Like a bazaar, Kit thought. The hum of talk and activity arose into the height of the old building, up to where calling sparrows darted amid the rafters. As an incoming freshman, Kit was told she had first to be photographed for her identification card. Signs and monitors guided her into a roped-off area where a portrait camera and lights were set up.

“Card?”

What card? The proctor or assistant neatly fingered it out of Kit’s packet. We were all getting used to these oblong punch cards then, one corner clipped, their rows of perfect rectangular holes. You were not to fold, spindle, or mutilate them. There was a comb there, and a mirror, for her to use. Kit stopped still for a moment, unable to move forward, reminded for no good reason (the big camera, the harried proctor) of Our Lady. All through the coming year in her ID photo she would see in her eyes what she had seemed to see at that moment when they were taking it. Hunted: or not hunted, caught.

She exited that area, permitted now to wander in the busy souk. She thought maybe she’d toss away the list of sensible choices she had worked out with the freshman adviser, and instead go over there, sign up for Introduction to Music Theory, or Uralic-Altaic Studies. But she went meekly and stood in the right lines, English Composition, the advanced French course she had tested into, a Psychology course (her required-science choice), World History I (from the Stone to the Middle Ages), Major Works of Western Literature I (Homer to Cervantes). Down the table from where she signed up for Composition, a line pressing toward a harassed young man threatened to break up into a crowd: people apparently trying to sign up for Comparative Literature 401, The Reading and Writing of Poetry. The anxious students in their duffel coats and canvas bags, white breath coming from their mouths in the unheated building, made Kit think of people in Russia lined up to buy something scarce, toilet paper or salt fish.

It was all gone, though. The graduate student was trying to explain: the class was filled.

Kit finished her list, getting from each station a punch card to be handed in the first day of class; then she and jostling numbers of others (her forehead was growing damp and her heart beat hard) were pressed through a passage where cashiers from the registrar’s office awaited them. When it was Kit’s turn, and she had laid down her hand of cards, her bill was totted up. At seven dollars a credit hour it came to ninety-one dollars, plus a ten-dollar lab fee for Psychology, where she would be doing what, exactly; and Kit put her hand into her crowded big pockets for her money. Her father had taken her to a bank and opened her an account, but because his check would take days to clear he had also given her an envelope of cash with which to pay her tuition.

And it wasn’t there. Not in her brown handbag either. The folded plastic checkbook was there but not the heavy fat envelope. She put down on the cashier’s desk her cascading class materials and handouts, syllabi, lists of recommended reading, and searched her pockets again. Oh God nope.

What was awful in that year was how every bad surprise or scare seemed to be one with all the others, all of them recurring at once within her in a flow of blinding freezing panic: caught. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” Around the cashier’s patient folded hands were displayed several checkbooks from various town banks, which you could use if you had forgotten to bring your own. As though hitting on the right plausible lie at the last minute, Kit pulled out her own checkbook, unclasped it and flattened it with a hand, and filled in the first virgin oblong, number 0001. “Okay,” she said again, and ripped it from its fellows.

The envelope of money was back in her room, it had to be: she could see it, lying among the bedclothes or on the floor, she tried to feel in advance the relief and exasperation she would feel when she found it.

Then down to the bank and deposit it.

She couldn’t find it in her room either, though. Lost somewhere between here in her room and the cashier’s table. Somewhere between morning and noon, lost along the way.

She sat on the narrow bed. At Our Lady you weren’t allowed to use your bed during the day. If they’d allowed it, half the girls would have done nothing but lie there.

Retrace your steps: she heard her father’s voice saying it. She pulled herself erect and retraced her steps, down the hall and stairway and out into the quads amid students who had not lost all their money.

In the field house, the bazaar was over, the set being struck. Men in overalls were pushing, with brooms absurdly huge, the masses of the day’s waste paper into great heaps. She thought of fairy tales, impossible tasks that magic helpers taught you how to do. The workmen’s voices echoed like faint song, and there was almost nobody else in the building; someone far off in an overcoat, looking at a book. But the tables were still in place, and the signs above them. She decided to go back to each, and stand in the lines she had stood in. French. Phys Ed. Psychology. At each station she walked forward studying the remaining litter.

English Composition. This was basically stupid and hopeless. Lost money is one of the things that doesn’t return: even she knew that much. It had been so much, though, more cash than she had ever held in her hand at once. Why did that give her hope? A disaster so great was just too rare, too unlikely: following on all that had happened to her. Just too sad, statistically.

Eyes on the way she walked, she only suddenly became aware that she had come up on the man standing reading in the window light: aware of his galoshes, unbuckled. Then his hound’s-tooth overcoat, collar turned up. His hair, thick black and upstanding but so fine it seemed almost to move in the random airs of the place, like undersea grasses.

That long V of a face, at once gaunt and tender, merry and haunted. There are so few photographs of him, none at all of him as a youth. The one used over and over was the one taken that first day in Berlin: harsh as an interrogation, it made him seem wary and weary and maybe harmed. Smiling though: this smile Kit saw.

Kit nodded to him, smiling too in response. Near him the banner of his seminar, The Reading and Writing of Poetry, still hung, as though he waited here for latecoming customers.

“Are you,” she said, and then rapidly discarded several ways of going on, are you the famous poet, the Soviet poet, Mr. Falin, Professor Falin, Comrade Falin, that guy who you know. “Are you teaching that class?”

He looked at the sign, and nodded.

“It sounds interesting,” she said. “How, I mean, who all can take it?”

“Anyone who loves poetry enough.” One word Kit could always remember him saying was poetry. In his voice the vowels seemed to run or stream over the rocks of the consonants to pour away at the end in one of those double I sounds only Slavs can make.

“How much is that?” she asked.

He laughed, as though, unexpectedly, she had got his joke. “It’s small class,” he said. “That’s all.”

She lowered her eyes momentarily, as though abashed, and saw that the toe of his black rubber boot pointed at a paper oblong half buried in the sawdust. It signaled to her as soon as her eyes fell on it, yes yes here I am, and she bent and picked it up: still fat, still full.

“Oh my God.”

He watched as she slid the bills from within. “Lucky,” he said, smiling.

“It’s mine,” she said. “I lost it here.”

“Oh yes? It would have been more lucky if it was not yours. Yes?”

She laughed in relief, thinking how many had stepped on the envelope, trudging forward as the line moved.

“I’d like to take your course,” she said suddenly.

He looked from her to her money, as though she meant to bribe him. “And what year are you?”