The Eager Interpreter

for Gloria Imagining, on a long walk between two Greek towns, those Turkish prisoners the guidebook says were sabred where they crowded together on the stone dock; and then imagining—still walking, anxious to see some worker in the fields or another old couple like the last one (he riding the donkey, she leading it in black)— the Greeks whom the Germans shot; and as the road after rising leads down again, at last to the town by the bay, imagining all the feuds given license by the civil war, the woman whose husband, forgive him his faults now, steps dead through the doorway one night: imagining, imagining—is there a way out of this brooding ahead to the hollow thud of the first dirt thrown down on his coffin? What is the word any tongue can make good for the boy— let someone else name his country— who speaks to his sleeping wife when he leaves at night, his brother tagging after him, one puny gun between them? If his cold spirit can still speak her name tomorrow, won’t she feel even more alone? Aeneas carried a high purpose on the point of his sword: a city needed founding, if not here then in another place. This road, though, dips past two ordinary houses and then the disco casting a stale abandoned shade, sharp-edged, to one side, and I descend— through hot odd-angled streets lined with those plane trees whose name’s so bland and awkward translated out of sunny Greek or Spanish— to the huge white plane-tree-shaded square. At the cafe in the open air I order lemonade from the waitress who has just served the little table crowded round by seven or eight, a changing group—the eager interpreter talking and listening at the same time, three young women dressed up, and even in this small town the four military men from the foreign ship offshore, out of uniform but with an apparent eye for swag some future day, talking of small deals, clever braveries, travels. They exact smiles and attentions and never have they seen such a pretty town as this, never. The three women listen hard to the roared harsh sounds of the odd tongue, then impatiently to the interpreter while the military men wait. What could such noise be about? Do these men love the ways ours do, do they like their women to speak to them in bed, to say what they want, to say it? The Turkish prisoners had been led outside with the lie that they’d be freed. Inside the smoky small bar so they can watch without being watched, young men are bitter, imagining the weight of medals, coming one by one to the dusty window-glass then returning toward the far unlit interior. The lemonade arrives at last in the pretty hands of the waitress, she puts it on my white table under the plane trees and hurries away to be near the laughing group, foreign men who one day may bring something new to the town, or something old. for Gloria