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  The author quoted songs, too, in several languages, for despite their wretchedness the characters would occasionally sing as they worked, or sing to cheer each other up, or sing during the few hours’ rest on Sunday afternoons. One musical woman even sleeps with a German kapo in exchange for a harmonica, along with a few slices of bread. But when the songs were translated into Italian, they needed to be rendered in English, as in the story of Lili, who is nicknamed for the familiar German war song, “Lili Marlene.” It was Lili who, according to the tarot cards, would be taking a long journey, so long that Madame Louise couldn’t even see the end of it.

  The pungent lyrics of “Lili Marlene” become emblematic of the characters’ situation. After the Bible episode, I realized right away that these lyrics existed in an English translation. Hunting for them took me to the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York, where I waited in a cozy armchair while the librarian whisked off behind locked doors to fetch my request. She handed me a mound of tattered old sheet music from the 1940s and I whiled away the afternoon, transported back half a century and enchanted by the songs printed in innocent old typefaces with period illustrations.

  The other songs in the text were originally Russian and Dutch, and since it wasn’t feasible to visit the Russian and Dutch versions of the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts, I translated them as best I could. This was a treat; I was growing nostalgic for my own work, and almost felt I was back in the lyrics for my nonexistent musical comedy.

  Consorting with the kapos wasn’t unusual; the women prisoners did it not only for bread, but to snatch a few moments of pleasure in a doomed life, or to have a possible ally during a selection for the gas chambers. Because of their desperation, I needed to know the proper declensions—masculine, feminine, singular, and plural—for the Polish word kochany, meaning lover, or more informally, boyfriend or girlfriend. A Polish-English dictionary was no help, so I went to the Slavic languages department at Columbia University, hoping a kind professor might come to my aid. I was so disappointed to find no one in that I moaned piteously to the secretary, a plump blonde woman who seemed a tolerant sort, “All I wanted was the right spelling for a few simple Polish words.” “Is that all?” she said. “I’m Polish. What do you need to know?” The experience not only corroborated but extended my astute friend’s maxim: Tell everyone you meet what you’re looking for, even if it isn’t one of the basics such as a job, an apartment, or a mate, but merely the word for mate.

  My last foray away from the dictionary was to the Yivo Institute in New York to find the English terminology for the different work groups in the camps—commandos, as they were called in Nazi military argot. The Yivo Institute, a center for the study of the Holocaust, is housed in a stately Fifth Avenue mansion with marble walls and a magnificently curving wrought-iron staircase in the lobby. It contains endless shelves of documentation—war reports, statistical breakdowns of prisoners by nationality, age, and sex, as well as by how they died, with photographs. Here too I spent an afternoon mesmerized by old books and papers, though not so happily as in the Library of the Performing Arts with the sheet music.

  I didn’t find what I needed and ended up fudging it, but I found something else: a chart showing the Nazis’ division of prisoners into categories with distinct identifying marks. A red triangle sewn on the uniform meant political prisoners, a purple triangle meant Jehovah’s Witnesses, green was for criminals, pink was for homosexuals, black for “antisocial” types, blue for immigrants, and yellow for Jews, though in this last case an additional triangle was superimposed to form a six-pointed star. A Rainbow Coalition.

  I’ve thought a great deal about the list of words scrawled in my handwriting in the front of the book in different colored pens, signifying that the entries were made at different times. Interminable. Outrage. Stampede. Rancid. And so on. It’s true many of the words suit the text and appear in my English version, but others do not. I think they weren’t simply suggested by the Italian, but were also words I liked and hoped to find an opportunity to use, like an heiress seeking social occasions to display her collection of jewels. That sounds a trifle frivolous, I know, especially for a translator. How can words come first? What about the truth of a piece of writing, its meaning or content?

  Well, a writer’s real allegiance is to language, words and their proper placement, without which there is no truth or meaning. The list reminds me that along with the given of Millu’s stories, the translation is built out of the English lexicon, the way bricks and mortar make walls to house life.

  Just a few months ago my polyglot friend Francesco died of AIDS at thirty-five years old. He would have worn a pink triangle. When he was sick and I visited him in his fifth-floor walk-up apartment with the caged finches and the plants and colored banners on the roof, I saw lying on a table the copy of the translation which I’d given him. Only he had known the name for the pentagram in the tarot deck, the card Madame Louise said meant a long journey, so long that she couldn’t even see the end of it.

  Visiting the Yivo Institute, I knew immediately that the information about the colored triangles, the rainbow of prisoners, would become a poem. Sometimes the form of a piece of writing or the images by which it will travel hit you before anything else. I haven’t yet written it but when I do, it will become another instance of the finite time during which I worked on the translation stretching out and arching, bending as physicists tell us time does when viewed under the aspect of eternity, reaching its tentacles back and forth over my life to encompass it all in a vast and flexible hand.

