The Translator

by John Crowley

  She was to respond to that, she knew, and the dean was nodding at her, but before she could nod back or smile or speak she realized that he must have been allowed to see her grades, and what else had he learned about her?

  “So,” he went on. “Follow-up. You have probably figured out that this all might have something to do with our friend Mr. Falin, and you’re right, it does.” He crossed his oddly small feet at the ankles; his socks were argyle ones in many colors. “You probably don’t realize it, Kit, but your country went to a great deal of trouble, a lot of real risk too in a lot of places, for Mr. Falin. Making it possible for him to come out and into the free world. And in some ways that job isn’t done, and it isn’t ever going to be done. Because this is a very dangerous world we live in, a world where it’s very hard to know who to trust. And Kit that’s why we’ve asked you here, to see if you can help us.”

  Kit looked from him to the dean; the dean’s smile was gone, her eyes lidded, a weary old huntress.

  “Your father was in the war, is that right?” Milton Bluhdorn asked. “And your brother was in the armed forces as well?”

  She nodded.

  “Well there is a world war going on right now too, though it might not seem like it. It’s being fought all the time, all over the world, and maybe we see only the tip of the iceberg; when we do learn about incidents in this war we don’t always recognize them for what they are.” He leaned forward as though to come closer to her. “In this world you have to make choices,” he said. “The President said so. If you’re not pushing you’re pulling. And everybody can push.”

  If she thought of Ben now, if she let him into her thought, they would get him, she would lose him again and forever. She didn’t move.

  “I see that you’re interested in the security or intelligence services of this country as a career,” Milton Bluhdorn said. “Maybe the CIA?”

  She shrugged, or shrank: lifted her shoulders for a moment.

  “Well that’s good, that’s commendable,” he said. “Now. Here’s what we’d like to ask you, and really it is not anything at all. We would like you to go about your business and your schoolwork and your friendships just as before. Only for the next little while, the next few months or so, we’d like you to keep a little mental record for us of what you see, I mean in relation to Mr. Falin. What you see and hear.”

  A case clock ticking in the corner of the office now whirred as though awaking, and struck: One. Two.

  “Okay,” Kit said.

  “Well don’t just say ‘okay,’” he said, grinning. “Let’s think this through. I mean I’m sure you’re a stand-up girl, a real smart girl. But let’s think what we’re asking. We’re not asking that you do anything you wouldn’t otherwise do. We’re not asking that you, you know, spy on anybody or take any measures at all. Mr. Falin is an acquaintance of yours, a mentor perhaps in some sort of way, and all we’re asking is that now and then you just let us know what’s been happening there with him at his place, the kinds of things that come up in conversations, whether he’s had visitors, whether he’s gone out of town, that kind of thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because it’s so much easier for you than say for me. Less intrusive.” He smiled the little scimitar smile. “What I’m saying Kit is this. We do need a commitment. We would like to know just how much of a friend to this country this guy is. I guess that’s how you might put it.” When she said nothing more for a long time, he stood. She stood too, looking only at him, and folded her arms before her. “Okay. Now as to the details of this, we’ll be getting in touch with you from time to time. I mean not often. You’re not to worry about it. Okay?”

  She nodded.

  “You might be interested to know that you aren’t the only person on campus who’s helping out in this way. Helping the dean here and the school. Not the only student.”

  She said nothing.

  “Okay,” he said, and looked to the dean. Her smile had returned. Kit had to take Milton Bluhdorn’s hand, it came toward her, a little fat white animal that she could not avoid. Then the dean showed Kit to the door, but before she opened it she put her hand on Kit’s arm.

  “Your thing with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee,” she said. “Going to that meeting. I understand that was nothing. Just curiosity. We understand it was nothing.”

  Then she let Kit go, and shut the door behind her.

  Kit went out past the secretary and out the big door into the corridor, and then she thought she could go no farther. There was a women’s room a few steps away and she caught the doorknob and held herself up; she opened the door and went in. It was empty. She clapped her hands to her face and cried aloud, small barks of fear and horror that she had never heard her throat make before, but that she couldn’t help making. They ceased, but her chest went on heaving.

  The door opened and Kit recognized the sleeve of the dean’s red wool jacket, and she turned quickly away to the frosted window. The top panel was canted open, showing green leaves moving in a breeze and a blue sky. The window was barred.

  “Beautiful day,” the dean said. “Beautiful.”

  Kit slipped out past her smiling, her eyes on the floor.

  She went out into the afternoon. The sun was hot and the whole sky so intense a blue it could hardly be looked at; still the morning mist seemed to cling lightly to things, to the trees thinking of turning, the rosy brick buildings, the clock tower. Students in groups or couples walked the paths, the girls holding their books to their breasts and laughing with the boys.

  Kit with her secret inside her could hardly walk among them. What had been done to her had been done to none of them. The beautiful world was theirs and they didn’t even know it and would never need to know it. She had felt this way—that she carried something black within her that no one could see but that cut her away from everything and everybody else—only once before, and it was when she first knew she was pregnant.

