The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  He did so shortly after the New Year. Apelles took the bus from his parents’ village to Miskwaagaming and stayed with her. Annette, for that was her name, seemed impressed that he was in college and not dismayed at all that she was clearly his first lover, his first as an adult. They drove to town and ate dinner at Bridgeman’s, which was the only place that would serve them, and otherwise they stayed at her house.

  Annette’s skin was very smooth and she spent an hour each morning curling her bangs. When, during their lovemaking, Apelles tried to put on a condom, she stopped him and said he didn’t need to.

  “So what if you come inside me?” she cooed. “If I get pregnant we’ll get married.”

  “You’re teasing me,” he said. She swore that she was not.

  The thought that she liked him that much thrilled him. “I could touch you forever,” he said.

  Soon the holidays were over and he went back to school. He called her when he could. Sometimes on the phone she cried, sniffling into the receiver, and then, judging from the way her sobs came from so far away, she released the phone altogether to bury her head in her pillow. Apelles thought she cried for him. Often she wasn’t home when he called. After final exams were over he took the first bus to Miskwaagaming. It was a long trip, and it felt as though the bus wandered across the country instead of driving through it. He felt sick, and he didn’t know if his queasiness came from his excitement or from the chemical smell of the toilet at the back of the bus that sloshed and swelled with the bumps in the road.

  Annette met him at the station wearing a new hairdo and an old dress. She had brought her son along. When Apelles tried to arrange time for the two of them alone, Annette always managed to include her boy in their activities. Finally, after two nights of falling asleep before she did, he managed to stay awake long enough to see the boy put to bed.

  Later, Annette was on top of him, naked. She began to move, but in the way someone dances when they know they are being watched. Then the phone rang. Much to Apelles’ surprise she answered it, cheerfully, as though the caller had caught her doing the dishes. She stopped riding him and absentmindedly rubbed lotion on her chest as she chatted. She flirted and laughed and talked much longer than good manners would allow, and stopped just short of making plans with the man on the other end of the line. By the time she said good-bye, Apelles had retreated far inside himself. His erection had wilted. And it was with great difficulty that he had to admit that the reasons she had cried on the phone—sobs echoing out of the past—had nothing to do with him at all. When she focused her attention back on him and began grinding her hips against his she seemed cheerful and distant. If Apelles had known how to cry or had realized it was the perfect time to do so, he would have.

  The next day Apelles boarded the bus, and Annette, who knew her part well, stood behind the glass and cried and cried. She brought a white handkerchief and when he looked back she waved it, but he couldn’t tell if she was waving it at him or cleaning the rain-streaked glass. It was hard to believe that she was the same woman he had met those months ago at the drum dance.

  3

  The years passed. As often happens the gears of the academic world didn’t always mesh with those of real life. Apelles counted out his days in terms and grant cycles. He finished his undergraduate degree and enrolled in graduate school, doing research first in one community and then in another, staying only long enough to learn a language or to master a variant. Life was divided into three-, six-, and nine-month periods, interrupted only by major conference presentations, exams, and, ultimately, the truly draining experience of writing his dissertation.

  Apelles was too shy to teach and too meticulous to write whole books, and it felt as though there was no place in the world for him until he took the job at RECAP. It suited the obscure circadian rhythms of his life very well. And whatever grief or sense of loss he felt about his affair with Annette had long since disappeared. He was happy in his modest job with his own modest researches.

  In the early years Dr Apelles’ routine was sometimes interrupted, or amended by, short research trips. These occurred once every two years and hung like commas between the long even clauses of his life. For instance, almost exactly two years earlier he had been working on a translation of a story written down in the early part of the twentieth century. He possessed no voice recording, only the text recorded by an amateur ethnologist who adhered to the faulty orthography set out in the Smithsonian Institution 1873 Bulletin. This created certain specific, and possibly fatal, instances in which the word or the meaning of the sentence was in doubt. Additionally, the Canadian reserve where the story had been collected had been, in the mid-nineteenth century, a place of asylum for three different bands of Indians, all of whom possessed different dialects, and so the presence of vastly different demonstratives and superlatives, as well as inherent lexical variations, made it difficult to recreate in English the exact sense of the original. The only way to sort it all out was to go there and interview the remaining speakers and use their language as a starting point from which to trace the language back to its earlier forms.

  Apelles made the necessary arrangements. And, after two airplane flights and three hours in a rental car from Fort William to Adikokaaning, he was speaking with the band’s educational coordinator, who, it should be said, was not at all interested in language and who spent most of his time organizing “healing conferences” designed to address the legacy of residential school abuse and staging “healing runs” wherein reserve youth would gasp their way down old portage trails and along the highway as a protest against alcohol abuse before returning to the woods to huff gas from their ATVs. Earl Downwind, however, did know everyone on the reserve and after some chitchat he made a suggestion. There was an older lady, a trapper, and she knew a lot.

