The Translator

by John Crowley

  She shook her head no again.

  “Is it perhaps,” he asked, “one of these things about which you think you can say nothing?”

  She nodded, so slightly it might not have been seen in the lamplight; but he saw.

  “He was then…”

  “He was just somebody,” she said. “Not anybody. He was hardly even there. It was just, like, a minute.”

  “Perhaps to himself, though, he was there. A somebody.”

  “I spose.” She thought how in the mess and blood and the dawning cold of its being over, of its having really been done, Burke had leaned close to her and said to her I love you: as though it were a precious thing, a jewel from inside him that he was obliged to yield up and was yielding up. Hearing it had been even stranger than the touch of his.

  What on earth had he thought? What did he think now? What is it, the mystery of it, once inside it did you ever get back to the outside again?

  Nothing to say, nothing she could say. She was surprised to feel wetness on her cheeks. Old Goofy Glass. She wiped them rapidly with her hands.

  The nameless cat leapt up suddenly from the floor, she hadn’t seen it come near and here it was. She put her hands on it and so did he and it looked with its demon eyes from her to him; and then folded itself up.

  Kit told Falin about Burke.

  She told him about her brother, and how he had joined the army; she told how he had come home at Christmas, and what had happened then. She told him about what happened after Burke. She told him about her child, and about the Blue Blades, and he took her wrists in his hands as though he had known all along. She told him of Ben’s death and his burial and the lie they had perhaps been told. Sometimes she stopped for a time and slipped again into silence and the gray cat’s fur and its purring. He waited and said nothing till she went on. Telling it she saw that she believed it was all one story, a web knotted at every point, and that at the center of the story was her own blind stupid willful wanting, black spider that had caused it all. And she saw too (she learned it here on this night, in this telling) that one day she would know better. She would know that it wasn’t one story but many, many many, not all of them hers.

  “You must one day speak of these things,” he said.

  “I did. I just did.”

  “In poems,” he said.

  But she didn’t reply or assent.

  Past midnight he brought her a thin coverlet and a pillow to put beneath her head on the couch.

  “I’m still angry with you,” she said. “Really.”

  “Yes.”

  “You spoiled everything. My whole plan.”

  “Yes. Now sleep.”

  “Will we ever?” she asked him.

  “I do not know what you mean.”

  “I mean be lovers.”

  “We are. We will be now always.”

  She didn’t say more. He kissed her brow: touched her brow with his lips for a long time, which seemed like an answer, an answer that wasn’t yes or no. He covered her.

  “Don’t you go,” she said. “Stay right here.”

  “I will not go.”

  “Just don’t.”

  “No. Kit. I will not.”

  He didn’t: he stayed with her as she slept; she knew, because it was late in the night, near dawn almost, when his leaving her side awoke her. She opened her eyes and turned to see the door of his bedroom open, and the tall shape of him, like a being not in a body, against the gray light of the far window.

  5.

  The house that Falin lived in was owned by an old woman, Anna Petroski, who had lived in the main house all her life with her brother till he died and now lived there alone. She had a condition of some kind, Kit never learned the name, that kept her from walking or grasping things except with great effort. Her brother had cared for her, and though he was gone she managed to go on; she was tall and stooped and broad-shouldered, with long arms that looked strong though they weren’t. In her house she moved around in an old wheeled office chair, pulling herself across the floor by handholds worn paintless by her progress. Old women from her church came to help, and Falin shopped for her sometimes. He once brought Kit into her part of the house when he paid his weekly rent, and she watched the old woman move around her kitchen in her huge slippers and flowered housecoat; she kept rags in various places to help strap a pot handle or a knife to her hand. Falin counted out bills, licking his thumb in a way Kit had never seen anyone else do and making jokes or remarks in Polish that made Miss Petroski smile; she watched Kit sharply though, with a small glittering inquiring eye.

  The cats around the place had been her brother’s, and she seemed to disdain them. They had found or made their way under the eaves and out above Falin’s ceiling, where they hunted mice or the little flying squirrels that nested there, and down through another gap into his kitchen, dropping to the top of the refrigerator and to the counter and the floor, where Falin fed them.

  “I will be gone a day and a night,” he said to Kit as he filled the cats’ cracked saucers. He was going to the state capital, where the offices of the Case Columbia Foundation were, a couple of hours’ drive away, where he would stay the night; she was to come to feed the cats, and after sundown water the garden. “It won’t be too much trouble?” he asked. “You have too much work?”

  “It won’t be any trouble.”

  He seemed harried or distracted, as though embarking on a long journey unprepared. The Case Columbia Foundation, according to Jackie, had been responsible for getting him the job he now held; had paid him a salary while he awaited an appointment, and helped him in other ways maybe too. He avoided Kit’s questions about why he was driving so far to talk to them.

  He was already gone when next day she came to his house after her classes. His house was empty, and almost all that had made it his was gone with him—including the poems and manuscripts that had accumulated on the card table.

