The Translator

by John Crowley

  No rain fell that night on the University campus, but the leaves of all the trees, yellow elm and hickory, gray-green ash, coppery oak and beech, seemed to have fallen at once in the night: long wind-combed rows of them moving in the still-restless air, dead souls lifted and tossed on gusts.

  People were in motion too. Kit crossing the campus from the College Street gate felt them, small eddies or flocks, people coming in from Fraternity Row and from town in numbers, the way they did on class days, hurrying together toward their classes in different buildings; but this wasn’t a class day, and they seemed to be all going one way. She went that way too. She’d awakened in the dawn light in Falin’s bed, and had not dared or wanted to lift the phone from its cradle. She’d left the empty house and walked in the frost to town, so strangely weak she had to stop now and then to rest, until she came to the All Night Cafeteria. She sat there with a coffee, thinking of nothing, wondering at the pain in her throat. Was she really sick? Her head felt not light but heavy, made of mud or stone; when she rested it on the cold plastic tabletop and closed her eyes, the waitress shook her awake, and told her not unkindly that she couldn’t sleep there, which maybe people did a lot, and she got up and found a quarter to pay with and went up toward the University.

  Many people were running, or hurrying as though not to miss something. They were becoming a crowd, rivulets flowing together into a stream and flowing faster. The earth rose up a little there, between the student center and the science building, beyond which lay the central axis of the campus, a broad way starting at the auditorium and lined with the newer buildings. That’s where the crowd was going, following the paths or pouring over the grass and through the leaves. Kit came to the top of the rise and saw what it was: the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and the other groups were marching, a little band with signs. Kit could just hear, like a plea repeated, the marchers’ voices, and the cries and shouts of the people around them, moving with them and pressing on them, a gauntlet they passed through. There were no more than twenty or thirty of them.

  She went down that way, drawn along. There was Saul Greenleaf, in the front, and Rodger in a jacket and tie and his porkpie hat. Max was in back keeping the group together. Black-and-white cars of the University police were pulled up along the route, their lights revolving and their radios emitting staticky communications louder than the protesters’ chants. Up on top of the auditorium Kit could see watchers and the tall tripods of cameras with long lenses, men with binoculars. She thought of Milton Bluhdorn. Jackie had said it would do her no good to be here: did he know it would be like this? Photographers scooted along the march route too, and some of them looked like news photographers, and some of them didn’t.

  She felt a tug at her sleeve, and pulled away, threatened. It was Fran.

  “Unbelievable,” she said in cold scorn. “Can you believe this?”

  It seemed that in a short time the furious crowd would fall on the demonstrators and beat them or worse. Kit and Fran went down the slope, hurrying as everyone hurried.

  “You can think what you want,” Fran said. “You can say what you want. But this is ludicrous.”

  A sign that read Hands Off Cuba was torn from someone’s hands and ripped to pieces to awful cheering.

  “Who are these people?” Fran said. “College students? They’re rednecks.”

  “Fran.”

  “Well you hear what they’re saying? ‘Commies go back to Russia.’ I mean come on.” She tossed down her cigarette and stepped on it. “Dopes. Know-nothings.”

  They pushed through the mass of hecklers and yellers that undulated along the march route until they were at the front of the crowd and keeping pace with the marchers. And without ever exactly choosing to, they became marchers, as though sorted from the crowd by a sorter that recognized only two kinds, if you weren’t one you were the other. Someone she didn’t know linked arms with her. Saul saw her and grinned, amazed, alight, unafraid she thought, or maybe not. A tall athletic guy was bent into his face, speaking curses meant just for him it seemed; on the guy’s crewcut head was a novelty straw hat decorated with church keys and a little sign that said Lets Raise Hell.

  “Where’s Jackie?” Kit called, but Saul had to turn away to face his opponent.