  “Head down the main road and turn left at the pump house. Halfway up the hill, take the dirt road to the left. Her place is back there. You’ll find it.”

  Apelles followed his directions but got turned around. He stopped his car by the pump house and the community dock and got out and stretched. The lake lapped the dock pilings and he could hear seagulls overhead. And then, faintly at first, but then louder and with insistent regularity, he heard what sounded like someone shoeing a horse. He thought this was odd because he was certain no one on the reserve owned a horse. He was overcome with sadness and he didn’t know why.

  He locked the car and proceeded on foot, following the sound. As he neared its source he remembered: it was the same sound of his father’s hatchet hitting the froe as he split shakes for his sister’s gravehouse. Ping, ping, it rang out through the reserve.

  When Apelles finally arrived he saw an elderly lady sitting on her front steps pounding smoked moosemeat with a hammer. She was using a short section of railroad tie for an anvil. She hit the meat and then bounced the hammer down to rest against the tie. This made the sound. This was the elder he had been looking for in the first place.

  It was late April, a good time for a research visit because winter trapping was over but the lake ice prevented the band members from setting nets. For the next three days Dr Apelles chatted with the woman while she sat on the floor with her back to the fridge, a black garbage bag spread over her knees, fine-skinning the beavers her sons had saved for her.

  These research trips were enjoyable for Dr Apelles, and this one was no exception. He drank mug after mug of Red Rose, and they spoke of trapping and fur prices. So overjoyed was the lady when he spoke to her in her own dialect and with much older and ornate locutions than she was used to hearing that she really opened up to him. She was a remarkable woman. She kept up a constant dialogue with Apelles in the language while fine-skinning the beaver. The refrigerator hummed against her back. All of his questions were answered, all the mistakes in the transcription and the translation were fixed.

  On his last full day, there was some excitement. One of the lady’s sons had sh
ot a moose along the road. He, with a few other men from the reserve, had managed to get the moose in the back of his truck. But since they had no block and tackle, they didn’t know how to hang it in order to pull the skin. Dr Apelles remembered what his father used to do when one of the cows died, and suggested they tie off each back leg to a single rope, throw that over a pole suspended between two trees in the yard, attach the other end of the rope to the truck hitch and drive forward. It all worked perfectly. The moose slid off the truck and swung on the rope. Apelles left the next morning.

  The only other deviation from his usual schedule had been the occasional visits he received from his nephew. He was the only one of his relatives who had attended college. The rest of his nephews, nieces, and cousins had either never left home or had joined the military. Victor was the exception. He applied to and was accepted at a very prestigious university two hours south of the city. He wanted to study politics and international relations. He planned on becoming tribal chairman someday. Once a term or so he took the train north to the city and stayed with Dr Apelles for the weekend. On his first visit he appeared at the station looking this way and that, scanning the crowd for Apelles, about whom almost no one at home spoke and whose face had not appeared in any of the photo albums put together by his aunt. Victor was thin and his black hair was cut very short. He was so anxious to look the part of the ambitious student at the prestigious school that he had chosen to wear a pink oxford shirt and a blue blazer. Coupled with his stiff khakis that allowed too much of his pilled white crew socks to show, and appended by the battered briefcase that served as his overnight bag, he looked less like an American Indian and future tribal chairman and more like a poor but ambitious East Indian immigrant there, in America, to make his future.

  Apelles saw him, waved, and approached. Victor was flushed and excited. It was his first visit to the big city.

  “Victor?” Dr Apelles could not stop himself from smiling. It was a great, warm, selfless smile.

  “Uncle,” replied Victor, and, he, too, without quite knowing why, greeted the other with a smile that was friendly, without guile.

  Apelles’ soul thrilled at the sound of the word “uncle.”

  Apelles carried Victor’s briefcase and they left the station. Each one walked quickly, each bent forward and looked earnestly into the other’s face. That night Apelles took him out for Japanese food that Victor was determined to like. Apelles asked him about news from home, but home was the last place on Victor’s mind. He spoke rapidly and, after he warmed up, so unceasingly that he did not have time to taste the food.

  “Life at home, is, well, it is what it is. I mean, I love everyone there of course. But... I don’t know. They . . .” his voice trailed off. He chewed quickly and then swallowed to make room for more speech.

  “Many of them don’t have any ambition,” said Apelles, finishing Victor’s thoughts for him.

  “Yes! That’s it. Ambition. Not to be powerful or to be rich or anything like that. But.”

  “To change things. To make something,” finished Apelles again.

  “Yes! Yes, that’s it.”

  When Apelles became aware of Victor’s interest in politics he tried to share with him one of the best examples of Indian political savvy he knew, the transcript of which he had rendered into English. Apelles recounted Bagonegiizhig’s anti-treaty speech delivered in 1854, first in English, then in____.

  “We declare our right to this land the same way you declare your rights to yours; by right of conquest . . .”

