“An open letter.”
“Always was done, you know, to write letters to the Tsar. Remind him of his sacred fatherhood; tell him of people’s suffering.” He was smiling now. “I wrote in thanks,” he said. “I wrote in hope too. I said to him that I too must acknowledge past error. My error was to hide: to write under no name: to destroy or keep secret what was not mine to conceal, these poems. And now no more.”
“And that’s all?”
He shrugged his big shrug, so full of unnamable meanings. “In times of Tsars was common, of course: writers into exile. Perhaps Nikita Sergeyevich was remembering this.”
She saw in his face that he had no more answer than that for her, and she said no more.
“And I have question,” he said then. “For you.”
She waited.
“Will you tell me,” he said, “why you chose to write no more poetry?”
Poytrii. Precious stuff different altogether from whatever she had made. She wanted to ask him to say it again. “I just didn’t have anything I could say. There was nothing.” She looked at her fingertips, the blunt nails her mother deplored. “‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.’ Wittgenstein. My psychology teacher said that. A lot.”
“But is this not what poetry must do? To say the nothing that cannot be said?”
For a long time she didn’t answer further. It was something she had learned over the last year, how to say nothing in answer to questions, not pretend to answer or say Well or Gee now or shrug or do anything at all.
“You do not know,” he said, “or will not say?”
She shook her head, but only to shake her hair away from her face, and she didn’t look at him.
“I ask this for a reason,” he said. “A selfish reason it might be. I have been wanting to have asked you question. To help me to translate my poems.”
It seemed to her that this was one of the strange wrong turns his uncertain English introduced into conversations, little dead ends that had to be backed out of to return to the main road, and for a moment she waited. But he only folded his hands before him and regarded her.
“Into English,” he said. “For publication.”
“I can’t do that,” she said. “I don’t know this language at all. You said so yourself.”
“But you can hear it. You can hear the meanings, which are part of the music. And you have English music.”
“You don’t really mean it,” she said. “I mean why not ask somebody else, ask a real poet?” She named two at the University, major figures. “They’d be so happy to be asked. I bet.”
“Ah well,” he said. “They are proud men. They would want to write poems of their own. I would not ask.”
The thunder muttered toward the west. She said, “Do you actually mean it?”
He went to the table, to the papers there. “Kit,” he said. “I have lost much. You know this. My name. Much more, you know how much. My readers. Dead, some of them—dead, Kit!—because they had my poems. Now no readers, except those few who have come here as I did, put out or escaped or run away. And a poem without readers, does it exist?”
He let the sheets he had picked up fall from his hand, and sat down in the one wooden kitchen chair, with strange care plucking at the knees of his trousers.
“There’s so little time,” he said. “I don’t wish to press you.”
“Why is there so little time?”
“Will you help me, Christa Malone? I ask for your help.”
There was only one answer, there was and always would be only one answer, and she gave it.
He seemed to rest then, or give way, though the essential tension that made him the way he was didn’t lessen. He scrubbed his head vigorously with his knuckles; stared at his shoes, and laughed; looked at her and lifted his hands in triumph, and let them fall.
“Very well,” he said, nodding. “Very well, it is very well, it is very well.” He slapped his knees and rose. “We will celebrate. Our partnership.”
She thought she had never seen him grin, but that’s what he was doing. He clasped his hands as though in prayer and went to his refrigerator; he took from the little freezer a flat clear bottle.
“Vodka,” he said. He put the bottle on his table, where it immediately grew a bloom of frost, and from a shelf took two tiny glasses. With a big wave he summoned her, and filled his glasses.
“Now,” he said, giving her one.
“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen the movies. You just throw it back.” Monocled archdukes and grim commissars both did it, instructing innocents, offering another and another.
“We can always quit if it doesn’t work,” she said. “Right?”
He only lifted his glass to her, and they drank in a gulp. It was so cold it was thick and almost silky, and though she swallowed it a huge shudder took over her and she made a sound of horror or wonder. It seemed not like the gin she had drunk with Jackie but somehow the antidote to it, a sharp smack on the cheek to bring her around. But when he reached for her glass to fill it again she refused.
“So you really,” she said. “You do.”
“I do.” He filled his own glass, and drank again.
“I feel stupid already,” she said. “Like I already tried and failed. What if you hate me.”
He shook his head. “No, you cannot,” he said. “Failure in this has no definition. Great success may be worst failure.”
“Well I bet I actually can fail pretty good. And would you know if I did?”
“No. Perhaps not.”
Lightning coruscated along the horizon far away; they could see it out the windows of the porch. “Heat lightning,” she said. “That’s what it’s called.” As though something huge and afire, an army or a navy, approached over the earth’s edge. “I’d better go back.”
“Ah, you remind me,” he said. “I must put car in garage. It will fill with storm water.”
“Yes. Well. Okay, you do that.”
She sat and put her shoes on as he watched, then stood again to face him. It was a new night, one that had started like other nights but now was unlike any other night. The air was hot with the storm’s electricity that made her skin alert, or was that the vodka’s fire, which had now passed from her stomach to her toes and fingertips. His wide accepting eyes that had always made her shrink a little. She couldn’t do that any longer, couldn’t shrink, couldn’t wilt or shrivel, and she didn’t, she stood before him as though bared, and her heart beat hard enough that she thought it might be heard or seen. “Okay,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.”
He put his huge hand out to her and this time she took it and squeezed as hard as she could, and then quickly turned away and went out the screen door, which a rising wind snatched from her hand and flung against the house, so that she had to turn back and push it shut; then she ran to where her bike was and mounted it. She didn’t look back. The night washed over her as she rode, the lightning flinging the fields and houses at her and then the dark instantly snatching them back, she still seeing them for a moment though, persistence of vision. She pedaled hard and fast, growing wildly afraid of the storm catching her. It almost did too, the first big raindrops pummeling her as she crossed campus. She was wet and panting with effort when she came into the little compound; the first great ripping shriek and fall of real thunder came just as she pulled open her door, and she yelled out loud with it in triumph and terror.
3.
So every day that summer she rose early and studied his language; she walked to the dining hall to speak it with her soldiers through lunch, went with them to the labs where, each within his own cubicle, they listened and repeated the surreal little poems they heard. Everywhere in Yalta you can smell the sea. Everywhere I look I see dry land. There is nowhere I can go. And after dinner she mounted her bike and rode out to the house at the end of the street where the fields began.