  It was what Kit had forever most hated and feared, to be pointed at and stared at and mocked. In the Passion story when she was a kid it was this that hurt her most, that the crowds mocked Jesus and spit on him. But she felt none of that now. She could see and assess the crowd around them as though they were etched. Almost all were men, many wearing their fraternity sweatshirts and their varsity jackets, some of them though in blazers and ties, with American-flag pins in their lapels and wolfish grins, not guys who got to be part of a mob very often and seeming to be enjoying it. One guy who bore down on them wore the button that the SANE women had worn, the three white lines on black, but when he came closer to Kit—so close and yelling so loud that she could see the fillings in his teeth—she saw that on his button the white lines were formed into a great swept-wing bomber, and beneath it were small letters that spelled DROP IT.

  “Keep the women in the center!” Saul yelled back at his shrinking group. “Keep the women in the center, men on the outside!” The marchers had ceased their chanting, Peace Now and Hands Off Cuba, it was obvious that it just goaded the crowd around them dangerously; but the women who walked with Kit and Fran, arms now more protectively linked than before, started to sing. They sang, amazingly, in Latin: Dona, dona nobis, dona nobis pacem.

  It was a round: one took up after the other had started, kept on after she ended. Fran laughed aloud, apparently she knew what they were singing, she right away began singing along in a loud hoarse voice perfectly on key, and Kit sang too when after a moment she got the little tune: Dona, dona nobis, dona nobis pacem, pacem, the women’s voices cycled.

  Then through the marchers and the shifting crowd coming and going, Kit saw Falin.

  He was just turning from looking elsewhere, and now his look passed over the marchers and the others with interest and something like delight. It seemed he didn’t recognize Kit in the mass of them, though she felt the instant of his look toward her like a stab of wonder.

  “Then it’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay.”

  “What’s okay?” Fran said.

  “It’s him,” Kit said. “Falin.”

  He was coming closer to them, it seemed. Kit was about to call out to him when he turned away, looking elsewhere. In a second she couldn’t see him anymore. But just before the crowd closed around him she saw—she thought she saw—that his big pale feet were bare.

  No. Where had he gone? There was no way to turn back, no way to leave the little group of marchers now, Kit was carried forward by all of it without a choice. She untangled herself from Fran and the women and stood still while the others passed by her, until the rear guard caught up with her and Max came close, his arms wide to keep them moving, like a shepherd.

  “We’ve got to break this up,” he said. “Somebody’ll get hurt.”

  “Max.”

  “Get up and tell Saul and the people in front. We’ve got to break it up. Go do that.”

  She went back up along the edge of the marching group, too tightly and defensively bound together now to pass through. When she came to the front she saw that Saul was less certain too than he had been, and that ahead the opposing crowd was coming together in a wall that wouldn’t let them pass. “Where’s the cops?” she heard him say. “Now where’s the cops? Free speech, people. Free speech. Land of the free.”

  In a minute the march would not be a march any longer, it would be a huddle of victims, the ones in the rear were pressing already against the slowing front rank. Almost all their signs were gone. Then, just as their forward progress was about to stop altogether, Saul stepped quickly out ahead and turned to face his group, walking backward like a drum major. With both hands he waved them to the right, off the main way and onto the walks of the campus.


  “Okay, quick!” he called out. “Keep on, keep together! We’re going to end this at the library! Everybody hear? Pass that on! At the library steps!” All the while waving them to the right and on. They did go faster too, almost broke into a run, and for the first time Kit felt fear, that they might run, and what might happen to them then. But they didn’t, even though the crowd around gave an awful cry of rage and triumph to see that they had given up and were getting away.

  But what had happened to him? Kit thought. What had he done, where had he gone?

  The library was open. At the steps Saul and Max ushered them all inside, medieval outlaws claiming sanctuary; a few though stayed outside to deal with the crowd—Saul, whose chest was heaving maybe from the unaccustomed exercise, and Max, unperturbed, hands clasped behind his back and even smiling when Kit went by him into the dark silent inside. For a moment she felt it had grown suddenly not dark but black, and her feet lost touch with the floor, as though it melted to liquid; then she felt someone take her arm, and steady her.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. Yes. Okay.”