  Empty. Kit sat on the couch; her couch. His absence was rich around her. She took her spiral notebook and a pencil from her bag. Since morning she had been thinking of a poem, or some verses anyway; for the first time in months, toying with lines and trying to perfect them. The idea arose as she studied her Russian, practicing her pronouns, her familiar and respectful forms, lost for so long to English. In our language, we have no thou.

  She shed her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her. The blinds were drawn, the house dim and hot.

  In our tongue now

  We have no Thou

  And must make do

  With only You.

  What people didn’t realize about their old thou and thee was that those were actually the familiar forms, the intimate ones; now they had that air of long-ago politeness and formality, but it was really the other way around.

  Thou wert my son

  My childhood chum

  This cat; that bum;

  Wert my loved one.

  She liked the way this all hovered between a sort of language lesson and a sort of declaration of something to somebody. As though she hovered too. Thou wert my son.

  Yet Thou wert God

  Incarnate Word

  Immortal Bird

  Death never trod.

  She’d maybe have to explain that to Falin; Keats’s nightingale. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! No hungry generations tread thee down. Wasn’t “tread” the word for what roosters did to hens, what male birds did to female? She saw she’d changed the rhyme scheme, and went back and altered the first stanza to match it, and liked it better:

  In our tongue now

  We must make do

  With only You:

  We have no Thou.

  She lifted her head from her page: a car might have come into the drive in front. Not him though: she could tell. One of Miss Petroski’s church friends maybe.

  Who is it wipes

  My muddied brow?

  Is it Thou?

  Is it You?

  Was it okay that the first line of this quatrain
rhymed with nothing? She hadn’t known whom these lines spoke to—to no one, she had thought—and now a thickness came into her throat to read what she had written.

  Art Thou so low

  Or art so high?

  I am but I

  And then there must be a last line, ending in O; it seemed to exist already—the words of it surely existed, and they were gathering, self-selected, waiting for her to notice them; what she wanted to say to him, but not to him alone. She felt at her tongue’s root the sounds the last line must make; she felt the small solemn pause the reader’s eye or voice ought to take as it crossed the words, and where it would fall; but she couldn’t hear the words themselves.

  Well it was just a joke, really, a trick, it was nothing at all. She looked up. There was a man in the garden.

  She stood, the notebook slipping from her lap. It was a big man, more fat than tall, and he wore a narrow-brimmed straw fedora and a pale suit; his arms didn’t quite hang at his sides, like some big men he seemed to be holding a suitcase or something in each hand as he walked. He looked around at the growing plants, the wheelbarrow, kicked at something lying in the dirt; then he stepped up to the door and came in without knocking. He was all the way through the windowed porch before he saw Kit.

  “Hi there,” he said.

  He had a deep plummy voice, a nice smile, and bright small eyes. Kit nodded and waited for explanation.

  “Didn’t think anyone was here,” he said.

  “Then why did you come in?”

  He took a few more steps within, looking around himself. “You’re a friend of Mr. Falin’s?”

  “Um yes.”

  “Hi.” He put out a plump hand to her and without wanting to she came to take it. “My name’s Bluhdorn. Milton Bluhdorn. I knocked on the front door, and I think someone’s inside, but no one answered.”

  “Yes. That’s Miss Petroski.”

  “Anna Petroski,” he said, looking at her with intense interest, as he had been doing since he came in.

  “Yes. She’s…she can’t move very much and sometimes she just doesn’t answer. I could go get her.”

  “And Mr. Falin’s not in.” He said it the way most people did who didn’t know him: fallen.

  “No.”

  “And you are…”

  “I’m—feeding the cats. He’s gone for the whole day. Till tomorrow.”

  “You a student?”

  “Yes.”

  His smile hadn’t altered, but seemed to have become less a smile and more an instrument, a tool of inquiry, like a lockpick.

  “You’re a student of his? He isn’t teaching this summer.”

  “I was a student of his last semester. This summer I’m studying Russian.”

  “What, he’s giving you some tutoring?”

  “Not really.”

  “Is that allowed? It would be quite a privilege. You interested in poetry? What Russian are you taking?” As he asked this he went around the room, looking at the anonymous furniture, the library books, the Russian typewriter. “Conversation? You doing conversational Russian?”

  Kit had decided to stop answering. The blood beat steadily and painfully against her throat. Milton Bluhdorn seemed to take no notice of her silence. The gray cat had come down its path from the ceiling and appeared beside him, rubbing against the leg of his suit.

  “He’s a remarkable man,” he said to the cat. “If you were interested in poetry and he took a liking to you, well.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Took, you know, a shine to you.” The lap of his pants was disgustingly wrinkled, the way fat men’s pants in summer get. She wouldn’t forget that. “I like poetry,” he said. “I liked it in college. ‘We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece full of straw.’” His smile broadened, and he shook his head, as though marveling at himself or the world long ago. “Listen,” he said. “You need a ride back to town? I can give you a ride.”

  “I have a bike.”

  “Toss it in the trunk.”

