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The Summer Garden
Paullina Simons
A novel tracing the enduring power of love and commitment against the forces of war and the equally dangerous forces of keeping the peaceFrom the bestselling author of The Girl in Times Square, comes the magnificent conclusion to the saga that was set in motion when Tatiana fell in love with her Red Army officer, Alexander Belov, in wartime Leningrad in 1941.Tatiana and Alexander have since suffered the worst the twentieth century had to offer. After years of separation, they are miraculously reunited in America, the land of their dreams. They have a beautiful son, Anthony. They have proved to each other that their love is greater than the vast evil of the world. But though they are only in their twenties, in their hearts they are old, and they are strangers. In the climate of fear and mistrust of the Cold War, dark forces are at work in the US that threaten their life and their family. Can they be happy? Or will the ghosts of yesterday reach out to blight even the destiny of their firstborn son?Epic in scope, masterfully told, The Summer Garden is a novel of unique and devastating emotional power that spans two thirds of the twentieth century, and three continents.


PAULLINA SIMONS
THE SUMMER
GARDEN





Copyright (#ulink_4cb7ceaf-087c-5f02-82b4-316c32c65bd7)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006
Copyright © Paullina Simons 2005
Besame Mucho Written by Consuelo Velasquez © 1941 & 1943 P.H.A.M., Mexico Latin-American Music Pub. Co. Ltd, London. Used by permission
Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007162499
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007390816
Version: 2017-09-25

Dedication (#ulink_75e4f06d-7338-5f64-b19b-23987dc4d160)
For Kevin, my own mystic guide

Epigraph (#ulink_2f786a2e-4004-598f-b307-82ad1b54c75d)
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst …For there, they that carried us awaycaptive required of us a song,And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,Sing us one of the songs of Zion.How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?Psalm 137
The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.The Song of Solomon

Contents
Cover (#u33c097dd-1b6e-52fc-b840-97aaa0fc9439)
Title Page (#udac6243d-5c8f-59e8-9788-c0b5f12119cb)
Copyright (#ulink_ca59dec5-b5d4-5486-8fc7-0890e20ac1b3)
Dedication (#ulink_1611f9b2-3d61-5952-97cf-23c1b886d264)
Epigraph (#ulink_962b7d8d-0e59-5ff1-8fee-960a9f9e3bff)
Book One: The Land of Lupine and Lotus (#ulink_62bdafe1-eccb-5651-8a5b-067590090cb0)
Chapter One: Deer Isle, 1946 (#ulink_89cf5a69-da2d-5eb2-aa9b-c6dbf61356c0)
Chapter Two: Coconut Grove, 1947 (#ulink_1edb484a-ce0a-5276-929a-dea231c49c65)
Chapter Three: Paradise Valley, 1947 (#ulink_5513456d-aab9-51ef-a9d1-5197dd370c9b)
Chapter Four: Vianza, 1947 (#ulink_c00d8ff0-bd68-59fd-893e-b53f59f6f164)
Chapter Five: Bethel Island, 1948 (#ulink_2f895ffb-f5dc-553e-bcad-08567a829488)
Chapter Six: Jane Barrington, 1948 (#ulink_72658d0b-a810-563a-b3c8-d7ac5eb4bdf5)
First Interlude: Saika Kantorova, 1938 (#litres_trial_promo)
Pasha (#litres_trial_promo)
Book Two: Ithaca (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven: Conjugal Compromises (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight: The House that Balkman Built (#litres_trial_promo)
Second Interlude: The Queen of Spades (#litres_trial_promo)
Cousin Marina (#litres_trial_promo)
Book Three: Dissonance (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine: The Five-Year Plan (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten: Blockade Girl (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven: Blue Christmas (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve: Gone Astray (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen: The Summer Garden (#litres_trial_promo)
Book Four: Moon Lai (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen: The Man on the Moon (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen: The Queen of Lake Ilmen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen: In the Heart of Vietnam (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen: Kings and Heroes (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen: Crossroads (#litres_trial_promo)
Coda (#litres_trial_promo)
One (#litres_trial_promo)
Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

BOOK ONE THE LAND OF LUPINE AND LOTUS (#ulink_ac8cfaa4-ccdb-57a2-acb4-9ee7c970872f)
The Lotos blooms below the barren peakThe Lotos blows by every winding creek …Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an enqual mind,In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclinedOn the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_0d23cd8e-1cc7-5782-bf17-66deb9c5d104)
Deer Isle, 1946 (#ulink_0d23cd8e-1cc7-5782-bf17-66deb9c5d104)
The Carapace
Carapace n. a thick hard case or shell made of bone or chitin that covers part of the body of an animal such as a lobster.
Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at the end of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young woman dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling hands, sat on a bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.
By her side was a small boy, also eating ice cream, his a chocolate. They were casually chatting; the ice cream was melting faster than the mother could eat it. The boy was listening as she sang “Shine Shine My Star” to him, a Russian song, trying to teach him the words, and he, teasing her, mangled the verses. They were watching for the lobster boats coming back. She usually heard the seagulls squabbling before she saw the boats themselves.
There was the smallest breeze, and her summer hair moved slightly about her face. Wisps of it had gotten out of her long thick braid, swept over her shoulder. She was blonde and fair, translucent-skinned, translucent-eyed, freckled. The tanned boy had black hair and dark eyes, and chubby toddler legs.
They seemed to sit without purpose, but it was a false ease. The woman was watching the boats in the blue horizon single-mindedly. She would glance at the boy, at the ice cream, but she gawped at the bay as if she were sick with it.
Tatiana wants a drink of herself in the present tense, because she wants to believe there is no yesterday, that there is only the moment here on Deer Isle—one of the long sloping overhanging islands off the coast of central Maine, connected to the continent by a ferry or a thousand-foot suspension bridge, over which they came in their RV camper, their used Schult Nomad Deluxe. They drove across Penobscot Bay, over the Atlantic and south, to the very edge of the world, into Stonington, a small white town nested in the cove of the oak hills at the foot of Deer Isle. Tatiana—trying desperately to live only in the present—thinks there is nothing more beautiful or peaceful than these white wood houses built into the slopes on narrow dirt roads overlooking the expanse of the rippling bay water that she watches day in and day out. That is peace. That is the present. Almost as if there is nothing else.
But every once in a heartbeat while, as the seagulls sweep and weep, something intrudes, even on Deer Isle.
That afternoon, after Tatiana and Anthony had left the house where they were staying to come to the bay, they heard loud voices next door.
Two women lived there, a mother and a daughter. One was forty, the other twenty.
“They’re fighting again,” said Anthony. “You and Dad don’t fight.”
Fight!
Would that they fought.
Alexander didn’t raise a semitone of his voice to her. If he spoke to her at all, it was never above a moderated deep-well timbre, as if he were imitating amiable, genial Dr. Edward Ludlow, who had been in love with her back in New York—dependable, steady, doctorly Edward. Alexander, too, was attempting to acquire a bedside manner.
To fight would have required an active participation in another human being. In the house next door, a mother and daughter raged at each other, especially at this time in the afternoon for some reason, screaming through their open windows. The good news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. The bad news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. They had waited for him since he left for England in 1942, and now he was back.
He wasn’t participating in the fighting either. As Anthony and Tatiana came out to the road, they saw him parked in his wheelchair in the overgrown front yard, sitting in the Maine sun like a bush while his wife and daughter hollered inside. Tatiana and Anthony slowed down as they neared his yard.
“Mama, what’s wrong with him?” whispered Anthony.
“He was hurt in the war.” He had no legs, no arms, he was just a torso with stumps and a head.
“Can he speak?” They were in front of his gate.
Suddenly the man said in a loud clear voice, a voice accustomed to giving orders, “He can speak but he chooses not to.”
Anthony and Tatiana stopped at the gate, watching him for a few moments. She unlatched the gate and they came into the yard. He was tilted to the left like a sack too heavy on one side. His rounded stumps hung halfway down to the non-existent elbow. The legs were gone in toto.
“Here, let me help.” Tatiana straightened him out, propping the pillows that supported him under his ribs. “Is that better?”
“Eh,” the man said. “One way, another.” His small blue eyes stared into her face. “You know what I would like, though?”
“What?”
“A cigarette. I never have one anymore; can’t bring it to my mouth, as you can see. And they”—he flipped his head to the back—“they’d sooner croak than give me one.”
Tatiana nodded. “I’ve got just the thing for you. I’ll be right back.”
The man turned his head from her to the bay. “You won’t be back.”
“I will. Anthony,” she said, “come sit on this nice man’s lap until Mama comes back—in just one minute.”
Anthony was glad to do it. Picking him up, Tatiana placed him on the man’s lap. “You can hold on to his neck.”
After she ran to get the cigarettes, Anthony said, “What’s your name?”
“Colonel Nicholas Moore,” the man replied. “But you can call me Nick.”
“You were in the war?”
“Yes. I was in the war.”
“My dad, too,” said Anthony.
“Oh.” The man sighed. “Is he back?”
“He’s back.”
Tatiana returned and, lighting the cigarette, held it to Nick’s mouth while he smoked with intense deep breaths, as if he were inhaling the smoke not just into his lungs but into his very core. Anthony sat on his lap, watching his face inhale with relief and exhale with displeasure as if he didn’t want to let the nicotine go. The colonel smoked two in a row, with Tatiana bent over him, holding the cigarettes one by one to his mouth.
Anthony said, “My dad was a major but now he’s a lobsterman.”
“A captain, son,” corrected Tatiana. “A captain.”
“My dad was a major and a captain,” said Anthony. “We’re gonna get ice cream while we wait for him to come back to us from the sea. You want us to bring you an ice cream?”
“No,” said Nick, leaning his head slightly into Anthony’s black hair. “But this is the happiest fifteen minutes I’ve had in eighteen months.”
At that moment, his wife ran out of the house. “What are you doing to my husband?” she shrieked.
Tatiana scooped Anthony off the man’s lap. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said quickly.
“You won’t be back,” said Nick, gaping after her.
Now they were sitting on the bench eating ice cream.
Soon there was the distant squawk of gulls.
“There’s Daddy,” Tatiana said breathlessly.
The boat was a twenty-foot lobster sloop with a headsail, though most fishing boats were propelled by gas motors. It belonged to Jimmy Schuster, whose father, upon passing on, passed it on to him. Jimmy liked the boat because he could go out in it and trawl for lobsters on his own—a one-man job, he called it. Then his arm got caught in the pot hauler, the rope that pulls the heavy lobster traps out of the water. To free himself, he had to cut off his hand at the wrist, which saved his life—and him from going to war—but now, with no small irony, he needed deckhands to do the grunt work. Trouble was, all the deckhands had been in Hürtgen Forest and Iwo Jima the last four years.
Ten days ago Jimmy had got himself a deckhand. Today, Jimmy was in the cockpit aft, and the tall silent one was standing pin straight, at attention, in orange overalls and high black rubber boots, staring intently at the shore.
Tatiana stood from the bench in her white cotton dress, and when the boat was close enough, still a bay away, she flung her arm in a generous wave, swaying from side to side. Alexander, I’m here, I’m here, the wave said.
When he was close enough to see her, he waved back.
They moored the boat at the buyers’ dock and opened the catches on the live tanks. Jumping off the boat, the tall man said he would be right back to off-load and clean up and, rinsing his hands quickly in the spout on the dock, walked up from the quay, up the slope to the bench where the woman and the boy were sitting.
The boy ran down to him. “Hey,” he said and then stood shyly.
“Hey, bud.” The man couldn’t ruffle Anthony’s hair: his hands were mucky.
Under his orange rubber overalls, he was wearing dark green army fatigues and a green long-sleeved army jersey, covered with sweat and fish and salt water. His black hair was in a military buzzcut, his gaunt perspiring face had black afternoon stubble over the etched bones.
He came up to the woman in pristine white who was sitting on the bench. She raised her eyes to greet him—and raised them and raised them, for he was tall.
“Hey,” she said. It was a breathing out. She had stopped eating her ice cream.
“Hey,” he said. He didn’t touch her. “Your ice cream is melting.”
“Oh, I know.” She licked all around the wafer cone, trying to stem the tide but it was no use, the vanilla had turned to condensed milk and was dripping. He watched her. “I can never seem to finish it before it melts,” she muttered, getting up. “You want the rest?”
“No, thank you.” She took a few more mouthfuls before she threw the cone in the trash. He motioned to her mouth.
She licked her lips to clean away the remaining vanilla milk. “Better?”
He didn’t answer. “We’ll have lobsters again tonight?”
“Of course,” she said. “Whatever you want.”
“I still have to go back and finish.”
“Yes, of course. Should we, um, come down to the dock? Wait with you?”
“I want to help,” said Anthony.
Tatiana vigorously shook her head. She would not be able to get the fish smell off the boy.
“You’re so clean,” said Alexander. “Why don’t you stay here with your mother? I’ll be done soon.”
“But I want to help you.”
“Well, come down then, maybe we’ll find something for you to do.”
“Yes, nothing that involves touching fish,” muttered Tatiana.
She didn’t care much for Alexander’s job as a lobsterman. He reeked of fish when he returned. Everything he touched smelled of it. A few days ago, when she had been very slightly grumbling, almost teasing, he said, “You never complained in Lazarevo when I fished,” not teasing. Her face must have looked pretty crestfallen because he said, “There’s no other work for a man in Stonington. You want me to smell like something else, we’ll have to go somewhere else.”
Tatiana didn’t want to go somewhere else. They just got here.
“About the other thing …” he said. “I won’t bring it up again.”
That’s right, don’t bring up Lazarevo, their other moment by the sea near eternity. But that was then—in the old bloodsoaked country. After all, Stonington—with warm days and cool nights and expanses of still and salty water everywhere they looked, the mackerel sky and the purple lupines reflecting off the glass bay with the white boats—it was more than they ever asked for. It was more than they ever thought they would have.
With his one good arm, Jimmy was motioning for Alexander.
“So how did you do today?” Tatiana asked him, trying to make conversation as they headed down to the dock. Alexander was in his big heavy rubber boots. She felt impossibly small walking by his side, being in his overwhelming presence. “Did you have a good catch?”
“Okay today,” he replied. “Most of the lobsters were shorts, too small; we had to release them. A lot of berried females, they had to go.”
“You don’t like berried females?” She moved closer, looking up at him.
Blinking lightly, he moved away. “They’re good, but they have to be thrown back in the water, so their eggs can hatch. Don’t come too close, I’m messy. Anthony, we haven’t counted the lobsters. Want to help me count them?”
Jimmy liked Anthony. “Buddy! Come here, you want to see how many lobsters your dad caught today? We probably have a hundred lobsters, his best day yet.”
Tatiana leveled her eyes at Alexander. He shrugged. “When we get twelve lobsters in one trap and have to release ten of them, I don’t consider that a good day.”
“Two legals in one trap is great, Alexander,” said Jimmy. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of this. Come here, Anthony, look into the live-well.”
Keeping a respectful distance, Anthony peered into the tank where the lobsters, already banded and measured, were crawling on top of one another. He told his mother he didn’t care much for their claws, even bound. Especially after what his father told him about lobsters: “They’re cannibals, Ant. Their claws have to be tied up or they would eat each other right in the tank.”
Anthony said to Jimmy, his voice trying not to crack, “You already counted them?”
Alexander shook his head at Jimmy. “Oh, no, no,” Jimmy quickly said. “I was busy hosing down the boat. I just said approximately. Want to count?”
“I can’t count past twenty-seven.”
“I’ll help you,” said Alexander. Taking out the lobsters one by one, he let Anthony count them until he got to ten, and then carefully, so as not to break their claws, placed them in large blue transfer totes.
At last Alexander said to Anthony, “One hundred and two.”
“You see?” said Jimmy. “Four for you, Anthony. That leaves ninety-eight for me. And they’re all perfect, as big as can be, right around a five-inch carapace—which means shell, bud. We’ll get 75 cents a piece for them. Your dad is going to make me almost seventy-five dollars today. Yes,” he said, “because of your dad, I can finally make a living.” He glanced at Tatiana, standing a necessary distance away from the spillage of the boat. She smiled politely; Jimmy nodded curtly and didn’t smile back.