  How long did they hide there? The librarian came to speak to them more than once, hushing them and telling them, which they knew, that the library was a place of study and work, not conversation and mingling. Someone was crying. Time passed. Above their heads, all around the base of the rotunda, were words printed in gold: A Good Book Is the Precious Life Blood of a Master Spirit. The doors kept opening to show the day and admitting more of the demonstrators, and also those who had bones to pick with them, their voices dropping to hissing whispers, until the librarian chased them away too.

  Kit sat huddled on the bench by the great doors where you could sit to pull off your galoshes or overshoes, which were not allowed in the halls and stacks.

  “Kit,” Fran said, studying her. “Are you sick?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How long since you ate?”

  “I forget.”

  Fran nodded. “I do that,” she said. “I fainted once in Saks.” She sat beside her. “Listen,” she said. “What happened. With Falin.”

  “I saw him,” Kit said. “Now, just now, out there. I have to find him. I have to.” She bent over, feeling she might fall asleep here, again, on this bench. “My throat hurts so much.”

  “We’ll go eat,” Fran said. “Hell with those people.”

  In the Castle the arguments were continuing; Max came in with an entourage of questioners, not all of them angry, and he sat to talk with them. Saul and Rodger came in too, warily.

  “Sit,” Fran said. “What do you want?”

  “Just a sec,” Kit said.

  Taking hold of the backs of booths she made her way to the phone in the back, in its little wooden house that had long ago lost its door. She called his office at the liberal arts tower but there was no answer there, the office closed on a Saturday. She called the operator and asked for the number at his house, not expecting to be told it. “Falin,” she said, and spelled it, and the operator told her what it was, Orchard 9-5066, not secret at all. She dialed, almost unable to turn the worn dial plate with her finger, why so weak. She listened to the Princess ring. Ben had told her that actually the ring you hear isn’t the one that’s heard or not heard in the room you call: just an illusion.

  After a long time she hung up.

  Fran stood by the booth where Saul and Rodger sat. “All those people,” she was saying. “It’s like they want it to go off. Like they’re tired of standing on the edge, and they want to jump. But that can’t be. It just can’t.”

  “1914,” Saul said. “War fever. The workers all joined the armies of their countries. Even though it was in none of their interests. Even though they knew it. They just did it. As though they were sleepwalking, or possessed. They weren’t even drafted. They volunteered. They were called, they went.”

  “1914 is a date in history,” Rodger said. “This isn’t gonna be, if it doesn’t stop.”

  “Saul,” Kit said. “What happened to Jackie, where is he.”

  Saul looked up at her and thought a moment. “He’s gone,” he said. “That’s the short answer. He said he had some emergency business. He threw some clothes and things in his car and left early this morning.”

  For a time she only stared at them, at Saul and Rodger and Fran, thinking she could no longer understand what was said to her. The voices of others came to her loud and resonant like noises made underwater but not seeming to be speech. Where had Jackie gone? Why would he go? “Do you have a car, Saul? I need a ride somewhere.”

  “Jeez, Kit. I don’t. I came in with Rodger.”

  “Rodger,” Kit said. “It isn’t far. Just out West North Street. I just can’t walk, I can’t.”

  “Kit what are you doing, what are you doing,” Fran said, clutching her brow.

  “I just want to go out and see,” Kit said. “I have to see.”

  “I think you should go to the infirmary,” Fran said. “I really think.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll go there with you.”

  “Rodger,” Kit said.

  Rodger regarded her, touching the tips of his long fingers together. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I am not ready to go riding a scooter through the west end of town with a white girl on my jumpseat. Arms around my waist. This ain’t Greenwich Village, girl.”

  “What if we waited till after dark,” she said.

  “Oh,” Rodger said. “Oh sure. After dark is good.”

