The Translator

by John Crowley

  “If I go? To the wind’s twelve quarters.”

  “Can’t you say?”

  “John Gwayne,” he said. He pointed to the television. “Do you know?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know.”

  “A big man, always in the right.”

  “Yes.” Once in the summer she had told him what she had heard or read somewhere was a motto of the Texas Rangers: A little man will always beat a big man, if the little man’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.

  She had begun to shiver, small flutters crossing her breastbone and her shoulders. He put his arm around her.

  “What’s going to happen,” she whispered. “What’s going to happen to us.”

  He said nothing for a time; she felt his breath taken, released. There could be only one thing she meant by what she said.

  “Well,” he said. “Now is near dawn in Moscow. Nikita Sergeyevich has slept in his office in his clothes; he does not want to be caught in his nightclothes if U.S. has decided on war. He did not sleep well.”

  Kit turned further into his arms and closed her eyes.

  “There is new letter from Dr. Castro in Cuba,” Falin said. “He is angry and afraid. From all that he has learned he knows that U.S. will attack Cuba in two, three days. Why does Soviet Union not announce that missiles on the island will be fired at U.S. if Cuba is invaded? So far Nikita Sergeyevich has not even stated that such missiles are present in Cuba. Why not?

  “Well. Nikita Sergeyevich will have tea and blinis and think about these things. Cuba cannot be allowed to be destroyed. Politburo thinks if U.S. invades Cuba, Soviet Union should immediately move on West Berlin, but Gensek—I mean Nikita Sergeyevitch, General Secretary—does not see what Berlin has to do with anything.”

  He bent back his head, looking up, as though looking farther. “By his wristwatch he sees that now it is midnight in America, in Washington. Dawn has not yet reached Ukraine. All West still asleep; because the world is round, and turns its face by hours to the sun. Nikita Sergeyevich, when he thinks of this, remembers always the schoolroom where first he learned of it, and his teacher there, and the smell of the stove, and how hard it was to understand this, and believe it.”

  “What will he do?” she asked.

  He shrugged a slow shrug, shook his head, held out his hand toward the television, as though from it alone could come the future. “Two great ones,” he said. “And neither in the right.”

  “They said it’ll be long,” Kit said. “Months of hardship and danger. The President said.”

  He shook his head. “No. Will come quickly now.”

  She felt again the height of cold air above them, the stratosphere; the rocket’s arc through it, arc-en-ciel.

  “Tell me,” he said. “If you could make it stop, then would you?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Of course I would.”

  “If to stop it meant that you would yourself not survive?”

  She pulled herself away to look at him, to see why he asked. “Well you’d have to,” she said. “You couldn’t refuse.”

  “Ah well. You would have to. Is not the same as would you. Wouldn’t you be afraid, wouldn’t the loss be too great to think of?”

  “You wouldn’t think,” she said. She hoped she wouldn’t; hoped she would not be given time to think. “It would be like being on a sinking ship, the Titanic. You’d have to let the women and children go first. Automatically. You’d have to go down with the ship, if you were the captain.”

  “You would. But what if no one would know of your sacrifice. If no one knows of my sacrifice, no one could know it was not made. Better to live, no? Better to live than die.”

  “But everybody dies.” She couldn’t tell what side he wanted her to take, what he wanted to hear her say.

  “Perhaps trust to chance,” he said. “It has not yet happened. Perhaps once again it will not. We live in danger but are never destroyed. Perhaps still never.” She could see in the silver light of the television that his brow glowed with sweat in the cold room. “I mean, so you might think. You might think, What if my sacrifice is not necessary? What if danger will pass anyway? Then every day that did pass, and the destruction did not come, you would think, Aha: I was right, how foolish I was to think of acting; I need not be hero, and I am still alive here.”

  “That sounds like hell. Like…damnation. Waiting. After your one chance has gone by.”