  She made herself walk far enough that she was out of sight of the building where the dean’s office was. She sat on the steps of the music building, where students went in and out with instrument cases; a piano poured notes out of an open window, the same huge clusters over and over.

  “Hi.”

  Jackie Norden had come up beside her, she hadn’t seen him till he spoke, and she got to her feet and in tears of relief or need hugged him hard and pressed her cheek against his smooth one, oblivious of those passing.

  “Oh God,” she said into his ear, “oh God, oh Jackie.”

  He laughed, amazed, trying to get a look at her face, interpret her. “Hey. It ain’t been that long.”

  “I called the house,” she said. “I called and called. They said the phone’s disconnected.”

  “Aw,” he said. “Damn Communists. They hate to pay their bills, they just hate it. Not like they don’t have the money.”

  “Jackie,” she said. “Something’s happened.”

  She sat down again, and held her head. Jackie took from his pocket a great handkerchief, snapped it and spread it on the step, and sat beside her. He said nothing more, only waited for her to begin: and when she could, she told him all that had happened, what she had been told, what had been asked of her.

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said I would. I said okay I would.”

  “You did?”

  “Well what could I say? What if I said no and they did something, something…I just couldn’t tell them I wouldn’t.”

  He took his pipe from his pocket and began to stuff its great mouth with shaggy tobacco. “And do you plan to tell Falin about this?” he asked. “I mean about them and what they said?”

  “Of course. Of course I will. What do you think.”

  He marveled at her. “God damn,” he said. “A double agent.”

  “What do they want?” she said. “Why did they say those things? They said they want to be sure about him. But what does that mean? What do they think?”

  “Well,” Jackie sai
d. “Look at it from their angle. Here’s a guy who wrote some kind of allegorical poems some time ago, poems nobody seemed to take a lot of notice of, but nobody objected to very much either, and then got some other poems published in other countries, for which you can go to prison or worse. Then he writes a letter, an open letter, to Khrushchev and admits all that stuff, and calls Khrushchev on stuff. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well, then what? Nothing. They call him in to question him, but he always comes out again. Then suddenly it’s in the papers that there’s been a trial and he’s been stripped of his citizenship and is being sent out of the country. Not what usually happens over there. So it makes you think.”

  “Makes you think what? What?”

  “Well what if a deal got made. What if they told him, okay, we’ll make it look like we got mad and threw you out, if you’ll agree to act as an agent for us over there. It’s that or. You know.” He made a gun with his hand and shot himself in the temple.

  “He’s not a spy,” Kit said. “He’s not.”

  “Well,” Jackie said. “How about this, though. Maybe he was an American agent, all along. And he was in danger of being exposed. And we planned it all, the open letter and all, because we had this way of getting him out, by having him kicked out for his provocative act, because we have guys high enough up in their system to do that.”

  “We do?”

  “Maybe we do.”

  She thought of Milton Bluhdorn: Your country went to a lot of trouble for Mr. Falin. “Well then why,” she said, “do they want to spy on him? Why would they want me to?”

  “An agent can always be turned one more time,” Jackie said. “If the Russians sussed out the Americans’ plan, they could be pretending to be fooled by it. And Falin might still really be their guy. The only way to be sure a spy ain’t changed sides is to end his career.”

  She covered her face in her hands.

  “And you’re planning to tell Falin what they wanted you to do,” Jackie said.

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Acourse you will. And acourse they must have thought of that.”

  She studied his face, trying to guess where his thought was headed. “If they thought that,” she said, “then what good would it do them, to, to.”

  “Maybe all they care for him to hear,” Jackie said, “is that they asked about him. That they can get to people he knows and ask them. Just to let him know they’re thinking about him.”

  She only looked at him, until he seemed to see in her face the dread and disbelief she felt; he took her hands and lifted her to her feet. “Aw hell with ’em,” he said, and put his arm around her shoulders. “They’re just being paranoid, no doubt. Knowing they don’t know everything, but not knowing what it is they don’t know, which is probably nothing anyway.” He held her tight. “Surely’s nothing, in fact. Surely.”

  They walked.

  “She asked me, the dean did,” Kit said, “about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.”

  Jackie said nothing.

  “She said she thought it didn’t mean anything that I was at that meeting, that it was just curiosity.”

  “Well that’s all it was.”

  “Yes. But how did she know about it?”

  Jackie shook his head, in wonderment or ignorance or disgust. “Man,” he said. “Oh man.”

  “Do you still have your car?” she asked him.

  “Oh sure.”

  “Would you take me out there? To his house?”

  “Well,” Jackie said, and stopped to light his pipe. “Yes. I’d be happy to. But you know you got to get used to this game. Maybe you wouldn’t want to race right over there soon as you can. Looks…Well you think how it looks.”

  “Just take me,” she said. “Please.”

  She made him stop as soon as they came near the house and she could see in the driveway the green convertible, its top still down, so that she knew Falin must be home; and she told Jackie she’d walk from there. He sat with the VW’s engine running, looking at her as though trying to see her insides, what she knew or thought she knew that was causing her to act as she did; then he shook his head and threw up his hands, not up to me; and she kissed his cheek and got out.

