The Translator

by John Crowley

  “Of course we will,” Saul said. “In the first exchange. Those missile silos to the west. That’s exactly where their missiles are aimed. The firestorm will reach at least as far as this. Easily,” he said. His small thick fingers circling his glass were still. “Easily.”

  “So it’s the end,” Rodger said. “It is, after all.”

  “It’s not the end, necessarily,” Jackie said; and he glanced at Kit, as though she should not hear these things, too young or vulnerable.

  “Well if it ain’t the end,” Rodger said, “it’ll do till the real end comes along.”

  “I have to go,” Kit whispered to Jackie, and she slid from the booth and went to the back and into the little toilet and the wooden stall with the scarred walls varnished a hundred times. Jim + Jean 4 Ever. Bobby I Love U. Jackie had told her how the scratchings in boys’ toilets were all about sex; these were always about love, eager hopeless love. She had thought of writing John Keats ½ + Easeful Death. In a heart cartouche, struck through by an arrow.

  Death.

  What she knew, all of a sudden and for sure, was that she wouldn’t hide. No matter what, she wouldn’t go down into the shelters they had made to put people in. The shame of that would be worse than the death they were going to inflict, it was like the shame she felt hiding under her desk in grade school, hands clasped over the tender back of her head, her butt in the air with all the others, while Sister watched. No never. She would stay up on the earth’s surface and wait.

  She knew something else. She had wondered if, when death came near her, she would in her fear want a priest, if she would ask for forgiveness. And now death was near and she knew she wouldn’t: Death couldn’t change her back to what she had been, or the world either. I am myself alone. If she were sent down then into his hell, well fine: better to be there than to grovel, to beg or praise. Praise for this? No not for this.

  She found herself weeping, though; she pulled off a length of rough paper from the roll and pressed it to her eyes and blew her nose. She didn’t want to die; she wanted the world not to die, or be so wounded it could never recover. She wanted to live.

  That night, twenty-two American interceptor aircraft went aloft in case the Cuban government reacted to the President’s speech with an attack on Guantanamo or the arming of missiles or the liftoff of the Il-28 bombers. The Soviet ships in the Atlantic received orders from Moscow to ignore the blockade and continue on course to Cuban ports. Polaris nuclear submarines in port went out to sea. The President signed an order, National Security Memorandum 199, authorizing the loading of multistage nuclear weapons on aircraft under the command of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. United States forces went from the worldwide state of alert that was code-named DEFCON III up to DEFCON II. DEFCON I meant war.

  The next day on East North Street, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee held what Saul called an emergency executive meeting to decide how to respond to the blockade of the island. The President had called it a quarantine, but it was a blockade, Saul said, and a blockade is an act of war, plain and simple, and it was obviously not going to be the last one either. The committee members spent the day calling other campus groups and trying to get a united front together to go into the streets in a mass public demonstration against the blockade. They couldn’t get a campus meeting place for a rally, not being a registered student group, but at last got an offer from a Unitarian church to hold their meeting there on the following evening. They got the Young People’s Socialist League to run off announcements on their mimeo machine and Jackie and the others went around in Jackie’s car tacking and taping them to lampposts and walls; they were mostly torn down as soon as they went up.

  On television they showed people emptying the shelves of supermarkets, buying canned food and bottled water, and guns and ammo too. Eighty-four percent of those polled said they supported the President’s action. One in five said they believed it meant the beginning of World War Three. But mostly people went on doing what they had been doing; they got up and went to work and went to class and in class went on talking about Shakespeare and quadratic equations and the rise of the middle class. Kit wrote notes into her notebooks and walked across campus listening to the carillon at noon and went to the library. And always she felt the depth of the sky above her, maybe being severed right now by the missiles coming. There was no poetry or knowledge or wisdom that could master or face or even survive it, it was hopeless: Pushkin’s smile as useless against it as any other weapon, any at all.

  The Unitarian church was bleak and homey at once, like a school cafeteria or a basement game room. There was no cross and no colored glass and the pews were square-backed and had worn velvet cushions to sit on. It was the first church that wasn’t a Catholic church Kit had ever been in; a little shadow of trespass was only one of the new feelings she felt sitting there. She watched the people come in and the minister in a blue button-down shirt and no tie set up a microphone and folding chairs for speakers in front of the altar.

  Saul and Max and the YPSL guys registered the people who came in, got signatures from those who were willing to sign. There were people from ADA in ties or in dresses; there were two women from SANE who each wore the black button with a white figure on it that Jackie told her was the semaphore letters for N and D laid one over the other, and they stood for Nuclear Disarmament. Kit wondered how anyone would know this.

  “So are you guys representing the Student Peace Union?” Max asked two boyish blonds, almost twins, in argyle sweaters.

  “We’re not representing it,” one said. “We are it.”

  In the end the church filled and the speakers one by one got up and tapped the mike and spoke. “Don’t say it’s too terrible to be used,” the SANE woman said. “Just because you wouldn’t use it. It’s not too terrible. It’s been used. We used it. Eisenhower threatened to drop one on the Chinese in Korea. Just a little one. He was going to lend one to the French in Indochina. Don’t tell me it’s inconceivable.”

