The Translator

by John Crowley

  She took his hand, cool and dry, and stood.

  Once, he had written out from memory a part of his poem “Bez,” to show Kit how it worked. The lines made her think of his wife, how she had starved to death in the siege of Leningrad. Had she been one of those who couldn’t help hating? Would Kit have been one of those, who died of hate, whom the Devil got in the end?

  I will do without bread: they think I cannot but I can.

  I will do without, and raise my hunger like a child;

  And from it I will breed a little cat.

  From my empty mouth and bowel I will produce it

  A cat who feeds on hunger as on bread

  And by doing without, that cat will grow greater than any tiger

  Its teeth of steel spoons and knives a-clatter, and its black breath of hunger

  And it will consume all those who thought I could not do without.

  So she said: but the cat when it had grown

  Ate her and her abnegation up

  And so was satisfied, and so died.

  4.

  When his apartment on the edge of the prairie grew too hot, too much a kuznitsa he said, a smithy where they labored together at the forge, they would go outside, walk to the end of the road under the sycamores, whose leaves seemed a burden too great almost to bear; or they sat on the wide rough steps of his apartment in the cool shadow of the house and watched the sky turn turquoise with slow solemnity, or welter uneasily and ponder what it would do next.

  “Tornado weather,” she said. Along the gray fence of posts and wire that separated his yard and garden from the fields beyond, the gray cat crept as though in fear, its fur upstanding and its eyes wide.

  “Tornado. This is storm we in my country do not have.”

  “Really?”

  “Not tornadoes. They are American storms. We have groza, burya, we have such round storms, how do you say, yes. Not tornadoes.”

  “Not American though really,” she said, “only Western. I mean I think sometimes they happen in other parts of the country, but mostly they’re here. Tornado Alley they call this area. Look.”

  From the black-sheep clouds hung a few small woolly twists: tornadoes being born. She thought she could smell them; she hugged herself and shivered in the heat. Why did fear feel so exhilarating when it blew coldly in you like stormwind? Her father had always been afraid of tornadoes, hated summers in Tornado Alley; maybe because his mother had used to gather all her children up during storms and crowd them into a closet to pray the rosary with her and wail at every thundercrash. Once Kit dreamed of a tremendous box, a sky-high cabinet divided like a shadow box, in whose divisions young tornadoes could be safely kept, as in pens. A gift for her father.

  “They are terribly destructive,” he said.

  “Oh yes.”

  “There is a French dish,” he said. “I have read of it. Tournedos. A dish of beef.”

  “This would be a different dish,” she said. “Scrambled eggs. Or maybe hash.” The wind was rising a little, teasing. “There are whole towns that get blown away. Russiaville, a tiny town near where I lived.” He looked at her and she shrugged, yes really it’s true. “Russiaville; they said it Roosha-veeo. No more Russiaville. All gone.”

  Just as she said this a white shatterline of lightning crossed from sky to earth in the west toward which they looked. They both counted their heartbeats till the thunder growled, awakened, and rolled away as though muttering to itself.

  “Oz,” Kit said softly, as though rhyming with it. Then that name too had to be explained to him. The child blown away by a tornado from her farm in drab gray Kansas to a wonderful new land of magic and possibility. And all she wants is to go home again.

  “Oz,” he said.

  It was dark as night now, and the wind rose. There might be hail. “Let’s go inside.”

  The gray cat flitted between his legs when he opened the door, and ran ahead of them to leap up on the couch, its yellow eyes alight. The cats around the place, a black one, maybe two, and a tiger, weren’t his but his landlady’s, and yet they seemed to prefer him or his rooms. My lovers, he called them. Lyubovnitsy. The gray allowed Kit to take it in her lap.

  “I suppose you have lovers,” she said. She thought of the woman she had seen him with, the one who wept and spoke to him as though in prayer or confession, and pressed her cheek to his coat. “Real ones.”

  “You do suppose?” he said.

  She looked only at the cat in her lap. “Ones that talk.”

  “Ah, these have that advantage, that they do not talk. They need not talk that way that lovers must.”

  “What way?”

  “The way all lovers talk. You know.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only know before. Before people are lovers, I mean.”

  “After, the same.” He propped his head on his fist and looked down at her. “What do they talk of. They say each other’s names. They describe each other, too. To each other, you know?”

  “No.”

  “They never tire of it. The hair, the eyes. Never tire. They ask each other questions, endlessly, to know more. What do you love, what do you need, what is favorite poem, favorite color.”

  Kit drew a cigarette from his pack and held it between her fingers. “My favorite color,” she said. “Is the color in a bottle of Coke when you lift it to the light and the light falls through it. That dark bright red brown.”

  He laughed.

  “Really. Sorry.”

  “The color of your hair,” he said. He put his hand on her hair, his fingers in the curls. “The color exactly.”

  She shut her eyes, to feel his hand so strangely light on her. “What do you love,” she said. “What are you afraid of, what do you need.” She lay still, seeming to have become something other than flesh, electricity maybe or pale silk, and wondered what she would do, what would become of her, if he were to answer.

