The Translator Read online

  “What was the poem he asked you to say?” Gavriil Viktorovich asked her gently.

  “I could have remembered it if I’d thought a minute.”

  “Of course.”

  “It was a poem about my brother,” Kit said. “About my brother, come home from the army.”

  4.

  Because her family moved often when she was growing up, Kit and her brother Ben had grown up more intimate than most siblings. The girls she met in each new school always spoke of their older brothers in tones of profound contempt and disgust, only surpassed by how they regarded younger brothers. It was one of the small divisions that usually began opening between her and them right after the first few easy questions (What’s your name? Is that your bike?) and then widened.

  It was because of her father’s job that Kit’s family moved from place to place, from seacoast to desert, sunbaked towns of new square buildings to old cities of mansions and stone churches. Ben had been able to remember a time before they began to move, several staid years spent in an Eastern college town, summer and fall and Christmas, and now and then he would be caught by the smell of blackberries or the creak of porch floorboards and say how it called forth that place, still whole within him. To Kit the places they lived were vivid, but she remembered them like scenes from novels: separate and poignant and hers, but not her.

  What her father did, exactly, she never quite knew. He would joke about it, putting off questions. When Kit or Ben insisted, he would turn grave and frank and explain, in terms that explained nothing. His job was connecting one place to another, he said; he was trying to connect them by connecting their big computers with phone lines, so they could call up one another and talk. It was a network, he said, a network of electronic brains. He talked about computers as if they were a game he played for the fun of it; he collected cartoons from Look and The Saturday Evening Post showing roomfuls of great square machines covered with lights and buttons, and puzzled men in white coats who read out the paradoxical little message that popped out of a slot. It says it won’t answer till we sacrifice a goat to it.

  Well then, who did he work for? The children they met wanted to know. Their fathers worked for Studebaker or Sunbeam or Bendix or they were policemen or barbers or sold cars or houses. Oh, he would say, I work for lots of people, there are getting to be a lot of computers, more every day. How many had he connected so far? Well, so far—and he solemnly held out a circle of thumb and finger that said Zero.

  And when eight months or a year had passed they would pack and sell the house they had just bought (for some reason they always bought them, made money or lost it, the same money over and over) and in their big station wagon they sailed on. Sailed, skated: Kit felt she skated, over the truths her father knew or hid, the network which lay under their rapid, placid lives like the tangled duckweed and roots down in a frozen pond.

  Tall house in an old downtown, a Midwestern city; bamboo-patterned wallpaper, dark polished woodwork. She was ten, her brother twelve. Before anything else, their household gods needed to be brought in, the things that had been put last into the moving van so they could be unpacked first: the percolator and its sister the toaster; their mother’s mother’s chest full of family photographs in crumbling albums, faces their mother progressively forgot the names for; their father’s shoe bag with its pockets for his wing-tips, brogues, golf shoes white and brown, each pair with its shoe trees; the chenille clothespin bag, without clothespins, wherein Kit’s eyeless and grimy stuffed white lamb always traveled, the lamb she’d had since birth, no amount of teasing would cause her to give it up; and the encyclopedia, twenty-six brown volumes to be unpacked and put in order in their own small brown bookcase: this Kit and Ben alone could do.

  Maybe it began when Ben had showed her the words or letters on the back of each volume, read them aloud to her before she could read: Annu to Baltic; Baltim to Brail; Brain to Castin; Castir to Cole. See, he said: This one goes from Annu to Baltic; and she thought that they were places—that you could go from one to another—and that the heavy books detailed these journeys, the lands and peoples, delights and terrors.

  The hundred iron fighter-kings of Baltim had armies that rode on iron elephants; but one of those kings had a princess daughter with six fingers on her hand, and a white cat with six toes; she had a garden, and in the garden a lake without a bottom. They would begin to travel from the plains of Annu to the mountains of Zygo and because there was an infinity in between, never arrive. But they would cry out, topping each other; but the trees can sing, and they warn you about the tigers; but the water is warm and the ice ship melts. He thought of dangers, and planned for them; she invented escapes, at the last moment.

