Now he was gone too, turned away, lost to her and to everyone. She had lost everything she loved, everything that made her herself, and now she was to lose all that she shared with everyone else as well.

A being such as that couldn’t die all in a day and be gone, it would take far longer, wouldn’t it? There would be things he would have to do, to tell us. We, the rest of us, can’t turn back after we have turned to go, but surely he could, for a time. Oh turn back, she thought, turn back, make this not to have happened all in a day forever.

But if he could turn back, if he were able, then she wouldn’t feel this grief, it would be grave and sad but it wouldn’t be this riving grief, and it was. It was no different from any grief: for Ben, for the dead child she had seen for only a moment. They couldn’t and he couldn’t either. And she could speak of none of it, did not dare to call them back because they would not turn, nor would she be able to bear their faces if they did.

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.

She thought: O my dead. If you return, O my dead. The road, blurry with rain and tears and drink, turned softly to recross the river.

She would have to learn. It’s what she was made to do and was all she was asked to do. She would have to learn as he had done, learn to speak: to learn again, as though for the first time, a tongue: though if she began, she knew she would never be done, not ever.

“Yes,” she said to her father. “Yes I remember.”

Before she left Washington to go home where her husband and her youngest daughter awaited her, Kit went down to the Mall on the wonderful new pharaonic subway of the city, and walked to the Vietnam War Memorial.

After her mother died and she began coming often to be with George, she used to walk the white city in the afternoons, sometimes for miles, while George drowsed in his armchair. And once she came upon this memorial, finished not long before: came upon it without knowing she would, a secret place, an underworld, passage to the land of the dead. She’d heard a lot about it, and yet she was still surprised by how moving it was, not only in itself but because it suggested that we had come at last to know how to remember war. She saw that people touched the glassy stone where the names seemed to float as in a pool, and touched at the same time the fingers of their own hands, saw their own faces reflected within.

Ben’s name wasn’t there. George had already told her it wasn’t. He wasn’t really Vietnam-era, he’d said. Not really.

Sleepy-warm in the late sun then, as it was now. She had sat there a long time, and she had come back often again. She was then writing—not on paper yet—the poem that would become the title poem of Ghost Comedies, and her sitting here and thinking of it would become part of the poem, though she didn’t know that then. Then it was mostly about Marion; mostly it was to make Ben smile.

If you return, O my dead, and you will, from your ashes and earth,

Return if you can as the ghosts in ghost comedies do:

Unwounded, unrotted, not limbless or eyeless (though fleshless,

Invisible till you take form, just a drape or a candle-flame fluttering,

A wineglass that rises and empties itself in the air);

Come walking through walls in your nice clothes and your uniforms, smiling,

Not to warn or dismay, not with news or reproaches or tears,

But only to visit; play tricks if you want to, make love to me, dance…

Christa Malone didn’t believe that she had ever been eternity’s hostage, captive in time; she had not been among the unacknowledged legislators of the world. She had proffered no laws; she had not in her poems told truth to power, or spoken to the greater angels of the nations, and she would not. She thought that if the time when a poet could carry a nation’s soul with him was passing in Russia, it had passed long ago in America.

No, she had only mourned her dead, to lighten her own heart; she had succeeded in that sometimes and sometimes not. But she knew this: when we grieve in our lives, we grieve for just the one person, friend, brother, son; but when we grieve for our own in poems, we grieve for all, for every one. It was all she had done, if she had done anything.

She had wept once for Falin, but she couldn’t grieve for him. Because of him she had been given, or given back, everything: her own being, all that she had lost and done and suffered. Through him she had recovered a way to speak; a home in her own heart; maybe even a world to live in, undestroyed. She would never learn what bargain he had made, or what the powers or principalities were that he had made it with; but she knew that Innokenti Isayevich had tricked them in the end. Like the boy in the story, he kept what he had given away.

A slanting light was on the mirror-stone of names. She had been gone a long time, she thought, and there was a lot to do; a book of poems to see through the press, and maybe now another poem to make, one beginning to form itself, too far off as yet to be heard: an elegy too, she thought. And a real poem, perhaps, if she was faithful. She whispered to herself okay, let’s go, in that motherly or fatherly way we forever speak to ourselves, so that we will do what we should or must. And yet for a while longer she didn’t stand and start for home.

Author’s Note

The author wishes to acknowledge the generous help of Julia Titus and, in particular, Professor Tatyana Buzina, who read this work in manuscript and answered my many queries. (All remaining errors, mistranscriptions, and cranberries are my own.) I learned about the lives of the besprizornye from “And Now my Soul is Hardened:” Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 by Alan M. Ball (University of California Press, 1994). The opinions about Pushkin expressed by my character I.I. Falin are derived in part from Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin (Yale University Press, 1995).

About the Author

JOHN CROWLEY lives in the hills above the Connecticut River in northern Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters. He is the author of Dæmonomania; Love & Sleep; Ægypt; Little, Big; and, most recently, The Translator.

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Praise for John Crowley’s The Translator

“Thrilling…. [Crowley] succeeds with what no prudent novel ought to attempt.”

—New York Times

“[The Translator] gives us a world so suffused with beauty that its inhabitants manage to speak in fragments of poetry….

Crowley’s subject matter is grand and serious, involving nothing less than the souls of nations and the transforming power of language.”

—New York Times Book Review

“A rarity: a love story with a core of intelligence and insight.”

—Kirkus Reviews