The Translator

by John Crowley

  8.

  The house on East North Street where Jackie had found a room was a bleak frame place of dirty white clapboard, as square and plain as an old farm wife; but there was a tangled grape arbor that would be green in summer, and tall elms along the road whose graceful lyre-shaped arms would be full of languid leaves (only they wouldn’t; the blight of those years would reach them that spring, and they’d begin to die). Jackie took Kit up the back steps to the kitchen door, called a greeting into the summer kitchen (where boots and coats and unreturned bottles were piled) to let his housemates know he was there, and led her in.

  “Howdy, Max.”

  Max looked around the book he held up before him propped in the fingers of one big hand, and nodded to Kit.

  “Don’t get up,” Jackie said. “Don’t feel you have to.”

  “I had no plans to,” Max said. His soft accent was country, like Jackie’s, but some other country, farther west or north.

  “This here is my friend Christa Malone.”

  “Hi, Christa Malone.”

  “Kit,” she said.

  “You’ll like Max,” Jackie said, pulling off his long scarf. “Max, Kit’s a writer. A real writer. A poet.”

  “Well say,” Max said with sweet careless awe.

  “Do you write?” Kit asked.

  “Just letters,” Max said, and laughed. All this while he had held the book up before him (it was called To the Finland Station) and now he let it down. “What poets do you like?”

  “Oh gee,” said Kit. “Oh lots.”

  “She reads Bode Lare,” said Jackie. “In French.”

  “Well I should hope,” said Max. “You’ve heard about this guy Falin?”

  “She’s taking his course, for Christ’s sake. A freshman.”

  “Huh.”

  “She’s kind of in love with him too. Am I right? Anyways I hear a lot about him.”

  She wouldn’t answer that, shook her hair and lifted her chin as her mother did when something was said in her presence that she chose not to hear.

  “Well. So. Welcome to our house, Kit,” Max said. “Bienvenue.” And he raised his book again.

  Jackie took her around. The house was comically grim in some ways, the window frames black with years of fingerprints, the furniture and walls covered with materials that someone must have chosen long ago, but which were so resolutely ugly that you couldn’t imagine how or why, indecipherable squiggles of brown on brown or lurid false flowers and fruit. The rooms were piled with the gear of four men in amazingly thorough disarray, books stuffed into shelves made of concrete blocks and boards and piled-up orange crates, records in a stack beside the record player and soda bottles clustered on the refrigerator’s top: she thought it was the happiest place she’d ever been in. Jackie’s room held a walnut double bed clad in a ratty quilt and a dresser and mirror that matched it, like the furniture a ship’s captain might own, and a huge plush armchair.

  “All mine,” he said. “Twelve bucks a week.”

  It smelled of his tobacco and his woolens and his maleness. She thought of having her own room, in a house like this; a chair like that one, a lace curtain, a whispering radiator. Girls couldn’t: not unless they were married. “Nice,” she said.

  That spring she and Jackie went to the movies, and to restaurants to eat what he called pizza pie; they sat in student lounges together and she listened to him talk; they went to lectures and readings and they studied together at the library. Everybody did those things and she thought it was strange and remarkable that she was doing them too, that these things had been waiting here for her to do, who so far in her life had done so little that everybody else did. But the house on East North Street wasn’t like the places everybody went, and it had been waiting for her too.

  Max was the one renting the house, to whom the others paid rent—Jackie; and Rodger, a fastidious Negro; and the new housemate they’d just acquired, a graduate student who was not taking any classes just then: his name was Saul Greenleaf, and with his round steel-rimmed glasses and his tight shabby overcoat and almost shaven head he looked like he had emigrated from a Dostoevsky novel, or had decided to seem so. The place was too far out of town to live in without a car, and that meant no undergraduates under twenty-one: they each had one, except Rodger, who got back and forth on a comical Vespa, perched on its little seat, his porkpie hat and earmuffs on his head.