  Her parents seemed hardly to notice this game, or so she then thought. She was surprised years later to find that her mother had kept a lot of the writings they had done, the drawings and the models, the chronologies and the maps. Most of the work was Ben’s, which was maybe why she had kept it. When Kit took it all from the cardboard box, she felt a strange vertigo: she recognized and remembered these things and at the same time saw them shrivel and shrink; what had once been big and vivid to her became small, and not only in size. He had done it all on little pieces of shoddy paper and card, in colored pencils; he had been just a child. It was like picking up the body of a bird, and being surprised to find it nearly weightless.

  Between themselves she and Ben called their parents George and Marion, not Mom and Dad: they found it irresistible that their parents had the same names as the two ghosts who bedeviled Cosmo Topper on television. George! Marion! the dapper little Englishman would cry in exasperation or befuddlement at his mischievous, unflappable dead friends, up to their tricks again; and the Malones would laugh and look at one another. Their George and Marion were so much like those ghosts: untouchable, it seemed, so blithe and insubstantial.

  In the summer before Kit went into high school, they moved into a new development strung along the banks of the Wabash River. Behind their split-level house were young woods, and a steep gully going down to the riverbank and the little brown river. The trees hung over it and lifted their slimy knuckled toes out of it and the undergrowth was dense.

  “Bugs,” Ben said as they climbed down. “Bugs and more bugs.”

  “You don’t say bugs,” Kit said, coming down after him with the collecting stuff, the jars and the cotton soaked in carbon tet, notebook under her arm. “That’s the first thing they said. Bugs doesn’t mean anything.”

  He smiled that serene smile of his, the one that meant he felt no need to respond and yet remained in the right. He had the net, and with it he brushed bugs—deerflies, mosquitoes—from his head.

  Kit had been enrolled in a Catholic school for the coming year, St. Hedwige’s, and at registration was told that over the summer it would be her job to make an insect collection, fifty species at least, to be mounted, labeled, and brought to Biology class on the first day of school, which now was only a couple of weeks away.

  She didn’t hate bugs, especially. She withdrew from them: ducked beneath the flight paths of hunting wasps, stayed far from June bugs and darning needles. Going down to the river just because that’s where they were, parting the layered leaves and upturning stones out of their sockets in the mud to find them, messing with them—she felt a deep reluctance that Ben made fun of. A girl’s reluctance, he implied, and it seemed to be so, for it was like the feeling that her own girl being was just then causing in her, unable to be ducked, her own swelling slug’s alien aliveness.

  So she had let the days slide away, and read her small books, which were full of earth’s music and the river too, of course, and the murmurous haunts of flies on summer eves, but that was different, until it was August and her few specimens (a couple of June bugs she had found already dead and a great moonstone-colored luna moth she wrote a poem about) had already decayed, improperly mounted; and Ben started taking her down to the river in the mornings and the evenings.

  “Listen,�
�� he said, standing still in the green.

  The noise really was ear-filling, an orchestra endlessly tuning, strings here, woodwinds there.

  “Good hunting,” he said, and rubbed his hands together. At first she only followed; he was fearless and soon fascinated by the job, finding amazing beings in the city of leaves that he might have seen at any time but never had, a robber fly, a cicada killer (huge slow wasp like an attack helicopter), or a camel cricket with glossy russet hump. He learned to step up to a hornet or a wasp as though he meant to tame it, and slip the net smoothly over it like an executioner’s hood; he made Kit try it.

  “He’s gonna get me, I know it.”

  “He’s not. He doesn’t even know you exist.”

  “I got him I got him.”

  “Easy. Don’t catch his wing, don’t hurt him.”

  “Hurt him! We’re trying to kill him.”

  “Give him a little shake. There, now he’s dropped in. Now the cap.”

