The Translator (8 page)

She turned halfway around on her revolving stool just to feel it move, and found herself looking at Falin. He was sitting very near, in a high-backed booth, and he was looking at her. It was hard to believe she hadn’t seen him when she came in. Maybe he had been summoned here by her thinking about his poem; or maybe she had been made to ponder his poem because he was himself so close by.

“Professor Falin,” she said. She was about to go on, so sorry about today, when he raised a finger and wagged it No.

“Not professor,” he said. “No. I profess nothing. I have no, no . . .”

He was stuck.

“Degree. Ph.D.,” she guessed. He nodded and shrugged as though that might be it.

“Well, um,” she said, and he watched her search for some other form of address.

“Innokenti Isayevich,” he said, smiling as though he knew this was well beyond this American girl to say, and he pointed at the booth seat opposite him. She got off her stool and slid into the seat somewhat mousily (could feel her head duck and her shoulders contract, why should they, but they did) and pressed her hands into her jacket pockets.

“Not in class today,” he said. “You were sick?”

“Asleep,” she said, unable not to.

“Ah well.”

The counterman, before Kit could protest, placed her (cold) coffee

before her. “I,” she said. “I just now, just a little while ago, read your poem. It was printed in a book, an anthology . . .”

“No, no,” he said, smiling again. “No, not my poem.”

“The one about denunciation.”

“My poem,” he said, “was a poem in Russian. The poem in the book was a poem—perhaps a poem—in English. This I believe you read.”

“Was it a bad translation?”

“I can’t say,” he said. “There were no rhymes, and my poem rhymed, and had a certain meter. The one there had no strict meter that I can perceive. It was free verse. Two poems could not be the same that differ so much.”

“But I could see the poem in it, a little. What it was about.”

“Ah. My poem and this one are about the same things. Perhaps. But even so they do not say the same things about those things.”

“It was just so sad.”

“I point out one small example,” he said. “Where this translation said I will denounce my neighbor my poem said only I will write about my neighbor.”

“Why would they translate it that way then?”

“Because the translator was clever enough to know that in my country now, if we say someone has written about someone else, we mean the person has supplied to authorities information or just speculation, enough perhaps to have him investigated, even arrested. We say of someone, I don’t trust her—I think she writes. So the poem may be read in that way, and that is why the translator chose this word denounce.

But to write, in Russian, is still also to—to just write. Write letters, poetry.”

She had never tried to translate poetry in any way except literally, as though cracking a code in which it was hidden, a chest or safe more beautiful than what was kept in it.

She said: “I don’t see why it couldn’t be translated more accurately.”

“Perhaps it could.” He moved the papers and things before him square with one another, his cigarettes and box of matches, notebook, 58

a small book bound in pale green linen. “But it would then be different poem in English. Still not mine.”

She thought this was too chaste, or too abnegating. It was too sad to think of too. She knew there were poets everybody said were impossible to translate (Horace, Pushkin) and others that weren’t (Shake-speare), but she didn’t know why they said that, or what made the difference.

“Now in your poem of May,” he said, and she felt a small sensation in her breast. “Could it, do you think, be translated so that every line would end as yours do, with a certain consonant?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If I were a translator, I’d try.”

He laughed in delight at this, and she thought she hadn’t seen him laugh before; still his eyes went on taking her in, her and everything.

“Do you think,” she said, “you’ll ever write in English?”

“It would be hard choice to make,” he said, as though he pondered it often.

“But why would it be a choice?” she asked. “Couldn’t you write in both?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It may be that languages are like lovers.

You can have more than one at a time. But perhaps it is possible to love only one at a time.”

She knew as little of lovers as of languages. She thought of a piece she’d read in National Geographic about an old Indian, the last of his tribe able to speak its language: it had never been recorded, and there was no one else left who understood it. You couldn’t be more alone than that.

He had begun to gather up his things and put them in his funny case. He said: “May I ask you. In your poem. Was it, the soldier, a person now alive?”

“Well yes.”

“It seemed when I read,” he said, “perhaps not. Perhaps this poem told of a boy who every May returns. But who can come no closer.”

“Oh no,” she said. She saw that it could be taken so, she hadn’t seen it but now she could, and always would. “No.”

“Well.” He stood, as though unfolding his long body. “Now. You must come to class next week.”

“Oh yes, yes,” she said ardently. “I mean that was just so not like me.

Falling asleep.”

“Since you have no doctor’s excuse,” he said, “you can now not get perfect grade. So you must come always.”

He smiled at her, shrugging on his great enveloping coat; his smile, this amazing open secret. She didn’t know whether to laugh because what he said was a joke, or look grave because it wasn’t. She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.

He looked back, at the door, and she waved a small farewell.

She pushed away her cup, feeling both privileged and besmirched: anyway as she had not felt ever before. On the table was the box of matches he had toyed with, left behind. She touched it, pressed her thumb against the little paper drawer. Then closed her hand over it and pocketed it.

When she got back to her room, Fran was practicing, but stopped and put down her viola as soon as Kit entered.

“I like it,” Kit said. “Go ahead.”

“Eh,” Fran said, a dismissive New York sound that by the semester’s end Kit would have acquired from her.

“No really.” Kit had avoided all her mother’s efforts to give her music lessons, and the sight and sound of someone actually playing an instrument, in the flesh, an otherwise ordinary person like herself, thrilled and fascinated her, a magical act, or at least a magic act.

“Somebody called for you,” Fran said, falling back on her bed with her Kierkegaard. “A sort of redneck-sounding guy? Named Jackie Nor-den?”

“Really?”

60

“Really,” Fran said wearily.

“Well,” said Kit. That sense of doors opening if you dared press on them, if you could find their knobs and jambs in the apparently seam-less world around you. This one being the one she had long avoided or chosen not to see, the one she had skirted so artfully through school.