  He said nothing for a time. A great restlessness seemed to be in him, in his breathing, a vortex inside his still exterior.

  “And if,” he said then. “If you loved someone, who must take such action, make such sacrifice. What then? Would you let them go?”

  “Wives in war do.”

  “Not willingly. Not always.”

  “My mother didn’t,” Kit said. “She didn’t. She begged my father not to go. She had a baby son when he went down to enlist. She stood crying on the doorstep with the baby and calling after him. So she says.” Falin arose, as she spoke, from beside her, and stood at the window looking out; had he even heard her? “Anyway, he got stationed in Washington, about six blocks from their apartment.”

  “Hardest thing,” he said, not to her. “Is not suffering. Much harder is to remember what you did to avoid suffering. What you were willing to do. This cannot be erased.”

  She lowered her eyes. On the television John Wayne brought home the white girl who had been taken by the Indians, brought her home to her mother in the bare bleak house on the desert. And turned away. When she and Ben had watched it years ago she thought he would kill the girl when he found her in her buckskins and feathers. He didn’t do that but he couldn’t stay there either. He turned away, turned to go, taller than any human, tall enough to walk on in that place, against that sky.

  “Kyt.” He still faced the window and the dark. “Do you have the translations we made, the poems of this summer?”

  “Yes. All of them.”

  “What do you think, are they poems in English?”

  “I don’t know. I hope. I think.”

  “So much undone,” he said. “So much that should be done.”

  “What we did,” Kit said. “Working on your poems. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was harder than I thought anything could be.”

  “And yet you did it.”

  “Yes. It was wonderful. It was…it was like water.”

  He seemed to hear her then clearly, and turned to her. “Now you will write your own poems,” he said. “And that will be harder still, and more wonderful still.”

  On the television their station had run out, and showed only the American flag flying, and the national anthem began, like a burst of cannon. An awful weariness seemed to be filling her up, from her toes and fingertips inward to her heart. He sat again by her on the couch; he touched her throat, where she held her own hand. “What is it?” he asked.

  “It hurts,” she said. “It hurts a lot. I don’t know why.”

  “Ill?”

  “I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like that, like a cold. I feel…like I’ve been crying for a long time.”

  “Perhaps you have.”

  “I’m so sleepy.”

  “Yes.” He took her hands and lifted her from the couch; she put her arms around him, her cheek on his shoulder, because she was tired of refusing to. She pressed her lips to his throat and the vein that beat along it. She would make him not turn away. But he didn’t turn away. After a time he led her to the small room, and she wouldn’t lie there alone, or release him at all: she drew him down beside her.

  “I should not touch you,” he said. “I have no right. You so clean and unsoiled.”

  No: she held him, took his face in her hands. She wondered if he could really believe it was so, that there was anyone anywhere unsoiled; or if he meant to warn her or ask her. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “Take me.”

  “Ah no.”

  “I will. Anywhere.”

  “Everywhere is here.”

/>   His arms seemed enormous. The heater in the far room boomed softly, igniting. The window in its wooden frame spoke a little note. The gray cat on the rug, indifferent, couldn’t keep its eyes open.

  “I don’t really know anything,” she said. “About…I never found out.”

  “There is not anything,” he said. “Everything is known.”

  It wasn’t so, that everything was known; she was sure of that. But with him now it was plain what they should do, that they shouldn’t refuse anymore. She didn’t know anything but there was nothing now she had to guess at or decide about, to stop at or shrink from. She found that out, there, then: that you didn’t always have to dare yourself, or make yourself; “yourself” could just be carried along, marveling, willing nothing, and who could have guessed that? It was the last thing she would have expected. She laughed, and he asked her why, but she knew she didn’t need to answer, that he only asked because lovers do, just to hear her speak.

  “You laugh and cry at once,” he said

  “No,” she said, “I don’t. No that’s silly. No one can. They just say that.”

  “You do, now.”

  “Well,” she said. “Okay then.”

