“Cooler,” he said.
She watched him for a while, and maybe because he smiled at her she came too, and stretched out beside him. It all looked different.
“In some worlds a black bird,” he said. “In some a black woman.”
“Are there really different worlds?” she asked. “Do you think that? Is that why you wrote that?” It seemed to diminish it as a poem if he did, and yet to make him himself huger.
He seemed to ponder. “No,” he said then. “No. There is but one world, only there are many worlds within it, for it exists in more than one way at once; and these different ways cannot be translated into one another.”
“Like poems.”
“Like poems. You cannot translate. You can only make other poems.”
The smoke of his cigarette was like a small being, a jinn folding its arms and salaaming, turning and dissipating, appearing again. “Then what’s the original?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps there is not one. Perhaps there are many translations but no original.”
“Or the original’s lost,” she said.
“Perhaps even more like poems,” he said. “Events in the world can perhaps be like rhyming words in poems: they can only, what would you say, pay off in one world, one translation, not in others. In one world people are cheering and weeping with joy, for best conclusion has been reached, secret is revealed, heroes have come home safe. In another world, say this world, same events are events of no significance; a pact has been made that will be broken just as many others have been. A man and a woman have misunderstood when they were to meet at train station and train is already gone, but there will be another.”
“Couldn’t sometimes they rhyme in both worlds?”
“Oh yes. Sometimes, not often, a rhyme can be found both in this world and in another. We call this coincidence.”
She felt the cool linoleum through her thin shirt, and she saw the undersides of the card table and the chairs, and yet she felt aloft too, rising. “How would you learn, though. That there are other worlds.”
“By same means as you perceive what poems say, the nothing that they speak of: by metaphor. By seeing that two things, all unconnected, are connected.”
“Like snow.”
“Like…”
“Snow. The last word in that Housman poem.”
“Yes,” he said, and smiled again, glad for her it seemed. “Yes. Just so. A-plus for you.”
She laughed, and without thinking or seemingly without thinking she turned her body so that she could place her head on his stomach. They lay looking at the ceiling or at the window where the light remained, and thought; and the worlds turned and multiplied as they thought, each within all the others, all linked yet different.
Wake, children, wake; mothers, lift your faces;
Turn away, stars; rise, sun, and dry our tears.
Each pale night she would ride back beside the empty road, listening to the insects, her bare legs brushed by the roadside grasses, only infrequently a car coming up behind her and passing with a rush of air and odor. Then in her room at her own desk and lamp she studied her Russian lessons until her eyes began to close and the words to turn back into the nonsense from which they had arisen; still she couldn’t sleep long, and awoke with the solstice sun thinking of what she and he had done with his lines, reshaping them, making them English, coming up sometimes with plain or commonplace English equivalents for what seemed at first mysteriously and wholly other, as though in the dark she picked up a common object and felt it come slowly or suddenly clear to her what it was. A poem called “1941” told of the Red Army troops sold to Death like grain, grain that was na kornyu: “in rooted condition,” Falin said, gesturing, acting out the inexpressible as in a game of charades. “Growing tall, not, not sprouts, you see, you see…” But she hadn’t, not till she sat in her room and it was delivered to her: standing was all it meant, troops in their ranks sold like standing grain, and it had the same fearful connotation too, for standing grain is ready for harvest. He had pulled her into his Russian and she had to make her way back alone.
She’d get up then, and type and retype the line, trying to fit her new line into the meter of his, and also keep the meaning of each successive line contained in the same boxcar out of which it had come, and almost always failing. He’d forbidden her to use rhyme unless her English rhyme words fell exactly where his Russian ones did, which almost never happened, though sometimes it did, or almost did. Corona and vorona, he wrote, crown and crow. Coincidence.
She thought, long after, that she had not then ever explored a lover’s body, learned its folds and articulations, muscle under skin, bone under muscle, but that this was really most like that: this slow probing and working in his language, taking it in or taking hold of it; his words, his life, in her heart, in her mouth too. Daylong she listened to her teachers and the air force boys and the mechanical voices in the language lab use the same language and she would feel the secret knowledge of what she did with him, with it, in the nights: she alone.
The library in the middle of the campus was as cool as a cave and nearly empty in July. It was in places like this—solemn and welcoming, high and dim and paneled in dark wood and going on in many directions—that Kit’s dreams often took place. The dreams didn’t have this smell, though, the sleeping breath of uncounted paper pages, old glue, what else. Because you can inhale in dreams but not smell, just as you can bleed but not be hurt.
She had asked Falin to meet her here and not come to the little language school compound for her, and he smiled and agreed without a word, and she felt a hot shame, that she was protecting him and herself too from being caught at something, something they weren’t doing, the protecting being all there was to catch. Still it was better to be here, to walk over here beneath the huge old campus oaks, to drift through the stacks and open Russian books almost as foreign to her as ever, or just linger in the great reading room where no one was, walking as in a forest glade along the tall rows of books no one ever removed.
Her hand, passing idly over their backs, came to a bright red one, bright once, called Folk-Tales and Fables of Old Russia. She took it out, guessed at the date (old but not very old), and looked at the title page. It has been printed in 1942, and all the profits were to go to a fund for children made homeless by the German invasion.
Besprizornye.
She looked at the list of editors and translators, American and Russian, and the cheerful flat red-and-black illustrations like Easter eggs. She wondered if she had actually once read it or looked at it. She turned the pages, and there was a card at one place, a computer punch card like the ones she had been given for her classes, that day in the field house where she had first seen Falin. What was that doing here? Had someone looked at this book, so recently? The card said nothing, told nothing. She put the book down on a long table beneath a lamp, open at the place where the card had been put or left, and sat to read.
Once, God and the Devil contended for Rus, and the Devil won.
Going happily to collect his prize, the Devil found the way barred. God had decided that after all the Devil could not have the souls of the people. All else he could take from them, but not their souls.
The Devil complained that it wasn’t fair, and God admitted that (thank God) things aren’t always fair.
So the Devil set himself up in state, and demanded that the people of Rus come before him, and each deliver up to him the thing he loved best. In his rage at having been cheated he was most exacting, and Death sat at his side and kept the books.