1.

The first time that Christa Malone heard the name of Innokenti Isayevich Falin, it was spoken by the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

In February of 1961, Christa stood in a reception line at the White House with twenty other high school seniors whose poems had been selected for inclusion in a national anthology of young people’s poetry called Wings of Song. All but four were girls, a flock of ungainly bright birds in their suits and dresses, all with hats and white gloves too. A gravely courteous aide had arranged them in a row, instructed them how to respond and step away, and now looked at his wristwatch and toward a distant door; and Kit Malone sensed the quick beating of their hearts. The anthology had the sponsorship of a major foundation.

He was stopping to meet them on his way to a grander affair, Kit wouldn’t remember later what it was, but when the far double doors opened he was wearing evening clothes; his wife beside him wore a gown of some unearthly material that gleamed like the robes of an El Greco cardinal. The aide guided them down the line of young poets; the President took each one’s hand, and so did the First Lady; the President asked each one a question or two, talking a bit longer with a tall girl from Quincy.

A little longer too with Kit: making an easy joke in his comical accent but seeming to turn her in his gaze like a jewel or object of curious interest. When she told him what state she came from he smiled.

“You have a new poet living there, I understand,” he said. “Yes. Our new poet from Russia. Falin. You’ve heard about him?”

She hadn’t, and said nothing, only smiled, her own smile compelled by his huge one.

“Falin, yes,” he said. “He’s been exiled. From over there. And come here.”

Jackie took his arm, smiling too at Kit, and drew him toward the next poet.

There were photographs taken then, and a few words from the President about the importance of poetry, to the nation, to the spirit. He said that the poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world; he reminded them that he had invited Robert Frost to speak at his own inauguration. The land was ours before we were the land’s. His pale eyes fell momentarily again on Kit, piercing or perceiving.

That night in their hotel, in the unaccustomed city lights and noise and the girl from Quincy unquiet in the other bed, Kit dreamed of a tiger: of walking with one in the corridors of a featureless palace (his?), watching the heavy muscles slide beneath his gorgeous clothes in the way a tiger’s do and talking with him about this and that: aware that she was to listen more than speak, awed and alert but not afraid.

In that month she wrote a poem, “What the Tiger Told Me,” the last poem she would write for a long time. And later, years later, she wondered if the President had lingered close to her for an extra moment and studied her with that smiling voracity because he perceived a sexual aura or exudate coming from her. His senses were inordinately acute that way, and had been alerted, perhaps, by something she herself hadn’t yet discovered: that she was pregnant.

In January of that year, on his way to the United States, Innokenti Isayevich Falin had begun writing a linked series of poems whose titles were dates. The first was sketched on Berlin hotel notepaper with his new German fountain pen, and was revised on the plane to New York. The original—later lost with all the others—is a sonnet, fourteen lines in Falin’s own peculiar rhyme scheme. The unrhymed rough translation that Kit Malone later worked out with Falin looked like this:

1961

Tip up this year on the fulcrum of its final serif

Revolve it through the degrees from right to upright

Like a lifted flagpole without a flag

Or a flat raised upon the stage of an empty theater

Before which histories will soon be enacted.

Now drop it farther, push it entirely over

As the statue of a deposed leader is thrown

Supine, his gloved finger that pointed Onward

riven into earth to point Endward instead.

See what you have accomplished?

This rarity comes but once in centuries:

A year that can be overthrown but not reversed,

And after all our labors seems to become itself again.

It is not so. As always, we will never be the same.

2.

It’s always a surprise and a wonderment when our plane breaks through a ceiling of cloud and, as though shedding some huge entangling dress of tattered lace, comes out naked into the naked blue sky and the sun. We on earth think there are blue skies and gray skies, but in fact of course the sky is always clear.

Then the reverse too. Christa Malone’s plane descended out of the clear desert air and was clothed again in clammy batting; came down through the ceiling into the house. There a light rain was falling: steely ocean, colorless heaped-up city, air of tears. Remembering what earth is like. Auden once said that it shocked him that airplane passengers, able to look down like gods on clouds and the earth, so often paid it no attention: pulled down the blind, read a thriller.

“I don’t know if it’s still the same now,” Christa’s seatmate was saying to a man across the aisle. “This was before ’89. Aeroflot. You took your life in your hands. And shabby. And mean. These stewardesses like prison camp matrons. About fifty of us on a big jet, Moscow to Vladivostok. They let us in the back door, and she walks up ahead of us directing us into seats, starting in the back row and filling every seat till we’re all in. No changing seats. Two-thirds of the plane empty!”

“Different now,” said his listener. “In the republics there aren’t even reserved seats. Everybody tears across the tarmac and fights to get aboard. Devil take the hindmost.”

“Democracy,” said the other, and they both laughed.

In Russian, then in English, then in French, the stewardess asked them softly to prepare for landing.

When she was a child, and for a long time afterward, Kit Malone always imagined Russia as dark. It was dark then; a Dark Continent from which no real news came, a dark star absorbing its own light. When she thought of it she saw long roads leading into the hinterlands, cold featureless steppe without color or sound, and huddled people silent too, their backs turned to her.

It was all she had, this metaphor of her own ignorance, because she wouldn’t believe or couldn’t believe in any Russia then offered her. She didn’t believe in the Russia the nuns taught her about in school, where priests were killed and churches despoiled and nuns were beaten by booted commissars. She didn’t believe it, not because she had evidence that such things were not true but because the nuns insisted on them, insisted so much that Kit withdrew her assent. She decided they were wrong about Russia and Communism, which probably weren’t so bad. Who would do dumb things like beat nuns just to be mean? Who would care that much? Kit saw, beyond politics and religion, a grown-up world where these childish exaggerated oppositions were put aside, admitted to be false: like her parents admitting at last that there was no Santa Claus.