He had gotten a typewriter from the Slavic Languages Department, an ancient un-American-looking thing whose name in enameled letters on its brow she worked out as he watched:
“Oondervud,” she said.
“Lenin had same,” he said. “Can be seen still in his office, now shrine. Undervud.”
“Oh,” she said, and laughed. “Oh.”
He had typed on this machine all his poems, those he had written since leaving the Soviet Union, and those he had carried out with him, here he said, tapping his breast with the blessing fingers of his right hand. Beside his he laid the English versions she brought, typed on Ben’s machine.
She felt at first, and never entirely ceased feeling, like a slow pupil, a fumbling apprentice without even the skills to know how to begin, as though he had to teach her English as well as Russian; as though her only role was to nod, and puzzle, and shake her head and laugh in bafflement, while he worked calmly (calmly, mostly) through the agonies of metamorphosis. His meanings struggling to get out, like chicks from their hard shells. But he said it wasn’t like that: there wasn’t a poem trying to get out of one language and into another; the shell and the chick were one.
“When I was a little kid,” she said, “I mean a really little kid, I used to wonder if poems in other languages rhymed in the languages they were written in, or only rhymed when you translated them into English.” She wiped the sweat from her upper lip with a forefinger; the papers between them were dotted with drops from their foreheads, hard labor for sure.
“Yes,” he said, not listening.
“I guess I thought English words were the real names of things, and other languages were just like masks; games those people played. For fun.”
“You see here,” he said, holding a limp sheet.
“I mean how could things have two real names?”
“Let us look,” he said. He put his finger on the words she had typed.
In some worlds my torturer is but a man as I am
And his bosses are men, as well
And their bosses men like me
And the leader a man, a man I myself could be.
Weep, weep, children; mothers, run and hide;
Go, day; sink, sun, don’t look upon us.
“Is not instruction, you see,” he said. “You instruct stars to turn, day to go; my lines say only that they will.”
She shrugged one shoulder slightly.
“Rhythm, though, is right.” He looked down at it doubtfully. “Yes, right.”
In some worlds my torturer is a being not like me
And his father is a fallen angel
whose father is a heedless god
whose father is the abyss to whom the leader bows.
See not, children; mothers, blind their eyes;
Gather, clouds; fall, night, and cover us.
In some worlds he is the tongue in my own mouth
In some worlds he is the child of my body
He dies of shame in some and lies unburied
In some he never dies, outlives the sun.
“Can the lines not be four beats, as mine are? Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum.”
His Russian rhythms were always stronger than her English ones; when she tried to duplicate them they sounded like drum-thumps.
And every world and every sun’s so near
To every other one! So near
The subtlest blade could not be passed between them
And dreamers cannot know from which to which they wake.
And I: I lift my eyes from your letter in my hands
“‘Look up from’ is better,” Kit said. “Use ‘look up from.’”
“‘Look up from,’” he said. He changed it with a yellow pencil.
And I: I look up from your letter in my hands
Because I have heard a sound in every world:
In some it is a chink of spurs upon the stair
In some a raven’s shriek that tears the night.
“Should be, yes, comma after ‘in some’? ‘In some, a little clink of spurs…’?”
“‘Chink.’” He looked doubtful again. He’d wanted “tinkle” at first, and she’d had to talk him out of it. “I don’t understand that line,” she said. “That and the next. By the way.”
“Ah. You see. Everyone knows. Those spurs come from last stanzas of Evgeny Onegin, novel in verse of Pushkin. Spór nezapnïy zvón. After Onegin has read his beloved’s letter of rejection. As he stands in her drawing room he hears her husband, the sound of the spurs on his boots, approaching. It is the last of Onegin we see.”
He opened his hands: simple.
“And the raven?”
“Yes. This was common name, usual name, for police vans. Ravens. Because both are black. Ravens arrive for arrest. Not now, long ago. Now, simply an ordinary car.” He pointed at the stanza. “So, different outcomes of a secret letter, in different worlds. In some only disappointment, trouble, an embarrassment; perhaps nothing at all. But in other worlds…other consequences.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, people don’t know that. I mean Americans.” He looked at her, so hurt and baffled that for a moment she almost laughed. “There’s an English word for a police wagon, the old kind; it was called a paddy wagon. But that’s comical. Like silent movie comedies.”
“No. Not comical.”
“There’s another name, a woman’s name, what is it.” He waited while she searched within for the term. “Black Maria!” she cried. “That’s it. How about that? Black Maria’s cry destroys the night.”
Now it was his turn to shrug, unable to know what effect this might have. “Not a bird,” he said.
“No.”
“You see.”
“Well,” she said. “You could have a footnote.”
“No! No no. You will not march all over my poems with muddy footnotes.” He pondered, lit a cigarette. “And these cars are black?”
“I guess.”
“Strange,” he said. “A bird and woman, both black.”
It had grown dark, indoors at least; the lamp he had turned on over the table where they worked no longer illuminated the whole of his little place. But in the windows the midsummer night was still alight. He stood, and then, seeming still to be absorbed in thought, he lay down full-length on the linoleum.