The Translator

by John Crowley

  “He took off me what he want, that’s all,” she told Kit. “Ain’t nobody ever going to do that to me again. I’ll cut their throat.” And she opened the pack of Juicy Fruit he’d brought her, and gave Kit one.

  She stopped writing to Ben, stopped reading and writing altogether.

  She sat huge and indolent in the dayroom and talked with the others about what it was going to be like when the great eggs they all carried began to crack. Sister said it hurt, yes, but that afterwards they wouldn’t remember; it’s a blessing, she said; maybe if we remembered all the anguish we wouldn’t be able to face ever doing it again; God’s kind enough to blot out all that part from our memories, and leave only the joy.

  That was the worst horror Kit could think of, the final cruelty, that she wouldn’t remember. What was suffering if you couldn’t remember it? She was determined she would. He wouldn’t cheat her out of that who had taken so much from her: she wouldn’t forget.

  But they were all so young: their first child in every instance, and they developed complications, or struggled through hours and hours of labor, prolonged by drugs that lessened pain and contractions both; they cursed and pressed down and sweated and prayed and called for their mothers as shot soldiers do. So much to remember, and she would remember too, but only by saving it in words, which dried up and grew light over time like leaves. And the pain passed from her anyway, just as Sister said it would.

  Finally they gave up on her and cut her open to get out the child. It was a boy, and he had a grievous hole in his heart and an incomplete intestine. He was baptized, and lived only a few hours.

  She didn’t think of it as grieving. She knew that in some places women tore their garments or cast ashes on their heads in grief, but she wasn’t thinking of them when she cut her hair off with shears taken from the sewing closet. She cut and cut, looking at herself in the bathroom mirror above the line of stained sinks. She had started thinking incessantly about sharp things, about broken glass and scalpels and the blades of the big kitchen disposal, into which now and then on kitchen duty they would toss a broken drinking glass and then duck down for fear of flying shards and listen to it be eaten, crunched and then ground and then whirred away to nothing. That was all she thought of while she cut.

  She could still walk only with difficulty. The nuns had told her how to care for her wound and how she should do no lifting and she stared at them not even nodding yes. She wanted to say I wish it was you who died and not him. She made them call her parents and have them come to get her immediately. Stay and rest, rest they said but she couldn’t rest, couldn’t sleep, and if she did sleep couldn’t wake. Hours before George and Marion were to arrive she went out into the hall with her Samsonite bag and sat on a bench there, as far from the delivery rooms and operating rooms as possible.

  “Pixie,” her mother said, touching her ruined head. “You remind me of somebody, with your hair like that. I can’t think who.”

  That was all. They took a plane and then drove home from the city airport across the farmlands. It was October and smelled of fruit and the first days of school. At first they kept her between them in the front seat, but at a gas stop she said she was tired and got in the back alone. Her mother tried to tell her stories of home, activities, relatives she’d heard from. Nothing more. They arrived home. “Here we are,” said Marion.

  It ought to have been not only possible but easy to say, to tell them that she was so hurt inside, that she had almost died there, that she felt entirely alone and unbearably crowded at the same time, that she was sorry and afraid. But she couldn’t speak, and was somehow not even aware that she couldn’t. What was the name of the thing that kept her, poor ghost, from speaking? The words were the words and there was no prohibition on saying them. She has looked backward sometimes on herself sitting in her room in that house, on her bed, knees drawn up to her chin, and wanted to say to herself Just go tell them what’s in your heart; speak, and they’ll answer.

  Grief laid too deep for speech might have been written down in poems; she’d used to believe that was how poems came to be. But she had lost or surrendered that, not even thinking about it, a traveler who’s forgotten a bag on a bench in a city he won’t return to, unable to remember even what it contained. For a time she went on reading poems, and would sometimes write down a bit of someone else’s. But such a tide as moving seems asleep Too full for sound or foam When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home.

