The Devil took from the miser his money, from the Tsar his triple crown, from the Patriarch his staff, from the mother the love of her child. One by one they came before him and went away weeping and sorrowing.
At length one young lad came before him who appeared to have little to yield up. The Devil demanded of him what he loved best, whatever it was. The boy pleaded to be spared; he offered to give the Devil anything else, even the sum of all that he had. Take his clothes and his hat; take his felt boots, and he will walk barefoot in winter; take the sight of his eyes.
No, the Devil wanted none of that; he would be put off with no substitutes. He wanted what the boy loved best. And what was it?
At last the boy told the Devil what it was.
A song? the Devil asked.
It’s my own, the boy said weeping. My very own song I have made.
Well, the Devil said, let’s have it.
Begging and weeping were no use, and so at last the boy lifted his voice and sang. For a time everyone ceased bewailing to listen. The Devil listened, his clawed hand cupped behind his ear. Even Death held still to hear.
Mine, said the Devil when the song was done. Mine forever and ever. Next!
The boy hung his head in grief and went away.
But not so long afterward, among the poor people of Rus from whom so much had been taken, that song began again to be heard. The boy had fooled the Devil, and had still kept what it was he had given away: for that’s the way it is with a song, as everyone but the Devil knows. The boy sang the song in the deserted roadways and in the villages from which every beloved cow had been taken. And by and by, in the woods where no flower grew and in the empty churches and even in the desolate courts of the Tsar, the little song could be heard, a song about nothing that filled the eyes with tears and the throat with joy to hear.
So the people of Rus had a song at least to comfort them in those days. But still life was very hard, since the Devil had taken every other thing that anyone loved away. And in the end, of course, one way and another, he got a good number of their souls as well.
She looked up. Falin stood nearby, his hands in the pockets of his pleated slacks. She hadn’t heard him come in. Without any warning, her eyes filled with tears, and the light glittered and swam.
“You must hate them so much,” she said. “For…for what they took, for all that they took.”
“No,” he said, “no no,” as though he knew why she had said this, knew just what she meant. “Some I despised. But when you hate, you touch. I wanted not to touch. You know in my poem ‘Bez’ are ones who hate. Ones who can never take their fingers from those throats. Now come.”
She took his hand, cool and dry, and stood.
Once, he had written out from memory a part of his poem “Bez,” to show Kit how it worked. The lines made her think of his wife, how she had starved to death in the siege of Leningrad. Had she been one of those who couldn’t help hating? Would Kit have been one of those, who died of hate, whom the Devil got in the end?
I will do without bread: they think I cannot but I can.
I will do without, and raise my hunger like a child;
And from it I will breed a little cat.
From my empty mouth and bowel I will produce it
A cat who feeds on hunger as on bread
And by doing without, that cat will grow greater than any tiger
Its teeth of steel spoons and knives a-clatter, and its black breath of hunger
And it will consume all those who thought I could not do without.
So she said: but the cat when it had grown
Ate her and her abnegation up
And so was satisfied, and so died.
4.
When his apartment on the edge of the prairie grew too hot, too much a kuznitsa he said, a smithy where they labored together at the forge, they would go outside, walk to the end of the road under the sycamores, whose leaves seemed a burden too great almost to bear; or they sat on the wide rough steps of his apartment in the cool shadow of the house and watched the sky turn turquoise with slow solemnity, or welter uneasily and ponder what it would do next.
“Tornado weather,” she said. Along the gray fence of posts and wire that separated his yard and garden from the fields beyond, the gray cat crept as though in fear, its fur upstanding and its eyes wide.
“Tornado. This is storm we in my country do not have.”
“Really?”
“Not tornadoes. They are American storms. We have groza, burya, we have such round storms, how do you say, yes. Not tornadoes.”
“Not American though really,” she said, “only Western. I mean I think sometimes they happen in other parts of the country, but mostly they’re here. Tornado Alley they call this area. Look.”
From the black-sheep clouds hung a few small woolly twists: tornadoes being born. She thought she could smell them; she hugged herself and shivered in the heat. Why did fear feel so exhilarating when it blew coldly in you like stormwind? Her father had always been afraid of tornadoes, hated summers in Tornado Alley; maybe because his mother had used to gather all her children up during storms and crowd them into a closet to pray the rosary with her and wail at every thundercrash. Once Kit dreamed of a tremendous box, a sky-high cabinet divided like a shadow box, in whose divisions young tornadoes could be safely kept, as in pens. A gift for her father.
“They are terribly destructive,” he said.
“Oh yes.”
“There is a French dish,” he said. “I have read of it. Tournedos. A dish of beef.”
“This would be a different dish,” she said. “Scrambled eggs. Or maybe hash.” The wind was rising a little, teasing. “There are whole towns that get blown away. Russiaville, a tiny town near where I lived.” He looked at her and she shrugged, yes really it’s true. “Russiaville; they said it Roosha-veeo. No more Russiaville. All gone.”
Just as she said this a white shatterline of lightning crossed from sky to earth in the west toward which they looked. They both counted their heartbeats till the thunder growled, awakened, and rolled away as though muttering to itself.
“Oz,” Kit said softly, as though rhyming with it. Then that name too had to be explained to him. The child blown away by a tornado from her farm in drab gray Kansas to a wonderful new land of magic and possibility. And all she wants is to go home again.
“Oz,” he said.
It was dark as night now, and the wind rose. There might be hail. “Let’s go inside.”
The gray cat flitted between his legs when he opened the door, and ran ahead of them to leap up on the couch, its yellow eyes alight. The cats around the place, a black one, maybe two, and a tiger, weren’t his but his landlady’s, and yet they seemed to prefer him or his rooms. My lovers, he called them. Lyubovnitsy. The gray allowed Kit to take it in her lap.
“I suppose you have lovers,” she said. She thought of the woman she had seen him with, the one who wept and spoke to him as though in prayer or confession, and pressed her cheek to his coat. “Real ones.”
“You do suppose?” he said.
She looked only at the cat in her lap. “Ones that talk.”
“Ah, these have that advantage, that they do not talk. They need not talk that way that lovers must.”