The Translator by John Crowley Page A

think about Falin a lot, but it was because she knew nothing of him, of his self and his past; only of his future, which she knew just to the extent that it was hers too, American. What she didn’t and probably couldn’t know about him gripped her, it was a fascination that seemed to her pure, almost impersonal, like a scientist’s obsession with the source of a river or the unseen side of the moon.
    She watched for him. She did do that. There was always the possibility that he might appear near her or in her view on campus or at lectures or elsewhere and some tiny thing more would be revealed. When she did see him she could often not keep from following him, unseen, shadowing him, which was easier to get away with than she would have 80

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    thought; all it took was alertness and a heart quiet enough to make the right smooth movements so that the other’s peripheral vision was not alerted. She had measured Fran’s peripheral vision in Psychology, where she had learned the term; one day it would become the title of a book of her poems. She kept the open letter in her bag, a sort of so-there to Jackie, she was only doing her part as Jackie had said she should: but she didn’t tell Jackie or anyone.
    She came upon him on a March night taking his long strides across the old campus, and she followed not far behind, ready to turn away and be no one that he knew if he turned toward her, if he felt her glance on his back and his high head, which he wouldn’t, because it was so light, so nonexistent. She lost him, though, from being too carefully inattentive, and she slowed uncertainly; she could see down all the lighted paths, he couldn’t have gone far.
    He was gone, gone entirely, vanished.
    She walked on toward the library, feeling an Alice feeling of having been put in the wrong by a being who didn’t follow the laws of physics.
    Then she found she was walking right toward him: he stood before the library, and he was talking to a slim dark woman, or rather listening to her talk, she seemed distraught or upset somehow, she talked and shook her head and almost seemed to tremble: and then as Kit came close, almost too close, unable not to, the woman pressed her cheek against his coat.
    Kit couldn’t walk on or she’d pass right by them, but if she stopped or turned abruptly away she’d catch their eye, she knew it. She fell in behind two students going up the steps into the library, and went in too, nothing else she could do, feeling the scene she had witnessed go on behind her, precious and lost.
    Now what. She moped in the atrium for a time, peeked out the doors when they were thrown open, but there was nothing to see. She couldn’t go back out, for fear he and the woman would be still there, having decided to sit on one of the benches there by the library. She had no chores to do here. She walked in the reading room; she climbed the stairs; she went to the sepulchral toilet on the second floor that no one ever used.

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    She walked back through the periodicals room and saw him sitting at a table and reading. His coat over the back of the chair and the green-shaded light on his book as though he had been there for hours.
    She moved closer to where he sat, going carefully up between the open periodical shelves filled with bound journals, till she found a gap wide enough to see through, see the room and him.
    One elbow on the table and the L of his finger and thumb support-ing his chin. Slowly and infrequently his other hand turned a page, but the rest of him was very still. What was it he read? She could sense his eyes moving over the big pages, absorbing what he looked at. She stood on her toes to see.
    It was an ad, a double-page spread: a huge purple Nash Ambassador of 1955 or ’56, passing diagonally through the white space, gleeful dad at the wheel with hat and pipe. She knew what car it was because Ben had taught her all the cars of those years, all the distinctive