  The Spoils of War

  HE ALWAYS SAT IN the back row, as far away as he could get: long skinny body and long face, thin curly hair, dark mustache. Sometimes his bony shoulders were hunched as he peered down at his notebook lying open on that bizarre prehensile arm that grows out of college classroom chairs. Or else he leaned way back, the lopsided chair balanced on two legs and propped against the rear wall, his chest appearing slightly concave beneath his white shirt, and one narrow leg, in jeans, elegantly stretched out to rest on a nearby empty chair.

  Casual but tense, rather like a male fashion model. Volatile beneath the calm: someone you would not want to meet on a dark street. His face was severely impassive in a way that suggested arrogance and scorn.

  He must have been about twenty-seven years old, an extremely thin young man—ascetic, stripped down to the essentials. His body looked so brittle and so electrically charged that I almost expected crackling noises when he moved, but in fact he slipped in and out silently, in the wink of an eye. His whole lanky, scrutinizing demeanor was intimidating. He would have no patience with anything phony, I imagined; would not suffer fools gladly.

  About every fourth or fifth class he was absent, common enough for evening-session students who had jobs, families, grown-up lives and responsibilities. I was a trifle relieved at his absences—I could relax—yet I missed him, too. His presence made a definite and compelling statement, but in an unintelligible language. I couldn’t interpret him as readily as I could the books on the reading list.

  I was hired in the spring of 1970. It was wartime. Students were enraged. When I went for my interview at Hunter College I had to walk past pickets into a building where black flags hung from the windows. I would use the Socratic method, I earnestly told the interviewer, since I believed in the students’ innate intelligence. To myself, I vowed I would win their confidence. After all, I was scarcely older than they were and I shared their mood of protest. I would wear jeans to show I was one of them, and even though I had just passed thirty and was married and had two children, I would prove that I could be trusted. I was prepared—even eager—for youthful, strident, moral indignation.

  Far from strident, he was totally silent, never speaking in class discussions, and I was reluctant to call on him. Since he had a Hispanic name, I wondered whether he might have trouble with English. Bureaucratic chaos was the order of the day, with the City University en
acting in microcosm the confusion in the nation at large; it was not unusual for students barely speaking English to wind up in an Introduction to Literature class. His silence and his blank arrogant look could simply mean bewilderment. I ought to find out, but I waited.

  His first paper was a shocker. I was surprised to receive it at all—I had him pegged as the sullen type who would give up at the first difficult assignment, then complain that college was irrelevant. On the contrary, the paper, formidably intelligent, jarred my view of the fitness of things. It didn’t seem possible—no, it didn’t seem right—that a person so sullen and mute should be so eloquent. Someone must have helped him. The truth would come out in impromptu class papers, and then I would confront him. I bided my time.

  After the first exam he tossed his blue book onto my desk, not meeting my eyes, and, wary and feline, glided away, withdrawing into his body as if attempting a disappearing act. The topic he had chosen was the meaning of “the horror” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the novella we had spent the first few sessions on.

  He compared it to Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust. He wrote at length about racial hatred and war and their connection in the dark, unspeakable places in the soul from which both spring, without sentimentality but with a sort of matter-of-fact, old knowledge. He knew Faulkner better than I did; I had to go back and skim Intruder in the Dust to understand his exam. I do know that I had never before sat transfixed in disbelief over a student paper.

  The next day I called him over after class and asked if he knew that he had an extraordinary mind. He said, yes, he did. Close up, there was nothing arrogant about him. A bit awkward and shy, yet gracious, with something antique and courtly in his manner.

  Why did he never speak in class, I asked.

  He didn’t like to speak in front of people. His voice and his eyes turned evasive, like an adolescent’s, as he told me this. Couldn’t, in fact. Couldn’t speak.

  What do you mean, I said. You’re not a kid. You have a lot to say. You write like this and you sit in class like a statue? What’s it all about?

  He was in the war, he said, and he finally looked at my face and spoke like the adult that he was. He was lost for a long time in the jungles of Vietnam, he explained patiently, as if I might not know what Vietnam was, or what a jungle was, or what it was to be lost. And after that, he said, he couldn’t. He just found it hard to be with people. To speak to people.

  But you’re so smart. You could do so much.

  I know. He shrugged: a rueful, devil-may-care, movie war-hero shrug. Can’t be helped.

  Anything can be helped, I insisted.

  No, he insisted back, quietly. Not after that jungle.

  Hunter had a counseling service, free. Go, I urged.

  He had already gone. They keep asking me questions about my childhood, he said, my relationship with my parents, my toilet training. He grinned quickly, turning it on and off. But it doesn’t help. It’s none of that. It’s from when I was lost in that jungle.

  You must work, I said. Don’t you have to talk to people when you work?

  No, he was a meter man.

  A what?

  He went around checking on cars, to see if they had overstayed their time at the parking meters.

  You can’t do that forever, I said. With your brains?

  Well, at least he didn’t have to talk to people, he said sweetly. For now. Maybe later on he would get braver.

  And what would he do if I called on him in class? If I made him talk?

  Oh no, don’t do that, he said, and flashed the wry grin again. If you did that I’d probably run out of the room.

  I never called on him because I didn’t want to risk seeing him run out of the room. But at least we stopped being afraid of each other. He gave up his blank look, and occasionally I would glance at his face, to see if I was still making sense or drifting off into some seductive, academic cloud of words.