  Again she said nothing, yielding nothing, not knowing what her face said. At last he pushed his hat up on his head and nodded. He was still smiling. He turned away and lifted his hand in farewell; then he turned back.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  Could she refuse to say? Why did she feel that she ought to? “Kit,” she said, and when he leaned his head closer to her, cocked his ear at her and raised his brows to ask or listen for more, the whole name, she shut down.

  “Well tell me something, Kit,” he said. “What do you actually know about this guy?” He opened his hands to include the room they stood in, where Falin was not. “Do you know anything about him?”

  Kit thought that she knew more about him than anyone in America; he himself had said so, almost, to her; and at the same time she thought that Milton Bluhdorn knew something she didn’t know, or he couldn’t have asked what he asked. She shrugged, one shoulder, just a little.

  “He is,” said Milton Bluhdorn. “He is one of a kind. You know that. That his situation is. Ah. Unprecedented.”

  Nothing.

  “I mean they didn’t kick Pasternak out.”

  He studied her for a while as though to see if he’d roused her; he hadn’t stopped smiling. Then all in a moment he seemed to give up on her again. “Okay, goodbye sweetheart,” he said, already turning away, this time to walk out the door and go.

  She didn’t move, listening for the slam of his car door, the starting of his engine. And she realized that she had not even asked what he wanted, who he was, and now she could not tell Falin.

  “Milton,” she said to him. A light rain fell, the first soft rain in weeks, she had ridden out to the house sheathed in a billowing poncho to find he hadn’t yet returned. She’d waited on Miss Petroski’s porch for his car, unwilling to go in the house again without him. “Milton Bluhdorn.”

  “Mil’ton,” he said, and smiled. He stood bareheaded in the rain. He had got his car’s top up at least, it was darkened with wet like the shoulders of his suit. “When I grew up with the lost children this was one of the words we had. Mil’ton was policeman. As you might say cop, or copper.” He took her hand and raised her from the porch step, led her around the house. “And he seemed to think no one would be in the house?”

  “Miss Petroski. He knew about her.”

  “But not in back. Not here.” He let them in.

  “He said he didn’t think there was. That he didn’t expect anyone to be here.”

  Falin’s eyes moved around the dark little apartment, maybe looking for something that should be there and was not, or something that might be there that shouldn’t be. Or maybe they weren’t searching or seeing at all, only moving while he thought. “Well,” he said. “If he expected that I was not to be here, he must have known where I went.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” he said, and then nothing for a time; he seemed to gather himself from a scattering or diffusion, slowly, a piece at a time, to reform himself into the person she knew. “It means that we should do our work for today. Means nothing more. Perhaps he will come again, Mil’ton the policeman. And we can ask him.”

  He put down his black case of imitation leather, unzipped it, and took from it with care the folders of his poems and her drafts, and arranged them on the table.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  He turned to her, and Kit saw something she hadn’t seen before in him. She had hardly ever seen him even surprised, and now for just an instant he seemed shocked, bereft. She felt it like a stab: that she could hurt him, and had.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have finals to study for. My course. These are the last days.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Certainly. You will do well.”

  “I hope.”

  “But still much summer is left.”

  “I have to go home. I promised my parents. Anyway I’d have no place to stay.”

  He looked down at the poems, hers and hi
s.

  “My parents,” she said. “They’re in a new city. Without…well, without their family.” Bez: without.

  “Yes. Yes surely.”

  From the bag she carried, her leather purse she had slung around her body like a tiny postman’s bag as she rode, she took two small books. “I brought these for you,” she said, just as she might to anyone, though her throat already trembled when she spoke and she wouldn’t try to still it.

  He took them from her. One, new, with a bright cover, was The Wizard of Oz. The other was Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, her own copy from childhood. She’d carried it with her to school in the winter, and she had come to believe she would carry it everywhere she went from here, from now on: because she knew now she would go on, and would need things to carry that would stay the same. But she had brought it for him.

  “The girl who goes through the mirror,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “You have to read it. You’ll see.”

  He held them, one in each hand, regarding her as though she were a puzzle, or an unknown. She thought of Ben at Christmas, holding his two books, Pascal, Baudelaire. Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux. “Can you tell me something?” she said.

  “Perhaps,” he said. He looked older, the stubble dark in the deep furrows by his mouth.

  “Are you,” she asked then, just a whisper, “are you in some kind of danger?”

  “No,” he said. “No new danger, no.”

  “Because,” she said. “If you are in danger. I know there’s nothing at all I could do. But I’d do anything I could.”

  “My dear,” he said, “my dear love. You have done already. More than I can say. I cannot ask you more. I will not.”

  “You can. Anything.”

  He said nothing, only went on hearing and seeing the world, and her; she could almost feel it all as he did, see herself as he did: almost but not quite.

  Not at all maybe.

  She picked up her crumpled poncho. “I have to go,” she said.

  He lifted a hand to stop her. Then from the small pile of papers before him he withdrew, one after another, her translations, the first drafts in pencil and the typed versions, themselves marked over. He squared them up and held them out to her.