“West,” she said. “Away.”
“In Russia,” he said, “east is away.”
The corn was tall and green on either side of the road, but far in the middle of the fields they could see where an acre of ground had been raised above the rest, and on it a small stand of trees left to grow, whose name she didn’t know when he asked. A dusty road went out that way, drawn right along the section line, but then bending around and up to the knoll’s top.
They got out there. Because for so far in all directions the land was flat and mostly uninhabited, they seemed to be very high. Not any nearer the tremendous clouds piling in the west, though, which were dizzying to look up at, like skyscrapers. There was a lick of breeze, lifting her skirt, then no more.
“Silos,” he said, pointing to far twin towers, midnight blue for some reason and not red. “This word I learned from your poem of last year.”
“Oh?” She felt a sudden small self-consciousness, as though he had brushed against her.
“Yes. I looked up the word.” He shaded his eyes. “And those are silos too, the others, the ones we cannot see, far off.”
“Not so far,” she said.
That poem, “Silos,” had been deliberately forged to meet an assignment he had given in class. The missile silos ringing the air force base to the west were something Jackie and Max and Rodger had told her about; there was talk of a protest to be staged out there, like the protests against the Polaris in Britain. Coolly made, the poem was intended to seem like a rush of hot, indignant rhetoric.
“Silos where nothing but the grapes of wrath are stored,” he said. “I found this image striking: the grapes of wrath. But I think is title of famous American book. In Soviet Union we all read.”
She laughed aloud, then covered her mouth. He looked at her:
What? And she shook her head. “It’s in an old song,” she said. “‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; he is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.’”
Now he laughed, chagrined. “Like Italians making wine,” he said. “The Lord.”
“Purple up to his knees.”
“With blood.”
“I guess.”
“I prefer not knowing this,” he said. “I thought those grapes were John Steinbeck’s. And yours.”
“Well. They are mine, now.”
That made him smile. He looked to the west again. “When they fly,” he said, “those missiles, then there will not even be blood. They do not spill blood; they vaporize it.”
“My brother Ben told me,” she said—and she realized she hadn’t said Ben’s name aloud since spring, and stopped a moment. “He told me,” she went on, “that all over the country now they have missiles on train cars, on special tracks, that go back and forth all the time, so the Russians can’t hit them.”
He nodded, as though he knew this.
“Or on trucks,” she said. “They only drive at night, so people won’t see them and be afraid. But they’re all linked by radiophones and they can all go off in a second.”
“And will they?” he asked. Just as her father had. As though the combined guesses of people who had no idea and no power might be able to fire them, or keep them here.
“I used to dream they would,” she said. “So often that I was afraid to sleep. Afraid of Russians.”
“So strange,” he said. “You people, with daring to conceive that bomb, and knowledge to build it. Then most awful of all the courage or—what name can you give, heedlessness or—to use it. And then to lie awake in fear, and to have such dreams.”
“Well,” she said. “I didn’t use it.” It was true, though: Americans were the only ones to have dropped one, and all you ever heard was how likely the Russians were to drop them on us: as though they were capable of what we never could be, so much destruction, such madness.
“We’ll go back,” he said. “Possibility of rain.”
“Just put your top up.”
“Yes,” he said. “I was shown how this is done. But I have not succeeded in doing it myself.”
“Oh. Oh, okay. But,” she said. “If you’re going to drive this thing, you know, really, you have to learn to drive like an American.”
“Ah?”
“Yes. You’ve got to have the attitude. For this car.”
“Will you show?”
“Um sure. Look, like this.” She got in the driver’s seat. “See you have to relax. I mean the car does everything. You just rest.” She turned the key, and felt the soft explosion of its ignition, like the downbeat of a somber symphony, and smiled at him in delight. Then she turned on the radio and pressed the wonder bar. “Next you find some nice tunes.” Something vague and lilting came from the speaker. She reached across and with a queenly gesture pressed the Reverse button on the push-button transmission; she hooked one finger over the steering wheel’s crossbar and turned the car around and faced the way they had come. She felt his eyes on her and a bubble of exhilarated laughter arose in her breast.
“See?” she said. “Now with this car you never need more than one hand to drive. Like this.” She laid a hand lightly on the wheel as though on the reins of a well-trained horse. “The other arm you got to hold the roof on with”—she showed him how on an imaginary roof—“or you just let it lay.” She hung her forearm limply out. “Don’t stick your elbow out too far,” she sang out. “It might go home in another car. Burma-Shave.”
She turned the car at speed off the farm road and onto the highway, and he lurched against the door. The blacktop receded into distance before them like a demonstration in geometry. “I’m as corny as Kansas in August,” she sang over the radio music. “I’m as high as an elephant’s eye.” She picked up speed, letting her hand fall down along the car’s side as though she trailed it in the water from a gliding canoe. “See, with the automatic transmission you can even cross your legs if you want.” She showed him, crossing her white-shod feet in the deep well and pressing the accelerator with her left.
“Brake,” he said, pointing.
“Oh you almost never need it,” she said. “And you got time. The main thing is to take it easy. Everything’s okay.”
Along a side road at right angles to theirs a truck was approaching; you could see it far off, could calculate its rate of approach.
“Careful,” he said.
“He’ll stop,” she said. “This is the highway. There’s a sign there.”
“You who trust no one,” he said. “You will trust him to stop.”
“People aren’t nuts,” she said. “You couldn’t drive if they were.” Why did he think she trusted no one? How had she made him think that?
Did she trust no one? It wouldn’t be strange if she didn’t. Was that the name of the thing gone from within her?
She uncrossed her feet, and touched her left foot to the brake. The truck, dragging its long plume of dust behind, slowed at the stop sign just as their convertible approached and passed.
“Can I ask you something?” she said. She had taken off her shoes and sat on his brown couch with her legs drawn up.
“You may ask.”
“I never knew why they put you out of, of your country. I never understood. I mean, what did you do, or…”
“Ah.” He sat by her. “This was new special idea of Nikita Sergeyevitch. New plan.”
“You mean Khrushchev.”
“Hrushchov, yes,” he said. “You see poems I had written had been taken abroad, and published by Russian presses in Europe, in France and in Netherlands.”
“Yes. I know. I knew that.”
“And I was not that poet; I was former zek, prison-camp inmate; former soldier; worker now. I was not in writers’ union. No one knew I and poet named Falin were one man. Falin the poet was gone, no one knew where.”
That dark huge land. She hadn’t known though that you could be lost in it: she thought everyone was numbered, accounted for.
“After Nikita Sergeyevich revealed deeds of Stalin, and those in camps of Gulag began to be freed, I wrote a letter to him. But for all to read, you know, public, or…”