After supper on the Saturday night of her first week of classes, Kit pushed her bike out to the street that led away from the Language Institute housing. It was slightly downhill from the crest on which the University was built to the center of town, and she coasted much of the way, aloft in the still-sunny evening, late June, the checkered shade. At the center of town she turned on North Street as she had with Jackie in the first week of the winter semester.
This was what the bike had been for all along. Though she didn’t build futures for herself, sometimes she could see one, a vivid moment that was to happen to her, and sometimes it really would happen; and this moment on her bike on North Street going west out of town was one.
The road looked different burdened with roadside brush and overarched by heavy-leaved trees, but this had certainly been it. Her legs prickled with sweat. Blackberries were ripening in the fearsome tangled briars along the road, canes springing higher than her head. And that was the house, more modest and much more weatherbeaten than the house she had glimpsed in the winter but the only candidate; she turned into the dusty driveway, where a new car was parked, a big convertible in two nameless shades of green. Kit dismounted and dropped the bike. The silence was deep, the cicadas warning her; she walked around the front of the house, where the blinds were drawn, through a stand of lilacs, to a broad backyard.
He was working in the garden, feet bare, cuffs of his blue serge pants rolled up and a sleeveless undershirt dark with sweat. He waved a greeting, smiling, making Kit think of Soviet farmers in photographs. The Family of Man. Dusting his hands on his pants, he came to her.
She greeted him in Russian, feeling suddenly foolish; and he returned it to her, graciously. He offered her his hand, seeming to be unsurprised somehow but delighted: her own hand felt crushed within the heat and strength of his. She smelled him.
“Kyt,” he said.
“I came out to see you,” she said, not having meant to say that, having meant to say that she was out and about and just happened to be passing. He nodded and spread his hands as though to offer her what lay around them: his part of the house, with its jalousie or screened porch; a picnic table of gray wood; the brown yard and brick path. The garden.
“What are you growing?” she asked.
“I am not growing,” he said. “Ah. What have I planted, you are asking. Yes. Well.” He took her hand, and led her to the neat rows, where green things were coming up, rows of this kind, rows of that. “I have tomatoes, cabbage,” he said. “Here. And carrots. Potatoes.”
“Potatoes?” She knew of no home gardeners who grew potatoes, but how many had she known? She thought of Marion, bent over her cucumbers and radishes, one eye closed against the rising smoke of her Pall Mall.
“Yes, potatoes,” he said. “For soup in winter. They are also easy, you know. Put potatoes in ground; cover a little; soon more potatoes. Like magic. Why they conquered the world.”
She noticed how many of his crops were root ones, that wouldn’t be ripe till late.
“Ah but they last. Any Russian knows. I knew high official in Leningrad. In autumn he must have his potatoes. Hundred pounds. In basement. Then, good winter, no matter what.”
“He couldn’t get potatoes in winter?”
“Oh yes. Even when others could not. But old habit. You know.”
She laughed, thinking of officials in American cities with potatoes stored in the basements of their apartments, safe till spring at least. Maybe someday.
He gathered his tools, apparently done for this day, and put them in a wooden wheelbarrow. “I am very glad to see you,” he said. “But why are you here and not far away at home?”
“Summer school,” she said. “You know I started late. I’m trying to catch up.”
He nodded, regarding her. “And studying what?”
“Russian,” she said.
At first he only looked at her in mild puzzlement; then a kind of illumination filled his features, which vanished into a laugh, of delight or triumph or something else she couldn’t name. “Russian,” he said.
“It’s an intensive course,” she said. “All day every day.”
“To speak or to read?” he asked.
“Well both.”
“And you do this for what reason?”
She shrugged. “Oh,” she said. “I don’t know. I like languages. Maybe I’ll be a spy.”
“Aha.” He gestured toward his house, inviting her to it, still regarding her, still smiling. “Come in. Have tea. Lemonade. Tell me what poems you have written.”
“I told you,” she said. “I’ve given up writing poetry.”
“You would not be first to have tried that and yet not succeeded,” he said. “Certain people give up poetry but poetry does not give them up.”
She said nothing in reply, and that was a reply, which he seemed to accept. He pulled open the squeaking screen door.
The porch was dark after the still-bright day, paneled with pine, and there was a davenport or glider upholstered in plaid canvas; pictures on the walls with no reason for being there or anywhere, dim views of unreal places, sad clowns. He took a flannel shirt from a hall tree, seemed to consider it, thought better of it. He was larger indoors, his white skin shadowed with black hair and his dusty feet.
“Your fellow students,” he said. “Also spies? Is this why they study?”
“I don’t know. They say they don’t know. They’re soldiers.”
“Perhaps only to read Pushkin.”
“Or Falin.”
He bent to the kitchen sink to wash: she watched him rapidly and efficiently scrub his hands and face, splash water on his head and neck and arms, and she knew he had done so for years in places without baths or showers; like an American of another era, a farmer or settler or miner, making do. For no reason she knew, a hot pity arose in her.
He toweled himself with a ragged and colorless thing that hung by the sink, and pulled open the refrigerator. “Lemonade,” he said. “Or tea with ice, American invention, very nice.”
“Either,” she said. “You pick.” She walked into the living room, divided from the kitchen by a half-wall; she peeked into a little bedroom, where a lumpy bed was spread with chenille. There were shelves meant for display of knickknacks that instead held small piles of books, all library books as far as she could see, and a folding card table that was a desk. Otherwise there seemed to be nothing of him here at all; if he left tomorrow no one would know he’d been here.
She sat on the couch. He brought her a glass of lemonade. “Now,” he said. “You must say truly why you come to this university, this hot place, in summer, to study such hard language.”
“I needed something to do,” she said. “Something hard to do. Something that was all the time.”
He waited.
“I wanted not to be at home. There’s no one at home. My parents are moving. I like it here.”
She sipped the drink. It was violently sweet, as though concocted for bees, or hummingbirds. “Also,” she said. “You.”
“Me?”
“You said to me once,” she said, “that your poems could only be read, that I could only really read them, if I learned Russian…” His head was shaking No and he had raised a finger to correct her, but she went on: “And so I’m going to, so I can.”
“I said that in translation they are different poems. Good or bad. Not that in other languages they did not exist.”
“I wanted to read them as you wrote them,” she said, and lowered her eyes. “That’s all.”
“Well,” he said. “Maybe someday. In six weeks, no.”
“No, of course.” She had begun to feel stupid, having brought a gift that wasn’t wanted, wasn’t even a gift.
“In any case you have given up poetry, you say. So.”
“I’ve only given up writing it. Not reading it. Not…” She almost said not needing it.
“A language,” he said. “It is a world. My poems are written for the people of a world I have lost. To read them I think you must have lived in my world—my language—since childhood, and grown up in it.”