“Maybe it was slang they used,” she said. “He said they had their own words, their own language.”

He was nodding. “Manit is beckon,” he said, and with his hand made the gesture, waving her gently toward him. “To lure, perhaps.”

Beckonville. The Russians had just changed the name of Stalingrad back to what it was before, another grad or gorod, what was it.

“In early poems of Gray Gods,” Gavriil Viktorovich said, “this world of Falin is spoken of as small. Perhaps, yes, like world of child-gangs to our big society, with its own rules and laws and language, secret names for things. But as poems go on, world of Falin expands. Speakers in poems now can take long journeys in this other world, which has its own transportation system, they travel to other cities, they petition officials who have offices and powers not like ours but little bit like, they try to be heard in government buildings, which are big, very big, go on forever.

“Then, at last, this world opens further, to greater realm, beyond-human realm of powers, powers maybe reflections of earthly ones, maybe not; maybe they are originals of earthly ones, who only reflect them. In their own great shut offices, you see. Endless. These are perhaps those Gray Gods for whom all the poems are named.

“And yet, and yet. No matter how far out it reaches, world of Gray Gods, it can suddenly become ordinary once more. As camera might change its focus, we see that we are nowhere but in dump or ashpit in Soviet city, to which besprizornye have come from trains or however they have come; where they have made shelters, to keep warm by fires of ash dump; and watchmen come to drive them away, and winter coming on. Then this moment passes, like hallucination. And great epic story of gods and journeys continues.”

When winter was deep, Innokenti went out from the station’s underground with the others to the yards to get aboard trains bound for the south, for Georgia, the Crimea. Some would go as far as Baku and Samarkand. How did they know which ones to board? Surely Innokenti didn’t know. How could they take such a small child with them, how did he endure it, how did he learn not to fear, and how long did learning take him?

The smaller you were, the more places there were to hide on a train. The smallest could ride in the dog boxes or storage compartments underneath the cars, curled up out of sight; sometimes though the conductors shut and locked the boxes, not knowing there were children inside who would be trapped unable to move for hours or days, or sometimes knowing very well. If you were strong enough to hold on you could ride farther under, on the rails, just above the tracks, the endless wooden crossties flicking hypnotically by just below your feet or your face; if you slept you could lose your perch and fall under the cars. One boy that Innokenti knew had fallen into the roadbed and lay facedown still and bleeding while the cars passed over him, one, one, one, one, a hundred: he was blind in one eye afterward and his cheek always drooped, but he could tell this story. It was easy to get into coal boxes but the air was suffocating, thick with greasy coal dust, and you carried a nail or a spike to bore a hole to breathe. There were even places inside the engines, crannies and spaces inches away from the pistons and thundering wheels, hotter even than the steam pipes of the station basement. When the train stopped the firemen would cry out to see children crawling from the engines all black and skinny as devils: Chort!

Maybe it was then he learned invisibility, riding the trains.

In the south somewhere he lost Teapot, or was lost by him, anyway he never saw him again. In his poems a person like Teapot disappears forever only to appear again, always returning in new guises and with new employments, but those are poems. He was taken in by another gang, older boys and girls of practiced cruelty. He begged for them, having still the trick of weeping whenever he needed to and having grown as yet not much larger, his nice clothes tattered and irremediably soiled and his shoes stolen and replaced with two mismatched ones much too large, but still the good little boy could be seen beneath, and he did well.

In another colder city they lived in an ash dump that ran along a railroad spur line; there were fires burning always, and a derelict freight car collapsed on a siding where the older children made a home. The younger dug caves in the clinkers or slept in heaps under salvaged boxes or broke into sheds, or sat out and cried. During the day they went out into the city, to the markets and the streets, to beg; at night the older children went out to steal or to sell stolen things or themselves. Sometimes they returned with vodka or candy or cocaine, to be distributed according to rules they made up: one older boy Falin remembered named Chinarik or Cigarette Butt, with a withered arm like Stalin’s, particularly liked this game.

Once they brought back with them a child, a psy or greenhorn, and talked about how they might get money for him, ransom money. After a while the boy began to cry and struggle and tried to get away, and said he would tell; they tried to make him shut up but he wouldn’t stop, and they killed him. Innokenti was one of them.

“I was set guard,” he said. “To watch for mil’ton or yard police. What I was told.”

“Did you see? What they did?”

“I saw.”

They held him down and hit him, and to make him stop crying they stuffed his mouth with ashes. They held him until he stopped writhing. Then they took all he had, his shoes, handkerchief, coat.

“They did that?”

“We did that. We.” He tapped the gray ash from his cigarette against the ashtray, which had the college’s seal on the bottom of it. “You see,” he said. “I have had child, born with illness, and before she grew I was taken away to camps, and never saw her more. I think of her every day. But I have this one too, this boy, and of him too I think every day. They are both my dead children, and they will not go.”

Not long after that, maybe because of that (and now he began to remember such things, causalities, the order of events, at least a little), the ash dump was swept by the authorities and the children rounded up and processed: Innokenti Isayevich entered the system. He was fed hot soup and given new boots not much better than his old ones, and then put aboard a special train, a sanpoezda, “sanitary” train; he had his hair cut off and was dunked in disinfectant as the train rolled, picking up as it went other besprizornye. He had a ticket sewn to his coat with his surname and the city he had come from, it wasn’t his name but a name someone thought she heard him say, and he would have it ever after. Many of them didn’t know their names; some of them refused to say them. They were given new names, common names or the names of film stars or heroes of the Revolution, Mikhail Kalinin, Len or Ninel or Vladilen, Ulyanova or Tsetkina or Elektrifikatsiya. At stations they would be offloaded into the care of the local officials, who put them in detskie doma. If there was no one to meet them, or detdoma was already full, or there was no detdoma, they would go on, or be left in the station or the street.

“Sometimes detdoma was not so good as street,” he said to her. “Hundreds try to get in; as many try to get out soon. Stay till food is gone, run away. I ran away. Not once only.”

“And after that?”

“Go to market. Beg. Ride on trains. I found other friends, as we did then. I knew then the rules of how to live, how to make—what—alliances, and make myself valuable to others. I could beg, though I was perhaps not so pitiful as once. I lived. At last, arrested again, for theft. Sent to prison. Then released to new detdoma. This time to stay.”

He put out his cigarette: she watched the strong square wrist; did his hand tremble? How much we can stand, she thought: how much, after all.