The Translator

by John Crowley

  “Yes.”

  “He offered that. He must have thought it would help me. And it did help.” She looked down at her hands; she turned the ring on her ring finger. “I wanted to write about it, what he told me, when I published the book, my book, the first one, with his poems in it. But by then I didn’t know if what I remembered was so.”

  “It is already more than I knew,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “I knew that his name was not his own. He told me that.”

  “He said he thought that his father was an engineer. He said it was all he knew of him.”

  “Yes?”

  “He never told you that?”

  “No. We were not then in habit of asking after families. It was not done to look into family trees, do you say this in English, family trees? You did not know who might be found peeping out from leaves, you see? A priest, perhaps, or former noble person, Tsarist policeman. No. You were New Man, no forebears; if they could not even be discovered, well, all to the good.”

  “So you knew he didn’t remember his parents.”

  “No. Not that either. I thought he had family. There was story, I forget now; parents separated by war, or maybe gone pioneers to north. I cannot remember. I remember he received letters. He said so.”

  She turned the ring on her finger, thinking. “If he went to that camp,” she said, “the one that was run by the secret police, could he have known boys there, boys who maybe later on…Well, I guess I don’t know what I’m asking.”

  “That such persons would later help him; see that he got better treatment? Perhaps even intervene at the end, when he was sent away?”

  “Well maybe.”

  “Or that perhaps he himself…”

  “Oh my God.”

  Gavriil Viktorovich piled up his small collection of Falin poems, got up, and with painful care put it all away again. “In all places and times we humans have believed in luck,” he said. “So perhaps this was all. Luck and his courage. But we ceased to believe in many things in time of Gray Gods, and luck was smallest thing among them.”

  He turned to face her, and he was smiling. “Well. Now these days at last we can look, in KGB records; they have been opened, some at least, like—like tombs. And so far there is nothing of him there.”

  Nothing. Kit didn’t know if she felt relieved or defeated. “Do you know why he was sent to the labor camp, after the war? I mean what his supposed crime was? Is that something that can be found out?”

  “He never told you?”

  “No.”

  Gavriil Viktorovich shook his head slowly. “Perhaps in future we can know. Not now. Not today. Wherever his name appears in records, it seems only to make more mystery; and such records are few. They are very few.”

  He tugged down his jacket, and dusted his hands. “Now you will excuse me,” he said. “I will dress for our dinner.” He made her a small bow, and went behind a flowered curtain that divided his apartment in two.

  Kit thought: Maybe I didn’t know anything at all about him. Maybe he was simply one of those lifelong wanderers who are compelled never to tell the truth about themselves, or to admit that they don’t really know the truth, and instead continually invent new pasts and new histories, not necessarily more creditable or glamorous, sometimes just parallel to the actual lives they lived, reversed or inverted for no clear reason. And she thought that some of them committed suicide: there were the survivors of camps; there was Arshile Gorky, the painter, and Kozinsky the writer; having run through all their possibilities, maybe.

  Had Falin committed suicide? Is that what had happened, after all?

  The things that threatened him in America, which all seemed to be shadows of what had happened to him here, reaching out for him; the plot that seemed to surround him, which he couldn’t or wouldn’t explain: maybe none of it was so. Maybe it was that he could not bear the sorrows that he had accumulated, or the deeds he’d done, whatever they’d been; too great a weight even for stories to lift or deflect any longer. And on that October night, when he went out in his car, when he said that the time had come, when he said he had to go on a journey and didn’t know when he could come back, he was merely slipping from beneath it all, canceling all his stories like debts.

  She’d watched him drive away. It was from her he had parted; she was the one to whom he’d said those things. And there was no one else now to ask, no one who knew.

  Gavriil Viktorovich returned from behind the curtain unchanged, though now with a tie on, one so anonymous and dim as to be remarkable. “So,” he said.

  “I brought something for you,” Kit said to him. “From America, I mean. Something…well. This.”

  She had brought it in a stiff brown envelope, hoping to keep it from harm, or at least to keep it, a thing so old and evanescent.

  “It’s the only one I have,” she said. “He mailed it to me once, after the summer we worked together, when I was at home. That’s why it wasn’t lost with the others.”

  He took it from her, a single sheet of yellow copy paper darkening at the edges, the lines of typed Russian words on it uneven and faded. He looked at it in wonder, and then at her. He sat. The paper shook lightly in the tremor of his hands.

  “He wrote me that I should try and understand it,” she said. “But I never really did. And then with what happened…I always kept it. I looked at it, sometimes, and studied it. But I never tried to make a translation. I don’t know why I didn’t.”

  She watched him read. It wasn’t true that she didn’t know why; she only didn’t know how to say why, what delicacy or fear it was that had kept her from opening the sheet on its worn tender folds and getting help somewhere from someone who knew this language as she never would.

  “Can you tell what it says?” she asked. “I mean, what sense it makes?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I can. Harder to say, what means, in language different from, from.” He removed his glasses with a sudden gesture and pressed his eyes with his fingers for a moment. He shook his head then and pulled from his pocket a handkerchief, and held it to his face. The folded sheet lay in his lap.

