“You were lovers, then, in that summer? You and he?”

It took her a moment, a moment out of time, to realize that the woman beside her had spoken to her in Russian, and that she had understood. Lyubovniki: lovers. She had asked Falin then what the word meant, if it meant what it means in English. And what in English does it mean? he said; and she had tried to tell him.

“No, no,” she said. “Not then. But yes a little later. Or maybe not. I mean…”

The woman waited for more, an answer. The great violet lids closed over the globes of her eyes and rose, and then again.

“Lyubovniki,” Kit said. “It means you, well you slept together, isn’t that right?”

“Right. Yes.”

“Well I don’t know,” Kit said smiling. “I’m not sure. I know it sounds crazy, that you could be not sure.”

“Like a dream?” the woman asked. “Or—how do you say this—a spell.”

“A spell,” Kit said, still smiling helplessly. But it didn’t seem to her that what happened on that last long October night was a spell he cast over her. It was one he lifted: a spell she had been under for a long time, that he broke to let her out.

At the corner table a disagreement had arisen; voices were getting loud. People were turning to look. Kit thought that among the Americans were one or two who had been on the plane with her, though probably they were only like those men. Were they afraid? The Russian biznesmeny arose suddenly in a group and filed out, glancing around themselves as if they might be challenged, or applauded. They passed where Kit sat; she thought she could smell cologne.

“You see,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “We go from country where nothing could change, to country now where every day everything is different. Interest in writing now is not what it was, even one year ago. Even writers are not so interested. Other things to think of. Everything becomes important, or nothing.”

“Monye now is everything,” the tiny old woman opposite Kit said.

“Like those lesser angels, as Falin writes,” he said to Kit. “In her dark time Russia was kept alive by the poets, the true poets. Perhaps now in the new time they will pass. They will cease to be souls, or persons, and become only books.”

He slowly tucked back into the inner pocket of his shapeless coat the envelope that contained Falin’s poem. “It may be we will lose him again,” he said. “And it may be that this time he will go where truly no one can find him.”

The restaurant was quieter, chastened or abashed. The Americans left at the corner table looked into their glasses or at one another.

But it couldn’t be, Kit thought: it couldn’t be that a nation’s lesser angel could be driven out, banished, for good. There could be no justice and no order on the earth if that were so; no power, however great, could do that.

Child, never forget that this too is so. Had that child been she, had he spoken to her and her alone, to warn or to explain? And did he know she wouldn’t discover it till she came here—here, bearing with her his fourteen lines—so long after that year in which they might have been lovers, the year the world didn’t end?

II

1.

When her first semester at the University was over in May, Kit collected her grades (they were sent home too, on little slips printed for the first time by a computer): a B+ in Psychology, A’s in the rest except for her A-in Falin’s class: the highest grade he gave anyone, she learned.

Fran wanted her to come to New York with her for a while, stay at her mother’s apartment on Riverside Drive, go hear some music, sit in dark coffeehouses in the Village. But Kit had to say no (Fran nodding solemnly as though she expected nothing more); had to go home for a while, spend time with George and Marion, if her plan, her new plan, was to come off.

“You are crazy about him,” Jackie said when she told him about the plan. “Maybe just crazy altogether.” He wished he could be around the University in the summer, instead of working; taking some courses, getting some credits maybe toward his second major (economics) or maybe just some education courses, something to fall back on.

“Like a sword,” Kit said.

She packed her paperbacks and her papers and Ben’s letters, Ben’s typewriter too, hers forever now (it would be in her attic thirty years later, in its case), and the clothes she’d brought, which seemed now to belong mostly to somebody else: she had lived the semester in three sweaters, her straight skirts and Capezios, and the black ballet leotards and tights that Fran had got her mother to send out from New York. The rest filled her laundry case, amazing contraption of beaverboard and canvas straps. Marion had carried this case with her to Vassar, and the ghosts of old postage were still perceptible on it. Back then you filled such a case with your laundry and belted it up, then turned over the little address card in its windowed holder, and back it went for Mom to empty and fill again with washed and ironed clothes smelling of home.

Home. Kit sat in the lounge, waiting again for her father to come and carry her and her bags home.

Her parents were moving again. This time back East, outside Washington, D.C., where they had lived years ago, and where George would (he said) be designing bomb shelters for computers—“electronic bomb shelters,” he said, smiling at a joke that only he could get. Marion looked out at her June garden, and the pretty mosaic table she had made especially for it, in grief and exasperation. Kit was exasperated too: why did her mother always think they were going to stay where they went, when they never did? And only that night, in her own old bed and in the suffocating warmth and familiarity of being home again, did she see that it wasn’t the garden or the house that Marion was torn to leave behind. Her son’s grave was here, in this city, in the raw new part of the old Catholic cemetery, and always would be.

They treated Kit like visiting royalty, taking her out to dinners and movies and even on trips to points of historic interest, as though unwilling to stay in the house. When they were home George made them play Scrabble or casino; or he put LPs on his new stereo system, an engineer’s dream all in separate parts—a glowing amplifier, four speakers, the massy turntable on its weighted base. George slipped the records from their paper jackets as though they were delicacies, turning them skillfully by their edges with his long white fingers. And got his wife up out of her chair to dance.

Kit and Ben had always found this music their father loved hilarious, Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Bunny Berrigan; it seemed to be played by cartoon animals, the singers to be kidding. But it had that jingle-jangle sweetness that made George take his wife’s hand and pull her to her feet.