  Wasn’t it they, though, George and Marion, who should have spoken? Shouldn’t they have found some way to ask? Sitting on either side of her at the kitchen table or in front of the TV, in rooms too warm for Kit, they seemed to be clothed in impenetrable wrappings or wadding of kindness and goodwill, but unable to feel or be touched through the thicknesses. No: no, it wasn’t their fault either. After a month’s silence they made an appointment for her with a psychologist, Dr. Biencouli, in a stuffy office downtown whose waiting room was decorated with things from the sea: a big aquarium, and a fisherman’s net, in which balls of colored glass were caught.

  All those girls of her generation, sent to do penance with these peculiar men, talking away or refusing to talk as the doctors too of course refused, calm and unresponsive as idols or twitchy and weird. Dr. Biencouli kept opening his desk drawer, fiddling with whatever it contained and shutting it again, only to open it again a few minutes later. Falin said the interrogators of the KGB asked their prisoners Do you know why you’re here? Dr. Biencouli asked her Do you know why you’re here? because like them he didn’t know. And you gave them nothing, or gave them nothing in the guise of giving them everything.

  Would it have been different if he had been different, if the practice of his art or craft had been different, as it would in time become different? Maybe if someone could just have spoken to her soul in kindness she would not have borne all the rest of her life those faint hatchings or hash marks on her wrists: badges of that doctor’s failure, or her own, or no one’s.

  It was a Sunday morning, and she’d refused to go to church, which Marion decided was because her tummy still hurt. And maybe it was just the sudden silence of the house and the November day: she felt solid and foreign to herself, as though she had no insides except a watching eye. She wandered in rooms and then into the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet with repulsion and fascination mixed; then she opened the door.

  Always the little surprise (she’d felt it first long before as a child) to find, behind her face, not the contents of herself but only this stuff. Bactine and Band-Aids and aspirin and medicines once prescribed and not all taken, little brown bottles, maybe one with a genie in it. Take two as needed for sleep; but how many to sleep for good? Brylcreem and Barbasol on the masculine side, and a safety razor, and the Blue Blades too, a night-blue box written on in black. Each blade inside the box was wrapped again in greasy paper; she had watched how carefully her father had put it in and screwed up the razor’s little trapdoors, and after, how he took the old blade and slid it through the little slot at the cabinet’s back.

  Once, walking to school in some city, she had passed a house being dismantled, the roof off and the walls coming down. The bathroom was open for all to see, the tub askew and the dusty toilet; and in the wall behind the sink—piled up behind the bared slats between the studs—were all the Blue Blades ever dropped into that slot. A treasure, revolting and amazing.

  Blue, it really was blue; slick, fresh as a peeled fruit.

  In dreams we do things and then awaken in the awful relief of finding we haven’t done them after all. She had dreamed recently that, preparing to mow the lawn herself now that Ben was gone, she had lifted the can of oil and gas mixed and instead of pouring it into the machine had drunk it. It seemed in the dream a dumb but natural error. But she could get no one to help her, not her mother at work ironing vast white sheets, nor her father, distracted and dim, who kidded her and put her off.

  She thought Th
is is dumb even as she struck the blade hard and swift across her left wrist. Immediately the blood scrambled out all along the slit she’d made as though eager to be free. It didn’t hurt, but it had run all over her hand, which was now too slippery to hold the blade to do the other wrist. She saw in horror that she had cut her fingers with the opposite edge of the blade, and at that almost stopped, but she gripped hard and made a weak slash and then another, crying out a little growl, with teeth bared.

  Not so hard. Watching the blood flow from her fingertips and the webs of her fingers into the sink she thought that after all she couldn’t die standing up. She turned from the sink holding her wrists aloft so the blood wouldn’t fall, but more did fall, spattering rapidly on the floor and on the pink rug. Her hands were numb. She thought of going to the tub and kneeling there and holding her hands under the faucet, but then she knew she couldn’t manage all that. She sat on the pink-clothed toilet seat and tried to reach the faucets on the sink. There was still not much pain except a weird dull ache in her upper arms. She felt as she had always supposed she would feel, that she was departing, dissipating, afraid and sorry but growing less so: lighter, lighter, lighter.

