“Now. Here.”
It was called the 24-Hour Grill, in fact, a funny little streamlined submarine powered by the great fan in its backside, lifting the periscope of a tin chimney. She wondered how he had first found this place, whether there was some memory of home for him in it. The heat inside steamed the windows opaque, and the coffee urns and the griddle steamed and smoked too; the place smelled pleasantly of grease and coffee and burnt toast and people’s damp wool. The jukebox was loud:
Be my be my baby
My one and only baby
“Draw one,” called the elderly waitress to the cook after hearing their order. “Drop one.”
“Coffee and tea,” he said confidentially to her. “The coffee is drawn from the urn; the tea is in the bag, dropped in cup.”
His coat hung on the brass hook by the booth’s end, and she noticed that in its pocket peeping out was a book, the same hay-green volume he’d had when she met him before, by chance that time. He saw her look, and took the book out, turned it so that she could see the title on the spine: A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman.
“Was this the book where you found the poem you talked about in class?” Kit asked. “The cherry trees?”
“No no,” Falin said. “No, I read that poem in a volume of English poems with Russian translations, made perhaps 1920. New English poems; new then. I read it in prison. Many times.”
“You were in prison?”
“I was not only in one.”
“What for? I mean…”
“Do you know,” he said, “this was first question, often, that our interrogators asked. Do you know why you have been arrested? And many, many people did their best to tell them why. If they did not know, to make guess. Even if there was no reason.”
She must have gaped, trying to work this out, for he lifted a hand as though to forestall what she might be thinking. “Well, well. They were overworked, you know; they used what means they could. Policemen everywhere do it, perhaps. As though to say to you: I know, but you tell me.”
“And the poems? They let you have them?”
“They gave them to me. Among other books. This was in transit camp. After arrest. Before sentence. We read part of every day.”
“Really? Well. I wouldn’t have thought.”
For a moment he regarded her as though he were thinking how much he should say to her: as though he measured her. “It was a former institute,” he said. “In 1947 were many, many prisoners. Camps very crowded. Many buildings taken over. In mine we were seven men in room like…like my office here, you know? Every day certain things happened. Take out latrine bucket. Eat, twice, same thing, soup. Inspection. And distribution of books. It must be there was still large library in this place; many odd books given us. Some even explained us to ourselves. Books of history. Poetry in several languages.”
“How did they choose them?”
“Oh they didn’t. Guards could not read such things, mostly. They only took from shelves.” He laughed, as anyone might at a funny memory. “There is no doubt this was a mistake. But giving us books kept us quiet. You see, totalitarian state—even if they wanted it to be so, there were many holes. Holes everywhere, large and small.”
“So you read.”
“Sat and read. As far from my fellows as I am from you. Two hours, until light was too weak.”
“Then?”
“Sit. Talk. Argue. Go out for interrogation. No sleeping though. Not allowed in day.”
She felt a strange grip in her insides, a shiver across her breast. “No,” she said.
“You learned to sleep eyes open.”
“Yes.” She looked down into the muddy brown round of her coffee. When she looked up again she found he had not ceased regarding her. He had not said what he had been arrested for; for nothing, for poetry. She wouldn’t ask. She opened the book; it fell open to a page he had bent it to, she thought. He saw what page it was and began to speak, looking at her, saying the lines as though he were discovering or inventing them, and for her.
“From afar, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I.
Now—for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart—
Take my hand quick and tell me
What have you in your heart.
Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.”
He sat back. Their submarine moved through the deep. As he spoke, the place had grown strangely silent, attentive; or it seemed to Kit that it had. Now the music and the talk and the clatter of dishes poured apologetically back in, around her and him. It seemed a long time too before he spoke again, or as though no time passed.
“Now perhaps you will tell me,” he said, taking the book gently back from her. “Why you have such interest in me.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Such interest that you would enjoy to follow me all this evening.”
She froze. Once when she was twelve she had been caught shoplifting: something, nothing, a candy bar, a lipstick. The saleslady’s hand on her wrist, a sudden roar in her ears. His face, though, showed nothing but simple interest, his eyes alight, as they always were.
“I didn’t actually,” she said. “I mean I wasn’t really…”
“Was there,” he asked, “something you want to know?”
She shook her head.
“Nothing? Well if you say so I will not ask further.”
After what seemed to her a long moment she spoke, almost too softly to be heard: “Where did you learn English? Did you just teach yourself, or…”
“Oh no. In school,” he said. “English was popular subject. I was prize student. Many Russians who write earn living in translation.”
“I thought you studied drafting.”
“Language too. A gift.”
She tucked these things away. “When you came here,” she said. “Did they make you come alone? Were they not going to let any of your family leave with you?”
“I had no family left. I’m sure that if I had, then no, they would not have let them come.”
“You have no family now?”
“My parents are dead. I was their only child.”
“No wife or kids,” she said with a sense of trespass.
“I had for short time a wife,” he said. “With her I had one child.”
Kit nodded, alert, afraid now of how far she had gone, what door she had knocked on.
“Girl,” he said. “She contracted disease—the name I know only in Russian. Bone disease, of which she died. I do not know what year. I was then in prison.”
“And her mother was…”
“Dead by then too. Died, 1942.”
“In the war.”
“In Leningrad, in the siege. While I was in army. She starved to death.”
Kit, without willing it, made a moan of pity and horror, and covered her mouth.
“So in answer to your question,” he said. “Same question asked by U.S. embassy in Berlin. No I have no family. Parents dead. Wife, dead I am told. I had child, and she died.”
He was so still. Kit almost spoke. She almost said: I had a child too. She was certain that he waited for her to speak, and she felt every reason not to speak give way within her. I had a child too, and he died.