The Translator

by John Crowley

  “I slept on their couch last summer when I couldn’t find a room,” Jackie told her when they’d left. “They’d just got hitched. Not a big apartment, let me tell you, but I guess they needed that little bit of money I gave them. Fine, except that night-long—night-long—they’d lie in their room on this bigole bed and rock and carry on, the bed squeaking and them singing out—well you know.”

  “Jeez,” Kit said. “Oh my God.” She didn’t exactly know.

  “Tough,” said Max. “For a single man such as yourself.”

  “Very tough,” Jackie said. “I’d lie there with sweat on my brow and just gnaw my wrist, just gnaw my wrist.”

  Kit shook with laughter, not altogether understanding his discomfort. Everyone watched her laugh and laugh, nodding at one another as though confirming that she was passing through the expected phases of her journey in the right order. She pushed the daffodil glass toward the pitcher and bottle standing before Jackie.

  “Got to pace yourself now,” Jackie said, which Kit thought was funny too; but soon a new wave of feeling rolled over her, swallowed in with the sticky sweetness (all the ice was gone) and replacing her. This one felt lofty, or deep, or both; she felt lofted out of her own deeps, which she saw beneath, or tasted, in dread and wonder. “Deeps,” she said. “Lofted.”

  “Uh-oh,” Jackie said.

  She wanted to talk about poetry; about Falin, about Baudelaire in Paris and Keats in Rome. “For long,” she said, “I have been half in love with easeful death. Called him sweet names in many a honeyed rhyme, to take into the air my quiet breath.” She drank. “My quiet breath.”

  “Now now,” Jackie said softly.

  “Eternity’s hostage,” she said. “Captive in time.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s what a poet is. Falin told us that. It’s in a poem by Patsernak,” she said. “I mean Prasternak. Pasternak.”

  “‘Eternity’s hostage,’” Jackie said thoughtfully. “I like that.”

  “Captive in time,” Kit said. “Captive in goddamn time.”

  “What makes you wonder about Falin,” Rodger said, “is why they did that in the first place. Kicked him out. You know? What was in it for them? The comrades. What was the threat to them, the big danger? One poet.”

  “The unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Kit said. “Of the world.”

  “Anyway, why not just shoot him?”

  “Listen,” Saul Greenleaf said. “If they could shoot poets, they would have shot Pasternak. They can shoot anybody but poets. You know this young guy, what’s his name, Vosnesensky, they filled this sports stadium to hear him read. Fifteen thousand people. For poetry. Try that at Wrigley Field.”

  “Then tell me what they’re doing throwing this one out,” Rodger asked. “If they love poets so much.”

  “I didn’t say they love them. I said they can’t shoot them. The people love them. The bosses are afraid of them.”

  “Here,” Jackie said, “they can say anything they want. Look at Ginsberg. Nobody’s talking about exiling Ginsberg. And for a good reason. Nobody’s heard of him.”

  Saul lifted his chin, and rose to his feet. The lamplight gilded his glasses. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,” he spoke. “Starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…”

  “Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave,” Kit said hollowly. “Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind.”

  “Angelheaded hipsters,” Saul kept on, “burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.”

  “Quietly they go, the intelligent the witty the brave,” Kit said. She too tried to rise to speak, slipped and fell heavily, still reciting: “I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.” Max and Rodger helped her to her feet. She looked around her at their faces, which resembled the mild interested faces of cows who watch you pass by their meadow. “Edna St. Vincent Millay,” she said. “I feel quite weird.”

  “You’re hittin’ a plateau,” Jackie said. “You’ll rise on past that.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay.” She sat again, with care. The trick was to go slow, and think. She lifted the glass before her, she toasted the room, the clatter of sleet on the window, the world, the unseen. And solemnly drank.

