What door, what window was this she felt open within her? God how small it was, how deep.

He came back into the room.

“I have nothing to give you,” he said. “No food, no drink.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Come, sit.”

But she had grown shy, afraid of him or for him, and turned away. The great television in the corner like a bored beast: she went to it and pressed the large button that must mean On, and it came to life. A gray western, one she recognized: she didn’t remember at first what story it told, only the huge sky, the horsemen.

“Where are you going?” she said, though she had promised herself she wouldn’t. “If you go.”

“If I go? To the wind’s twelve quarters.”

“Can’t you say?”

“John Gwayne,” he said. He pointed to the television. “Do you know?”

“Yes,” she said. “I know.”

“A big man, always in the right.”

“Yes.” Once in the summer she had told him what she had heard or read somewhere was a motto of the Texas Rangers: A little man will always beat a big man, if the little man’s in the right and keeps on a-comin’.

She had begun to shiver, small flutters crossing her breastbone and her shoulders. He put his arm around her.

“What’s going to happen,” she whispered. “What’s going to happen to us.”

He said nothing for a time; she felt his breath taken, released. There could be only one thing she meant by what she said.

“Well,” he said. “Now is near dawn in Moscow. Nikita Sergeyevich has slept in his office in his clothes; he does not want to be caught in his nightclothes if U.S. has decided on war. He did not sleep well.”

Kit turned further into his arms and closed her eyes.

“There is new letter from Dr. Castro in Cuba,” Falin said. “He is angry and afraid. From all that he has learned he knows that U.S. will attack Cuba in two, three days. Why does Soviet Union not announce that missiles on the island will be fired at U.S. if Cuba is invaded? So far Nikita Sergeyevich has not even stated that such missiles are present in Cuba. Why not?

“Well. Nikita Sergeyevich will have tea and blinis and think about these things. Cuba cannot be allowed to be destroyed. Politburo thinks if U.S. invades Cuba, Soviet Union should immediately move on West Berlin, but Gensek—I mean Nikita Sergeyevitch, General Secretary—does not see what Berlin has to do with anything.”

He bent back his head, looking up, as though looking farther. “By his wristwatch he sees that now it is midnight in America, in Washington. Dawn has not yet reached Ukraine. All West still asleep; because the world is round, and turns its face by hours to the sun. Nikita Sergeyevich, when he thinks of this, remembers always the schoolroom where first he learned of it, and his teacher there, and the smell of the stove, and how hard it was to understand this, and believe it.”

“What will he do?” she asked.

He shrugged a slow shrug, shook his head, held out his hand toward the television, as though from it alone could come the future. “Two great ones,” he said. “And neither in the right.”

“They said it’ll be long,” Kit said. “Months of hardship and danger. The President said.”

He shook his head. “No. Will come quickly now.”

She felt again the height of cold air above them, the stratosphere; the rocket’s arc through it, arc-en-ciel.

“Tell me,” he said. “If you could make it stop, then would you?”

“Of course,” she said. “Of course I would.”

“If to stop it meant that you would yourself not survive?”

She pulled herself away to look at him, to see why he asked. “Well you’d have to,” she said. “You couldn’t refuse.”

“Ah well. You would have to. Is not the same as would you. Wouldn’t you be afraid, wouldn’t the loss be too great to think of?”

“You wouldn’t think,” she said. She hoped she wouldn’t; hoped she would not be given time to think. “It would be like being on a sinking ship, the Titanic. You’d have to let the women and children go first. Automatically. You’d have to go down with the ship, if you were the captain.”

“You would. But what if no one would know of your sacrifice. If no one knows of my sacrifice, no one could know it was not made. Better to live, no? Better to live than die.”

“But everybody dies.” She couldn’t tell what side he wanted her to take, what he wanted to hear her say.

“Perhaps trust to chance,” he said. “It has not yet happened. Perhaps once again it will not. We live in danger but are never destroyed. Perhaps still never.” She could see in the silver light of the television that his brow glowed with sweat in the cold room. “I mean, so you might think. You might think, What if my sacrifice is not necessary? What if danger will pass anyway? Then every day that did pass, and the destruction did not come, you would think, Aha: I was right, how foolish I was to think of acting; I need not be hero, and I am still alive here.”

“That sounds like hell. Like…damnation. Waiting. After your one chance has gone by.”

He said nothing for a time. A great restlessness seemed to be in him, in his breathing, a vortex inside his still exterior.

“And if,” he said then. “If you loved someone, who must take such action, make such sacrifice. What then? Would you let them go?”

“Wives in war do.”

“Not willingly. Not always.”

“My mother didn’t,” Kit said. “She didn’t. She begged my father not to go. She had a baby son when he went down to enlist. She stood crying on the doorstep with the baby and calling after him. So she says.” Falin arose, as she spoke, from beside her, and stood at the window looking out; had he even heard her? “Anyway, he got stationed in Washington, about six blocks from their apartment.”

“Hardest thing,” he said, not to her. “Is not suffering. Much harder is to remember what you did to avoid suffering. What you were willing to do. This cannot be erased.”

She lowered her eyes. On the television John Wayne brought home the white girl who had been taken by the Indians, brought her home to her mother in the bare bleak house on the desert. And turned away. When she and Ben had watched it years ago she thought he would kill the girl when he found her in her buckskins and feathers. He didn’t do that but he couldn’t stay there either. He turned away, turned to go, taller than any human, tall enough to walk on in that place, against that sky.

“Kyt.” He still faced the window and the dark. “Do you have the translations we made, the poems of this summer?”

“Yes. All of them.”

“What do you think, are they poems in English?”

“I don’t know. I hope. I think.”

“So much undone,” he said. “So much that should be done.”

“What we did,” Kit said. “Working on your poems. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It was harder than I thought anything could be.”

“And yet you did it.”

“Yes. It was wonderful. It was…it was like water.”

He seemed to hear her then clearly, and turned to her. “Now you will write your own poems,” he said. “And that will be harder still, and more wonderful still.”

On the television their station had run out, and showed only the American flag flying, and the national anthem began, like a burst of cannon. An awful weariness seemed to be filling her up, from her toes and fingertips inward to her heart. He sat again by her on the couch; he touched her throat, where she held her own hand. “What is it?” he asked.

“It hurts,” she said. “It hurts a lot. I don’t know why.”

“Ill?”

“I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like that, like a cold. I feel…like I’ve been crying for a long time.”

“Perhaps you have.”

“I’m so sleepy.”

“Yes.” He took her hands and lifted her from the couch; she put her arms around him, her cheek on his shoulder, because she was tired of refusing to. She pressed her lips to his throat and the vein that beat along it. She would make him not turn away. But he didn’t turn away. After a time he led her to the small room, and she wouldn’t lie there alone, or release him at all: she drew him down beside her.