The Translator

by John Crowley

  While she slept motionless and dreamless in the University infirmary a message began to be transmitted by cable from General Secretary Khrushchev to the President of the United States. It was broadcast publicly over Moscow Radio at the same time. The weapons which you describe as “offensive” are in fact grim weapons, the message said. Both you and I understand what kind of weapons they are. It went on to say that in order to give encouragement to all those who long for peace, and to calm the American people, who, I am certain, want peace as much as the people of the Soviet Union, the Soviet government had decided to dismantle the weapons that the United States objected to. They would be crated and returned to the Soviet Union. The only condition placed on the offer was that the United States give its solemn pledge not to invade Cuba.

  In the Atlantic the Soviet ship Grozny stopped and was reported to be standing still. It was afternoon in Moscow, morning in Washington when the message had been assembled and translated. The generals and the Secretaries of State and Defense gathered to study it. The admirals and generals urged caution and the Air Force Chief of Staff demanded that Cuba be invaded anyway, everything was in readiness: but the President overruled them. He ordered that no air reconnaissance missions be flown that day.

  An aide to the President said later: Everyone knew who were the hawks and who were the doves, but today was the doves’ day.

  Kit and Fran went out into the Sunday sun. The world was still before them, as it had been the day before and the day before that, which seemed like a kind of miracle: that there should be students walking in groups and in pairs, and at noon the ringing of the University’s famous carillon. Fran groaned and held her ears as they walked.

  The strangest idea, Kit wanted to say to her. Fran I have the strangest idea, I can’t even say it. But not even that much could she say.

  What she thought was that maybe he was supposed to disappear. Maybe it was supposed to look as though he had died, but he hadn’t, he had gone on. She knew this was possible, that people who were in danger could be made to disappear, or seem to have died, when really they’d been helped to escape, helped to safety. But how could that be? There was no escape; he had already escaped. There was no place left that was safe.

  Jackie would be able to tell her, tell her that she was nuts, to calm down. Or maybe not. He had gone too, without a word.

  At nightfall a telegram was delivered to her, that had made its way to the campus and to her tower and her room. It was in a yellow envelope with a cellophane window. She took it from the proctor who had signed for it, an object she had never held in her hands before.

  “Open it,” Fran said.

  It was just as in the movies, a paper with typed lines of capital letters stuck on and the dots between phrases that meant stop. It was from George and Marion; the picture of Kit in the front row of the demonstrators must have appeared in their paper too.

  THREE QUOTES COME TO MIND ONE MY COUNTRY MAY SHE ALWAYS BE RIGHT BUT RIGHT OR WRONG MY COUNTRY TWO I DISAGREE WITH WHAT YOU SAY BUT I WILL DEFEND TO THE DEATH YOUR RIGHT TO SAY IT THREE IS THIS TRIP NECESSARY LOVE MOM DAD

  She slept most of the day and night. In the morning she found in her mailbox a postcard, mailed on Friday, a picture of the carillon on campus. The message said only I’m sorry. Will write later and explain.

  It was from Jackie. He hadn’t signed it but she knew.

  The short answer is, he’s gone. That’s what Saul had said to her when she asked. The short answer. She felt a kind of warning tremor begin deep within her. She thought of the kitchen at East North Street, when Saul and Fred were pretending that Fred was an FBI agent. A joke. But there had to be one, they said: wherever two or three are gathered together in my name. And when she had agreed to spy on Falin, Jackie had been there, outside the dean’s office, appearing by chance but not by chance. And she had told him everything after that, everything she learned.

  She crushed the card into her pocket. The tremor within her had risen to a kind of roar like the roar she felt in her head and breast when she awoke from shocking dreams. She set out across campus. The morning was white with cold.

  The dean of students was just arriving at her door as Kit reached it too. She tried to avoid Kit, pretending not to have seen her coming up the steps behind her, but Kit called out to her. “Excuse me. Wait.”

  “Well?” the dean said.

  “I have a question,” she said.

  For a moment the dean said nothing. Breath came from her red mouth. Then she let Kit through the door and went to the office, Kit following. The secretary’s desk was empty, her typewriter shrouded and her lamp off.

  “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can tell you,” the dean said. She sought amid a huge bunch of keys for one that would open her own office door. “Just like you, I’m waiting for news. I’m afraid though that we’ll have to prepare ourselves for the worst.”

  “I was wondering,” Kit said, coming into her office behind her uninvited, “if you could find Milton Bluhdorn. He might know something. I think he might know something.”

  The dean at her desk looked at her as though trying to choose among several responses; Kit could see them come and pass in her features despite her masklike makeup.

  “Well I would have no way of contacting him,” she said at length. “And why…What is it you think he would know?”

  For a fearful moment, Kit wondered if she herself knew more than the dean did. “Professor Falin was really afraid of him,” she said, which wasn’t exactly true. “He was.”

  “How did Professor Falin know about Mr. Bluhdorn?”

  “I told him.” The dean seemed to be twisted inside by feelings she wanted not to show; she held herself erect as for a formal photograph, hand on the back of her big chair, but her white fingers pressed deeply into the leather. “You knew I would.”

