The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Me? Yes. I think so anyway.”

  “Maybe you should eat something.”

  Maybe he should. But the problem didn’t seem to be with his stomach. Rather, the problem was with his soul.

  “Maybe I should,” he said. “But maybe it’s just the weather.”

  “Whatever it is,” she said gently, “you don’t look so good. You should take care of yourself.”

  When the rest of the workers stopped for their lunch break, and he finally had the chance to contend with the silence while logging books at his station, he heard, far overhead, the rain beating down with steady ferocity on the roof. He was thinking all the while how strange it was that Campaspe had spoken to him, as though she knew he had been thinking about her lately. And why should he take care of himself? Did it really matter to her?

  By the time he punched out, it had been raining steadily for four hours. He put on his coat and carried his briefcase in his left hand and held his umbrella in his right. The temperature had dropped and the rain had begun to congeal on the walks, the branches overhead, on the cars parked glumly in the parking lot, and on either side of the small streets leading to the train station. No one had thought an ice storm was possible at this time of year and so no provisions had been made. The sidewalks and roads had not been salted. Within minutes they were coated in a thin layer of ice, and the daffodils and tulips, cold enough to freeze, bent low and finally prostrated themselves in their border gardens.

  Dr Apelles had not thought to bring his rubber overshoes or the duck boots he wore during bad winter weather, so he had to walk very carefully and slowly down to the station. His feet were soaked through within minutes. The cars felt their way down the slippery streets. The whole world had been transformed from a place of quick movement to one that was tentative and fragile.

  Dr Apelles was almost there. He had only to walk up the steps to the platform, sit and wait for the train, and then he’d be home free—the sidewalks in the city were so covered in pollution, exhaust and grime, and paced by so many people, vented with so many grills leading up from the subways, that they were sure to be free of ice.

  He transferred his umbrella to his left hand so he could grasp the cold wet handrail with his right as he climbed the steps to the platform. The steps were especially slippery. Each one was guarded by a stamped metal strip and they had acquired a thick covering of ice.

  Dr Apelles was so lost in thought—the translation had, in large part, made him deaf to the clamor of the world—that he did not see or hear a group of teenagers in mid-antic slamming their way down the steps. They were goofing, enjoying the slip and slide of the ice, unaware as teenagers are unaware that they should be careful of their bodies. It did not occur to them they could be hurt. The teens expected that the noise of their antics (part exuberance and part warning) would cause Dr Apelles to shrink against the handrail, giving them room to pass. But he didn’t move out of the way. At the last instant the foremost teen twisted to the side as he careened down the steps, and he managed to shout, “Watch out, man! Watch it!” but it was too late. He managed to miss running into Dr Apelles but he clipped his briefcase. Dr Apelles spun to his left, his feet went out from underneath him, and he fell hard on the steps while the teens zoomed away out into the darkening parking lot. Their shouts and laughter could be heard long after the boys could no longer be seen.

  Dr Apelles had fallen sideways. He had hit his right elbow on the metal edge and had broken his fall by putting his right hand out flat on the step. He was sure he had not twisted or broken anything, but his backside hurt and his palm had been skinned. Already it had begun to bleed, but not from any one spot. He picked himself up, walked up the few remaining steps to the platform, and found relief on one of the green benches. He shook his head to clear it.

  The electrified wires overhead that ran the trains sagged in their casings of ice.

  His right arm was numb, his back and butt hurt, and he noticed with dismay that blood was still seeping from his hand. He set down his briefcase and umbrella and removed his white handkerchief from his breast pocket and wrapped it around his hand. The cool cloth felt good against the wound, and he thanked his father silently for showing him that a real man always carried a kerchief.

  A muffled voice from the speaker announced that train service had been suspended indefinitely.

  Dr Apelles looked to his left down the empty tracks. The wires made a lonesome sound in the wind. The green signal light far down the line winked in and out of the rain.

  He looked back down at his hand and unwrapped the kerchief to see how much he was bleeding. The white Egyptian cotton was prinkled with blood. A sudden feeling of faintness made him stop. Many thoughts—of the loneliness and isolation wrapped up in translating something no one would ever read, of his fall and his wounded hand, of the sad memories of his childhood and his parents, whom he had loved too much as a child and not enough as an adult, of the disappointment of his affair with Annette, and the loss of Victor—came back to him at once. He was sure his heart would burst.

  He heard someone speak, but as from far away.

  “Are you okay?”

  He looked up and saw Campaspe leaning over him, her hands deep in the pockets of a navy peacoat.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay. Nothing broken. Nothing sprained.” Dr Apelles sat up straighter and tried to look composed.

  Once it was clear to Campaspe that Dr Apelles was not in any danger and once it was clear to him that she knew he was not in danger, neither of them knew what to say.

  “The train is delayed until further notice,” Dr Apelles informed her.

  “Ahh!”

  “Are you heading into the city?” he asked.

