The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  Later he will think of his sister only on crisp winter mornings. Four days after her death, when the sun was just over the trees, Apelles woke to hear his father splitting cedar shakes for her grave-house with a hatchet and froe. The sound was clear and singular and rang out through the yard all the day; his father was making scales to cover her gravehouse: her ark that would bob the slow swell of earth where she was buried. The dot dash of his father’s activity—the ping of the hatchet hitting the froe and then the ripping sound of the shake being levered from the round—was all Apelles heard. Over and over. Blow after blow. The sound carried on the morning air, and so it is always that on the first days of autumn he can’t help it, he thinks of her. Just as for most of his life he won’t be able to bear the sight of women’s makeup because, before she was buried, when the house was still full of people, the boss ladies from the big drum painted his sister’s cheeks with lipstick to make her look happy in the afterlife. But that first night he can’t think of her, and so he tries instead to make himself cry, to think of his own tears instead, but can’t because the wool blanket irritates his skin.

  Now, he realizes, he couldn’t cry then because he had no language for his grief. And no way to translate his sorrow, his private, pitiful, meager sorrow into something more lasting, more noble.

  She died suddenly, with little warning, of the flu. His parents were stunned. At first, when she fell sick, when she stopped eating and her fever rose, there was a lot of activity in their small cabin. Baths were made, medicines were picked, and as a last resort she was driven to the clinic off the reservation. But when it was clear that she was dying and there was nothing else to be done, they came back home and waited and waited for her to die. Once she did die, his parents had nothing to say and nothing to do but prepare her and the ground for her funeral, which was presided over by Apelles’ uncle. As for Apelles—his life, what there was of it, stopped. He hadn’t realized how much his life of life had been spent as a brother. Between meals and during chores or on their way to ceremony or in the fields he had fed her and poked her drumlike belly and had balanced her on his hip while she grabbed onto his overall straps. When she rode on his back, she had gripped him under his collarbone. He had made her necklaces out of lilyroot and chains of pine needles. He had done all these things but would no more and what was left was an awful silence. He was not encouraged to speak about his feelings. His sorrow was held in check because it was of no use to her at all and would only make her trip on death’s road more difficult—sorrow itself was an impediment, like deep and shifting sand. His grief took the form of an unbearably quiet kind of boredom and acute physical discomfort upon going to bed with the wool blanket itching his face. Apelles couldn’t sleep that night. His face felt hot and flushed against the wool. And it was all made worse because he had thrashed and coughed, at which point his father had unhooked the lantern from over the table and brought it near Apelles’ face. He had reached out with his rough wide hand and felt Apelles’ forehead and then his chest. There was no expression on his face. After a moment he said—“Gego babaamamaazikaaken. Bizaan dana gosha”—and retreated to the table, the lamp once again swinging on its hook. Apelles tried to obey, and he shuddered with the effort.

  And so it was for a long time that he could not abide the feel of wool against his cheek because the sensation, the very feeling, was, for him, the raw, blank, depthless, unending sensation of sadness. He must have carried much of his sorrow with him all these years, making of him a serious boy and a serious man and causing sadness to range wide and cover much of life’s retrospect.

  These are the kinds of scenes and memories, so long buried, that have moved to the surface. He feels faint. Dizzy. He closes his eyes and opens them, double-checking the solidity of the room. Sure enough, the green-shaded table lamp is still solidly affixed to the wide oak table and still casts its light in a gentle yet focused beam on his manuscript and his yellow legal pad and his hands, in their ghostly latex, and his squad of green pencils lined up to the side of the notepad. To his side the “Doc. File #492” is filled with yellowed pages neatly arranged by date and encased in tinted plastic folders. The reading room is solid and unchanged. His table is one of six, all identical, arranged in two rows of three. All have three green-shaded reading lamps fixed in their centers and their wooden surfaces are use worn but well taken care of. The green carpet has not changed. The oak bookshelves along the two far walls hold their accumulation of indexes and reference books. In front, the raised reference desk, much like a judge’s bench, where the reading-room librarian holds court over the researchers, is still there. Above, the plaster ceiling, twenty-feet high, and approximately white as though to suggest the purity of archival research, though in the dim wintry light it could be gray or blue, still vaults the darkness that must surely have fallen on the world outside. All is where it should be. The whole room is designed to suggest the patient eternity of information. Information that exists whether there is anyone interested or able to interpret it or not.

  The turmoil, in the form of two realizations—one about a translation and the other about love—has not yet subsided and Dr Apelles glumly thinks that this is the very price we pay for transforming our knowledge into wonder. He is paying with his peace of mind. And as with all forms of tranquility, it is not easily won nor is it long lasting; there are always skirmishes at the frontier of the soul.

