“Oh God,” she said. “Speaking of the bomb.” She folded over the page and scanned it. “Here’s Ken Keating saying the Russians are putting missiles in Cuba.”

“Who’s Ken Keating?”

“He’s our senator. I mean New York’s. He says they may have MRBMs in Cuba. These names, how can they call them BMs, it’s so bad.”

“What are they?”

“Medium-range ballistic missiles.”

“With bombs?”

“He doesn’t say that. He says they could have. And they could reach as far as Washington and Indianapolis. He says.”

She lifted her eyes to Kit. “We’d lose Indianapolis,” she said.

Kit gathered her books. “I’ve got to go. So do you.”

“This is such shit,” Fran said with sudden vehemence, folding up the paper furiously, and Kit couldn’t tell what the words were directed at.

When she went to the Castle later she found them reading the same paper, Max and Saul and Rodger, drinking coffee too except for Saul, who drank only water.

“And how does Keating come to know this?” Saul asked, one of those questions he asked because he already had the answer. “Someone is feeding him this stuff, because the public has to know it. We have to know that those pesky Cubans have Soviet missiles pointed at us. So when the strike against Cuba comes we won’t be shocked.”

“But do they have the missiles?” Max asked. “That’s the sixty-four-dollar question.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Saul said. “Kennedy doesn’t know. He’s making a case. That’s all.”

“It matters,” Rodger said. “It matters if they stomp on Cuba and missiles get fired. That’s the end.”

“How can they find out if they have them?” Kit asked. “They hide them, don’t they?”

“Spy planes,” Saul said. “U-2s.”

“Cratology,” said Max, and everyone looked at him. “Hey, their word,” he said. “It means being able to tell what’s coming out of the hold of a ship by the shape and size of the crate. Cratology.”

“Okay,” Saul said. “Here’s what Dorticos said yesterday at the UN.” He looked at Kit: “He’s President of Cuba.” He read: “If we are attacked, we will defend ourselves. I repeat, we have sufficient means with which to defend ourselves; we have, indeed, our inevitable weapons, the weapons we would have preferred not to acquire and which we do not wish to employ.”

“Man,” Max said. “That sounds like a warning.”

“That sounds like a threat,” Rodger said.

“What does that mean?” Kit said. “Inevitable weapons?”

“Inescapable, unavoidable,” said Max.

“Maybe a mistranslation,” Saul said. “Maybe he meant something else.”

“Ultimate,” said Rodger. “The end.”

All the reconnaissance flights over the island of Cuba had in fact shown nothing so far, and had been given up out of fear that a plane might be shot down, causing a diplomatic incident. It was agents on the ground who reported the long trailer trucks bearing tarpaulin-covered cargoes moving through the town of San Cristóbal in the west: trailers so long that they couldn’t negotiate the streets of the little town, and knocked down telegraph poles and chipped the walls of tabernas as they ground around corners. Something was going on, the agents said: from San Cristóbal to Palacios and up to Consolación del Norte there was activity, Soviet military movements, something big. The CIA dismissed these reports, but the Secretary of Defense pondered them, and brought them to President Kennedy; and the President ordered U-2 surveillance to begin.

The weather over the Midwest was preternaturally clear, but it was the season of autumn storms in the Caribbean. Not until October 13 was the sky cloudless enough for a successful overflight of the San Cristóbal triangle; the resulting photographs showed a Gods’-eye view of the newly stripped earth of San Cristóbal, and there, the photo intelligence officer said, were the trailers and their cargoes. How do you know this is a medium-range ballistic missile? the President asked. (He had recently had the office he sat in equipped with recording devices; the switches were in the kneehole of his desk, and he had turned them on; years later we would listen to him thinking.)

The length, sir, the intelligence officer answered.

The what? The length?

The length of it. Yes.

Is this ready to be fired?

No, sir.

How long have we got? We can’t tell, I take it.

No one could say. They said that it could be ready within weeks, or sooner, or might be ready to be armed now. There was also no way yet to know if there were nuclear warheads already present on the island. The President told his advisers they should be prepared to take out the San Cristóbal site at any time; the missiles couldn’t be permitted and he saw no other options.

Within days it was learned that there were several sites on the island, and on some of them intermediate-range missiles capable of reaching the missile silos of the Midwest were detected. The President’s military advisers now said that only a full-scale strike and an invasion of the island would remove the threat.

The first shipment of Soviet nuclear armaments had in fact already arrived and been unloaded at Mariel, one-megaton warheads for the R-12 medium-range missiles, twelve-kiloton bombs for the Il-28 bombers, and smaller warheads for the cruise missiles. And at that moment the Soviet ship Aleksandrovsk was nearing Cuba, carrying nuclear warheads for the IRBMS.

The world was so beautiful that autumn in the north; it had never seemed so beautiful. Kit had learned the term pathetic fallacy in her Romantic Poetry class—the projection of the poet’s feelings on to insensible nature, the weather or the scenery; nature in poetry expressing human feeling. This weather was the opposite, it was profoundly, wholly indifferent, unconscious, asleep past sleep in its own perfections: as though this time it would last forever, as it never had before.

Kit stayed outdoors as much as she could, not wanting to learn that Milton Bluhdorn had tried to reach her; she sat on the sun-warmed benches of the old college, and the air smelled of fruits that weren’t there, apples and pears and grapes, and she felt the feeling soul drawn out of her into it. It was painful and terribly sad and at the same time she felt an unrefusable delight. She wasn’t eating very much in those days, unable to go into the roar and the smell of the dining room or touch the bland and nameless foods they heaped on her plate, but she couldn’t afford to buy much more than candies and saltines and coffee, and wouldn’t let Jackie buy dinners for her. It didn’t matter. Not eating made the sweetness more intense, the pain and sadness too: made them sweet in her mouth like her own sweet spit.

On the 22nd of October she saw in the campus paper that Falin would be speaking in the auditorium of the Slavic Languages Department about Pushkin, and her heart shrank inside her.

“Acourse you can go,” Jackie said. “What do you think, they’re going to give you the third degree over some public event?”

“I’m afraid,” Kit said.

“They’ve forgotten all that,” he said. “I know it.”

“Will you come?”

“Sure. I like Pushkin. Didn’t he write Crime and Punishment?”

There were fewer people in the auditorium than Kit would have thought. She had hoped to slip in a little late into a masking crowd, but there were plenty of empty seats in the tall lecture theater and they were more than a little late. Falin looked up from his papers when they bent down their squeaking seats, and his eyes were wise to them; his smile was for her.

He spoke about Pushkin as she had heard him speak, in her classes and in the nights of last summer; he read the lines he chose in his honey-thick singing Russian voice, and she thought her heart would split. The poems he read from were the ones he had quoted for her: Count Nulin and Feast in Time of Plague and Evgeny Onegin.