  Rodger departed to study. Max got out his guitar, sensing maybe to what point the evening had come; they sought for songs they all knew, or that any of them knew all the way through. Kit had learned “Sloop John B” from the Kingston Trio, Max had learned it from Pete Seeger at a camp for workers’ children; he sang in a high true tenor and she in an earnest cry, eyes closed. He sang other Weavers songs, and Lead-belly, songs of a kind she didn’t know existed:

  “Me un’ Marthy, we was standin’ upstairs

  I heard a white man say, “I don’t want no colored up there,”

  Lawd, he’s a bourgeois man

  Hee, it’s a bourgeois town

  I got the bourgeois blues, gonna spread the news

  all around.”

  He taught them a song he said Pete Seeger had learned from activists in Carolina who were organizing sit-ins in Southern cities. It was an old hymn tune maybe, he thought, to which Seeger had added some words of his own:

  “Oh, deep in my heart

  I do believe

  We shall overcome someday.”

  Saul Greenleaf wouldn’t sing, saying he had sung enough camp songs in camp, and heard enough Pete Seeger too. Max smiled benignly on him and sang on:

  “We’ll walk hand in hand,

  We’ll walk hand in hand,

  We’ll walk hand in hand someday.”

  Kit, riven somehow by that cruel-kind word someday, thought of sitting with Falin in the All Night Cafeteria. Take my hand quick and tell me: what have you in your heart. She thought—she knew, suddenly, for sure—that he had been saying it to her. He’d meant her to answer it, though she didn’t know why he did. And with a visceral suddenness she sobbed, and went on sobbing.

  How could you say what was deep in your heart, how? What was in your heart could never be said, because it was what you were inside of, you yourself.

  “Why would he ask, why would he,” she said to them gathered around her offering comfort or a hankie. “Why.”

  That was about the last thing she remembered, those tears, and the sense of a rolling wave carrying her will-lessly elsewhere. She had turned into a robot or zombie, a rogue beast who went on saying and doing things even though she, Kit, had fled or been voided. Said some pretty funny stuff too, according to Jackie. Anyway before she got sick.

  “You remember getting sick?” he asked her.

  “No.” She was in his bed; he sat at the end of it, wearing a college sweatsuit and a boy’s Indian-patterned robe. Light that must be dawn was in his window below the shade.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, smiling. “Hugging the old toilet. Yes.” He pointed out a japanned wastebasket at the bed’s end: he’d put it there for her when everything that she could puke had been puked and she was still heaving. And looking at it she had a memory or recurrence, and a deep revulsion swept her.

  “Oh God.”

  “Went on quite a time.”

  He seemed pretty pleased with her, or with himself. Suddenly she shuddered, and yanked aside the covers, as though suspecting something was in the bed with her.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “No need.”

  She was still fully clothed, except for her shoes and sweater. He pointed at her jeans.

  “I think I could have got them off you,” he said. “But I don’t think I could have got them back on you again. So you can see, you’re safe.”

  “Oh jeez.”

  “I shared the bed with you,” he said. “Didn’t think you’d mind that, seeing as how it’s my bed, and the only one.”

  “No,” she said. “No, jeez, Jackie.” She hugged his pillow, laying herself carefully down, a jug
of ill humors she wanted not to spill. “I guess that wasn’t quite the date you were expecting.”

  “Well, I have to admit…”

  “I thought maybe too. I really did,” she said. He had been so far always polite and patient with her about that, or impatient in a comic and harmless way. He seemed to think of her as skittish and virginal, which maybe she was. Anyway she let him regard her that way, unable to tell him of the cold dread or repugnance that gripped her when he smiled and caressed her, and what the reason might be. “You know I’m not sure I can ever, I mean…”

  “Well,” he said. “So long as you’re not sure.” He smoked a cigarette and watched her. “Now we got another thing to think about,” he said, “and that’s getting you back into your dorm.”

  He must have seen a dreadful understanding dawn in her eyes then, because he nodded solemnly at her: yes it’s true.

  “Oh God, I never got back into the dorm.”

  “No, you didn’t. Not exactly in any shape to.”

