The Translation of Dr Apelles

by David Treuer

  Dr Apelles’ face-to-face contact with Zola was limited to the few seconds he stood inside the door before he went to his spot and the even briefer moment when he passed the hostess stand before leaving for home. In these brief moments he drank in the startling whiteness of her teeth. He drank in the startling avid look of her gray eyes. And he drank in her beautiful lips, which were full, but narrow, and on the lower one there was a birthmark, black, no more than a dot, that looked like ink, as though she had been sucking on her pen.

  Dr Apelles thinks that women are never so lovely as now. Zola is lovely. Campaspe is lovelier still. He thinks about her constantly. Ever since the ice storm, Dr Apelles thinks a lot. He thinks about so much so often and his Fridays at the archives had, until now, been his main time for thinking. Those days had existed solely for him and for his thoughts, especially for thoughts in which he was absent. He usually spent the whole day having left himself behind. But it is different now. His life is different now. He has become interested in other people. He is now part of that half of the human race who takes an interest in the other half. With his new interests had come problems. All the formerly discrete parts of his life—his past, his work, his passions, and the versions of himself he told himself and the versions of his life treasured and told by others—were mixed up together now.

  When he is not with Campaspe, she comes to him and keeps coming back even if he doesn’t want her to, but he does want her to, so he lets her come.

  When brushing his teeth he thinks of her because hers are so white. When he clips his fingernails he thinks of her because her fingernails are so slender and strong. He thinks of her toenails because they were so tiny, and especially the smallest one. It is very small and discolored because of the drastic shoes she loves to wear at work. And since she is so deep in his thoughts he no longer needs specific prompts for him to think of her. He thinks of her when he walks by hair salons because he loves her hair. And whenever he sees a sweater, no matter the style, he thinks of her because she looks so fine in her white sweater. At the train station. Whenever he sees a book. When he sees paper. He thinks of her. A girl on a bench at the station. An ad for Mexican drinks. A shampoo for curly hair. He thinks of her everywhere. He sees her everywhere. When passing water or waking up she is with him, when he eats or sees any woman anywhere wearing anything, Campaspe is suddenly and unexpectedly with him, on elevators and at the druggist’s (how he would love to nurse her back to health), in the train and on line at the bank and always when it looks like bad weather. She is with him in the afternoons, at least during these wintry afternoons when the sun so quickly moves along the horizon, never staying long, never rising too high in the sky. All the seasons and weathers of the world are different and bring with them different joys and different sorrows, all except northern afternoons in the end of winter. These are the same everywhere.

  So even though Campaspe is with him, other things are, too, and other people. Zola, yes, she is there. And people from farther back in his life, too.

  These skies, gray and low, the sun a failed promise so quickly gone, are the same skies of his childhood. The skies of times and places and people that belong to him only as memory if they belong to him at all. So even though Campaspe is with him so are the habits and hopes of his youth, a time when his future was his only solace. And these winter afternoons bring with them the very particular memory of milking the cows, which in memory always and only happened under low skies without the sun. When he sees these skies he sees himself when he was sixteen years old. He sat on his bed cross-legged and read a book. He read of a place where it never snowed and milking was done by others and where every decision was accompanied by an ideal and where every view was beautiful and people spoke of love as though it were real. Perhaps these skies are those skies because in those days children did not wear watches or have cell phones on which you could read the time. So he had to look at the sky through the single window set in the cabin wall to the left of the cookstove to see if was time to do the milking. It was. He saw his boots standing at attention at the foot of the bed and saw the front steps littered with wood chips and smelling like fresh-split jackpine, and he saw the narrow trail down to the milkshed, and he saw very clearly the pine slab of the shed itself, scored with teeth marks by the cows during the winter, and then he saw the cows themselves who looked at him reproachfully, and the bucket with a rind of dried milk at the rim. His mind was still on the book he had been reading. He was still in the story, in the worlds it contained, as he milked the cows. He thought it would be a good thing to write books or at least to dedicate his life to them in one way or another. He knew then that he would leave his family and live in places they did not live and the cities he would know would be cities they would not know. His life would become incomprehensible to them.

  It is the gray sky of the afternoon that makes him think of his childhood, but since Campaspe colors everything he thinks of her, too, and the two thoughts become mixed. The mystery of Campaspe’s body, which is a mystery easier to access than the mystery of her mind, occupies him completely and reminds him, just now standing outside the restaurant, of his first introduction to the mysteries of a woman’s body and the pleasures concealed inside.

  He was twelve. It was summer. There was little to do. The hay and alfalfa were growing and the woods were heavy with heat. Apelles and a cousin spent their time collecting worms in the pasture, breaking the trampled cowshit with a pitchfork and pouncing on the stunned worms and storing them in a tobacco tin lined with shredded newspaper. When they had collected enough they brought them to the resort just on the other side of the village where they sold them to the owner for a nickel a dozen.

