There was a time when she had refused to sleep, afraid that in the anti-world it would come again, that huge hollow that opened in the world, or in her heart. To comfort her, Ben had told her about the DEW Line: far in the north, ringing the continent, there were radar stations watching day and night, and no bomber from Russia would ever come that they wouldn’t see; and so we’d be warned, and we could hide.
He was right that it was the inexplicable suddenness that was the fearful part. She would lie in her bed, eyes on her night-light, thinking of the dew line, which she thought of as somewhere so far north that no dew felclass="underline" like the timberline, above which no trees grew. Hoping they were awake and listening.
She didn’t believe it would fall, not anymore. She didn’t think about it falling: at least not awake. But she also knew that it didn’t matter what she thought or believed; and maybe her inability to imagine a future for herself, to imagine what her life might someday contain (a husband, children, work), was because of its falling, in the future: the shock wave of it so final that it not only blanked out everything that followed but reached backwards too, to the moment of her sitting here, empty and still.
When she went back to the University she brought the square mahogany Webcor record player that had been a joint Christmas gift for her and for Ben, and all the records she had bought for herself and for him since then. The bitter machine smell, unique to it, that arose when the lid was lifted was home, and winter. A little haiku-like poem of that year was about it:
Black ivy by the window
Beaten by cold rain.
Inside, Brahms.
She brought her bike too. It was a long walk from the barrackslike dorms of the Language Institute to the center of campus and the town, she told George, helping him tie it to the car’s roof; she’d need it. It was her first and only bike. Ben had made her learn to ride, saying he’d just leave her behind when he went to the park or the natatorium if she couldn’t keep up, and she had made George answer an ad for a bike in the Lost & Found/Swap & Shop column of the paper. Fifteen dollars was all it cost, a bike like no other in the world, which made it (she felt) fit for her alone. It was a Schwinn English—styled like the ones you saw in European movies, only made (it seemed) of iron pipe; it was heavy as hell, Ben laughed aloud when he tried to take it from the back of the station wagon when they brought it home. The handbrakes had been at some time swapped for a standard back-pedal, and the whole thing had been repainted bright blue with what appeared to be house paint. But the seat was narrow, smooth black leather, and the tires were slim and delicate like a thoroughbred’s withers, and Kit loved it like a pony from the first.
“Do other students use bikes these days?” George asked doubtfully, untying it now in the cracked parking lot of the Institute dorm compound. The summer heat was already intense.
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “No, not many. I don’t care.” She’d bought a lock for it, which George thought was funny, and which in the end she never used.
“Like summer camp,” George said, looking around. Long gray one-story buildings, lettered A, B, C on their faces, the parking lot, and some sycamores that had grown tall since the buildings had been thrown up, just after the war, for returning soldiers crowding into the University. It was like the army, not camp. They both thought it, but neither said it.
Her room. Now and then through her life there would be places like this for her, places that looked like confinement and poverty or at least austerity but which filled Kit with a rich sense of possibility, welcomed her and made her heart’s doors open as though to the same room’s original, inside. The varnished wooden floors and window frames, crooked window propped open with a stick; and the black fan with three silver blades and a twisted cord of black and white; and the iron bed and thin mattress, the Celotex walls where the amber rectangles of old Scotch tape remained; and the wooden desk, and the gooseneck lamp.
“Christ,” said George. “And how much is this costing, again?”
“Scholarship, Dad.”
“No air-conditioning? God, I remember…” But what he remembered, army stories, he didn’t say.
Down the hall were the showers, smelling of damp zinc and mildew, private stalls at least for the girls, who had only one-third of one of the three buildings, and only one girl to a room. Kit sat on her bed. She had a wicked impulse to apologize to George for her strange choice, for herself as girl, as young person, as strange spirit, just to make sure he understood it thoroughly. Instead she said, “It’s okay. Really. It’s what I wanted. Thanks.”
“Well,” George said. There were dark circles under the arms of his Dacron shirt, and his bald forehead gleamed. “If we can’t have what we want, I’m glad that at least you do.”
She got up and hugged him.
“Now you have to come to us when the program’s over,” he said, holding her tight. “Before fall semester.”
“I will.”
“You have to come home.”
“Yes,” she said. “I promise. I will.”
2.
First there was the alphabet, which even when she had memorized it and listened to the teacher and the tapes over and over still seemed to Kit when she looked at it to be mute. She could hear a sentence in English or even French just by looking at it on the page, but these she never could: at best she heard a dim mumble, as though the sentences were spoken by someone with a mouthful of cotton. Not so when Nadezhda Fyodorovna spoke them aloud: then they became a kind of vocal acrobatics, her red-painted mouth moving in ways that Kit was sure hers never could as she produced the long, long sounds of the language, at once ludicrous and beautiful.
Today the weather is cold.
Saturday the weather was cold.
Tomorrow the weather will be cold.
It has been cold for a long time.
Nadezhda Fyodorovna was small and solid, her too-black hair in a tight bun, her hands red and marked with psoriasis; as she listened to her students she stroked one hand with the other, secretly tending to them, the fingers searching and scratching. Kit followed their motions, sometimes losing the thread of the lesson. Nadezhda Fyodorovna lifted her hand in a magician’s gesture and let her gold bracelets clash together; she plucked gently at the rattling beads around her neck. How had this woman come here? Why was she here, doing this, looking at them all with this look of hope and anger?
Her fellow students were mostly air force enlisted men, on a special course. They didn’t know why they had been assigned to learn Russian, but it didn’t seem to bother them at all; they said they’d be told eventually, and meanwhile seemed pleased with light duty. They were like Burke Eggert, like Ben, confident men who took their work as seriously as though it were play, at which they actually worked hard, playing one-hoop basketball on the cracked concrete with a kind of furious gaiety till the green evening began to fade from the sky and the ball grew invisible. They were big eaters who drank milk at breakfast and made themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches after they’d consumed their hot lunch, stuck their hands in their pant tops and belched gratefully. They wore no uniforms; knit shirts and madras button-downs, pressed khakis, white socks and loafers or desert boots. But beneath their shirts, like the Miraculous Medal on a beaded chain that Kit had worn for a while as a child, were their stamped steel tags. Ben’s had been returned to George and Marion.