“Sometimes detdoma was not so good as street,” he said to her. “Hundreds try to get in; as many try to get out soon. Stay till food is gone, run away. I ran away. Not once only.”
“And after that?”
“Go to market. Beg. Ride on trains. I found other friends, as we did then. I knew then the rules of how to live, how to make—what—alliances, and make myself valuable to others. I could beg, though I was perhaps not so pitiful as once. I lived. At last, arrested again, for theft. Sent to prison. Then released to new detdoma. This time to stay.”
He put out his cigarette: she watched the strong square wrist; did his hand tremble? How much we can stand, she thought: how much, after all.
“That was first place in all my life I knew where was,” he said. “Ah no: I don’t make myself clear. I mean I learned only there that world is round, where on it I am; where I stand.”
“They had teachers?”
“Here, yes. Khar’kov. A labor commune; we worked and learned. There were books. Not like the others.”
“Was that what happened to the others, the kids you knew?”
“No. Most not. There were so many, you know: most not. Streets, markets, trains. In the end many, many were sent to camps. You see, aim of reform, rehabilitation, was soon given up; they were by then only young criminals, hooligans, human waste. They were sent to mine gold or coal, make roads, dig canals.”
“Prison camps.”
“Lageria, yes. Camps of slave labor, men and women building new land, new world. Novy mir.”
“But not you.”
“Not then.”
“Well how did you, how…”
He had stood, restless; he went to open his office window to the spring, and Kit felt the stale air of the room pushed aside, the cool sweetness on her cheek. “Many of us who were lost,” he said. “They knew only to fight, or to run away. They could not learn to eat with fork and knife, some of them; they could not listen to any command, could not sit still, not remember what happened yesterday or guess what might happen next. This had become of them. And then further things were done to them, which they could not run from, which they could not fight.”
What he was saying now was hard for him to say: Kit could see.
“I knew,” he said. “I knew. Not to run; to listen. To be not seen when looked at; to be seen when I chose; to speak, to agree, to seem. I did not learn these things; if I would have to learn, I would not have been able. If I had not been able, I would not now be here, telling this to you, Kyt Malone. I would not be here.”
13.
“I thought about it, what he told me,” Kit said to Gavriil Viktorovich. “I thought about it all the time. I guess I needed something to think about, just then, and he…”
“Yes.”
“He offered that. He must have thought it would help me. And it did help.” She looked down at her hands; she turned the ring on her ring finger. “I wanted to write about it, what he told me, when I published the book, my book, the first one, with his poems in it. But by then I didn’t know if what I remembered was so.”
“It is already more than I knew,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “I knew that his name was not his own. He told me that.”
“He said he thought that his father was an engineer. He said it was all he knew of him.”
“Yes?”
“He never told you that?”
“No. We were not then in habit of asking after families. It was not done to look into family trees, do you say this in English, family trees? You did not know who might be found peeping out from leaves, you see? A priest, perhaps, or former noble person, Tsarist policeman. No. You were New Man, no forebears; if they could not even be discovered, well, all to the good.”
“So you knew he didn’t remember his parents.”
“No. Not that either. I thought he had family. There was story, I forget now; parents separated by war, or maybe gone pioneers to north. I cannot remember. I remember he received letters. He said so.”
She turned the ring on her finger, thinking. “If he went to that camp,” she said, “the one that was run by the secret police, could he have known boys there, boys who maybe later on…Well, I guess I don’t know what I’m asking.”
“That such persons would later help him; see that he got better treatment? Perhaps even intervene at the end, when he was sent away?”
“Well maybe.”
“Or that perhaps he himself…”
“Oh my God.”
Gavriil Viktorovich piled up his small collection of Falin poems, got up, and with painful care put it all away again. “In all places and times we humans have believed in luck,” he said. “So perhaps this was all. Luck and his courage. But we ceased to believe in many things in time of Gray Gods, and luck was smallest thing among them.”
He turned to face her, and he was smiling. “Well. Now these days at last we can look, in KGB records; they have been opened, some at least, like—like tombs. And so far there is nothing of him there.”
Nothing. Kit didn’t know if she felt relieved or defeated. “Do you know why he was sent to the labor camp, after the war? I mean what his supposed crime was? Is that something that can be found out?”
“He never told you?”
“No.”
Gavriil Viktorovich shook his head slowly. “Perhaps in future we can know. Not now. Not today. Wherever his name appears in records, it seems only to make more mystery; and such records are few. They are very few.”
He tugged down his jacket, and dusted his hands. “Now you will excuse me,” he said. “I will dress for our dinner.” He made her a small bow, and went behind a flowered curtain that divided his apartment in two.
Kit thought: Maybe I didn’t know anything at all about him. Maybe he was simply one of those lifelong wanderers who are compelled never to tell the truth about themselves, or to admit that they don’t really know the truth, and instead continually invent new pasts and new histories, not necessarily more creditable or glamorous, sometimes just parallel to the actual lives they lived, reversed or inverted for no clear reason. And she thought that some of them committed suicide: there were the survivors of camps; there was Arshile Gorky, the painter, and Kozinsky the writer; having run through all their possibilities, maybe.
Had Falin committed suicide? Is that what had happened, after all?
The things that threatened him in America, which all seemed to be shadows of what had happened to him here, reaching out for him; the plot that seemed to surround him, which he couldn’t or wouldn’t explain: maybe none of it was so. Maybe it was that he could not bear the sorrows that he had accumulated, or the deeds he’d done, whatever they’d been; too great a weight even for stories to lift or deflect any longer. And on that October night, when he went out in his car, when he said that the time had come, when he said he had to go on a journey and didn’t know when he could come back, he was merely slipping from beneath it all, canceling all his stories like debts.
She’d watched him drive away. It was from her he had parted; she was the one to whom he’d said those things. And there was no one else now to ask, no one who knew.
Gavriil Viktorovich returned from behind the curtain unchanged, though now with a tie on, one so anonymous and dim as to be remarkable. “So,” he said.