As the buyers started to pour in from the fish market, from the general store, from the seafood restaurants as far away as Bar Harbor, Alexander washed and cleaned the boat, cleaned the traps, rolled up the line, and went down dock to buy three barrels of bait herring for the next day, which he placed into bags and lowered them into the water. The herring catch was good today, he had enough to bait 150 lobster traps for tomorrow.
He got paid ten dollars for the day’s work, and was scrubbing his hands with industrial-strength soap under the water spout when Jimmy came up to him. “Want to wait with me and sell these?” He pointed to the lobsters. “I’ll pay you another two dollars for the evening. After, we can go for a drink.”
“Can’t, Jimmy. But thanks. Maybe another time.”
Jimmy glanced at Tatiana, all sunny and white, and turned away.
They walked up the hill to the house.
Alexander went to take a bath, to shave, to shear his hair, while Tatiana, placing the lobsters in the refrigerator to numb them, boiled the water. Lobsters were the easiest thing to cook, 10–15 minutes in salted boiling water. They were delicious to eat, breaking the claws, taking the meat out, dipping them in melted butter. But sometimes she did think that she would rather spend two dollars on a lobster in a store once a month than have Alexander spend thirteen hours on a boat every day and get four lobsters for free. Didn’t seem so free. Before he was out of the bathroom, she stood outside the door, knocked carefully and said, “You need anything?”
There was quiet inside. She knocked louder. The door opened, and he towered in front of her, all fresh and shaved and scrubbed and dressed. He was wearing a clean green jersey and fatigues. She cleared her throat and lowered her gaze. Barefoot she stood with her lips level with his heart. “Need anything?” she repeated in a whisper, feeling so vulnerable she was having trouble breathing.
“I’m fine,” he said, walking sideways past her. “Let’s eat.”
They had the lobsters with melted butter, and carrot, onion and potato stew. Alexander ate three lobsters, most of the stew, bread, butter. Tatiana had found him emaciated in Germany. He ate for two men now, but he was still war thin. She ladled food onto his plate, filled his glass. He drank a beer, water, a Coke. They ate quietly in the little kitchen, which the landlady allowed them to use as long as they were either done by seven or made dinner for her, too. They were done by seven, and Tatiana left some stew for her.
“Alexander, does your … chest hurt?”
“No, it’s fine.”
“It felt a little pulpy last night …” She looked away, remembering touching it. “It’s not healed yet, and you’re doing all that trap hauling. I don’t want it to get reinfected. Perhaps I should put some carbolic acid on it.”
“I’m fine.”
“Maybe a new dressing?”
He didn’t say anything, just raised his eyes to her, and for a moment between them, from his bronze-colored eyes to her sea-green passed Berlin, and the room at the U.S. Embassy where they had spent what they both were certain was their last night on earth, when she stitched together his shredded pectoral and wept, and he sat like a stone and looked through her— much like now. He said to her then, “We never had a future.”
Tatiana looked away first—she always looked away first—and got up.
Alexander went outside to sit in the chair in front of the house on the hill overlooking the bay. Anthony tagged along behind him. Alexander sat mutely and motionlessly, while Anthony milled about the overgrown yard, picking up rocks, pine cones, looking for worms, for beetles, for ladybugs.
“You won’t find any ladybugs, son. Season for them’s in June,” said Alexander.
“Ah,” said Anthony. “Then what’s this?”
Tilting over to one side, Alexander looked. “I can’t see it.”
Anthony came closer.
“Still can’t see it.”
Anthony came closer, his hand out, the index finger with the ladybug extended.
Alexander’s face was inches away from the ladybug. “Hmm. Still can’t see it.”
Anthony looked at the ladybug, looked at his father and then slowly, shyly climbed into his lap and showed him again.
“Well, well,” said Alexander, both hands going around the boy. “Now I see it. I sit corrected. You were right. Ladybugs in August. Who knew?”
“Did you ever see ladybugs, Dad?”
Alexander was quiet. “A long time ago, near a city called Moscow.”
“In the … Soviet Union?”
“Yes.”
“They have ladybugs there?”
“They had ladybugs—until we ate them all.”
Anthony was wide-eyed.
“There was nothing else to eat,” said Alexander.
“Anthony, your father is just joking with you,” said Tatiana, walking out, wiping her wet hands on a tea towel. “He is trying to be funny.”
Anthony peered into Alexander’s face. “That was funny?”
“Tania,” Alexander said in a far away voice. “I can’t get up. Can you get my cigarettes for me?”
She left quickly and came out with them. Since there was only one chair and nowhere for her to sit, she placed the cigarette in Alexander’s mouth and, bending over him, her hand on his shoulder, lit it for him while Anthony placed the bug into Alexander’s palm.
“Dad, don’t eat this ladybug.” One of his little arms went around Alexander’s neck.
“I won’t, son. I’m full.”
“That’s funny,” said Anthony. “Mama and I met a man today. A colonel. Nick Moore.”
“Oh, yeah?” Alexander looked off into the distance, taking another deep drag of the cigarette from Tatiana’s hands as she was bent to him. “What was he like?”
“He was like you, Dad,” Anthony replied. “He was just like you.”
Red Nail Polish
In the middle of the night, the boy woke up and screamed. Tatiana went to comfort him. He calmed down, but would not let her leave him alone in his bed, even though it was just across the nightstand. “Alexander,” she whispered, “are you awake?”
“I am now,” he said, getting up. Moving the nightstand out of the way, he pushed the two twin beds together so Anthony could lie next to his mother. They tried to get comfortable, Alexander against the wall spooning Tatiana spooning Anthony, who instantly fell asleep in his mother’s arms. Tatiana only pretended to fall back to sleep. She knew that in a moment Alexander would get up and leave the bed.
And in a moment, he was gone. She whispered after him. Shura, darling. After a few minutes, she got up, put on a robe and walked outside. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the yard. She looked for him all the way down to the dock. Alexander was sitting on the bench where Tatiana usually sat waiting for him to come back from the sea. She saw the flare of the cigarette in his mouth. He was naked except for his skivvies, and he was shivering. His arms were crossed over himself, and his body was rocking back and forth.
She stopped walking.
She didn’t know what to do.
She never did know what to do.
Turning around, she stumbled back to their room and lay in bed blinkless, staring beyond Anthony’s sleeping head until Alexander came back, icy and shaking, and fitted in behind her. She didn’t move and he said nothing, made no noise. Just his cold arm went around her. They lay there until four when he got up to go to work. As he ground the coffee beans in the pestle, she buttered a fresh roll for him, filled his water containers and made a sandwich for him to take on the boat. He ate, drank his coffee, and then left, his free hand traveling under her chemise for a moment to rest on her bare buttocks and then between her legs.
They had been on Deer Isle exactly five minutes, breathing in the salt water of the afternoon and seeing the lobster boats returning to shore, and already Tatiana said that a month would not be long enough to spend here. Their agreement was just a month in every state and then onward. Forty-eight states, forty-eight months, beginning with Deer Isle. “A month won’t be enough here,” she repeated when Alexander said nothing.
“Really?” And nothing more.
“You don’t think it’s great here?”
A small ironic something crossed his silent mouth in reply.
On the surface, Stonington had everything they needed: a general store, a variety store, a hardware store. The general store sold newspapers, magazines and, most important, cigarettes. It also sold coffee beans and chocolate. On North and South Deer Isle, there were cows—thus milk, cheese and butter—and chickens that laid eggs. Grain was shipped in by the shipload. There was plenty of bread. Plenty of apples, peaches, pears, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, carrots, turnips, radishes, eggplant, zucchini. There was cheap and plentiful lobster, trout, sea bass, pike. There even was beef and chicken, not that they ever ate it. Who’d ever believe the country had been through a Depression and a world war?
Alexander said ten dollars a day wouldn’t be enough to live on.
Tatiana said it would be plenty.
“What about high-heeled shoes? Dresses for you? Coffee? My cigarettes?”
“Definitely not enough for cigarettes.” She forced a smile, seeing his face. “I’m joking. It’s enough for everything.”
She didn’t want to mention that the amount he was spending on cigarettes was nearly what they were spending on food for the week for all three of them. But Alexander was the only one working. He could spend his money on whatever he liked.
She had been talking English to him as she drank her Sunday coffee. He was responding in Russian to her as he smoked his Sunday cigarettes and read his Sunday paper.
“There’s trouble brewing in Indochina,” he said in Russian. “The French owned it, and lost it to the Japanese during the war. The Japanese lost the war, but they don’t want to leave. The French, rescued by the victors and thus on the side of victory, want their colony back. The Japanese are protesting. While staying neutral, the U.S. are helping their ally France, but they’re really between a rock and a hard place since they’re also helping Japan.”
“I thought Japan is no longer allowed to have an army?” Tatiana asked in English.
And he replied in Russian, “They’re not. But they had a standing army in Indochina, and short of the U.S. forcing them out, the Japanese refuse to lay down their arms.”
She asked in English, “What’s your interest in all this?”
He replied in Russian, “Ah. In all this—because there just isn’t enough trouble—Stalin for decades has been courting a peasant farmer named Ho Chi Minh, paying for his little educational trips to Moscow, feeding him vodka and caviar, teaching him the Marxist dialectic by the warm fire and giving him some old Shpagins and mortars, and some nice American Lend-Lease Studebakers while training and educating his little band of Vietminh right on Soviet soil.”
“Training the Vietminh to fight the Japanese whom the Soviets fought and hate?”
“Believe it or not, no. To fight the former Soviet allies, the colonial French. Ironic?” Alexander stubbed out his cigarette, put down his paper. “Where’s Anthony?” he said in a low voice in English, but before he could even reach for her wrist, Anthony walked into the kitchen.
“I’m here, Dad,” he said. “What?”
They needed a room for just themselves, but Anthony didn’t think so, and besides, the old landlady didn’t have one. The choice was one tiny room next to the kitchen in a vertical house overlooking the bay—with two twin beds, and a bath and toilet down the hall—or their camper with one full bed, and no bath and no toilet.
They had looked at other houses. One had a family of five living in it. One had a family of three. One a family of seven, all women. Generations and generations of women, filling up the white houses, and old men going out on the boats during the day. And younger men—sometimes whole, sometimes not—trickling back from war.
Mrs. Brewster lived alone. Her only son was not back, though Tatiana didn’t think he was out with the troops. Something in the way the old lady said, oh he had to go away for a little while. She was sixty-six years old and had been a widow for forty-eight of them: her husband died in the Spanish-American War.
“In 1898?” Tatiana whispered to Alexander.
He shrugged. His heavy hand was squeezing her shoulder, telling her he didn’t much like Mrs. Brewster, but Tatiana was happy to have his hand on her in any capacity. “This is your husband, right?” Mrs. Brewster had said suspiciously before she rented out the rooms to them. “He’s not just some …” She waved her hand around. “Because I won’t have that in my house.”
Alexander stood mute. The three-year-old said, “Have what?”
The landlady narrowed her eyes at Anthony. “This your father, boy?”
“Yes,” said Anthony. “He is a soldier. He was in a war and in prison.”
“Yeah,” said Mrs. Brewster, looking away. “Prison’s hard.” Then she narrowed her eyes at Tatiana. “So where’s your accent from? Doesn’t sound American to me.”
Anthony began to say, “Russ—” but Alexander pulled his son behind him, pulled Tatiana behind him. “Are you going to rent us the room or not?”
She rented them the room.
But now Alexander asked Tatiana, “Why did we buy the Nomad if we’re not going to stay in it? We might as well sell it. What a waste of money.”
What would they do when they got to the deserts of the west? she wanted to know. To the wine hills of California? To Hell’s Canyon in Idaho? Despite his sudden frugality, Alexander didn’t sell the camper, the dream of it still so fresh. But this was the thing about him: though Tatiana knew he liked the idea of the camper—he was the one who wanted to buy it—he didn’t particularly like the reality of it.
Tatiana got the impression he felt that way about a number of things in his new civilian life.
The camper had no running water. And Alexander never stopped washing one part or another of his body. Living too close for too many years to men at war had done this to him. He washed his hands obsessively; true, much of the time they had fish on them, but there wasn’t enough soap or lemons and vinegar in all of Maine to get Alexander’s hands clean enough for his liking. They had to pay Mrs. Brewster an extra five dollars a week for all the water they were using.
He may have liked the idea of a son, but the reality of a three-year-old boy being with them every waking moment, never leaving his mother’s side, sleeping in the same room with them! coming into bed with them at night! was too much for a soldier who had never been around children.
“Nightmares are hard for a little boy,” Tatiana explained.
“I understand,” he said, so polite.
Alexander may have once liked the idea of a wife, but the reality of one, Tatiana wasn’t so sure about either. Maybe he was looking for Lazarevo in every day that they lived, though from the way he acted, she fully expected him to say, “What’s Lazarevo?”
His eyes, once like caramel, were now hard copper, nothing liquid or flowing in them. He turned his polite face to her, and she turned her polite face back. He wanted quiet, she was quiet. He wanted funny, she tried funny. He wanted food, she gave him plenty. He wanted to go for a walk, she was ready. He wanted newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, she brought them all. He wanted to sit mutely in his chair; she sat mutely on the ground by his side. Anything he wanted, she was ready at any moment to give him.
Now, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, Tatiana stood barefoot in front of the mirror in a yellow, slightly sheer muslin dress, a peasant-girl dress, appraising, assessing, obsessing.
She stood with her hair down. Her face was scrubbed, her teeth were clean and white. The summer freckles on her nose and cheeks were the color of malt sugar, her green eyes sparkled. She rubbed cocoa butter into her hands to make them softer in case he wanted to take her hand as they walked down to Main Street after dinner. She rubbed a bit of musk oil behind her ears, in case he bent to her. She put some gloss on her sulky lips and pressed them together to make them softer, pinker. She stood, looked, thought. Smiled a nice fake smile to make the lips less sulky, and sighed. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
Her hands went inside her dress and cupped her breasts. Her nipples hardened. Ever since Anthony was born, her body had changed. That, and the American food—all those nutrients. The post-nursing, American-fed breasts hadn’t lost their weightiness, their full-bodied heartiness. The few bras Tatiana owned were all too loose around and made her jiggle. Instead of a bra, Tatiana sometimes wore tight white vests, tight enough to restrain her breasts, which tended to sway when she walked, attracting the eyes of men. Not her husband, necessarily, but other men, like the milk boy.
She slowly lifted up her dress to see her slim rounded hips in the mirror, her smooth belly. She was slight, but everything on her seemed to have been curved by Anthony’s birth—as if she stopped being a girl at the point of his entry into the world.
But it was the girl-child with breasts that the soldier man with the rifle on his back had once crossed the street for.
She pulled down her sheer panties to see her patch of blonde hair. She touched herself, trying to imagine what he might have felt once when touching her. Seeing something in the mirror, she looked closer, then bent her head to look at her legs. On the insides of her thighs were small fresh bruises—thumbprints from his hands.
Seeing them gave Tatiana a liquid throb in her loins, and she straightened out, adjusted herself and, with a flushed face, started brushing out her hair, debating what to do with it. Alexander had never seen her hair this length before, down to the small of her back. She thought he would like it, but distressingly he seemed indifferent to it. She knew the color and texture of the hair weren’t quite normal. She had colored it black eight months ago, before she went to Europe, then painstakingly leached the black out of it last month in Hamburg, and now the hair was dry and limp. It wasn’t silk anymore. Is that why he wasn’t touching it? She didn’t know what to do about it.
She put it into its usual braid, leaving the fronts out and the tuft long in the back, threading the braid with a yellow satin ribbon, in case he touched the hair. Then she called for Anthony, who was outside playing with dirt, and cleaned him, making sure his shorts and shirt weren’t stained, pulling up his socks. “Why do you play with dirt, Anthony, right before we go see Daddy? You know you have to be tidy for him.” Alexander liked order in his wife and son when they came to meet him at the docks. She knew he liked how neat they looked, how put-together, how summery. The flowers in Stonington were breathtaking, the tall shimmering lupines purple and blue; she and Anthony had picked some earlier and now Tatiana put some in her hair, the purple, like lilac, to contrast with the hair, like gold, because once he had liked that, too.
