12.
“So the poems were lost,” she said to Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov.
They still walked with her by the river, this Russian river, three or four of them, unwilling to go home; they walked, and she told her story again, it seemed they would never tire of hearing it. She had thought at first, when they came down into the street, that dawn had come while they sat so long in the gold-and-white restaurant; but no, it was that day had never gone: the White Nights of the city on the gulf.
“Lost,” he said. “Lost.”
“I had only the translations, and there was no one to ask, no one to tell. I hid them. It was silly. I thought I had to.”
“You were afraid,” said the dark-eyed woman, as though she knew; as though it were simple, obvious. “You could not know. You were very afraid.”
“I was.”
She hid herself too, for a long time afterwards, one way and another. She ran to hide, from what she had first understood in the drugstore on the square, what she had touched, what had touched her. She ran as though to escape its notice, first from school, dropping out before she graduated and making her way over the country to the coasts, and after that even out of the country for a time. Falin and his disappearance ceased to be news; they said the case remained open but nothing was done, and she didn’t dare pursue what they so obviously didn’t want pursued: even to think of doing that made her afraid, made her think of running again. All that while the poems she had made with him were locked away, waiting.
It was only when others who were braver than she was stood up to it—to them, to that secret power—gave a name to it, spoke truth to it; only when they came out in their thousands and then tens of thousands singing Dona nobis pacem, that she found she could too. And she went to find the work that Falin and she had done together, and think about it, and about the summer days.
“He said there wasn’t much time,” she said. “He always knew there wasn’t much time, and he was right. He knew that those poems would be lost, or taken; that they would be taken away from him.”
“Perhaps he did,” said Gavriil Viktorovich.
“I was sure it was why he wanted the translations made, when he didn’t believe in translation. I thought he needed me, that I was helping him save his poems from being lost. I thought he chose me because I would do it: I would do it as he wanted it done, would only help, and not put myself into what was his. And I didn’t mind.”
“But was not so?”
“No. What we had done together were not his poems, really, but mine. He knew that.”
“Why then?”
“I think that he hoped he could pass on to me something he couldn’t keep any longer. He wanted it for me.”
“You began then to write again.”
“Yes.”
“It was what he wanted.”
“Yes.”
“Not his poems into other poems, then. Himself into…into another poet.”
“Sort of. Somehow.” She stopped; she had not said any of this before. “Can you imagine how strange it is to think that?”
Gavriil Viktorovich clasped his hands behind him, lifted his eyes to his city suspended in the pale light. She had never seen a river so wide that seemed so still. “I can imagine a reason, perhaps, why he would.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Simply, he loved you.”
“Yes. Maybe.”
“He was one of that kind, it is easy to think, who to those he loved might give all he had, at once, without thought of gain.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes he was. He was one of that kind.”
“Sometimes to give away is the only way to keep.”
“Yes it is.”
“So then it was he who was truly the translator,” said Gavriil.
She nodded. The streetlights and the Neva sparkled in her vision and she pressed the cuffs of her shirt to her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “All along.”
They offered to have Vasili Vasilievich and the black ZIL sedan pick her up the next morning at the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel and take her to the language institute where the conference would begin, but she refused, wanting to make her own way there. And reluctantly Gavriil Viktorovich wrote out the directions for her.
Early then she walked down the wide steps of the hotel and into the morning crowds. The city’s smell was distinct; Kit thought every city had its own, one you recognize when you return to it even if you can’t remember it when you’re away: it’s what makes you know it’s actual, not a notion or a dream, this smell of yeast and mist and drainpipes, warm stone and the exhalations of open windows, unique and indisputable. She carried with her in her bag a copy of Life magazine from 1961, the year Falin left the Soviet Union and came to America. It had occurred to her that here in this country almost no one could know what he looked like, and if she could find it she might bring them the one picture she knew of, the one of him weary and wary in Berlin, smiling, his tie askew and the tiny end of a cigarette in his fingers; and she had found it, this issue amid others in an old bookstore. His lost face.
The subway was different at this hour, herds of people jostling and pushing, the pressure of them at her back creating the sensation of falling headlong down the speeding escalator. By the time she had been packed into a car and the car had moved off with a high whisper, she was no longer sure she was right—the orthography of each stop’s name had to be worked out so quickly—and she was nearly carried away from the one she thought she wanted, had to fight her way off.
She came up into a huge empty public space that seemed to have been abandoned, or to have lost its function somehow and become unclaimed, shelter for squatters, a crowd of vendors selling to the people rushing through to the streets beyond. The unventilated air was heavy. Was she in the wrong place? She tried to stop and look for signs. Every vendor with his little blanket or box or cart seemed to be selling the same goods, the same cigarettes and pens and bottles of soap or scent. Today each one was selling the same little toy, a windup girl on a tin bicycle, who went around in circles on the dirty marble floor while her dog ran leaping at her side. A dozen girls, bicycles, dogs. Somewhere someone was singing, a high, piercing cry.
How had they come to this? A family in a pile in a corner, unspeakable blankets drawn around them, mother dead asleep. A bearded man on a plastic sheet, medals on his coat, held a densely lettered sign. Menia predali, she thought it said: “I was betrayed.” Or was it “devoted”? There was a word, a word Falin had taught her, that meant both. Devoted, betrayed. The crowds went by unseeing, just as the crowds in New York or Mexico City would: as though they passed momentarily through an alternate world that remained invisible to them, only causing their mouths to set and their eyes to fix on some distant goal.
She hadn’t known such places could be in this country. She didn’t know they could be so abandoned, these people, after having been penned up so long, left without anything of what had once sustained them, without even their terrible abnegation at last: abandoned even by silence.
The singer was a boy, standing on a box and clapping to his singing.
A girl squatted by him, little as a pixie, her hair an astonishing black tangle, bent over a stringed instrument that she beat on. Another boy played an upturned plastic bucket with wooden sticks. Amazing how loud they were, you couldn’t pass by them without listening. And Kit saw—she tried to stop, despite the forward press of the crowd, to make sure—that the boy was the same who had taken her hand at the subway the night before, tried to press a rose on her.
Yes the same boy, still in his filthy American shirt, you could see the big blue stars on it banded red and white. The song was one of those radically simple ones that seem not to have been made up but to have always been, she hadn’t ever heard it before but knew just what it would do; he moved like a rapper or a pop star to it, and maybe it was a pop song she didn’t know. He sang out the last note and jumped from his box to go through the crowd with a paper cup. Far away down the great vault two policemen were coming, Kit saw them but the little band saw them first, the girl calling out to the others to go, go. The drummer gathered his bucket and sticks and followed her, calling after the singer.