“Nu davaj zhe,” he said. Come on.
But he went on cheerfully working the crowd, tugging at sleeves and lifting his cup and cajoling, people laughed and shook him off or found a coin. He turned toward Kit, caught her eye and read her look, as though he knew her too.
“Innokenti,” the girl cried. “Innokenti, davaj, davaj!”
He went then, snatching up his box and following, looking back though with a smile even as he vanished, as though to take a bow. His smile. For her alone it seemed: had always seemed.
Then it’s okay, she said or thought. As she had in the protest march that October day when she saw him, when he had showed himself to her, just as he had promised he would. It’s okay.
For a breath I tarry, nor yet disperse apart.
The crowds pushed on, new crowds from a new train, their heels loud in the marble heights, carrying Kit on. They went out into the day, she and the people on their journeys, dispersing into the harmed city. Buses jam-packed with people, and the earth below them jam-packed too she thought, and the sky above them.
Of course they hadn’t been abandoned. They couldn’t be. They couldn’t be left all alone or there would be neither justice nor order anywhere, not even the hope of it. They couldn’t always know that he was near, of course, of course you couldn’t know, whatever else you might be sure of. You might not know even if he came close to you, passed right by you, even if he touched you. Probably you wouldn’t. And yet you might for a moment think it’s okay.
She had come to the edge of the wide street, whose name she couldn’t find. She looked at her instructions, at the day. She had that unnerving experience that travelers sometimes have, of momentarily forgetting what city this is, what continent. She turned left, then changed her mind and went right. A large black car that had been creeping along the street by her now stopped. Vasili Vasilievich put his head out the window, waved to her, nu davaj, and reached around to open the back door for her.
The institute wasn’t far, but probably Gavriil Viktorovich was right, she would have not found it, which is what fat-necked Vasili was apparently explaining to her as he took his rights and lefts. Then here it was, another unmodern modern building seeming to be falling apart before having been finished, and he let her out. Going up the stairs just ahead of her were a group from her dinner the night before, and they saw her and came to her. “Davaj, davaj,” they said, smiling, and took both her arms like schoolgirls, talking rapidly and bringing her within the building, where others she had met turned to greet her.
She was hurried through the crowd of arriving conferees to the wide double doors of an auditorium, which they pushed open to let her through. It was packed, and as she came in people turned in their chairs to see her, people seemed to be telling one another who she was. Could it really be she they had come to see, and why? She wanted to stop, to resist, to run away and hide; she knew she bore nothing for them, nothing but a thirty-year-old magazine: nothing really that she could say, and even that little she couldn’t say in their tongue, in his. But Gavriil Viktorovich at the green-draped table on the platform stood up, and lifted his hand to her; and another ancient man arose from his seat as she passed, took her hand, and said, “Spasibo. Thank you. Thank you for coming so far.”
13.
Four days later Christa Malone flew away, from a different city than she had come to: burdened with gifts, books in a language she might now again try to learn to read, honey, photographs in awful Kodachrome and fax numbers and a little wooden doll of Gorbachev, inside him Brezhnev, inside him Stalin, inside him Lenin, inside him nothing. Forgiven for what she had done or not done; nothing to forgive, of course, nothing. And as she ascended, the city was hammered gold and gold enameling, the setting sun glancing off the river and the rainwater in the squares. One swath of strange cloud, all of a piece, stretched like a pelt of crimson lamb’s wool over the Gulf of Finland. Near it hung a burnished sliver of moon, like a wedding ring worn so long it was almost worn through, like her own. The Aeroflot turned away to the west, and as it went, it lifted the sun back up over the horizon, as though making its way back into the day before, beating into the past.
“We came very close, you know,” Kit’s father told her. “We came within minutes—some people say minutes. Of course we weren’t told that then, how close it was. You want a drink?”
“No, thanks, Dad.”
She had made her return ticket for Washington, D.C., so she could visit him; she did it whenever she could, traveling down by train from conferences in New York, driving up from home during school vacations. He wouldn’t move from the old apartment.
“How we avoided it is a mystery to me. Let me tell you something. There was a Russian colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, who was a high-level American spy in Moscow, and at the tensest moment of this thing he got arrested. The Americans had given him telephone codes to be used only in the greatest emergency. One code would mean that he’d been arrested; the other code meant that a Russian attack on the U.S. was about to happen. Apparently Penkovsky used the wrong code. So the CIA had this warning of a Soviet attack. And what did they do? They didn’t do anything. They thought it was a mistake, apparently. Anyway they ignored it; they didn’t even tell the President.”
On the windowsill he had arranged all the little Russian leaders she’d brought him, in order by size, little to big, past to present.
“Intelligence services are famous for ignoring the wrong information,” he said. “It’s a signal-to-noise ratio problem: too much coming in through the ether. Stalin ignored warnings that Hitler was going to attack; we missed Pearl Harbor. But this time—this time they made the right guess; this time the coin flipped right side up. No reason I can see.”
He sat, carefully, in the big armchair where no one ever sat but him, and crossed his slippered feet. “So what did you learn?” he asked. “Did he have something to do with it? Falin?”
“I didn’t learn anything. Nothing. They wanted to learn what I know. Which is nothing too.”
“Well what do they think happened? What had they been thinking?”
“They think maybe he was killed by the CIA or the FBI.”
“Why?”
“They don’t know why. I guess they can accept not knowing; they think there are secret reasons for lots of things that can never be known.”
He pondered, as though trying to decide if this was true, or made sense, though Kit didn’t suppose that was really what he was thinking. Then he said: “And you? Do you think that’s what happened?”
“I used to. I used to think it must have been something like that.”
“Now?”
“Now,” she said: and she thought. She thought of Falin, and the child with his name singing in the naked hall in St. Petersburg. She thought of Gavriil Viktorovich holding Falin’s poem, in tears in his little apartment. She thought of Ben, choosing to fight for the right, believing that one power was right, the other wrong. “I think that back then, when he came to this country, there was a struggle going on between the angels of the nations, his and ours; and that in their anger and their fear, those angels came to destroy the world, anyway the parts of it that they were supposed to be watching over—and everything in between too…”