“Now.
“Since we will be together long while, I thought we should come to know one another. We might begin now to introduce ourselves, in this way: I will ask you each to say a poem that has meant something to you.”
He looked around at them, maybe the faintest curl of a smile to his mobile mouth, his hands laid one over the other now and unmoving: Kit had noticed before how large they were, long strong fingers and jutting wrist bones. They were all silent, maybe trying to decide if he actually meant what he said, or if maybe he meant only that they should name a poem, or a poet, they had liked or read; knowing he hadn’t, though, and that they would have to recite poetry, if they could, before their fellows and this personage.
“We will perhaps start on my left,” Falin said.
“Okay,” said the student on his left after a moment. She was a pretty moon-faced blue-eyed girl of a kind there seemed to Kit to be a lot of in the world, cookie-cut, but sometimes very different inside, she knew. “I like this one:
“I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
They’d banish us, you know.”
“It’s Emily Dickinson,” she said. “There’s more I don’t remember.”
Falin nodded, regarding her or what she had said in a kind of plain wonder, then turning his gaze to the boy next to her, who passed the glance along with a shrug to the one next to him. This one said: “All I can think of is one by Swinburne,” and he began it:
“When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces
The mother of months in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain…”
He was a small guy with a red crewcut growing out raggedly and a spray of childlike greenish freckles across his nose; one button of his button-down shirt was undone and his glasses a little askew.
“And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.”
Kit thought of him reading these lines so often that they had lodged in his memory, and found herself liking him. He began on another stanza before running out or growing embarrassed; seeming to shake free of a little trance.
The baton was passed, or refused mostly with shrugs or giggles, which seemed to interest Falin as much as the poems or bits of poems recited. Kit wondered if the other kids felt like what they seemed to her, prisoners summoned out of dungeons and ordered to speak, who had almost forgotten human speech. A beaked storky guy with a bobbing Adam’s apple recited in a weird basso:
“The moving finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”
Many nodded when another girl began, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and though she didn’t seem to be one who had gone down many less-traveled roads, you couldn’t know that, which was maybe what this exercise was for. Then it was Kit’s turn, whose mind was empty, there were no poems in her except her own, the one she had given him: it stood in the way of all the others she knew. Falin waited.
“Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,” she said. “That’s…well, it’s what I remember right now. It’s Baudelaire, and it means I am like the king of a rainy country.” The line had appeared on her French placement exam, this glowing sentence among the ordinary requests for directions and statements of fact, opening like a casement. She’d had a hard time moving past it. “The next lines are, I think, like this: Riche, mais impuissant; jeune, et portant très vieux. Rich but powerless; young and yet very old.” She stopped, for she found her eyes had filled with tears and her throat trembled: because of the poem, and because she had remembered it, but for more than that. She seemed to see that country, to which a long time ago she had been able to go so easily, where rain was as exquisite as sun, where pain and even boredom could have the same golden weight and worth as joy or triumph.
“Anyway,” she said, ceasing, embarrassed and abashed. “Sort of like that. There’s more, but.”
Falin was looking at her, leaning somewhat forward over the table toward her. She would later think that he seemed often to listen by looking as much as by hearing. He said: “This is an English word, ‘rainy’?”
“Sure,” Kit said. “Sure. A rainy day.”
He lifted his head as though remembering that yes, he knew this locution. “Rainii,” he said softly.
No one else was willing to speak, and Falin spread his great hands on the table.
“Very well,” he said. “In exchange for yours, here is one.”
He began to speak in Russian, in a voice entirely different from the one in which he had spoken before, sounds that don’t exist in English, complex fluid vowels and strange soft consonants drawn out impossibly: it was as though he sculpted the poem in the middle of the air with broad steady strokes of rhythm and rhyme. Kit didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh aloud or to moan in amazement.
He finished, seeming to settle again, a hawk that had just roused and beat its wings. “This,” he said in his usual—or was it his American?—voice, “is quite famous poem in Russian, poem of Pushkin, known to everyone who reads, as perhaps some poems you have repeated are known to everyone here.” The students were still, and did not look at one another. “I cannot tell you what it says, not at all exactly, because meaning so much resides in Russian words; this problem we will talk much of. I will tell you though something of what it is about.”
He looked within, as though marshaling again before him the lines he had spoken.
“He says—Pushkin—that the poet, until he is summoned by the god Apollo to sacrifice to him, is afraid, confused, immersed in the world and its troubles; his lyre—poet’s instrument—is still muffled, his soul is wrapped in sleep. And of all the world’s worthless children, he is most worthless.
“Until he sings.”
He let them think about this, or anyway said no more for a long moment.
“Well, I will tell you something of myself,” he said at length. “Because it may be that some of you have come chiefly to have look at me, someone who has come from so far away and from somewhere so—strange to you.
“Okay.
“My name is Innokenti Isayevich Falin. I was born and grew up in the city of Leningrad, at that time Petrograd, before that St. Petersburg. My father was an engineer, I his only child.”
He picked up and put down again his cigarettes; took his fountain pen from his pocket, and put it back.
“When very young I liked poetry, nursery rhymes as you say; I was very intent on these, and I like them still today. But for a long time I showed no further interest in poetry. When I went to school I wished to be engineer like my father; but this was not possible. I became instead a drawer; not an artist but a drawer of plans, for machines…”