She thought at first that nothing had changed inside his house. The standard lamp with its flowered shade shone on the brown bearlike sofa, the card table held papers and books. Then a gleam or wink in the corner drew her eye. He had a television.
“Yes,” he said, seeing where she looked.
It was a dull bronze color, and set up on a chrome stand: its gray eye closed.
“These,” he said, and touched the antennae, “these have name in English. Rabbit’s ears. I was told this.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Did you also know,” he said, “that the radiation or broadcast of television waves goes on always, passing through air, through houses, through bodies even?”
“I guess so.”
“Yes. I knew but did not think of it till I bought this. Until it was turned on, and revealed them to be here. Then I thought of them, passing always through here, only unknown to me.”
“They might make it a law,” she said. “To leave it on all the time, so they don’t get wasted or lost.”
She could tell that for a moment he pondered what she had said, before laughing.
“Oh hey,” she said. “This is new too.”
It was a phone. A tiny oval phone of the kind she thought belonged only in the pastel bedrooms of teenage girls in movies. “A Princess,” she said.
“Yes, is its name,” he said. “Look.” He lifted the receiver, and its dial lit up, aglow in the corner where it had been installed. “It seems to me a thing found maybe undersea,” he said. “Among pearls and treasure. Do you know the name of this color?”
“Um,” she said. “I guess it’s aqua.”
“Yes!” he said, surprised. “Is Latin word for water. So you see.” He put the receiver to his ear. “Like shell you listen to. From this might come poems. More than from car radio of Orpheus.”
He cradled the receiver with an odd gentleness. Kit felt a dark apprehension suddenly, a certainty of loss.
“Ah,” he said, lifting his eyes. “Excuse me. I saw as we came in Miss Petroski’s light on. I must speak to her one minute. One minute only.” He made a motion with his hands to say she must sit down, and went to the door that separated his rooms from the Petroski house; he knocked, and his small knock was as uniquely his, or uniquely Russian, as the way he washed or held a glass of tea. He seemed to hear a voice, and went in.
Kit sat. When he was gone, though, she stood again, and walked the cold room. A big gas heater, clad in metal made to look like wood, breathed hotly, but still she was cold. On the card table where last summer they worked there were a few papers scattered in the familiar lamplight. The small square letters of his English hand.
In this tongue I like poison more than food,
Choose clamor over song, like rain not sun
It was a poem, or the beginnings of one, words crossed out and other words inserted, the few lines rewritten many times. The accents of the lines were marked with pencil ticks.
A storm for which I had no name
Broke all the eggs in Russiaville;
The roofs of Russiaville off came
And flew away like flapping wings
He was trying to write in English.
In pity and wonder she touched the sheets. It was like watching an athlete who’s had a dreadful accident learning to walk again, using all his knowledge and strength to do the simplest things. How long would it take him? You couldn’t know, because you couldn’t know when you were done. She could never know it of herself, either: she had learned this language at the same time as she had learned to see and hear, and yet she would never know, because you never came to a time when you could say Done. Not until you were shot, like Pushkin. Or like Rimbaud, until you just stopped for good, for ever.
What door, what window was this she felt open within her? God how small it was, how deep.
He came back into the room.
“I have nothing to give you,” he said. “No food, no drink.”
“I don’t want anything.”
“Come, sit.”
But she had grown shy, afraid of him or for him, and turned away. The great television in the corner like a bored beast: she went to it and pressed the large button that must mean On, and it came to life. A gray western, one she recognized: she didn’t remember at first what story it told, only the huge sky, the horsemen.
“Where are you going?” she said, though she had promised herself she wouldn’t. “If you go.”
“If I go? To the wind’s twelve quarters.”
“Can’t you say?”
“John Gwayne,” he said. He pointed to the television. “Do you know?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know.”
“A big man, always in the right.”
“Yes.” Once in the summer she had told him what she had heard or read somewhere was a motto of the Texas Rangers: A little man will always beat a big man, if the little man’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.
She had begun to shiver, small flutters crossing her breastbone and her shoulders. He put his arm around her.
“What’s going to happen,” she whispered. “What’s going to happen to us.”
He said nothing for a time; she felt his breath taken, released. There could be only one thing she meant by what she said.
“Well,” he said. “Now is near dawn in Moscow. Nikita Sergeyevich has slept in his office in his clothes; he does not want to be caught in his nightclothes if U.S. has decided on war. He did not sleep well.”
Kit turned further into his arms and closed her eyes.
“There is new letter from Dr. Castro in Cuba,” Falin said. “He is angry and afraid. From all that he has learned he knows that U.S. will attack Cuba in two, three days. Why does Soviet Union not announce that missiles on the island will be fired at U.S. if Cuba is invaded? So far Nikita Sergeyevich has not even stated that such missiles are present in Cuba. Why not?
“Well. Nikita Sergeyevich will have tea and blinis and think about these things. Cuba cannot be allowed to be destroyed. Politburo thinks if U.S. invades Cuba, Soviet Union should immediately move on West Berlin, but Gensek—I mean Nikita Sergeyevitch, General Secretary—does not see what Berlin has to do with anything.”
He bent back his head, looking up, as though looking farther. “By his wristwatch he sees that now it is midnight in America, in Washington. Dawn has not yet reached Ukraine. All West still asleep; because the world is round, and turns its face by hours to the sun. Nikita Sergeyevich, when he thinks of this, remembers always the schoolroom where first he learned of it, and his teacher there, and the smell of the stove, and how hard it was to understand this, and believe it.”
“What will he do?” she asked.
He shrugged a slow shrug, shook his head, held out his hand toward the television, as though from it alone could come the future. “Two great ones,” he said. “And neither in the right.”
“They said it’ll be long,” Kit said. “Months of hardship and danger. The President said.”
He shook his head. “No. Will come quickly now.”
She felt again the height of cold air above them, the stratosphere; the rocket’s arc through it, arc-en-ciel.
“Tell me,” he said. “If you could make it stop, then would you?”
“Of course,” she said. “Of course I would.”
“If to stop it meant that you would yourself not survive?”
She pulled herself away to look at him, to see why he asked. “Well you’d have to,” she said. “You couldn’t refuse.”
“Ah well. You would have to. Is not the same as would you. Wouldn’t you be afraid, wouldn’t the loss be too great to think of?”