by John Crowley
“I’ll tell you what I know,” she said, not for the first or the last time in that week. “Everything I can tell.”
“First eat,” Gavriil Viktorovich said to her in Russian, and filled her glass. “‘Eat bread and salt and speak the truth.’ What we always say.”
The restaurant had begun to fill with parties, waiters pushing tables together and people taking pictures and rising to make toasts that made others laugh or cheer. At one round corner table a group that were surely Americans sat with several Russians in black leather or Italian suits, some with their hair pulled back in ponytails. Their table was crowded with bottles, champagne, Stolichnaya, Chivas. Gavriil Viktorovich saw her look.
“Biznesmeny,” he said to her. “Konsultantye. Our new Gray Gods.”
The meal went on and on without ever seeming to have begun, plate after plate of salty and piquant zakuski, appetizers: smoked salmon, herring, blini with caviar red and black, griby v smetane which she guessed were Mushrooms in Confusion but no, that would be smyatennye, these were only in sour cream. They poured vodka for her and leaned over to her to take her hand or to touch her and speak: dusha-dushe. Kit remembered her teacher Nadezhda Fyodorovna saying it, striking her breast so that her bangles sounded: dusha-dushe, soul to soul.
The woman next to her turned great smiling dark eyes on her. “I have read many poems of yours,” she said. “Read with great interest, yes.”
“You have?” There’s nothing, no proposal of delight or compliment or vatic prophecy, that will enter a poet’s heart as such a statement does. And here of all places.
“Contemporary American poetry is my speciality,” the woman said, pronouncing it with an extra syllable, like a Briton. “I have read often your poem that begins If you return O my dead, and you will, from your ashes and earth. This is very fine.”
It was “Ghost Comedy.” Kit felt her throat tighten with strange wonder to hear the line in this heavy grave accent.
“This was written 1982?”
“No. It was finished then. It was…It took a long time.”
“It is elegiac meter, no?”
“Well almost,” Kit said. “I didn’t mean it to be.” The woman looked at her in puzzlement, or disbelief, still smiling. She was, still was, darkly beautiful. “I mean I didn’t know it was when I wrote it. I found out later, when it was done.”
Return if you can as the ghosts in ghost comedies do. She would see him in a moment at the end of this table, his drowned-man’s hair afloat, his smile that knew everything and nothing. Breaking a real piece of dark bread like Jesus at Emmaus. But his feet bare that couldn’t be seen: she alone would know.
Gavriil Viktorovich lifted his knife, and rising he gently tapped his glass to get their attention. It took some time, and even when he began to speak not everyone turned to him or fell silent. Kit tried to follow what he said, and understood only when he drew out the envelope that she had given him, the poem Falin had sent to her at the summer’s end. Then they were hushed, and still. Gavriil Viktorovich began to read, the thin old paper trembling in his hand but his voice strong and sweet. When he reached the end and sat, there was no applause or sound or even movement for a moment, as they all seemed to gather again one by one from where the poem had taken them.
“You were lovers, then, in that summer? You and he?”
It took her a moment, a moment out of time, to realize that the woman beside her had spoken to her in Russian, and that she had understood. Lyubovniki: lovers. She had asked Falin then what the word meant, if it meant what it means in English. And what in English does it mean? he said; and she had tried to tell him.
“No, no,” she said. “Not then. But yes a little later. Or maybe not. I mean…”
The woman waited for more, an answer. The great violet lids closed over the globes of her eyes and rose, and then again.
“Lyubovniki,” Kit said. “It means you, well you slept together, isn’t that right?”
“Right. Yes.”
“Well I don’t know,” Kit said smiling. “I’m not sure. I know it sounds crazy, that you could be not sure.”
“Like a dream?” the woman asked. “Or—how do you say this—a spell.”
“A spell,” Kit said, still smiling helplessly. But it didn’t seem to her that what happened on that last long October night was a spell he cast over her. It was one he lifted: a spell she had been under for a long time, that he broke to let her out.
At the corner table a disagreement had arisen; voices were getting loud. People were turning to look. Kit thought that among the Americans were one or two who had been on the plane with her, though probably they were only like those men. Were they afraid? The Russian biznesmeny arose suddenly in a group and filed out, glancing around themselves as if they might be challenged, or applauded. They passed where Kit sat; she thought she could smell cologne.
“You see,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “We go from country where nothing could change, to country now where every day everything is different. Interest in writing now is not what it was, even one year ago. Even writers are not so interested. Other things to think of. Everything becomes important, or nothing.”
“Monye now is everything,” the tiny old woman opposite Kit said.
“Like those lesser angels, as Falin writes,” he said to Kit. “In her dark time Russia was kept alive by the poets, the true poets. Perhaps now in the new time they will pass. They will cease to be souls, or persons, and become only books.”
He slowly tucked back into the inner pocket of his shapeless coat the envelope that contained Falin’s poem. “It may be we will lose him again,” he said. “And it may be that this time he will go where truly no one can find him.”
The restaurant was quieter, chastened or abashed. The Americans left at the corner table looked into their glasses or at one another.