  Dr Apelles remembers it all. He can smell the liquid smell of manure and the ink on the newspaper. He can feel the heat building in the yard. Then he and his cousin walked to the resort. The road was unpaved then and the fine sand grabbed their toes and then the lake appeared off to their left between the trees and brought with it a cool breeze. He can smell the sharp scent of spruce as they turned off the road toward the resort and can feel the tedium of waiting at the counter while the owner counted out each and every worm and then he can hear the magical sound of the nickels dropping into their outstretched palms.

  On their way home they walked along the lake instead of on the road and went swimming in their cutoff jean shorts. They swam at the edge of the cattails and bulrushes where the lake bottom was mucky and covered with weeds because the beach was reserved for white guests. They didn’t swim long because they were under strict orders to come home straight away. Apelles’ father demanded they give him half the money they earned. He had said that they were his cows and his cowpies and his land, so the worms were half his. But the lake was so inviting and so cool and the white children who got to swim at the beach were so interesting to watch. The white children’s voices were different somehow from theirs, and the way they ran on the sand gingerly was different. Their feet must be very tender. There was a girl among them. She was Apelles’ age or maybe a year younger. She looked his way a lot when he was swimming, and when he and his cousin went in the lodge to sell their worms she was there, usually playing Ping-Pong by herself, just hitting the ball across the net and running around the other side and across the room to get it. He had seen her in one of the motorboats with her father as they crossed the lake, she was looking his way then, too.

  He was sitting on the front steps of the cabin when she came in the yard.

  “My pa needs worms and they’re out at the lodge.”

  “We don’t have any.”

  “They’re in the ground, ain’t they?”

  She seemed strong in her mind. She was skinny and her legs were very pale and her belly pushed out against her shirt like a frog’s belly.

  “It’s too hot. We won’t find any.”

  “Let’s look.”

  Later in the woods the girl squatted to pee. Apelles looked
away.

  The girl laughed.

  “You ain’t ever seen a woman pee?”

  “Not a girl.”

  “Come on. You can look. Come on.”

  Later on, maybe it was the next week, or maybe it was the next day. Things move much faster when you’re young, or maybe they move faster when you remember them—the mind skips the unimportant times. Our memories are always in such a hurry to see themselves. So maybe it was much later in the summer or maybe it was not when she said:

  “You mean you never?”

  “No, you?”

  “I have. Yeah I have.”

  They lay under the wide low branches of a white spruce, the needles poking into their backs. You’d hardly expect to flush a rabbit out of there, the space looked so small.

  She had him in her hand.

  He did not speak and he watched her as she worked.

  “There.” She was finished with the job and pleased with her work.

  Apelles looked with wonder at his penis.

  “And now me.”

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “There’s that, and there. See? And can you see now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  Her finger disappeared.

  “Now you do it.”

  Her hands were very white against the pink and harmless place she made for them.

  Then later, it was a long time gone, much later.

  “Do you think we made a baby?”

  “No.”

  She seemed very far away. Apelles rubbed his legs together. They itched and his penis was spent and raw.

  “No,” she said.

  “Babies aren’t made that way.”

  “No? Who says?”

  “My pa. My pa says that. He said that when he showed me. He says they come from storks.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He’s a doctor.”

  Afterwards and for the rest of the summer they looked for worms together. He and his cousin still sold them at the resort. And it didn’t matter if she was swimming or playing with a puzzle in the lodge or moving across the lake very quickly in a motor-boat. From a distance and maybe it was the way she held her head or squared her thin shoulders or put her hands on her hips or tossed her hair or maybe it was the tan of her cheeks. From far away she looked very cold and very haughty. But it was always the same when they went in the woods together. She acted as though she were in charge, but it always ended the same, with her turning her head and mouthing lines that must have come from the movies. “Oh darling! Oh my darling!” And she would also say, “Do you see? Do you see?” in a way that was desperate. She seemed to plead for him to understand something that was never, ever, made clear.

  Now, if Zola, or anyone else, but if Zola at the restaurant had asked what was it like when you were growing up? what was the reservation like? could he say that the days, the short days of winter and the long days of summer, when the sun stayed so long that just when the afternoon began it felt like a whole new day had been added on to the one you had just enjoyed and the night would never come, and that in these hours life was very full, and there was so much to do you never wondered who you were and what the answer might mean, and that the people of your childhood, your parents who, neither one no matter what, ever said or did a cruel thing, and your uncle often got very drunk but was always kind, and Adolphe who lived behind the village had such a funny way of swinging his arms when he walked and he walked with a limp because he had dropped a crate of ammunition on his foot during the First World War but played the fiddle at all the jigs, or the girl who owned a pack of dogs and could climb trees like no one else ever could and who climbed those trees and kept those dogs and sicced them every so often on her own father when he met her in the woods when she was alone because he wanted things she did not want to give, or the land itself; the ever-stretching swamps into which it felt that no one had ever gone before you and the pinestands, those that were left, anonymous and communal, and the hardwoods so full of secrets but so quiet and good to hunt in if there was snow. He could not.

