The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  8. Eta lagged far behind the enemy, but lucky for her, they had stopped to eat and look over their loot before crossing the river into their own territory. They were confident that no one had followed them, confident that they had attacked with complete surprise and would not have to worry about reprisals until spring. They were so confident in their victory that they stood on the riverbank and looked south at the land they had savaged and shouted boasts between mouthfuls of frozen pemmican. Once they were done boasting and eating, they mounted up again and began crossing the river in single file. By the time Eta could see the river between the trees, most of the sleds were on the ice and the first was almost all the way across.

  They drove their teams, supplemented by Gitim’s dogs, as fast as they could across the thin river ice, and they were weighted down with plunder. Eta wasted no time and raised the whistle to her lips and blew three short blasts.

  Suddenly the enemy’s swift retreat became a tumultuous snarl of motion. Gitim’s dogs were large—the biggest and best trained—and they were fresh, not having run through the night and all that day. So even though they were far back in the traces when the whistle blew, they jumped and twisted and tried to turn back with great energy. There was little the drivers could do to control them and the sleds stopped. Some of the sleds spilled over as Gitim’s dogs pulled them sideways, others jerked this way and that and could not move forward. The first sled in line, the one loaded with the woodstove and the washtub, was so heavy that when the sled stopped, the thin ice could not support it and it broke through. The river was deep in those parts, and with yips and yells, the driver, the team, and the sled, slid under the ice and disappeared.

  The other sleds followed, cracking and splashing, and soon the river crossing was a crossing no longer, but an icy hole, choked with plates of ice. The dogs set up a terrible howl, and the men shouted and jumped off their sleds in order to keep them from going through but they themselves broke through the ice, floundered, and were carried under.

  Bimaadiz was bundled into the rearmost sled, whose owner had, in his greed, hitched three of Gitim’s dogs in front of his own team of three. When the dogs heard the whistle they wheeled and headed back the way they had come, and the driver was thrown off by the sudden change in direction.

  Eta held her breath after she blew the whistle. When she saw the last sled in line come careening through the woods toward her with Bimaadiz’s body in the cargo area, she could not believe that he had been spared. She looked past the sled to the river and saw some of the enemy splashing along the frame of ice, trying to pull themselves out. One man, the one thrown from the sled that carried Bimaadiz, was on his hands and knees and was trying to crawl across the ice away from Eta’s side of the river.

  As the sled with Gitim’s dogs in front approached Eta, she stepped to the side of the trail and let the dogs pass and then expertly swung herself up on the rails. She shouted her commands, and the dogs lunged in their traces while taking Eta and Bimaadiz to the most remote part of her trapline. As for the enemies at the river, those who had not drowned were soaked through. The fools had burned every shelter within walking distance of their crossing point, and so they had no place to warm themselves. They were forced to walk toward their own village far to the north. The wind picked up, the temperature dropped, and their clothes iced fast. So did the men, down to the last. They all died before they reached home.

  Eta knew nothing of her victory—she was concerned only with bringing Bimaadiz to safety. She drove the sled into the lean-to since the sled was as good a bed as any and with two quick passes of her puukko she severed the leads and dragged the whole excited team to a nearby tree and lashed them fast. She ran back to the lean-to and took her first good look at Bimaadiz. She ran her fingers through his hair and felt the large lump raised by the war club—a nasty bump and a gash was all, and after she got a fire going she peeled off Bimaadiz’s bloody trousers. She cried when she saw the broken shaft of the arrow sticking out of his beautiful thigh. “Your leg! Look what they’ve done to your leg!” she cried. Her hands flew to her own thigh. She cared for him so much that she shared his pain equally.

  Carefully, she cut the fletchings off the arrow.

  “My Bimaadiz, you know this’ll hurt. But be brave.”