  “I know you are a very reckless young lady.”

  “Why did you let him come here? Mr Bluhdorn. Why did you let him come in here and ask me those things?”

  “These aren’t matters I can fully explain. Not to you. Mr. Bluhdorn represents our government. There was no reason at all to question his motives or his, his.”

  “Well can you help me reach him? Please.”

  “You are not going to see him again. His work here is done.” She clasped her hands behind her and lifted her chin, as though trying to grow taller. “I want you to understand me,” she said. “Everything that was said in this room between you and me and Mr. Bluhdorn was said in the utmost confidence. You are to say nothing at all about anything that took place here, or anything that was asked of you. That’s required, Christa.”

  “You shouldn’t have let him come here,” Kit said.

  “If you do say anything, anything at all, then what you say will be denied,” the dean said. “You can see why that would be necessary. I’m afraid that no one would believe you in any case.”

  Kit turned away, stricken, and went to the door.

  “Where are you going?” the dean asked.

  Kit stopped but didn’t answer.

  “You should know,” the dean said, “that the police will be at Professor Falin’s house this morning. They are going to be making a thorough search; they have told me so. I would think they would be there already.”

  She had left her desk and come close to Kit, who backed away; she took Kit’s arm in a red-nailed hand. Kit couldn’t look away; she felt her lower lip tremble, as though she were a child caught in the sudden grip of a hostile adult, knowing nothing but fear and baseless guilt. “Now listen to me carefully, Christa. Your years here at the University could be the best years of your life. Don’t, don’t put them in jeopardy. Do you understand me? I want you to tell me that you understand me.”

  Kit held still, refusing assent.

  “I will tell you something else,” she said. “And I mean this in the sincerest way. You should break off with your left-wing friends. They’ll do you no good. You can blight your life by whom you associate with. I know
this. No matter how smart and capable you are. They’ll always have that on you, a connection like that. And when they have need of you they’ll use it.”

  Something had happened to her face, something subtle and terrible. Kit shrank away, extracting herself, in fear and pity.

  “You don’t understand,” the dean said. “And maybe you won’t for a long time. But I’ll tell you this. I wish that someone had told me what I’m telling you, when I was young. I wish that very much.”

  Outside Kit stood for a moment on the step. She had lost the power to look back or ahead, Epimetheus and Prometheus, she had strength only to act. She started across campus walking fast until the breath stung in her throat, then slowed until her heart ceased to pound, then ran again. At the campus gate where the cars went in and out she stopped again and leaned on the rough stone pillar. College Street ran down from here to town, down to the square and the courthouse, the Woolworth’s and the big hotel. From the drugstore on the corner the Greyhound buses departed. It seemed far away, as though it would recede from her if she tried to reach it.

  She did reach it, and at the soda counter asked for a ticket to the capital, the next bus, when would that be? Her fingers trembled as she unfolded crumpled bills from her purse and sought for change to make up the difference. The big freckled woman looked on her with interest, wondering maybe what Kit was running from.

  “There. That’s right. Right?”

  “Yep. Bout nour.”

  “What? Oh. Yes. Thanks. Okay.”

  In the drugstore’s phone booth were two phone books, a slim battered one for the college town, a fat one for the capital. The Case Columbia Foundation was listed, and its address; she wrote it on her palm with a ballpoint.

  She had watched him on that night, speaking on the Princess phone, putting it down. Would he have done that or had she only dreamed it? He’d put on his coat then and picked up his briefcase; and into it had put all the poems in Russian that he had typed on the Undervud. When they found that briefcase it was empty, they said. And once before she had seen him put his papers into that case, his poems, readying himself for a journey to the capital, and she had wondered why.

  One hour. Her heart still thudded as though she had not stopped running. She sat on the last stool of the soda fountain and looked out the window; she had spent all her money on the ticket, she could buy nothing.

  It was where he had gone, or where he had been going. If it had not been, maybe they would know, they would know something. She would make them tell her what they knew: what had been done to him, what had been planned for him, what had gone wrong.

  A front, Max had said; a shell, just a conduit for funds. She could see it, a blank granite building like a bank, closed dark doors, a brass plaque that said nothing but its name. A front. She would have to pierce it. She would have to believe it could be pierced. And then.

  And then beyond it lay another front. Beyond those doors. If she had the courage to do this, now, to go as far as she could, she would only reach a point beyond which she couldn’t go, beyond which she failed.

  Beyond the dean of students and beyond Milton Bluhdorn and beyond the Case Columbia Foundation there were other fronts, for powers that went on without an end. And that’s where Falin had gone, where he was able to go, where he had been summoned or had chosen to go. To find them or defy them or to bargain with them. The behind-the-mirror world he had come from was not a place on this earth, and the place to which he had gone, gone back or gone on, it wasn’t either. We have kissed at that frontier he wrote to her. She would never find him or see him again, he would traverse that distance until he was too small to see any longer or even to remember.

