The Translator

by John Crowley

  The subway was different at this hour, herds of people jostling and pushing, the pressure of them at her back creating the sensation of falling headlong down the speeding escalator. By the time she had been packed into a car and the car had moved off with a high whisper, she was no longer sure she was right—the orthography of each stop’s name had to be worked out so quickly—and she was nearly carried away from the one she thought she wanted, had to fight her way off.

  She came up into a huge empty public space that seemed to have been abandoned, or to have lost its function somehow and become unclaimed, shelter for squatters, a crowd of vendors selling to the people rushing through to the streets beyond. The unventilated air was heavy. Was she in the wrong place? She tried to stop and look for signs. Every vendor with his little blanket or box or cart seemed to be selling the same goods, the same cigarettes and pens and bottles of soap or scent. Today each one was selling the same little toy, a windup girl on a tin bicycle, who went around in circles on the dirty marble floor while her dog ran leaping at her side. A dozen girls, bicycles, dogs. Somewhere someone was singing, a high, piercing cry.

  How had they come to this? A family in a pile in a corner, unspeakable blankets drawn around them, mother dead asleep. A bearded man on a plastic sheet, medals on his coat, held a densely lettered sign. Menia predali, she thought it said: “I was betrayed.” Or was it “devoted”? There was a word, a word Falin had taught her, that meant both. Devoted, betrayed. The crowds went by unseeing, just as the crowds in New York or Mexico City would: as though they passed momentarily through an alternate world that remained invisible to them, only causing their mouths to set and their eyes to fix on some distant goal.

  She hadn’t known such places could be in this country. She didn’t know they could be so abandoned, these people, after having been penned up so long, left without anything of what had once sustained them, without even their terrible abnegation at last: abandoned even by silence.

  The singer was a boy, standing on a box and clapping to his singing.

  A girl squatted by him, little as a pixie, her hair an astonishing black tangle, bent over a stringed instrument that she beat on. Another boy played an upturned plastic bucket with wooden sticks. Amazing how loud they were, you couldn’t pass by them without listening. And Kit saw—she tried to stop, despite the forward press of the crowd, to make sure—that the boy was the same who had taken her hand at the subway the night before, tried to press a rose on her.

  Yes the same boy, still in his filthy American shirt, you could see the big blue stars on it banded red and white. The song was one of those radically simple ones that seem not to have been made up but to have always been, she hadn’t ever heard it before but knew just what it would do; he moved like a rapper or a pop star to it, and maybe it was a pop song she didn’t know. He sang out the last note and jumped from his box to go through the crowd with a paper cup. Far away down the great vault two policemen were coming, Kit saw them but the little band saw them first, the girl calling out to the others to go, go. The drummer gathered his bucket and sticks and followed her, calling after the singer.

  “Nu davaj zhe,” he said. Come on.

  But he went on cheerfully working the crowd, tugging at sleeves and lifting his cup and cajoling, people laughed and shook him off or found a coin. He turned toward Kit, caught her eye and read her look, as though he knew her too.

  “Innokenti,” the girl cried. “Innokenti, davaj, davaj!”

  He went then, snatching up his box and following, looking back though with a smile even as he vanished, as though to take a bow. His smile. For her alone it seemed: had always seemed.

  Then it’s okay, she said or thought. As she had in the protest march that October day when she saw him, when he had showed himself to her, just as he had promised he would. It’s okay.

  For a breath I tarry, nor yet disperse apart.

  The crowds pushed on, new crowds from a new train, their heels loud in the marble heights, carrying Kit on. They went out into the day, she and the people on their journeys, dispersing into the harmed city. Buses jam-packed with people, and the earth below them jam-packed too she thought, and the sky above them.

  Of course they hadn’t been abandoned. They couldn’t be. They couldn’t be left all alone or there would be neither justice nor order anywhere, not even the hope of it. They couldn’t always know that he was near, of course, of course you couldn’t know, whatever else you might be sure of. You might not know even if he came close to you, passed right by you, even if he touched you. Probably you wouldn’t. And yet you might for a moment think it’s okay.

  She had come to the edge of the wide street, whose name she couldn’t find. She looked at her instructions, at the day. She had that unnerving experience that travelers sometimes have, of momentarily forgetting what city this is, what continent. She turned left, then changed her mind and went right. A large black car that had been creeping along the street by her now stopped. Vasili Vasilievich put his head out the window, waved to her, nu davaj, and reached around to open the back door for her.

  The institute wasn’t far, but probably Gavriil Viktorovich was right, she would have not found it, which is what fat-necked Vasili was apparently explaining to her as he took his rights and lefts. Then here it was, another unmodern modern building seeming to be falling apart before having been finished, and he let her out. Going up the stairs just ahead of her were a group from her dinner the night before, and they saw her and came to her. “Davaj, davaj,” they said, smiling, and took both her arms like schoolgirls, talking rapidly and bringing her within the building, where others she had met turned to greet her.

