The Translator

by John Crowley

  In the house on East North Street, Jackie wrapped her in his quilt to stop her shivering, gave her boiled coffee and jelly doughnuts, and listened. Max too, in the doorway, and Saul.

  “He was stationed in the Philippines, it turns out,” she said, clutching her drawn-up knees. “I don’t remember him saying he was there. But anyway this thing happened with the ammunition, this accident…”

  “I don’t think so,” Saul said.

  “What?”

  “Didn’t you say he spent time in Vietnam?”

  “Well a while ago. I mean I guess he got moved around.” She knew suddenly that she had better not talk about it anymore. She sipped her bitter brew.

  “Well, because,” Saul said, uncomfortable but unwilling to stop, “what we’re hearing is that American Special Forces are engaging with the Viet Cong, that’s the South Vietnamese insurgents, and even with the North Vietnamese army.”

  “What do you mean, engaging with?” Max asked.

  “I mean fighting them. Having, well, not battles, but. And some Americans are getting killed.” He looked at Kit and not at Max. “Then they ship the bodies back to the Philippines and tell everybody it was an accident.”

  Kit stared at him. “How can you say that?” she whispered, amazed. “How can you say a thing like that?”

  “Well that’s what we’re hearing. And this fits. And if it’s so, I think people should know.”

  “My God,” Kit said. “You’re saying my brother was killed in a battle.”

  “No no,” Saul said, seeming at last to perceive his roommates’ looks and Kit’s horror for what they were. “Not necessarily. I’m just saying, well, it fits.” He lowered his eyes. “You might be able to find out. You might ask some questions.”

  Kit struggled free of the quilt, kicking it aside, getting to her feet, wanting out with furious urgency.

  “It’s important,” Saul said behind her. “It is.”

  No place to go. She sat down on the edge of the couch and embraced herself. Something unbearably sharp hurt her heart: How could they, how could they, she thought, not knowing what she meant by it, whether she meant Saul’s cruelty to say that to her, or Ben’s lie to her, that he wouldn’t shoot anybody, or those soldiers who came with his body, who were his friends, who knew.

  “Kit,” Jackie said, and sat beside her.

  Ben hadn’t slipped into death, as anyone could, no he had fought his way there, into that blackness and nonexistence; pressed on in, armed. Oh please let it not be so. Let him not have lied to her, the very last thing. If they had lied, if he had, they took even her grief from her, and left her nothing.

  Two days of classes had gone by, and Kit was required to bring absence excuses, signed by her proctor, to each teacher whose class she had missed. Instead she stuffed them in her purse and forgot them. One she did think she had to hand in, but rather than to class she brought it to the liberal arts tower, thinking she would put it in his mailbox as she had her poem at the beginning of the semester. When she passed by his office, though, he was standing in the doorway, apparently just leaving. Seeing her, he opened the door wider for her and showed her in.

  “I wasn’t in class last week,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Again asleep?”

  “No. Not asleep.” She pulled from her pocket the green form and gave it to him. He unfolded and read it, sitting down at his desk. The room could have been anyone’s: there was no sign that he alone occupied it.

  “A family member?” he said.

  “My brother.” He looked up from the form. “An accident. Far away.” She hoped he wouldn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t speak.

  “I think I might have to drop your class, though,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  He refolded the green form. “Why do you say this?”

  “Oh,” she said. “I guess I found out I don’t love poetry enough. Anymore.”

  He got up then from his desk and pulled a chair close to his and indicated it with a hand. She sat reluctantly.

  “Six weeks now left in this semester,” he said. “Too late to drop. You can only fail.”

  She crossed her arms and hid her hands in her armpits. “Can I ask you something?” she said.

  He nodded, unsurprised.

  “When your daughter died,” Kit said, bargaining hard within herself not to cry, her throat not to tremble, “well how did you…how did you stand knowing that. Knowing what had happened.”

  “I was far away.”

  “Still. When you learned. When you thought about it.”

  He thought, or was quiet. Then he said: “Where was he, your brother, far away?”