  It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair: that with him she moved from wonder, and then knowledge, to those astonishing tears and cryings-out without a name that come when everything inside is breached; and then to other things, to plain belonging and necessity, a necessity as profound and permanent and easily slaked as thirst. And then they couldn’t do without each other; and that was fearful and awesome, but there was no reversing it, no matter what. The last stars paled, the casement window opened on the cold dawn; they went out, they went on. She got lost, and went on alone; then she was found, and lost, and found again; they went on, they grew old, they died together. That’s what it seemed like.

  And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened. So it had to be that there was really nothing to remember, because if there were, it certainly couldn’t be all forgotten. All she remembered with distinctness was that she slept that night in his bed, and that she awoke different. Alone. The gray cat atop her, the steady roar of its purring and the kneading of its paws on the quilt, its little cross-eyed face poised just an inch from her own to smell her sleeping breath. Nothing more.

  She saw him in the next room on the phone, the Princess, its dial alight in the dark corner. He was dressed, and wearing his overcoat.

  She heard him say words in Russian, and she seemed to understand them, but not their import. She heard him say Da. Da. Da.

  Or she dreamed that, having gone to sleep again. Then he was standing by the bed, looking down on her.

  “You slept,” he said. He said it as though she had done what she should, as though he were happy for her.

  She struggled to stand up. “You’re going? Now?”

  “I made offer,” he said. “Now offer has been accepted.” He put his hands in his big pockets. “I had hoped I could bring you back, to University. Was my intention. Now I cannot. I must go.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Stay here,” he said. “Is not long till morning. Then call your friends. Ask to come and pick you up. Yes?”

  “No,” she said. “Don’t go.”

  “I must.” He smiled, as though to remind her of what she had said, before midnight, before she slept. “If I must I must, is it not so?”

  “No. No don’t.” There was a noise around them, a huge noise like a jet airplane’s settling on a runway, and she realized what it was: wind.

  “Kyt,” he said. He sat by her. “Listen. Tomorrow, later on, they may say they know what became of me, what happened, but they will be wrong. Because an act—any act—may be one thing in one world and something else in another world, a thing that is not like it but has its shape, that rhymes with it. A commonplace thing, accident or loss, it may mean nothing here and everything there…”

  “There’s only one world.”

  “Yes. Yes there is. Only one.” He stood. He had shed the uncertain restlessness that had afflicted him before, and it made her afraid, for him or herself. When he returned to the farther room she got up too, weak as water, pulling on her shoes, and followed him.

  “Are you,” she said, unable to believe she could guess this, say this aloud, “are you going back?”

  “Back,” he said. “No. On. I am going on.” He took from the table his black case of imitation leather, and filled it with papers, yellow copy paper, typewritten: his poems in Russian. Then he stopped, and lifted his eyes, the lamps of his eyes, to her. “And do you know. Strangest thing of all in this mirrorland. I can only go because you, Kit, my dear, my love, you want me to stay.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes and she put her hands to her mouth. When he came closer she pressed herself to him, to keep him or stop him. He took her shoulders in his hands so that he could see her face. “I can tell you now. The world, this world, is to go on; it will not end. That is certain now, this day, this morning. No bomb will fall. You will have a life that you must live, a long one it might be. Instead of closing now, it opens, do you see? So you must learn to speak, Kyt. You must find ways to speak.”

  “I could with you. Without you I can’t.”

  “You can, for you must. Oh my dear love, don’t you see. You have to say. For them, for him. For my sake too.” He held her again, his cheek pressed to hers, and he spoke softly in Russian; she heard her own name, and a diminutive of it, and other words she knew, and then words she didn’t know and would never remember.

  “I must go.”

  She released him, having no choice; without haste he picked up his case, and took from his pocket a shiny key on a length of gray twine; he looked at her and seemed to have passed away already, to be seeing her clearly but from a great distance.