  “I need you, Kit,” he said.

  When she opened her eyes he was not smiling. She didn’t doubt what he said, not then or ever after; but after a moment she said, “Why?”

  “To save my soul,” he said. “Or perhaps only my life.”

  Another flicker of fire around the world, and then a pause, and then nearer thunder.

  “Why did you say that?” Kit whispered. “What did you mean?”

  He was sweating, big drops standing at his brow line and along his lip.

  “I’m doing all I can,” she said. “It’s just such a hard language…”

  He shook his head quickly, no no. He said nothing more, though she went on listening. She knew that he didn’t answer her because he couldn’t, because for the first time—she thought it was the first time—he didn’t know or didn’t have the words, not yet.

  He laid his arm along the couch’s back, which made a hollow for her at his side, and cautiously she entered it, turning into him as though within him or within the circle of his arm were a big far country, whose border only she had so far crossed: she was coming to know how big it was, and that she probably never would go very far within it.

  “Rain,” he said.

  The storms that rolled over the land unhindered in that month didn’t cool it; it would seem to Kit later on that nowhere she had ever been, rain forest or desert or Asian city, was ever as hot as that Midwest plain could be on a July night when the sun bloodied the west and the temperature did not fall and wouldn’t fall till the dark of the morning. On such nights they drove his convertible into town, to eat at the nearly empty restaurants and go to air-conditioned movies. She took him to see Cocteau’s Orfée at the art theater. They were almost alone there. Beautiful Orpheus in his nice suit received messages from his Muse over the car radio; Falin laughed lightly and crossed his legs impatiently. Only when the Angel of Death took Orpheus to the Underworld, passing through the mirror (a lovely obvious silly trick), did she feel him quiet and attentive beside her.

  “Alice,” Kit whispered.

&nbs
p; “Who is Alice?”

  “She went through a mirror. Shh.”

  Chic Mme. Death, like a Vogue model in her black sedan, escorted by two black motorcyclists: and Orpheus looked back at Eurydice in the rearview mirror. Kit heard Falin make a small noise, of appreciation or maybe not.

  “I do not much like such grandiosity,” he said afterward. “Eurydice is to me better image of poyt. She who must stay, who cannot return.”

  “But nobody can.”

  “Yes.”

  What he liked better was big expensive Hollywood soap operas, where people lived in houses slung over California ravines or on rocks by the turbulent sea, who were architects or surgeons or best-selling authors, whose wives suffered from too much love or too little, wept and brooded, hardly noticed the glamour of their surroundings or their glossy sports cars or their living rooms larger than churches. For these Falin sat still, his mouth open a little and the portals of his eyes wide; she thought of him as feeding on the rich otherworldly colors, the emerald grasses and pastel coordinated furniture and huge bowls of delphiniums and roses. Like the people she read of who had been hungry in childhood and then ever after hoarded food and had to have more than they could ever eat. But then she thought of him in the library turning the pages of The Saturday Evening Post with the same attention, and what he had said. Happiness.

  “Happiness,” she said. She took his arm as they went back to his car, as she often did now, unafraid to, certain it was hers to do, a gesture without force compared to what they had already done together and would do.

  “Now you must return to dormitory,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Not tonight. I signed out.”

  “What is signed out?”

  “It means I told them I wouldn’t be in tonight. I told them where I’d be, and gave them the phone number. You have to do that.”

  Her curfew at the Language Institute was the same as the dormitory’s, ten o’clock on weekdays, an hour later on weekends, but supervision was lax; the one older woman in the program who had agreed to proctor the others seemed to enjoy letting her few charges slip in late, get away with infractions, greeting Kit at the door in pajamas and curlers, an eyebrow raised, tapping her foot but smiling too like someone in a movie where nothing really mattered.

  “And where,” he said, “did you say you would be?”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “They won’t call.” He hadn’t started the car. “I just don’t want to go back,” she said. “Not for a long time.”

  “Where then instead of back?”

  “Far,” she said. “Far forward.” She said it without actually choosing to say it. She’d said the other things in the same way: she’d actually left no number at all with the proctor, that had simply exited her mouth when she opened it and winged toward him. “Go,” she said.

  He drove her no farther than their grove of trees above the fields. The weather had changed; the sky was so clear that the stars within it seemed to stand at varied distances from earth, some near, some very far. Kit climbed to the broad hood of the car and stood, feeling the heat of the engine rise beneath her skirt and the breeze move it.

  “You can see farther over the earth from up here,” she said.

  “How far?” he said. He rested against the car door, lifting a starlike glowing cigarette now and then to his lips.

  “Very far.”

  “Forever? To the ends?”

  “No,” she said. “Because of the earth’s curve. The earth is curved, but vision is straight.”

  “Easy to bend vision,” he said. “Easy as tossing a ball, or shooting an arrow. Just let it drop.” He showed with a hand.

  “You can?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “What do you see, then? How far?”

  “Well. Looking eastward. I see…What are those flames, that orange flare?”