She studied her fingernails to make sure there was nothing underneath them. They both hated dirty fingernails. Now that Tatiana stopped working—and Alexander was with her—she kept her nails a little longer, because, though he never said anything, he wordlessly responded to the light back and forth of her nails on him. Today she had a few minutes and painted them red.
He said nothing that day about the nails. (Or the lilac lupines, the satin in the hair, the lips, the hips, the dress, the breasts, the sheer white panties.) The next day he said, “They sell such dazzling nail polish at the Stonington store?”
“I don’t know. I brought this one with me.”
He was quiet so long, she thought he hadn’t heard her. And then: “Well, that must’ve been nice for all the invalids at NYU.”
Ah, some participation. Not great—but a start. What to say to that, though? Oh, it wasn’t for the invalids. She knew it was a trap, a code for, since nurses aren’t allowed to wear nail polish, what’d you have nail polish for, Tania?
Later that evening at the kitchen table, she took the polish off with acetone. When he saw it was gone, he said, “Hmm. So other invalids rate the red nails but not me?”
She lifted her eyes at him standing over her. “Are you joking?” she said, the tips of her fingers beginning to tremble.
“Of course,” he said, without a glimmer of a smile.
Tatiana threw away her red New York nail polish, her flirty post-war ruched and pleated New York dresses, her high-heeled New York greenbelt brilliant Ferragamo shoes. Something happened to him when he saw her in New York things. What’s the matter, she would ask, and he would reply that nothing was the matter, and that would be all he’d reply. So she threw them all out and bought herself a yellow muslin dress, a floral chintz dress, a white cotton sheath, a blue wrap dress—from Maine. Alexander still said nothing, but was less quiet. Now he talked to her of other things, like Ho Chi Minh and his band of warriors.
She tried, tried to be funny with him like before. “Hey, do you want to hear a joke?”
“Sure, tell me a joke.” They were walking up a Stonington hill behind a huffing Anthony.
“A man prayed for years to go to paradise. Once, going up a narrow path in the mountains he stumbled and fell into the precipice. By a miracle he grasped some sickly bush and started crying: ‘Anybody here? Please, help! Anybody here?’
“After some minutes of silence the voice answered: ‘I am here.’
“‘Who are you?’
“‘I am God.’
“‘If you are God, then do something!’
“‘Look, you asked me for so long to be brought to paradise. Just unclench your hands—and immediately you will find yourself in paradise.’
“After a small silence the man cried: ‘Anybody ELSE here? Please—help!’”
To say that Alexander didn’t laugh at that joke would have been to understate matters.
Tatiana’s hands trembled whenever she thought of him. She trembled all day long. She walked through Stonington as if she were sleepwalking, stiff, unnatural. She bent to her son, she straightened up, she adjusted her dress, she fixed her hair. The churning inside her stomach did not abate.
Tatiana tried to be bolder with him, less afraid of him.
He wouldn’t kiss her in front of Jimmy, or the other fishermen, or anybody. Sometimes in the evenings, as they walked down Main Street and looked inside the shops, he would buy her some chocolate, and she would turn up her face to thank him, and he would kiss her on the forehead. The forehead!
One evening Tatiana got tired of it and, jumping up on the bench, flung her arms around him. “Enough with the head,” she said, and kissed him full on his lips.
His one hand on the cigarette, the other on Anthony’s ice cream, he couldn’t do more than press against her. “Get down,” he said quietly, kissing her back without ardor. “What’s gotten into you?”
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you man o’ war!
Alone with Anthony, in their daily wanderings up and down the hills of Stonington, Tatiana made friends with the women who ran the stores and the boys who brought the milk. She befriended a farm woman in her thirties up on Eastern Road, whose husband, a naval officer, was still in Japan. Every day Nellie cleaned the house, weeded the front garden and waited for him on the bench outside, which is how Tatiana met her, just skipping by with her son. After talking to her for two minutes, Tatiana felt so sad for the woman, viscerally remembering grieving for Alexander, that she asked Nellie if she needed help with the farm. Nellie had an acre of potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers. Tatiana knew something about these things.
Nellie gladly agreed, saying she could pay Tatiana two dollars a day from her husband’s army check. “It’s all I can afford,” she said. “When my husband comes back I’ll be able to pay you more.”
But the war ended a year ago, and there was still no news of him. Tatiana said not to worry.
Over coffee, Nellie opened up a little. “What if he comes back and I won’t know how to talk to him? We were married such a short time before he went to fight. What if we find out we’re complete strangers?”
Tatiana shook her lowered head. She knew something about these things, too.
“So when did your husband come back?” Nellie asked with envy.
“A month ago.”
“So lucky.”
Anthony said, “Dad didn’t come back. Dad was never coming back. Mama left me to go find him.”
Nellie stared dully at Anthony.
“Anthony, go play outside for a minute. Let Nellie and me finish up.” Tatiana ruffled Anthony’s hair and ushered him outside. “Kids these days. You teach them to speak and look what they do. I don’t even know what he’s talking about.”
That evening Anthony told Alexander that Mama got a job. Alexander asked Anthony questions, and Anthony, happy to be asked, told his father about Nellie and her potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers, and her husband who wasn’t there, and how Nellie ought to go and find him, “just like Mama went and found you.”
Alexander stopped asking questions. All he said after dinner was, “I thought you said we were going to be all right on ten dollars a day.”
“It’s just for Anthony. For his candy, his ice cream.”
“No. I’ll work at night. If I help sell the lobsters, it’s another two dollars.”
“No!” Tatiana quickly lowered her voice. “You work plenty. You do plenty. No. Anthony and I play all day anyway.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Play.”
“We’ll have time for everything. He and I will be happy to help her. And besides,” said Tatiana, “she is so lonely.”
Alexander turned away. Tatiana turned away.
The next day Alexander came back from the boat and said, “Tell Nellie to stuff her two dollars. Jimmy and I worked out a deal. If I catch him over a hundred and fifty legal lobsters, he’ll pay me an extra five dollars. And then five more for every fifty legals above one fifty. What do you think?”
Tatiana thought about it. “How many traps on your trawl?”
“Ten.”
“At two legal lobsters per trap … twenty at most per trawl … one trawl an hour, hauling them up, throwing most of them back … it’s not enough.”
“When it comes to me,” he said, “aren’t you turning into a nice little capitalist.”
“You’ve sold yourself short, Alexander,” Tatiana said to him. “Like a lobster.”
Jimmy must have known it, too—the market price for lobsters increasing, and Alexander receiving many job offers from other boats—because he changed the terms without even being asked, giving Alexander five dollars extra for every fifty legals above the first fifty. At night Alexander was too tired to hold a glass of beer in his hands.
Tatiana marinated Nellie’s tomatoes, made Nellie potato soup, tried to make tomato sauce. Tatiana had learned to make very good tomato sauce from her friends in Little Italy, almost as if she were Italian herself. She wanted to make Alexander tomato sauce, just like his Italian mother used to make, but needed garlic, and no one had garlic on Deer Isle.
Tatiana missed New York, the boisterous teeming marketplace of the Saturday morning Lower East Side, her joyous best friend Vikki, her work at Ellis Island, the hospital. The guilt of it stung her in the chest—longing for the old life she could not live without Alexander.
Tatiana worked in the fields by herself while Nellie minded Anthony. It took her a week to dig up Nellie’s entire field—one hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes. Nellie could not believe there was so much. Tatiana negotiated a deal with the general store for 50 cents a bushel, and made Nellie seventy-five dollars. Nellie was thrilled. After twelve hours on the boat, Alexander helped Tatiana carry all hundred and fifty bushels to the store. At the end of the week, Nellie still paid Tatiana only two dollars a day.
When Alexander heard this, his voice lost its even keel for a moment. “You made her seventy-five dollars, we carried all the fucking bushels down the hill for her, and your so called friend still only paid you your daily wage?”
“Shh … don’t …” She didn’t want Anthony to hear the soldier-speak, kept so carefully under wraps these days.
“Maybe you’re not such a good capitalist after all, Tania.”
“She has no money. She doesn’t make a hundred dollars a day like that Jimmy does off you. But you know what she did offer us? To move in with her. She has two extra bedrooms. We could have them free of charge and just pay her for the water and electric.”
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch.”
“There’s a catch. I hear it in your voice.”
“Nothing.” She twittered her thumbs. “She just said that when her husband came back, we’d have to go.”
Across the table, Alexander stared at Tatiana inscrutably, then got up and took his own plate to the sink.
Tatiana’s hands trembled as she washed the dishes. She didn’t want to make him upset. No, perhaps that was not quite true. Perhaps she wanted to make him something. He was so exceedingly polite, so exceptionally courteous! When she asked him for help, he was right there. He carried the cursed potatoes, he took the trash to the dump. But his mind was not on the potatoes, on the trash. When he sat and smoked and watched the water, Tatiana didn’t know where he was. When he went outside at three in the morning and convulsed on the bench, Tatiana wished she didn’t know where he was. Where was she within him? She didn’t want to know.
When she was done clearing up, she came outside to sit on the gravel by his feet. She felt him looking at her. She looked up. “Tania …” Alexander whispered. But Anthony saw his mother on the ground and instantly planted himself on her lap, displaying for her the four beetles he had found, two of them fighting stag beetles. When she glanced up at Alexander, he wasn’t looking at her anymore.
After Anthony was asleep and they were in their twin bed, she whispered, “So do you want to—move in with Nellie?” The bed was so narrow, they could sleep only on their sides. On his back Alexander took up the whole mattress.
“Move in until her husband comes back and she kicks us out because she might actually want some privacy with the man who’s back from war?” Alexander said.
“Are you … angry?” she asked, as in, please be angry.
“Of course not.”
“We’ll have more privacy at her house. She’s got two rooms for us. Better than the one here.”
“Really? Better?” Alexander said. “Here we’re by the sea. I get to sit and smoke and look at the bay. Nellie’s on Eastern Road, where we’ll just be smelling the salt and the fish. And Mrs. Brewster is deaf. Do you think Nellie is deaf? Having Nellie at our bedroom door with her young hearing and her five years without a husband, do you think that would spell more privacy for us? Although,” he said, “do you think there could be less privacy?”
Yes, Tatiana wanted to say. Yes. In my communal apartment in Leningrad, where I lived in two rooms with Babushka, Deda, Mama, Papa, my sister, Dasha—remember her?—with my brother, Pasha—remember him? Where the toilet down the hall through the kitchen near the stairs never flushed properly and was never cleaned, and was shared by nine other apartment dwellers. Where there was no hot water for four baths a day, and no gas stove for four lobsters. Where I slept in the same bed with my sister until I was seventeen and she was twenty-four, until the night you took us to the Road of Life. Tatiana barely suppressed her agonized groan.
She could not—would not—she refused to think of Leningrad.
The other way was better. Yes, the other way—without ever speaking.
This bloodletting went on every night. During the day they kept busy, just how they liked it, just how they needed it. Not so long ago Alexander and Tatiana had found each other in another country and then somehow they lived through the war and made it to lupine Deer Isle, neither of them having any idea how, but for three o’clock in the morning, when Anthony woke up and screamed as if he were being cut open, and Alexander convulsed on the bench, and Tatiana thrashed to forget—and then they knew how.
Tainted with the Gulag
He had such an unfailing way with her. “Would you like some more?” he would say, lifting the pitcher of lemonade.
“Yes, please.”
“Would you like to take a walk after dinner? I heard they’re selling something called Italian ices by the bay.”
“Yes, that would be nice.”
“Ant, what do you think?”
“Let’s go. Let’s go now.”
“Well, wait a second, son. Your mother and I have to finish up.” So formal. Mother.
He opened doors for her, he got jars and cans for her off the high shelves in the kitchen. It was so handy him being tall; he was like a step stool.
And she? She did what she always did—for him first. She cooked for him, brought the food to his plate and served him. She poured his drink. She set and cleared his table. She washed his clothes, she folded them. She made their little beds and put clean sheets on them. She made him lunch for the boat, and extra for Jimmy too, because one-handed Jimmy didn’t have a woman to make him a sandwich. She shaved her legs for him, and bathed every day for him, and put satin ribbons in her hair for him.
“Is there anything else you would like?” she asked him. Can I get you something? Would you like another beer? Would you like the first section of the newspaper or the second? Would you like to go swimming? Perhaps raspberry picking? Are you cold? Are you tired? Have you had enough, Alexander? Have—you—had—enough?
“Yes, thank you.”
Or …
“No, I’ll have some more, thanks.”
So courteous. So polite. Straight from the Edith Wharton novels Tania had read during the time of his absence from her life. The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth (ironic).
There were times when Alexander wasn’t unfailingly polite.
Like one particular afternoon when there was no wind and Jimmy was hung over—or was it when Jimmy was hung over and there was no wind? In any case, Alexander had returned early when she wasn’t expecting him and came looking for her when she was still in Nellie’s potato fields. Anthony was inside the house, having milk with Nellie. Tatiana, her hands grimy from the earth, her face flushed, her hair in tangles, stood up in the field to greet him in her sleeveless chintz summer dress, tight in the torso, slim down the hips, open down the neckline. “Hey,” she said with happy surprise. “What are you doing back so early?”
He didn’t speak. He kissed her, and this time it wasn’t calm and it wasn’t without ardor. Tatiana didn’t even have a chance to raise her hands in surrender. He took her deep in the fields, on the ground, covered in potato leaves, the dress becoming as grimy as her hands. The only foreplay was his yanking the dress off her shoulders to bare her breasts to his massive hands and pulling the dress up over her hips.
“Look what you did,” she whispered afterward.
“You look like a peasant milkmaid in that dress.”
“Dress is ruined now.”
“We’ll wash it.” He was still panting but already distant.
Tatiana leaned to him, murmuring softly, looking into his face, trying to catch his eye, hoping for intimacy. “Does the captain like his wife to look like a peasant milkmaid?”
“Well, obviously.” But the captain was already getting up, straightening himself out, giving her his hand to help her off the ground.
Since Alexander came back, Tatiana had become fixated on his hands, and on her own by contrast. His hands were like the platter on which he carried his life. They were large and broad, dark and square, with heavy palms and heavy thumbs, but with long thick flexible fingers—as if he could play the piano as well as haul lobster trawls. They were knuckled and veined, and the palms were calloused. Everything was calloused, even the fingertips, roughened by carrying heavy weapons over thousands of miles, hardened by fighting, burning, logging, burying men. His hands reflected all manner of eternal struggles. You didn’t need to be a soothsayer, or a psychic or a palmreader, you needed not a single glance at the lines in the palms but just one cursory look at the hands and you knew instantly: the man they belonged to had done everything—and was capable of anything.
And then take Tatiana and her own square hands. Among other things, her hands had worked in a weapons factory, they had made bombs and tanks and flamethrowers, worked the fields, mopped floors, dug holes in snow and in the ground. They had pulled sleds along the ice. They had taken care of dead men, of wounded men, of dying men; her hands had known life, and strife—yet they looked like they soaked in milk all day. They were tiny, unblemished, uncalloused, unknuckled, unveined, palms light, fingers slender. She was embarrassed by them—they were soft and delicate like a child’s hands. One would conclude that her hands had never done a day’s work in their life—and couldn’t!
And now, in the middle of the afternoon, after touching her in places unsuitable to the genteel propriety of Nellie’s cultivated potato fields, Alexander gave her his enormous dark hand to help her off the ground, and her white one disappeared into his warm fist as he pulled her to her feet.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
When they first got to Deer Isle, in the evenings, after Anthony was finally asleep, they climbed up the steep hill to where their Nomad was parked off road near the woods. Once inside, Alexander took the clothes off her—he insisted she be bare for him—though most of the time he did not undress himself, leaving on his T-shirt or his sleeveless tank. Tatiana asked once. Don’t you want to undress, too? He said no. She didn’t ask again. He kissed her; with his hands he touched her to soften her; but never said a word. He never called her name. He would kiss her, clasp her body to him, present himself to her eager mouth—sometimes too forcefully, though she didn’t mind—and then he would deliver himself unto her. She moaned, she couldn’t help herself, and there had once been a time when he lived for her moaning. He himself never made a sound anymore, not before, not during, and not even at the end. He aspirated at the end; made an H. Sometimes not even a capital H.
