The Translator Read Free Page A

watchtower, facing the plain brown west and the evening; the river’s little oxbow, peach-colored like the sunset sky.
    All of that too was fearful in its melancholy but didn’t make her afraid.
    “Well,” her father said again.
    “All yours I guess,” said her mother, looking into the closets. One of Kit’s fears had been of the roommate she might get, creepy doppel-ganger of some kind or cold and imperious. She had had enough of roommates at Our Lady, other souls too near hers.
    Leaving her belongings there still packed (her mother wanted to fill the cunning built-in drawers of blond wood and hang pictures, but Kit wouldn’t let her), they drove around the campus until it was too dark to see. (“‘The Old Wishing Well in its grove of oaks has long been a tra-ditional spot for marriage proposals,’” her father read from the guide-book. “Gee. Must be a long line come June.” And Kit saw her mother frown and put a silencing hand on his slacks.) Then they drove down into the little town, to the one big old hotel, and had dinner. A cock-tail? Ma glanced for approval at Dad and said, “I’ll have a grasshopper.”
    Dad ordered a martini, and when it was brought he pushed it toward Kit. “Back on track,” he said to her, and a big hard lump suddenly rose in Kit’s throat, that only a swallow of the awful pale drink dissipated.
    Late that night she awoke in her new narrow bed as though she had 16

j o h n c r o w l e y
    heard a whisper in her ear, and when she sat up, she could see that outside the window snow was falling fast and thick.
    Registration for second-semester classes was held next day, in the great Romanesque field house, toward which students pressed, slogging through the uncleared snow and churning it to slush. The boots to have, Kit could tell, were those stadium boots with fur collars, white polar bear or gray kitten: her own Capezios, and her feet, were icy wet.
    Inside, banners in the University colors hung from the iron rafters, and the tall barred windows lit the dusty air in columns. Sawdust, now wet too, was spread over the dirt of the floor and the markings of the running track. Rows of long folding tables had been set up, above which signs were hung announcing what classes could be signed up for at each station.
    Like a bazaar, Kit thought. The hum of talk and activity arose into the height of the old building, up to where calling sparrows darted amid the rafters. As an incoming freshman, Kit was told she had first to be photographed for her identification card. Signs and monitors guided her into a roped-off area where a portrait camera and lights were set up.
    “Card?”
    What card? The proctor or assistant neatly fingered it out of Kit’s packet. We were all getting used to these oblong punch cards then, one corner clipped, their rows of perfect rectangular holes. You were not to fold, spindle, or mutilate them. There was a comb there, and a mirror, for her to use. Kit stopped still for a moment, unable to move forward, reminded for no good reason (the big camera, the harried proctor) of Our Lady. All through the coming year in her ID photo she would see in her eyes what she had seemed to see at that moment when they were taking it. Hunted: or not hunted, caught.
    She exited that area, permitted now to wander in the busy souk. She thought maybe she’d toss away the list of sensible choices she had worked out with the freshman adviser, and instead go over there, sign up for Introduction to Music Theory, or Uralic-Altaic Studies. But she

t h e t r a n s l a t o r
17
    went meekly and stood in the right lines, English Composition, the advanced French course she had tested into, a Psychology course (her required-science choice), World History I (from the Stone to the Middle Ages), Major Works of Western Literature I (Homer to Cervantes).
    Down the table from where she signed up for Composition, a line pressing toward a harassed young man threatened to break up into a crowd: people