  “I’ll wait,” he said to her out the window.

  “No don’t,” she said.

  “It’s a long walk back to town.”

  “It’s okay. Don’t wait.”

  The grasses were yellow and the trees browning and riddled by bugs, whose noise filled up the still day. The house too looked more aged, used, battered than it had. She went around past the lilacs, which had grown nearly together to block the path. When she saw that he sat at the gray picnic table in his undershirt her heart swelled and then shrank painfully. Everything now different, hurt, endangered, that had been so strong and full before.

  “Hi.”

  He turned, and his face filled with pleasure but not surprise to see that it was she. He had a blackened bone-handled kitchen knife with which he was cutting tomatoes on a flowered plate. He rose as though he meant to come and embrace her, but she stopped before she came close to him, and so he paused too, still smiling.

  “Tomatoes,” she said. Her hands behind her back. “Nice.”

  “Yes. They are now ripe. So huge and red, so generous. Not potatoes yet.”

  “Something’s happened,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  “You know?” she said.

  “I know that something has happened. While we wrote poems and tomatoes grew.” He sat slowly again, and showed her with a hand that she should sit opposite him. But she still stood.

  “What?” she said. “What happened?”

  “Kyt,” he said. “I am very glad to see you. I am so very glad.”

  She sat then by him, uncertain, feeling that she was already betraying him, that if he touched her she would poison or taint him; but when he put his hand on her shoulder it calmed her. He didn’t say anything, only waited, and she told him what had happened, the dean and Milton Bluhdorn and the questions asked her. As she spoke he withdrew his hand from her.

  “And he asked these things of you to learn—to learn what?” he asked. “What is suspected?”

  “That you might be connected to, to. Your old country and the leaders there. That you might be still on their side really.”

  “You mean what is called asset of theirs.” He cut a wedge of the big beefsteak and salted it from a glass shaker.

  “Called what?”

  “In capitalist countries, so called. Assets are friendly or helpful ones, people or institutions willing to do secret work. They ask if I am Soviet asset. Not American asset.” He said it lightly, dangerously. “Assets of course can become liabilities, move to other column of books. If they are exposed or become for any reason useless.”

  “What then?”

  “Well. You must remove liabilities. Profit and loss. KGB also knows this well, though not by capitalist accounting.”

  “You aren’t, are you? Some kind of…agent.”

  “Ah. But not all agents are secret. And not all secret agents are spies.”

  “But you aren’t,” she said. “You aren’t any of those.”

  “Kyt, you know what I am.” He closed his hands together and spoke in Russian: “Vechnosti zalozhnik u vremeni v plenu,” he said, and now she knew enough that she could recognize it, the poem of Pasternak’s that he had long ago recited in his class. “Poet, take care, watch well,” he said. “Do not sleep, for you are Eternity’s hostage, kept captive by Time.”

  She shook her head, helpless, helpless before his resistance to what had happened, as though he thought it was a game: not a dangerous one like Jackie talked about, played for keeps, but one you could win just by talking, by words.

  “Who is he?” she asked. “Why did he come here?” She asked because she could not ask another question: Who are you? Why did you come here?

  “Perhaps he is not one thing,�
�� Falin said. “It may be he is one thing here, another thing elsewhere.” He didn’t smile now. “Perhaps they do not know entirely what their mil’ton is. The great right hand cannot always know what the little left hand is up to.”

  This meant nothing to her. “I had to touch him,” she said. “I had to shake his hand, he made me.”

  “Ah,” Falin said. “A good sign. In my country a good sign. The agents of the state never touch the hands of those they intend to destroy. Never.”

  He got up, and went to where his garden began, the big blowzy potato plants brown-edged and hairy-limbed. He’d said once that in Russia he’d known someone who kept supplies of potatoes in his cellar: a high official, he said, a party leader. She remembered that, and in horror she thought that now she would record all that he said and did, without willing it, helplessly. And as though he overheard her think this he turned to her, rubbing his bare arms, seemingly cold even in the sun.

  “Kyt,” he said. “I must say this now. Not easy to say. It has become dangerous that you should be nearby me. You must from now on stay away.”

  It was, somehow, what she had known he would have to say no matter what he felt. She didn’t hear what he said so much as drink it, a terrible caustic liquid that burned her as it entered, burned her out. She wanted to beg him, beg him to forgive her or to withdraw what he had said, and because his eyes hadn’t changed, were still as open and full of calm pity as always, she thought he would surely see it, or hear her thought. But she said nothing to him.

  “I will drive you back to campus.” He came to the table and picked up a shirt that lay there.

  “No,” she said, “no,” and she got up and backed away from him as though he meant her harm in coming toward her. “No it’s okay. It’s not so far.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “No.” She turned away from him, thinking that if now she went out of his yard, she didn’t know how she would reach town and the university again, or why. She didn’t turn back, though; she went out and to the road again, and down to where it met the main road.