gold band. “I believe, however, that I’m now on the wrong damn road.”

“You didn’t leave the road you were on.”

“I was on the wrong road from the start,” he said. “I just now figured it out. West North Street, not East North Street. Ain’t that something?

North Street, named for a man called North, but then it got so long they had to name it East and West. All the way on the other side of town. It’ll be too late to go visit them.” He turned again in the roadway; as they went back past the poet’s road, Kit could see lamplight in the windows, the short day darkening.

6.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays was Psychology, which Fran was taking too, a big lecture class followed by lab sections in which students, by feeding them or withholding food, caused white rats to press or not press bars or turn wheels. It wasn’t what Kit or Fran either would have thought was meant by psychology; they had envisioned an array of explanations of themselves, convincing or not. But this university was a center of behaviorism, and in class they were taught never to speculate about what went on within the Black Box into which they fed their Stimulus and got their Response. We never say The rat wants to get the food, we never say The rat is afraid of the electric shock, we only count the number of repetitions or avoidances. Delightful small cold model of aliveness, it was hard to resist extrapolating from the twitch-nose rats to every birthday present, campaign promise, love letter, torture chamber, school prize, and any other human connection that could be thought of. They didn’t resist, either, not the professor at his lectern (a beaky and high-domed Englishman who said shed-jewel 50

and la-bore-a-tree), not his graduate assistants, not his students. Let your boyfriend undo your bra on one date, then forbid it the next two, then maybe yes again on the fourth: you are hooking him deeply through intermittent reinforcement. Stop answering his calls long enough, though, and you’ll extinguish the response.

Tuesdays and Thursdays it was Falin’s seminar in the same time period. Another world she wrote to Ben, but a world just as exact, just as precise in its accounts and descriptions, and less like a kid’s game somehow, more serious—though she knew the Psychology grad students would have said the same the other way around: to them it was Poetry that was the game.

“We look now at a famous poem by English poet A. E. Housman,”

Falin said, turning the purple mimeo sheets to find the little thing, one of the few in the packet familiar to Kit. He looked down on it, nodded slightly as though in greeting, and then looked up. Kit wrote famose boym in her notebook. “What does it say and how is it made.

“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.”

Two couplets, he pointed out, in a meter also favored by the Russian poet Pushkin and others writing in that language. Kit wrote in her notebook D’Roshin boyt. The stanza is very simple in form and thought, and has a figure only in the last line: the cherry trees are girls in white clothes, for church at Easter.

“Now the poet does some arithmetic,” said Falin.

“Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more.

“Arithmetic is hard to do in verse without clumsiness,” he said. “So poets sometimes like to see if they can do this. And I have learned, though I did not know this when I first read this poem in Soviet Union, that the poet was professor of Latin, and worked for many years on a Latin poet who wrote about astrology, a poem filled with arithmetic in verse. So.”

Kit wrote Sov yetchunion. Then she tore the page from her notebook and crumpled it, looking up to find them all regarding her, including Falin; and she lowered her eyes.

“Now see how he ends this small poem,” Falin said. “He has said that he is young, but even so he knows life is short; here is what he now says:

“And since to look at things in bloom, Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

“Now do you see,” he said to them with great strange tenderness, as though for them but also for Housman and the young man in the poem as well, “do you see: the only other figure in this poem is very last word, and it compares white blossoms to tree in winter, covered with snow.

With snow, when all blossoms and leaves will be gone. In the very moment of his delight the poem reminds him, and us, that time will pass, blossoms will fall.” He leaned forward toward all of them. “And it may well be that it was not Housman’s thought but the poem itself that produced this meaning; that the poet reached next-to-last line and this rhyme arose of its own accord, with all these meanings. Yes I am sure, sure it did. A gift that came because of rhyme, came because rhyme exists. Because poetry is what it is. And because this poet was faithful.”

They were all immobile in their chairs before him, stilled maybe (she was) by that word faithful. Kit would remember it: the word he used that day.

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“And how unlikely is this, do you think?” he said. “To have this coin-cidence, I mean; these words and this man Housman occurring together at this time; this rhyme, this quickness to grasp it before it passed away.

What are the odds of this, of exactly this poem existing in the world, coming into being in this form that we can apprehend, not failing somehow along the way or getting lost? I think odds are astronomical. Only the stars can model odds so great. That is the marvel and wonder of this enterprise of poetry: that we have this—and all its fellows, the real poems—among all other things that we have in this world.

“Which include, you know,” he added smiling, “very many poems that are not real poems at all.”

She was a good student: she had nothing else to do but her homework, and she did it, as she almost never had in high school. On a Friday after lunch she went up to her room to finish a poem of her own due for Falin’s class at two, or maybe to write a letter to Ben. She didn’t think that the poem she was writing was one of the real ones. It was carefully impersonal, artificial even, and she guessed that its clever-ness—all it really had to go on—wouldn’t be apparent to someone who knew English only uncertainly; jokes must be the last thing you begin to get. After poems themselves even. Reverse your answer, Love: not no but on.

The letter was the same. In the kingdom of Rayn they used to cut your tongue out for lying—they did, Ben, didn’t they?—but the sunsets were spectacular. Here it’s the reverse. Would he know she wasn’t really talking to him, wasn’t telling him anything because of something she couldn’t tell? She hoped he knew, and she watched her hope carefully, so it wouldn’t betray her to him.