  In the jar she had caught, yes, quite a specimen, a beetle painted in clown colors and in fact named (they looked it up as they sat to drink the Cokes he had brought too) a harlequin. So there.

  And this was how she learned to be unafraid of the world, at least unafraid of this modality of it: how she became a hunter and an explorer and a namer, a taxonomist. By summer’s end she was crashing through the shallows and the reeds in pursuit of some glamorous something whose wing-hum she had heard, digging into a black crevice where a centipede, not actually an insect, was escaping, one of a kind she hadn’t seen before and wanted. The more she learned the more she wanted to know, and wanting to know displaced fear. Her poem “The Split Level” would be about that: about a woman learning the names of flowers, and thus (she believes) coming closer to nature, and really coming closer too, even though by means of the one thing nature doesn’t possess of itself, its names.

  The day before school started she came to her mother (who was washing dishes) and told her this weird thing had happened and she was scared: her stomach hurt and there was blood on her underpants.

  Well that’s not something to be scared of, her mother said (Kit remembers how she went on washing her flowered plates and standing them upright in the rack like soldiers or tombstones, not alarmed or apparently unsettled at all). She began an explanation, saying Now you know you have this hole there, not the peepee one but the other one. Kit nodded and listened to the rest of what her mother said, and accepted the hug and pat her mother offered (Big girl now, my baby’s a big girl) and then went back to her room; and as though she were catching a bright centipede in its damp crevice she discovered what she had in fact not known before, that she had a hole there: not how far it went, though, or where it led.

  How can you know anything true about someone when your memories stop just as you are becoming a person yourself? She thought Ben had been beautiful and strong, that his strength and his beauty were like a horse he rode: once a pretty pony, it grew into a tall stallion, then gone, bearing him away. That’s what she remembered, not knowing if it was true or false or neither.

  Home from high school on a day in spring, taking off his watch at the kitchen sink to wash his hands; his thick dark hair just cut, what they called then a “Princeton cut” for some reason, just long enough to part and brush to one side. Pink button-down shirt, a Gant, only one of the brand names he was loyal to; an inch of white undershirt showing in its cleft, its sleeves turned back one graceful turn. People say I can remember as though it were yesterday, but you can never remember yesterdays as clearly as these moments that are not yesterday or any day, but always now. His pleated gray slacks, pegged at the ankle, revealing now and then like a mockingbird’s flicked tail another inch of white: his socks between the black loafers and the breaking flannel cuff. She remembered his clothes better than she remembered her own. A slim gold belt, buckled (it was the style that season) at the side.

  But what is he saying? It’s easier to see than to hear. She might have been kidding him about his weekend dates. She did that a lot in that year, trying under the guise of teasing to understand his life apart from her, his feelings about girls and dates and making out. She was like a color-blind person trying to guess the names and imports of colors; she knew these rituals were of vital importance and that she would have to begin on them soon. Yet she didn’t think to connect them to the huge feelings she did feel, feelings that could be started by a summer storm or a violin sonata or a thousand other things. And she feared for him: feared losing him.

  “Isn’t she taller than you?”

  “Maybe a little taller.”

  “But that’s ridiculous, going on a date with a girl taller than you.”

  “It’s not a date.”

  “She’ll have to wear flat shoes. It says so in the magazines.”

  “Okay, maybe she will. We’re going to a riding stable, though. I think she wears boots.”

  “And how can you go out with somebody taller than you whose name is Earp? Greta Earp?”

  “Geraldine. Greta is her sister.”

  “Geraldine!” Collapsing in laughter. “With a riding crop, smacking her big leather boots, looking down on you!”

  “She’s going to teach me some riding.”

  “Oh my God! Teach you riding! Oh no!”

  In school he never played team sports, and maybe that too was because of how often they moved: he was never inducted into the male fraternity of a particular time and place, a team’s forming and knitting over several summers and school years. Instead he took up sports he could play alone. He ran, preferring distance and endurance events; swam; wrestled too, strong and smart enough to win but maybe too generous or not competitive enough to win often.