  It is strange for him to think of himself as having a soul. He would like someone to help him chart its dimensions. He touches his chest with his fingertips and thinks: there is something inside. Past my shirt, and past this old skin, and deeper still, there is something inside of me. I can sense it yet, even if I cannot see it. Just as I cannot see, not fully, the scenes of my past: my sorrows and my joys. And my tribe, which in itself is strange to say. I have been studying the languages of others for so long I have not thought of myself as having a tribe or a reservation any longer. But those things are inside me, too. I remember once, talking to the old man, the ceremony man, and he told me just before I left that we have two souls, not one. We hide one in our heart and the other hides someplace on our body only we know where—in our left hip, perhaps, or in the shoulder blade, or the kneecap, and this soul is the soul that roams. It is roaming now.

  He touches the parchment. Because of the latex gloves and the plastic cover, it feels distant. He strokes the surface of the document. How rare, and how sad. What has existed has existed, and what has been destroyed has been destroyed. What can he do to undo all of that? He is only a middle-aged bachelor. A mere translator (not even a professional translator) of languages that have ceased to matter to most people. He cannot create anything. God creates. God is the utterance and he is merely the air of language that can transmit the sound. Sad, too, to think that the page, in and of itself, has no meaning without him. He is the only one who can make sense of the thing, or who can give it sense, give it life. Maybe he is a god after all—one who rules the smallest of worlds.

  All he might be able to do is breathe onto the page as onto a stunned bird he once held as a child. It had flown into a window and he picked it up. It was lifeless, still. His father, unconcerned, said, “Blow on it. Like you’re warming your hands.” He did, cupping the finch and blowing, slowly, with all his hope and hot breath. The finch revived, sat in the nest of his hands for a second, and suddenly flew into the trees. For the document, though, there is no sky into which it can climb. Because, for stories, the sky is made of the endless dome of readers and freckled with constellations of the kindly and curious.

  He looks up from the document. The hours have passed quickly. He places the precious pages back in the box and carefully puts his pencils in the breast pocket of his shirt and stands. His back is stiff from hunching. He is hungry. He is surprised to remember that he has a body of his own. He picks up the box and brings it to the cart set to the side of the reading-room librarian’s desk. He then confronts the logbook and prepare
s to sign out. The librarian looks up from her work, and asks, as she usually does,

  Did you find everything you needed?

  Yes. I found everything.

  Was it to your satisfaction?

  No, it was not.

  Why not?

  I am afraid I have made a discovery.

  Discoveries are what bring scholars and translators here. You are here to make them.

  But I do not come here to make discoveries. I come here to confirm what I already know.

  Aren’t you here for knowledge?

  No. I and everyone else come for evidence.

  For evidence?

  What about knowledge?

  Knowledge is not found here.

  Where then?

  It is not to be found at all. It is created.

  Out of what?

  Out of our desire for it.

  Well, where does that desire come from?

  He falters. This when he pauses, already surprised at the nature of the exchange.

  I don’t know. That’s what I don’t know.

  His heart is beating wildly and without any kind of rhythm he can detect. Instead of saying Good night, See you tomorrow, Until next time, he nods curtly and turns and leaves the room. After collecting his coat and briefcase from his locker, he finds himself on the front steps of the archive.

  He breathes deeply. His heart is slowing down, and his chest doesn’t feel as tight. He is conscious of the cool air. It restores him. The oxygen helps his troubled head, but more than that, he is cheered, thrilled, to remember there exists a world in which he actually lives. A world he shares with other people. There is a place that continues, that has not gone the way of dust and death, that is represented by more than a few words on a page. He looks up at the sky. It is gray and low, and soon it will be night. For some reason this sky reminds him of his childhood and of his reservation with its thin trees and ever-stretching swamps. And of his people. They are waking up in his mind, stirring, as though to start a new day in which they are remembered again. That is their job now. To be remembered.

  He has not moved yet, and the few researchers, librarians, and guards who are leaving, must do their 180-degree turn in the revolving door and then step around him to continue down the steps. He surveys the city in front of him—his gaze trips down the wide granite steps, across the small park where they have jazz concerts in the summer, and then, since the eye muscle moves so quickly, his gaze splits left and right down the broad busy avenue filled with people and cars and buses. Everyone is going home for the evening, and just as the horizon has shut the door on the sun, they have shut the door on the day’s work.

  He is afraid to step into the stream of people. The archive with its milky marble walls and stout Doric columns feels like the only still point in this world, the only possible refuge. The life outside the archive, outside his translation, seems anonymous and barren, unknowable and without safe harbor. He longs to duck back into the forest of texts behind him. It is not for no reason that songbirds sing from the safety of the trees.

  But he is in the way. People, anonymous or not, need to get out of the building and he is in the way. The security guard at the front desk in the foyer has seen him and has been watching him for a while. But it is dark and he mistakes Dr Apelles for a homeless man many of whom often seek shelter under the portico of the archive. He gets up from his seat and takes his turn in the revolving door. He stands to the side and says,

  You can’t stay here. You have to find someplace else to sleep.

  I suppose I will. Humans don’t sleep standing up.

  Oh. Dr Apelles. My mistake.

  Yes, me.

  I thought you were a bum.

  They are called the homeless now.

  Maybe. But my dad called them bums.

  My father did, too. But times have changed.

  A bum’s a bum, isn’t he?

  Yes. But the difference is important. Bum suggests action—to bum, to beg. Homeless is an adjective, it describes a condition.