  “These missiles are a danger to this country,” the ADA man in tweed jacket and striped tie said. “But after all they are equivalent to our own missiles in bases in England and Turkey. There has to be a general summit-level discussion on the reduction of these forces around the world. Sudden precipitate action…”

  But Max had stood up in the audience, his long S shape, and started to speak. “Well those weapons may not represent a new danger to us,” he said, “but we sure are a danger to Cuba. And this government would prefer Cuba to be defenseless. The Russians are lending a hand to the little kid who’s just about to get beat up…”

  There were shouts of No, no and protests; Max slid his big hands into his pockets and went on. “Kennedy says we’ve got no plans to invade Cuba at the present time. At the present time. Well, swell. Must make them feel confident down there.” More protests, but Max didn’t raise his voice. “Kennedy’s risking the end of civilization to get another whack in at Castro. Do we go along? Sixty-four-dollar question.”

  Splits and oppositions appeared among the groups, an ill will spreading that Kit could only partly perceive. It was like a family argument where what someone said reminded others of everything that person always said or shouted, so that people began responding angrily at the first words, as though they knew what had to be coming. Saul took over the mike and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee proposed a rationale for a march on Saturday, coordinated with the protest marches the national committee was sponsoring in Washington and at the UN. The theme of the march would be Hands Off Cuba. There was real shouting then, and some people walked out.

  “Listen,” Jackie said to Kit, leaning close. “I don’t think you should get involved with this.”

  “I am,” Kit said. “I’m here.”

  “I don’t think you should participate in this thing tomorrow. It’s not anything that’s going to do you any good.”

  “What do you mean? Any good?”

  He looked away, at Saul going through a list and asking for volu
nteers, at the darkened windows, and at his hands. “I just think you ought not to,” he said softly. “I can’t even promise you’ll be safe.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m not safe.”

  “Kit,” Jackie said, but still he didn’t look at her. “For once. Listen and believe me.”

  9.

  The next night, as if he knew just where she’d be—though in fact he could not have known—Falin stood in the lamplight outside the music building when Kit came out with Fran and her friends.

  Kit had insisted that Fran let her come along with her to the rehearsal. Fran’s pickup quintet was doing the Trout, but only the first two movements, and not perfect, Fran warned her. Kit could not have borne solitude, though it had always been so easy. She sat on a hard chair while they went through it twice, stopping to work on small moments like craftsmen on a jewel, five oddly assorted, even funny-looking people beautiful in their attention, transformed into what seemed to Kit almost a holy unity. The music filled her as though with water, as though she swam, a trout released, too small to keep: escaped.

  He tossed away a cigarette; there was no doubt he had been waiting for her. They knew it too, the boys and the girl with their black cases.

  “May I speak to you for a moment?”

  “Yes sure,” she said.

  He began to walk away, and she went beside him, uncertain.

  “I may have a journey to go on,” he said. “A trip. I cannot tell exactly when return. Perhaps now will be last night I am here for some time. I would like if you come to visit, stay. Stay with me for a time.”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I have to be in by eleven. It’s almost eleven now.”

  He lifted his eyes, as though to look at the sky, tell time by the moon, but perhaps only to remember. “Of course,” he said. “I had forgotten.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “A short journey. If I am summoned, and if I…Well. A plan I did not expect so suddenly to, to.” He lifted something vague with his hand. He might have meant hatch or come to fruition or ripen. He looked at the watch on his wrist; she didn’t remember that he had worn one before. “Well. No time. I should have thought.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  He nodded lightly, lifted his hand again, this time to mean good-bye or no matter or so long. “Do svidanya,” he said.

  Kit watched him go. Then she looked back to where the others stood, watching and waiting, as still and alert as observers at an argument or a kiss.

  “Okay,” she said, not loud enough for them to hear. Then she waved and called out to them: “Okay! It’s okay!”

  She turned, feeling their eyes on her, and ran down to where Falin was opening his car with a key.

  “Wait,” she said. He looked up to see her. “I want to go.”

  “Your curfew.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “If the bombs fall, I don’t want to be in my dorm room.”

  “No?”

  “I mean I won’t be glad I was there. That I kept the rules to the end.”

  For a long time he stood with his hand on the door. “Perhaps may not be the end,” he said.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Anyway.”

  In the dark of the car he put his hands on the wheel but for a time didn’t start it. His hands were gloved. He put one over her own clasped cold hands.

  “You said you wanted me to stay away from you,” she said.

  “No,” he said, “no you are wrong. I did not want that. Not that of anything.”

  “You were afraid of me,” she said. “Afraid that I’d put you in danger. I didn’t know I could. You sent me away, and I guess I understood why, but still.”

  “Oh my dear,” he said. “You could be no danger to me. No. Nothing you could do.”

  “Well then. Why.”

