The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (9 page)

Freidin introduced me to Janet Lind, and suggested that we might like to talk about
King Kong
. It rapidly emerged that she and I had very little to say to one another about
King Kong
. What little spark there had been in this conversation was soon extinguished by Nathalie Babel, who was staring at Lind with a fixed, unbenevolent expression. A chilly silence descended upon the table.

“JANET,” Nathalie said finally, in her fathomless voice. “IS IT TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME?”

Janet Lind turned to her calmly. “I beg your pardon?”

“IS IT TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME?”

“I can’t imagine what makes you say that.”

“I say it because I would like to know if it is TRUE THAT YOU DESPISE ME.”

“That is an extremely odd question. What gives you an idea like that?”

“I just think you were told that I’m a NASTY OLD WITCH.”

“This is really extremely odd. Did someone say something to you?” Lind frowned slightly. “You and I have barely had any interactions.”

“Even so, I had the impression—that you DESPISE ME.”

This conversation continued for longer than one would have thought possible, given how clear it was that Janet Lind, for whatever reason, was just not going to tell Nathalie Babel that she did not despise her. Looking from Lind to Babel, I was struck by the nontrivial truth behind the Smiths song: “Some girls are bigger than others.” It wasn’t just that Nathalie Babel’s face was physically larger—it was somehow visibly clear that she came from a different place and time, where the human scale was different, and bigger.

“Come, Nathalie,” Freidin interceded.

She fixed him with her deep, watery eyes. “SOME PEOPLE DO DESPISE ME, YOU KNOW . . .” She sighed, and pointed at two wineglasses: “Which of these is my glass?”

“They’re both yours.”

“Oh? I can’t see anything. Which is water?”

“It looks to me like they’re both white wine.”

Nathalie stared at him. “AND WHY DO I HAVE TWO GLASSES OF WINE?”

“Why do you say it like it’s a bad thing? If it were me, I would think, ‘This must mean that I’ve done something very good.’
Here
, however, is your water glass.”

“Ah.” Nathalie Babel took a drink of water.

There was a long silence.

“So,” Platt said to Freidin, as the waiters were bringing out the entrées. “I hear that Slavic department enrollments are declining in the United States.”

“Oh, do you? Well, you’re probably right.”

“Do you notice a decline here at Stanford?”

“I’d say we’ve had a pretty fair enrollment the past few years.”

“What about graduate students—do you have many graduate students? I have somehow not seen your students.”

“Here is Elif,” said Freidin. “She is one of our graduate students.”

Platt peered at me over the rims of his glasses for several seconds, then turned back to Freidin. “Yes—so. I see you have one specimen. Are there many others?”

By this point we had all been served some cutlets swimming in a sea of butter. These cutlets appeared to depress everyone. The Hungarian scholar even sent hers back, with detailed instructions. It reappeared a few minutes later, with no modification visible to the naked eye.

Toward the end of the meal, Lidiya Babel came over from her table, stood behind Nathalie’s chair, put her arms around her shoulders, and patted her head. “My darling,” she said, “how I love you! How
good
it is that we are all together!”

Nathalie glanced over her shoulder, with the expression of a cat who does not want to be picked up.

Freidin looked from Nathalie to Lidiya. “Thank you!” he exclaimed. “Thank you, Lidiya!”

Lidiya stared at him. “What for?”

“For coming! In your place maybe I would have hesitated.”

“What do you mean to say—that you would find it difficult to travel with my mother?”

“No, of course not—but it’s a long distance, an unknown place . . .”

“Speaking of your mother,” Nathalie told Lidiya, “how old is she anyway? Some people say ninety-two, some people say ninety-six. Or is it a secret?”

“My mother is ninety-five.”

“She doesn’t look a day over ninety-three,” said Freidin gallantly.

“It’s true, she’s in good health and looks well,” Lidiya said. “However, not as well as she looked two years ago. But that isn’t the main thing. The main thing is that everything is still all right
here
.” She tapped her temple. “Her memory and her understanding.”

When Lidiya went back to her table, Nathalie followed her with her eyes.

“THAT OLD WITCH WILL BURY US ALL,” she remarked.

“Nathalie!” said Freidin.

She turned to stare at him. “YOU THINK I SHOULD KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT,” she observed. “But—WHY? WHAT DO I HAVE TO LOSE? I HAVE NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE.”

Freidin looked nonplussed. “Well, then, I guess you should risk everything,” he said. And, making a visible effort to change the subject: “Nathalie, now that you’re here, there is something I’ve been dying to ask you. What was your aunt’s name? One sees it written so many ways. Meriam, Miriam, Mary, Maria—which was it?”

“Oh! Do tell us the correct spelling!” exclaimed Platt, his eyes lighting up.

Nathalie looked at him. “I don’t understand what you mean by the correct spelling. Some called her Meriam, others Mary, others Maria. All three were used.”

“How interesting,” said Janet Lind, turning to Freidin. “I’m surprised you haven’t already gone to Odessa and looked it up in the municipal register.”

“I’m afraid there are many other surprises where that came from. I’ve always wanted to go to Odessa and look all these things up, but it somehow never happened.”

“Why don’t you go now?”

“For the same reason that the Babel conference is here, at Stanford: I don’t really travel.”

“Why not?” asked the American journalist.

Freidin explained that his wife’s health kept him in the area, which I thought would end the discussion, but it didn’t.

“Well, your daughter still lives with you, doesn’t she?” someone asked. “Can’t your daughter stay with her?”

“Anna is an enormous source of support and happiness, but she is eighteen years old, and she has a busy life of her own.”

The journalist looked thoughtful. “You know what I think?” she said. “I think you should get her a dog.”

