No, sir.
How long have we got? We can’t tell, I take it.
No one could say. They said that it could be ready within weeks, or sooner, or might be ready to be armed now. There was also no way yet to know if there were nuclear warheads already present on the island. The President told his advisers they should be prepared to take out the San Cristóbal site at any time; the missiles couldn’t be permitted and he saw no other options.
Within days it was learned that there were several sites on the island, and on some of them intermediate-range missiles capable of reaching the missile silos of the Midwest were detected. The President’s military advisers now said that only a full-scale strike and an invasion of the island would remove the threat.
The first shipment of Soviet nuclear armaments had in fact already arrived and been unloaded at Mariel, one-megaton warheads for the R-12 medium-range missiles, twelve-kiloton bombs for the Il-28 bombers, and smaller warheads for the cruise missiles. And at that moment the Soviet ship Aleksandrovsk was nearing Cuba, carrying nuclear warheads for the IRBMS.
The world was so beautiful that autumn in the north; it had never seemed so beautiful. Kit had learned the term pathetic fallacy in her Romantic Poetry class—the projection of the poet’s feelings on to insensible nature, the weather or the scenery; nature in poetry expressing human feeling. This weather was the opposite, it was profoundly, wholly indifferent, unconscious, asleep past sleep in its own perfections: as though this time it would last forever, as it never had before.
Kit stayed outdoors as much as she could, not wanting to learn that Milton Bluhdorn had tried to reach her; she sat on the sun-warmed benches of the old college, and the air smelled of fruits that weren’t there, apples and pears and grapes, and she felt the feeling soul drawn out of her into it. It was painful and terribly sad and at the same time she felt an unrefusable delight. She wasn’t eating very much in those days, unable to go into the roar and the smell of the dining room or touch the bland and nameless foods they heaped on her plate, but she couldn’t afford to buy much more than candies and saltines and coffee, and wouldn’t let Jackie buy dinners for her. It didn’t matter. Not eating made the sweetness more intense, the pain and sadness too: made them sweet in her mouth like her own sweet spit.
On the 22nd of October she saw in the campus paper that Falin would be speaking in the auditorium of the Slavic Languages Department about Pushkin, and her heart shrank inside her.
“Acourse you can go,” Jackie said. “What do you think, they’re going to give you the third degree over some public event?”
“I’m afraid,” Kit said.
“They’ve forgotten all that,” he said. “I know it.”
“Will you come?”
“Sure. I like Pushkin. Didn’t he write Crime and Punishment?”
There were fewer people in the auditorium than Kit would have thought. She had hoped to slip in a little late into a masking crowd, but there were plenty of empty seats in the tall lecture theater and they were more than a little late. Falin looked up from his papers when they bent down their squeaking seats, and his eyes were wise to them; his smile was for her.
He spoke about Pushkin as she had heard him speak, in her classes and in the nights of last summer; he read the lines he chose in his honey-thick singing Russian voice, and she thought her heart would split. The poems he read from were the ones he had quoted for her: Count Nulin and Feast in Time of Plague and Evgeny Onegin.
“Perhaps because so many ikons, so many churches, were smashed and burned,” he said, “that we made of Pushkin an ikon and a church. He must express our spirit, must stand for us and speak for us. Indeed he has been made even a hero of the Revolution, with mausoleum of his own, though in this no one has believed, not even schoolchildren, not anyway those who can read.”
The gray hadn’t been in his hair before and it was now; it was the same gray as the shiny bland gray suit he wore, what was that stuff, was it sharkskin? Why would he wear that? A soft knit shirt beneath it, buttoned to the neck. Something has happened he had said to her, not surprised or afraid, but changed.
“So hard to make Pushkin hero. You know what our great critic Belinsky said of Evgeny Onegin, that it was encyclopedia of Russian life. We all were taught to say this. Encyclopedia of Russian life. But he is like encyclopedia only in his even-handedness. All things are alike to him; he does not choose one thing over another; the alphabet of his eyes and his ears alone bring things together, this next to that. He is trivial; even his earliest defenders said this, so exasperated with him. Everything interests him, everything delights him. He becomes the Tsar’s soldier and also the Cossack that the soldier kills; he delights in death’s energy and meat pies at a feast, little too salty, then some slim-waisted wineglasses too that remind him of his old love, whom he then must address. He is like his heroine Natalya Pavlovna in Count Nulin…”
He read, and Kit thought she remembered the lines, when he had tried to make her see what Pushkin saw:
Natalya Pavlovna tried to give
The letter all her attention
But soon she was distracted
By an old goat and a mutt
In a fight beneath her window,
And she attended calmly to that;
And three ducks were splashing in a puddle,
And an old woman was crossing the yard
To hang her laundry on the fence.
It looked like it might soon rain…
“This is why Pushkin is our poet,” he said. “Not because he expresses our spirit, d’Roshin spirit: but because he exactly does not. He is everything that Russia, in his age and now in ours, is not: he cares for everything and yet for nothing in particular, everything gladdens him, he approves and does not judge. He was dark man, you know: Negro, in fact. He lived short life that ended in disaster. But he shines brightly; the smile of Pushkin is a white light in our darkness, always.”
In the Castle the television was on over the counter, and when Kit and Jackie came in they could tell that almost everyone there was watching it. The East North Street men were all there, all watching. She slipped in beside Saul, and turned to see the President above them, speaking.
“What is it?” Kit asked.
“Cuba,” Saul said.
The transformation of Cuber into an important strategic base, by the presence of these large, long-range and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction, constitutes a threat to the peace and security of all the Americas. He had that air he always seemed to Kit to have, that he was somehow only pretending, no matter how earnestly he spoke; as though he knew better, knew how it would all come out. This sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside Soviet soil is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.
“Not like our missiles in Turkey, huh,” Saul said. “Or Italy. What the hell does he think.”
Kit looked over all the upturned faces, the students and the others, the two Greek brothers who ran the place, all looking and listening.
We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced. He said that he was ordering a strict naval quarantine around the island of Cuba, and ships would be stopped and shipments of offensive weapons turned back; he said that there would be continued surveillance of the island, and that if work was found to be going forward on the missile sites, then further actions would be necessary, and that he had ordered the armed forces to be prepared for all eventualities. The United States, he said, would regard a nuclear missile launched from Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. And then for a moment he turned his pages and gazed out: gazed at us, though of course he couldn’t see us.