  “But are they really Communists?” she asked Jackie in the Beetle, going back to campus on a Thursday night, trying to beat the clock.

  “Now how am I supposed to answer that?” he said. “I mean right now at this moment. You know I’d be accusing them of being members of a criminal conspiracy?”

  “It’s what you said,” she said. “My Commie cell.”

  “Oh, hell, girl. Oh my lord.” And he wiped the little windshield with the back of his gloved hand in apparent exasperation.

  Kit had only ever half-believed in the existence of Communists in America; they were like fairy-tale bears or the burglars that crept into Dagwood’s house in the midnight. At twelve she watched the robotic conspirators of I Led Three Lives on TV and wondered why they spoke without their Russian accents. If they were Communists, why did they sound American? George had taken the family through Washington, D.C., on their way from one city to another, and there they toured the FBI headquarters and the government buildings; and, because the committee was in recess, they could look into the room where Senator McCarthy held his hearings: far smaller-seeming than the blackish crowded pit they watched on television where the draconic senator talked and talked and never listened. He’s an ugly son of a bitch, George would say, but he’s our ugly son of a bitch. And Marion begged him not to swear.

  But Max said: “Last summer I spent working these peace booths at state fairs. We’d go around in this bigole pickup with this knocked-down booth in the back and boxes of literature. People’d come up to me and hear me talking about colonialism or the bomb or who was responsible for the Cold War, and they’d start railing on Communists. Communists, these damn Communists. And I’d say hey, hold on now, you’re talkin’ about my mother. They’d look at me like I’d turned into a Russky before their very eyes. It certainly shut ’em up.” He smiled to remember, delighted. “They were good people. Country people. Didn’t want to say anything bad about a fellow’s mom.”

  Saul was a city kid from Chicago, but he and Max were both red-diaper babies, they said; their parents had been involved all their lives in what they called progressive politics. Saul Greenleaf’s earliest memory was being wheeled in the May Day parade in Chicago. Kit listened, thinking of the May Day processions she had walked in, to crown the Virgin Mary Queen of the May.

  “Oh yeah,” her roommate, Fran, said dismissively when Kit tried to taxonomize these specimens unknown to her. They weren’t unknown to Fran, who’d gone to the Little Red Schoolhouse in the Village (“the ‘little pink schoolhouse,’ everybody called it”) and had known the type well at her Manhattan high school, which she called the High School of Music and Ott. “Oh sure. Solidarity. The peace-loving peoples of the world. Ban the bomb. Oh all the time.”

  So they were real after all, and there were lots of them, and there were others who took what they said seriously or with the easy contempt that comes with familiarity, but who still themselves held what seemed to Kit to be children’s opinions: they said things that no grown-up she had known, her relatives and teachers and parents, the priest and the principal, ever said plainly, that war was criminally stupid and bombs were insane, that fairness was better than cruelty, and that people were all basically the same, at least in their claims on the means of life: convictions that she had unconsciously supposed you had to give up or at least keep quiet about in order to grow up yourself.

  Jackie laughed and shook his head at her naiveté, delighted to lecture her about the jealousies and hatreds that in fact divided these people, the deep and narrow gulfs fixed between CP and Trotskyists, between the Young People’s S
ocialist League and the Young Socialist Alliance, the War Resisters League and the Student Peace Union, and which were the fronts of which others, who took orders from whom and who didn’t: an encyclopedic knowledge that seemed at odds with his general approbation of people like Max and Saul, people who think and sharp minds.

  “So which one do you belong to?” she asked him.

  He regarded her as though, a child, she had made a coarse faux pas she couldn’t have understood. “Oh,” he said. “I ain’t a joiner.”

