“Kit,” Jackie said, and sat beside her.
Ben hadn’t slipped into death, as anyone could, no he had fought his way there, into that blackness and nonexistence; pressed on in, armed. Oh please let it not be so. Let him not have lied to her, the very last thing. If they had lied, if he had, they took even her grief from her, and left her nothing.
Two days of classes had gone by, and Kit was required to bring absence excuses, signed by her proctor, to each teacher whose class she had missed. Instead she stuffed them in her purse and forgot them. One she did think she had to hand in, but rather than to class she brought it to the liberal arts tower, thinking she would put it in his mailbox as she had her poem at the beginning of the semester. When she passed by his office, though, he was standing in the doorway, apparently just leaving. Seeing her, he opened the door wider for her and showed her in.
“I wasn’t in class last week,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Again asleep?”
“No. Not asleep.” She pulled from her pocket the green form and gave it to him. He unfolded and read it, sitting down at his desk. The room could have been anyone’s: there was no sign that he alone occupied it.
“A family member?” he said.
“My brother.” He looked up from the form. “An accident. Far away.” She hoped he wouldn’t say he was sorry. He didn’t speak.
“I think I might have to drop your class, though,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
He refolded the green form. “Why do you say this?”
“Oh,” she said. “I guess I found out I don’t love poetry enough. Anymore.”
He got up then from his desk and pulled a chair close to his and indicated it with a hand. She sat reluctantly.
“Six weeks now left in this semester,” he said. “Too late to drop. You can only fail.”
She crossed her arms and hid her hands in her armpits. “Can I ask you something?” she said.
He nodded, unsurprised.
“When your daughter died,” Kit said, bargaining hard within herself not to cry, her throat not to tremble, “well how did you…how did you stand knowing that. Knowing what had happened.”
“I was far away.”
“Still. When you learned. When you thought about it.”
He thought, or was quiet. Then he said: “Where was he, your brother, far away?”
“The Philippines,” she said. “In the army. There was an accident, they said. Something—some shells or something—blew up.” The dark wave made itself known within her, but didn’t rise. “That’s what they say. They brought him home.”
Falin rested his chin in the L of his index finger and thumb, as she had seen him do in the library. He went on looking attentively at her, and in that time of silence the air in the little room seemed to be withdrawn and replaced, a little cleaner or clearer.
“Did you,” Kit said then, “ever write about her? Your daughter.”
“There are children in my poems who die,” he said. “Who are hungry, who are lost, who are hurt. But of these I knew many.”
“Many?”
He seemed to consider how he might say more. “You know,” he said. “We lived, in that country, in times of terrible things. Not for a short time, but for long years. There was hardly a person to whom these things did not happen; even to those who sold everything—their souls, their loved ones—so that the terrible things would not happen to them. There was no safety.”
“So if things like that were so common, then you…”
“No, no,” he said, as though he knew what she thought. “No, you did not get used to it. Only you ceased to be surprised. And you did not have the pain to yourself: you did not look around yourself and say Why should they be happy and I have this; how can they walk in the sun and smile and not know what I know.”
She gripped the hankie that, just in case, she had taken out.
“All those I was with in camps, they had children, wives. No: I am wrong, not all. Many had lost all even before they came.”
He moved a paper minutely on the desk.
“I was, myself, a lost child,” he said, and lifted his eyes to her again. “A homeless boy. I do not remember my mother or my father. And as I lost them, so too did they lose me.”
“I thought you said your father was an engineer.”
“Yes. I said so. I believe this to be so.” He regarded her puzzlement for a moment. “I do not remember my father,” he said. “But from my first memory, I could say this sentence: My father is an engineer. A name the others sometimes called me was Engineer.”
“The others?”
“The lost children. Besprizornye. There were many of us. Tens of thousands. No, more: a million. Millions.” He smiled, maybe at her wonderment. “Another name I had among the lost children was Monashka, the Nun.”
“Nun?”
“Perhaps I was delicate child. Innocent.” His smile was teasing for a moment, then gone. “I don’t really know why they called me that. I have forgot much. I do not know for sure where I was lost, and I do not know why.”
“But you also said you grew up in Leningrad with your parents. That your parents were dead. That you were an only child.”
“Yes. I lied when I said that.”
Kit, shocked, couldn’t respond. He was telling her he had lied. No adult had ever told her such a thing. They had lied, many of them had—telling her about the world or God or other things—and sometimes she had guessed and sometimes not. But never had one admitted it.
“I first appeared on earth in a train station in a northern city,” he said. “It was beginning to be cold, winter. I perhaps was seven or eight or six years old. I was abandoned there, or by chance separated from whoever was to take care of me. It was very common.”
“You first appeared?”
“I mean I remember nothing before that. I mean that there I begin to remember something that may be told.”
“No father or mother?”
He shook his head.
“Well…what happened? I mean…”
“You would like to hear?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder why.”
She said nothing.
“I must say: it is not always easy for me. Not easy to remember, not easy to tell.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well.”
“You will know more about me than I have revealed in this country before,” he said. “You’re not afraid?”
“Why should I be afraid?”
He didn’t answer. He took from his pocket his cigarettes—they were Herbert Tareytons, with the jaunty little man in antique formal dress on the pack—and put them on the desk; he opened his coat and tipped back the office chair, stretching out his long legs. “Very well,” he said. “And in exchange for my story, if you think it worth it, I will ask of you one thing. All right?”
“All right,” she said, and she wasn’t afraid, though her throat was tight and painful. “What is it?”
“I ask that you not drop my class,” he said. “That you stay till end. That you not fail.”
She shrugged, and looked away. “No, it’s okay,” she said. “I can make it up someplace else. The credit. It’s okay.”
He said nothing, as though she had said nothing: and she looked up at him.
“It’s only a course,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“To me, yes,” he said. “That you are not there. That I do not see you there. Yes. It matters very much.”
“It does?”
“It does.”
It was as though she stepped off an unseen edge and fell, only not down but up. He had been thinking about her. He had been thinking about her when she wasn’t there, just as she had thought about him, who he was, what he was. He had been thinking about her, and maybe for the same reasons too, reasons she had no name for.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll do that. I’ll stay. Till the end.”