  She was hurried through the crowd of arriving conferees to the wide double doors of an auditorium, which they pushed open to let her through. It was packed, and as she came in people turned in their chairs to see her, people seemed to be telling one another who she was. Could it really be she they had come to see, and why? She wanted to stop, to resist, to run away and hide; she knew she bore nothing for them, nothing but a thirty-year-old magazine: nothing really that she could say, and even that little she couldn’t say in their tongue, in his. But Gavriil Viktorovich at the green-draped table on the platform stood up, and lifted his hand to her; and another ancient man arose from his seat as she passed, took her hand, and said, “Spasibo. Thank you. Thank you for coming so far.”

  13.

  Four days later Christa Malone flew away, from a different city than she had come to: burdened with gifts, books in a language she might now again try to learn to read, honey, photographs in awful Kodachrome and fax numbers and a little wooden doll of Gorbachev, inside him Brezhnev, inside him Stalin, inside him Lenin, inside him nothing. Forgiven for what she had done or not done; nothing to forgive, of course, nothing. And as she ascended, the city was hammered gold and gold enameling, the setting sun glancing off the river and the rainwater in the squares. One swath of strange cloud, all of a piece, stretched like a pelt of crimson lamb’s wool over the Gulf of Finland. Near it hung a burnished sliver of moon, like a wedding ring worn so long it was almost worn through, like her own. The Aeroflot turned away to the west, and as it went, it lifted the sun back up over the horizon, as though making its way back into the day before, beating into the past.

  “We came very close, you know,” Kit’s father told her. “We came within minutes—some people say minutes. Of course we weren’t told that then, how close it was. You want a drink?”

  “No, thanks, Dad.”

  She had made her return ticket for Washington, D.C., so she could visit him; she did it whenever she could, traveling down by train from conferences in New York, driving up from home during school vacations. He wouldn’t move from the old apartment.

  “How we avoided it is a mystery to me. Let me tell you something. There was a Russian colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, who was a high-level American spy in Moscow, and at the tensest moment of this thing he got arrested. The Americans had given him telephone codes to be us
ed only in the greatest emergency. One code would mean that he’d been arrested; the other code meant that a Russian attack on the U.S. was about to happen. Apparently Penkovsky used the wrong code. So the CIA had this warning of a Soviet attack. And what did they do? They didn’t do anything. They thought it was a mistake, apparently. Anyway they ignored it; they didn’t even tell the President.”

  On the windowsill he had arranged all the little Russian leaders she’d brought him, in order by size, little to big, past to present.

  “Intelligence services are famous for ignoring the wrong information,” he said. “It’s a signal-to-noise ratio problem: too much coming in through the ether. Stalin ignored warnings that Hitler was going to attack; we missed Pearl Harbor. But this time—this time they made the right guess; this time the coin flipped right side up. No reason I can see.”

  He sat, carefully, in the big armchair where no one ever sat but him, and crossed his slippered feet. “So what did you learn?” he asked. “Did he have something to do with it? Falin?”

  “I didn’t learn anything. Nothing. They wanted to learn what I know. Which is nothing too.”

  “Well what do they think happened? What had they been thinking?”

  “They think maybe he was killed by the CIA or the FBI.”

  “Why?”

  “They don’t know why. I guess they can accept not knowing; they think there are secret reasons for lots of things that can never be known.”

  He pondered, as though trying to decide if this was true, or made sense, though Kit didn’t suppose that was really what he was thinking. Then he said: “And you? Do you think that’s what happened?”

  “I used to. I used to think it must have been something like that.”

  “Now?”

  “Now,” she said: and she thought. She thought of Falin, and the child with his name singing in the naked hall in St. Petersburg. She thought of Gavriil Viktorovich holding Falin’s poem, in tears in his little apartment. She thought of Ben, choosing to fight for the right, believing that one power was right, the other wrong. “I think that back then, when he came to this country, there was a struggle going on between the angels of the nations, his and ours; and that in their anger and their fear, those angels came to destroy the world, anyway the parts of it that they were supposed to be watching over—and everything in between too…”

  “The angels of the nations,” George said blankly.

  “They should have been keeping us from harm, and maybe that was what they thought they were doing, each in its own way. But the power they had together, the power put in our own hands, was too much, and in the end they…they let it go. Mutual assured destruction.”

  “But,” George said.

  “But no, of course it didn’t happen,” Kit said, and she rose up and went to the window, as though to release her thought or her soul that way. “It didn’t, it should have but it didn’t. Because the lesser angel of one nation interceded. On our behalf. He made an offer; he offered himself.”

  “The lesser angel,” George said. “The lesser angel.”

  She turned to her father, and his face wasn’t sarcastic or mocking but only intent and listening; and she thought, How do I dare to tell this, how do I dare imagine it to be so, imagine believing it?

  “The lesser angel,” she said. “Every nation has one: an angel who is all that the greater angel isn’t. Who can weep if the nation’s angel can’t, or laugh if it never does; who is small and weak and powerless, like us. Except this once. Because the lesser angel could say: Take this as a sop to your anger. And it worked: for just a minute they were distracted, the two big ones, and thought about this, took time to consider it—and they accepted. They took what the lesser angel offered. And in that time the big moment went by. The agreement was reached. The ships stopped. The bombers went home.”