  She pushed it out the back of his thigh and then pulled it all the way out. Bimaadiz shouted with pain. Eta was both mortified and overjoyed because as much as his pain hurt her, pain was life, and his cries meant he was going to live. She washed his wound with hot water and pressed arrowroot into the hole. Once the wound was bandaged, she fed him raw beaver liver and swamp tea to speed his healing.

  Night fell. Bimaadiz was sound asleep and he did not toss or turn. Eta, however, could not sleep. Instead she sat next to the sled and fed the fire and in the firelight she watched Bimaadiz. She marveled at him and at her luck. For once she could gaze at him without shame and without having to hide her desire. She could stroke his hair without fear of his waking and could touch his legs and the smooth angles of his face. The enemy had given her the best gift she could have hoped for.

  But suddenly, she realized that she was covered in Gitim’s blood. It was on her arms and had caked under her fingernails, and worst of all, with no small amount of guilt, she realized that she had Gitim’s blood on her face, on her lips no less! She had kissed him, and though it was understandable, she did not want Bimaadiz to know it. So in the night hours she stoked the fire, heated some more water, stripped to the waist, and began to bathe herself. In long strokes she washed her arms, her belly, and her breasts, wiping away the blood and sweat that coated her.

  But at this point, as she bent over the kettle of water next to the fire, Bimaadiz opened his eyes. Unbeknownst to her, he could see everything. He saw the long strings of muscle along her spine, the wings of her shoulder blades, her flat stomach, and her small breasts—her body as supple and strong as that of an otter. He was surprised to learn that her breasts were tipped with small brown nipples, almost exactly like his. And the sight of her body was almost too much for him, an unexpected shock. And he felt as though he had been shot twice that day, once by the enemy’s arrow and once by Eta’s beauty.

  9. The next day Eta hitched the team, and she and Bimaadiz arrived back in Agencytown safely. Eta handed Bimaadiz over to his parents, and she immediately drove the sled over to Gitim’s parents and went out in the woods with them to bring his body back. After the funeral and after Bimaadiz had healed enough to move about the village, he and Eta went to visit Gitim’s parents together. They sat with his heartbroken family and told them of Gitim’s bravery. Bimaadiz told them of how, upon seeing him taken prisoner, Gitim had fired on the enemy without thinking of his own safety and even killed one of them before he died. Eta then told them what Gitim had done even when he was certain he was going to die: how he had provided the means for rescuing Bimaadiz and avenging his family. Many of the enemy had died in the river, all because of Gitim’s whistle. Eta tried to give them the whistle back, as a memento, but they refused. Gitim’s parents, with tears streaming down their cheeks, folded their hands over Eta’s and asked her to keep the whistle, and the dogs, too. His parents said it was clear to them how much they had loved their lazy and difficult son. Bimaadiz and Eta cried, too, for their lost friend. They thought of Gitim as their brother and they told Gitim’s parents that they should think of them as their children. They had lost one child but through his death they had gained two in his place.

  10. After Bimaadiz healed and the Stingy Moon turned into the Moon of the Returning Eagles, everything returned to normal. Almost everything. Eta resumed trapping and Bimaadiz, not without some pain and a slight limp, began hunting again. But life was different now for Bimaadiz. He could not forget what he had seen. His breath came quick and his heart beat fast when he thought of Eta’s body. Even though he had escaped life as a slave of the enemy, he had instead become a slave of desire.

  The
bell has just tinkled,

  and like a shuffle of wings, the manuscripts and pages are closed in on themselves like birds settling to roost, and they are carried, sleeping, up to the desk and the waiting cart. Each creature is feathered in tough pins of different colored plastic—cerulean, red, orange, and green. Each cover hides the white and yellow down of the more intimate pages. Dr Apelles, near the end of his labors, uncringes his hand, leans back, and surveys the room.