But it couldn’t be, Kit thought: it couldn’t be that a nation’s lesser angel could be driven out, banished, for good. There could be no justice and no order on the earth if that were so; no power, however great, could do that.
Child, never forget that this too is so. Had that child been she, had he spoken to her and her alone, to warn or to explain? And did he know she wouldn’t discover it till she came here—here, bearing with her his fourteen lines—so long after that year in which they might have been lovers, the year the world didn’t end?
II
1.
When her first semester at the University was over in May, Kit collected her grades (they were sent home too, on little slips printed for the first time by a computer): a B+ in Psychology, A’s in the rest except for her A-in Falin’s class: the highest grade he gave anyone, she learned.
Fran wanted her to come to New York with her for a while, stay at her mother’s apartment on Riverside Drive, go hear some music, sit in dark coffeehouses in the Village. But Kit had to say no (Fran nodding solemnly as though she expected nothing more); had to go home for a while, spend time with George and Marion, if her plan, her new plan, was to come off.
“You are crazy about him,” Jackie said when she told him about the plan. “Maybe just crazy altogether.” He wished he could be around the University in the summer, instead of working; taking some courses, getting some credits maybe toward his second major (economics) or maybe just some education courses, something to fall back on.
“Like a sword,” Kit said.
She packed her paperbacks and her papers and Ben’s letters, Ben’s typewriter too, hers forever now (it would be in her attic thirty years later, in its case), and the clothes she’d brought, which seemed now to belong mostly to somebody else: she had lived the semester in three sweaters, her straight skirts and Capezios, and the black ballet leotards and tights that Fran had got her mother to send out from New York. The rest filled her laundry case, amazing contraption of beaverboard and canvas straps. Marion had carried this case with her to Vassar, and the ghosts of old postage were still perceptible on it. Back then you filled such a case with your
laundry and belted it up, then turned over the little address card in its windowed holder, and back it went for Mom to empty and fill again with washed and ironed clothes smelling of home.
Home. Kit sat in the lounge, waiting again for her father to come and carry her and her bags home.
Her parents were moving again. This time back East, outside Washington, D.C., where they had lived years ago, and where George would (he said) be designing bomb shelters for computers—“electronic bomb shelters,” he said, smiling at a joke that only he could get. Marion looked out at her June garden, and the pretty mosaic table she had made especially for it, in grief and exasperation. Kit was exasperated too: why did her mother always think they were going to stay where they went, when they never did? And only that night, in her own old bed and in the suffocating warmth and familiarity of being home again, did she see that it wasn’t the garden or the house that Marion was torn to leave behind. Her son’s grave was here, in this city, in the raw new part of the old Catholic cemetery, and always would be.
They treated Kit like visiting royalty, taking her out to dinners and movies and even on trips to points of historic interest, as though unwilling to stay in the house. When they were home George made them play Scrabble or casino; or he put LPs on his new stereo system, an engineer’s dream all in separate parts—a glowing amplifier, four speakers, the massy turntable on its weighted base. George slipped the records from their paper jackets as though they were delicacies, turning them skillfully by their edges with his long white fingers. And got his wife up out of her chair to dance.
Kit and Ben had always found this music their father loved hilarious, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berrigan; it seemed to be played by cartoon animals, the singers to be kidding. But it had that jingle-jangle sweetness that made George take his wife’s hand and pull her to her feet.
“See, you don’t have to go to college to be rich and have a big life,” George said, squiring Marion around the room. “Look at these guys. Most of them didn’t finish high school. Hell, grade school.” Each of his phrases was marked by a turn. Marion’s eyes were closed, her neat little feet seeming to be propelled by his. Kit wondered what that felt like, to be certain and swift and surefooted because your man was. She could almost hear their hearts beat together, like it said in these songs: to beat as one. They’d always been like that, she thought, George and Marion; opposites matching, fitting together the way only opposites can, like the two magnetic Scotties that click together, the black one and the white one. The best of friends. How much could that make up for? They couldn’t get over Ben, no more than she could: but maybe if they could always have these moments, these moments when they couldn’t tell one from the other, then maybe they wouldn’t need her so badly.
Meanwhile her letter had come from the Language Institute; Marion handed it to her incuriously along with other mail from the University. Kit made sure the offer was what she hoped it would be, and as they waited for dinner at George’s favorite long low steakhouse on the highway she told them what she was going to do.
“Russian?” her mother said, as though it were basket weaving, or sexology. “Why on earth.”
She told them about the Institute’s summer program, the scholarship money she’d been awarded, the intensive study. She’d be able to catch up, she said; with these hours and some more hard work she’d be able to graduate with her class, her true class, the Class of 1965. Still they looked at her, fingers on the stems of their drinks.
“It’s a government program,” George said.
“No. It’s just the University.”
“Believe me,” said George. “It’s DoD money, honey. Just like mine.”
It was the first time Kit had ever heard him say what his money was. She worked out what DoD must mean. “Okay,” she said. “So?”