  “The Philippines,” she said. “In the army. There was an accident, they said. Something—some shells or something—blew up.” The dark wave made itself known within her, but didn’t rise. “That’s what they say. They brought him home.”

  Falin rested his chin in the L of his index finger and thumb, as she had seen him do in the library. He went on looking attentively at her, and in that time of silence the air in the little room seemed to be withdrawn and replaced, a little cleaner or clearer.

  “Did you,” Kit said then, “ever write about her? Your daughter.”

  “There are children in my poems who die,” he said. “Who are hungry, who are lost, who are hurt. But of these I knew many.”

  “Many?”

  He seemed to consider how he might say more. “You know,” he said. “We lived, in that country, in times of terrible things. Not for a short time, but for long years. There was hardly a person to whom these things did not happen; even to those who sold everything—their souls, their loved ones—so that the terrible things would not happen to them. There was no safety.”

  “So if things like that were so common, then you…”

  “No, no,” he said, as though he knew what she thought. “No, you did not get used to it. Only you ceased to be surprised. And you did not have the pain to yourself: you did not look around yourself and say Why should they be happy and I have this; how can they walk in the sun and smile and not know what I know.”

  She gripped the hankie that, just in case, she had taken out.

  “All those I was with in camps, they had children, wives. No: I am wrong, not all. Many had lost all even before they came.”

  He moved a paper minutely on the desk.

  “I was, myself, a lost child,” he said, and lifted his eyes to her again. “A homeless boy. I do not remember my mother or my father. And as I lost them, so too did they lose me.”

  “I thought you said your father was an engineer.”

  “Yes. I said so. I believe this to be so.” He regarded her puzzlement for a moment. “I do not remember my father,” he said. “But from my first memory, I could say this sentence: My father is an engineer. A name the others sometimes called me was Engineer.”

  “The others?”

  “The lost children. Besprizornye. There were many of us. Tens of thousands. No, more: a million. Millions.” He smiled, maybe at her wonderment. “Another name I had among the lost children was Monashka, the Nun.”

  “Nun?”

  “Perhaps I was delicate child. Innocent.” His smile was teasing for a moment, then gone. “I don’t really know why they called me that. I have forgot much. I do not know for sure where I was lost, and I do not know why.”

  “But you also said you grew up in Leningrad with your parents. That your parents were dead. That you were an only child.”

  “Yes. I lied when I said that.”

  Kit, shocked, couldn’t respond. He was telling her he had lied. No adult had ever told her such a thing. They had lied, many of them had—telling her about the world or God or other things—and sometimes she had guessed and sometimes not. But never had one admitted it.

  “I first appeared on earth in a train station in a northern city,” he said. “It was beginning to be cold, winter. I perhaps was seven or eight or six years old. I was abandoned there, or by chance sepa
rated from whoever was to take care of me. It was very common.”

  “You first appeared?”

  “I mean I remember nothing before that. I mean that there I begin to remember something that may be told.”

  “No father or mother?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well…what happened? I mean…”

  “You would like to hear?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder why.”

  She said nothing.

  “I must say: it is not always easy for me. Not easy to remember, not easy to tell.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Well.”

  “You will know more about me than I have revealed in this country before,” he said. “You’re not afraid?”

  “Why should I be afraid?”

  He didn’t answer. He took from his pocket his cigarettes—they were Herbert Tareytons, with the jaunty little man in antique formal dress on the pack—and put them on the desk; he opened his coat and tipped back the office chair, stretching out his long legs. “Very well,” he said. “And in exchange for my story, if you think it worth it, I will ask of you one thing. All right?”

  “All right,” she said, and she wasn’t afraid, though her throat was tight and painful. “What is it?”

  “I ask that you not drop my class,” he said. “That you stay till end. That you not fail.”

  She shrugged, and looked away. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “I can make it up someplace else. The credit. It’s okay.”

  He said nothing, as though she had said nothing: and she looked up at him.

