by John Crowley
She had let him say those things, she had let him put her out and had said nothing.
Down the road toward town in the stillness and sun she could see Jackie’s Volkswagen pulled over on the shoulder in a tall tree’s shadow.
8.
It had fallen, it had been dropped, but the effect was nothing like anybody ever said it would be. There had been the sudden universal energy-flash covering the earth, and the great cloud-ball too (in hiding she had seen or known this) but silent: and when she came out she saw that it had changed everything and yet destroyed nothing. Everything that she remembered was gone, all the buildings and the houses and roads and the high-tension wires and telephone poles, the plowed fields and the farms and the people; instead there were only green-blue forests and a living wind that moved their leaves and showed the silver undersides. Still silent. Even the ground had been altered, into low hills and valleys, where before it had been plains.
She went down in wonder into the glens, and the way was easy, though there was no path. I’ll kill you if you tell me there’s a reason for this, she said to Ben, who followed behind her, just out of sight. I’ll kill you if you say you know. Then, as she thought of what she had said, and wanted to unsay it, she saw that in the grass there was an animal, like a cat but not a cat, and it seemed to be having some kind of fit: its muscles tensed and writhing, its wide eyes piteous. When she came closer, though, she saw it was made not of flesh and fur but of grease or clay, and the life in it was caught in this matter, and the eyes were blind. And as she bent to study it in repulsion, she saw Ben beside her turn away from her and go away; and though he still smiled she saw that his flesh was white and wasted, his neck thin as rope, his legs hardly able to support him, and she knew she had been wrong about everything.
Fran was shaking her awake.
“You okay?” Fran asked her. “You okay? You were making this moaning.” Her eyes were piggy without her glasses on and her hair was tangled seaweed. “It was awful.”
For a time Kit only looked up at her. Then she said: “I had a bomb dream.”
“Oh God,” Fran said.
Kit lifted herself to her elbows. The world was real, solid, but also somehow tentative, able to go either way. “What time is it?”
Fran read the time from her big wristwatch, which she wore sleeping, something Kit couldn’t do. It was late. They both had early classes; they had stayed up late talking, passing back and forth their stories; Kit had told about what had become of her that summer, not all of it though. Still filled with the dream-feelings she had felt, of wonder and relief and then awful understanding, she struggled to rise and dress and get ready.
They went out past the dining hall that smelled repellently of eggs and soured milk, and into the bright still day.
“So you never told me,” Fran said. “Are you going to keep on working with him? Falin. Like you were doing.”
“No.”
Fran stopped to light a Camel. “Did you have sex with him?”
“No,” Kit said, after a moment.
“Did you want to?”
“Yes.”
“Did he know you did?”
“Yes. I think.” There was so much now she couldn’t say, would maybe never be able to say, that this hardly seemed a secret at all. “He said it was hard not to. But he said it’s not what he’s for.”
“Not what he’s for?” Fran asked.
Kit shrugged. “It’s what he said.”
“And did he say,” Fran asked, “what he is for?”
“And how ’bout you?” Kit asked. “Did you?”
“Did I what.”
“Have sex. This summer.”
Fran flicked the end of her cigarette with a thumbnail. “Depends on what you mean,” she said. Kit saw that though she looked only at the way ahead, following her big nose, she smiled a little.
They went up the steps of the student union and waited in line for coffee. Fran bought the New York Times and opened it by her cup. “I heard a viola joke,” she said.
“Oh yes?”
“If a guy comes into a bank with a violin case, everybody gets nervous, because they think maybe he’s got a tommy gun in there, and he’s going to take it out and use it.” She studied Kit solemnly as she spoke. “If a guy comes into a bank with a viola case, everybody gets nervous; they think he’s probably got a viola in there, and he might take it out and use it.” And on her face, after a long moment, another small smile dawned. Kit laughed as much to see that as at the joke. Fran shook the pages of the paper, lifted her cup by the body and not the handle, and drank thirstily.
“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, So
viet 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.
“Perhaps because so many ikons, so many churches, were smashed and burned,” he said, “that we made of Pushkin an ikon and a church. He must express our spirit, must stand for us and speak for us. Indeed he has been made even a hero of the Revolution, with mausoleum of his own, though in this no one has believed, not even schoolchildren, not anyway those who can read.”
