The Translator

by John Crowley

  Millions. The children of fathers dead in the Great War, whose mothers couldn’t keep them, or who were separated from their families when their villages were overrun by advancing or retreating troops as the fighting moved eastward. Children evacuated by train from the front, carried far to the east, losing their families at stations or crossings: the trains stopped for hours, for days, parents got off and went to look for food, and the trains were ordered to depart while they were away, and the parents never saw their child again, who might fetch up as far east as the Urals, holding a smudged and illegible form. Children left behind when their parents died of typhus, which spread rapidly among refugees pressed into unheated barracks or shipped back and forth by train. Children orphaned in the Revolution and the civil war that followed, their parents killed by the Reds or the Whites, shot for hiding grain or concealing livestock or aiding the enemy; children lost when families again fled before one army or the other. Children sent out by the authorities from starving northern cities, Petrograd, Moscow, to the Ukraine and the Crimea, where there might be food and warmth at least: eight thousand were remanded by the Bolsheviks to Poltava, and then when the White forces took the city and the Reds retreated, the White army was left with the children.

  It never stopped. After the civil war there was famine, and millions died. “Millions died”: one by one, though, each in his own way, in his house or church or by the roadside to somewhere; children sitting with their dead parents, unable to go farther, their bellies swollen from eating grass. The multitudes driven from their land by collectivization, sent to the east to make new farmlands or die; many lingered or hid, tried to return to their old homes, failed along the way, their children having become practiced beggars and thieves, and so able to live. And always there were the children of those condemned by the state, arrested, taken away: their children were shunned, sometimes given up by parents or grandparents, maybe in the hope that without the taint of their father’s crimes they could survive. My father was an engineer: there was a purge of engineers, “bourgeois specialists,” accused of “wrecking,” many tried and shot: Falin might have been eight or nine then.

  “We all knew of them then, besprizornye,” Gavriil Viktorovich told her. “They were a constant threat, a grief, a fear. Papers talked much of them. Other children were afraid of them, yes, and mothers frightened their children with them—don’t lag behind and be lost with besprizornye.”

  Gavriil Viktorovich lifted his eyes, looking backwards; his full soft mouth and the red-rimmed liquid eyes made it seem he wept.

  “I went in 1927 with my parents and many other families from Moscow to Crimea on vacation,” he said. “There is a place on that railroad line where one can begin to smell the sea, and often tracks become covered with windblown sand, and train must stop so that they can be cleared. I and my little fellows, you know, all in our holiday clothes, climb down from train to collect shells that were always in the sand. Then we rushed away frightened. Under the carriages we had been riding in were these other children, dark figures, hardly human they seemed, five, ten, a dozen, more. We children ran. Besprizornye! Besprizornye! We were afraid and thrilled.”

  “Maybe one of them…”

  “Among so many thousands.” He shook his head.

  “It means without something,” Kit said. “Besprizornyi. He told me. More than homeless. Without…”

  “Without guardian, unsheltered, not cared for.”

  “Yes.”

  “There was talk, back then, that perhaps to be besprizornyi was good training for socialism: that such children would be toughened by life, by having to rely on others; that to have all bourgeois social conventions overturned or taken away meant they would make new, cooperative ways of living. Maybe besprizornye would make good Communists.”

  He smiled in a way that made Kit feel far from home. “Did you think so?”

  “Oh, I had no thoughts of such things; I was so young. But a man who thought so was Felix Dzerzhinski.”

  “The secret police chief.”

  “Yes, he. Whose statue in Moscow was not long ago pulled down. The hugest of them all, the one we all saw.”

  “Yes. I saw it too.” Like Falin’s poem: The finger that pointed Onward driven into earth to point Endward instead.

  “‘Iron Felix’ he was called. There is more than one person in Falin’s poems named Felix, always people of great power and, and—moral ambiguity, you would say. Of course his name means Happy, or Happy One. Yes, Dzerzhinski took great interest in besprizornye. There had been then established for them many detskie doma, children’s homes; detdoma we always called them. Most were very poor places, no staff or materials or even beds.”

  “He told me. He said he nearly starved in one, and ran away.”

  “But Cheka—that was first secret police organization of Dzerzhinski—set up its own detdoma. Camps and schools too. Well funded. Often children who escaped from other homes, who refused help, were selected for these.”

  “Like reform school.”

  “Well. What was said was that Cheka recruited from these schools: chose the most toughened and strongest and most willing children to become Chekists. Children who had already on the streets learned lessons that they must learn. That we all were to learn.”

  He went to the burdened shelves and without searching or pondering drew out from the clutter a handful of magazines and papers tied in red-and-white string. He picked at the knot with trembling fingers; Kit wanted to help, but knew she mustn’t.

  “We were all besprizornye,” he said. “The whole society. We were all torn away from all common bonds that we had been born into. All had to rely on others, on those we found around us, yet never trust them; had to make our lives without what we had been born with, families, institutions, protectors. But it did not make us New Man, entirely social. We pretended. But we became instead nation of individuals, of atoms; only thing left to us, instinct for self-preservation. All against all.”

