She watched him read. It wasn’t true that she didn’t know why; she only didn’t know how to say why, what delicacy or fear it was that had kept her from opening the sheet on its worn tender folds and getting help somewhere from someone who knew this language as she never would.

“Can you tell what it says?” she asked. “I mean, what sense it makes?”

“Yes,” he said. “I can. Harder to say, what means, in language different from, from.” He removed his glasses with a sudden gesture and pressed his eyes with his fingers for a moment. He shook his head then and pulled from his pocket a handkerchief, and held it to his face. The folded sheet lay in his lap.

“What,” Kit whispered.

“No no,” he said. “No no.” He took a great breath, composed himself. “Only, I thank you. For this. I knew him so long ago, so long ago.”

He looked down again at the poem. Kit waited. She knew how hard it was to draw out even a little of the sense of a poem from its carapace; for its carapace was the thing itself.

“Isn’t it about angels?” she asked. “The angels of the nations.”

“Yes,” he said. “It says that there is angel who watches over the affairs of every nation; and that each such angel has an opposite.”

“A little angel,” she said. “A lesser angel.”

He put the poem between them; he found on his table a pad of rough paper, and from his jacket took out a pencil. He put the pad before her, and held out the pencil; and the moment parted, and it wasn’t Gavriil Viktorovich before her, or this place or time; then it healed, and she was here.

“See,” he said. “Look.”

In an hour, with his help and a dictionary he fetched, she had written out on the little pad the fourteen lines. The title was a date: 1963.

Child, never forget that this too is true:

So that justice in our cosmos may be preserved,

The angels that watch over our nations each has an opposite,

A left hand whose works the strong right hands don’t know.

If a nation’s angel is proud, then the other is shy

Brilliant if the nation’s angel is dull

Full of pity if the angel shows none

Laughing if it always weeps, weeping if it cannot weep.

But so that order may also be preserved

(Which has always concerned the great ones more)

The nation’s angel is the greater, older and more terrible,

And from his sight the lesser always hides.

Lost, pale and bare, he shivers and sings

And there is no reproach so stinging as his smile.

Gavriil Viktorovich smiled and shrugged, unable to tell her finally if what she wrote was like or unlike what Falin had written. He thought there were other people, at the dinner tonight, who would know better, if she would show her translation to them. She shook her head, however; she ripped the sheet from the pad and put it in her purse, and returned Falin’s poem to Gavriil Viktorovich.

“It was for you,” she said. “Because it was all I had.”

He folded it up along its old folds with care, and replaced it in the envelope Kit had brought. He asked her again the date that Falin had sent it to her, and only then did he notice that the title Falin had given it was a year beyond the year in which he had written and sent it: a year beyond the end of his own life, as well.

“Berdyayev also speaks of this concept, angels of the nations,” Gavriil Viktorovich said to her as they went toward the subway, which didn’t seem to Kit to be very close. The evening was alight, more dreamlike than before, and he led her through a kind of dream wilderness of abandoned or forgotten construction materials, a path that seemed to have been made long ago over heaps of gravel or sand, past heavy equipment covered in tarpaulins. “Berdyayev, Russian religious philosopher, expelled from Soviet Union 1922, perhaps you know? Well in any case.” She almost wished he wouldn’t talk so much, waste his strength; she felt an impulse to take his arm, help him along.

“What Berdyayev asks,” he said. “Angels of nations are each different, as nations are. And do nations take their special characters from their angels, or is it opposite?”

“I don’t understand,” Kit said.

“Well, may it be that even such great guardians are altered by long association with nations they protect? If that is so, what has become of ours?”

They reached the subway, and he guided her downwards, gave her the fifteen kopeks for the entry, and showed her where it was to be inserted. The patch of red light turned green and she was through.

“I think the angel of our nation must have long ago become discouraged by us, and no wonder,” he said to her. “Degraded, depressed, sorrowful. Perhaps corrupted even; brutal, uncaring. I hope not. I fear so.”

“Then what would happen to the lesser angel?”

“Ah. Well. Of that being, we know only what Falin tells us. Yes? Even of his existence we did not know before.” He smiled at her. The crowd pressed toward the escalators. She had always loved and feared subways, always rode them in whatever city she traveled to, collecting new ones as other tourists collected famous views. Why was it so crowded at this hour? It was a tremendously long way down, longer than the way down in any New York subway, and seemed to issue in darkness far below.

“I suppose,” he said, “worst thing such a corrupted great angel could do would be to send away into exile the lesser angel who is paired with him. Even destroy. Just as Stalin could not bear to have around him anyone who reminded him of what he had done, no he must kill or get rid of all of them.”

Like the hotel she had been put in, at once so bleak and so dowdy, the cavernous station seemed to her not very much like anywhere she had ever been. It was ostentatiously industrial but somehow not modern, as unmodern and un-Western as a gilded ikon.

“Did you know that Stalin feared poets?” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “Oh yes. Example: Pasternak. When Stalin’s wife died—by suicide, though no one knew—then poets wrote condolences for newspaper. 1932. Pasternak wrote too. He wrote that that very night of her death he had thought hard about Stalin, thought as poet about him for first time; and when next day he heard news, he was so shocked, as though he had been there beside Stalin when it happened.” The train slid into the station almost silently. “Stalin never harmed Pasternak. Never dared, it may be. What other powers might he have?”

It was so strange to be having this conversation, here, that Kit laughed a little; she felt like Alice, talking to the Gryphon.

“Oh is true, is true,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “Later when Mandelstam wrote his poem denouncing Stalin, famous poem, Pasternak asked Bukharin to intercede with Stalin, not to have him arrested. And Stalin agreed, and he called Pasternak on telephone and told him Mandelstam would not be touched. And Pasternak, such brave man, asked Stalin if perhaps they might meet and talk. About what? Stalin asked. Life and death, said Pasternak. And Stalin hanged up the phone. Pasternak grieved ever after: could not get Stalin back on phone, could not talk to him, tell him truths. One chance. Here is our stop.”

As long a way up as down, their own ascension falling in a gap in the flow of people, they two alone.

“Then could it be,” Kit said, “that they put him out—Falin—because they were afraid of him? That somebody was?”

Gavriil Viktorovich said nothing, and at first Kit thought he hadn’t heard; then she was sure he had, and had no answer.

In the time after Falin was lost or went away, she had used to think that if ever she could come here, to this country, and could look far enough or deep enough, she would find him eventually, alive and smiling as always: here again where he should be. No matter what he had said. The certainty came back to her as they arose toward the street and the evening: she knew for sure, as she had once known for sure, that he hadn’t killed himself, nor had he been killed. It wasn’t possible. It was easier to believe that he was here now in this city; that because the world was no longer what it had been, because she had come here at last, he might be waiting at the top of the stairs, might appear beside her from somewhere or nowhere as he so often had: not dead, not even changed.