  She knew then what world she lived in. As though one of the missiles that had not fallen the day before now fell into her depths and there went off, she understood what world she lived in, what sky she lived beneath. They didn’t know it, the colored cars passing and the sham courthouse and the helpless people on the street; Milton Bluhdorn might know it, and Jackie Norden might not, but she knew it, she knew it in her heart’s root and could never unknow it. If she cried out in this world her cry would make no echo.

  “You okay, miss?”

  “Yes. Yes. I’m okay. I.”

  “Need a glass of water?”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Kit said. “I’m not going.” She slid from the stool, pulling her jacket around her.

  “Well hold on a second. Hey. Don’t go till I give you your money back.”

  “Oh. Oh right. Thanks.”

  To defy Power, which seems omnipotent. And if it really was omnipotent, what then? What if it didn’t seem to be but was? What kind of being was he, that he could dare to challenge it? He had asked her to let him go and she had, and she felt his leaving as though the vast implosion within her went on and would go on without an end.

  It took her a long time to reach Tower 3 again. In the lounge the television was on; and before the single watcher changed the channel, Kit saw again the convertible, the river. Then a scene of divers in black rubber, frogmen, letting themselves down backwards into the opaque waters where he was not.

  12.

  “So the poems were lost,” she said to Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov.

  They still walked with her by the river, this Russian river, three or four of them, unwilling to go home; they walked, and she told her story again, it seemed they would never tire of hearing it. She had thought at first, when they came down into the street, that dawn had come while they sat so long in the gold-and-white restaurant; but no, it was that day had never gone: the White Nights of the city on the gulf.

  “Lost,” he said. “Lost.”

  “I had only the translations, and there was no one to ask, no one to tell. I hid them. It was silly. I thought I had to.”

  “You were afraid,” said the dark-eyed woman, as though she knew; as though it were simple, obvious. “You could not know. You were very afraid.”

  “I was.”

  She hid herself too, for a long time afterwards, one way and another. She ran to hide, from what she had first understood in the drugstore on the square, what she had touched, what had touched her. She ran as though to escape its notice, first from school, dropping out before she graduated and making her way over the country to the coasts, and after that even out of the country for a time. Falin and his disappearance ceased to be news; they said the case remained open but nothing was done, and she didn’t dare pursue what they so obviously didn’t want pursued: even to think of doing that made her afraid, made her think of running again. All that while the poems she had made with him were locked away, waiting.

  It was only when others who were braver than she was stood up to it—to them, to that secret power—gave a name to it, spoke truth to it; only when they came out in their thousands and then tens of thousands singing Dona nobis pacem, that she found she could too. And she went to find the work that Falin and she had done together, and think about it, and about the summer days.

  “He said there wasn’t much time,” she said. “He always knew there wasn’t much time, and he was right. He knew that those poems would be lost, or taken; that they would be taken away from him.”

  “Perhaps he did,” said Gavriil Viktorovich.

  “I was sure it was why he wanted the translations made, when he didn’t believe in translation. I thought he needed me, that I was helping him save his poems from being lost. I thought he chose me because I would do it: I would do it as he wanted it done, would only help, and not put myself into what was his. And I didn’t mind.”

  “But was not so?”

  “No. What we had done together were not his poems, really, but mine. He knew that.”

  “Why then?”

  “I think that he hoped he could pass on to me something he couldn’t keep any longer. He wanted it for me.”

  “You began then to write again.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was what he wanted.”

  “Yes.”
<
br />   “Not his poems into other poems, then. Himself into…into another poet.”

  “Sort of. Somehow.” She stopped; she had not said any of this before. “Can you imagine how strange it is to think that?”

  Gavriil Viktorovich clasped his hands behind him, lifted his eyes to his city suspended in the pale light. She had never seen a river so wide that seemed so still. “I can imagine a reason, perhaps, why he would.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Simply, he loved you.”

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “He was one of that kind, it is easy to think, who to those he loved might give all he had, at once, without thought of gain.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes he was. He was one of that kind.”

  “Sometimes to give away is the only way to keep.”

  “Yes it is.”

  “So then it was he who was truly the translator,” said Gavriil.

  She nodded. The streetlights and the Neva sparkled in her vision and she pressed the cuffs of her shirt to her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “All along.”

  They offered to have Vasili Vasilievich and the black ZIL sedan pick her up the next morning at the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel and take her to the language institute where the conference would begin, but she refused, wanting to make her own way there. And reluctantly Gavriil Viktorovich wrote out the directions for her.

  Early then she walked down the wide steps of the hotel and into the morning crowds. The city’s smell was distinct; Kit thought every city had its own, one you recognize when you return to it even if you can’t remember it when you’re away: it’s what makes you know it’s actual, not a notion or a dream, this smell of yeast and mist and drainpipes, warm stone and the exhalations of open windows, unique and indisputable. She carried with her in her bag a copy of Life magazine from 1961, the year Falin left the Soviet Union and came to America. It had occurred to her that here in this country almost no one could know what he looked like, and if she could find it she might bring them the one picture she knew of, the one of him weary and wary in Berlin, smiling, his tie askew and the tiny end of a cigarette in his fingers; and she had found it, this issue amid others in an old bookstore. His lost face.