  Golf. The summer after he graduated from high school they lived in an odd tall house on the edge of a golf course, a house like a summer cabin, paneled in varnished plywood. He’d get up early that summer and take a stained canvas bag of six or eight clubs he’d bought at a church sale and walk out onto the course when the grass was wet and the air still; play five or six holes until the shape of the course brought him back near his own lawn again, and quit.

  He took Kit with him if she got up quickly when she heard him wake and dress. She walked out with him into the checkered shade and the sounds of birds awaking, out along those mysterious shorn rides bordered with placid trees and undergrowth, the rough. He let her try to hit the ball, stood behind her to model her stance and swing, flinging her arms like a puppet’s. Now and then she lofted a ball sweetly into the day. Once she watched it float (with mysterious solemn slowness, hooking badly) right between a rising goldfinch crossing one way and a monarch butterfly sailing another, as though they played in Eden.

  Eden: Falin said that we are entranced with Eden because it is at once changeless and fleeting. It was on the golf course that Ben told her he was planning to join the army.

  “I can’t tell Mom and Dad yet,” he told her. “So I’m practicing on you.”

  They sat on a little bench between holes. She would remember the little herm that stuck up there by them, brushed metal, a dirty white towel hung around it: the ball washer.

  “I thought you were going to college. To Thomas Aquinas.”

  “I thought I wanted to. But. I want to do this.” He grinned at her. “That’s good, though, see. That’s what they’re going to say.”

  He was turning a drab little flower in his fingers. Six months before he had driven home on a great black motorcycle and then told his parents it was his, he had bought it with his own money, earned at the jobs he was always able to get. He found it easier to explain and account for what he had done than to tell them what he planned to do. They were lucky that what he had gone and done so often made good sense, or at least wasn’t dangerous or wrong.

  “A soldier,” Kit said. “Mom and Dad’ll kill you.”

  “Soldiers,” he said, “don’t get killed by their parents. That’s not the idea.”

  “Oh jeez. Ben. But.”

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nbsp; He began to explain, as much to himself as to them or to her. He had an obligation to his country, if he didn’t do it now it would be hanging over him till it was done. College wasn’t cheap, and if he got all the way through his army training, not only would he have completed a lot of work that would count toward a degree—language, for instance—he would be eligible for good scholarships and loans. The GI Bill. He talked carefully, building a small watertight house around himself, putting each brick in place with care. Dad had been in the army, after all, hadn’t he; this was a time when everybody ought to be willing to defend this country, everybody knew the dangers. If you joined up you served longer, yes, but you got top choice of programs and locations.

  Every brick he put in place shut him off further from Kit.

  She almost never thought about the future, it seemed brazen or dangerous, the very thing that the gods got you for doing. Ben though: he loved planning and believed in it. So he was probably right about the army, that it would be a good deal for him, and work out well. But why didn’t he see that it would leave her without him, with no future that she could envision, no way to get ready?

  “They’ll miss you so much. Mom will miss you so much.”

  “Oh,” Ben said. “I think they’re ready. They say I eat too much.”

  “You do. But they love that. They love you.”

  “Well,” he said softly. “I love them.” Kit clapped her hands over her face then so that he wouldn’t see, pressed her hands into her traitorous eyeballs, but it didn’t help. The one thing she knew she mustn’t do, weep, the one thing that would push him away; knowing always made her weep more.

  “Oh here we go,” he said. “Old Goofy Glass.”

  That was so cruel that she began to laugh. The Goofy Glass was part of a magic set he had had once, an ordinary water glass that somehow sweated or oozed from invisible pores so that whoever held it was soon awash, or the table where it was put down, the knee it was rested on. She laughed and then went on crying, and though he had never done so before, he put an arm around her shoulders and waited, saying nothing, till she could stop, and they could go home.