  It was evident to Kit that the FBI had nothing to fear anyway from these people. They had the cheerful contempt for Russian Communists that a smart young pony might have for an old gelded cart horse. They acknowledged the Russians’ primacy, and allowed only one another to slight them or make fun of them; in any face-off with the United States they were quick to point out where their own country was in the wrong. But their heroes were different ones: Trotsky, fallen eagle, murdered in Mexico; Mao in Yenan, writing poetry; Joe Hill, the bosses couldn’t kill him; above all Fidel and Che and their young bearded men, stripped to the waist cutting cane alongside the people, teaching kids to read. They talked of how when Fidel came to New York to speak at the United Nations, instead of the Waldorf-Astoria he went up to Harlem to stay at the Hotel Teresa; how he joked in English with the students at Johns Hopkins. The young men at East North Street seemed to feel about Fidel and the Cubans the way so many she knew felt about Kennedy: whatever else they were or might become, they weren’t old and sick and stuck.

  The group formed a Fair Play for Cuba Committee chapter and held meetings in the living room at North Street. Delegates came from some of the alphabet-named groups on campus, and some refused to send one, but it was Max and Saul who ran the meetings, read from the literature sent out by the national committee, answered the questions.

  Was it true that the Soviets were sending military help to Cuba?

  “Sure,” Saul said. “And isn’t that reasonable? I mean the U.S. invaded the country. But the U.S. line is that anybody who thinks our intentions are anything but sterling is either falling for Communist propaganda or is paranoid. Right. Sure. Look at Arbenz, for Christ’s sake. Look at Lumumba.”

  Did he think that the United States would actually invade Cuba again? The cigarette smoke was thick in the room. Kit didn’t know the persons who were asking.

  “Yes. Absolutely. They’ll invade as soon as they think they can get away with it. But as long as they still care about world opinion, they might hold off. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we’re doing this.”

  And so then will the United States be able to overthrow the Castro government? Or not?

  “That depends,” Saul said, and lifted his head.

  “Depends on what?” Kit said.

  “It depends on whether, right now, History needs a martyr, or needs a hero,” he said. The shine on his glasses hid his eyes, and Kit couldn’t tell if he was wholly serious; but a kind of premonitory black triumph arose in her own breast that amazed her. Martyr or hero.

  The delegates agreed on an open letter about the U.S. threat to the existence of Cuba as an independent nation, to be sent to whoever might print it and signed by as many important people on campus as they could persuade. And they went on talking, talking. At last Kit tugged Jackie’s sleeve: she had to get back to her dorm.

  “You ought to take that open letter to your friend Falin,” Jackie said. “He’s the kind of name it needs.”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “I’m supposed to ask him that?”

  “Why? You think he wouldn’t agree? Wouldn’t want to sign? What makes you think that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Just because you got a crush on him,” Jackie said. “Don’t mean you know him.” At that she decided to take offense, and said nothing more the rest of the way home.

  “Anyway,” Jackie said, letting her out at her dorm. “You keep it with you. That letter. Keep your eyes open and wait for a good time to ask him. Learn a little about him meanwhile. You owe it to yourself.”

  A crush, an obsession with a magnetic teacher: she couldn’t believe that it was actually a category of feeling, a very common one around here, Jackie said. She did think about Falin a lot, but it was because she knew nothing of him, of his self and his past; only of his future, which she knew just to the extent that it was hers too, American. What she didn’t and probably couldn’t know about him gripped her, it was a fascination that seemed to her pure, almost impersonal, like a scientist’s obsession with the source of a river or the unseen side of the moon.

  She watched for him. She did do that. There was always the possibility that he might appear near her or in her view on campus or at lectures or elsewhere and some tiny thing more would be revealed. When she did see him she could often not keep from following him, unseen, shadowing him, which was easier to get away with than she would have thought; all it took was alertness and a heart quiet enough to make the right smooth movements so that the other’s peripheral vision was not alerted. She had measured Fran’s peripheral vision in Psychology, where she had learned the term; one day it would become the title of a book of her poems. She kept the open letter in her bag, a sort of so-there to Jackie, she was only doing her part as Jackie had said she should: but she didn’t tell Jackie or anyone.