  “It was not you who made danger for me,” he said. “It was I who was dangerous for you. I wanted you to be not near me, so you would not be…caught. Hurt.”

  She knew it was so: saw him again in his garden, how he turned to her, telling her to go. She knew it was so, that for her sake he had sent her away, though he hadn’t wanted to, not that of anything. “What danger? Tell me.”

  “In English,” he said, “danger is something not yet come, yes? Something that waits or threatens. Around the corner. Close behind.”

  “I guess.”

  “There is no danger then any longer,” he said. “What was to come, has come.” A passing car’s lights stroked his car’s interior, his ghost hands, his face, and went away. “Do you know, I thought I had ceased to want things, Kyt. And this I thought was very well. Much to gladden me, nothing to want. But one last thing I wanted. I wanted you to be near. This night.”

  He took his hand from hers. “But if you cannot,” he said.

  “I will,” she said. “If it’s what you want.”

  His smile, that had never before asked anything of her, anything for himself. For his poems he had asked, but not for himself. In the thundery storm-dark evening he had said I need you. And then nothing more.

  He started the car. She crossed her hands in her lap and looked ahead. She would ask him nothing more, not where he was going, nor why. The car went out of town and out across the fields to the west, to his house at the end of the road. Every turn of the wheels, every step of her feet toward his door, took her into another world unknown to her, and she could only go on, for the old worlds behind were gone. She would just be with him and be glad, and gladden him if she could.

  She thought at first that nothing had changed inside his house. The standard lamp with its flowered shade shone on the brown bearlike sofa, the card table held papers and books. Then a gleam or wink in the corner drew her eye. He had a television.

  “Yes,” he said, seeing where she looked.

  It was a dull bronze color, and set up on a chrome stand: its gray eye closed.

  “These,” he said, and touched the antennae, “these have name in English. Rabbit’s ears. I was told this.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did you also know,” he said, “that the radiation or broadcast of television waves goes on always, passing through air, through houses, through bodies even?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Yes. I knew but did not think of it till I bought this. Until it was turned on, and revealed them to be here. Then I thought of them, passing always through here, only unknown to me.”

  “They might make it a law,” she said. “To leave it on all the time, so they don’t get wasted or lost.”

  She could tell that for a moment he pondered what she had said, before laughing.

  “Oh hey,” she said. “This is new too.”

  It was a phone. A tiny oval phone of the kind she thought belonged only in the pastel bedrooms of teenage girls in movies. “A Princess,” she said.

  “Yes, is its name,” he said. “Look.” He lifted the receiver, and its dial lit up, aglow in the corner where it had been installed. “It seems to me a thing found maybe undersea,” he said. “Among pearls and treasure. Do you know the name of this color?”

  “Um,” she said. “I guess it’s aqua.”

  “Yes!” he said, surprised. “Is Latin word for water. So you see.” He put the receiver to his ear. “Like shell you listen to. From this might come poems. More than from car radio of Orpheus.”

  He cradled the receiver with an odd gentleness. Kit felt a dark apprehension suddenly, a certainty of loss.

  “Ah,” he said, lifting his eyes. “Excuse me. I saw as we came in Miss Petroski’s light on. I must speak to her one minute. One minute only.” He made a motion with his hands to say she must sit down, and went to the door that separated his rooms from the Petroski house; he knocked, and his small knock was as uniquely his, or uniquely Russian, as the way he washed or held a glass of tea. He seemed to hear a voice, and went in.

  Kit sat. When he was gone, though, she stood again, and walked the cold room. A big g
as heater, clad in metal made to look like wood, breathed hotly, but still she was cold. On the card table where last summer they worked there were a few papers scattered in the familiar lamplight. The small square letters of his English hand.

  In this tongue I like poison more than food,

  Choose clamor over song, like rain not sun

  It was a poem, or the beginnings of one, words crossed out and other words inserted, the few lines rewritten many times. The accents of the lines were marked with pencil ticks.

  A storm for which I had no name

  Broke all the eggs in Russiaville;

  The roofs of Russiaville off came

  And flew away like flapping wings

  He was trying to write in English.

  In pity and wonder she touched the sheets. It was like watching an athlete who’s had a dreadful accident learning to walk again, using all his knowledge and strength to do the simplest things. How long would it take him? You couldn’t know, because you couldn’t know when you were done. She could never know it of herself, either: she had learned this language at the same time as she had learned to see and hear, and yet she would never know, because you never came to a time when you could say Done. Not until you were shot, like Pushkin. Or like Rimbaud, until you just stopped for good, for ever.

  What door, what window was this she felt open within her? God how small it was, how deep.

  He came back into the room.

  “I have nothing to give you,” he said. “No food, no drink.”

  “I don’t want anything.”

  “Come, sit.”

  But she had grown shy, afraid of him or for him, and turned away. The great television in the corner like a bored beast: she went to it and pressed the large button that must mean On, and it came to life. A gray western, one she recognized: she didn’t remember at first what story it told, only the huge sky, the horsemen.

  “Where are you going?” she said, though she had promised herself she wouldn’t. “If you go.”