The Translator

by John Crowley

  She thought she understood then, that he had shown her these things so that she would know he was right: she could never understand his poems, they couldn’t be changed like money. “Okay,” she said. “I guess I see.”

  “It’s very hard.”

  “Yes. Well. It’s interesting.” She got up, went to set her glass by the sink. “I’d better be going back. I have a, you know. Curfew. And lots of homework.”

  He got to his feet. “You must go?”

  “Yeah. I guess.” She shrugged, and turned away suddenly from his look; outside, beyond the darkening porch and the garden, the evening was changing from gold to blue. He opened the screen door for her, and together they walked around the house to where Kit had left her bike.

  “May I ask you something?” he said.

  “Yes sure.”

  “Will you come back?”

  A soft seawave lifted her. He had spoken as though what he asked might be hard to grant him: as though he knew he might be refused.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I will. Yes.”

  “We might read again.”

  “If you want to.”

  “Perhaps you will go for a ride with me,” he said. “In my car.”

  They had come around to where it was parked, the two-tone convertible gleaming as though wet, its heavy chrome turned pink with sunset.

  “That car is yours?”

  “Yes. It is new.”

  “I can see.”

  “You like it.”

  “Well.” She regarded it; it seemed, like all its kind, to be preening, smirking, inviting. “It’s kind of large.”

  He went to lean against the door, as though posing for a picture. Kit, remembering Jackie’s Beetle, wondered if like the wizards who once hid their souls in gems or in trees, men now hid their souls in cars, which then were like them. Or which disguised them: as this one surely did.

  “When would you like to come again?” he said.

  “When,” she said. “Well.”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Can you come tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And will you?”

  “Yes,” she said, laughing. “I can and I will.”

  He said he would come and get her, but she didn’t know how that would look, and told him no, she liked to bike. She changed after her dinner, putting on a shirtwaist dress of dotted swiss; thought of wearing her linen shoes with the little heels too, but that meant stockings, and suddenly feeling foolish she put on smudged white sneakers over her bare feet. She wished her legs were tanned; what was wrong with her that she looked always like she’d just climbed out of a cave or a rain barrel. And a red sore right in the middle of her shin, where had that come from, didn’t she even notice when she banged herself bloody. She licked a finger and rubbed at the scab.

  He was waiting outside his house, in the front yard by his car; he wore sunglasses though the sun was low.

  “Ride I promised you,” he said.

  “If you want,” she said.

  “Good.” He pulled open the heavy door for her and when she was in he slammed it shut; went around the back of the car, long trip, and to the driver’s side.

  “So did you get a license?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve driven cars before?”

  “Trucks. In war. Easy.”

  He drove his car as though it were a truck, carefully putting it in gear, backing around and out, turning with caution onto the road. He held the ivory steering wheel with both hands, constantly working it, as an old person does. They crept along.

  “Which way?” he asked her at the highway.

  “West,” she said. “Away.”

  “In Russia,” he said, “east is away.”

  The corn was tall and green on either side of the road, but far in the middle of the fields they could see where an acre of ground had been raised above the rest, and on it a small stand of trees left to grow, whose name she didn’t know when he asked. A dusty road went out that way, drawn right along the section line, but then bending around and up to the knoll’s top.

  They got out there. Because for so far in all directions the land was flat and mostly uninhabited, they seemed to be very high. Not any nearer the tremendous clouds piling in the west, though, which were dizzying to look up at, like skyscrapers. There was a lick of breeze, lifting her skirt, then no more.

  “Silos,” he said, pointing to far twin towers, midnight blue for some reason and not red. “This word I learned from your poem of last year.”

  “Oh?” She felt a sudden small self-consciousness, as though he had brushed against her.

  “Yes. I looked up the word.” He shaded his eyes. “And those are silos too, the others, the ones we cannot see, far off.”

  “Not so far,” she said.

  That poem, “Silos,” had been deliberately forged to meet an assignment he had given in class. The missile silos ringing the air force base to the west were something Jackie and Max and Rodger had told her about; there was talk of a protest to be staged out there, like the protests against the Polaris in Britain. Coolly made, the poem was intended to seem like a rush of hot, indignant rhetoric.

  “Silos where nothing but the grapes of wrath are stored,” he said. “I found this image striking: the grapes of wrath. But I think is title of famous American book. In Soviet Union we all read.”

  She laughed aloud, then covered her mouth. He looked at her:

  What? And she shook her head. “It’s in an old song,” she said. “‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.’”

  Now he laughed, chagrined. “Like Italians making wine,” he said. “The Lord.”

  “Purple up to his knees.”

  “With blood.”

  “I guess.”

  “I prefer not knowing this,” he said. “I thought those grapes were John Steinbeck’s. And yours.”

  “Well. They are mine, now.”

  That made him smile. He looked to the west again. “When they fly,” he said, “those missiles, then there will not even be blood. They do not spill blood; they vaporize it.”