  Dr Apelles never said anything to Zola except good evening or hello or thank you because to say more would lead to a discussion of these other things that he could not say, and the long string of his life would unravel.

  Recently, like many other people with whom he was acquainted but whom he did not know well, she had begun to pay more attention to him.

  He had been eating his meal with book and beer. It was a quiet night. But his were, or had been, always quiet nights. Zola was walking past him in front of a couple she was seating in the rear of the restaurant. He happened to look up as she passed.

  “Hi. Hey. You look different.”

  “I do?”

  But she had already gone past. He took a sip of beer, and when he set the glass down, she was on her way back to the hostess stand.

  “Yeah,” she continued. “I don’t know. Different.”

  “Better, I hope.”

  Zola glanced at the hostess stand.

  “Yes. Yes, better. Different, though.”

  She didn’t have much more to say so she left. As he watched her walk away he looked at her legs and her small, beautiful waist and her ass and thought, “God no, you’re not different. God no. Yes.” She really was beautiful.

  But he could not tell her of his life even though she was nice and acted like she wanted to know him better. Zola always made it clear she knew who he was when she said things like “Your place looks clear” and “Every other Friday as usual,” and she was generous with her smile and spent it freely on his face. She was nice and she was nice to him, but he could not say anything to her because what she and everyone else wanted to hear was an ideal version of him.

  Later that evening his reading was interrupted by someone pulling out the barstool next to him. It was Zola. She put her cell phone, keys, and Marlboro Lights on the bar and got a drink.

  “You off?” ventured Apelles.

  “Yeah. Finally. They’re cutting the checks now. I gotta wait.”

  She lit a cigarette and considered him. Her head was tilted a little to the side.

  “You come in every other Friday. Right?”

  “Yes. Yeah. Every other Friday.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Me? You mean with my life? I work in a library.”

  “You’re a librarian? Really?”

  “No. Not a librarian. It’s different. A different kind of library.”

  “I love books.”

  “Really? Do you read them or just love them?”

  She laughed.

  “I don’t read them as much as I love them, I suppose.”

  “You love the idea of them.”

  “Yeah. The idea. I like stories.” She was drinking a vodka tonic. “So. Where else do you eat? What do you do when you’re not here?”

  A more experienced man would have seen her interest for what it was. But Apelles was not experienced enough to know that she would have fucked him merely out of curiosity and that she was intrigued by him because he showed no obvious interest in her. Though when he spoke to her, his stomach churned and his penis throbbed, electrified by the conversation.

  “Oh. I eat. Sure. But it doesn’t beat coming in here.”

  And what would have been an opportunity quickly became conversation, just conversation, which he always steered back to the bar, her coworkers, to the jokes he could make about what they already knew of each other, which was next to nothing. The conversation felt unreal, staged. But his life was real to him, and if he told it in the wrong way or for the wrong reasons it would cease to be real, it would no longer be his life because it would become a story like all the other stories about his people, and if he told it he would only become a character in that story and would be only
the Indian they knew and the Indian they told their friends about. His life would cease to be his and he would not even recognize himself anymore.

  He could tell her nothing, but this did not stop him from fantasizing about her. He didn’t stop himself from fantasizing because he did not have to be an Indian to do that. All he needed to be in order to imagine her beautiful imperfect lips on his, to imagine her hands on his shoulders, to imagine her hard breasts against his chest, and oh her hands yes now on his hips, all he needed for that was to be a man. And to be a man was the easiest thing in the world. Those fantasies came easily, and Zola wasn’t the only one at the restaurant who excited him. The bartender was all too lovely as well, a real darling. She was voluptuous and her skin looked very soft, but she was also very efficient and quick at her work, not at all the way you think someone as curvy and beautiful as Elizabeth would be. She was good at keeping up banter with the other customers, but not with him, because he kept to his book and since during the course of the evening he only ordered two beers and never more she left him alone. Though his eyes searched for Zola, they would sometimes rest, resting, on Elizabeth and truly she was so beautiful. Her skin was so beautiful, and she had such a bright smile and such a girlish and businesslike demeanor both, that it was easy for him to imagine not the act of loving her but what was sure to be her tremendous pleasure in bed. She was the kind of woman who existed to be pleasured.

  Now Dr Apelles is in a bind with Campaspe because he can no longer forestall her questions about his life.

  They are lovers now.

  She needs the story of his life, but as an Indian he is reluctant to give up that sovereign part of himself. So when Campaspe might ask, “What was it like?” because eventually everyone wanted to know, he says, “I don’t know.”