Kolya reached inside the pack and drew out a thin volume with the title The Poems of CL Richter, and he asked what it was. Pyotr harrumphed that it was a load of self-indulgent garbage. He didn’t know who C.L. Richter was, but the words, according to Pyotr’s judgment, read like the elementary school musings of a spurned lover. Briefly looking through the volume, Kolya had come, more or less to agree, but with certain exceptions.
“Well, it is certainly not Shakespeare,” he concluded. “Still, it has its own little moments of beauty and truth. After all, those are the primary things we should seek in poetry. If it is true, then it can be beautiful.” He paused, thumbing through the book. “Like here… I like this one,” he said, and he read it aloud to them.
Kolya began to go on about how the poem generally lacked a certain central structure that was hinted at in that title, but, he said, it had never been fully developed, and he told the other three how the poem was merely a kind of list of emotions that the fellow had felt in his obvious loss, so there was truth there, and how the poem had a sad sweetness to it, and how it was like the honey in the first line. It needed, Kolya said, only to be tasted, it would not suffice for an entire meal—and it was then when Natasha had begged him please… please… to just stop. He was killing her with his endless analysis. Sisters and brothers don’t always agree on the merits of art, but the one thing they have no trouble agreeing upon is the need to silence one another.
Kolya had stopped, and then he noticed a poem folded into the first page of the volume, a poem by the Harlem poet Langston Hughes. That was when he suddenly looked at the others and decided that they should all assume new names.
“Look,” he said. “We’re about to enter a world that does not know us and does not accept us, even though we are as much a part of it as anyone else. There are certainly likely to be those who will be unfriendly. We would do well to make ourselves fit as closely as possible. We’ve already enough going against us. Though Lev taught many of us how to speak perfect, accentless English, he taught us all too well. We are not good at the vernacular, and slang… we know almost nothing of it. We were not raised to live in America. We were raised to live in Russia. If anyone were reading us… say… in a book… they would say, why do the characters speak so awkwardly? And by awkwardly, we would know that they actually mean correctly.”
Pyotr nodded. “I agree completely. That’s why Lev told us to flee to Amish country. He said we would not stick out there so obviously. Anyone who hears us there will think that we speak painfully awkward, though precise, English.”
Vasily, too, decided that he approved of the idea and said that he really liked the ring of the name from the poem that was folded into the volume. He decided he would call himself Lang. Kolya, for his part, decided to call himself Cole, partly because, he said, he had always liked the jazz musician named John Coltrane. “He played a Russian lullaby that was simply spectacular,” he said, as if that settled the matter for him.
Pyotr liked the suggestion overall, but wasn’t willing to take it much further than he ought, so he decided simply to be known as Peter, the English version of his Russian name. And Natasha—was it the unwillingness to give in to her sibling?—had refused the entire matter.
“Well, you guys can do what you will,” she said. “As for me, I will live with the name my mother gave me.” And with that, and a firm nod of her head, the matter was settled for her, too.
Following this, the newly titled Lang began to dig through the backpack some more and found a small blue box inside. He asked Peter what was in it.
“I don’t know,” Peter said. “It rattles when you shake it. That is all that I know of that box.”
“What?! What?!” Cole asked. “You didn’t open it to find out?”
“No. It belonged to a man who has just died,” he said. “I believe in letting things be. In showing some respect for the departed.”
This was too much for Cole. “But aren’t you even a little bit curious?”
“No,” Peter said. And the sound in his voice suggested that he was unwilling to budge on the matter.
“What if it’s important? What if it has something in it that will aid our survival?”
Peter looked at Cole, unblinking. “Then we will still have it, won’t we? If we end up in dire need of something that is in a box and rattles, we’ll open it then.”
Lang and Cole looked at each other, and then at Natasha, who gave them no sign of help, and then they looked back at each other as younger men do in the presence of their seniors. They decided to let the matter drop. They placed the box and the books and the other items back in the backpack, and then placed the pack along the wall.
They were satisfied that they had seen everything the pack had to offer, but God from His omniscient seat in the heavens knew that they had not. In a small, zippered pocket near the strap of one of the handles was a weathered, crumbling business card that had been given to the traveler who had carried the pack into their community. It was perhaps best that they did not see it. If they had, they might have considered it trash and thrown it on the floor of the dugout to be lost forever. But they did not see it and so they did not throw it away. Instead, they simply sat and talked quietly while they waited for sleep to overtake them. That was a blessing, like most blessings are, in the way it happened without their effort or notice. The card, like the rattling in the box, would indeed be there still if, as Cole had innocently said, it was ever needed to aid their survival.
In his sleep, Lang dreamt of the town of Warwick. He dreamt of the people that he left there, of the way they’d passed through thick and thin together, how they’d come through holy and perverse. His dreams were in color and then black and white. He saw the others faintly through the moonlight, on the far side of the shore, heard the clamor of their uprising, and mourned for the loss that he felt in leaving.
One face in particular haunted him in his dream. The face of the sweet girl from the bakery named Irinna. He’d always loved her in secret, and he’d hoped that she might one day love him, too. He’d stood and watched her pass through the town as she made her deliveries for the baker. He’d watched her gently sweep away a wisp of hair from her lovely brow, leaving just a gentle trace of flour at times, which she would then wipe away with her sleeve and smile in embarrassment. He’d hoped that someday he might convince her to go on a date with him, but he’d never had the courage to ask