  Her mother, coming back for her missal and her cigarettes, heard Kit fall in the bathroom upstairs, heard the tooth glass smash in the sink; when she pushed open the door her first thought was that her daughter’s wound had opened again, and that her hands were red with trying to stanch it.

  10.

  They were thin white lines, not noticeable really, almost indistinguishable from the creases of her wrists: some days she thought so, anyway. Other days she knew that everyone knew what they meant, and she tugged down the sleeves of her blouse, and folded her arms.

  “If I ever try it again I’ll know better how,” she said to Jackie. “I got it down now.”

  “Oh yes? Well I hope you won’t ever.”

  “First thing,” she said. “You have to use a single-edge blade. They make them for tools and for art.”

  “Okay.”

  “The double-edge kind cut up your fingers. That was actually the most horrible part. You wouldn’t think so. But cutting my fingers was just…It said hey, you have a cut, stop, stop—and I almost did.”

  “Uh-huh.” The day was bitter cold, a change in the weather. They sat in the lounge of her dorm, where men were admitted at certain hours, though it was empty now, gray dinnertime.

  “And you don’t cut across,” she said. “Somehow you don’t think of this, but it’s like, of course.” She held her wrist. “It’s all bones and tendons, like a chicken leg. Probably all there just so it can’t be cut. So you have to cut down.” She showed him, a quick slash as though she struck a match there. But her hands shook a little.

  “Down,” he said.

  “And you have to have hot water, flowing water. You have to do all this in a bath, so you can keep your hands in the water even after you pass out.”

  He said nothing. She could see he was appalled. She was appalled herself at the certainty of her knowledge. “Guess what else,” she said.

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and say.”

  “Rat poison,” she said. “A little rat poison makes you not clot. Which is why it kills rats. They bleed inside. But you take just a little.”

  “I hope,” he said, “you’re planning to give me a long lead time on this. Let me know when the thought’s preying on your mind.”

  She pressed her hands together to stop their trembling.

  “I ain’t going to be much good at talking you out of anything you want to do,” he said. “But I want the chance to try.”

  “What are you going to say?” she asked.

  “Well sometimes, when in the past I’ve had these conversations, which isn’t so often…Once, anyway, I talked about breakfast.”

  “Breakfast, huh.”

  “Well when I get real depressed that’s what I think about,” he said. “Tomorrow’s another day, and you’re going to wake up and smell that coffee and there’s eggs and buttered toast. And you won’t want to miss that. And you just go on from there.” He laughed, and she was laughing already. “Really, really, that’s what I said.”

  She hadn’t told him why she’d done it. They’d started talking about how many girls did. Boys too, she claimed, only you didn’t notice, or couldn’t tell: in a car, in a blind rage. And she’d shown him her wrists, the undersides, maps where the blue rivers ran.

  “So here’s what I want to do,” she said. “I want to get drunk.”

  “You do.” He’d asked her what she wanted to do that night, it was “late hours night” and they could be out together till midnight.

  “I want to try it out.”

  “What, you never did?”

  “No,” she said. “Never did. I think it’s time.”

  “Well, bad on me if I was to get you drunk,” he said. “A man’s not to do that, it’s not right.”

  “I thought I’d get myself drunk,” she said. “You could just be there.”

  “Sober as a judge.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  He shook his head in wonder. “Well. I suppose if you want to, you ought to get to. Got to be a first time.”

  “Sure.”

  She pulled on her leather jacket and he wound his long scarf around his neck and patted his blue navy watch cap in place. His Volkswagen was in the parking lot, ticketed. “There’s company I wouldn’t recommend you try this with,” he said, pocketing the ticket and pulling his door closed. “But probably out t’my house you’d be as safe as anywhere.”

