The Translator Read Free

Poetry. It was the year after he came. I was nine-teen years old.”
    “And you were a poet then?”
    “Oh, well. I’d won a prize. I was supposed to have a, you know. A bent.”
    “And you studied there with him.”
    “I was supposed to begin at the university in the fall of 1961,” she said. “But I couldn’t; something else had happened, something . . .
    well, it doesn’t matter, anyway I couldn’t go to school that semester. By then Falin had come to teach at the university in my state; and I’d read about him, in Look and Life.” She saw Gavriil Viktorovich lift his great eyebrows curiously. “The magazines. We were fascinated by people who had, you know, come over: Nureyev, running away from his body-guards in Paris, we all knew about that. And the people trying to get over the Berlin Wall. And Falin, the poet, who couldn’t bring his poems with him. I didn’t hear about him when he came, but I knew he was teaching there when I went in the second semester to start.”
    “You planned to meet him?”
    “No,” she said. “No. I had sort of given up poetry.”
    “Yes? And for what reason?” He took her glass from her and began to pour her more.

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    “Falin once asked me that,” she said: and she knew then that it would not be easy to be here, nor to go on with this story here. For as far in space as she had come she would also have to go in time, or in that dimension that was not either, where they had parted. “I told him I had nothing I could say. And he said that’s what poetry is, the saying of nothing. The Nothing that can’t be said.”
    “Later on, though, you did write again,” Gavriil Viktorovich said.
    He waited, leaning forward slightly, to show that she had his full attention, or on account of his hearing.
    “Yes,” she said. “Later I did. Afterwards.”
    He still waited.
    “I’ll tell you it all,” she said. “I’m here to tell you it all. All that I know.”
    3.
    It was a university huge even in 1961, a city rising on a piece of high ground pressed up for some geological reason from the surrounding prairie. It was built as a land-grant college, and the original cluster of red-stone buildings in toybox Gothic style still stood under big elms and sycamores. By the time Kit went there, though, these were immured within new concrete dorms and featureless towers that stepped even beyond the little willow-bordered river whose Indian name the early scholars had resurrected and the school song celebrated.
    Kit’s parents brought her down in the family station wagon, its back loaded with her books and a set of Samsonite luggage, battered and marred from the many family moves it had made. Her brother’s portable typewriter too, which had devolved on her, a long-term loan, when he joined the army. He had no use for it. In the service he had no use either for the black leather jacket, lined in cerulean satin, zip-pered at the sleeves and across the breast, that he had worn only a few times riding his motorcycle. Kit had accepted it, or taken it from him,

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    after he reupped in November. A hostage she held, or an oblation, or just the old slipper that a lonesome dog chews in its master’s absence.
    She wore it, way too large for her and distressingly strange and barbaric to her mother, who had plucked at the wide shoulders on Kit’s slight frame and almost wept when Kit insisted on wearing it here, to her new school, not as a joke or a gesture but as a coat, to keep her warm.
    “That’s it. Tower 3,” said her father, the University map spread out over the steering wheel. Central one of a group, almost identical, like three pyramids in a row in Egypt. The lone and level sands stretched far away. Kit hated and feared it immediately. Only when they had parked the wagon and hauled her stuff up the elevator and opened the door to her room did she see that, although dreadful to look at, it was wonderful to look out of. A last