  “What,” Kit whispered.

  “No no,” he said. “No no.” He took a great breath, composed himself. “Only, I thank you. For this. I knew him so long ago, so long ago.”

  He looked down again at the poem. Kit waited. She knew how hard it was to draw out even a little of the sense of a poem from its carapace; for its carapace was the thing itself.

  “Isn’t it about angels?” she asked. “The angels of the nations.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It says that there is angel who watches over the affairs of every nation; and that each such angel has an opposite.”

  “A little angel,” she said. “A lesser angel.”

  He put the poem between them; he found on his table a pad of rough paper, and from his jacket took out a pencil. He put the pad before her, and held out the pencil; and the moment parted, and it wasn’t Gavriil Viktorovich before her, or this place or time; then it healed, and she was here.

  “See,” he said. “Look.”

  In an hour, with his help and a dictionary he fetched, she had written out on the little pad the fourteen lines. The title was a date: 1963.

  Child, never forget that this too is true:

  So that justice in our cosmos may be preserved,

  The angels that watch over our nations each has an opposite,

  A left hand whose works the strong right hands don’t know.

  If a nation’s angel is proud, then the other is shy

  Brilliant if the nation’s angel is dull

  Full of pity if the angel shows none

  Laughing if it always weeps, weeping if it cannot weep.

  But so that order may also be preserved

  (Which has always concerned the great ones more)

  The nation’s angel is the greater, older and more terrible,

  And from his sight the lesser always hides.

  Lost, pale and bare, he shivers and s
ings

  And there is no reproach so stinging as his smile.

  Gavriil Viktorovich smiled and shrugged, unable to tell her finally if what she wrote was like or unlike what Falin had written. He thought there were other people, at the dinner tonight, who would know better, if she would show her translation to them. She shook her head, however; she ripped the sheet from the pad and put it in her purse, and returned Falin’s poem to Gavriil Viktorovich.

  “It was for you,” she said. “Because it was all I had.”

  He folded it up along its old folds with care, and replaced it in the envelope Kit had brought. He asked her again the date that Falin had sent it to her, and only then did he notice that the title Falin had given it was a year beyond the year in which he had written and sent it: a year beyond the end of his own life, as well.

  “Berdyayev also speaks of this concept, angels of the nations,” Gavriil Viktorovich said to her as they went toward the subway, which didn’t seem to Kit to be very close. The evening was alight, more dreamlike than before, and he led her through a kind of dream wilderness of abandoned or forgotten construction materials, a path that seemed to have been made long ago over heaps of gravel or sand, past heavy equipment covered in tarpaulins. “Berdyayev, Russian religious philosopher, expelled from Soviet Union 1922, perhaps you know? Well in any case.” She almost wished he wouldn’t talk so much, waste his strength; she felt an impulse to take his arm, help him along.

  “What Berdyayev asks,” he said. “Angels of nations are each different, as nations are. And do nations take their special characters from their angels, or is it opposite?”

  “I don’t understand,” Kit said.

  “Well, may it be that even such great guardians are altered by long association with nations they protect? If that is so, what has become of ours?”

  They reached the subway, and he guided her downwards, gave her the fifteen kopeks for the entry, and showed her where it was to be inserted. The patch of red light turned green and she was through.

  “I think the angel of our nation must have long ago become discouraged by us, and no wonder,” he said to her. “Degraded, depressed, sorrowful. Perhaps corrupted even; brutal, uncaring. I hope not. I fear so.”

  “Then what would happen to the lesser angel?”

  “Ah. Well. Of that being, we know only what Falin tells us. Yes? Even of his existence we did not know before.” He smiled at her. The crowd pressed toward the escalators. She had always loved and feared subways, always rode them in whatever city she traveled to, collecting new ones as other tourists collected famous views. Why was it so crowded at this hour? It was a tremendously long way down, longer than the way down in any New York subway, and seemed to issue in darkness far below.

  “I suppose,” he said, “worst thing such a corrupted great angel could do would be to send away into exile the lesser angel who is paired with him. Even destroy. Just as Stalin could not bear to have around him anyone who reminded him of what he had done, no he must kill or get rid of all of them.”

  Like the hotel she had been put in, at once so bleak and so dowdy, the cavernous station seemed to her not very much like anywhere she had ever been. It was ostentatiously industrial but somehow not modern, as unmodern and un-Western as a gilded ikon.

  “Did you know that Stalin feared poets?” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “Oh yes. Example: Pasternak. When Stalin’s wife died—by suicide, though no one knew—then poets wrote condolences for newspaper. 1932. Pasternak wrote too. He wrote that that very night of her death he had thought hard about Stalin, thought as poet about him for first time; and when next day he heard news, he was so shocked, as though he had been there beside Stalin when it happened.” The train slid into the station almost silently. “Stalin never harmed Pasternak. Never dared, it may be. What other powers might he have?”

  It was so strange to be having this conversation, here, that Kit laughed a little; she felt like Alice, talking to the Gryphon.