  Dr Apelles’ eyes beamed back at the past, and he was about to dive back into the speech with even more gusto when he noticed that Victor was falling asleep in his chair. It did not matter. They walked back to Dr Apelles’ apartment. He made a bed for Victor on the couch, and the boy was asleep before Dr Apelles was done straightening up the kitchen.

  When they were parting at the station on Sunday, Victor once again looked Apelles up and down and said, “I’ll come up again, uncle. I’ll be back.”

  “I’ll wait for you, nephew.” It was daring for Apelles to say “nephew” but it felt right to say it.

  After that first visit there were others. Twice a year Victor would come up to the city. They got along very well. And each time he met Victor at the station Dr Apelles marveled at the changes in him. His frame widened and he put on muscle. He let his hair grow to a more human length. By his sophomore year he had become a very handsome man. His interest in politics was replaced with more anti-establishmentarian sentiments.

  “Our tribal governments have taken the worst from the American system. There is so much corruption. So much graft!”

  He passionately decried the nepotism and collusion rampant on the reservation, the inefficiency of the Indian Health Service.

  By his junior year he barely resembled the boy who appeared on the station that first day. His long hair was pulled back in a braid and so were his thoughts: “Our traditions are what hold us together as a people,” he said through his Japanese food.

  Victor’s last visit occurred two weeks shy of his graduation. He was to be graduated with a dual degree in English and Cultural Studies. He planned on attending graduate school to study language and curriculum development.

  “Language,” he said, as he wolfed down his portion of sukiyaki, “it makes us who we are. And it’s dying. Our language is really dying.”

  Dr Apelles agreed and quoted him statistics, but he did not say much else. He did not want to flatter himself by thinking his steady influence had caused this change in Victor. It gave him more pleasure to believe that the boy was growing up all on his own, watered and fed by his own natural intelligence and inherent goodness.

  They planned on seeing each other at Victor’s graduation in two weeks. Victor’s parents would not be coming. Dr Apelles was prepared, though. A small box wrapped in mauve tissue paper rested on the mail table to the side of the front door and held a black and silver Mont Blanc fountain pen. Dr Apelles had even rehearsed what he would say when he gave it to him: All serious thinkers deserve serious tools.

  Six days later Victor was killed in a car accident on his way to North Carolina to go hiking with his girlfriend. Dr Apelles was devastated. And, in ways he was only now realizing, he had never recovered.

  4

  Dr Apelles sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. Almost done. He returned his materials to the front desk. There was, so far, very little he had had to clean up—a few crumbs, particles, and missing hyphens. It was very clean, his best work, that he was sure of. But there was the ending, he still had to take care of that. So it wasn’t the work that overwhelmed him so much—it was the translation itself, the fact of its existence, its maddening persistence. When, as now, as it had been from the beginning, he had it in front of him the difficult task was to keep his mind there with it—not swinging through the halls of memory on silken threads, not probing the potential caves of the future. Maybe, he thinks as he unshutters his eyes and looks at the blue-gray ceiling—more gray in the wintry light—maybe I should go and see Mai. After his massage and after the deliciously overwhelming naughty feeling subsided, and he had cleaned the come from his belly button as though wiping tears from an eye, he usually felt a wonderful nothingness. His release was a release because it had no significance whatsoever. But no. He could not go there now. Not now.

  And the maddening fact was that the manuscript forced his mind onto other episodes of his life while he was working on it, but, and this had never happened before, while he was away from it he thought of little else. The story followed him around—it clamored from the trees, it peeked from behind stacks of books. He had even been tempted on several occasions to read a book or two that had crossed his workstation at RECAP—who knows what he might find? The translation would not leave him alone. When he worked at his station, phrases and scenes would repeat themselves ad nauseum, and he found himself
muttering out loud and shaking his head. It was maddening—this could go on for years with no relief. Hopefully it would not.

  Then, the grip of the translation tightened, and its claws tore him open.

  Even though the bell has sounded, he sits in his chair and looks up at the gray ceiling, so much like the sky on that fateful day. He sees it in his mind very clearly. It might have been a day like any other day. His mind had been on the translation instead of the work in front of him, and as a result he had made many mistakes. Jesus and Campaspe both had noticed—sizing a whole batch of books only to put them in the wrong-sized box; forgetting to scan a box so that the shelvers had to come back with it so he could enter the number. He was left with the hot feeling of shame.

  Maybe it was the weather. When he had walked the ten blocks to the train station, the clouds hovered far overhead, a uniform gray lid on the day. They were so remote that they lost the variation and interest low rain clouds can bring. A chill pervaded everything.

  By the time he arrived at RECAP, it had already begun to rain, and still the clouds did not descend. Dr Apelles was cold to the bone, and the feeling had dogged him all day. And then there were those mistakes, those simple and humiliating errors. He did not feel good at all. He wiped his brow, and not knowing what to do next, he rubbed his hands together as though to warm them. He looked up from his station at Campaspe. She was looking directly at him.