13.

Four days later Christa Malone flew away, from a different city than she had come to: burdened with gifts, books in a language she might now again try to learn to read, honey, photographs in awful Kodachrome and fax numbers and a little wooden doll of Gorbachev, inside him Brezhnev, inside him Stalin, inside him Lenin, inside him nothing. Forgiven for what she had done or not done; nothing to forgive, of course, nothing. And as she ascended, the city was hammered gold and gold enameling, the setting sun glancing off the river and the rainwater in the squares. One swath of strange cloud, all of a piece, stretched like a pelt of crimson lamb’s wool over the Gulf of Finland. Near it hung a burnished sliver of moon, like a wedding ring worn so long it was almost worn through, like her own. The Aeroflot turned away to the west, and as it went, it lifted the sun back up over the horizon, as though making its way back into the day before, beating into the past.

“We came very close, you know,” Kit’s father told her. “We came within minutes—some people say minutes. Of course we weren’t told that then, how close it was. You want a drink?”

“No, thanks, Dad.”

She had made her return ticket for Washington, D.C., so she could visit him; she did it whenever she could, traveling down by train from conferences in New York, driving up from home during school vacations. He wouldn’t move from the old apartment.

“How we avoided it is a mystery to me. Let me tell you something. There was a Russian colonel, Oleg Penkovsky, who was a high-level American spy in Moscow, and at the tensest moment of this thing he got arrested. The Americans had given him telephone codes to be used only in the greatest emergency. One code would mean that he’d been arrested; the other code meant that a Russian attack on the U.S. was about to happen. Apparently Penkovsky used the wrong code. So the CIA had this warning of a Soviet attack. And what did they do? They didn’t do anything. They thought it was a mistake, apparently. Anyway they ignored it; they didn’t even tell the President.”

On the windowsill he had arranged all the little Russian leaders she’d brought him, in order by size, little to big, past to present.

“Intelligence services are famous for ignoring the wrong information,” he said. “It’s a signal-to-noise ratio problem: too much coming in through the ether. Stalin ignored warnings that Hitler was going to attack; we missed Pearl Harbor. But this time—this time they made the right guess; this time the coin flipped right side up. No reason I can see.”

He sat, carefully, in the big armchair where no one ever sat but him, and crossed his slippered feet. “So what did you learn?” he asked. “Did he have something to do with it? Falin?”

“I didn’t learn anything. Nothing. They wanted to learn what I know. Which is nothing too.”

“Well what do they think happened? What had they been thinking?”

“They think maybe he was killed by the CIA or the FBI.”

“Why?”

“They don’t know why. I guess they can accept not knowing; they think there are secret reasons for lots of things that can never be known.”

He pondered, as though trying to decide if this was true, or made sense, though Kit didn’t suppose that was really what he was thinking. Then he said: “And you? Do you think that’s what happened?”

“I used to. I used to think it must have been something like that.”

“Now?”

“Now,” she said: and she thought. She thought of Falin, and the child with his name singing in the naked hall in St. Petersburg. She thought of Gavriil Viktorovich holding Falin’s poem, in tears in his little apartment. She thought of Ben, choosing to fight for the right, believing that one power was right, the other wrong. “I think that back then, when he came to this country, there was a struggle going on between the angels of the nations, his and ours; and that in their anger and their fear, those angels came to destroy the world, anyway the parts of it that they were supposed to be watching over—and everything in between too…”

“The angels of the nations,” George said blankly.

“They should have been keeping us from harm, and maybe that was what they thought they were doing, each in its own way. But the power they had together, the power put in our own hands, was too much, and in the end they…they let it go. Mutual assured destruction.”

“But,” George said.

“But no, of course it didn’t happen,” Kit said, and she rose up and went to the window, as though to release her thought or her soul that way. “It didn’t, it should have but it didn’t. Because the lesser angel of one nation interceded. On our behalf. He made an offer; he offered himself.”

“The lesser angel,” George said. “The lesser angel.”

She turned to her father, and his face wasn’t sarcastic or mocking but only intent and listening; and she thought, How do I dare to tell this, how do I dare imagine it to be so, imagine believing it?

“The lesser angel,” she said. “Every nation has one: an angel who is all that the greater angel isn’t. Who can weep if the nation’s angel can’t, or laugh if it never does; who is small and weak and powerless, like us. Except this once. Because the lesser angel could say: Take this as a sop to your anger. And it worked: for just a minute they were distracted, the two big ones, and thought about this, took time to consider it—and they accepted. They took what the lesser angel offered. And in that time the big moment went by. The agreement was reached. The ships stopped. The bombers went home.”

“And what was it that was offered?” George asked. “Something mighty nice.”

“It didn’t have to be much. It wasn’t much. It was only the thing most precious to him. What would destroy him to lose. His soul.”

“They have souls?”

“His self. His life.” A sheaf of papers, yellow American copy paper, the rough uneven lines of Russian words typed on the Undervud. “They couldn’t refuse that.”

“They couldn’t.”

“They couldn’t. They can’t. It’s how they are.”

He was regarding her with that smile of complicity or amazement with which he had looked on her for decades, for all her life, though it had been a long time since she’d seen it. Love and wonder was what it meant, she knew now: love for her, wonder at her.

But it was true. The disaster we were all implicated in—all of us who should have known better and spoken out, all of us who were foolish and blind and didn’t do what we should have done, and who knew it too, and still did nothing, only waited in what we convinced ourselves was helplessness for it to happen, almost as though it had already happened—well it didn’t happen. The final logic of this century, this century that believed in logic and history and necessity, the final spasm so long and well prepared: it didn’t happen, and now seemed likely never to happen. You couldn’t tell, of course, and there were plenty of other things that could and did happen—she thought of Ben—but not that one, the worst one. And there ought to be someone to thank, someone to whom to be grateful.

“Well I don’t know,” her father said. “It doesn’t seem like enough. Their big angel lost, you know: it was a major defeat.” He indicated the row of wooden leaders with his thumb. “Khrushchev did the right thing, but we basically de-pantsed him, cost him his job, which in retrospect was maybe not as smart as we thought. So I mean—wouldn’t there have to be something additional paid in return? Something—what’s the word here, something more exacted? In return for their backing down?”