by John Crowley
Black ivy by the window
Beaten by cold rain.
Inside, Brahms.
She brought her bike too. It was a long walk from the barrackslike dorms of the Language Institute to the center of campus and the town, she told George, helping him tie it to the car’s roof; she’d need it. It was her first and only bike. Ben had made her learn to ride, saying he’d just leave her behind when he went to the park or the natatorium if she couldn’t keep up, and she had made George answer an ad for a bike in the Lost & Found/Swap & Shop column of the paper. Fifteen dollars was all it cost, a bike like no other in the world, which made it (she felt) fit for her alone. It was a Schwinn English—styled like the ones you saw in European movies, only made (it seemed) of iron pipe; it was heavy as hell, Ben laughed aloud when he tried to take it from the back of the station wagon when they brought it home. The handbrakes had been at some time swapped for a standard back-pedal, and the whole thing had been repainted bright blue with what appeared to be house paint. But the seat was narrow, smooth black leather, and the tires were slim and delicate like a thoroughbred’s withers, and Kit loved it like a pony from the first.
“Do other students use bikes these days?” George asked doubtfully, untying it now in the cracked parking lot of the Institute dorm compound. The summer heat was already intense.
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “No, not many. I don’t care.” She’d bought a lock for it, which George thought was funny, and which in the end she never used.
“Like summer camp,” George said, looking around. Long gray one-story buildings, lettered A, B, C on their faces, the parking lot, and some sycamores that had grown tall since the buildings had been thrown up, just after the war, for returning soldiers crowding into the University. It was like the army, not camp. They both thought it, but neither said it.
Her room. Now and then through her life there would be places like this for her, places that looked like confinement and poverty or at least austerity but which filled Kit with a rich sense of possibility, welcomed her and made her heart’s doors open as though to the same room’s original, inside. The varnished wooden floors and window frames, crooked window propped open with a stick; and the black fan with three silver blades and a twisted cord of black and white; and the iron bed and thin mattress, the Celotex walls where the amber rectangles of old Scotch tape remained; and the wooden desk, and the gooseneck lamp.
“Christ,” said George. “And how much is this costing, again?”
“Scholarship, Dad.”
“No air-conditioning? God, I remember…” But what he remembered, army stories, he didn’t say.
Down the hall were the showers, smelling of damp zinc and mildew, private stalls at least for the girls, who had only one-third of one of the three buildings, and only one girl to a room. Kit sat on her bed. She had a wicked impulse to apologize to George for her strange choice, for herself as girl, as young person, as strange spirit, just to make sure he understood it thoroughly. Instead she said, “It’s okay. Really. It’s what I wanted. Thanks.”
“Well,” George said. There were dark circles under the arms of his Dacron shirt, and his bald forehead gleamed. “If we can’t have what we want, I’m glad that at least you do.”
She got up and hugged him.
“Now you have to come to us when the program’s over,” he said, holding her tight. “Before fall semester.”
“I will.”
“You have to come home.”
“Yes,” she said. “I promise. I will.”
2.
First there was the alphabet, which even when she had memorized it and listened to the teacher and the tapes over and over still seemed to Kit when she looked at it to be mute. She could hear a sentence in English or even French just by looking at it on the page, but these she never could: at best she heard a dim mumble, as though the sentences were spoken by someone with a mouthful of cotton. Not so when Nadezhda Fyodorovna spoke them aloud: then they became a kind of vocal acrobatics, her red-painted mouth moving in ways that Kit was sure hers never could as she produced the long, long sounds of the language, at once ludicrous and beautiful.
Today the weather is cold.
Saturday the weather was cold.
Tomorrow the weather will be cold.
It has been cold for a long time.
Nadezhda Fyodorovna was small and solid, her too-black hair in a tight bun, her hands red and marked with psoriasis; as she listened to her students she stroked one hand with the other, secretly tending to them, the fingers searching and scratching. Kit followed their motions, sometimes losing the thread of the lesson. Nadezhda Fyodorovna lifted her hand in a magician’s gesture and let her gold bracelets clash together; she plucked gently at the rattling beads around her neck. How had this woman come here? Why was she here, doing this, looking at them all with this look of hope and anger?
Her fellow students were mostly air force enlisted men, on a special course. They didn’t know why they had been assigned to learn Russian, but it didn’t seem to bother them at all; they said they’d be told eventually, and meanwhile seemed pleased with light duty. They were like Burke Eggert, like Ben, confident men who took their work as seriously as though it were play, at which they actually worked hard, playing one-hoop basketball on the cracked concrete with a kind of furious gaiety till the green evening began to fade from the sky and the ball grew invisible. They were big eaters who drank milk at breakfast and made themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches after they’d consumed their hot lunch, stuck their hands in their pant tops and belched gratefully. They wore no uniforms; knit shirts and madras button-downs, pressed khakis, white socks and loafers or desert boots. But beneath their shirts, like the Miraculous Medal on a beaded chain that Kit had worn for a while as a child, were their stamped steel tags. Ben’s had been returned to George and Marion.
