What even can I write?

“Should I look among the living or the dead
If I’m searching for you.”
— Son Lux, “Lanterns Lit (Among the Living)”

*

Elena Mikhailovna wanted Kirill, her son, to work for the government as a “chinovnik,” a clerk.

”What does a clerk do?” I asked.

“A clerk registers. See here, a person is born: the clerk registers it. A person gets married: they register it. A person dies. Register.”

“A person takes a step,” said Kirill, “the clerk registers it.”

I laughed.

Elena Mikhailovna frowned.

I’d been living with her and Kirill in Moscow for about two months.

She was keen to keep her son out of the Army. Which, fine. I got that.

As a host mother, I found her wanting, and in fact, I would move out soon, to the foreigners’ dormitory behind the University.

That was almost twenty years ago.

*

The following year, I was back in the States, flashing my ID card to C. Maxwell, the security guard in my Columbia dorm.

One night, there was a skirmish, some flaunting of rules on his watch.

“That’s just one more thing I have to write in my book,” he said. “So I look away.”

*

The church bells at twelve o’clock, and at six.

The expressway that Robert Moses cut into the earth.

Ash trees on Windsor Place going gold and dropping their leaves at the same time.

Stoops with cairns of books, and other offerings, on the streets that run into the Park.

Streets lined with brownstones.

Brownstones not exempt from the brush of rats.

A child’s singsong voice — “Was it my birthday, Mama? Or was it nothing?”

I write it down.

*

The first time I saw a teacher cry was in November 1995, when Mr. Martin read the assassinated Yitzhak Rabin’s obituary to my fifth grade class.

I learned the word, “obituary,” then.

The things Bill Beutel talked about on Eyewitness News at six o’clock, and eleven. The conflicts, the suffering. These things inched into focus.

*

“If you don’t know — say, ‘I don’t know, I’ll find out.’”

Ilya tried to drill this principle into the head of everyone we hired to work at the bike shop. Without success.

“In school we’re taught to hazard a guess,” I said. "Make up an answer that sounds plausible."

He couldn’t fathom this. It’s possible he cut so many classes, he escaped indoctrination.

*

I don’t know the answer.

I don’t even know what question to ask.