Chapter 15 #2
Vivian gave me a bracing slap on the shoulder at the door. Her eyes flicked to my forehead, slicked with sweat, and she shook her head, fondly. “Poor thing. You must be absolutely stifling in that coat. You’d think you were expecting snow.”
Everyone laughed, and so I laughed, too.
I finished the translation well before winter.
It wasn’t hard. The Chancellor gave me a very nice office in the capitol building, two security guards, and crisp, glossy photographs of each page of The Death of Una Everlasting. (The original text was packed carefully away; the college archivist would have approved.)
I was also provided with a pair of painfully deferential graduate students who insisted on addressing me as Professor Mallory. When I corrected them—I was only a lecturer—they said, instantly and simultaneously, “Yes, Professor Mallory.”
One of them, an anxious young woman named something like Daphne or Shelly, scrambled to explain. “It’s just, that’s what the Chancellor called you. And Professor Sawbridge talked about you so much when we took her Material Cultures of Middle Dominion course. She said you were—”
“A feckless sycophant?”
“—worth ten of us.”
I was shocked to feel a sudden surge of affection; I hadn’t felt much of anything since I walked out of Vivian’s office. “Oh.”
The other one, a rowing-clubbish boy named Georgie or Frankie, said, glumly, “And twenty of me.”
I sent Professor Sawbridge another telegram that evening but received no reply. The term had started the previous week, but her office on campus remained locked, and her usual courses had been assigned to harassed-looking junior faculty.
I made an effort to be nicer to the graduate students after that.
Partly because anyone who had survived Material Cultures of Middle Dominion deserved reparations, and partly because I needed them rather badly.
Their Middle Mothertongue was quite poor—why did everyone struggle so much with strong and weak noun classes—but I kept forgetting to eat or drink, and my hand often hurt too badly to type.
I would translate aloud, instead, while they took turns transcribing. Once I caught Georgie (Frankie?) staring glazedly at me rather than typing. “What?” I asked him.
“Sorry, Professor! It’s just”—some revelatory throat-clearing and blushing here—“you have a lovely voice.”
I did. I always had. There was no reason it should startle me so. “Thank you, Frankie. Did you put that second comma in the last sentence?” He nodded, still blushing. “Well, strike it out. Whoever wrote this had a very loose grasp of punctuation.”
The day we finished the first draft, the Chancellor herself arrived with a bottle of expensive-looking brandy, the color of which reminded me of someone’s eyes, though I couldn’t recall whose.
We raised our glasses to Dominion, and to the First Queen, and to you.
My voice caught and snapped on your name, like a loose thread around a nail.
Before she left, Vivian took me aside. “Well done, Owen. You’ve done everything I asked, beautifully. You’ve kept the faith. It hasn’t been easy, I know, but”—here she actually winked—“God rewards the faithful.”
I tried to believe her. But when I thought of God, all that came to mind was a wide smile with a chipped, graying tooth.
The first edition of my translation was published in a matter of months, with a level of fanfare even I found vaguely disquieting.
Surely it wasn’t usual for every academic review and newspaper column to adopt the same awed, idolatrous tone; surely someone had doubts about the provenance of the original book or the quality of the translation.
But if anyone asked questions, they asked them quietly, from the corners of their mouths.
Chancellor Rolfe had, after all, declared the book a national treasure.
She read long passages aloud on the radio, drawing lessons and parallels from them as priests did from scripture.
She had cheap pocket editions printed for the troops, and there were rumors that she slept with the original text on her bedside table.
Satford I had a fine, strong speaking voice, but I was uneasy on the stage, inclined to fidget and stutter. I doubted whether anyone would come.
But they did. At first in the twenties, then the hundreds, packing every hall and forum.
Each event might have been plucked from my most ambitious, unlikely fantasies: shaking hands with leading scholars and critics, fielding invitations to clubs and societies I’d never even known existed, standing behind tall oaken lecterns, looking down upon a sea of eager pink faces.
I supposed in my fantasies Professor Sawbridge might have been among the crowd, or even my father.
But Sawbridge was still busy with her tomb, apparently, and my father must have still been angry with me.
Admittedly, I’d called him a liar and a traitor when last we spoke, and expressed the hope that he would never again darken my doorstep, but it struck me as rather shabby of him to respect my wishes after thirty years of ignoring them.
But what did I care? I had the adulation of thousands, now. I was a respected scholar, a war hero—a knight of the nation, even. The Chancellor had taken my oath in a somewhat hurried ceremony just before the first edition went to print; Satford & Gills had been very eager to put Sir on the cover.
The people of Dominion—who had laughed and spat at me, who had scorned and doubted and reviled me—now loved me as one of their own. I had been born outside of Dominion, which I imagined as a grand house with shuttered windows and locked doors. The Death of Una Everlasting, it appeared, was the key.
But then a woman had lingered after one of my lectures to pat my hand and tell me she only wished the rest of “my type” would devote themselves to their new country.
Later, a photographer had asked if I would be willing to pose in my “native costume.” Then I’d overheard a pair of scholars who’d invited me to join their society: Oh, come now, one of them said, laughing, you’re always saying we need a mascot.
And I understood finally that a nation is a house with no windows or doors at all. That no matter what I did—no matter how much blood I spilled in its defense or ink I spent in its praise—it would never, ever be my home.
But if Dominion was not my home, where was it?
Not the fetid flat above the butcher shop.
Not my father’s narrow gray row house in Queenswald, and surely not my mother’s country, which I had known only as an infant and, later, as an invader.
I would only be a different kind of stranger there, anyway: Instead of being surprised when I spoke their language, people would be surprised when I didn’t.
No. The word home evoked only the sweet green smell of the woods, long gone, and sometimes another word: Yew, I thought, or perhaps you.