  “They’ll know. They check. They tell your parents.”

  “You had a good excuse. The weather was real bad. Ice on the roads. Dangerous.”

  “No! I’ve got to get back in, I’ve got to now. Maybe they didn’t check after all, maybe just this once. Oh God.” She tried to leap from the bed but the contents of her self seemed to slide or slop hideously when she tried. She had to sit again and hold still till her seas stopped heaving. “Oh help me.”

  Now he began to laugh, as he had not done so far. “Well you got the whole experience, you really did. Including the part where you do something dumb, and the part where you only figure it out the next day.”

  “Oh stop, stop.”

  “And the part where you want to die.”

  She had got up and begun to make her way to the bathroom in a crippled crouch, holding the backs of chairs and the edge of the bureau, that made him laugh more. “You help, just help,” she murmured. “You find my shoes.”

  She would have made it out of the house, determined to move and keep moving, except that she had to pass through the kitchen, the ashtrays filled with twisted butts and the sink with dishes and the table where, shockingly, the empty gin bottle still held court, its prissy lying label the last straw. She spent more time in the toilet, Jackie speaking soothingly and encouragingly to her through the door, though she wouldn’t let him in.

  “The proctor has left you a couple of notes,” Fran told her. “She seemed pretty concerned.”

  “Oh God.”

  “You look bad. Very bad.”

  “Don’t say anything, don’t let her know I’m here till I wash. Please don’t.”

  “Hey,” Fran said, by which she seemed to mean reassurance, and solidarity, and sweet reason, and goes-without-saying, all in a tiny non-word. Kit went to stand under the feeble shower, wishing she could wash inside as well as out. Then when she was freshly dressed she went to the proctor’s door, thinking hard about how to put her hopeless case.

  The proctor’s face stilled her: stricken and tender at once. “Your parents called,” she said. “They’ve been calling. They want you to call right back. I didn’t know where you were.” She wore a terry-cloth robe cinched with a belt. She was only a couple of years older than Kit. “Here,” she said. “Use the phone here.” And she pushed a chair up to the phone on its table, and touched Kit’s shoulder to make her sit there before it.

  11.

  It had been an accident with some ammunition, some shells being transported: that’s what the letter said that had been sent to George and Marion. Ben had been stationed in the Philippines, and on a routine training mission this thing had happened. They didn’t describe it in any way that could be pictured. They said he had died instantaneously. Two members of his outfit were accompanying his body home and would have more to tell them.

  She tried not to cry out, tried with her strength, somehow thinking that if she could keep from crying out she would keep it from being true. But she did, she cried out, and it was as though the cry would break her in pieces, shake her to the ground like a bombed building.

  “I’ll come get you,” George called to her over the phone, so far away. “I’m leaving in a few minutes. It’s still raining, Kit, and it might take me a while, but I’ll come.”

  The rain went on through the day, never quite turning back to snow, but coating the trees and telephone lines with ice, the new green tips of branches too, how could they survive that, they always did. George driving her north on the highway held the wheel in both hands; when some invisible frontier was crossed and the wet road turned to ice, the cars before him in the twilight began to stop or try to and he had to brake, and the great station wagon spun slowly around and onto the shoulder before coming to a stop. He opened the door and was halfway out when he stopped and sat again and began to sob. The falling rain darkened the felt of the hat on his bent head. They both wept there. A police cruiser stopped beside them, lights going, to ask if they were all right.

  That night she lay in her bed, so near her father’s and mother’s that she could hear them stir and talk; could hear even the click of the lamp coming on, then going off again. Her mother’s tears. She lay and looked up into the darkness of the ceiling and listened. Just please let her sleep, she thought or prayed. Just let her sleep. You bastard.

  This stormlike grief. It wasn’t the hollowed, blank grief that she had felt after Our Lady, like being scraped out to the rind. This grief was something and not nothing, it rose continually to sweep over you, making you sob or cry out unexpectedly, to lose your footing even, like a riptide. Marion coming out of the church behind his aluminum casket must have felt it come over her, for she moaned and stumbled and George could hardly hold her upright.

  Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, the priest said, and let perpetual light shine upon him. Then it was Kit who was shaken with sudden disabling tears, wishing it were so and at the same time knowing that if they asked God to shine a light upon him in his box in the earth, it could only be their own light that was meant—hers and her father’s and mother’s—because there wasn’t any other, and that light wasn’t perpetual and it wasn’t eternal. Marion had grown calmer by then, maybe the capsule she’d taken working at last (she’d given Kit one too), and she held her head high and didn’t cry when the young soldiers, one white and one black, placed the folded flag in her lap like his baby soul wrapped up.

  She lay facedown on her bed a long time, as she had the day when he went to join the army. Downstairs Marion and George gave cake and coffee to the soldiers and to the priest and the few relatives who had been able to come so far. An awakened winter fly buzzed and buzzed between the sash and the storm window. Kit knew with certainty that it was she who had caused Ben’s death, by the intensity of her attention to him, by clawing at him to keep him with her on the roads from Libi to Mary and Rayn to Sorc where nothing changed and everything was possible. Until at last he broke free, broke her hold. Broke free, broke her hold: that was the ninth wave again arising, and she felt anew what had happened, inconceivably, irreversibly, and wept again.

  Her child too: by conceiving it in her anger at Ben, by offering it a promise of life that she couldn’t keep, she had done harm that could never be made right. If there really was a light to shine upon us, she would never see it now. She was going to see Ben in dreams and he was going to ask her why she had done those things, why she hadn’t known how to not want them, why she hadn’t just let him alone.

  She pressed her head into the pillow, her teeth clenched shut on her sobs. She knew now why people can’t leave the graves where those they love are buried, why they want to lie down there and grip the grass, hug the stone: it wasn’t out of any stupid extravagance of grief but just a need to stop this hemorrhaging, to press something into you to stanch the wound. If she could she would go lie down there like an abandoned dog till she died.

  Well she could die. She was smarter than she had been; she knew now how tough her body was and how it w
ould fight back. But it wasn’t all she knew.

  After a time the pill she had taken, cycling through her brain and soul, ran out or let go; for a while she slept and didn’t dream. When she woke the world was vacant. She left her room, but at the top of the stairs she sat down, dizzy or unable to continue. Marion, come from the kitchen in her apron, saw her there.

  “Your father has taken those two boys to the bus station.”

  Kit nodded.

  “I wonder if you could help me.”

  “Sure. What.”

  But her mother said nothing further, only looked up at her, and Kit got up and made her way to the bottom of the half-flight of stairs. Her mother’s smile was more terrible than her grief. She took Kit’s shoulders in her hands, to reassure her, or to steady herself.

  “I am just so glad,” she said, “that I found you that day. That I came back and found you that day in the bathroom. I am just so glad.”

  In her mother’s embrace Kit felt all the tears that were to come, drawn from a reservoir deeper than she could have imagined. Oh Ben. She couldn’t die: she had no right to. She had been a bad daughter and she supposed (in the odor of her mother’s perfume and the sound of her weeping) that she would probably never really be a good one. But she couldn’t die. Not dying was the only thing she could do for her mother, and she would have to do it.

  She didn’t need to go right back, George told her that. Surely they’d understand at school if she wanted to stay for a day or two, or even longer. Marion could use the help. But she went back when Monday came, refusing George’s offer of a ride and taking the big smelly bus that stopped at every cornfield crossroads. The weather had changed utterly, and along the rivers the willows were yellow-green. Swollen buds made the trees seem cloudy or vague in the sunlight, as though they were in the process of vanishing, or appearing newly, which they were. Daffodils were even coming out; this part of the state was proud of its daffodils, which were featured on travel posters and city medallions; all along the road there would appear sudden glowing fields of them, nodding together like orchestras, trumpeting silently. It was a long trip.