  She came upon him on a March night taking his long strides across the old campus, and she followed not far behind, ready to turn away and be no one that he knew if he turned toward her, if he felt her glance on his back and his high head, which he wouldn’t, because it was so light, so nonexistent. She lost him, though, from being too carefully inattentive, and she slowed uncertainly; she could see down all the lighted paths, he couldn’t have gone far.

  He was gone, gone entirely, vanished.

  She walked on toward the library, feeling an Alice feeling of having been put in the wrong by a being who didn’t follow the laws of physics. Then she found she was walking right toward him: he stood before the library, and he was talking to a slim dark woman, or rather listening to her talk, she seemed distraught or upset somehow, she talked and shook her head and almost seemed to tremble: and then as Kit came close, almost too close, unable not to, the woman pressed her cheek against his coat.

  Kit couldn’t walk on or she’d pass right by them, but if she stopped or turned abruptly away she’d catch their eye, she knew it. She fell in behind two students going up the steps into the library, and went in too, nothing else she could do, feeling the scene she had witnessed go on behind her, precious and lost.

  Now what. She moped in the atrium for a time, peeked out the doors when they were thrown open, but there was nothing to see. She couldn’t go back out, for fear he and the woman would be still there, having decided to sit on one of the benches there by the library. She had no chores to do here. She walked in the reading room; she climbed the stairs; she went to the sepulchral toilet on the second floor that no one ever used.

  She walked back through the periodicals room and saw him sitting at a table and reading. His coat over the back of the chair and the green-shaded light on his book as though he had been there for hours.

  She moved closer to where he sat, going carefully up between the open periodical shelves filled with bound journals, till she found a gap wide enough to see through, see the room and him.

  One elbow on the table and the L of his finger and thumb supporting his chin. Slowly and infrequently his other hand turned a page, but the rest of him was very still. What was it he read? She could sense his eyes moving over the big pages, absorbing what he looked at. She stood on her toes to see.

  It was an ad, a double-page spread: a huge purple Nash Ambassador of 1955 or ’56, passing diagonally through the white space, gleeful dad at the wheel with hat and pipe. She knew what car it was because Ben had taught her all the cars of those years, all the distinctive grilles and taillights.

  He was reading a bound periodical, Life or Look or Colliers. He turned another page: a story
of sea rescue; a mom and her new refrigerator; a bottle of Scotch. Don’t spill a drop, that’s Old Smuggler. Was he practicing his colloquial English, learning to be an American?

  She walked back down the stacks and came out behind the row of tables where he sat, careful to stay just barely in motion, and not stare, so that no student in his line of sight would puzzle at her, and awaken his notice. He turned the page again.

  Kit had sometimes thought heaven would be like the reading of an endless, or eternal, big slick magazine. Always interesting and undemanding, a new page to be turned whenever boredom threatened, to reveal something welcomed and unexpected: new things to desire, but not seriously; new beautiful movie stars or homes you might be or live in; moving stories of children far away, of dangers or bad weather, but not where you were; always more silly or witty ads and clear-eyed people looking right at you and brief cute anecdotes, no end to it ever. Happiness.

  It was as though he were feeling or thinking just that: feeling what she felt, looking at the same magazine she had looked at five years ago, the cars and dresses by now already replaced by different ones. Maybe it was she he was trying to understand.

  She actually laughed to think this stupid thought, and he looked up and saw her.

  “Hi,” she said or whispered, still laughing a little.

  “Miss…Malone,” he said.

  “Kit.”

  “Kyt.” He folded his hands in his lap. She had to lean close to him so that their talk wouldn’t disturb others. “I do not need to ask why you are here. To read books. Poetry.”

  “No,” she said. “Actually.”

  “Not I either,” he said. He folded shut the huge book, big as a Gutenberg Bible, with a smack that caused heads around the great room to lift and look. “Enough,” he said. “Time for tea, and a smoke. Yes?”