  “My brother Ben told me,” she said—and she realized she hadn’t said Ben’s name aloud since spring, and stopped a moment. “He told me,” she went on, “that all over the country now they have missiles on train cars, on special tracks, that go back and forth all the time, so the Russians can’t hit them.”

  He nodded, as though he knew this.

  “Or on trucks,” she said. “They only drive at night, so people won’t see them and be afraid. But they’re all linked by radiophones and they can all go off in a second.”

  “And will they?” he asked. Just as her father had. As though the combined guesses of people who had no idea and no power might be able to fire them, or keep them here.

  “I used to dream they would,” she said. “So often that I was afraid to sleep. Afraid of Russians.”

  “So strange,” he said. “You people, with daring to conceive that bomb, and knowledge to build it. Then most awful of all the courage or—what name can you give, heedlessness or—to use it. And then to lie awake in fear, and to have such dreams.”

  “Well,” she said. “I didn’t use it.” It was true, though: Americans were the only ones to have dropped one, and all you ever heard was how likely the Russians were to drop them on us: as though they were capable of what we never could be, so much destruction, such madness.

  “We’ll go back,” he said. “Possibility of rain.”

  “Just put your top up.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I was shown how this is done. But I have not succeeded in doing it myself.”

  “Oh. Oh, okay. But,” she said. “If you’re going to drive this thing, you know, really, you have to learn to drive like an American.”

  “Ah?”

  “Yes. You’ve got to have the attitude. For this car.”

  “Will
you show?”

  “Um sure. Look, like this.” She got in the driver’s seat. “See you have to relax. I mean the car does everything. You just rest.” She turned the key, and felt the soft explosion of its ignition, like the downbeat of a somber symphony, and smiled at him in delight. Then she turned on the radio and pressed the wonder bar. “Next you find some nice tunes.” Something vague and lilting came from the speaker. She reached across and with a queenly gesture pressed the Reverse button on the push-button transmission; she hooked one finger over the steering wheel’s crossbar and turned the car around and faced the way they had come. She felt his eyes on her and a bubble of exhilarated laughter arose in her breast.

  “See?” she said. “Now with this car you never need more than one hand to drive. Like this.” She laid a hand lightly on the wheel as though on the reins of a well-trained horse. “The other arm you got to hold the roof on with”—she showed him how on an imaginary roof—“or you just let it lay.” She hung her forearm limply out. “Don’t stick your elbow out too far,” she sang out. “It might go home in another car. Burma-Shave.”

  She turned the car at speed off the farm road and onto the highway, and he lurched against the door. The blacktop receded into distance before them like a demonstration in geometry. “I’m as corny as Kansas in August,” she sang over the radio music. “I’m as high as an elephant’s eye.” She picked up speed, letting her hand fall down along the car’s side as though she trailed it in the water from a gliding canoe. “See, with the automatic transmission you can even cross your legs if you want.” She showed him, crossing her white-shod feet in the deep well and pressing the accelerator with her left.

  “Brake,” he said, pointing.

  “Oh you almost never need it,” she said. “And you got time. The main thing is to take it easy. Everything’s okay.”

  Along a side road at right angles to theirs a truck was approaching; you could see it far off, could calculate its rate of approach.

  “Careful,” he said.

  “He’ll stop,” she said. “This is the highway. There’s a sign there.”

  “You who trust no one,” he said. “You will trust him to stop.”

  “People aren’t nuts,” she said. “You couldn’t drive if they were.” Why did he think she trusted no one? How had she made him think that?

  Did she trust no one? It wouldn’t be strange if she didn’t. Was that the name of the thing gone from within her?

  She uncrossed her feet, and touched her left foot to the brake. The truck, dragging its long plume of dust behind, slowed at the stop sign just as their convertible approached and passed.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said. She had taken off her shoes and sat on his brown couch with her legs drawn up.

  “You may ask.”

  “I never knew why they put you out of, of your country. I never understood. I mean, what did you do, or…”

  “Ah.” He sat by her. “This was new special idea of Nikita Sergeyevitch. New plan.”

  “You mean Khrushchev.”

  “Hrushchov, yes,” he said. “You see poems I had written had been taken abroad, and published by Russian presses in Europe, in France and in Netherlands.”

  “Yes. I know. I knew that.”

  “And I was not that poet; I was former zek, prison-camp inmate; former soldier; worker now. I was not in writers’ union. No one knew I and poet named Falin were one man. Falin the poet was gone, no one knew where.”

  That dark huge land. She hadn’t known though that you could be lost in it: she thought everyone was numbered, accounted for.

  “After Nikita Sergeyevich revealed deeds of Stalin, and those in camps of Gulag began to be freed, I wrote a letter to him. But for all to read, you know, public, or…”

  “An open letter.”

  “Always was done, you know, to write letters to the Tsar. Remind him of his sacred fatherhood; tell him of people’s suffering.” He was smiling now. “I wrote in thanks,” he said. “I wrote in hope too. I said to him that I too must acknowledge past error. My error was to hide: to write under no name: to destroy or keep secret what was not mine to conceal, these poems. And now no more.”

  “And that’s all?”