  For twenty years Dr Apelles has excited the quiet envy of his peers in the archive and of his fellow translators of Native American languages. He publishes four translations a year and can solve the most riddling questions regarding the origins and circumstances of anonymous texts. He is never influenced to translate anything based on the academic climate, can tell the difference between Algonquian dialects based on vocables alone, is never fooled by the colorful and meaningless reintroduction of “myths” into modern novels promoted by languageless folklorists and desperate novelists, and has so far avoided being tricked into compiling anything as public as a dictionary or as useless as a prescriptive grammar.

  Among the other researchers, there is a kind of diligence, or an aspect of diligence, that more or less makes them all look the same. The advanced student over there who furiously catalogs the 500th footnote of his dissertation as he squirrels away yet another nut in his cache of nuts, all of which have been passed over by other researchers because the meat is tiny in comparison to the thickness of the shell, looks a lot like the amateur historian with his boxes of cards and his interest, which has long before shifted from passion to mania and for whom the larger theme or epoch or battle has been so thoroughly assimilated deep within his being that he now only remembers very tiny details and to whom clings the aroma of cigar smoke wafting as though from a past age. He could easily be confused with the aging academic monitoring the progress of trains that have all stopped at the station, picked up the French heroine, and have continued on and to which the schedules no longer correspond. They all hunch over their file boxes and scan these documents and note down on notecards or plain white paper whatever it is they’ve found or think they’ve found. They hunch, glance up, look back down, and continue their work in silence, and this diligence—it can’t really be called productivity because they don’t produce anything—is so uniformly persistent, unhurried and precise that they could easily be mistaken for one another. These people form the core group of people that comprise the only community Dr Apelles has left anymore.

  After graduate school he had done his work at the university library in the city that held the papers of many missionaries and royal explorers. The library was a modern affair with glazed windows all along the south side and a courtyard in the middle where students drank coffee in preparation for another round of studying. But he quickly exhausted the texts in that library, and when no one went out to record or collect more, he sought out another haven. He found the archive and quickly saw that the amount of material there would provide him with a lifetime of work.

  The archive occupied the old customs house of the city. Inside and out it was clad in white marble and was built in the neoclassical style popular in the early 1800s. The doors were guarded by two lions and flanked by columns that supported the portico. The hallway was impressive, spacious. The left side of the building housed the administrative offices and on the right was the reading room. In the back, where goods waiting to pass through customs used to linger, were the stacks, to which no one save archive personnel was admitted.

  Once every two weeks Dr Apelles walked up the marble steps, went through the revolving doors, deposited his coat and briefcase in a locker, and entered the wood-paneled reading room, where, usually, a box was already waiting for him. He did not, as a rule, eat at the cafeteria or at the hot-dog cart drawn up on the sidewalk whose metal skin winkled in the sunlight. He worked steadily from opening till closing. Being more diligent than curious, he made steady progress through his material, and by the end of the day he usually had a tidy stack of paper to show for his efforts. The ease with which he greeted the texts, his fluency and nuanced approach, was the despair of the other researchers.

  All the year long he dressed the same, in tan chinos and a blue button-down shirt and though a little chubby, he was never seen to sweat.

  His voice was mellow and calm and all in all there was a pleasing roundness to him—from the way he finished his translations to his quiet and rich voice in which one always searched for an accent. Dr Apelles’ life resembled calm, peaceful weather, but as with windless days, there is either a storm coming or one has just passed.

  2

  Like everyone, he had his own past, if nothing else. His father farmed their allotment in the summer and cut timber in the winter. He raised two cows for milk that he sold in the village and two pigs to butcher in the dark of the moon in October and again in April. His mother looked after the cabin, hauled water, harvested rice in the fall, and, when time permitted, set nets in the lake to supplement their diet of pork and venison. She had the habit of banging out her corncob pipe on her thigh, but she only smoked when she thought her husband wasn’t looking.

  Apelles was expected to help his father in the fields and woods and he did not disappoint him. His life, along with those of his brothers and sisters was well regulated and marked by the rhythm of hard work. Like many of the Indians in the area, they were poor, so poor it was as though they lived in a different age. They used horses instead of a tractor (unless they could borrow one) and, though Apelles grew up in the 1960s, they had no electricity or running water until just before he left for college.