  “Oh is true, is true,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “Later when Mandelstam wrote his poem denouncing Stalin, famous poem, Pasternak asked Bukharin to intercede with Stalin, not to have him arrested. And Stalin agreed, and he called Pasternak on telephone and told him Mandelstam would not be touched. And Pasternak, such brave man, asked Stalin if perhaps they might meet and talk. About what? Stalin asked. Life and death, said Pasternak. And Stalin hanged up the phone. Pasternak grieved ever after: could not get Stalin back on phone, could not talk to him, tell him truths. One chance. Here is our stop.”

  As long a way up as down, their own ascension falling in a gap in the flow of people, they two alone.

  “Then could it be,” Kit said, “that they put him out—Falin—because they were afraid of him? That somebody was?”

  Gavriil Viktorovich said nothing, and at first Kit thought he hadn’t heard; then she was sure he had, and had no answer.

  In the time after Falin was lost or went away, she had used to think that if ever she could come here, to this country, and could look far enough or deep enough, she would find him eventually, alive and smiling as always: here again where he should be. No matter what he had said. The certainty came back to her as they arose toward the street and the evening: she knew for sure, as she had once known for sure, that he hadn’t killed himself, nor had he been killed. It wasn’t possible. It was easier to believe that he was here now in this city; that because the world was no longer what it had been, because she had come here at last, he might be waiting at the top of the stairs, might appear beside her from somewhere or nowhere as he so often had: not dead, not even changed.

  But they came out into golden light and the crowds along a brilliant river, nothing she had foreseen, street lights lit and shop windows full of goods, men and women in summer clothes walking arm in arm. Leaving the subway exit she felt the strangest sensation: her hand suddenly taken. She cried out in surprise. It was a child, a small boy, dirty or dark-skinned, smiling up at her and holding a single rose wrapped in cellophane.

  “Nyet!” Gavriil Viktorovich beside her said, prying the child not untenderly from Kit’s side and pushing him away; and now Kit could see several children working the stream of people, each with a single rose, shamelessly taking people’s hands and insisting; one small boy, no more than five, pleading with and actually wrapped around the leg of a well-dressed woman, who was ordering him off, laughing in exasperation.

  Gavriil took Kit’s arm. “You see,” he said. “Once again, besprizornye. It is not only the poets who now return to us.” Kit looked back; the boy who had taken her hand—his T-shirt as big on him as a smock, advertising something American—still looked after her for a moment, smiling, before he turned to pester someone else.

  The restaurant, off the Nevsky Prospekt, was on a floor above the street, the steps leading upward crowded with eager people, mostly young and talking and smoking with passion. Inside it was all white and gold and draped with blue drapes, the tables covered with long cloths: Kit couldn’t decide what sort of place it was, how it had come to be, if it had evolved by chance or had been created last week to look this way. It was loud and messy and the waiters in white aprons seemed not pleased to be there.

  A crowd at a great round table signaled to Gavriil Viktorovich, and he guided Kit to it.

  “Our committee,” he said.

  Most of them were old, and some were very old; they seemed to have survived more than years, they seemed like aged trees that had been harmed but not killed by long droughts and terrible winters, limbs lopped and misshapen, thick bark scarred and cut. They displayed the history they had lived through in the ropy veins of their hands, their teeth, their bent bodies.

  Kit was introduced to each of them, and each of them claimed to speak no English, or only a little English, and Kit said the lines she had worked out, about her own Russian, and they laughed and some of them left their places to come and hug her. As though they had been waiting for years to meet her, she thought, as though she had been away on a long
and hard journey and had come back to them at last.

  A red-faced man with Brezhnev’s Tartar eyes and hawk’s-wing eyebrows rose at the table’s end and made a toast to Gavriil Viktorovich, which everyone joined. Gavriil Viktorovich made one in return: to Innokenti Isayevich Falin. When they had drunk that, he would not let them sit; he made them drink again, to Christa Malone. And they lifted their glasses and drank.

  “When conference was first proposed,” the man on her left said. “When Gavriil Viktorovich first began to speak of it. Was a certain moment in our history, in our…catastrophe. For the first time exiled and forbidden writers could be spoken of openly. In periodika, literary journals you know, were published so many things…”

  “Zamyatin,” said another man, from across the table, who hadn’t seemed to be following. “Nabokov. Kafka. 1984.”

  “We had of course read many of them already in samizdat or in smuggled copies, but here they were at news kiosks. Everyone read like hungry man. But as well were appearing work of those who had been sent abroad or who had escaped to other side, and of whom we had heard nothing for so long. Now books of theirs came into country, and were not confiscated; we read Brodsky, Aksyonov. Many others. Riches.”

  “Yes,” Kit said. She’d heard about them, the people reading on the trains and crowded streetcars, swapping books and journals, reading two at a time.

  “Conferences too,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “Writers discussed whose names had for so long not been spoken in public. It is true. Falin too. Now we could ask: what happened, what became of them.”

  Kit found they had all turned to her.

  “You know,” she said, “that he was never found.”

  They waited, neither assenting nor dissenting.

  “Supposedly it was just an accident,” she said. “A car accident.”

  “No accidents,” said a tiny woman whose freckled breastbone barely rose above the table’s edge. “There are no such.”