“Well what would you do with it?” Marion asked. “I mean.”
“Okay,” Kit said. “I talked to this person, she’s taking this same course. She said that the National Security Administration…”
“Agency,” said George. “The National Security Agency.”
“Agency. They need people with Russian. And the CIA. Lots of government places. Government bodies.”
“Well,” said Marion.
“You know I’ve always been good at languages,” said Kit. A silence fell again. Kit decided not to say that on her own application she too had expressed interest in the CIA; it had seemed the right response, to win their favor. Marion’s brows were knitted (it was this face of Marion’s that would always illustrate that funny phrase for Kit), and George studied her acceptance letter as though for hidden watermarks. It must have been (Kit only thought this later on) like a Catholic family who’ve been told their daughter has decided to be a nun: hard to find grounds for objection. And maybe because they thought that what she was doing was somehow a tribute to Ben, to his impulse to service, or to George, they couldn’t fight her for long. For once, like Ben, she had thought of everything. It was the first time she’d ever made and executed such a plan, and it would be a very long time till she did so again.
Marion asked her to clean out her room before she went back, and to throw out all she could; in the apartment where they would be living there would be no attic, no basement where the archives of years could be stored. So she went through her things, judging quickly and harshly, pulling out her high school notebooks, prizes, pictures of girls she would never see again with rash and unfelt protestations of eternal friendship written over them, and throwing them toward the wastebasket in a kind of rage: knowing already where this was leading.
Three black folders in the left-hand drawer; a composition book with marbled cover; some loose sheets of blue-lined school paper and pages torn from spiral notebooks. Her handwriting changing as she grew older, her preferred ink color too. Drafts with more crossed out than left alone; final copies typed on onionskin. She could hold it all in one hand easily. Almost none of it had ever been seen, except by her.
There would be times, when she was much older, that she would wish she could go back to that evening and take it all out of her hands, the hands of that child, and make it safe, whatever it contained, however unworthy to be saved: times in which it seemed to her that she had nothing, nothing but her self to care for. But she couldn’t go back, and it was all carried to the wire incinerator near the garage, and thrown in to be burned up with waste and old newspapers, with Time and Life.
She came back through the kitchen, where Marion was wrapping and packing glassware with the grim efficiency of long practice, and sat at the end of the plaid couch where George was watching TV. She didn’t feel cleansed, or shriven; not naked, or unburdened, or as though she had suffered a wound self-inflicted; not anything. She felt nothing. But for a long time she watched the gray figures come and go on the screen without actually perceiving them.
“Here’s your pal,” George said.
President Kennedy was speaking. To recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age without our citizens knowing what they should do and where they should go if the bombs begin to fall would be a failure of responsibility.
There were scenes of people passing city doorways that were stamped with a special hex sign; in the basements down below were piles of dry food, containers of water, medicines. It looked hopeless and sad.
“Look at this guy,” George said. A man stood in a tubular space like a sewer pipe or a submarine, his private shelter; it had cost him fifteen hundred dollars to build, and he had stocked it with bottled beer, a rifle, and a 1939 Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nuclear war would set the world back a generation, he said, and these books would tell him how to live, back then.
They were there, she could see their brown backs in their case behind him.
She could do that too. All she needed.
“So you think they’re going to drop it?” George asked her.
“No,” Kit said. “It would be too stupid. Just too stupid.”
“Uh
-huh.” He crossed his arms, grinning as though her answer was the one he expected. “Well, I hope to God you’re right.”
“You don’t think I am.”
“I think it’s about fifty-fifty.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think that.”
Kit had once had bomb dreams: she knew no one who grew up in those days who didn’t have them, dreams of mysterious and total desolation, or the oncoming of disaster like a huge wind or wave rising without warning, at which you woke. Rarely the event itself, which maybe even dreams could not imagine: only just after, or just before.
There was a time when she had refused to sleep, afraid that in the anti-world it would come again, that huge hollow that opened in the world, or in her heart. To comfort her, Ben had told her about the DEW Line: far in the north, ringing the continent, there were radar stations watching day and night, and no bomber from Russia would ever come that they wouldn’t see; and so we’d be warned, and we could hide.
He was right that it was the inexplicable suddenness that was the fearful part. She would lie in her bed, eyes on her night-light, thinking of the dew line, which she thought of as somewhere so far north that no dew fell: like the timberline, above which no trees grew. Hoping they were awake and listening.
She didn’t believe it would fall, not anymore. She didn’t think about it falling: at least not awake. But she also knew that it didn’t matter what she thought or believed; and maybe her inability to imagine a future for herself, to imagine what her life might someday contain (a husband, children, work), was because of its falling, in the future: the shock wave of it so final that it not only blanked out everything that followed but reached backwards too, to the moment of her sitting here, empty and still.
When she went back to the University she brought the square mahogany Webcor record player that had been a joint Christmas gift for her and for Ben, and all the records she had bought for herself and for him since then. The bitter machine smell, unique to it, that arose when the lid was lifted was home, and winter. A little haiku-like poem of that year was about it:
