“Just take me,” she said. “Please.”
She made him stop as soon as they came near the house and she could see in the driveway the green convertible, its top still down, so that she knew Falin must be home; and she told Jackie she’d walk from there. He sat with the VW’s engine running, looking at her as though trying to see her insides, what she knew or thought she knew that was causing her to act as she did; then he shook his head and threw up his hands, not up to me; and she kissed his cheek and got out.
“I’ll wait,” he said to her out the window.
“No don’t,” she said.
“It’s a long walk back to town.”
“It’s okay. Don’t wait.”
The grasses were yellow and the trees browning and riddled by bugs, whose noise filled up the still day. The house too looked more aged, used, battered than it had. She went around past the lilacs, which had grown nearly together to block the path. When she saw that he sat at the gray picnic table in his undershirt her heart swelled and then shrank painfully. Everything now different, hurt, endangered, that had been so strong and full before.
“Hi.”
He turned, and his face filled with pleasure but not surprise to see that it was she. He had a blackened bone-handled kitchen knife with which he was cutting tomatoes on a flowered plate. He rose as though he meant to come and embrace her, but she stopped before she came close to him, and so he paused too, still smiling.
“Tomatoes,” she said. Her hands behind her back. “Nice.”
“Yes. They are now ripe. So huge and red, so generous. Not potatoes yet.”
“Something’s happened,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
“You know?” she said.
“I know that something has happened. While we wrote poems and tomatoes grew.” He sat slowly again, and showed her with a hand that she should sit opposite him. But she still stood.
“What?” she said. “What happened?”
“Kyt,” he said. “I am very glad to see you. I am so very glad.”
She sat then by him, uncertain, feeling that she was already betraying him, that if he touched her she would poison or taint him; but when he put his hand on her shoulder it calmed her. He didn’t say anything, only waited, and she told him what had happened, the dean and Milton Bluhdorn and the questions asked her. As she spoke he withdrew his hand from her.
“And he asked these things of you to learn—to learn what?” he asked. “What is suspected?”
“That you might be connected to, to. Your old country and the leaders there. That you might be still on their side really.”
“You mean what is called asset of theirs.” He cut a wedge of the big beefsteak and salted it from a glass shaker.
“Called what?”
“In capitalist countries, so called. Assets are friendly or helpful ones, people or institutions willing to do secret work. They ask if I am Soviet asset. Not American asset.” He said it lightly, dangerously. “Assets of course can become liabilities, move to other column of books. If they are exposed or become for any reason useless.”
“What then?”
“Well. You must remove liabilities. Profit and loss. KGB also knows this well, though not by capitalist accounting.”
“You aren’t, are you? Some kind of…agent.”
“Ah. But not all agents are secret. And not all secret agents are spies.”
“But you aren’t,” she said. “You aren’t any of those.”
“Kyt, you know what I am.” He closed his hands together and spoke in Russian: “Vechnosti zalozhnik u vremeni v plenu,” he said, and now she knew enough that she could recognize it, the poem of Pasternak’s that he had long ago recited in his class. “Poet, take care, watch well,” he said. “Do not sleep, for you are Eternity’s hostage, kept captive by Time.”
She shook her head, helpless, helpless before his resistance to what had happened, as though he thought it was a game: not a dangerous one like Jackie talked about, played for keeps, but one you could win just by talking, by words.
“Who is he?” she asked. “Why did he come here?” She asked because she could not ask another question: Who are you? Why did you come here?
“Perhaps he is not one thing,” Falin said. “It may be he is one thing here, another thing elsewhere.” He didn’t smile now. “Perhaps they do not know entirely what their mil’ton is. The great right hand cannot always know what the little left hand is up to.”
This meant nothing to her. “I had to touch him,” she said. “I had to shake his hand, he made me.”
“Ah,” Falin said. “A good sign. In my country a good sign. The agents of the state never touch the hands of those they intend to destroy. Never.”
He got up, and went to where his garden began, the big blowzy potato plants brown-edged and hairy-limbed. He’d said once that in Russia he’d known someone who kept supplies of potatoes in his cellar: a high official, he said, a party leader. She remembered that, and in horror she thought that now she would record all that he said and did, without willing it, helplessly. And as though he overheard her think this he turned to her, rubbing his bare arms, seemingly cold even in the sun.
“Kyt,” he said. “I must say this now. Not easy to say. It has become dangerous that you should be nearby me. You must from now on stay away.”
It was, somehow, what she had known he would have to say no matter what he felt. She didn’t hear what he said so much as drink it, a terrible caustic liquid that burned her as it entered, burned her out. She wanted to beg him, beg him to forgive her or to withdraw what he had said, and because his eyes hadn’t changed, were still as open and full of calm pity as always, she thought he would surely see it, or hear her thought. But she said nothing to him.
“I will drive you back to campus.” He came to the table and picked up a shirt that lay there.
“No,” she said, “no,” and she got up and backed away from him as though he meant her harm in coming toward her. “No it’s okay. It’s not so far.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No,” she said. “No.” She turned away from him, thinking that if now she went out of his yard, she didn’t know how she would reach town and the university again, or why. She didn’t turn back, though; she went out and to the road again, and down to where it met the main road.
She had let him say those things, she had let him put her out and had said nothing.
Down the road toward town in the stillness and sun she could see Jackie’s Volkswagen pulled over on the shoulder in a tall tree’s shadow.
8.
It had fallen, it had been dropped, but the effect was nothing like anybody ever said it would be. There had been the sudden universal energy-flash covering the earth, and the great cloud-ball too (in hiding she had seen or known this) but silent: and when she came out she saw that it had changed everything and yet destroyed nothing. Everything that she remembered was gone, all the buildings and the houses and roads and the high-tension wires and telephone poles, the plowed fields and the farms and the people; instead there were only green-blue forests and a living wind that moved their leaves and showed the silver undersides. Still silent. Even the ground had been altered, into low hills and valleys, where before it had been plains.
She went down in wonder into the glens, and the way was easy, though there was no path. I’ll kill you if you tell me there’s a reason for this, she said to Ben, who followed behind her, just out of sight. I’ll kill you if you say you know. Then, as she thought of what she had said, and wanted to unsay it, she saw that in the grass there was an animal, like a cat but not a cat, and it seemed to be having some kind of fit: its muscles tensed and writhing, its wide eyes piteous. When she came closer, though, she saw it was made not of flesh and fur but of grease or clay, and the life in it was caught in this matter, and the eyes were blind. And as she bent to study it in repulsion, she saw Ben beside her turn away from her and go away; and though he still smiled she saw that his flesh was white and wasted, his neck thin as rope, his legs hardly able to support him, and she knew she had been wrong about everything.