Many things were gone from them. Alexander didn’t use his mouth on her anymore, or whisper all manner of remarkable things to her anymore, or caress her from top to bottom, or turn the kerosene light on—or even open his eyes.
Shura. Naked in the Nomad was the only time in their new life Tatiana called him by that beloved diminutive now. Sometimes she felt as if he wanted to put his hands to his ears so he wouldn’t hear her. It was dark in the camper, so dark; there was never light to see anything. And he wore his clothes. Shura. I can’t believe I’m touching you again.
There were no Edith Wharton novels in the camper, no Age of Innocence. He took her until she had nothing more to give, but still he took her until there was nothing.
“Soldier, darling, I’m here,” Tatiana would whisper, her arms opened, stretched out to him in helplessness, in surrender.
“I’m here, too,” Alexander would say, not whispering, getting up, getting dressed. “Let’s go back downhill. I hope Anthony is still sleeping.” That was the afterglow. Him giving her his hand to help her up.
She was defenseless, she was starved herself, she was open. She would give it to him any way he needed it, but still …
Oh, it didn’t matter. Just that there was something so soldierly and unhusbandly about how silently and rapaciously Alexander needed to still the cries of war.
Near tears one night, she asked him what was the matter with him—with them—and he replied, “You have become tainted with the Gulag.” And then they were interrupted by a child’s maniacal screams from down below. Already dressed, Alexander ran.
“Mama! Mama!”
Old Mrs. Brewster had trotted into his room, but she only terrified Anthony more.
“MAMA! MAMA!”
Alexander held him, but Anthony didn’t want anyone but his mother.
And when she ran in, he didn’t want her either. He hit her, he turned away from her. He was hysterical. It took her over an hour to calm him down. At four Alexander got up to go to work, and after that night Tatiana and Alexander stopped going to the camper. It stood abandoned in the clearing up the hill between the trees as they, both clothed, and in silence, with a pillow or his lips or his hand over her mouth to stifle her moaning, danced the tango of life, the tango of death, the tango of the Gulag, creaking every desperate bedspring in the twin bed across from Anthony’s restless sleeping.
They tried to come together during the day when the boy wasn’t looking. Trouble was, he was always looking. By the end of long napless Sundays, Alexander was mute with impatience and discontent.
One late Sunday afternoon Anthony was supposed to be in the front yard playing with bugs. Tatiana was supposed to be cooking dinner, Alexander was supposed to be reading the newspaper, but what he was actually doing was sitting beneath her billowing skirts on the narrow wooden chair that leaned against the wall of the kitchen, and she was standing astride him. They were panting, her legs were shaking; he was supporting her shifting weight with his hands on her hips, moving her in spasms. Near the moment of Tatiana’s greatest distress, Anthony walked into the kitchen.
“Mama?”
Tatiana’s mouth opened in a tortured O. Alexander whispered Shh. She held her breath, unable to turn around, overwhelmed by the stillness, the hardness, the fullness of him so thoroughly inside her. She dug her long nails into Alexander’s shoulders and tried not to scream, and all the while Anthony stood behind his mother.
“Anthony,” said Alexander, his voice almost calm. “Can you give us a minute? Go outside. Mommy will be right there.”
“That man, Nick, is in his yard again. He wants a cigarette.”
“Mom will be right there, bud. Go outside.”
“Mama?”
But Tatiana could not turn around, could not speak.
“Go outside, Anthony!” said Alexander.
In the short term, Anthony left, Tatiana took a breath, Alexander took her to the bedroom, barricaded the door, and resolved them, but in the long term she didn’t know what to do.
One thing they didn’t do is talk about it.
“Would you like some more bread, some more wine, Alexander?” she would ask with open hands.
“Yes, thank you, Tatiana,” he would reply with lowered head.
The Captain, the Colonel, and the Nurse
“Dad, can I come on the boat with you?” Anthony turned his face up to his father, sitting next to him at the breakfast table.
“No, bud. It’s dangerous on a lobster boat for a little boy.”
Tatiana studied them both, listening, absorbing.
“I’m not little. I’m big. And I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll help.”
“No, bud.”
Tatiana cleared her throat. “Alexander, if I come, um, I can look after Ant.”
“Jimmy’s never had a woman on his boat before, Tania. He’ll have a heart attack.”
“No, you’re right, of course. Ant, you want some more oatmeal?”
Anthony’s head remained down as he ate his breakfast.
Sometimes the wind was good, and sometimes it wasn’t. Windward, leeward, when there was no wind, it was difficult to trawl, despite Jimmy’s valiant efforts to set the sail. With just the two of them on the boat, Alexander loosened the staysail and while the sloop floated in the Atlantic, they sat and had a smoke.
Jimmy said, “Good God, man, why do you always wear that shirt down to your wrists? You must be dying of heat. Roll it up. Take it off.”
And Alexander said, “Jimmy, man, forget about my shirt, why don’t you get yourself a new boat? You’d make a heap more money. I know this was your old man’s, but do yourself a favor, invest in a fucking boat.”
“I got no money for a new boat.”
“Borrow it from a bank. They’re bending over backwards to help men get on their feet after the war. Get a fifteen-year boat mortgage. With the money you’ll make, you’ll pay it back in two years.”
Jimmy got excited. Suddenly he said, “Go halves with me.”
“What?”
“It’ll be our boat. And we’ll split the profits.”
“Jimmy, I—”
Jimmy jumped up, spilling his beer. “We’ll get another deckhand, another 12-trap trawl; we’ll get a 1300-gallon live tank. You’re right, we’ll make a heap.”
“Jimmy, wait—you have the wrong idea. We’re not staying here.” Alexander sat with the cigarette dangling from his fingers.
Jimmy became visibly upset. “Why would you be leaving? She likes it here, you keep saying so. You’re working, the boy’s doing all right. Why would you go?”
Alexander put the cigarette back in his mouth.
“You’ll have the winters off to do what you want.”
Alexander shook his head.
Jimmy raised his voice. “So why’d you get a job if you were just going to raise anchor in a month?”
“I got a job because I need work. What are we going to live on, your good graces?”
“I haven’t worked full time like this since before the war.” Jimmy spat. “What am I going to do after you leave?”
“Plenty of men are coming back now,” Alexander said. “You’ll get someone else. I’m sorry, Jim.”
Jimmy turned away and started untying the rope from the staysail. “Just great.” He didn’t look at Alexander. “But tell me, who else is going to work like you?”
That evening, as Alexander was sitting in his chair, showing Anthony how to tie a hitch knot through the marlinspike in his hands while they were waiting for Tatiana to go for their evening walk, there was shouting, and what was unusual this time was that a male voice was participating.
Tatiana came out.
“Mama, do you hear? He’s fighting back!”
“I hear, son.” She exchanged a glance with Alexander. “You two ready?”
They walked out the gate and started slowly down the road—all of them trying to hear the words instead of just the raised voices.
“Odd, no?” Alexander said. “The colonel arguing.”
“Yes,” Tatiana said in the tone of someone who was saying, isn’t it fantastic.
He glanced puzzled at her.
They strained to listen. A minute later, the mother came barreling out of the backyard, pushing the wheelchair with Nick in it through the tall grass. She nearly knocked herself and her husband over.
Thrusting the chair into the front yard, she said, “Here, sit! Happy now? You want to sit here all by yourself in the front so that passersby can gawk at you like you’re an animal in a zoo, go ahead. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about anything.”
“That much is obvious!” the colonel yelled as she stormed away. He was panting.
Tatiana and Alexander lowered their heads. Anthony said, “Hi, Nick.”
“Anthony! Shh.”
Anthony opened the gate and went in. “Want a cigarette? Mama, come here.”
She looked at Alexander. “Can I have a cigarette for him?” she whispered.
But it was Alexander who went to the colonel—his body and face slightly twisted—took out a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and held it to the colonel’s mouth.
The man inhaled, exhaled, but without his previous fervor with Tatiana. He didn’t speak.
Tatiana put her hand on Nick’s shoulder. Anthony brought him a stag beetle, a dead wasp, a raw old potato. “Look,” he said, “look at the wasp.”
Nick looked, but said nothing. The cigarette calmed him down. He had another one.
“Want a drink, Colonel?” Alexander asked suddenly. “There is a bar down on Main Street.”
Nick nodded in the direction of the house. “They won’t let me go.”
“We won’t ask them,” Alexander said. “Imagine their surprise when they come out and find you gone. They’ll think you wheeled yourself down the hill.”
This made Colonel Nicholas Moore smile. “The image of that is worth all the screeching later. OK, let’s go.”
Swezey’s was the only bar in Stonington. Children weren’t allowed in bars.
“I’m going to take Anthony on the swings,” Tatiana said. “You two have fun.”
Inside Alexander ordered two whiskeys. Holding both glasses, he clinked them, and put the drink to Nick’s mouth. The liquor went in one gulp. “Should we order another one?”
“You know,” said Nick, “why don’t you order me a whole bottle? I haven’t had a drink since I got hit eighteen months ago. I’ll pay you back.”
“Don’t worry,” Alexander said, and bought Nick and himself a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They sat in the corner, smoking and drinking.
“So what’s the matter with your wife, Colonel?” Alexander asked. “Why is she always so ticked off?”
They were leaning toward each other, the colonel in a wheelchair, the captain by his side.
Nick shook his head. “Look at me. Can you blame her? But not to worry—the army is going to get me a round-the-clock nurse soon. She’ll take care of me.”
They sat.
“Tell me about your wife,” Nick said. “She’s not afraid of me. Not like others around here. She’s seen this before?”
Alexander nodded. “She’s seen this before.”
Nick’s face brightened. “Does she want a job? The army will pay her ten dollars a day for my care. What do you say? A little more money for your family.”
“No,” Alexander said. “She was a nurse long enough. No more nursing for her.” He added, “We don’t need the money, we’re fine.”
“Come on, everyone needs money. You can get yourself your own house instead of living with crazy Janet.”
“And what’s she going to do with the boy?”
“Bring him, too.”
“No.”
Nick fell quiet, but not before making a desperate noise. “We’re on a waiting list for a nurse, but we can’t get one,” he said. “There aren’t enough of them. They’ve all quit. Their men are coming back, they want to have babies, they don’t want their wives to work.”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “I don’t want my wife to work. Especially not as a nurse.”
“If I don’t get a nurse, Bessie says she’s going to send me to the Army Hospital in Bangor. Says I’d be better off there.”
Alexander poured more needed drink down the man’s throat.
“They’ll certainly be happier if I’m there,” Nick said.
“They don’t seem like a happy pair.”
“No, no. Before the war, they were great.”
“Where d’you get hit?”
“In Belgium. Battle of the Bulge. And there I was thinking colonels didn’t get hit. Rank Has Its Privileges and all that. But a shell exploded, my captain and lieutenant both died, and I was burned. I would’ve been fine, but I was on the ground for fourteen hours before I got picked up by another platoon. The limbs got infected, couldn’t be saved.”
More drink, more smoke.
Nick said, “They should’ve just left me in the woods. It would’ve been over for me five hundred and fifty days ago, five hundred and fifty nights ago.”
He calmed down by degrees, helped by whiskey and the smokes. Finally he muttered, “She is so good, your wife.”
“Yes,” said Alexander.
“So fresh and young. So lovely to look at.”
“Yes,” said Alexander, closing his eyes.
“And she doesn’t yell at you.”
“No. Though I reckon she sometimes wants to.”
“Oh, to have such restraint in my Bessie. She used to be a fine woman. And the girl was such a loving girl.”
More drink, more smoke.
“But have you noticed since coming back,” said Nick, “that there are things that women just don’t know? Won’t know. They don’t understand what it was like. They see me like this, they think this is the worst. They don’t know. That’s the chasm. You go through something that changes you. You see things you can’t unsee. Then you are sleepwalking through your actual life, shell-shocked. Do you know, when I think of myself, I have legs? In my dreams I’m always marching. And when I wake up, I’m on the floor, I’ve fallen out of bed. I now sleep on the floor because I kept rolling over and falling while dreaming. When I dream of myself, I’m carrying my weapons, and I’m in the back of a battalion. I’m in a tank, I’m yelling, I’m always screaming in my dreams. This way! That way! Fire! Cease! Forward! March! Fire, fire, fire!”
Alexander lowered his head, his arms drooping on the table.
“I wake up and I don’t know where I am. And Bessie is saying, what’s the matter? You’re not paying attention to me. You haven’t said anything about my new dress. You end up living with someone who cooks your food for you and who used to open her legs for you, but you don’t know them at all. You don’t understand them, nor they you. You’re two strangers thrown together. In my dreams, with legs, after marching, I’m always leaving, wandering off, long gone. I don’t know where I am but I’m never here, never with them. Is it like that with you, too?”
Alexander quietly smoked, downing another glass of whiskey, and another. “No,” he finally said. “My wife and I have the opposite problem. She carried weapons and shot at men who came to kill her. She was in hospitals, on battlefields, on frontlines. She was in DP camps and concentration camps. She starved through a frozen, blockaded city. She lost everyone she ever loved.” Alexander took half a glass of sour mash into his throat and still couldn’t keep himself from groaning. “She knows, sees, and understands everything. Perhaps less now, but that’s my fault. I haven’t been much of a—” he broke off. “Much of anything. Our problem isn’t that we don’t understand each other. Our problem is that we do. We can’t look at each other, can’t speak one innocent word, can’t touch each other without touching the cross on our backs. There is simply never any peace.” Another stiff drink went into Alexander’s throat.
Suddenly Tatiana appeared in the dark corner. “Alexander,” she whispered, “it’s eleven o’clock. You have to be up at four.”
He looked up at her bleakly.
She glanced at Nick, who was staring at her with a knowing, full expression. “What have you been telling him?”
“We’ve just been reminiscing,” said the colonel. “About the good old days that brought us here.”
Slightly slurred, Alexander said he would be right back and stood up, knocking over his chair and swaying away. Tatiana was left alone with Nick.
“He tells me you’re a nurse,” Nick said.
“I was.”
He fell silent.
“What do you need?” She placed her hand on him. “What is it?” His moist eyes were pleading. “Do you have morphine?”
Tatiana straightened up. “What’s hurting?”
“Every single fucking thing that’s left of me,” he said. “Got enough morphine for that?”
“Nick …”
“Please. Please. Enough morphine so that I never feel again.”
“Nick, dear God …”
“When it gets unbearable for your husband, he’s got the weapons he cleans, he can just blow his brains out. But what about me?”
Nick couldn’t grab her, but he threw his body forward to her. “Who is going to blow my brains out, Tania?” he whispered.
“Nick, please!” Her hands were propping him up, but he’d had too much to drink and was listing.
Alexander came back, unsteady on his feet. Nick stopped speaking.
Tatiana had to wheel Nick up the steep hill herself because Alexander kept releasing the handlebars and Nick kept rolling back down. It took her a long time to get him to his house. Nick’s wife and daughter were purple with ire. The shrieking would have been sweeter for Tatiana had the colonel not spoken to her, but since he had, and since Alexander himself was too drunk to react to the histrionics of the two women, and since Nick Moore was also in a stupor, the punchline of the joke—a quadruple amputee in a wheelchair vanishing from the front lawn—went unappreciated by all parties, except for Anthony the following day.
The next morning Alexander had three cups of black coffee, staggered to work hung over, could put down only three traps at a time instead of the usual twelve, and came back with barely seventy lobsters, all of them chickens or one-pounders. He refused his pay, fell asleep right after dinner and never woke up until Anthony screamed in the middle of the night.