  “It’s only a course,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “To me, yes,” he said. “That you are not there. That I do not see you there. Yes. It matters very much.”

  “It does?”

  “It does.”

  It was as though she stepped off an unseen edge and fell, only not down but up. He had been thinking about her. He had been thinking about her when she wasn’t there, just as she had thought about him, who he was, what he was. He had been thinking about her, and maybe for the same reasons too, reasons she had no name for.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll do that. I’ll stay. Till the end.”

  12.

  Wherever it was, in whatever city, it was a vast and crowded station. Through its high windows the sun made great solid bars of light in the dusty air that were vertiginous to look up at: he remembered that. Before that day or moment, nothing: a sensation of warmth and light, a golden orange, a white lace curtain, that might have been earlier, and might have been home.

  Who it was that took him to that station; how he lost her, or him, or them; whether he was separated by chance from parents or uncles or schoolmates—nothing of that persisted. He didn’t know if he was an only child, or just the only one who was lost. Had he been set down on a bench there and told to wait, by a parent or a sibling who was then swept away in the crowds, pushed aboard a train still calling his name (that he remembered, his name and patronymic, of these he was sure). Or did someone just leave him there, hoping for the best, someone headed elsewhere (stay here Innokenti and don’t move and I’ll come back), to the Polish border or the Crimea or Central Asia, anyway far away and unwilling or unable to carry him? How had he lived, not knowing?

  He didn’t remember coming to understand that something was wrong and whoever had brought him there was gone. Maybe he had come to that conclusion at last, and got up from his bench and started searching, thereby maybe losing himself certainly and finally, no matter if he or she or they who had told him to wait there had come back at last to collect him. All that was supposition. The first person he clearly remembered knowing—the earliest he could find by searching backwards—wasn’t a parent or any other kin, it was Teapot.

  Probably he had started to cry, amid the endless people passing the place where he sat. Not many would have turned to listen, or pay much attention, there were just too many children like him, some crying as he was, some begging, some not moving, having stopped trying. If someone did stop for a moment, because this boy was clean and in good clothes and still seeming to think he had a claim on their kindness, they could still do nothing but ask him where his mother was, who was caring for him: and he didn’t remember any of those encounters if they happened. He remembered seeing the lean boy in a coat of no color and a shapeless cap, a teapot in his hand: how he slipped in and out among the travelers, apparently one of them and on his way somewhere (travelers everywhere then carried pots like that, to make their tea rather than buying it). But someone sitting long enough there, seeing him come and go, would come to understand he was not on his way anywhere.

  He saw this boy steal a cloth bag that a mother put down, just for a moment so she could wipe the face of her crying child. It was under his coat and he was gone instantly, and then a while later he reappeared without it, with only his teapot, stopping strangers and telling them a story, a story most of them didn’t want to hear. Now and then one gave him a small coin, at which he immediately stopped talking and looked elsewhere.

  Through the day he saw Innokenti too, and studied him. He came at last and sat next to him, and took from his pocket a scrap of newspaper and a pinch of loose tobacco. Night must have grown late, because the station was emptying, the last trains having left or never arrived. Teapot rolled his cigarette and then leapt up to pester the last passersby for a match. When his smoke was alight he sat again (Innokenti watching the perilous thing smolder and fume) and looked the little one over. What was he waiting for? Was he lost?

  Innokenti couldn’t answer; he knew where he was, where he had been placed; how could he be lost?

  Was he hungry? Yes, he was hungry.

  Any money? Innokenti searched in his pockets, took out three kopeks and a lucky gold coin. Teapot took them and put them in his own pocket. He told Innokenti that in a while the stationmaster and the soldiers would go through the station and put out everybody who had no ticket. Did he have a ticket? He didn’t. He wasn’t to worry, though; Teapot would get him away in time.

  They never get me, he said; he said he would go on a train to where he wanted to go, and he would go when he chose, and stay here till then.

  Innokenti asked Teapot if he had a ticket. Sure he did, ten of them: and he held up his dirty hands. Innokenti later understood this joke, a common one among the kids: ten tickets, ten fingers to hold on to the rods or the ladders or somewhere else, and ride for free.

