So the people of Rus had a song at least to comfort them in those days. But still life was very hard, since the Devil had taken every other thing that anyone loved away. And in the end, of course, one way and another, he got a good number of their souls as well.

She looked up. Falin stood nearby, his hands in the pockets of his pleated slacks. She hadn’t heard him come in. Without any warning, her eyes filled with tears, and the light glittered and swam.

“You must hate them so much,” she said. “For…for what they took, for all that they took.”

“No,” he said, “no no,” as though he knew why she had said this, knew just what she meant. “Some I despised. But when you hate, you touch. I wanted not to touch. You know in my poem ‘Bez’ are ones who hate. Ones who can never take their fingers from those throats. Now come.”

She took his hand, cool and dry, and stood.

Once, he had written out from memory a part of his poem “Bez,” to show Kit how it worked. The lines made her think of his wife, how she had starved to death in the siege of Leningrad. Had she been one of those who couldn’t help hating? Would Kit have been one of those, who died of hate, whom the Devil got in the end?

I will do without bread: they think I cannot but I can.

I will do without, and raise my hunger like a child;

And from it I will breed a little cat.

From my empty mouth and bowel I will produce it

A cat who feeds on hunger as on bread

And by doing without, that cat will grow greater than any tiger

Its teeth of steel spoons and knives a-clatter, and its black breath of hunger

And it will consume all those who thought I could not do without.

So she said: but the cat when it had grown

Ate her and her abnegation up

And so was satisfied, and so died.

4.

When his apartment on the edge of the prairie grew too hot, too much a kuznitsa he said, a smithy where they labored together at the forge, they would go outside, walk to the end of the road under the sycamores, whose leaves seemed a burden too great almost to bear; or they sat on the wide rough steps of his apartment in the cool shadow of the house and watched the sky turn turquoise with slow solemnity, or welter uneasily and ponder what it would do next.

“Tornado weather,” she said. Along the gray fence of posts and wire that separated his yard and garden from the fields beyond, the gray cat crept as though in fear, its fur upstanding and its eyes wide.

“Tornado. This is storm we in my country do not have.”

“Really?”

“Not tornadoes. They are American storms. We have groza, burya, we have such round storms, how do you say, yes. Not tornadoes.”

“Not American though really,” she said, “only Western. I mean I think sometimes they happen in other parts of the country, but mostly they’re here. Tornado Alley they call this area. Look.”

From the black-sheep clouds hung a few small woolly twists: tornadoes being born. She thought she could smell them; she hugged herself and shivered in the heat. Why did fear feel so exhilarating when it blew coldly in you like stormwind? Her father had always been afraid of tornadoes, hated summers in Tornado Alley; maybe because his mother had used to gather all her children up during storms and crowd them into a closet to pray the rosary with her and wail at every thundercrash. Once Kit dreamed of a tremendous box, a sky-high cabinet divided like a shadow box, in whose divisions young tornadoes could be safely kept, as in pens. A gift for her father.

“They are terribly destructive,” he said.

“Oh yes.”

“There is a French dish,” he said. “I have read of it. Tournedos. A dish of beef.”

“This would be a different dish,” she said. “Scrambled eggs. Or maybe hash.” The wind was rising a little, teasing. “There are whole towns that get blown away. Russiaville, a tiny town near where I lived.” He looked at her and she shrugged, yes really it’s true. “Russiaville; they said it Roosha-veeo. No more Russiaville. All gone.”

Just as she said this a white shatterline of lightning crossed from sky to earth in the west toward which they looked. They both counted their heartbeats till the thunder growled, awakened, and rolled away as though muttering to itself.

“Oz,” Kit said softly, as though rhyming with it. Then that name too had to be explained to him. The child blown away by a tornado from her farm in drab gray Kansas to a wonderful new land of magic and possibility. And all she wants is to go home again.

“Oz,” he said.

It was dark as night now, and the wind rose. There might be hail. “Let’s go inside.”

The gray cat flitted between his legs when he opened the door, and ran ahead of them to leap up on the couch, its yellow eyes alight. The cats around the place, a black one, maybe two, and a tiger, weren’t his but his landlady’s, and yet they seemed to prefer him or his rooms. My lovers, he called them. Lyubovnitsy. The gray allowed Kit to take it in her lap.

“I suppose you have lovers,” she said. She thought of the woman she had seen him with, the one who wept and spoke to him as though in prayer or confession, and pressed her cheek to his coat. “Real ones.”

“You do suppose?” he said.

She looked only at the cat in her lap. “Ones that talk.”

“Ah, these have that advantage, that they do not talk. They need not talk that way that lovers must.”

“What way?”

“The way all lovers talk. You know.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only know before. Before people are lovers, I mean.”

“After, the same.” He propped his head on his fist and looked down at her. “What do they talk of. They say each other’s names. They describe each other, too. To each other, you know?”

“No.”

“They never tire of it. The hair, the eyes. Never tire. They ask each other questions, endlessly, to know more. What do you love, what do you need, what is favorite poem, favorite color.”

Kit drew a cigarette from his pack and held it between her fingers. “My favorite color,” she said. “Is the color in a bottle of Coke when you lift it to the light and the light falls through it. That dark bright red brown.”

He laughed.

“Really. Sorry.”

“The color of your hair,” he said. He put his hand on her hair, his fingers in the curls. “The color exactly.”

She shut her eyes, to feel his hand so strangely light on her. “What do you love,” she said. “What are you afraid of, what do you need.” She lay still, seeming to have become something other than flesh, electricity maybe or pale silk, and wondered what she would do, what would become of her, if he were to answer.

“I need you, Kit,” he said.

When she opened her eyes he was not smiling. She didn’t doubt what he said, not then or ever after; but after a moment she said, “Why?”

“To save my soul,” he said. “Or perhaps only my life.”

Another flicker of fire around the world, and then a pause, and then nearer thunder.

“Why did you say that?” Kit whispered. “What did you mean?”

He was sweating, big drops standing at his brow line and along his lip.