The gray hadn’t been in his hair before and it was now; it was the same gray as the shiny bland gray suit he wore, what was that stuff, was it sharkskin? Why would he wear that? A soft knit shirt beneath it, buttoned to the neck. Something has happened he had said to her, not surprised or afraid, but changed.
“So hard to make Pushkin hero. You know what our great critic Belinsky said of Evgeny Onegin, that it was encyclopedia of Russian life. We all were taught to say this. Encyclopedia of Russian life. But he is like encyclopedia only in his even-handedness. All things are alike to him; he does not choose one thing over another; the alphabet of his eyes and his ears alone bring things together, this next to that. He is trivial; even his earliest defenders said this, so exasperated with him. Everything interests him, everything delights him. He becomes the Tsar’s soldier and also the Cossack that the soldier kills; he delights in death’s energy and meat pies at a feast, little too salty, then some slim-waisted wineglasses too that remind him of his old love, whom he then must address. He is like his heroine Natalya Pavlovna in Count Nulin…”
He read, and Kit thought she remembered the lines, when he had tried to make her see what Pushkin saw:
Natalya Pavlovna tried to give
The letter all her attention
But soon she was distracted
By an old goat and a mutt
In a fight beneath her window,
And she attended calmly to that;
And three ducks were splashing in a puddle,
And an old woman was crossing the yard
To hang her laundry on the fence.
It looked like it might soon rain…
“This is why Pushkin is our poet,” he said. “Not because he expresses our spirit, d’Roshin spirit: but because he exactly does not. He is everything that Russia, in his age and now in ours, is not: he cares for everything and yet for nothing in particular, everything gladdens him, he approves and does not judge. He was dark man, you know: Negro, in fact. He lived short life that ended in disaster. But he shines brightly; the smile of Pushkin is a white light in our darkness, always.”
In the Castle the television was on over the counter, and when Kit and Jackie came in they could tell that almost everyone there was watching it. The East North Street men were all there, all watching. She slipped in beside Saul, and turned to see the President above them, speaking.
“What is it?” Kit asked.
“Cuba,” Saul said.
The transformation of Cuber into an important strategic base, by the presence of these large, long-range and clearly offensive weapons of sudden mass destruction, constitutes a threat to the peace and security of all the Americas. He had that air he always seemed to Kit to have, that he was somehow only pretending, no matter how earnestly he spoke; as though he knew better, knew how it would all come out. This sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside Soviet soil is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change in the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.
“Not like our missiles in Turkey, huh,” Saul said. “Or Italy. What the hell does he think.”
Kit looked over all the upturned faces, the stu
dents and the others, the two Greek brothers who ran the place, all looking and listening.
We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth—but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced. He said that he was ordering a strict naval quarantine around the island of Cuba, and ships would be stopped and shipments of offensive weapons turned back; he said that there would be continued surveillance of the island, and that if work was found to be going forward on the missile sites, then further actions would be necessary, and that he had ordered the armed forces to be prepared for all eventualities. The United States, he said, would regard a nuclear missile launched from Cuba as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. And then for a moment he turned his pages and gazed out: gazed at us, though of course he couldn’t see us.
The path we have chosen is full of hazards, he said. Many months of sacrifice and self-discipline lie ahead—months in which our patience and our will will be tested. He called upon Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles immediately. He said our goal was not peace at the expense of freedom, but peace and freedom. God willing, he said, that goal would be achieved.
He said Thank you and good night. And after a moment he was gone.
There was a soft swell of voices then in the place. From somewhere came a spectral wail or moan of grief or terror, and people turned in their chairs or on their stools to see who had made it. We had all been so afraid of this, for so long; we had been so sure it would happen, so sure it couldn’t.
“Bastards,” said Max softly. “Sonsa bitches.” Rodger put his hand over Max’s where it lay on the table.
“Gotta remember,” Jackie said. “They’ve been firing off those bombs for twenty years. So far the world’s still here. I mean this might mean war. But it don’t mean we’ll necessarily get hit.”