  Sometimes when the weather was fine and the work was done, they would hitch the draft horses to the wagon and set off for the far side of the lake. They crossed their own fields—always planted conservatively with alfalfa and oats, forty acres of each—and climbed the hill slowly and passed into the woods. Once his father had shot a bear at the wood’s edge that had killed one of the pigs. The woods were filled with stands of maple, basswood, and ironwood. The silence was deep among the leaves, and the floor was clear of underbrush and deadfall for this was where Apelles and his siblings were sent every afternoon to collect kindling and to cut wood with a Swede saw.

  Sometimes they passed others from the village there on the tote road and his father would rein in the horses and inquire politely about the errand on which the traveler was bent and the luck with which his various enterprises were being greeted, and then he would tip his hat, cluck, and lift the reigns up, and then down, and they were off again. Once they met Apelles’ grandfather on the trail, and his father went through his usual routine, asked the same questions he always asked of strangers, spoke with him for just as long but no longer, and they continued on as before.

  They passed through the forest and into an area of scrub where they had cut pulp five years before and as a result it was now overgrown with poplar saplings and hazelbrush and then they broke through the growth. They had arrived at the cemetery.

  The old village was gone. It had been moved, family by family, shack by shack, closer to the highway, but the graves had been kept there, they could not be moved. They overlooked the lake. Apelles’ father tied the horses to the fence that ringed the graves and carried their things among the markers. There were modern stones, marble and granite that had been given a high polish, and metal plaques for the war dead, and, here and there, old gravehouses that lay solemnly on the ground. They passed through these graves until they reached their family’s section, which was dominated by gravehouses. The newest one was only a few years old; this was where Apelles’ younger sister was buried. They spread a quilt on the ground, opened the food, and his father smoked his pipe. When he was finished he put it aside and prayed quietly in the language. Apelles was always surprised, even as a child, at how delicate his father sounded when he prayed and how he sat with his feet tucked under him like a woman, so different than his usual posture o
n the wagon or behind the plow. It was as though he were a different person. After they ate, the children ran to play outside the fence, or down at the lake. As soon as they saw their father hitching the horses they stopped what they were doing and helped pack up the food and they were off for home. When they left the woods, their small shack appeared like a black stamp on the blue envelope of dusk. But the horses knew where they were and anticipating their ration of oats, they nickered and picked up the pace ever so slightly.

  During the snowy months they did not go to the cemetery. Instead, two or three times during the season they would take the pickup truck, with all of the family crammed into the cab, and drive to Gaa-niizhogamaag or Netaawaash or Zhiingwaako-neyaashing for the drum dances. His parents always sat together at the back of the dance hall. They said little to the other Indians and had no part in the ceremony. They always ate last and only when one of the messengers approached them and held out the chairs at the table. When he was a boy Apelles played with the other children outside, and later, when he was older, he sat with his parents and watched the antics during the squawdances that lasted through the night.

  Once, having left home for college, he returned for the holidays. He was twenty years old, and he accompanied his parents once again to the dance. He was amazed at the energy and commotion of the dancing for he had previously only attended as a child and so had seen the dance through his parents’ eyes. But now he saw it through his own. He marveled at the grace of the kettleman and the passion of the singers, always laughing. From across the dance hall he saw a woman he had never seen before, and as though in a trance, once the squawdance started he wove his way through the crowd and presented her with three red kerchiefs. She smiled and they set off in the circle of dancers. Every time the drum was checked she raised the kerchiefs just so, and he admired her arms in the lamplight. They chatted between songs, and he learned she was older than he was by six years, she was from Miskwaagaming, she had a child of four, and she worked for the Indian Health Service. She extolled the virtues of government work and modern housing. He left with her phone number and promised to visit her the first chance he got.