No God either, eventually, on whose side to be. And yet the dark country persisted, unfolding inwardly under dark skies, through the years as she grew up; she never imagined traveling there, as she imagined traveling almost everywhere else.

Christa looked through the scumbled cloud still tearing past her window. The gray city, turning like a piled platter in a waiter’s hand as the plane maneuvered, was called St. Petersburg, once again. Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov’s handwritten invitation was in the bag in her lap that she was clutching somewhat too tightly: she didn’t like landing, though she loved taking off. A celebration of the 75th anniversary of the birth of Innokenti Isayevich Falin, and of his life and poetry. June 1993, St. Petersburg, Russia. Had it been gratifying to him to write the real name of his city, as though a fog had lifted from it?

It had still been Leningrad when Semyonov had first written to her, twenty years ago now. In the same exquisite tiny handwriting, learned in a prison camp it seemed, a hand for writing down poems on cigarette papers. The weird orthography so like Falin’s own that for a minute she had been unable to open it, only stared at her own name on the front of the envelope and felt the hard beating of her heart.

But of course it hadn’t been from Falin; it was from this man G. V. Semyonov, asking her in the most delicate terms what no other Russian apparently dared to ask: what had happened, what was the truth, and what had become of the last poems of I. I. Falin.

Semyonov had sent her that letter because of her own first book of poetry, a book newsworthy not for her own slight poems (she would write stronger ones later on) but for the fifteen poems of Falin’s that it contained. “Translations without originals” she had called them: poems neither his nor hers, or both his and hers; poems written in a language that she couldn’t read, and surviving only in a language he couldn’t write.

Russia had been deep in the Brezhnev freeze then; nothing went in unauthorized, nothing came out; how this Semyonov had even got hold of her book she didn’t know, nor how his letter had reached her. She had answered it as well as she could, but she heard nothing more. She couldn’t learn if her letter had been received or not; answered or not. But ever since then she had gone on explaining to the writer of that letter what had happened: answering, trying to answer, the charge that he had not made: that she had let their poet die, and then taken his poems for her own.

Now at last he had written to her again, in a new world, and summoned her. Invited her, actually, and in the kindest and most flattering terms. But she felt it was a summons, and one she couldn’t refuse.

The airport was a frenzy, with uniformed men and women everywhere whose role seemed to be to make things worse, to stand in the way, stir rage or frustration. Not for Russia the sterile cool calm of big European or American airports. It was like a vast crowded living room, with a faint homey repellent smell too. Christa waited for her bags to appear amid the expensive leather suitcases of her traveling companions, and then she joined the lines at the customs counters.

“Passport, please.”

The man in a green uniform with red tabs looked once, twice, three times from her passport picture to her and blew expressively, in boredom or exhaustion. She handed over her visa, and she had the invitation to the conference ready in her bag too, and a little speech prepared; but she was waved on, and when she put her bags before the customs clerk he also wearily waved her on, and she sailed out into the crowded space where everyone was hugging and kissing, old people, children, men in suits; and there ahead was a tall and very thin, very old man, who held up a small sign, a torn piece of cardboard, with her name on it in that same odd orthography, a sign that shook slightly in his hand. His face was infinitely sad and yet his smile was kind, as though he waited to conduct her to an afterlife that was better than she deserved yet not all she might desire. He turned his eyes on her and seemed to know her immediately.

“Good morning,” he said, in English and then in Russian. “I am Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov. Welcome to my country.”

Already she was uncertain she had heard correctly; she replied with a Russian greeting, and he began to speak again in Russian, turning away and pointing toward far parts of the terminal.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s thirty years since I spoke Russian. Is it possible to speak in English, at least at first?”

“Of course,” he said with great courtliness. “In English I am not fluent. I am fluent in Russian, Estonian, Polish, French. Not English however, unfortunately.”

“No?” Christa said. “Oh well. You speak it better than I’ve ever spoken any language but my own. Americans, you know…”

“Yes,” he said. “I know.”

He insisted on carrying a bag for her, and she chose the lightest to give him; he led her down corridors and up escalators until they emerged into a vast garage where dozens of ugly black cars were waiting, their motors running. Semyonov looked a long time before locating the one he wanted and waving it forward. A ZIL sedan; Christa could read that name at least. The windows were tinted and the backseat huge; it smelled of smoke and sweat.

“Vasili Vasilievich is driver for government official,” Gavriil told her. “Once he spent hours waiting for his official to be done with meetings, et cetera. Now, rule is, instead of waiting he is allowed to use this car for taking others. Like ourselves.” He smiled, as though the situation were comical, which it was: the fearsome car, the thick-necked driver, the innocent moonlighting.

When he had done talking to the driver and the car began crawling from the airport with other traffic, Gavriil Viktorovich turned to her, for a long moment only regarding her with his face of tender apology, which maybe meant nothing that it seemed to mean, was just an old Russian’s face.

“So,” he said. “We meet.”

“You know,” she said, “I did answer your first letter. Long ago. I did.”

He made a wonderful elaborate shrug that forgave, proclaimed ignorance, dismissed the question, invoked Fate, all at once.

“I wanted to tell you,” she said. “What I knew. It wasn’t much.”

“Here nothing at all was known of what became of him in U.S.,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “This was our period of reaction, after fall of Khrushchev, after Cuba missiles crisis. Here we withdrew again into our castle, or we were again locked in our closet, however it is put. Very dangerous once again to talk to foreigners, or about foreigners, or about past, or the dead. Poets then who wrote about the dead were always saying only farewell to them, turning away to face future, you see.” He was smiling. “The dead had just begun again to speak to us when we stopped for a long time listening.”

“But now again,” she said.

“Yes. Now again we listen. Some of us.”

Vasili bore them through a region of identical concrete apartment and office buildings, a bad idea that seemed to have been given up on lately, idle cranes and piles of building materials that looked as though they had been standing untouched for a long time. It made her think of her father’s apartment. Oh forget it he said when she tried to gather up years-old magazines or wash the windows.

“We have program,” he said to her. “First, to restore his citizenship, which was taken from him. To put up monument perhaps, though where? We don’t know where he was born; he lived in many places. And many places now gone: homes, schools he was in, places of work. Gone. As though time ate up these traces of him as it moved along.” He laced together his long yellow-nailed fingers in his lap. “We would want above all to bring him home. But he was not ever found.”