“I should not touch you,” he said. “I have no right. You so clean and unsoiled.”

No: she held him, took his face in her hands. She wondered if he could really believe it was so, that there was anyone anywhere unsoiled; or if he meant to warn her or ask her. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “Take me.”

“Ah no.”

“I will. Anywhere.”

“Everywhere is here.”

His arms seemed enormous. The heater in the far room boomed softly, igniting. The window in its wooden frame spoke a little note. The gray cat on the rug, indifferent, couldn’t keep its eyes open.

“I don’t really know anything,” she said. “About…I never found out.”

“There is not anything,” he said. “Everything is known.”

It wasn’t so, that everything was known; she was sure of that. But with him now it was plain what they should do, that they shouldn’t refuse anymore. She didn’t know anything but there was nothing now she had to guess at or decide about, to stop at or shrink from. She found that out, there, then: that you didn’t always have to dare yourself, or make yourself; “yourself” could just be carried along, marveling, willing nothing, and who could have guessed that? It was the last thing she would have expected. She laughed, and he asked her why, but she knew she didn’t need to answer, that he only asked because lovers do, just to hear her speak.

“You laugh and cry at once,” he said

“No,” she said, “I don’t. No that’s silly. No one can. They just say that.”

“You do, now.”

“Well,” she said. “Okay then.”

It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair: that with him she moved from wonder, and then knowledge, to those astonishing tears and cryings-out without a name that come when everything inside is breached; and then to other things, to plain belonging and necessity, a necessity as profound and permanent and easily slaked as thirst. And then they couldn’t do without each other; and that was fearful and awesome, but there was no reversing it, no matter what. The last stars paled, the casement window opened on the cold dawn; they went out, they went on. She got lost, and went on alone; then she was found, and lost, and found again; they went on, they grew old, they died together. That’s what it seemed like.

And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened. So it had to be that there was really nothing to remember, because if there were, it certainly couldn’t be all forgotten. All she remembered with distinctness was that she slept that night in his bed, and that she awoke different. Alone. The gray cat atop her, the steady roar of its purring and the kneading of its paws on the quilt, its little cross-eyed face poised just an inch from her own to smell her sleeping breath. Nothing more.

She saw him in the next room on the phone, the Princess, its dial alight in the dark corner. He was dressed, and wearing his overcoat.

She heard him say words in Russian, and she seemed to understand them, but not their import. She heard him say Da. Da. Da.

Or she dreamed that, having gone to sleep again. Then he was standing by the bed, looking down on her.

“You slept,” he said. He said it as though she had done what she should, as though he were happy for her.

She struggled to stand up. “You’re going? Now?”

“I made offer,” he said. “Now offer has been accepted.” He put his hands in his big pockets. “I had hoped I could bring you back, to University. Was my intention. Now I cannot. I must go.”

“No,” she said.

“Stay here,” he said. “Is not long till morning. Then call your friends. Ask to come and pick you up. Yes?”

“No,” she said. “Don’t go.”

“I must.” He smiled, as though to remind her of what she had said, before midnight, before she slept. “If I must I must, is it not so?”

“No. No don’t.” There was a noise around them, a huge noise like a jet airplane’s settling on a runway, and she realized what it was: wind.

“Kyt,” he said. He sat by her. “Listen. Tomorrow, later on, they may say they know what became of me, what happened, but they will be wrong. Because an act—any act—may be one thing in one world and something else in another world, a thing that is not like it but has its shape, that rhymes with it. A commonplace thing, accident or loss, it may mean nothing here and everything there…”

“There’s only one world.”

“Yes. Yes there is. Only one.” He stood. He had shed the uncertain restlessness that had afflicted him before, and it made her afraid, for him or herself. When he returned to the farther room she got up too, weak as water, pulling on her shoes, and followed him.

“Are you,” she said, unable to believe she could guess this, say this aloud, “are you going back?”

“Back,” he said. “No. On. I am going on.” He took from the table his black case of imitation leather, and filled it with papers, yellow copy paper, typewritten: his poems in Russian. Then he stopped, and lifted his eyes, the lamps of his eyes, to her. “And do you know. Strangest thing of all in this mirrorland. I can only go because you, Kit, my dear, my love, you want me to stay.”

Tears sprang to her eyes and she put her hands to her mouth. When he came closer she pressed herself to him, to keep him or stop him. He took her shoulders in his hands so that he could see her face. “I can tell you now. The world, this world, is to go on; it will not end. That is certain now, this day, this morning. No bomb will fall. You will have a life that you must live, a long one it might be. Instead of closing now, it opens, do you see? So you must learn to speak, Kyt. You must find ways to speak.”

“I could with you. Without you I can’t.”

“You can, for you must. Oh my dear love, don’t you see. You have to say. For them, for him. For my sake too.” He held her again, his cheek pressed to hers, and he spoke softly in Russian; she heard her own name, and a diminutive of it, and other words she knew, and then words she didn’t know and would never remember.

“I must go.”

She released him, having no choice; without haste he picked up his case, and took from his pocket a shiny key on a length of gray twine; he looked at her and seemed to have passed away already, to be seeing her clearly but from a great distance.

At the door he turned, as though there were a thing left to say that he had not yet said. “You will see me soon, Kyt. I promise this.”

He went out.

She knew, by now, what it is when someone walks away or goes away saying they’ll return, how you can know that they won’t, that they are already lost to you even in setting out. She knew it and she couldn’t go after him, she couldn’t cry out or call him back. The gray cat came around her legs and purred and stroked her in its soft selfish ignorance. She heard the car start, and its lights colored the yard she could see through the windows; the light swayed, diminished; the sound diminished.

She took her coat, went out into the yard. The wind was increasing, an autumn storm come, or passing overhead. The road was entirely dark, only the occluded moon outlining it, and she began to walk along it, and then to run, knowing how far ahead he was, how far behind she was, but running anyway. The tall roadside trees thrashed their limbs and lost their leaves in great cascades.

The main road was dark and empty too. The way east, the way west. She stood, breathing hard. Then down the straight road far away she saw two headlights coming toward the place where she stood. As she watched they seemed to come on with awful, impossible speed, the lights of a huge vehicle, roaring. No, the lights weren’t one vehicle but two motorcycles, two that had drifted apart as they came on, fooling her. Still her heart raced. They were unbearably loud. They passed by her, one, then the other, both black, and went on down the straight road.