In the evening after supper, Tatiana went outside with a cup of tea, and Alexander wasn’t there. He and Anthony were with Nick in the next yard. Alexander had even taken his chair. Anthony was looking for bugs, and the two men were talking. Tatiana watched them for a few minutes and then went back inside. She sat down at the empty kitchen table and, surprising herself, burst into tears.
And the next night, and the next. Alexander didn’t even say anything to her. He just went, and he and Nick sat together, while Anthony played nearby. He started leaving his chair on Nick’s front lawn.
After a few days of not being able to stand it, Tatiana made a long distance call to Vikki before breakfast.
Vikki screamed into the phone with joy. “I can’t believe I’m finally hearing from you! What’s wrong with you? How are you? How is Anthony, my big boy? But first, what is wrong with you? You are a terrible friend. You said you’d be calling every week. I haven’t heard from you in over a month!”
“It hasn’t really been a month, has it?”
“Tania! What in heaven’s name have you been doing? No, no, don’t answer that.” Vikki giggled. “How has everything been?” she said in a low, insinuating voice.
“Oh, fine, fine, how’s it with you? How have you been keeping?”
“Never mind me, why haven’t you called me?”
“We’ve been—” Tatiana coughed.
“I know what you’ve been doing, you naughty girl. How is my adored child? How is my beloved boy? You don’t know what you’ve done to me. Tania giveth him and Tania taketh him away. I really miss looking after him. So much so that I’m thinking of having my own baby.”
“Unlike mine, Gelsomina,” said Tatiana, “your own child you’re going to have to keep forever. No giving him away like a puppy. And he’s not going to be as nice as Antman.”
“Who ever could be?”
They talked about Vikki’s nursing, about Deer Isle, about the boats, and the swings, and Edward Ludlow, and about a new man in Vikki’s life (“An officer! You’re not the only one who can take up with an officer”), and about New York (“Can’t walk any street without getting your shoes dirty with construction debris”), about her grandparents (“They’re fine, they’re trying to fatten me up, they say I’m too tall and skinny. Like if they feed me, I’ll get shorter”) and about the new short teased haircuts and new stilettos, and new fandango dresses and suddenly—“Tania? Tania, what’s the matter?”
Tatiana was crying into the phone.
“What’s the matter? What is it?”
“Nothing, nothing. Just … nice to hear your voice. I miss you very much.”
“So when are you coming back? I can’t live without you in our empty apartment,” said Vikki. “Absolutely can’t. Can’t do without your bread, without your boyzie-boy, without seeing your face. Tania, you’ve ruined me for other girls.” She laughed. “Now tell Vikki what’s wrong.”
Tatiana wiped her eyes. “Are you thinking of moving out of the apartment?”
“Moving, are you joking? Where am I going to find a three-bedroom in New York? You can’t imagine what’s happened to apartment prices since the war ended. Now stop changing the subject and tell me what’s the matter.”
“Really. I’m fine. I just …” Anthony was by her feet. She blew her nose and tried to calm down. She couldn’t speak aloud about Alexander in front of his son.
“You know who’s been calling for you? Your old friend Sam.”
“What?” Tatiana instantly stopped crying. She became alert. Sam Gulotta was her contact at the State Department for the years she had been trying to find Alexander. Sam knew very well Alexander had been found; why would he be calling for her? Her stomach dropped.
“Yes, calling for you. Looking for Alexander.”
“Oh.” Tatiana tried to keep her voice careless. “Did he say why?”
“He said something about the State Department needing to talk to Alexander. He was adamant that you call him. He’s been adamant every time he called.”
“How many times, um, has he called?”
“Oh, I don’t know, try … every day?”
“Every day?” Tatiana was stunned and frightened.
“That’s right. Every day. Adamant every day. That’s too much adamant for me, Tania. I keep telling him, as soon as I hear from you, I’ll give him a call, but he doesn’t believe me. Do you want his number?”
“I have Sam’s number,” she said slowly. “I’ve called him so many times over the years, I have it committed to memory.”
When Alexander first returned home, they had gone to Washington to thank Sam for helping with Alexander’s return. Sam had mentioned something about a mandatory debriefing by the State Department, but he had said it calmly and without haste, and added that it was summer and vital people were away. When they had left Sam at the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial, he didn’t say another word about it. So why such urgency now? Did this have anything to do with the reversal of friendly relations between two recent war allies, the United States and the Soviet Union?
“Call Sam, please, so he stops calling me. Although …” Vikki’s voice lowered a notch into flirtation territory. “Perhaps we should let him continue calling me? He’s a cutie-pie.”
“He’s a 37-year-old widower with kids, Vikki,” said Tatiana. “You can’t have him without becoming a mother, too.”
“Well, I’ve always wanted a child.”
“He has two children.”
“Oh, just stop it. Promise you’re going to call him?”
“I will.”
“Will you give our boyzie-boy a kiss from me the size of Montana?”
“Yes.” When Tatiana went to Germany to search for Alexander, it was Vikki who took care of Anthony. She had grown very attached to him. “I can’t call Sam right away,” Tatiana said. “I have to talk to Alexander about it first when he comes home tonight, so do me a favor, if Sam calls again, just say you haven’t spoken to me yet, and you don’t know where I am. All right?”
“Why?”
“I just … I need to talk to Alexander, and then sometimes we can’t get the phone to work. I don’t want Sam to panic, so hang tight, okay? Please don’t say anything.”
“Tania, you’re not very trusting, that’s your problem. That’s always been your problem. You’ve always been suspicious of people.”
“I’m not. I’m just … suspicious of their intentions.”
“Well, Sam wouldn’t do anything to …”
“Sam’s not running the State Department, is he?” said Tatiana.
“So?”
“He can’t vouch for everyone. Haven’t you been reading the papers?”
“No!” Vikki said proudly.
“The State Department is afraid of espionage on all fronts. I must talk to Alexander about this, see what he thinks.”
“This is Sam! He didn’t help you get Alexander back home just to accuse him of espionage.”
“I repeat, is Sam running the State Department?” Tatiana felt apprehension she could not explain to Vikki. In the 1920s Alexander’s mother and father belonged to the Communist Party of the United States. Harold Barrington got himself into quite a bit of trouble stateside. Suddenly Harold’s son was back in America just as tension between the two nations was escalating. What if the son had to pay for the sins of the father? As if he hadn’t paid enough—and by the looks of him indeed he had. “I have to run,” Tatiana said, glancing at Anthony and squeezing her hands around the phone. “I’ll talk to Alexander tonight. Promise you won’t say anything to Sam?”
“Only if you promise to come and visit me as soon as you leave Maine.”
“We’ll try, Gelsomina,” said Tatiana, hanging up. I will try someday to make that promise.
Shaking, she called Esther Barrington, Alexander’s aunt, his father’s sister, who lived in Massachusetts. She called ostensibly to say hello, but really to find out if anyone had contacted Esther about Alexander. They hadn’t. Small relief.
That evening over lobsters, Anthony said, “Dad, Mama called Vikki today.”
“She did?” Alexander looked up from his plate. His eyes probed her face. “Well, that’s great. How is Vikki?”
“Vikki is good. Mama cried though. Two times.”
“Anthony!” Tatiana lowered her head.
“What? You did cry.”
“Anthony, please, can you go and ask Mrs. Brewster if she wants some dinner now or if I should keep it in the oven for her?”
Anthony disappeared. Acutely feeling Alexander’s silence, Tatiana got up to go to the sink, but before she could utter a word of defense for her tears, Anthony reappeared.
“Mrs. Brewster is bleeding,” he said.
They rushed upstairs. Mrs. Brewster told them her son, newly returned from prison, beat her to get the rent money Alexander was paying. Tatiana tried to clean up the old lady with rags.
“He’s not staying with me. He’s staying down the road with friends.” Could Alexander help her with her son? Since he’d been in prison too, he should understand how things were. “I don’t see you beatin’ your wife, though.” Could Alexander ask her son not to beat her anymore? She wanted to keep her rent money. “He’s just going to spend it on filthy drink, like always, and then get hisself into trouble. I don’t know what you was in for, but he was in the pen for assault with a deadly weapon. Drunken assault.”
Alexander left to go next door to sit with Nick, but late that night he told Tatiana he was going to talk to Mrs. Brewster’s son.
“No.”
“Tania, I don’t like her either, but what kind of a fucked-up loser beats his own mother? I’m going to talk to him.”
“No.”
“No?”
“No. You’re too tightly wound.”
“I’m not tightly wound,” Alexander said slowly, into her back. “I’m just going to talk to him, that’s all, man to man. I’ll tell him beating his mother is not acceptable.” They were whispering in the dark, the beds pushed together, Anthony lightly snoring by Tatiana’s side.
“And he says to you, screw you, mister. Stay out of my business. And then what?”
“Good question. But perhaps he’ll be reasonable.”
“You think so? He beats his mother to take her money!” Sighing, Tatiana twitched in the middle between her two men.
“Well, we can’t just do nothing.”
“Yes, we can. Let’s not ask for someone else’s trouble.” We’ve got plenty. She didn’t know how to bring up Sam Gulotta, cold terror gluing his name to her throat. She tried to keep thinking about someone else’s troubles. She didn’t want Alexander near that woman’s son. But what to do?
“You’re right,” Tatiana finally said with a throat clearing. “We can’t do nothing. You know what? I think I’ll go and speak to him. I’m a woman. I’m little. I’ll talk to him nicely, the way I talk to everybody. He’s not going to get rough with me.”
She felt Alexander stiffen behind her. “Are you joking?” he whispered. “He beats his mother! Don’t even think of coming close to him.”
“Shh. It’ll be okay. Really.”
He turned her around to face him. “I’m serious,” he said, his eyes on her unblinking and intense. “Don’t take one step in his direction. Not one step. Because a syllable out of him against you, and he won’t be speaking to anyone ever again, and I’ll be in an American prison. Is that what you want?”
“No, darling,” she said softly. He was talking! He was animated. He had raised his whispering voice! She kissed his face, kissed him and kissed him, until he kissed her back, his hands pacing over her nightgown.
“Have I mentioned how much I hate you wearing clothes in my bed?”
“I know, but there’s a little boy with us,” she whispered. “I can’t be naked next to him.”
“You don’t fool me,” Alexander said heavily.
“Darling, it’s the boy,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Besides, my slip is made of silk, not burlap. Have you noticed I’m naked underneath?”
Alexander slipped his hands under. “Why were you crying with Vikki?” Something cool and unwelcome got into his voice. “What, you miss your New York?”
Guiltily Tatiana glanced at him. Lonely she glanced at him. “Why do you keep going next door every night?” she whispered, moaning lightly.
Alexander took his hands away. “Come on. You’ve seen Nick’s family. I’m the only one he can talk to. He’s got nobody besides me.”
Me neither, Tatiana thought, the hot hurt of it burning her eyes.
She couldn’t say anything to Alexander about Sam Gulotta and the State Department. There was no more room on his cold plate of anguish.
The next evening Anthony wandered back by himself after only half an hour outside with his father and the colonel. The sun had set and the mosquitoes were out. Tatiana bathed him, and as she was applying Calamine lotion to his bites, she asked, “Ant, what do Daddy and Nick talk about?”
“I don’t know,” Anthony said vaguely. “War. Fighting.”
“What about tonight? Why did you come back so early?”
“Nick keeps asking Dad for something.”
“What does he keep asking Dad for?”
“To kill him.”
A crouching Tatiana staggered backward, nearly falling on the floor. “What?”
“Don’t be upset with Dad. Please.”
She patted him. “Anthony … you’re a good boy.”
Seeing the crashed look on his mother’s face Anthony began to whimper.
She took him in her arms. “Shh. Everything is going to be all right, son.”
“Dad says he doesn’t want to kill him.”
Tatiana quickly dressed the boy for bed. “You wait here, you promise? Don’t go outside in your nightshirt. Stay in your bed and look at your book of boats and fish.”
“Where are you going?”
“To get Daddy.”
“Are you going to … come right back after you get Dad?” he said uncertainly.
“Of course. Anthony, of course. I’ll be right back.”
“Are you going to yell at him?”
“No, son.”
“Mama, please don’t be mad if he killed the colonel.”
“Shh. Look at your book. I’ll be right back.”
Tatiana got her nurse’s bag from the closet. It took her a few minutes to compose herself, but finally she walked determined down the road.
“Uh-oh,” said Nick when he saw her. “I think there’s going to be some hollerin’.”
“There isn’t,” Tatiana said coldly, opening the gate.
“It’s not his fault,” Nick said. “It’s mine. I’ve kept him.”
“My husband is a big boy,” she said. “He knows when enough is enough.” She looked at Alexander accusingly. “But he does forget that his son speaks English and hears every word the adults say.”
Alexander got up. “On that note, good night, Nick.”
“Leave the chair,” said Tatiana. “Go. Ant is by himself.”
“You’re not coming?”
“I’m going to talk to Nick for a minute.” She looked steadily at Alexander. “Go on. I’ll be right along.”
Alexander didn’t move. “What are you doing?” he said quietly.
She could see he wasn’t going to go and she wasn’t going to argue in front of a stranger. Though an argument would’ve been nice. “Nothing. I’m going to talk to Nick.”
“No, Tania. Come.”
“You don’t even know what—”
“I don’t care. Come.”
Ignoring his outstretched hand, she sat down in the chair and turned to the colonel. “I know what you’re talking to my husband about,” Tatiana said. “Stop it.”
Nick shook his head. “You’ve been at war. Don’t you understand anything?”
“Everything,” she said. “You can’t ask this of him. It’s not right.”
“Right?” he cried. “You want to talk about what’s right?”
“I do,” said Tatiana. “I’ve got a few things I’m trying to set right myself. But you went to the front, and you got hurt. That’s the price you paid to keep your wife and daughter from speaking German. When they stop grieving for you, they’ll be better. I know it’s hard now, but it will get better.”
“It’ll never get better. You think I don’t know what I was fighting for? I know. I’m not complaining about it. Not about that. But this isn’t life, not for me, not for my wife. This is just bullshit, pardon my language.” Because he could do nothing else, Nick heaved himself out of his chair onto the grass. Tatiana gasped. Alexander picked him up, put him back into his chair. “All I want is to die,” Nick said, panting. “Can’t you see it?”
“I see it,” she said in a low voice. “But leave my husband alone.”
“No one else will help me!” Nick tried to throw himself on the ground again, but Tatiana kept a firm arm on him.
“He won’t help you either,” she said. “Not with this.”
“Why not? Have you asked him how many of his own men he had shot to spare them agony?” Nick cried. “What, he hasn’t told you? Tell her, Captain. You shot them without thinking twice. Why won’t you do it for me now? Look at me!”
Tatiana stared at a darkly grim Alexander and then at Nick. “I know about my husband at war,” she said, her voice shaking. “But you leave him alone. He needs peace, too.”
“Please, Tania,” Nick whispered, bending his head into her hand. “Look at me. My revels now are ended. Have mercy on me. Just give me the morphine. It’s not violent, I’ll feel no pain. I’ll just drift off. It’s kind. It’s right.”
Tatiana looked questioningly up at Alexander.
“I’m begging you,” said Nick, seeing her vacillation.
Alexander pulled Tatiana up out of the chair. “Stop this, both of you,” he said, in a voice that brooked no argument, not even from the colonel. “You two have lost your minds. Good night.”
Later, in bed, they didn’t speak for a long while. Tatiana was scooped narrowly into him.
“Tania … tell me, were you going to kill Nick so that I wouldn’t spend any more time with him?”
“Don’t be ridi—” she broke off. “The man is dying. The man wants to be dead. Can’t you see that?”
With difficulty came Alexander’s reply. “I see it.”
Oh God.
“Help him, Alexander,” said Tatiana. “Take him to Bangor, to the Army Hospital. I know he doesn’t want to go, but he needs to go. The nurses are trained to take care of people like him. They will put the cigarettes in his mouth, they will read to him. They will care for him. He will live.” That man can’t be around you. You can’t be around him.
Alexander stopped talking. “Should I go to Bangor Hospital, too?” he asked.
“No, darling, no, Shura,” she whispered. “You have your own nurse right here. Round the clock.”