  He shrugged his big shrug, so full of unnamable meanings. “In times of Tsars was common, of course: writers into exile. Perhaps Nikita Sergeyevich was remembering this.”

  She saw in his face that he had no more answer than that for her, and she said no more.

  “And I have question,” he said then. “For you.”

  She waited.

  “Will you tell me,” he said, “why you chose to write no more poetry?”

  Poytrii. Precious stuff different altogether from whatever she had made. She wanted to ask him to say it again. “I just didn’t have anything I could say. There was nothing.” She looked at her fingertips, the blunt nails her mother deplored. “‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.’ Wittgenstein. My psychology teacher said that. A lot.”

  “But is this not what poetry must do? To say the nothing that cannot be said?”

  For a long time she didn’t answer further. It was something she had learned over the last year, how to say nothing in answer to questions, not pretend to answer or say Well or Gee now or shrug or do anything at all.

  “You do not know,” he said, “or will not say?”

  She shook her head, but only to shake her hair away from her face, and she didn’t look at him.

  “I ask this for a reason,” he said. “A selfish reason it might be. I have been wanting to have asked you question. To help me to translate my poems.”

  It seemed to her that this was one of the strange wrong turns his uncertain English introduced into conversations, little dead ends that had to be backed out of to return to the main road, and for a moment she waited. But he only folded his hands before him and regarded her.

  “Into English,” he said. “For publication.”

  “I can’t do that,” she said. “I don’t know this language at all. You said so yourself.”

  “But you can hear it. You can hear the meanings, which are part of the music. And you have English music.”

  “You don’t really mean it,” she said. “I mean why not ask somebody else, ask a real poet?” She named two at the University, major figures. “They’d be so happy to be asked. I bet.”

  “Ah well,” he said. “They are proud men. They would want to write poems of their own. I would not ask.”

  The thunder muttered toward the west. She said, “Do you actually mean it?”

  He went to the table, to the papers there. “Kit,” he said. “I have lost much. You know this. My name. Much more, you know how much. My readers. Dead, some of them—dead, Kit!—because they had my poems. Now no readers, except those few who have come here as I did, put out or escaped or run away. And a poem without readers, does it exist?”

  He let the sheets he had picked up fall from his hand, and sat down in the one wooden kitchen chair, with strange care plucking at the knees of his trousers.

  “There’s so little time,” he said. “I don’t wish to press you.”

  “Why is there so little time?”

  “Will you help me, Christa Malone? I ask for your help.”

  There was only one answer, there was and always would be only one answer, and she gave it.

  He seemed to rest then, or give way, though the essential tension that made him the way he was didn’t lessen. He scrubbed his head vigorously with his knuckles; stared at his shoes, and laughed; looked at her and lifted his hands in triumph, and let them fall.

  “Very well,” he said, nodding. “Very well, it is very well, it is very well.” He slapped his knees and rose. “We will celebrate. Our partnership.”

  She thought she had never seen him grin, but that’s what he was doing. He clasped his hands as though in prayer and went to his refrigerator; he took from the little freezer a flat clear bottle.

  “Vodka,” he said. He
put the bottle on his table, where it immediately grew a bloom of frost, and from a shelf took two tiny glasses. With a big wave he summoned her, and filled his glasses.

  “Now,” he said, giving her one.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve seen the movies. You just throw it back.” Monocled archdukes and grim commissars both did it, instructing innocents, offering another and another.

  “We can always quit if it doesn’t work,” she said. “Right?”

  He only lifted his glass to her, and they drank in a gulp. It was so cold it was thick and almost silky, and though she swallowed it a huge shudder took over her and she made a sound of horror or wonder. It seemed not like the gin she had drunk with Jackie but somehow the antidote to it, a sharp smack on the cheek to bring her around. But when he reached for her glass to fill it again she refused.

  “So you really,” she said. “You do.”

  “I do.” He filled his own glass, and drank again.

  “I feel stupid already,” she said. “Like I already tried and failed. What if you hate me.”

  He shook his head. “No, you cannot,” he said. “Failure in this has no definition. Great success may be worst failure.”

  “Well I bet I actually can fail pretty good. And would you know if I did?”

  “No. Perhaps not.”

  Lightning coruscated along the horizon far away; they could see it out the windows of the porch. “Heat lightning,” she said. “That’s what it’s called.” As though something huge and afire, an army or a navy, approached over the earth’s edge. “I’d better go back.”

  “Ah, you remind me,” he said. “I must put car in garage. It will fill with storm water.”

  “Yes. Well. Okay, you do that.”

  She sat and put her shoes on as he watched, then stood again to face him. It was a new night, one that had started like other nights but now was unlike any other night. The air was hot with the storm’s electricity that made her skin alert, or was that the vodka’s fire, which had now passed from her stomach to her toes and fingertips. His wide accepting eyes that had always made her shrink a little. She couldn’t do that any longer, couldn’t shrink, couldn’t wilt or shrivel, and she didn’t, she stood before him as though bared, and her heart beat hard enough that she thought it might be heard or seen. “Okay,” she said.