  “Yes!” Her voice was shrill. She was almost undone by this unforeseen encounter. Both of them knew that deadly convention dictated they could only speak for a few minutes before they would be unable to part on the platform and would be forced to wait together for the next train.

  “Me, too. But, with this weather . . .”

  A car horn gasped, once, mutedly, in the parking lot.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Campaspe had leaned in, closer, trying to read him. He looked at her face. Her olive complexion was there, but underneath it, tinged by the cold, was a rosy bloom to her cheeks. He looked back quickly at his damaged hand.

  “I just slipped, that’s all.”

  “It happens, I guess.”

  “Would you like to sit? We’ll be waiting awhile. Or . . .” But he could think of no alternative.

  They had succeeded in talking themselves into talking.

  “Or . . .” she pondered, or pretended to ponder, not wanting to seem too eager, but having thought it through the moment she saw him sitting forlornly on the green bench. She was sure he had been crying or was about to. “Or . . . there’s Bella’s. Just on the other side of the station. They make train announcements. We can wait there.” She looked first up and then down the tracks and then made a wistful face.

  Margarita Bella’s, where the other sorters sometimes went for drinks.

  “Okay. Sure. Yes. Why not.”

  He gathered his things and they went down the steps—careful now—and through the tunnel under the tracks. Once again they both became shy.

  “Your last name is Bello, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Bello at Bella’s. I like that.” This was the best he could do.

  “Ha ha!”

  And then they were through the tunnel, up the steps, across the road, and inside Margarita Bella’s.

  It was dark inside. Red lights lit the small bar. The walls were paneled in wood, the floor was wood as well. They found a booth in the middle of five stretching from the front door to the back. A television above the bar was tuned to a basketball game but the sound
was off. Instead, Juan Luis Guerra’s Greatest Hits was playing over the speaker system.

  It was strange for both of them. They had worked side by side, a mere ten feet apart, for almost three years. And since they rarely passed each other in the hallway, and since Dr Apelles never ate lunch in the Reading Room, and since they had never, never before that night, seen each other at the train station, they each only recognized the other in profile. To sit across from and to speak directly to the other, this was novel.

  It seemed best to speak of work, which is what they did. While one bemoaned or celebrated this or that, the other nodded and listened with more energy and interest than the topic merited. They each felt exposed, almost naked. They kept their margarita glasses between them on the table.

  They ordered another round. The regulars at the bar came and went, the basketball players went back and forth on the television while the score rose, the two waitresses smoked together at the end of the bar, and every once in a while one or the other walked quickly to the front window and gazed out into the night.

  The weather had not let up.

  Large drops of rain attacked the plate glass.

  Dr Apelles and Campaspe listened for announcements, but none were forthcoming. Their conversation stretched and grew and continued into the evening.

  By the third round of drinks they had grown more exuberant. Campaspe shared with Dr Apelles her impersonations of some of their coworkers. When she mocked Ms Manger by pecking her head back and forth and meekly folding her hands together in front of her, Dr Apelles laughed and could not stop laughing. It was a very good likeness. Campaspe was a kindhearted girl, and so she laughed at her own audacity. When she laughed, Apelles was thrilled by how her eyes crinkled prettily, her cheeks rosy with tequila and humor. Likewise, it was a great pleasure for her to see Dr Apelles tip his head back, throw his eyes to the ceiling, and let his whole body shake.

  Once, during a lull in the conversation while waiting for more drinks and having grown more brave, Campaspe smoothed the table with her fingers as though straightening an invisible piece of string, and asked where Dr Apelles went on Fridays.

  Dr Apelles could not hide from the question behind his drink—the waitress had not brought it over yet. And he did not feel right giving the usual answer of “amateur historian” or “history buff.”

  “I am a translator of Native American languages.”

  “Oh!” she cried. “So that’s what you are!”

  “A translator or an Indian?”

  “Both,” she said.

  The margaritas arrived, and Campaspe lifted her glass, and her words, so brave for a girl like her, seemed to be coming from the glass rather than from her.

  “You are a very serious man.”

  He blushed inwardly. He didn’t feel serious. He wasn’t trying to be.

  “Am I? Am I really? I don’t feel serious. I don’t feel . . .” and when his thoughts trailed off, he realized that the thought had been complete after all and so he said, looking directly at her: “I just don’t feel. At all.”

  Campaspe was embarrassed, though she didn’t know why.

  “So what are you working on now?”

  And once he began speaking about his work, he found it difficult to stop.

  He grew animated. He spoke quickly and only paused to make sure Campaspe was following along down the trails his mind took. And even though he meant to talk about the translation, instead he managed to do a very good job of talking around it.