“Tania …”
“Please … shh.” They were whispering desperately, he into her hair, she into the pillow in front of her.
“Tania, would you … do it for me, if I asked? If I was … like him—”
He broke off.
“Faster than you can say Sachsenhausen.”
Click click somewhere, crickets crickets, bats and wings, Anthony snoring in the silence, in the sorrow. There was once so much Tatiana could help Alexander with. Why couldn’t she do it anymore?
Soundlessly she cried, only her shoulders quaking.
The next day Alexander took the colonel to the Bangor Army Hospital, four hours away. They left in the early morning. Tatiana filled their flasks, made them sandwiches, and washed and ironed Alexander’s khaki fatigues and a long-sleeved crew.
Before he left he asked, crouching by Anthony’s small frame, “You want me to bring you something back?”
“Yes, a toy soldier,” replied Anthony.
“You got it.” Alexander ruffled his hair and straightened up. “What about you?” he asked Tatiana, coming close to her.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she said, purposefully casual. “I don’t need anything.” She was trying to look beyond his bronze eyes, into somewhere deeper, somewhere that would tell her what he was thinking, what he was feeling, trying to reach across the ocean waters she could not traverse.
Nick was already in the camper, and his wife and daughter were milling nearby. Too many people around. The backs of Alexander’s fingers stroked her cheek. “Be a good girl,” he said, kissing her hand. She pressed her forehead into his chest for a moment before he stepped away.
When he was near the cab of the Nomad, he turned around. Tatiana, standing still and erect, squeezed hard Anthony’s hand, but that was the only indication of the turmoil within her, for to Alexander she presented herself straight and true. She even managed to smile. She blew him a kiss. Her hand went up to her temple in a trembling salute.
Alexander didn’t come back that night.
Tatiana didn’t sleep.
He didn’t come back the next morning.
Or the next afternoon.
Or the next evening.
She searched through his things and saw that his weapons were gone. Only her pistol remained, the German-issue P-38 he gave her in Leningrad. It was wrapped in a towel near a large wad of bills—extra money he had made from Jimmy and left for her.
She slept in a stupor next to Anthony in his twin bed.
The next morning Tatiana went down to the docks. Jimmy’s sloop was there, and Jimmy was doing his best to repair some damage to the side. “Hey, little guy,” he said to Anthony. “Your dad back yet? I gotta go and get me some lobsters or I’m gonna go broke.”
“He’s not back yet,” said Anthony. “But he’s going to bring me a toy soldier.”
Tatiana wavered on her calf legs. “Jim, he didn’t say anything to you about how many days he was going to take off?”
Jimmy shook his head. “He did say if I wanted to, I could hire one of the other guys coming here looking for work. If he doesn’t come back soon, I’m gonna do it. I gotta get back out there.”
The morning was dazzling.
Tatiana, dragging Anthony by the hand, practically ran uphill to Bessie’s and knocked until Bessie woke up and came miserably to the door. Tatiana, without apologizing for the early call, asked if Bessie had heard from Nick or from the hospital.
“No,” Bessie said gruffly. Tatiana refused to leave until Bessie called the hospital, only to find out that the colonel had been admitted without incident two days ago. The man who brought him stayed for one day and then left. No one knew anything else about Alexander.
Another day passed.
Tatiana sat on the bench by the bay, by the morning water, and watched her son push himself on a tire swing. Her arms were twisted around her stomach. She was trying not to rock like Alexander rocked at three o’clock in the morning.
Has he left me? Did he kiss my hand and go?
No. It wasn’t possible. Something’s happened. He can’t cope, can’t make it, can’t find a way out, a way in. I know it. I feel it. We thought the hard part was over—but we were wrong. Living is the hardest part. Figuring out how to live your life when you’re all busted up inside and out—there is nothing harder. Oh dear God. Where is Alexander?
She had to go to Bangor immediately. But how? She didn’t have a car; would she and Ant go there by bus? Would they leave Stonington for good, leave their things? And go where? But she had to do something, she couldn’t just continue to sit here!
She was clenched inside, outside.
She had to be strong for her son.
She had to be resolute for him.
Everything was going to be all right.
Like a mantra. Over and over.
This is my vicious dream, Tatiana’s entire body shouted. I thought it was like a dream that he was with me again, and I was right, and now I’ve opened my eyes, and he’s gone like before.
Tatiana was watching Anthony swing, looking beyond him, dreaming of one man, imagining only one other heart in the vastness of the universe—then, now, as ever. She still flew to him.
Is he still alive?
Am I still alive?
She thought so. No one could hurt this much and be dead.
“Mama, are you watching me? I’m going to spin and spin and spin until I get dizzy and fall down. Whee! Are you watching? Watch, Mama!”
Her eyes were glazed over. “I’m watching, Antman. I’m watching.”
The air smelled so August, the sun shone so brightly, the pines, the elms, the cones, the sea, the spinning boy, just three, the young mother, not even twenty-three.
Tatiana had imagined her Alexander since she was a child, before she believed that someone like him was even possible. When she was a little girl, she dreamed of a fine world in which a good man walked its winding roads, perhaps somewhere in his wandering soul searching for her.
On the Banks of the Luga River, 1938
Tatiana’s world was perfect.
Life may not have been perfect; far from it. But in the summer, when the day began almost before the last day ended, when the crickets sang all night and cows mooed before dreams fled, when the smells of summer June in the village of Luga were sharp—the cherry and the lilacs and the nettles in the soul from dawn to dusk—when you could lie in the narrow bed by the window and read books about the Grand Adventure of Life and no one disturbed you—the air so still, the branches rustling and, not far, the Luga River rushing—then the world was a perfect place.
And this morning young Tatiana was skipping down the road, carrying two pails of milk from Berta’s cow. She was humming, the milk was spilling, she was hurrying so she could bring the milk back and climb into bed and read her marvelous book, but she couldn’t help skipping, and the milk couldn’t help spilling. She stopped, lowered the rail over her shoulders onto the ground, picked up one pail and drank the warm milk from it, picked up the other and drank some more. Replacing the rail around her shoulders she started skipping again.
Tatiana was one elongated reedy limb from toe to fingers, all one straight line, feet, knees, thighs, hips, ribs, chest, shoulders, a stalk, tapering off in a slender neck and expanding into a round Russian face with a high forehead, a strong jaw, a pink smiling mouth and white teeth. Her eyes glinted green with mischief, her cheeks and small nose were drowned in freckles. The joyous face was framed with white blonde hair, just wispy feathers falling on her shoulders. No one could sit by Tatiana without caressing her silky head.
“TATIANA!” The scream from the porch.
Except maybe Dasha.
Dasha was always shouting. Tatiana, this, Tatiana, that. She is going to have to learn to relax and lower her voice, Tatiana thought. Though why should she? Everyone in Tatiana’s family hollered. How else could one possibly be heard? There were so many of them. Well, her gray quiet grandfather managed somehow. Tatiana managed—somehow. But everyone else, her mother, her father, her sister, even her brother, Pasha—what did he have to shout about?—shouted as if they were just coming into the world.
The children played noisily and the grown-ups fished and grew vegetables in their yards. Some had cows, some had goats; they bartered cucumbers for milk and milk for grain; they milled their own rye and made their own pumpernickel bread. The chickens laid eggs and the eggs were bartered for tea with people from the cities, and once in a while someone brought sugar and caviar from Leningrad. Chocolate was as rare and expensive as diamonds, which was why when Tatiana’s father—who had left for a business trip to Poland recently— asked his children what they wanted for gifts, Dasha instantly said chocolate. Tatiana wanted to say chocolate, too, but instead said, maybe a nice dress, Papa? All her dresses were hand-me-downs from Dasha and much too big.
“TATIANA!” Dasha’s voice was now coming from the yard.
Turning her reluctant head, Tatiana leveled her bemused gaze at her sister, standing at the gate with her exasperated arms at her large hips. “Yes, Dasha?” she said softly. “What is it?”
“I’ve been calling you for ten minutes! I’m hoarse from shouting! Did you hear me?” Dasha was taller than Tatiana, and full-figured; her unruly curly brown hair was tied up in a ponytail, her brown eyes indignant.
“No, I didn’t hear,” Tatiana said. “Next time, maybe shout louder.”
“Where have you been? You’ve been gone two hours—to get milk from five houses up the road!”
“Where’s the fire?”
“Stop it with your fresh lip this instant! I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Dasha,” said Tatiana philosophically, “Blanca Davidovna says that Christ says that blessed are the patient.”
“Oh, you’re a fine one to talk, you’re the most impatient person I know.”
“Well, tell that to Berta’s cow. I was waiting for it to come back from pasture.”
Dasha took the pails off Tatiana’s shoulders. “Berta and Blanca fed you, didn’t they?”
Tatiana rolled her eyes. “They fed me, they kissed me, they sermonized me. And it’s not even Sunday. I’m fed and cleansed and one with the Lord.” She sighed. “Next time you can go get your own milk, you impatient heathen.”
Tatiana was three weeks from fourteen, while Dasha had turned twenty-one in April. Dasha thought she was Tatiana’s second mother. Their grandmother thought she was Tatiana’s third mother. The old ladies who gave Tatiana milk and talked to her about Jesus thought they were her fourth, fifth and sixth mothers. Tatiana felt that she barely needed the one loud exasperated mother she had—thankfully in Leningrad at the moment. But Tatiana knew that for one reason or another, through no fault of her own, women, sisters, other people felt a need to mother her, smother her more like it, squeeze her in their big arms, braid her wispy hair, kiss her freckles, and pray to their God for her.
“Mama left me in charge of you and Pasha,” Dasha declared autocratically. “And if you’re going to give me your attitude, I won’t tell you the news.”
“What news?” Tatiana jumped up and down. She loved news.
“Not telling.”
Tatiana skipped after Dasha up the porch and into their house. Dasha put the pails down. Tatiana was wearing a little-girl sundress and bouncing up and down. Without warning she flung herself onto her sister, who was nearly knocked to the floor before she caught her footing.
“You shouldn’t do that!” Dasha said but not angry. “You’re getting too big.”
“I’m not too big.”
“Mama is going to kill me,” said Dasha, patting Tatiana’s behind. “All you do is sleep and read and disobey. You don’t eat, you’re not growing. Look how tiny you are.”
“I thought you just said I was too big.” Tatiana’s arms were around Dasha’s neck.
“Where’s your crazy brother?”
“He went fishing at dawn,” Tatiana said. “Wanted me to come too. Me get up at dawn. I told him what I thought of that.”
Dasha squeezed her. “Tania, I have kindling that’s fatter than you. Come and eat an egg.”
“I’ll eat an egg if you tell me your news,” said Tatiana, kissing her sister’s cheek, then the other cheek. Kiss kiss kiss. “You should never keep good news all to yourself, Dasha. That’s the rule: Bad news only to yourself but good news to everybody.”
Dasha set her down. “I don’t know if it’s good news but … We have new neighbors,” she said. “The Kantorovs have moved in next door.”
Tatiana widened her eyes. “You don’t say,” she said in a shocked voice, grabbing her face. “Not the Kantorovs!”
“That’s it, I’m not speaking to you anymore.”
Tatiana laughed. “You say the Kantorovs as if they are the Romanovs.”
In a thrilled tone, Dasha continued. “It’s rumored they’re from Central Asia! Turkmenistan, maybe? Isn’t that exciting? Apparently they have a girl—a girl for you to play with.”
“That’s your news?” said Tatiana. “A Turkmeni girl for me to play with? Dasha, you’ve got to do better than that. I have a village-full of girls and boys to play with—who speak Russian. And cousin Marina is coming in two weeks.”
“They also have a son.”
“So?” Tatiana looked Dasha over. “Oh. I see. Not my age. Your age.”
Dasha smiled. “Yes, unlike you, some of us are interested in boys.”
“So really, it’s not my news. It’s your news.”
“No. The girl is for you.”
Tatiana went with Dasha on the porch to eat a hard-boiled egg. She had to admit she was excited, too. New people didn’t come to the village very often. Never actually. The village was small, the houses were let out for years to the same people, who grew up, had children, grew old.
“Did you say they moved in next door?”
“Yes.”
“Where the Pavlovs lived?”
“Not anymore.”
“What happened to them?”
“I don’t know. They’re not there.”
“Well, obviously. But what happened to them? Last summer they were here.”
“Fifteen summers they were here.”
“Fifteen summers,” Tatiana corrected herself, “and now new people have moved into their house? Next time you’re in town, stop by the local Soviet council and ask the Commissar what happened to the Pavlovs.”
“Are you out of your mind, such as it is? I’m going to the Soviet to ask where the Pavlovs went? Just eat, will you? Have the egg. Stop asking so many questions. I’m tired of you already and it’s only morning.”
Tatiana was sitting, cheeks like a chipmunk, the whole egg uneaten in her mouth, her eyes twinkling. Dasha laughed, pulling Tatiana to herself. Tatiana moved away. “Stay still,” said Dasha. “I have to rebraid your hair, it’s a mess. What are you reading now, Tanechka?” she asked as she started unbraiding it. “Anything good?”
“Queen Margot. It’s the best book.”
“Never read it. What’s it about?”
“Love,” said Tatiana. “Oh, Dasha—you’ve never dreamed of such love! A doomed soldier La Môle falls in love with Henry IV’s unhappy Catholic wife, Queen Margot. Their impossible love will break your heart.”
Dasha laughed. “Tania, you are the funniest girl I know. You know absolutely nothing about anything, yet talk in thrall of words of love on a page.”
“Obviously you’ve never read Queen Margot,” Tatiana said calmly. “It’s not words of love.” She smiled. “It’s a song of love.”
“I don’t have the luxury of reading about love. All I do is take care of you.”
“You leave a little time for some nighttime social interaction.”
Dasha pinched her. “Everything is a joke to you. Well, just you wait, missy. Someday you won’t think that social interaction is so funny.”
“Maybe, but I’ll still think you’re so funny.”
“I’ll show you funny.” Dasha knocked her back on the couch. “You urchin,” she said. “When are you going to grow up? Come, I can’t wait for your impossible brother anymore. Let’s go meet your new best friend, Mademoiselle Kantorova.”
Saika Kantorova.
The summer of 1938, when she turned fourteen, was the summer that Tatiana grew up.
The people who moved in next door were nomads, drifters from parts of the world far removed from Luga. They had odd Central Asian names. The father, Murak Kantorov, too young to be retired, mumbled that he was a retired army man. But his black hair was long and tied in a ponytail. Did soldiers have long hair like that? The mother, Shavtala, said she was a non-retired teacher “of sorts.” The nineteen-year-old son, Stefan, and the fifteen-year-old daughter, Saika, said nothing except to pronounce Saika’s name. “Sah-EE-ka.”
Was it true that they came from Turkmenistan? Sometimes. Georgia? Occasionally. The Kantorovs answered all questions with vagueness.
Usually new people were friendlier, not as watchful or silent. Dasha tried. “I’m a dental assistant. I’m twenty-one. What about you, Stefan?”
Dasha was already flirting! Tatiana coughed loudly. Dasha pinched her. Tatiana wanted to make a joke, but there didn’t seem to be any room for jokes in the crowded dark room where too many people stood awkwardly. The sun was blazing outside, yet inside, the unwashed curtains were drawn over the filthy windows. The Kantorovs had not unpacked their suitcases. The house had been left furnished by the Pavlovs, who seemed not so much to have left as to have stepped out.
There were some new things on the mantel. Photos, pictures, strange sculptures and small gilded paintings, like icons, though not of Jesus or Mary … but of things with wings.
“Did you know the Pavlovs?” asked Tatiana.
“Who?” the father said gruffly.
“The Pavlovs. This was their house.”
“Well, it’s not their house anymore, is it?” said the raven mother.
“They won’t be back,” said Murak. “We have papers from the Soviet. We are registered to stay here. Why so many questions from a child? Who wants to know?” He pretended to smile.
Tatiana pretended to smile back.
When they were outside, Dasha hissed, “Stop it! I can’t believe you’re already starting with your inane questions. Keep quiet, or I swear I’ll tell Mama when she comes.”