  “He said that,” Kit said. “Falin.”

  Gavriil Viktorovich had undone the bundle, and laid it before her: thick periodika, and gray sheets with typewritten lines almost invisible, and a small pamphlet on cheap paper.

  “He said so,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “He said long ago, in his poems. These, The Gray Gods.”

  It was so small. Falin’s body, shrunk in death or in time. She thought of her mother lifting from a cardboard box the drawings and stories and maps that Ben had made, that she had helped to make, their land.

  “Our hope is to publish all, as it was—I think—meant to be; one tale, or novel in verse maybe you would say, though consists of many fragments. I have tried to transcribe, to edit.”

  He put them before her and she touched the pages. The paper was dry, unresponsive.

  “Has never been entirely translated,” he said. “Perhaps someday you might…”

  “No,” she said, and drew her hand away, and clasped it with the other. “No. Not now, when all of you can have them. No.”

  He tended the little pile, straightening and smoothing. “Nothing is like it in Russian poetry in this century,” he said. “There was Russian writer who called himself Grin, who would not write realistic social stories, who conceived imaginary land, Grinland, where marvelous things could happen; he died young. But Falin’s country in these poems was not another country, no, but one inside or alongside this one. Inhabitants of his land seem to know of this one but do not think about it very much, as though it was unimportant to them. Example. They have city, some stories are set there, called Manitograd, and it is apparently located in or on side of Stalingrad, and the name Stalingrad is mentioned, but only as name for unknown or imaginary place.”

  “Maybe it was slang they used,” she said. “He said they had their own words, their own language.”

  He was nodding. “Manit is beckon,” he said, and with his hand made the gesture, waving her gently toward him. “To lure, perhaps.”

  Beckonville. The Russians had j
ust changed the name of Stalingrad back to what it was before, another grad or gorod, what was it.

  “In early poems of Gray Gods,” Gavriil Viktorovich said, “this world of Falin is spoken of as small. Perhaps, yes, like world of child-gangs to our big society, with its own rules and laws and language, secret names for things. But as poems go on, world of Falin expands. Speakers in poems now can take long journeys in this other world, which has its own transportation system, they travel to other cities, they petition officials who have offices and powers not like ours but little bit like, they try to be heard in government buildings, which are big, very big, go on forever.

  “Then, at last, this world opens further, to greater realm, beyond-human realm of powers, powers maybe reflections of earthly ones, maybe not; maybe they are originals of earthly ones, who only reflect them. In their own great shut offices, you see. Endless. These are perhaps those Gray Gods for whom all the poems are named.

  “And yet, and yet. No matter how far out it reaches, world of Gray Gods, it can suddenly become ordinary once more. As camera might change its focus, we see that we are nowhere but in dump or ashpit in Soviet city, to which besprizornye have come from trains or however they have come; where they have made shelters, to keep warm by fires of ash dump; and watchmen come to drive them away, and winter coming on. Then this moment passes, like hallucination. And great epic story of gods and journeys continues.”

  When winter was deep, Innokenti went out from the station’s underground with the others to the yards to get aboard trains bound for the south, for Georgia, the Crimea. Some would go as far as Baku and Samarkand. How did they know which ones to board? Surely Innokenti didn’t know. How could they take such a small child with them, how did he endure it, how did he learn not to fear, and how long did learning take him?

  The smaller you were, the more places there were to hide on a train. The smallest could ride in the dog boxes or storage compartments underneath the cars, curled up out of sight; sometimes though the conductors shut and locked the boxes, not knowing there were children inside who would be trapped unable to move for hours or days, or sometimes knowing very well. If you were strong enough to hold on you could ride farther under, on the rails, just above the tracks, the endless wooden crossties flicking hypnotically by just below your feet or your face; if you slept you could lose your perch and fall under the cars. One boy that Innokenti knew had fallen into the roadbed and lay facedown still and bleeding while the cars passed over him, one, one, one, one, a hundred: he was blind in one eye afterward and his cheek always drooped, but he could tell this story. It was easy to get into coal boxes but the air was suffocating, thick with greasy coal dust, and you carried a nail or a spike to bore a hole to breathe. There were even places inside the engines, crannies and spaces inches away from the pistons and thundering wheels, hotter even than the steam pipes of the station basement. When the train stopped the firemen would cry out to see children crawling from the engines all black and skinny as devils: Chort!

  Maybe it was then he learned invisibility, riding the trains.

  In the south somewhere he lost Teapot, or was lost by him, anyway he never saw him again. In his poems a person like Teapot disappears forever only to appear again, always returning in new guises and with new employments, but those are poems. He was taken in by another gang, older boys and girls of practiced cruelty. He begged for them, having still the trick of weeping whenever he needed to and having grown as yet not much larger, his nice clothes tattered and irremediably soiled and his shoes stolen and replaced with two mismatched ones much too large, but still the good little boy could be seen beneath, and he did well.

