But they came out into golden light and the crowds along a brilliant river, nothing she had foreseen, street lights lit and shop windows full of goods, men and women in summer clothes walking arm in arm. Leaving the subway exit she felt the strangest sensation: her hand suddenly taken. She cried out in surprise. It was a child, a small boy, dirty or dark-skinned, smiling up at her and holding a single rose wrapped in cellophane.

“Nyet!” Gavriil Viktorovich beside her said, prying the child not untenderly from Kit’s side and pushing him away; and now Kit could see several children working the stream of people, each with a single rose, shamelessly taking people’s hands and insisting; one small boy, no more than five, pleading with and actually wrapped around the leg of a well-dressed woman, who was ordering him off, laughing in exasperation.

Gavriil took Kit’s arm. “You see,” he said. “Once again, besprizornye. It is not only the poets who now return to us.” Kit looked back; the boy who had taken her hand—his T-shirt as big on him as a smock, advertising something American—still looked after her for a moment, smiling, before he turned to pester someone else.

The restaurant, off the Nevsky Prospekt, was on a floor above the street, the steps leading upward crowded with eager people, mostly young and talking and smoking with passion. Inside it was all white and gold and draped with blue drapes, the tables covered with long cloths: Kit couldn’t decide what sort of place it was, how it had come to be, if it had evolved by chance or had been created last week to look this way. It was loud and messy and the waiters in white aprons seemed not pleased to be there.

A crowd at a great round table signaled to Gavriil Viktorovich, and he guided Kit to it.

“Our committee,” he said.

Most of them were old, and some were very old; they seemed to have survived more than years, they seemed like aged trees that had been harmed but not killed by long droughts and terrible winters, limbs lopped and misshapen, thick bark scarred and cut. They displayed the history they had lived through in the ropy veins of their hands, their teeth, their bent bodies.

Kit was introduced to each of them, and each of them claimed to speak no English, or only a little English, and Kit said the lines she had worked out, about her own Russian, and they laughed and some of them left their places to come and hug her. As though they had been waiting for years to meet her, she thought, as though she had been away on a long and hard journey and had come back to them at last.

A red-faced man with Brezhnev’s Tartar eyes and hawk’s-wing eyebrows rose at the table’s end and made a toast to Gavriil Viktorovich, which everyone joined. Gavriil Viktorovich made one in return: to Innokenti Isayevich Falin. When they had drunk that, he would not let them sit; he made them drink again, to Christa Malone. And they lifted their glasses and drank.

“When conference was first proposed,” the man on her left said. “When Gavriil Viktorovich first began to speak of it. Was a certain moment in our history, in our…catastrophe. For the first time exiled and forbidden writers could be spoken of openly. In periodika, literary journals you know, were published so many things…”

“Zamyatin,” said another man, from across the table, who hadn’t seemed to be following. “Nabokov. Kafka. 1984.”

“We had of course read many of them already in samizdat or in smuggled copies, but here they were at news kiosks. Everyone read like hungry man. But as well were appearing work of those who had been sent abroad or who had escaped to other side, and of whom we had heard nothing for so long. Now books of theirs came into country, and were not confiscated; we read Brodsky, Aksyonov. Many others. Riches.”

“Yes,” Kit said. She’d heard about them, the people reading on the trains and crowded streetcars, swapping books and journals, reading two at a time.

“Conferences too,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “Writers discussed whose names had for so long not been spoken in public. It is true. Falin too. Now we could ask: what happened, what became of them.”

Kit found they had all turned to her.

“You know,” she said, “that he was never found.”

They waited, neither assenting nor dissenting.

“Supposedly it was just an accident,” she said. “A car accident.”

“No accidents,” said a tiny woman whose freckled breastbone barely rose above the table’s edge. “There are no such.”

“I’ll tell you what I know,” she said, not for the first or the last time in that week. “Everything I can tell.”

“First eat,” Gavriil Viktorovich said to her in Russian, and filled her glass. “‘Eat bread and salt and speak the truth.’ What we always say.”

The restaurant had begun to fill with parties, waiters pushing tables together and people taking pictures and rising to make toasts that made others laugh or cheer. At one round corner table a group that were surely Americans sat with several Russians in black leather or Italian suits, some with their hair pulled back in ponytails. Their table was crowded with bottles, champagne, Stolichnaya, Chivas. Gavriil Viktorovich saw her look.

“Biznesmeny,” he said to her. “Konsultantye. Our new Gray Gods.”

The meal went on and on without ever seeming to have begun, plate after plate of salty and piquant zakuski, appetizers: smoked salmon, herring, blini with caviar red and black, griby v smetane which she guessed were Mushrooms in Confusion but no, that would be smyatennye, these were only in sour cream. They poured vodka for her and leaned over to her to take her hand or to touch her and speak: dusha-dushe. Kit remembered her teacher Nadezhda Fyodorovna saying it, striking her breast so that her bangles sounded: dusha-dushe, soul to soul.

The woman next to her turned great smiling dark eyes on her. “I have read many poems of yours,” she said. “Read with great interest, yes.”

“You have?” There’s nothing, no proposal of delight or compliment or vatic prophecy, that will enter a poet’s heart as such a statement does. And here of all places.

“Contemporary American poetry is my speciality,” the woman said, pronouncing it with an extra syllable, like a Briton. “I have read often your poem that begins If you return O my dead, and you will, from your ashes and earth. This is very fine.”

It was “Ghost Comedy.” Kit felt her throat tighten with strange wonder to hear the line in this heavy grave accent.

“This was written 1982?”

“No. It was finished then. It was…It took a long time.”

“It is elegiac meter, no?”

“Well almost,” Kit said. “I didn’t mean it to be.” The woman looked at her in puzzlement, or disbelief, still smiling. She was, still was, darkly beautiful. “I mean I didn’t know it was when I wrote it. I found out later, when it was done.”

Return if you can as the ghosts in ghost comedies do. She would see him in a moment at the end of this table, his drowned-man’s hair afloat, his smile that knew everything and nothing. Breaking a real piece of dark bread like Jesus at Emmaus. But his feet bare that couldn’t be seen: she alone would know.

Gavriil Viktorovich lifted his knife, and rising he gently tapped his glass to get their attention. It took some time, and even when he began to speak not everyone turned to him or fell silent. Kit tried to follow what he said, and understood only when he drew out the envelope that she had given him, the poem Falin had sent to her at the summer’s end. Then they were hushed, and still. Gavriil Viktorovich began to read, the thin old paper trembling in his hand but his voice strong and sweet. When he reached the end and sat, there was no applause or sound or even movement for a moment, as they all seemed to gather again one by one from where the poem had taken them.