Dasha, Stefan, Tatiana and Saika stood in the sunlight.
Tatiana said nothing. She wasn’t allowed to ask questions.
Finally Stefan smiled at Dasha.
Saika watched Tatiana guardedly.
It was at that moment that Pasha, little and fast, ran up the steps of the house, shoved a bucket with three striped bass into Tatiana’s body and said loudly, “Ha, little smart Miss Know-it-nothing, look what I caught today—”
“Pasha, meet our new neighbors,” interrupted Dasha. “Pasha—this is Stefan, and Saika. Saika is your age.”
Now Saika smiled. “Hello, Pasha,” she said.
Pasha smiled broadly back. “Well, hello, Saika.”
“And how old are you?” Saika said, appraising him.
“Well, I’m the same age as this one over here.” Dark-haired Pasha pulled hard on Tatiana’s blonde braid. She shoved him. “We’re fourteen soon.”
“You’re twins!” exclaimed Saika, looking at them intently. “What do you know. Obviously not identical.” She smirked. “Well, well. You seem so much older than your sister.”
“Oh, he is so much older than me,” said Tatiana. “Nine minutes older.”
“You seem older than that, Pasha.”
“How much older do I seem, Saika?” Pasha grinned. She grinned back.
“Like twelve minutes older,” Tatiana grumbled, stifling the desire to roll her eyes, and “accidentally” tripping over the bucket, spilling his precious fish onto the grass. Pasha’s attention was loudly and properly diverted.
To wake up and be still with the morning, to wake up and feel the sun, to not do, to not think, to not fret. Tatiana lived in Luga unbothered by the weather, for when it rained she read, and when it was sunny she swam. She lived in Luga unbothered by life: she never thought about what she wore, for she had nothing, or what she ate, because it was always adequate. She lived in Luga in timeless childhood bliss without a past and without a future. She thought there was nothing in the world that a summer in Luga could not cure.
The Last Snow, 1946
“Mama, Mama!”
Shuddering she came to and swirled around. Anthony was running, pointing to the sloping hill, down which walked Alexander. He was wearing the clothes he left in.
Tatiana got up. She wanted to run to him, too, but her legs wouldn’t carry her. They couldn’t even support her standing. Anthony, the brave boy, jumped straight into his father’s arms.
Carrying his son, Alexander walked to Tatiana on the pebbled beach and set him down.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“Hey,” she said, barely able to keep her composed face.
Unshaven and unclean, Alexander stood and stared at her with gaunt black rings under his eyes, with a barely composed face of his own. Tatiana forgot about herself and went to him. He bent deeply to her, his face pressed into her neck, into the braids of her hair. Her feet remained on the ground and her arms were around him. Tatiana felt such black despair coming from Alexander that she started to convulse.
Gripping her tighter, his arms surrounding her, he whispered, “Shh, shh, come on, the boy …” When he released her, Tatiana didn’t look up, not wanting him to see the fear for him in her eyes. There was no relief. But he was with her.
Tugging on his father’s arm, Anthony asked, “Dad, why did you take so long to come back? Mama was so worried.”
“Was she? I’m sorry Mommy was worried,” Alexander said, not looking at her. “But, Ant, toy soldiers aren’t easy to come by.” He took out three from his bag. Anthony squealed.
“Did you bring Mama anything?”
“I didn’t want anything,” said Tatiana.
“Did you want this?” He took out four heads of garlic.
She attempted a smile.
“What about this?” He took out two bars of good chocolate.
She attempted another smile.
As they were walking up the hill, Alexander, carrying Anthony, gave Tatiana his arm. Putting her arm through his, she pressed herself against him for a moment before walking on.
Alexander was cleaned, bathed, shaved, fed. Now in their little narrow bed she was lying on top of him, kissing him, cupping him, caressing him, carrying on, crying over him. He lay motionless, soundless, his eyes closed. The more clutching and desperate her caresses became, the more like a stone he became, until finally, he pushed her off himself. “Come on now,” he said. “Stop it. You’ll wake the boy.”
“Darling, darling …” she was whispering, reaching for him.
“Stop it, I said.” He took her hands off him.
“Take off your vest, darling,” Tatiana whispered, crying. “Look, I’ll take off my nightgown, I’ll be naked, like you like …”
He stopped her. “No, I’m exhausted. You’ll wake the boy. The bed creaks too much. You’re making too much noise. Stop crying, I said; stop carrying on.”
She didn’t know what to do. Caressing him until he was swollen in her hands, she asked if he wanted something from her. He shrugged.
Trembling, she put him in her mouth but couldn’t continue; she was choking, she was so sad. Alexander sighed.
Getting off the bed, he brought her down to the plank wood floor, turned her on her hands and knees, told her to keep quiet, and took her from behind, holding her at the small of her back with one hand and at her hip with the other to keep her steady. When he was done, he got up, got back into bed, and never made a sound.
After that night, Tatiana lost her ability to talk to him. That he wouldn’t just tell her what was going on with him was one thing. But the fact that she couldn’t find the courage to ask was wholly another. The silence between them grew in black chasms.
For three subsequent evenings, Alexander wouldn’t stop cleaning his weapons. That he had the weapons was troubling enough, but he wouldn’t part with any of the ones he brought back from Germany, not the remarkable Colt M1911 .45 caliber pistol she had bought for him, not the Colt Commando, not even the 9mm P-38. The M1911, the king of pistols, was Alexander’s favorite—Tatiana could tell by how long he cleaned it. She would go to put Anthony to bed, and when she returned outside, he would still be sitting in the chair, sliding the magazine in and out, cocking it, putting the safety on it and back again, wiping all the parts with cloth.
For three subsequent evenings Alexander wouldn’t touch her. Tatiana, not knowing, not understanding, but desperately wanting to make him happy, stayed away, hoping that eventually he would explain, or evolve back into what they had. He evolved so slowly. On the fourth night Alexander pulled off all his clothes and stood in front of her naked in the dark, as she sat on the bed, about to get in. She looked up at him. He looked down at her. You want me to touch you? she whispered uncertainly, her hands rising to him. Yes, he said. I want you to touch me, Tatiana.
He evolved a little but never explained anything in the dark, in their little room with Anthony sleeping.
The days became cooler, the mosquitoes left. The leaves started changing. Tatiana didn’t think there was breath left in her body to sit on the bench and watch the hills of cinnabar and wine and gold reflect off the still water.
“Anthony,” she whispered. “Is this so beautiful or what?”
“It’s or what, Mama.” He was wearing his father’s officer’s cap, the one Dr. Matthew Sayers had given her years ago off a supposedly dead Alexander’s head. He has drowned, Tatiana, he is dead in the ice, but I have his cap; would you like it?
The beige cap with a red star, too big for Anthony, made Tatiana think of herself and her life in the past tense instead of in the present. Sharply regretting having given it to the boy, she tried to take it from him, to hide it from him, to put it away, but every morning Anthony said, “Mama, where is my cap?”
“It’s not your cap.”
“It is so. Dad told me it was mine now.”
“Why did you tell him he could have it?” she grumbled to Alexander one evening as they were ambling down to town.
Before he had a chance to reply, a young man, less than twenty, ran by, lightly touching Tatiana on her shoulder, and said with a wide, happy smile, “Hi there, girly-girl!” Saluting Alexander, he continued downhill.
Slowly Alexander turned his head to Tatiana, who was next to him, her arm through his. He tapped her hand. “Do I know him?”
“Yes, and no. You drink the milk he brings every day.”
“He’s the milkman?”
“Yes.”
They continued walking.
“I heard,” Alexander said evenly, “that he’s had it off with every woman in the village but one.”
“Oh,” Tatiana said without missing a beat, “I bet it’s that stuck-up Mira in house number thirty.”
And Alexander laughed.
He laughed!
He laughs!
And then he leaned to her and kissed her face. “Now that’s funny, Tania,” he said.
Tatiana was pleased with him for being pleased. “Will you explain to me why you don’t mind the boy wearing your cap?” she asked, squeezing his arm.
“Oh, it’s harmless.”
“I don’t think it’s so harmless. Sometimes seeing your army cap prevents me from seeing Stonington. That isn’t harmless, is it?”
And what did her inimitable Alexander say to that, strolling down a sublime New England autumn hill overlooking the crystal ocean waters with his wife and son?
He said, “What’s Stonington?”
And a day later Tatiana finally figured out why this place was so close to her heart. With its long grasses and sparkling waters, the field flowers and the pines, the deciduous smells coupled with the thinness in the air—it reminded her of Russia! And when she realized this—the minutes and hours of claret and maroon maples, the gold mountain ash and swaying birches piercing her heart—she stopped smiling.
When Alexander came home from the boat that evening and went up to her, as usual sitting on the bench, and saw what must have been her most unresponsive face, he said with a nod, “Ah. And there it finally is. So … what do you think? Nice to be reminded of Russia, Tatiana Metanova?”
She said nothing, walking down to the dock with him. “Why don’t you take the lobsters, go on up?” he offered. “I’ll keep the boy while I finish.”
Tatiana took the lobsters and flung them in the trash.
Alexander bit his amused lip. “What, no lobsters today?”
She strode past Alexander to the boat. “Jim,” she said, “instead of lobsters, I made spaghetti sauce with meatballs. Would you like to come have dinner with us?”
Jimmy beamed.
“Good.” Tatiana turned to go, and then, almost as an afterthought, said, “Oh, by the way, I invited my friend Nellie from Eastern Road to join us. She’s a little blue. She just found out she lost her husband in the war. I hope you don’t mind.”
Jimmy, as it turned out, didn’t mind. And neither did a slightly less blue Nellie.
Mrs. Brewster was beaten for her rent money again. Tatiana was cleaning the cut on her hand for her, while Anthony’s eyes, as somber as his father’s, stared at his mother from the footstool at her feet.
“Mama was a nurse,” said Anthony reverentially.
Mrs. Brewster watched her. There was something on her mind. “You never told me where you come from, the accent. It sounds—”
“Russian,” said the three-year-old whose father wasn’t there to stop him.
“Ah. Your husband a Russki, too?”
“No, my husband is American.”
“Dad is American,” said Anthony proudly, “but he was a captain in the—”
“Anthony!” Tatiana yanked his arm. “Time to go get Dad.”
The next day Mrs. Brewster expressed the opinion that the Soviets were nasty communists. This was her son’s view. She wanted another seven dollars for the water and electric. “You’re cooking all the time on my stove there.”
Tatiana was rattled at the shakedown. “But I make dinner for you.”
Mrs. Brewster said, patting the bandage Tatiana had wrapped around her hand, “And in the spirit of communism, my son says he wants you to pay thirty dollars a week for the room, not eight. Or you can find another collective to live on, comrade.”
Thirty dollars a week! “All right,” said Tatiana through her teeth. “I’ll pay you another twenty-two a week. But this is just between us. Don’t mention it to my husband.” As Tatiana walked away, she felt the glare of someone who’d been beaten by her son for rent money and yet still trusted him more.
No sooner had they met Alexander on the dock than Anthony said, “Dad, Mrs. Brooster called us nasty communists.”
He glanced at Tatiana. “She did, did she?”
“She did, and Mama got upset.”
“She did, did she?” He sidled up to her.
“No, I didn’t. Anthony walk ahead now, I have to talk to your father.”
“You did, you did,” Anthony said. “You get that tight mouth when you get upset.” He tightened his mouth to show his father.
“Doesn’t she just,” said Alexander.
“All right you two,” Tatiana said quietly. “Will you go on ahead, Anthony?”
But he lifted his arms to her, and she picked him up.
“Dad, she called us communists!”
“I can’t believe it.”
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“What are communists?”
That night before dinner, of lobsters (“Oh, not again!”) and potatoes, Anthony said, “Dad, is twenty-two dollars a lot or a little?”
Alexander glanced at his son. “Well, it depends for what. It’s a little money for a car. But it’s a lot of money for candy. Why?”
“Mrs. Brooster wants us to pay twenty-two more dollars.”
“Anthony!” Tatiana was near the stove; she didn’t turn around. “No, the child is impossible. Go wash your hands. With soap. Thoroughly. And rinse them.”
“They’re clean.”
“Anthony, you heard your mother. Now.” That was Alexander. Anthony went.
He came up to her by the sink. “So what’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s time to go, don’t you think? We’ve been here two months. And soon it’s going to get much colder.” He paused. “I’m not even going to get started on the communists or the twenty-two dollars.”
“I wouldn’t mind it if we never left here,” she said. “Here on the edge of the world. Nothing intrudes here. Despite …” she waved her hand to Mrs. Brewster upstairs. “I feel safe here. I feel like no one will ever find us.”
Alexander was quiet. “Is someone … looking for us?”
“No, no. Of course not.” She spoke so quickly.
He placed two fingers under her chin and lifted her face to him. “Tania?”
She couldn’t return his serious gaze. “I just don’t want to go yet, okay?” She tried to move away from his hand. He didn’t let her. “That’s all. I like it here.” She raised her hands to hold on to his arms. “Let’s move to Nellie’s. We’ll have two rooms. She has a bigger kitchen. And you can go for a drink with your pal Jimmy. As I understand, he’s been coming around there a little.” She smiled to convince him.
Letting go of her, Alexander put his plate in the sink, clanging it loudly against the cast aluminum sides. “Yes, let’s,” he said. “Nellie, Jimmy, us. What a fine idea, communal living. We should have more of it.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. Guess you can take the girl out of the Soviet Union, but you can’t take the Soviet Union out of the girl.”
At least there was some participation. Though, like Tatiana kept saying, not great.
They moved to Nellie’s. The air turned a little chilly, then a lot chilly, then cold, particularly in the night, and Nellie, as they found out, was Dickensianly cheap with the heat.
They may have paid for two rooms, but it was all never mind to Anthony, who had less than no interest in staying in a room all by himself. Alexander was forced to drag his twin bed into their room, and push the beds together—again. They paid for two rooms and lived in one.
They huddled under thick blankets, and then suddenly, in the middle of October, it snowed! Snow fell in balls out of the sky, and in one night covered the bay and the barely bare trees in white wool. There was no more work for Alexander, and now there was snow. The morning snow fell, they looked out the window and then at each other. Alexander smiled with all his teeth.
Tatiana finally understood. “Oh, you,” she said. “So smug in your little knowledge.”
“So smug,” he agreed, still smiling.
“Well, you’re wrong about me. There is nothing wrong with a little snow.”
He nodded.
“Right, Anthony? Right, darling? You and me are used to snow. New York had snow, too.”
“Not just New York.” The smile in Alexander’s eyes grew dimmer, as if becoming veiled by the very snow he was lauding.
The stairs were slippery, covered with four inches of old ice. The half-filled metal bucket of water was heavy and kept spilling over the stairs as she held on to the banister with one hand, the bucket with the other and pulled herself up one treacherous step at a time. She had to get up two flights. At the seventh step, she fell on her knees, but didn’t let go the banister, or the bucket. Slowly she pulled herself back to her feet. And tried again. If only there were a little light, she could see where she was stepping, avoid the ice maybe. But there wouldn’t be daylight for another two hours, and she had to go out and get the bread. If she waited two hours there would be no bread left in the store. And Dasha was getting worse. She needed bread.
Tatiana turned away from him. It was morning! There was no dimming of lights at the beginning of each day; it was simply not allowed.
They went sledding. They rented two Flexible Flyers from the general store, and spent the afternoon with the rest of the villagers sledding on the steep Stonington hill that ran down to the bay. Anthony walked uphill exactly twice. Granted, it was a big hill, and he was brave and good to do it, but the other twenty times, his father carried him.
Finally, Tatiana said, “You two go on without me. I can’t walk anymore.”
“No, no, come with us,” said Anthony. “Dad, I’ll walk up the hill. Can you carry Mama?”
“I think I might be able to carry Mommy,” said Alexander.
Anthony trudged along, while Alexander carried Tatiana uphill on his back. She cried and the tears froze on her face. But then they raced down, Tatiana and Anthony on one sled, trying to beat Alexander, who was heavier than mother and son, and fast and maneuvered well, unhampered by fear for a small boy, unlike her. She flew down anyway, with Anthony shrieking with frightened delight. She almost beat Alexander. At the bottom she collided into him.