After supper on the Saturday night of her first week of classes, Kit pushed her bike out to the street that led away from the Language Institute housing. It was slightly downhill from the crest on which the University was built to the center of town, and she coasted much of the way, aloft in the still-sunny evening, late June, the checkered shade. At the center of town she turned on North Street as she had with Jackie in the first week of the winter semester.
This was what the bike had been for all along. Though she didn’t build futures for herself, sometimes she could see one, a vivid moment that was to happen to her, and sometimes it really would happen; and this moment on her bike on North Street going west out of town was one.
The road looked different burdened with roadside brush and overarched by heavy-leaved trees, but this had certainly been it. Her legs prickled with sweat. Blackberries were ripening in the fearsome tangled briars along the road, canes springing higher than her head. And that was the house, more modest and much more weatherbeaten than the house she had glimpsed in the winter but the only candidate; she turned into the dusty driveway, where a new car was parked, a big convertible in two nameless shades of green. Kit dismounted and dropped the bike. The silence was deep, the cicadas warning her; she walked around the front of the house, where the blinds were drawn, through a stand of lilacs, to a broad backyard.
He was working in the garden, feet bare, cuffs of his blue serge pants rolled up and a sleeveless undershirt dark with sweat. He waved a greeting, smiling, making Kit think of Soviet farmers in photographs. The Family of Man. Dusting his hands on his pants, he came to her.
She greeted him in Russian, feeling suddenly foolish; and he returned it to her, graciously. He offered her his hand, seeming to be unsurprised somehow but delighted: her own hand felt crushed within the heat and strength of his. She smelled him.
“Kyt,” he said.
“I came out to see you,” she said, not having meant to say that, having meant to say that she was out and about and just happened to be passing. He nodded and spread his hands as though to offer her what lay around them: his part of the house, with its jalousie or
screened porch; a picnic table of gray wood; the brown yard and brick path. The garden.
“What are you growing?” she asked.
“I am not growing,” he said. “Ah. What have I planted, you are asking. Yes. Well.” He took her hand, and led her to the neat rows, where green things were coming up, rows of this kind, rows of that. “I have tomatoes, cabbage,” he said. “Here. And carrots. Potatoes.”
“Potatoes?” She knew of no home gardeners who grew potatoes, but how many had she known? She thought of Marion, bent over her cucumbers and radishes, one eye closed against the rising smoke of her Pall Mall.
“Yes, potatoes,” he said. “For soup in winter. They are also easy, you know. Put potatoes in ground; cover a little; soon more potatoes. Like magic. Why they conquered the world.”
She noticed how many of his crops were root ones, that wouldn’t be ripe till late.
“Ah but they last. Any Russian knows. I knew high official in Leningrad. In autumn he must have his potatoes. Hundred pounds. In basement. Then, good winter, no matter what.”
“He couldn’t get potatoes in winter?”
“Oh yes. Even when others could not. But old habit. You know.”
She laughed, thinking of officials in American cities with potatoes stored in the basements of their apartments, safe till spring at least. Maybe someday.
He gathered his tools, apparently done for this day, and put them in a wooden wheelbarrow. “I am very glad to see you,” he said. “But why are you here and not far away at home?”
“Summer school,” she said. “You know I started late. I’m trying to catch up.”
He nodded, regarding her. “And studying what?”
“Russian,” she said.
At first he only looked at her in mild puzzlement; then a kind of illumination filled his features, which vanished into a laugh, of delight or triumph or something else she couldn’t name. “Russian,” he said.
“It’s an intensive course,” she said. “All day every day.”
“To speak or to read?” he asked.
“Well both.”
“And you do this for what reason?”
She shrugged. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know. I like languages. Maybe I’ll be a spy.”
“Aha.” He gestured toward his house, inviting her to it, still regarding her, still smiling. “Come in. Have tea. Lemonade. Tell me what poems you have written.”
“I told you,” she said. “I’ve given up writing poetry.”
“You would not be first to have tried that and yet not succeeded,” he said. “Certain people give up poetry but poetry does not give them up.”
She said nothing in reply, and that was a reply, which he seemed to accept. He pulled open the squeaking screen door.
The porch was dark after the still-bright day, paneled with pine, and there was a davenport or glider upholstered in plaid canvas; pictures on the walls with no reason for being there or anywhere, dim views of unreal places, sad clowns. He took a flannel shirt from a hall tree, seemed to consider it, thought better of it. He was larger indoors, his white skin shadowed with black hair and his dusty feet.
“Your fellow students,” he said. “Also spies? Is this why they study?”
“I don’t know. They say they don’t know. They’re soldiers.”
“Perhaps only to read Pushkin.”
“Or Falin.”
He bent to the kitchen sink to wash: she watched him rapidly and efficiently scrub his hands and face, splash water on his head and neck and arms, and she knew he had done so for years in places without baths or showers; like an American of another era, a farmer or settler or miner, making do. For no reason she knew, a hot pity arose in her.
He toweled himself with a ragged and colorless thing that hung by the sink, and pulled open the refrigerator. “Lemonade,” he said. “Or tea with ice, American invention, very nice.”
