“Yes,” she said.

“Simply, he loved you.”

“Yes. Maybe.”

“He was one of that kind, it is easy to think, who to those he loved might give all he had, at once, without thought of gain.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes he was. He was one of that kind.”

“Sometimes to give away is the only way to keep.”

“Yes it is.”

“So then it was he who was truly the translator,” said Gavriil.

She nodded. The streetlights and the Neva sparkled in her vision and she pressed the cuffs of her shirt to her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “All along.”

They offered to have Vasili Vasilievich and the black ZIL sedan pick her up the next morning at the Pribaltiyskaya Hotel and take her to the language institute where the conference would begin, but she refused, wanting to make her own way there. And reluctantly Gavriil Viktorovich wrote out the directions for her.

Early then she walked down the wide steps of the hotel and into the morning crowds. The city’s smell was distinct; Kit thought every city had its own, one you recognize when you return to it even if you can’t remember it when you’re away: it’s what makes you know it’s actual, not a notion or a dream, this smell of yeast and mist and drainpipes, warm stone and the exhalations of open windows, unique and indisputable. She carried with her in her bag a copy of Life magazine from 1961, the year Falin left the Soviet Union and came to America. It had occurred to her that here in this country almost no one could know what he looked like, and if she could find it she might bring them the one picture she knew of, the one of him weary and wary in Berlin, smiling, his tie askew and the tiny end of a cigarette in his fingers; and she had found it, this issue amid others in an old bookstore. His lost face.

The subway was different at this hour, herds of people jostling and pushing, the pressure of them at her back creating the sensation of falling headlong down the speeding escalator. By the time she had been packed into a car and the car had moved off with a high whisper, she was no longer sure she was right—the orthography of each stop’s name had to be worked out so quickly—and she was nearly carried away from the one she thought she wanted, had to fight her way off.

She came up into a huge empty public space that seemed to have been abandoned, or to have lost its function somehow and become unclaimed, shelter for squatters, a crowd of vendors selling to the people rushing through to the streets beyond. The unventilated air was heavy. Was she in the wrong place? She tried to stop and look for signs. Every vendor with his little blanket or box or cart seemed to be selling the same goods, the same cigarettes and pens and bottles of soap or scent. Today each one was selling the same little toy, a windup girl on a tin bicycle, who went around in circles on the dirty marble floor while her dog ran leaping at her side. A dozen girls, bicycles, dogs. Somewhere someone was singing, a high, piercing cry.

How had they come to this? A family in a pile in a corner, unspeakable blankets drawn around them, mother dead asleep. A bearded man on a plastic sheet, medals on his coat, held a densely lettered sign. Menia predali, she thought it said: “I was betrayed.” Or was it “devoted”? There was a word, a word Falin had taught her, that meant both. Devoted, betrayed. The crowds went by unseeing, just as the crowds in New York or Mexico City would: as though they passed momentarily through an alternate world that remained invisible to them, only causing their mouths to set and their eyes to fix on some distant goal.

She hadn’t known such places could be in this country. She didn’t know they could be so abandoned, these people, after having been penned up so long, left without anything of what had once sustained them, without even their terrible abnegation at last: abandoned even by silence.

The singer was a boy, standing on a box and clapping to his singing.

A girl squatted by him, little as a pixie, her hair an astonishing black tangle, bent over a stringed instrument that she beat on. Another boy played an upturned plastic bucket with wooden sticks. Amazing how loud they were, you couldn’t pass by them without listening. And Kit saw—she tried to stop, despite the forward press of the crowd, to make sure—that the boy was the same who had taken her hand at the subway the night before, tried to press a rose on her.

Yes the same boy, still in his filthy American shirt, you could see the big blue stars on it banded red and white. The song was one of those radically simple ones that seem not to have been made up but to have always been, she hadn’t ever heard it before but knew just what it would do; he moved like a rapper or a pop star to it, and maybe it was a pop song she didn’t know. He sang out the last note and jumped from his box to go through the crowd with a paper cup. Far away down the great vault two policemen were coming, Kit saw them but the little band saw them first, the girl calling out to the others to go, go. The drummer gathered his bucket and sticks and followed her, calling after the singer.

“Nu davaj zhe,” he said. Come on.

But he went on cheerfully working the crowd, tugging at sleeves and lifting his cup and cajoling, people laughed and shook him off or found a coin. He turned toward Kit, caught her eye and read her look, as though he knew her too.

“Innokenti,” the girl cried. “Innokenti, davaj, davaj!”

He went then, snatching up his box and following, looking back though with a smile even as he vanished, as though to take a bow. His smile. For her alone it seemed: had always seemed.

Then it’s okay, she said or thought. As she had in the protest march that October day when she saw him, when he had showed himself to her, just as he had promised he would. It’s okay.

For a breath I tarry, nor yet disperse apart.

The crowds pushed on, new crowds from a new train, their heels loud in the marble heights, carrying Kit on. They went out into the day, she and the people on their journeys, dispersing into the harmed city. Buses jam-packed with people, and the earth below them jam-packed too she thought, and the sky above them.

Of course they hadn’t been abandoned. They couldn’t be. They couldn’t be left all alone or there would be neither justice nor order anywhere, not even the hope of it. They couldn’t always know that he was near, of course, of course you couldn’t know, whatever else you might be sure of. You might not know even if he came close to you, passed right by you, even if he touched you. Probably you wouldn’t. And yet you might for a moment think it’s okay.

She had come to the edge of the wide street, whose name she couldn’t find. She looked at her instructions, at the day. She had that unnerving experience that travelers sometimes have, of momentarily forgetting what city this is, what continent. She turned left, then changed her mind and went right. A large black car that had been creeping along the street by her now stopped. Vasili Vasilievich put his head out the window, waved to her, nu davaj, and reached around to open the back door for her.

The institute wasn’t far, but probably Gavriil Viktorovich was right, she would have not found it, which is what fat-necked Vasili was apparently explaining to her as he took his rights and lefts. Then here it was, another unmodern modern building seeming to be falling apart before having been finished, and he let her out. Going up the stairs just ahead of her were a group from her dinner the night before, and they saw her and came to her. “Davaj, davaj,” they said, smiling, and took both her arms like schoolgirls, talking rapidly and bringing her within the building, where others she had met turned to greet her.

She was hurried through the crowd of arriving conferees to the wide double doors of an auditorium, which they pushed open to let her through. It was packed, and as she came in people turned in their chairs to see her, people seemed to be telling one another who she was. Could it really be she they had come to see, and why? She wanted to stop, to resist, to run away and hide; she knew she bore nothing for them, nothing but a thirty-year-old magazine: nothing really that she could say, and even that little she couldn’t say in their tongue, in his. But Gavriil Viktorovich at the green-draped table on the platform stood up, and lifted his hand to her; and another ancient man arose from his seat as she passed, took her hand, and said, “Spasibo. Thank you. Thank you for coming so far.”