That day she wrote nothing after all. She sat for a time unmoving at her tiny desk and then lay down on her bed. She closed her eyes and thought of having a machine like a tape recorder, only small, not suitcase-sized like George’s, and so sensitive it could record her words as she thought them.

When she woke up, two hours had passed and half of Falin’s class was over.

She lay a moment in astonished shame, feeling pinned to the bed.

Except at Our Lady (sitting up in the dayroom chair, head lolling), she wasn’t someone who slept in the day; it always made her feel dizzy and sad and heavy and hateful (as she did all the time at Our Lady). She felt horror too, the first class she’d missed. Oh well oh well. She went out into the silent halls (everybody else dutifully in class) and went to the bathroom to wash out her woolly mouth.

Then what? She sure wasn’t going to walk into that class when it was almost over. She went back to her room and her desk and her letter to Ben. I see Elvis got his discharge. They didn’t wipe that smirk off his face though. If he can get out why can’t you? I’m glad there’s no war going on now Ben except for a Cold War. I really hate that term, Cold War, it almost makes me feel crazy to write it down: a war that’s cold, what could be worse, that freezes instead of burning, everyone frozen in place, without passion or motion, as though it could last forever. But anyway they don’t shoot at you, do they, the bad guys? And you don’t shoot back. So that’s all right.

She opened her French text, and closed it again; she listened to the room and the building, lone footsteps in the corridor, tick of the heater.

Weirdly, transgressively free. She put on her coat and went out walking.

Running from the University gates to the center of town, where a comical courthouse lifted a pointy dome, College Street passed by bookstores and diners and an art theater that was showing The Cranes Are Flying, and a coffee shop or restaurant that was a local landmark, the Castle, its front made to look like stone and little crenellations carved above the door.

Kit went into the bookstore, a crowded and cluttered one that had literary magazines and books of poetry and glossy paperbacks put out by university presses, and the New York Times a day late, and more commonplace things too. All her life Kit would find herself to be stingy and close about only one thing, and that was the buying of 54

books, and she would never find out why, much as she questioned herself when she stood in a bookstore pondering the purchase of one, one she needed or wanted but couldn’t bring herself to put down money for, since maybe after all she wouldn’t read it: a kind of shyness or self-effacement. She looked them over now, her covetousness aroused but her hands remaining in her pockets. Among the books in Poetry was one called Terror and the Muse: Soviet Poetry Under Stalin.

She pulled it out. There was one poem of Falin’s in it. Above it was a note by the translator, saying that it was part of a long poem called “Bez,” which meant “without,” or “-less” in compound words like bez-lyubye, “lovelessness.” He said that in the long poem Falin created a choral meditation somewhat like a Russian Spoon River Anthology, or like Stephen Vincent Benét’s celebrated John Brown’s Body, a poem Kit had hated. She moved her finger down the lines, almost shy to look upon them; then she began to read, going back when she lost the thread, stitching it into her own thought as best she could.

After long thought I have at last decided: I must write to denounce my neighbor.

Evidence both seen and invisible has so accumulated That it cannot be ignored

And I know what my duty is.

I believe that nothing that has been reported can ever be erased, And everything unreported likewise will not go unrecorded, And everything that can be known is somewhere known, If we are vigilant, and if we have done our duty.

I will tell how once returning home On an evening when snow was beginning to fall Seeing the light far off in his window He began unaccountably to weep

And for a time could not go on.

It lasted only moments and he has forgotten it but there is no denying it.

I will denounce my neighbor for it is my duty As smiling boys do their duty to wild birds: Once, he cut a cabbage in half, and saw that the two halves Were a demon’s face and its reflection; And he saw that each face also had two halves, left and right, And he wondered if symmetry was the deepest truth about the world Or if he only wondered at it because of his own division, Himself a creature struck in two as by a swordcut One half the inexact mirror of the other.

I will write if I can find paper and a pen Though there have been sudden shortages lately of these things Shortages that are certainly someone’s fault But around here we have done all right without these and other things.

If I can find no paper or pen, I will write in the wet sand With one arm of a broken pliers; I will sew letters together with hawthorns and straw, I will write in spit on the pale undersides of leaves, I will write with the torn hieroglyphics of moonlight on water.

It is my duty as a citizen not to keep these things hidden But to bring them to the attention of those who need to know.

She sat down, on a box of books waiting to be unpacked, and read it again. She wondered what the duty of smiling boys to wild birds was; she wondered what words in the poem gave the sense of desolation and cold that she found in it. Something more than the “snow beginning to fall.” Bezlyubye: lovelessness.

She slipped the book back into the space it had left.

Did it seem to be a poem by him, was it what she would have expected? She couldn’t tell. She thought of him standing before their class and reading the poem by Pushkin; is that how he would read his own poems, this poem?

She went out of the bookstore and turned left the few steps to the 56

Castle; went to the counter and asked for coffee; sat with it before her, still seeing the page she had read. She wondered if there are some poems that are moving or touching simply because of the things to which they refer, the griefs and terrors that stand behind them. Would that be a bad kind of poem, would it be too easy to do that, to evoke those things that the reader will surely be thinking and feeling, though not because of anything you wrote, only because of the world in which you wrote? And would such a poem be different for readers who read it in another world, as she did, overhearing it maybe, something not intended for her ears at all?