Freidin stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“You should get your wife a dog,” the journalist explained. “It will change her life.”

“I really don’t see what a dog has to do with any of this.”

“The dog will change her life!”

“What makes you think that her life needs to be changed?” There was another silence. “There are various things that cannot be accomplished by a dog.”

The journalist looked downcast. “I just thought that if she’s sick, the dog can cuddle with her.”

“Cuddling is not the problem,” said Freidin firmly.

The journalist nodded. “I can see I’ve said something wrong,” she said. “But I’m just crazy about dogs.” She looked truly sorry.

“We did have a dog once, years ago,” Freidin said, in a conciliatory tone, “called Kutya.”

The Hungarian professor, a mournful-looking woman in gray, looked up with interest. “
Kutya
means ‘dog’ in Hungarian!” she said. She spoke in a head voice, a bit like a puppet.

“We think Kutya might have had some Hungarian blood. He had a complicated heritage—part German shepherd, part Labrador retriever, and part bass baritone.”

“Your dog could
sing
? Did he also
speak
? We had a
cat
once who could speak.”

Silence.

“What—,” I ventured, and cleared my throat. “What did your cat say?”

The Hungarian professor stared at me. “ ‘
I’m hungry
,’ ” she sang out.

The one person at the table who had remained completely silent during these exchanges was the English translator: a lithe, handsome man—a former dancer, I later learned—with high cheekbones, narrow eyes, and a faintly contemptuous expression. He spoke British English, with a hint of a foreign accent.

His translation was itself an enigma: there were passages of such brilliance that you would stare from the original to the English and wonder how anyone had arrived at anything so unlikely and yet dead-on, but there were also strange discrepancies. For example, at the end of “My First Fee,” Babel writes, “I will not die before I wrest from the hands of love one more—
and this will be the last
—gold coin”; the translation reads: “I will not die until I snatch one more gold ruble (
and definitely not the last one!
) from love’s
hands.” In “Guy de Maupassant,” Babel writes: “Night
bolstered
my hungry youth with a bottle of ’83 Muscatel.” The translation says, “Night
obstructed
my youth with a bottle of Muscatel ’83.” The book was full of such odd changes. Babel says “at nine o’clock”; the translation says “shortly after eight.” Babel says “at midnight”; the translation says “after eleven.” Freidin didn’t like the way “giving the fig” was rendered as “thumbing one’s nose,” or the passage in which the homeless poet during the Petrograd famine has “Siberian salmon caviar and a pound of bread in [his] pocket”: on the grounds that “homeless people do not carry caviar in their pockets,” Freidin considered the correct translation to be “salmon roe.”

Because of these and other disagreements, we all ended up writing our own translations, with a note that “many translations were used in the preparation of this exhibit, including . . .”

Everything had seemed fine until the end of the dinner, when the handsome translator suddenly turned to Freidin.

“You know,” he said, “I went to your exhibit yesterday, and I noticed something strange. Perhaps you can explain it to me.” He had noticed his own book in a glass case, open to Babel’s story “Odessa”—next to a caption quoting “Odessa,” in a different translation.

“Copyediting,” Freidin said promptly. “Hoover ran all our text through copyediting. You would not believe the changes they made.” He told the story of the copy editor who had translated all the italicized Yiddish in such a way that
Luftmensch
(an impractical visionary) came out as “pilot”;
shamas
(the beadle of a synagogue) turned, via “shamus,” into “private detective.”

The translator looked completely unamused. “So you’re saying that the Hoover copy editors changed my translation?”

“Well, I’m saying that these texts went through many different hands.”

“But what am I supposed to think, as a translator? My book is put on display next to something I didn’t write. Is it possible to take some sort of legal action?”

Freidin paused. “Michael,” he said, “we all like your translation, and we are grateful to you. I want us to be friends. Let’s not talk about legal action. It doesn’t even make sense. We didn’t charge admission for the exhibit.”

“That isn’t the point. The point is that there in the display case I see
my book
, and next to it I see a typed quotation
with mistakes
. And you’re telling me nobody can be held accountable because you didn’t charge admission?”

“Michael. I want us to be friends. Now let’s be honest. Were there mistakes in the exhibit? Yes! There are mistakes everywhere. There are mistakes in the
Complete Works
, if it comes to that.”

The translator, who had excellent posture, sat up even straighter. “What mistake? Do you mean in the notes? That was corrected in the paperback.”

“No, I’m not talking about the notes.”

“Well, frankly, I don’t know what you
are
talking about.”

“Michael, I want us to be friends. The
Complete Works
is very, very good. We all like it very much. But in translating Babel—in translating anyone—mistakes are unavoidable.
I
have found mistakes.
Elif
has found mistakes.” The translator briefly turned his hooded eyes in my direction. “But
I want us to be friends
.”

“Do you see what I’m up against?” Freidin demanded. We were standing outside the conference hall after dinner. The
Chinese were about to give their presentation. A junior professor of symbolism was standing nearby, smoking.

“What happened?” the symbolist asked.

“What didn’t happen? It was a dinner from Dostoevsky, that’s all.”

“In what sense? ‘The Two Families’?”

“Well, there was that.”

“And what else?”

“Well—” Freidin broke off, glancing into the hall, where two professors and one Chinese filmmaker were crawling under a table, doing something with extension cords. “Excuse me.” As Freidin hurried into the conference room, Lidiya Babel came up the stairs trailed by several International Babel Scholars, who were perhaps hoping to learn the things that
only she could tell us
. “Do you know,” one of them said, “of those two Chinese, one is a Muslim?”

“Which one?”

“The short one.”

“Are there many Chinese Muslims?” Lidiya asked.