Except that she hadn’t skirted it, not in the end. She had not skirted it at all.

“Well,” she said again, alarmed and elated. “Well I’ll be.”

7.

The Christmas when Kit was a senior in high school, Ben came home on the last leave of his enlistment. He had been lucky to be posted in the States, he told her, he could have been one of the GIs they watched on TV, getting turkey dinners on desert islands or arctic airstrips, unwrapping presents from home.

That winter Kit had begun baby-sitting, and learned to write blank verse. She had little interest in babies and no natural ability with them, except in the telling of stories; yet she preferred infants and toddlers, who could be put to sleep early with any luck, releasing her to explore the still house in a close approximation of solitude, close enough to make her giddily gleeful. A sip or two out of the dusty liqueur bottles.

Once she came upon the family supply of condoms in a blond dresser, though at first she didn’t know what they were.

Blank verse was just a matter of nerve. At the library she’d come upon the old Mermaid series of Elizabethan poets, beautiful books that just fit into her new Mark Cross bag; and she started reading 62

Marlowe and Massinger and Webster and counting the beats on her fingers, da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum. As soon as she found the courage to do it too, it began immediately knitting lines up as though by itself, long swatches growing longer, like the scarves Marion knitted while watching TV, holding them up at the night’s end startled by their sudden length.

This Park is green. I will not see him here.

So fall, you leaves, and change your seasons, trees; Turn, moons, from full to dark to full again Until earth bows her head before the sun And winter comes, and snow; and so does he.

“Who’s this ‘he’?” Ben asked.

“Nobody,” she said.

“Oh come on.”

She meant it though. She thought her “he” was like that “she” who appeared in the poems of male poets so continually, who also appeared in their biographies sometimes, sometimes not. The Eternal Feminine, George had said, as though he knew this, as though everybody did. Female poets didn’t seem to have an Eternal Masculine; the “you” or the “he” in their poems seemed to be more often actual people, being chided or pleaded with or charmed. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Kit loved nobody, but she thought she had a right to this faceless he anyway, and set herself problems in verse to solve, all about him. One or two she had put, anonymously typed, in Burke Eggert’s locker or bookbag at school, knowing he’d never guess.

Burke was a football player and senior-class officer a year ahead of her, lean and tall (a quarterback), with Ben’s dark short hair, but thick glasses too, designed probably to correct a still-detectable crossed eye: Kit cherished that weakness. She couldn’t think of any way to attract him, and didn’t try. In her diary and inwardly she assembled the parts of her crush like the elements of a hard poem, oddly assorted things to be connected in such a way that they made an anfractuous figure, a

tetrahedron maybe, solid and gleaming and worthy of the feelings that had evoked it, that it evoked.

She hadn’t written to Ben about Burke. She found she couldn’t write down his silly name on letter paper. For one thing.

“Well it’s swell,” Ben said, and gave her back the sheet of onionskin.

He had changed while he was away. She watched him, they all did when he wasn’t noticing; they could watch him because he didn’t notice. Watched how he looked out the windows at the brown lawns and bare trees, trying to remember them maybe, or maybe not seeing them at all, his attention on something else: as though during his absence he had grown a private self, and was no longer whole, all of a piece, the way he had been. Kit babbled at him and teased him, afraid and cold inside.

Christmas Eve after George and Marion went to bed, Kit and Ben sat up; Kit insisted they watch an inane Christmas movie they’d seen together as kids. The only lights were the TV and the gray-green tree; already it looked a little tawdry and leftover, on the way out. On the sofa’s broad arm were the two books Kit had given Ben, printed by the Peter Pauper Press: The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire and Pascal’s Pensées.

“A matched pair,” she said. “Small, so you can carry them.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, nodding earnestly, maybe too earnestly. The Baudelaire had harsh, black woodcuts, dark women, demon lovers. It was for him, but even more it was from her: something of her, a part of her life for him to carry. The Pascal, though, was just for him, for his faith and his clear-eyed austerity: it scared Kit, but she thought Ben would respond. “So nicely wrapped too.”

Kit had got a Christmas-season job at a department store downtown; they’d taught her to wrap, tie bows, skills she’d never lose.

“So Merry Christmas,” she said; and because it was allowed, on this night of this year surely, she hugged him, laid her cheek against his rough one and held him a long time: feeling a hot dreamlike relief in his touch, a completeness, even as she felt him shrink and begin to extricate himself. Merry Christmas they said on the screen, the bishop’s 64

wife, the suave angel who had come from heaven to help them, the happy people. Merry Christmas, while the big flakes of snow fell on the black-and-white town and the overcoats and fedoras and pheasant-feather hats.

“So tell me,” he said. “What’s the plan? What are you going to do next year?”

“I don’t know yet.” She spread her skirt flat with her hands, far from him again; shy to be questioned, her imaginary futures brought forth.

“I’ve sent away for some college catalogs. I could get a scholarship maybe. Mom wants me to apply to Vassar.”

“Good school.”

“Oh my God,” Kit said. “All girls? I don’t think so. I don’t really like girls that much.”

“No?”

“No. You know that.”

“Just boys?”

“Well no, I mean . . . Oh you. You know. Ben: you know.”

He wouldn’t talk about his own plans for when he got out, whether he’d use the GI Bill to go to school or if he’d get a job or what; he deflected his family’s inquiries with jokes, maybe he’d be a cop, the army was good training for police work, a lot of guys he knew. Or jani-torial work too. Then Christmas night, as they sat in the kitchen eating cold turkey and pie, he told them what he had decided: he was going to reenlist when his hitch was done. Re-up he said: he’d learned a new language, and used it shyly but willfully, as though abandoning his old one in its favor.