  In another colder city they lived in an ash dump that ran along a railroad spur line; there were fires burning always, and a derelict freight car collapsed on a siding where the older children made a home. The younger dug caves in the clinkers or slept in heaps under salvaged boxes or broke into sheds, or sat out and cried. During the day they went out into the city, to the markets and the streets, to beg; at night the older children went out to steal or to sell stolen things or themselves. Sometimes they returned with vodka or candy or cocaine, to be distributed according to rules they made up: one older boy Falin remembered named Chinarik or Cigarette Butt, with a withered arm like Stalin’s, particularly liked this game.

  Once they brought back with them a child, a psy or greenhorn, and talked about how they might get money for him, ransom money. After a while the boy began to cry and struggle and tried to get away, and said he would tell; they tried to make him shut up but he wouldn’t stop, and they killed him. Innokenti was one of them.

  “I was set guard,” he said. “To watch for mil’ton or yard police. What I was told.”

  “Did you see? What they did?”

  “I saw.”

  They held him down and hit him, and to make him stop crying they stuffed his mouth with ashes. They held him until he stopped writhing. Then they took all he had, his shoes, handkerchief, coat.

  “They did that?”

  “We did that. We.” He tapped the gray ash from his cigarette against the ashtray, which had the college’s seal on the bottom of it. “You see,” he said. “I have had child, born with illness, and before she grew I was taken away to camps, and never saw her more. I think of her every day. But I have this one too, this boy, and of him too I think every day. They are both my dead children, and they will not go.”

  Not long after that, maybe because of that (and now he began to remember such things, causalities, the order of events, at least a little), the ash dump was swept by the authorities and the children rounded up and processed: Innokenti Isayevich entered the system. He was fed hot soup and given new boots not much better than his old ones, and then put aboard a special train, a sanpoezda, “sanitary” train; he had his hair cut off and was dunked in disinfectant as the train rolled, picking up as it went other besprizornye. He had a ticket sewn to his coat with his surname and the city he had come from, it wasn’t his name but a name someone thought she heard him say, and he would have it ever after. Many of them didn’t know their names; some of them refused to say them. They were given new names, common names or the names of film stars or heroes of the Revolution, Mikhail Kalinin, Len or Ninel or Vladilen, Ulyanova or Tsetkina or Elektrifikatsiya. At stations they would be offloaded into the care of the local officials, who put them in detskie doma. If there was no one to meet them, or detdoma was already full, or there was no detdoma, they would go on, or be left in the station or the street.

  “Sometimes detdoma was not so good as street,” he said to her. “Hundreds try to get in; as many try to get out soon. Stay till food is gone, run away. I ran away. Not once only.”

  “And after that?”

  “Go to market. Beg. Ride on trains. I found other friends, as we did then. I knew then the rules of how to live, how to make—what—alliances, and make myself valuable to others. I could beg, though I was perhaps not so pitiful as once. I lived. At last, arrested again, for theft. Sent to prison. Then released to new detdoma. This time to stay.”

  He put out his cigarette: she watched the strong square wrist; did his hand tremble? How much we can stand, she thought: how much, after all.

  “That was first place in all my life I knew where was,” he said. “Ah no: I don’t make myself clear. I mean I learned only there that world is round, where on it I am; where I stand.”

  “They had teachers?”

  “Here, yes. Khar’kov. A labor commune; we worked and learned. There were books. Not like the others.”

  “Was that what happened to the others, the kids you knew?”

  “No. Most not. There were so many, you know: most not. Streets, markets, trains. In the end many, many were sent to camps. You see, aim of reform, rehabilitation, was soon given up; they were by then only young criminals, hooligans, human waste. They were sent to mine gold or coal, make roads, dig canals.”

  “Prison camps.”

  “Lageria, yes. Camps of slav
e labor, men and women building new land, new world. Novy mir.”

  “But not you.”

  “Not then.”

  “Well how did you, how…”

  He had stood, restless; he went to open his office window to the spring, and Kit felt the stale air of the room pushed aside, the cool sweetness on her cheek. “Many of us who were lost,” he said. “They knew only to fight, or to run away. They could not learn to eat with fork and knife, some of them; they could not listen to any command, could not sit still, not remember what happened yesterday or guess what might happen next. This had become of them. And then further things were done to them, which they could not run from, which they could not fight.”

  What he was saying now was hard for him to say: Kit could see.

  “I knew,” he said. “I knew. Not to run; to listen. To be not seen when looked at; to be seen when I chose; to speak, to agree, to seem. I did not learn these things; if I would have to learn, I would not have been able. If I had not been able, I would not now be here, telling this to you, Kyt Malone. I would not be here.”

  13.

  “I thought about it, what he told me,” Kit said to Gavriil Viktorovich. “I thought about it all the time. I guess I needed something to think about, just then, and he…”