“Either,” she said. “You pick.” She walked into the living room, divided from the kitchen by a half-wall; she peeked into a little bedroom, where a lumpy bed was spread with chenille. There were shelves meant for display of knickknacks that instead held small piles of books, all library books as far as she could see, and a folding card table that was a desk. Otherwise there seemed to be nothing of him here at all; if he left tomorrow no one would know he’d been here.
She sat on the couch. He brought her a glass of lemonade. “Now,” he said. “You must say truly why you come to this university, this hot place, in summer, to study such hard language.”
“I needed something to do,” she said. “Something hard to do. Something that was all the time.”
He waited.
“I wanted not to be at home. There’s no one at home. My parents are moving. I like it here.”
She sipped the drink. It was violently sweet, as though concocted for bees, or hummingbirds. “Also,” she said. “You.”
“Me?”
“You said to me once,” she said, “that your poems could only be read, that I could only really read them, if I learned Russian…” His head was shaking No and he had raised a finger to correct her, but she went on: “And so I’m going to, so I can.”
“I said that in translation they are different poems. Good or bad. Not that in other languages they did not exist.”
“I wanted to read them as you wrote them,” she said, and lowered her eyes. “That’s all.”
“Well,” he said. “Maybe someday. In six weeks, no.”
“No, of course.” She had begun to feel stupid, having brought a gift that wasn’t wanted, wasn’t even a gift.
“In any case you have given up poetry, you say. So.”
“I’ve only given up writing it. Not reading it. Not…” She almost said not needing it.
“A language,” he said. “It is a world. My poems are written for the people of a world I have lost. To read them I think you must have lived in my world—my language—since childhood, and grown up in it.”
“How will your poems get to them now, though? Your new poems, I mean. Who will bring them back there?”
He only went on looking at her frankly, holding his glass in an oddly un-American elbow-cocked way; and for the first time she saw the harm they had done him, that they had meant to do him, by putting him out. In almost every way that could be enumerated it was better to be here than there, she knew that; and when she thought of him she imagined an angel fled from a comical terrible hell, a sulfurous wonderland of cruel illogic from which he had escaped untouched and unharmed. But they had known what they were doing, what a vengeance they were taking.
“Would you,” he said, “enjoy to read a poem of mine, with me?”
“Yes,” she said, and her heart filled. “I would.”
For a long moment he still stood, as though his question and her answer had not been said. Then he went to the card-table desk and picked up some sheets of yellow paper, written, she saw, on both sides, in pencil and in ink, much of it crossed out. With these he came and sat beside her on the brown couch.
“The poem is called ‘1937,’” he said. “It is a year.”
She nodded, as still as though she watched a brave but wary animal come close. He began to read. Though his eyes were lowered to the paper he seemed to speak from memory, and sometimes his eyes closed as he spoke. It wasn’t the big strange voice with which he had read Pushkin; it wasn’t Nadezhda Fyodorovna’s incantatory exactness; but it was more than plain speech too, the rhythms more clear and hard-struck than they would be in a poem read in English, iambs stepping gravely forward. She could hear them. She even recognized a few common words, night, bed, star. She bent her soul toward his voice as though she might be able to translate what he said by will alone, or by desire.
He lifted his head. She smiled at him and lifted her hands helplessly. “Nothing,” she said. “Not the vaguest idea.”
He nodded. “It tells of a young man who says he has—how do you say this—has come of age; and so now he will pack a small bag, suitca
se, to put under his bed, as his father before him also did.”
“Okay,” she said cautiously.
“This was such common thing, you see, everyone understands. You expect that perhaps secret police will come, can come at any time; you will not be given much time, and will perhaps be not in condition to think clearly, what to take, what you will need.” He nodded, smiling, it’s true. “So the wise ones, they packed small bag, small enough to carry a long way; in it, warm socks, felt boots, tobacco, a book. A photograph. And this bag placed ready under the bed.”
“Oh.”
“In the poem the man thinks of his father and mother, who slept in their big bed near his for decades; every night beneath them the small bag waiting. While they slept, while they…”
“Yes.”
He read the lines in Russian. “So now the son has grown up, the new generation, and the wisdom of the father descends to him, you see, and he has packed bag of his own. And what shall he put in it? What shall he try to carry if he must go?” He read again, and she seemed to hear a list, a catalog. “The innocent yat, among those who perished the most discreet. Some smoke of north, or northland, which is well known to him and to his father. Their city, caught in snow-puddle or snowmelt, never to fall or, or.” He stared earnestly at the lines, his lips moving; then he shook his head and laughed. “No it is meaningless. Or I cannot. Cannot find equivalents.”
He put the paper down on the couch between them and showed her. “You see here. The innocent yat: yat is that small letter, there. It was a useless, a redundant letter in Russian alphabet; after the Revolution, language was reformed, and that letter was got rid of.” He tapped it. “Terminated. Liquidated. And it was discreet, said nothing, of course.”
He was laughing again, in some kind of paroxysm of frustration, as though he were being tickled. “Look, look. Some smoke of the northland, known to him and to me. This is easy, everyone knows. Northland is name of popular type of cigarette. It seems both father and son smoke this kind. But also smoke of chimneys of far northern camps, prison camps, everyone knows.”