  I’ve thought of him a lot over the past twenty-five years. I think of him every time I see young men entering an Army recruiting office. I think of him every time I hear presidents announce plans to send troops to some faraway jungle or desert, the prefab, endlessly recyclable phrases billowing from their lips: “solemnly pledging,” “protecting,” “upholding commitments,” “defending,” “taking every measure to ensure.” Not one yet has pledged himself to the defense of this country’s young men, “taking every measure necessary” to “ensure” that their genius does not turn mute and their lives become the spoils of war.

  Help

  MY EDGY FEELINGS ABOUT maids go way back. As a child I lived next door to the only family on our all-white block to employ a black maid. Not a “colored girl” appearing once a week, which was not quite so uncommon, but a “live-in” maid. Roselle, who was about twenty, cleaned, cooked, and generally catered to the family’s every domestic need, and they in turn made a point of telling the neighbors she was “just like one of the family,” a piece of unexamined hypocrisy that irked me even before I could say why. I knew in some way that her work in the house and her color, both of which made her distinctly not like one of the family, were connected. The lady of the house boasted of how they had “gotten” her from the South when she was still in her teens, while I also knew that was not how any other family member had been gotten. Moreover, though Roselle did sit on the small brick porch on warm evenings, chatting with neighbors taking the air, she came out later, once she had cleared the remains of the dinner she had prepared and served.

  Above all, claiming her as part of the family seemed to obliterate any family Roselle might possess on her own, a family evidenced by a grandmother who occasionally traveled north to visit her and sat out on the porch chatting and gossiping too, yet for all I knew helped with the housework in exchange for hospitality. I suspected that had Roselle or her grandmother or any black person bought a house on our block, my neighbors would have been among the first to flee.

  As I grew up and perceived the way things were, I was certain I could never be so insensitive, patronizing and disrespectful as to boast of friendship with an employee, especially one so intimately placed. It would be a point of honor not to mistake the civility of common interests for true friendship, not to appropriate someone’s private life along with her labor. Certain relationships existed, I reasoned, because of deplorable inequities; every connection based on economic necessity was shaped and warped by it. To pretend otherwise was to exploit still further, adding personal insult to social injury.

  I was young. I thought in terms of abstract principle. I hadn’t learned there are times, crucial times, when you find yourself doing in good faith something you have scorned in others on principle. The act sneaks into your life like an infiltrator, confounding, unnerving you: how did it manage to get past the border guards? Not very effective guards, after all. No sooner do simple instincts present themselves than principles are bared as straw men, scarecrows that scare no winged impulse.

  In any case, it seemed I needn’t worry about being tempted or tainted, since I would never be in a position to have a maid or cleaning woman. During the early years of marriage, while I held various jobs and went to graduate school, my husband and I did the minimal housework together, with the feeling of playing House. No doubt we ate real food, not the airy food consumed in childhood games of House, but though I remember marathon shopping trips and bulging bags of groceries, what those groceries turned into and by what means has sunk into oblivion. Then as soon as our first daughter was born we slipped unthinkingly into the ready-to-wear habits of working husband and stay-at-home wife, for lack of imagination and with no other visible model. It was the early 1960s. We instituted some enlightened variations—I worked part-time doing writing and public relations for a civil rights agency in neighboring Harlem, with my mother filling in at home—but not so as to make a significant difference in the standard pattern. Three and a half years later our second daughter was born.

  I did not take easily to the grown-up
version of House—quite the contrary. One day I announced that either we found someone to take care of the children so I could get out and work, or I went to Kings County. Kings County was the Brooklyn hospital now called Downstate, but for those who grew up in its shadow, the label was generic: as Kafka’s castle has come to signify state bureaucracy and, more broadly, the hopeless intransigence of the human condition, Kings County meant the psycho ward, the terminus.

  My husband replied earnestly, without irony, as if, like the wife on the TV commercial, I had proposed a choice between stuffing or potatoes: “In that case we’d better find someone to take care of the children.” Strictly speaking, this meant I must find someone, since besides my mental health, the children too were apparently my responsibility. Naturally whatever money I earned would go to pay for the maid, who represented my sanity. With luck I would break even. Sanity, in any event, is beyond measuring in dollars and cents.

  Nothing had been stopping me from making this move on my own, but one didn’t, then. At least I didn’t. Besides—or as a result of—my distaste for the maid situation I had observed as a child, I didn’t believe in having servants altogether. I believed, and still do, that people should clean up after themselves. My rudimentary social philosophy went as follows: if people tended to their own needs, pernicious hierarchies of class and race would be abolished (I was not yet keenly aware of those of sex), the artificial ranking of different kinds of work would fall away, the power-hungry would be kept from making trouble. Everyone would stay close to the elementary, necessary tasks of maintenance and child care, which would engender respect and reverence for the essentials—family bonds, children, useful work, a salutary life on earth: all sorts of unquestionably fine goals would be accomplished. I still believe this, though I have not found or created a setting in which I can live by it.