  “That’s right. That’s what I thought too.”

  “You’re pretty damn sure,” he said. “What makes you so sure?”

  “Well, why’d you say it?”

  They drove down into town. The VW’s little blades flailed against the icy rain. “First thing,” he said. “You got to decide what you’re going to get drunk on. That’s the big decision. Can’t be beer, you can’t get all that far on beer. Wine, you’ll fall asleep first.”

  She pondered the question, or pretended to, having no criteria at all to go by. “Gin,” she said.

  “Gin!”

  Clearer than water, good medicine, with the branches of juniper pictured on the label, the dusky blue berries. How did they drown that blue in this transparency? Girls didn’t take Chemistry. In the car, she uncapped the bottle he bought her and inhaled it tentatively.

  “Hey. Don’t you know it’s against the law in this state to carry an open bottle in a vee-hicle?”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said. “So there.” The gin smelled gloriously harmful, weird, what would the word be, intoxicating.

  At the house, Max and Rodger were reading the previous Sunday’s New York Times, acres of fine print, rattling the pages in disgust or glee.

  “Gin?” Max asked in mild amazement.

  “Gin,” Jackie said. “Now what have we got to mix it with?” He opened the little gray refrigerator and then the cupboards. Kit stroked the glass-ringed wooden kitchen table, liking this idea of living with other people’s old things, their mismatched chairs and swayback walnut beds and brass lamps with floral shades. It was like living in the woods, she thought, at once homey and strange, yours and not yours.

  “You can’t drink gin without a mixer,” Max said. “You might not survive.”

  “Well I’m not going all the way back to town to get something,” Jackie said. “’Sides I got no money left. This has become a rather expensive date, no offense. Oh here.” He pulled from the back of a cupboard a little envelope, and shook it. “Lemon Kool-Aid.”

  Rodger’s mouth fell open and his tongue protruded, though he said nothing. In a plastic pitcher Jackie mixed the Kool-Aid. Kit sat with arms crossed, intent on her adventure. “We don’t have a lot of ice, either,” Jackie said. He pulled two metal trays from the icebox’s frozen heart. He found glasses, painted with daffodils and tulips, and filled them.

  For many years after that night, Kit couldn
’t drink gin again, though in time she learned to; Kool-Aid, never.

  Other people arrived and went again as she sat there engaged in her experiment, filling up gradually like an alchemist’s retort. Jackie explained to them what she was up to and they nodded or kidded her gently and took a drink or didn’t. There was a silent auto mechanic, a friend of Max’s, who brought beer; his hands were stronger and his fingernails more atrociously broken and stained than any she had ever seen. There were Fred and Joanne, he a graduate student in Poli-Sci and she his wife, a graduate student too but in Sociology.

  “Saul, you dirty Semite,” Fred said, taking Saul’s arm in a sudden grip. “My report to the district office is thin, very thin. They will want more. Where are the plans?”

  Saul almost laughed, though he didn’t seem amused, and it had to be explained to Kit that Fred was the FBI guy, or was pretending to be.

  “In any meeting of any group on the Attorney General’s list, one of them is going to be an agent,” Fred said. “A mathematical certainty.”

  “In any meeting over a certain size,” Saul said.

  “Where two or three are gathered together in my name,” Fred said solemnly.

  Kit had only a slight idea what the Attorney General’s list was and couldn’t be certain when Fred was joking or if his joking bothered Saul or Max. He disputed coolly with them as Jackie puffed on his pipe and looked from one to another in admiration or amusement. Fred had been a member (one of only four or five) of the already defunct Nietzsche Study Group, and when the hour grew late he led them in singing the group’s marching song:

  “Nietzsche loves me, this I know

  Zarathustra told me so

  Little ones to US belong

  They are weak but WE ARE STRONG.”