  She looked at them. She wanted to say that if she could get there, she would just wait alone, wait until she learned something, until she knew something. She saw though that they had ceased to look at her or at one another, that their eyes were drawn to something behind and above her, first Rodger’s and then the others’, and the sound on the television above the counter was just then turned up, and the hubbub faded. Kit turned to see what they all saw.

  A police car, lights revolving, attended on a truck poised on the bank of a river, its big tires planted like feet. From the truck a cable ran, thrumming with effort as it was winched in; and what it drew up from the river, what it had caught with a heavy hook, was a car: a big new convertible. It was pulled by inches up and out of the river, and water poured from it as it rose, from the insides over the doorsills and out from under the crumpled hood.

  11.

  It must have been near dawn. The little town where that iron bridge arched the river was a couple of hours to the north, on the way, though not the main way, to the capital. Up there the sudden storm had poured a great slew of rain across a narrow band of prairie, flooding streams and washing out dirt roads. The car in the river had only become visible after floodgates downstream were opened at morning and the river’s level fell. It might have encountered another vehicle on the bridge; police said tire marks and a scattering of broken glass were visible there where the guardrail was depressed, but nothing was certain. There were plans for a full search of the river, but the authorities said that the rapid flow resulting from the downstream gates being opened could have carried a body very far. Police recovered items from the river that they said might have been discarded by a man trying to swim ashore: an overcoat, an empty briefcase, shoes.

  That was all that was said in the Sunday-morning papers that Fran brought to Kit in the student infirmary. There was the picture of the convertible being drawn up out of the river, and the picture of Falin when he arrived in West Berlin the year before. One year, almost two.

  There was another picture on the front page of the same paper, and on the front page of a Chicago paper that Fran had also brought. The little group of demonstrators, looking not only few but small, surrounded like damned souls in a Brueghel hell by the contorted crowded faces of their tormentors, yelling or laughing or cursing at them. Most of their signs already gone, except for one that read Hands Off and didn’t seem to be about Cuba at all. Pro-Cuba March Meets Massive Opposition. Kit in the front, in her leather jacket: her eyes loo
king away, as though just then catching sight of something, something not part of this conflict at all.

  “He’s not dead,” Kit said. “He isn’t. I know it.”

  “Well then why, where,” Fran said. “I mean come on.”

  The doctor came down the row of beds to where Kit lay. The infirmary was old and small and strangely smelly, the iron beds in an open row. Only one other was occupied, a boy who seemed to be weeping, weeping, face into his pillow.

  “How’s the throat?” the doctor asked.

  “Okay,” Kit said. “I guess.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to swallow?”

  “It never did. It just hurt.”

  The doctor put his hands in the pockets of his white coat. “The tests are back. You have mononucleosis. You know what that is?”

  “The kissing disease,” Kit said. “Mono.”

  “Well you get it from more than kissing. I mean you can get it in more ways than one. It’s just an infectious disease.” He bent over her and with warm dry hands felt the underside of her chin, the sides of her throat. “The pain comes from swollen lymph nodes that are producing the white blood cells to fight it off. There’s a number of nodes right along here. They don’t usually get as swollen as yours, though.”

  “Is that why she fainted?” Fran asked.

  The doctor shrugged, a little shrug, as though he knew no more than anybody. It hadn’t been he who had been here when the University police car brought her; only nurses and a student receptionist. She couldn’t make them leave her alone, they made her answer questions and show her ID card and then undress and put on a cotton robe, they took blood, they put her into a narrow bed and drew the curtains around it. Sleep, they said, but she said she wouldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, and she started to tremble again as she had before she fell down in the Castle, as though shaking to pieces. She tried to get out of the bed and a nurse held her with a strong hand and another brought a paper cup with a red pill in it, a capsule like a little shiny gout of blood. It was the same pill that the nuns had made her take the first night at Our Lady, when she had not stopped arguing, not stopped shaking. It was like a little death; she knew it, and she took it.