  She closed her own eyes. “That must be Gary, or East Chicago,” she said. “The mills, the refineries, burning off gases. They do it all night, high in the air. What else?”

  He turned. “Northwestward. Is a city on the plain,” he said. “Many crossing streets, marked with lights, like drops of dew on spider’s web.”

  “That’s, um. That’s got to be St. Paul,” she said. “Those lights. Or Duluth.”

  “Southwestward too. Another.”

  “Des Moines,” she said. “Tulsa.”

  “Beautiful,” he said, in his Falin voice, another word of his she would hear ever after. “Beautiful.”

  “O Beautiful for spacious skies,” she said. “For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain.”

  “Is this verse of your own? Or once again common song?”

  “O Beautiful,” she said, “for patriot dream, That sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears.” She was never able to say or sing those lines, those hopes, without her own eyes sparkling. Undimmed by human tears: reminding you of tears, human tears, even while denying them. It was unbearably sad. She looked down to where he stood below her; she lifted her arms, and he opened his, and she leapt into them. He caught her, held her a moment suspended between the hot earth and the cool sky; and when her feet were on the ground he didn’t take his hands from her waist. She lifted her face to him, sure she had guessed right, so certain of it that the little tight hand that had seemed to grip her heart all day let go of it at last, and it beat hard and wildly.

  It was a long blind kiss, but then he ended it, with a breath like a sob, and laid his cheek, his rough cheek, against hers. She tried to turn him toward her, nuzzling, her hands on his shoulders. He drew away and looked down at her. How could his face be so alight in nothing but starlight, she could read it as though it were day: great-eyed and plain like an archaic Greek head.

  “I’m staying with you tonight,” she said.

  “Kit,” he said.

  “You don’t have to be afraid,” she said. “It’s not like I’m a virgin.”

  “But I am afraid,” he said. “You make me so.”

  “Well you just…You need to get over that.”

  “Kit,” he said again, and seemed to ponder—not what to say but whether he would say it. “I do not think it is…what I am for.”

  “Oh jeez,” she said. “Not what you’re for. Well, what.” She swallowed, or tried to; her throat was tightening with the onset of a deep embarrassment or shame. She turned from him, crossed her arms.

  “Is not what you want,” he said.

  “You don’t know what I want.”

  “Perhaps what you do not want. Perhaps I know this.”

  “How?”

  He didn’t answer, and she wouldn’t turn to look at him.

  “You would like to go back?” he said.

  Without speaking she went to the door he opened for her, and got in, her arms still crossed protectively, and looked at the night. The eastern sky had paled, and now an amber moon, comically huge and full, rolled up as if with a soft exhalation that could be heard. Big moon, big car, summer night, green corn. How could she have been fooled?

  “So I guess, what,” she said. “You think of me as a daughter? Is that right?”

  She said it as sarcastically, as fiercely, as she could, turning to face him. As soon as it was said, she heard it herself as he would, as he must; and she clapped her hand to her mouth, too late. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh I’m so sorry.”

  “No,” he said. “Not daughter, no. I would not think so of you.”

  “How could I say that, how. I’m such a…”

  “No, no,” he said. “No.”

  His hand covered hers where it lay on the car seat, his hand large and real and cool.

  “Just don’t take me back to campus,” she said. “Let me stay.”

  “Yes,” he said. “No reason to go there. She is fast asleep now, your guardian there.”

  “Oh no,” Kit said, shaking her head. “I bet not.”

  “Oh yes. And in her hand her
beads, what do you call these…”

  “Rosary.”

  “Rosary: of green jade. She has not slept without this since day she took First Communion. Believes she could not sleep, if it were lost.”

  “Will it be?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  He drove them back to his little house and let them in with a key; she hadn’t known him to lock his door before. In the lamplight lay the work they had done that day. She sat on the couch and he made sweet tea. They hadn’t spoken further.

  “Now Kit. Here is tea.”

  She let the steaming glass sit before her on the low table. She never in her life drank hot tea except when she was sick; tea was to her the drink of solitude and recuperation and a house of blankets, an inner watch kept on a bad tummy or a migraine. Marion gave her tea and aspirin when her periods hurt or devastated her as they did sometimes.

  She felt that now: on watch over her body. Because of the tea but not just because of the tea.

  And maybe he was right. Maybe it was closed, and wouldn’t have opened. But you couldn’t know, and she had been ready at least to knock: to open to his knock, or try.

  With his glass of tea he sat beside her on the couch. She didn’t look at him.

  “Do you know,” he said. “It is not easy to say what I have said to you.”

  “I don’t know what’s easy for you. Everything seems easy.” She covered her mouth again, stupid again. “I don’t mean that.”

  “Anyway not easy to say no to your invitation. So frank too. That I should be one of your lovers.”

  She laughed at that. “Oh sure,” she said. “My lovers. There’s only been one. Not even one. I mean, technically, but.” She stopped, and looked into her glass.

  “Was it,” he said, “this blond boy you go with?”

  She shook her head minutely, not wondering how he knew about Jackie; she had got used to him knowing things he shouldn’t.

  “Someone else you loved.”