  At the sound of a great door closing, Teapot leapt up, and grabbed the younger boy by his collar, and ran. They could hear the tramp of the soldiers, the shouting, and the homeless people who had hoped to sleep on the benches in the warmth pleading or cursing. Teapot led him away along the closed buffet and down a lightless passage and further downward to a locked door. A dim bulb far off showed that there was no farther they could go. Teapot put down his pot, took hold of Innokenti’s coat, and pulled it open; he felt within the younger boy’s clothes, though Innokenti tried feebly to pull his hands away, reaching into pockets and even touching his skin. He pulled a cross on a chain from his throat, and a pen from his pocket; two marbles, and a peppermint wrapped in paper. After he had pocketed these things he knelt before the locked door and somehow pushed out one of its lower panels. He bent Innokenti’s head toward the hole, and shoved him through into the utter darkness on the other side.

  For a moment he thought he would be left there. He couldn’t cry out, couldn’t move. Then he felt a push from behind: Teapot cursed him, move along, and came in after him. When he was in, he turned and put the panel of the door back in place.

  Now, he said. See?

  He was close enough for Innokenti to smell him. It was hot in the lightless passage. Teapot lit a match—he had matches of his own, after all—and by its light found a stub of candle hidden in the rough wall, and lit it. The darkness lightened. And Teapot pulled him along the passage.

  Innokenti would later come to learn the way down, and remember it ev
er after: it was dangerous not to know it, maybe fatal. How he was able to do it the first time he didn’t know; only because Teapot wouldn’t let him stop, or rest, or weep, but pushed him along and smacked his head when he stopped in fear or in the paralysis of total loss. Teapot had a trick of attaching the candle stub to his hat so that he could use both hands to climb downward on narrow iron ladders, warm to the touch, into airless darkness. Had Innokenti believed in hell, or even heard of it? Only a grown-up would think that a child might think of such a thing, that he was descending into those fires. But he heard noises too: a kind of sudden release of dragon breath, once there, again over there; and then an eerie long human whistle. Teapot stopped at the whistle, listened, and whistled back. They reached an iron floor slick with damp. Light came from a string of bulbs in iron cages overhead, dim as candles, many broken. They walked crabwise along the passage, inches from steam pipes whose heat they could feel on their faces, that now and then at valves released that sigh or sob, and steam hot enough to scorch flesh. Duck down here; don’t touch that; now stop and listen.

  More whistles to answer. Then they wiggled through a hole in the thick rubble wall, and it was a little less stifling; Innokenti began to see other candles, and Teapot laughed and banged the lid of his chainik, and out from holes in the passage and from under piles of rags and from packing crates came white faces, girls and boys, old and young.

  Got a new one, Teapot said.

  Any money? said a voice, deeper, Innokenti couldn’t see whose it was. There were many children, more and more gathering, some looking at him, some uncaring. Dozens.

  Nah, Teapot said. He’s just a psy.

  And Teapot, who’d taken all his money and everything else he had, put his arm around Innokenti’s neck and hugged and grinned at him.

  She had never heard of it, and no one she asked about it then had heard of it, this world that had been hidden within the Soviet world, down deep within it, this Dickensian world with no Dickens to make things right, to tie up all the ends. It was real, though; in Russian novels of that time she would later find them mentioned, “ragamuffins” or “urchins” in the background of scenes, you knew who they were if you had been taught to look for them, they were the besprizornye. And she found them in the writings of others who went there in the 1920s to visit and see the Revolution for themselves; Langston Hughes saw besprizornye and recorded them, and so did Averell Harriman, and Theodore Dreiser, who watched a little dirty girl trying to get on a Black Sea steamer, watched her carried off screaming by the huge genial sailors who deposited her on the docks, and carried her off again when she snuck on again, and again. Stevedores taking up hay, crates of geese, boxes of canned goods. Her bare legs kicking and the Red Army soldiers guarding the dock laughing.