"Now you must understand that in those years we all desired invisibility..." says Gavriil Victorovich, and he begins to lead Kit into a past where nothing is more important than not being noticed and where Falin is safe because he has no fear so those who hunt cannot sense his difference. The poet's innocence was an armor of sorts, more perfect than guile.
That explained, slowly and carefully, the Russian asks her what her poem, the one she could not recite, was about.
Kit says it was about her brother, her brother come home from the army.
And the story drops back into Kit's—Christa's—past.
Because they moved so often for their father's work, the girl and her older brother were closer than most siblings, and she never understood her classmates' assumption that older brothers were supposed to be oppressive and disliked, just as younger brothers were supposed to be pests and disliked.
The children never quite knew what their father did. He made jokes about computers, collected cartoons about computers, and said he was building a network but that none of it had been connected. They spent eight months or a year here and another there, and always travelled on, never settling in one place long enough for Christa to remember much about any one place, other than the occasional vivid scene, like something seen but not experienced.
Rather than places, the family shared the ritual of moving: The household gods taken out and set in place in their proper order. It fell to the children to do the unpacking of the encyclopedia and the placing of it in its own squat, brown bookcase. The bits of alphabet on the spine of the books were places to Christa, and she and her brother played an elaborate game, with stories, maps, and models.
The siblings assumed their parents paid it no mind. Years later Christa was twice surprised. One, to find her mother had saved a great deal of what her children had done, and two, to find how shoddy it all looked. It had been so wonderful and now the great tale was nothing but scraps of paper and cardboard covered with work in colored pencils.
Came the summer before Christa was to go to a Catholic high school and she was required to make an insect collection. She didn't dislike insects particularly: She avoided them. Things didn't go well until Ben, her older brother, began to take her out hunting in the morning and the evening. Then she went at things with enthusiasm, basking in the sunshine of his company.
By the end of that summer she was physically a woman, but she had not yet looked outside her family and become interested in boys. Ben held her attention, and she puzzled over his dates, what he thought, and what he did, but her older brother was growing away from his family. Finally came the day when he told her—practicing to tell his parents—that he had decided to join the army, rather than go straight to college.
Despite Christa's dismay and tears, and whatever his parents and his priest may have said, Ben rode his black bike to the recruiting office and swore to serve his country. Then, bewildering his sister, who had not been able to listen, he came home for a month's leave. Not even the offer to teach her how to drive during their last month together consoled her: Christa behaved badly and didn't know how to stop.
Her beloved older brother's first homecoming is what the poem, recreated in her college room on Ben's old typewriter, is about. Hidden in it is a secret for her alone, that it hides Ben's name. Kit takes the typed copy and leaves it in Falin's faculty mailbox with a note. When she comes back, she finds she has acquired a roommate. It is an awkward moment for Kit, who has never been close to any girl, and who does not wish to explain why she is starting college a semester late.
Fran has no such compunctions.
(to be continued)