“You wouldn’t think,” she said. She hoped she wouldn’t; hoped she would not be given time to think. “It would be like being on a sinking ship, the Titanic. You’d have to let the women and children go first. Automatically. You’d have to go down with the ship, if you were the captain.”
“You would. But what if no one would know of your sacrifice. If no one knows of my sacrifice, no one could know it was not made. Better to live, no? Better to live than die.”
“But everybody dies.” She couldn’t tell what side he wanted her to take, what he wanted to hear her say.
“Perhaps trust to chance,” he said. “It has not yet happened. Perhaps once again it will not. We live in danger but are never destroyed. Perhaps still never.” She could see in the silver light of the television that his brow glowed with sweat in the cold room. “I mean, so you might think. You might think, What if my sacrifice is not necessary? What if danger will pass anyway? Then every day that did pass, and the destruction did not come, you would think, Aha: I was right, how foolish I was to think of acting; I need not be hero, and I am still alive here.”
“That sounds like hell. Like…damnation. Waiting. After your one chance has gone by.”
He said nothing for a time. A great restlessness seemed to be in him, in his breathing, a vortex inside his still exterior.
“And if,” he said then. “If you loved someone, who must take such action, make such sacrifice. What then? Would you let them go?”
“Wives in war do.”
“Not willingly. Not always.”
“My mother didn’t,” Kit said. “She didn’t. She begged my father not to go. She had a baby son when he went down to enlist. She stood crying on the doorstep with the baby and calling after him. So she says.” Falin arose, as she spoke, from beside her, and stood at the window looking out; had he even heard her? “Anyway, he got stationed in Washington, about six blocks from their apartment.”
“Hardest thing,” he said, not to her. “Is not suffering. Much harder is to remember what you did to avoid suffering. What you were willing to do. This cannot be erased.”
She lowered her eyes. On the television John Wayne brought home the white girl who had been taken by the Indians, brought her home to her mother in the bare bleak house on the desert. And turned away. When she and Ben had watched it years ago she thought he would kill the girl when he found her in her buckskins and feathers. He didn’t do that but he couldn’t stay there either. He turned away, turned to go, taller than any human, tall enough to walk on in that place, against that sky.
“Kyt.” He still faced the window and the dark. “Do you have the translations we made, the poems of this summer?”
“Yes. All of them.”
“What do you think, are they poems in English?”
“I don’t know. I hope. I think.”
“So much undone,” he said. “So much that should be done.”
“What we did,” Kit said. “Working on your poems. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was harder than I thought anything could be.”
“And yet you did it.”
“Yes. It was wonderful. It was…it was like water.”
He seemed to hear her then clearly, and turned to her. “Now you will write your own poems,” he said. “And that will be harder still, and more wonderful still.”
On the television their station had run out, and showed only the American flag flying, and the national anthem began, like a burst of cannon. An awful weariness seemed to be filling her up, from her toes and fingertips inward to her heart. He sat again by her on the couch; he touched her throat, where she held her own hand. “What is it?” he asked.
“It hurts,” she said. “It hurts a lot. I don’t know why.”
“Ill?”
“I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like that, like a cold. I feel…like I’ve been crying for a long time.”
“Perhaps you have.”
“I’m so sleepy.”
“Yes.” He took her hands and lifted her from the couch; she put her arms around him, her cheek on his shoulder, because she was tired of refusing to. She pressed her lips to his throat and the vein that beat along it. She would make him not turn away. But he didn’t turn away. After a time he led her to the small room, and she wouldn’t lie there alone, or release him at alclass="underline" she drew him down beside her.
“I should not touch you,” he said. “I have no right. You so clean and unsoiled.”
No: she held him, took his face in her hands. She wondered if he could really believe it was so, that there was anyone anywhere unsoiled; or if he meant to warn her or ask her. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “Take me.”
“Ah no.”
“I will. Anywhere.”
“Everywhere is here.”
His arms seemed enormous. The heater in the far room boomed softly, igniting. The window in its wooden frame spoke a little note. The gray cat on the rug, indifferent, couldn’t keep its eyes open.
“I don’t really know anything,” she said. “About…I never found out.”
“There is not anything,” he said. “Everything is known.”
It wasn’t so, that everything was known; she was sure of that. But with him now it was plain what they should do, that they shouldn’t refuse anymore. She didn’t know anything but there was nothing now she had to guess at or decide about, to stop at or shrink from. She found that out, there, then: that you didn’t always have to dare yourself, or make yourself; “yourself” could just be carried along, marveling, willing nothing, and who could have guessed that? It was the last thing she would have expected. She laughed, and he asked her why, but she knew she didn’t need to answer, that he only asked because lovers do, just to hear her speak.
“You laugh and cry at once,” he said
“No,” she said, “I don’t. No that’s silly. No one can. They just say that.”
“You do, now.”
“Well,” she said. “Okay then.”
It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair: that with him she moved from wonder, and then knowledge, to those astonishing tears and cryings-out without a name that come when everything inside is breached; and then to other things, to plain belonging and necessity, a necessity as profound and permanent and easily slaked as thirst. And then they couldn’t do without each other; and that was fearful and awesome, but there was no reversing it, no matter what. The last stars paled, the casement window opened on the cold dawn; they went out, they went on. She got lost, and went on alone; then she was found, and lost, and found again; they went on, they grew old, they died together. That’s what it seemed like.
And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened. So it had to be that there was really nothing to remember, because if there were, it certainly couldn’t be all forgotten. All she remembered with distinctness was that she slept that night in his bed, and that she awoke different. Alone. The gray cat atop her, the steady roar of its purring and the kneading of its paws on the quilt, its little cross-eyed face poised just an inch from her own to smell her sleeping breath. Nothing more.
She saw him in the next room on the phone, the Princess, its dial alight in the dark corner. He was dressed, and wearing his overcoat.
She heard him say words in Russian, and she seemed to understand them, but not their import. She heard him say Da. Da. Da.
Or she dreamed that, having gone to sleep again. Then he was standing by the bed, looking down on her.
“You slept,” he said. He said it as though she had done what she should, as though he were happy for her.
She struggled to stand up. “You’re going? Now?”
“I made offer,” he said. “Now offer has been accepted.” He put his hands in his big pockets. “I had hoped I could bring you back, to University. Was my intention. Now I cannot. I must go.”