  She appeared genuinely interested. Even so, he wanted to stop speaking, to lock up this part of his mind, to keep it separate, as it had been for so long. But his fall on the steps and his work on the translation had maneuvered out of him all that he had been keeping inside. He was not one of those professional Indians who were willing to dispense platitudes disguised as cultural treasure. He was not one of those for whom the past, because of how exotic it seemed to most people, could be used as social credit among the credulous or liberal. He was a private man, with private sorrows. Once, long ago, he had realized he must do this in order to survive. As an Indian in the world, he was, as far as most were concerned, a little ghost in living colors, with a reality of his own that was written out in the tenses of the remotest past. And the heartache that now threatened to overwhelm him, and that he was only now beginning to recognize, was largely due to this one great sacrifice—he had been forced to hide his most subtle and fluent self. He was tempted now to let that self come out.

  Suddenly the bartender turned down Juan Luis Guerra. He shouted to the corners of the bar that there would be no more train service until the following day.

  After he announced the calamitous news, the bartender turned the sound back on and Guerra’s voice was heard once again on the stereo, but Guerra handed the microphone to Ruben Blades who, as though daring the weather, urged his listeners to “muevete.”

  Some of the people in the bar cheered the news. Others, those who lived far away, groaned. The waitresses did nothing.

  Apelles and Campaspe looked at each other. They looked very seriously at each other and knew, somehow, that how they decided to escape the storm would decide something between them.

  “Are you anxious to get home?” asked Campaspe.

  “Yes and no.” He was thinking of his bed, but not in the usual way.

  “You?”

  “Same. I’m tired. But this is . . . I don’t know.”

  “Yes.”

  Dr Apelles and Campaspe quickly decided to share a cab into the city. It would be expensive, but they had no other options. The cab was called. They waited, sober but not sober. Dr Apelles said,

  “If we were peasants in some other time we would walk all night to reach a dying relative in the next village. That’s what purpose these storms serve in stories. In stories, ice storms bring people together who normally are not together, and they cause great changes in those people.”

  Campaspe laughed.

  5

  As it turned out, the night would become famous. Thousands of people remained stuck right where they were until morning. People slept in malls. Babies were born in copy shops. Other babies were conceived in supermarkets. Marriages. Deaths.

  Dr Apelles and Campaspe did manage, however, to make it out of Margarita Bella’s. The cab they had called arrived and they began their trip into the city.

  Although the streets were deserted except for a delivery truck or two, it was a very long ride.

  The windshield wipers beat at twice the speed of the wheels. Everything was dark. The parked cars on the side streets were coated with ice and looked like cinnamon buns glazed with sugar.

  Dr Apelles and Campaspe each gazed out of the side windows at the spectacle of the ice storm that had put the city to sleep. Neither looked very often through the front windshield. They left that to the driver who, for his part, was a patient fellow. He operated the heater and windshield wipers in unison, striving for the right balance between heat and motion that would keep the wind shield free of ice. If he was put out or concerned by the storm, he did not show it. He drove slowly. The roads were slick. Assiduous braking and signaling along with the very forgiving seats made the cab and its motion a thing of peace. Occasionally the driver pressed the speed dial on his cell phone, inserted the ear bud, and had long conversations in Urdu. Neither Campaspe nor Dr Apelles knew what the cabbie was saying (though, since Dr Apelles collected languages out of habit he did catch the words smoke, Hamid, and moth), though it most certainly was about the weather, judging from the way the driver spoke, paused, and looked out and up at the sky through the windshield, and then in the beautiful rolling rhythms of his mother tongue, continued his conversation.

  After a while his voice and his gentle and constant manipulations of the vehicle quit having meanings of their own. He receded and melded with the hiss of the tires as they ploughed through the
slush. And when the cab rolled to a stop at traffic lights, Campaspe and Dr Apelles could only once again hear the thrush of rain on the car roof.

  All of this was enough to lull them, but not to put them to sleep. They were too much on edge, too much subject to the wonder and strangeness of it all. They were startled by the very fact of riding in a cab together.

  After a series of twists and turns on the small side streets they turned on the main thoroughfare, which was—unbeknownst to Campaspe but knownst to Dr Apelles—the old post road that led into the city. The road followed the canal for a distance, and all that could be seen were the outermost branches of trees that had worn the blossoms of spring only hours before, but which had now been transformed into icy, clawing things, fairy-tale trees. The small saplings planted on the greenway were bent low under their armor of ice. Here and there in low areas fog curled on the ground and seemed to hide mysterious secrets that excited Dr Apelles and Campaspe.

  Then the road left the canal, became the main street of a small town that had not yet become a suburb, the kind of town favored by college professors and doctors because it reminded them of small towns in general. It had clothed itself in a historical self-regard, judging from the Fudge Shoppe, three antique stores, and the “Mercantile” that all existed side by side, but the fantasy competed with a Kinko’s and a Starbucks that bookended the more quaint stores.

  The village was whisked behind them somewhere in the night.

  The view gave way to technology parks. Great cubes of concrete and glass housed software companies and the like and seemed designed to make people guess at what went on inside. Really, just judging from the exterior anything could happen there.

  After a string of auto-body shops and convenience stores, they coasted through the sister city to the one across the river in which they lived.

  They were still on the old post road, though it had been over two centuries since it had served as such. Since that time it had lived as a main street, then as the town had become a city, a central avenue.