  “And what was it that was offered?” George asked. “Something mighty nice.”

  “It didn’t have to be much. It wasn’t much. It was only the thing most precious to him. What would destroy him to lose. His soul.”

  “They have souls?”

  “His self. His life.” A sheaf of papers, yellow American copy paper, the rough uneven lines of Russian words typed on the Undervud. “They couldn’t refuse that.”

  “They couldn’t.”

  “They couldn’t. They can’t. It’s how they are.”

  He was regarding her with that smile of complicity or amazement with which he had looked on her for decades, for all her life, though it had been a long time since she’d seen it. Love and wonder was what it meant, she knew now: love for her, wonder at her.

  But it was true. The disaster we were all implicated in—all of us who should have known better and spoken out, all of us who were foolish and blind and didn’t do what we should have done, and who knew it too, and still did nothing, only waited in what we convinced ourselves was helplessness for it to happen, almost as though it had already happened—well it didn’t happen. The final logic of this century, this century that believed in logic and history and necessity, the final spasm so long and well prepared: it didn’t happen, and now seemed likely never to happen. You couldn’t tell, of course, and there were plenty of other things that could and did happen—she thought of Ben—but not that one, the worst one. And there ought to be someone to thank, someone to whom to be grateful.

  “Well I don’t know,” her father said. “It doesn’t seem like enough. Their big angel lost, you know: it was a major defeat.” He indicated the row of wooden leaders with his thumb. “Khrushchev did the right thing, but we basically de-pantsed him, cost him his job, which in retrospect was maybe not as smart as we thought. So I mean—wouldn’t there have to be something additional paid in return? Something—what’s the word here, something more exacted? In return for their backing down?”

  “Exacted?” she asked. “What, exacted? What kind of thing?” It mattered not at all to George if what they talked of here was real or true; he knew how to make a train of thought come out right whether its terms were ones and zeroes or gods and angels. A kind of poet without poetry: maybe, finally, she had got her talent from him.

  “Well,” he said. He swirled the ice in his drink, all water now. “For instance. You know what happened a year later. They always connect that with Cuba too. Somehow.”

  “What happened a year later?” Kit said, and remembered even as she asked. “Oh God,” she whispered. “1963.”

  “Yeah,” said George. “Right.”

  She felt stabbed, as though the story or myth she had articulated had caused it to happen, had right now got him shot through the head in Dallas: the sacrificial goat, the tragos of our tragedy. “Oh my God.”

  “Fair Play for Cuba,” George said. “Free Cuba Committee. Castro, anti-Castro. Something somewhere somehow.”

  It’s not so, she thought, and she took hold of a chair’s back, feeling she might keel over with strangeness: it’s not so, it’s only as though. It wasn’t truth but the economy of metaphor, everything in balance, this side of the mirror with Alice’s side, only reversed: Jacqueline cradling his poor head in her bloodstained lap, just a man dying. And yet also, far beyond where we could see, the Gray Gods licking up the same blood from the same bowl. Satisfied: appeased.

  “You remember where you were when you heard?” George asked, not so much because he wanted to know, it seemed, as to change the subject, or its tendency. “You know they say everybody does. Like Pearl Harbor.”

  “Yes,” Kit said. “Sure. I remember.” On the straight road north from the University toward that city in whose suburbs she had once lived with George and Marion and Ben. Yes. That day.

  There was a little rain and the blacktop was velvety in the soft light. Kit was driving, Fran beside her searching on the radio for something besides Top 40 or preachers. It was so far only a brief sentence, interrupting the broadcast: the motorcade fired on in Dallas, the President hit.

  “It’s probably really nothing,” Kit said. “You kn
ow how they get, about every little thing.”

  “He’s dead,” Fran said with simple certainty. “He’s dead.”

  They listened, waiting for more, going north. Kit had driven back to school that fall in George and Marion’s old Buick station wagon, they had at last got something newer. She had kept it, though she wasn’t twenty-one and had to park it at a garage off campus. Fran had a friend—her best friend, she said—who was singing in the chorus of a road-show company of Camelot that was appearing in that city. Fran longed to see her, it seemed so close; and Kit had said okay, let’s cut and go.

  More news, worse. The rain got a little steadier, then seemed to pass.

  They went past the junction where a secondary road turned off toward the town where Falin’s car had gone off the bridge; after a time they crossed on a wide causeway the same river, grown great. A river to cross.

  The river of Jordan is muddy and cold

  It chills the body

  But not the soul

  Kit thought of those lines, and at last began to weep. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh poor man.”

  All my trials

  Soon be over

  It was a Joan Baez song, one of the terrible bleak songs she cried out so piercingly, at once wounding and healing. Fran had brought the records back from New York and they listened to them over and over, sometimes when drunk hugging the Webcor like a friend and pressing an ear right to the speaker grille. She longed to hear it now.