  I never thought of it that way.

  Neither had I. I’m sorry. I’ll move. I should have known I was in the way.

  No problem. Good night, Dr Apelles.

  Good night.

  But is it a good night? He is not sure. It is unusual, though. He blinks, trying to clear his vision. Maybe I’m sick, after all. Maybe I’m having a stroke, he thinks. He blinks and slides his hand behind his glasses to rub his eyes. There has been no day like this that he can remember. He feels sick in a way that would not be noticeable to a specialist. But he has no one to turn to, no one to ask. No one whom he could ask, Am I sick? Do I have a fever? Here, feel my forehead. Dr Apelles remembers his mother’s words when he was a child. Don’t get sick. Don’t ever get sick. Sick Indians die. The ghost of his sister coming between them.

  With a sigh he shoulders his bag and takes the first step and the second, and next the third. Before he knows it he is in motion. He finishes the steps and walks forward and onto the side walk and turns left and he is within the flow of people, ordinary people after all, on their way home.

  He has not decided yet about dinner, which he usually takes alone at a small restaurant near his apartment. Decisions about dinner can wait. Instead of looking down at his feet as he usually does when he is thinking hard, he looks up at the people around him.

  Some are traveling the same direction he is. Others come from the opposite way. It makes little difference which way they are headed—all use the same physical grammar. There is no argument about how they use the sidewalk. Some walk faster than others, weaving between the young and elderly. Others, burdened with bags or packages, or with infirmities, or thoughts, move much more slowly. What is remarkable is that the crowdedness of the city that he first noticed when he moved there as a younger man and quickly learned not to notice has been replaced with a sense of vacancy: everyone feels miles away from him. What he doesn’t know is whether it is always like this, and he hasn’t noticed because he so rarely looks up into the faces and lives around him, or if it is solely a result of his recent research. Usually, except for the two Fridays a month when he is a translator of Native American languages instead of a librarian of sorts, he pushes his languages to what he actually envisions as the back of his mind, in the bowl of bone atop his neck. There is no point in keeping languages he cannot use—with the waiters at the restaurant, at the dry-cleaners, with the librarians or floor workers he works with—ready, on the tip of his tongue. It is better to keep the whole cushion of his brain between them and his everyday language. But when he occasionally meets with Indians from his tribe, or other tribes, he can bring those beautiful languages to the front of his mind. So special are they to him that he produces them with the clumsy flourish of a teenager presenting a bouquet of flowers to a date. And he is a different person when he speaks those languages. He is sly and can tell a good joke. The puns and play come naturally. He can flirt in those languages. And they lend themselves to memory. Or perhaps his memory borrows against his English because he can think about things like Victor’s death and Annette’s betrayal and the other scenes of his youth, both happy and sad, in those languages, but his English has no credit, can make no purchase on them. Dr Apelles’ languages all have different values and those values change according to what he is doing or what he is thinking about, and when he bothers to think about his feelings, there is a kind of linguistic arbitrage that takes place wherein English loses all its value.

  He hasn’t had time to bury the day’s discovery back where it belongs. So it must be that the distance he feels, the darkness, the dizziness, arises from what he has read in the archive and not from the people or the place. People look at one another all the time. Looking at other people can’t cause sickness, anxiety, or light-headedness.

  He has arrived at the restaurant. To eat ther
e tonight does not seem possible. He usually sits at the bar, never crowded during the early dinner hours, and has his meal and a beer (no more than one), while he reads. It is a comforting kind of public seclusion—the way he imagines city statues must feel after dark; still a part of the city, still able to hear and see the thrum of life, but unnoticed and unremarked upon. Consciousness, the pesky reality in which he and everyone else is enmeshed, does sometimes intrude on his solitary dinners, usually in the form of fantasies about the hostess and the bartendrix, Zola and Elizabeth. It is a comfort to dine alone, he reminds himself, not the sad necessity of a lonely but, as of today, hopeful bachelor. It is a pleasure to dine alone with only a beer and a book for company. A pleasure, he thinks as he looks in the restaurant window, most people don’t know how to enjoy. Such a time—after work and before going home—is the temporal crossroads of his day: a breezeway connecting the separate buildings of labor and domestic life. His time in the restaurant is a chance for the emissaries from the different kingdoms of his life—scholarly, domestic, and gustatory—to meet on neutral ground.

  But he knows he will not be able stop the whisperings coming from within his own mind, and so he will, tonight, exile himself and eat at home.

  The waitresses are visible through the glass that, as it gets darker, shows them in increasingly greater relief. He knows them all by name but is not chummy with any of them—and tonight they seem both too familiar and too distant to speak to them safely. They are a part of his life enough so that it would be strange, it would feel strange, not to tell them about the drastic changes that have occurred inside him, yet they are too distant from him to really share anything meaningful. “Elizabeth,” he might say, “I found something in the archives this afternoon. It might change my life.” And she would respond by saying, “Wow. That’s really something. What does it say?” And he would respond, after taking a sip of his beer, “Well, it’s about the most amazing thing of all...”