  At the door he turned, as though there were a thing left to say that he had not yet said. “You will see me soon, Kyt. I promise this.”

  He went out.

  She knew, by now, what it is when someone walks away or goes away saying they’ll return, how you can know that they won’t, that they are already lost to you even in setting out. She knew it and she couldn’t go after him, she couldn’t cry out or call him back. The gray cat came around her legs and purred and stroked her in its soft selfish ignorance. She heard the car start, and its lights colored the yard she could see through the windows; the light swayed, diminished; the sound diminished.

  She took her coat, went out into the yard. The wind was increasing, an autumn storm come, or passing overhead. The road was entirely dark, only the occluded moon outlining it, and she began to walk along it, and then to run, knowing how far ahead he was, how far behind she was, but running anyway. The tall roadside trees thrashed their limbs and lost their leaves in great cascades.

  The main road was dark and empty too. The way east, the way west. She stood, breathing hard. Then down the straight road far away she saw two headlights coming toward the place where she stood. As she watched they seemed to come on with awful, impossible speed, the lights of a huge vehicle, roaring. No, the lights weren’t one vehicle but two motorcycles, two that had drifted apart as they came on, fooling her. Still her heart raced. They were unbearably loud. They passed by her, one, then the other, both black, and went on down the straight road.

  There was nowhere for her to go, nowhere to follow. She went back toward the house, where only the light in Falin’s room was still lit and waiting. She shut the door she had left open. In Falin’s bedroom his quilt was thrown back, his shirt on a chair. She took the shirt in her hands and inhaled its odor; she crawled into the bed beneath the quilt. She drew her legs up and held his shirt to her cheek as she had for so long held her white lamb. Just please don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him she prayed, to what powers she didn’t know. The wind diminished. She lay unmoving, and after a long time he
r heart ceased its banging and she knew, astonished, that she would sleep again.

  10.

  All that night a storm moved over the Gulf too, and toward morning Cuba was beneath it: rain and wind and the palms wild and the sea coming ashore to cover the roads and wash away the beaches. Cuban and Soviet officers in the northeastern mountain posts watched it through the knocking windows of their command posts, small shacks with corrugated roofs, and wondered how long their equipment would remain functioning. All the MRBMs on the island were now ready to be fired; they lacked only their nuclear warheads, which were stored away from the missile sites and heavily disguised by maskirovka, camouflage, the same word Soviet intelligence used for all misdirection, disinformation, false stories, entrapments. The twenty-four warheads for the R-14 IRBMs remained on the Aleksandrovsk, now rocking in the stirred waters of La Isabela harbor. At about ten o’clock the clouds parted; an antiaircraft unit in the mountains above Banes was alerted that a U-2 had been sighted near Guantanamo. It seemed certain that it was taking pictures in preparation for an attack the following day. The officers at the station had been forbidden to fire on U.S. aircraft without orders from the Soviet commander on the island, but they couldn’t reach him; the U-2 would be out of Cuban airspace in just minutes. The officers made their own decision: an SA-2 surface-to-air missile was fired up through the rainy air, found the U-2, and exploded near enough to it to bring it down. The pilot died in the crash.

  American plans called for an immediate retaliatory strike on any SAM bases in Cuba that attacked an American aircraft. As soon as the report could be confirmed, the news went to the President. The assumption was that the Kremlin was deliberately intensifying the crisis by ordering an attack on an unarmed U-2.

  Great feeble angels, long-winged and slow, all eyes. At almost the same moment, though so far from the sun it was still in the dark of the morning, a U-2 from a SAC base in Alaska strayed into Soviet airspace over the Chukotski Peninsula. Soviet MiGs rose to intercept it, and at the same time, in response to the U-2’s call for help, American F-102s armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles scrambled and headed for the Bering Sea. With just a few minutes to go before contact, the U-2 managed to fly out of Soviet airspace: as unintentionally, it seems—as helplessly, as accidentally—as it had wandered in.