“You know if I didn’t have Ant, you’d never win,” she said, lying on top of him.
“Oh, yes, I would,” he said, pushing her off him into the snow. “Give me Ant, and let’s go.”
It was a good day.
They spent three more long days in the whitened mountain ash trees on the whitened bay. Tatiana baked pies in Nellie’s big kitchen. Alexander read all the papers and magazines from stem to stern and talked post-war politics to Tatiana and Jimmy, and even to indifferent Nellie. In Nellie’s potato fields, Alexander built snowmen for Anthony. After the pies were in the oven, Tatiana came out of the house and saw six snowmen arrayed like soldiers from big to little. She tutted, rolled her eyes and dragged Anthony away to fall down and make angels in the snow instead. They made thirty of them, all in a row, arrayed like soldiers.
On the third night of winter, Anthony was in their bed restfully asleep, and they were wide awake. Alexander was rubbing her bare buttocks under her gown. The only window in their room was blizzarded over. She assumed the blue moon was shining beyond. His hands were becoming very insistent. Alexander moved one of the blankets onto the floor, silently; moved her onto the blanket, silently; laid her flat onto her stomach, silently, and made love to her in stealth like they were doughboys on the ground, crawling to the frontline, his belly to her back, keeping her in a straight line, completely covering her tiny frame with his body, clasping her wrists above her head with one hand. As he confined her, he was kissing her shoulders, and the back of her neck, and her jawline, and when she turned her face to him, he kissed her lips, his free hand roaming over her legs and ribs while he moved deep and slow! amazing enough by itself, but even more amazingly he turned her to him to finish, still restraining her arms above her head, and even made a brief noise not just a raw exhale at the feverish end … and then they lay still, under the blankets, and Tatiana started to cry underneath him, and he said shh, shh, come on, but didn’t instantly move off her, like usual.
“I’m so afraid,” she whispered.
“Of what?”
“Of everything. Of you.”
He said nothing.
She said, “So you want to get the heck out of here?”
“Oh, God. I thought you’d never ask.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Jimmy asked when he saw them packing up the next morning.
“We’re leaving,” Alexander replied.
“Well, you know what they say,” Jim said. “Man proposes and God disposes. The bridge over Deer Isle is iced over. Hasn’t been plowed in weeks and won’t be. Nowhere to go until the snow melts.”
“And when do you think that might be?”
“April,” Jimmy said, and both he and Nellie laughed. Jimmy hugged her with his one good arm and Nellie, gazing brightly at him, didn’t look as if she cared that he had just the one.
Tatiana and Alexander glanced at each other. April! He said to Jim, “You know what, we’ll take our chances.”
Tatiana started to speak up, started to say, “Maybe they’re right—” and Alexander fixed her with such a stare that she instantly shut up, ashamed of questioning him in front of other people, and hurried on with the packing. They said goodbye to a regretful Jimmy and Nellie, said goodbye to Stonington and took their Nomad Deluxe across Deer Isle onto the mainland.
In this one instant, man disposed. The bridge had been kept clear by the snow crews on Deer Isle. Because if the bridge was iced over, no one could get any produce shipments to the people in Stonington. “What a country,” said Alexander, as he drove out onto the mainland and south.
They stopped at Aunt Esther’s for what Alexander promised was going to be a three-day familial visit.
They stayed six weeks until after Thanksgiving.
Esther lived in her big old house in a quaint and white Barrington with Rosa, her housekeeper of forty years. Rosa had known Alexander since birth. The two women clucked over Alexander and his wife and child with such ferocity, it was impossible to leave. They bought Anthony skis! They bought Anthony a sled, and new boots, and warm winter coats! The boy was outside in the snow all day. They bought Anthony bricks and blocks and books! The boy was inside all day.
What else would you like, dear Anthony?
I’d like a weapon like my Dad has, said the boy.
Tatiana vehemently shook her head.
Look at Anthony, what an amazing boy he is and he talks so well for a three-and-a-half-year-old, and doesn’t he look just like his father did? Here’s a picture of a baby Alexander, Tania.
Yes, Tatiana said, he was a beautiful boy.
Once, said Alexander, and Tania nearly cried, and he was never smiling.
Esther, seeing nothing, continued. Oh, was my brother ever besotted with him. They had him so late in life, you know, Tania, and wanted him so desperately, having tried for a baby for years. Never was a man more besotted with his child. His mother too. I want you to know that, Alexander, darling, the sun rose and set on you.
Cluck, cluck, cluck, for six weeks, wanting them to stay for the holidays, through Easter, through the Fourth of July, maybe Labor Day, for all the days, just stay.
And suddenly, late one evening in the kitchen, when Alexander, exhausted from playing in the snow with Anthony, fell asleep in the living room, and Tatiana was clearing up their tea cups before bed, Aunt Esther came into the kitchen to help her, and said, “Don’t drop the cups when you hear this, but a man named Sam Gulotta from the State Department called here in October. Don’t get upset, sit. Don’t worry. He called in October, and he called again this afternoon when you three were out. Please—what did I tell you?—don’t shake, don’t tremble. You should have said something when you called in September, given me a warning about what was going on. It would have helped me. You should have trusted me, so I could help you. No, don’t apologize. I told Sam I don’t know where you are. I don’t know how to reach you, I know nothing. That’s what I told him. And to you I say, I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. Sam said it was imperative that Alexander get in touch with him. I told him if I heard from you, I’d let him know. But darling, why wouldn’t you tell me? Don’t you know I’m on your side, on Alexander’s side? Does he know that Sam is calling for him? Oh. Well. No, no, you’re right of course. He’s got enough to worry about. Besides, it’s the government; it takes them years just to send out a veteran’s check. They’re hardly going to be on top of this. Soon it will go into the inactive pile and be forgotten. You’ll see. Tell Alexander nothing, it’s for the best. And don’t cry. Shh, now. Shh.”
“Aunt Esther,” said Alexander, walking into the kitchen, “what in the world are you telling Tania now to make her cry?”
“Oh, you know how she is nowadays,” Aunt Esther said, patting Tatiana’s back.
On Thanksgiving, Rosa and Esther talked about having Anthony baptized. “Alexander, talk some sense into your wife. You don’t want your son to be a heathen like Tania.” It was after a magnificent dinner during which Tania gave thanks to Aunt Esther, and they were sitting late in the deep evening, with mulled apple cider in front of a roaring fire. Anthony had been long bathed and fussed over and adored and put to sleep. Tatiana was feeling sleepy and contented, pressed against Alexander’s sweatered arm. It reminded her throbbingly of another time in her life, sitting next to him, like this, in front of a flickering small stove called the bourzhuika, feeling calmed by his presence despite the apocalyptic things going on just steps from her in her own room, in her own apartment, in her own city, in her own country. And yet, she sat like this with him and for a fleeting minute was comforted.
“Tania is not a heathen,” Alexander said to Esther. “She was dunked into the River Luga promptly after birth by Russian women so old they looked as if they lived in the times of Christ. They took her from her mother, babynapped her, you might say, and muttered over her for three hours, summoning the love of Christ and the Holy Spirit onto her. Tania’s mother never spoke to the old women again.”
“Or to me,” said Tatiana.
“Tania, is this true?”
“Alexander is teasing, Esther. Don’t listen to him.”
“That’s not what she asked, Tatia. She asked if it was true.” His eyes were twinkling.
He was teasing! She kissed his arm, putting her face back against his sweater. “Esther, you mustn’t fret about Anthony. He is baptized.”
“He is?” said Esther.
“He is?” said Alexander with surprise.
“He is,” Tatiana said quietly. “They baptized all the children at Ellis Island because so many of them used to get sick and die. They had a chapel, and even found me a Catholic priest.”
“A Catholic priest!” Catholic Rosa and Protestant Esther raised their hands to the heavens in a loud interjection, one happy, one slightly less so. “Why Catholic? Why not even Russian Orthodox, like you?”
“I wanted Anthony,” Tatiana said timidly, looking away from Alexander’s gaze, “to be like his father.”
And that night in their bed, all three of them, Alexander didn’t go to sleep, lightly keeping his hand on her. She felt him awake behind her. “What, darling?” she whispered. “What do you need? Ant’s here.”
“Don’t I know it,” he whispered back. “But no, no. Tell me …” his voice was halting, “was he … very small when he was born?”
“I don’t know …” she replied in a constricted voice. “I had him a month early. He was quite little. Black-haired. I don’t really remember. I was in a fever. I had TB, pneumonia. They gave me extreme unction, I was so sick.” She clenched her fists to her chest, but groaned anyway. And so alone.
Alexander told her he couldn’t stay in wintry Barrington any longer, couldn’t do snow, winters, cold. “Never again—not for one more day.” He wanted to go swimming for Christmas.
Whatever Anthony’s father wanted, Anthony’s father got. The sun still rises and sets on you, husband, she whispered to him.
Sets mainly, he whispered back.
They said a grateful goodbye to Esther and Rosa, and drove down past New York.
“Aren’t we stopping to see Vikki?”
“We’re not,” Tatiana said. “Vikki always goes to visit her mentally ill mother in California during Christmas. It’s her penance. Besides, it’s too cold. You said you wanted to go swimming. We’ll catch her in the summer.”
They drove through New Jersey and Maryland.
They were passing Washington DC when Alexander said, “Want to stop and say hello to your friend Sam?”
Startled she said, “No! Why would you say that?”
He seemed pretty startled by that. “Why are you getting defensive? I asked if you wanted to stop and say hello. Why are you talking to me as if I asked you to wash his car?”
Tatiana tried to relax.
Thank goodness he dropped it. In the past, he never used to drop anything until he got his answer.
Virginia, still in the thirties, too cold.
North Carolina, in the high forties, cold.
South Carolina in the fifties. Better.
They stayed in cheap motels and had hot showers.
Georgia in the sixties. Not good enough.
St. Augustine in Florida was in the seventies! on the warm ocean. St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States, had red Spanish tile roofs and was selling ice cream as if it were summer.
They visited the site of Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth, and bought a little immortal water, conveniently in bottled form.
“You know it’s just tap water, don’t you?” Alexander said to her, as she took a drink from it.
“I know,” Tatiana said, passing him the bottle. “But you have to believe in something.”
“It’s not tap water I believe in,” Alexander said, drinking half of it down.
They celebrated Christmas in St. Augustine. Christmas Day they went to a deserted white beach. “Now this is what I call the dead of winter,” said Alexander, diving into the ocean water in swimming shorts and a T-shirt. There was no one around him but his son and wife.
Anthony, who didn’t know how to swim, waded at the edge of the water, dug holes that looked like craters, collected seashells, got burned, and with his shoulders red and his hair sandy, skipped on the beach, singing, holding a long stick in one hand, and a rock in the other, moving his arms up and down to the rhythmic beat of the tune while his mother and father watched him from the water.
“Mr. Sun/ Sun/ Mr. Golden Sun/ please shine down on/ please shine down on/ please shine down on me …”
After weeks in St. Augustine, they drove south down the coast.

CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_d2d8a103-f642-5b43-8b85-f954d3806fb7)
Coconut Grove, 1947 (#ulink_d2d8a103-f642-5b43-8b85-f954d3806fb7)
The Vanishing
Miami in January! Tropics by the sea. It was eighty degrees and the water was seventy-five. “Better,” said Alexander, smiling. “Much better. Now we stay.”
Sprawled near the calm aqua waves of the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay, Miami Beach and South Beach were a little too … grown up for them with a small boy, with the rampant gambling casinos, the made-up, dressed-up women walking the streets, and the fanned, darkened 1930s Art Deco hotels on the ocean that looked as if men with mortal secrets lived there. Perhaps such hotels were rightful places for the Tatianas and Alexanders of this world—but she couldn’t tell him that. She used Anthony’s moral well-being as her excuse to leave. From South Beach, they drove twelve miles south to Coconut Grove, where it was calmer and neater. Cocoanut Grove, as it was called before the roads and the trains and the tourist trade came in 1896, was just a little town on Biscayne Bay with twenty-eight smart elegant buildings, two large stores doing whopping business, and a luxury hotel. That was then. Now the prosperity was like the sunshine—abundant and unabated. Now there were parks and beaches, marinas, restaurants and stores galore, all etched on the water under the fanning palms.
They stayed at a motel court inland but every day kept drifting out to the bay. Tatiana was worried about the money running through their fingers. She suggested selling the camper. “We can’t stay in it anyway. You need to wash—”
“I’ll wash in the ocean.”
“I need somewhere to cook your food.”
“We’ll eat out.”
“We’re going to go broke.”
“I’ll get work.”
She cleared her throat. “We need a little privacy …”
“Ah, now you’re talking. But forget it, I won’t sell it.”
They were strolling along Bayshore Avenue, past moorings that fingered out into the water. He pointed to a houseboat.
“You want to rent a boat?”
“A houseboat.”
“A what?”
“A boat that is also a house.”
“You want us to live on a boat?” Tatiana said slowly.
Alexander called to his son. “Anthony, how would you like to live in a house that is also a boat?”
The child jumped up and down.
“Anthony,” said his mother, “how would you like to live in a snowy mountain retreat in the north of Canada?”
Anthony jumped up and down.
“Alexander, see? I really don’t think you should be making all your life decisions based on the joy of one small boy.”
Alexander lifted Anthony into his arms. “Bud,” he said, “a house that is moored like a boat and sways like a boat, but never moves from the dock, right on the ocean, doesn’t that sound great?”
Anthony put his arms around his father’s neck. “I said yes, Dad. What more do you want?”
For thirty dollars a week—the same money they didn’t want to pay Mrs. Brewster—they rented a fully furnished houseboat on Fair Isle Street, jutting out into the bay right between Memorial Park and the newly broken construction site for Mercy Hospital. The houseboat had a little kitchen with a small stove, a living room, a bathroom with a toilet—And two bedrooms!
Anthony, of course, just like at Nellie’s, refused to sleep by himself. But this time Tatiana was adamant right back. She stayed with her son for an hour, until he was asleep in his own bed. The mother wanted a room of her own.
When an utterly bare Tatiana, without even a silk nightgown, lay down in a double-size bed in front of Alexander, she thought she was a different woman making love to a different man. It was dark in the bedroom, but he was also naked, no tank tops, no shirts, no battle gear. He was naked and on top of her, and he actually murmured a bit to her, things she hadn’t heard in a very long while, he took it a little slower, slower than he had in a very long while, and for that Tatiana rewarded him with a breathless climax, and a shy plea for a little more, and he obliged, but in a way that was too much for her, holding up her legs against his upright arms and moving so intensely that small thrilling cries of pain and pleasure drowned her parchment throat, followed by a less shy plea for some more … and he even opened his eyes briefly, watching her mouth moaning for him, Oh my God, Shura. She saw his searching face; he whispered, You like that, do you? He kissed her, but Tatiana unclasped from him and began to cry. Alexander sighed and closed his eyes again, and there was no more.
Alexander got ready to go look for work, Tatiana got ready to take their clothes to the Laundromat. There was no Laundromat nearby. “Maybe we should have rented a house closer to the Laundromat.”
He stopped getting his cigarettes and his money and stared at her. “Just so we’re clear,” he said, “a houseboat on the Atlantic, dawn over the water like you saw this morning, or living by the Laundromat? Are you opting for the latter?”
“I’m not opting,” she said, chastised and blushing. “But I can’t wash your clothes in the Atlantic, can I?”
“Wait for me to come back and we’ll decide what to do.”
When he returned in the late afternoon he said, “I found work—Mel’s Marina.”
Tatiana’s face was so crestfallen, Alexander laughed. “Tania, Mel owns a marina right on the other side of Memorial Park, a ten minute walk from here down the ocean promenade.”
“Does Mel have one hand like Jimmy?” asked Anthony.
“No, bud.”
“Does Mel smell like fish like Jimmy?” asked Tatiana.
“Nope. Mel rents boats. He’s looking for someone to maintain them, and also do a tour-ride twice a day around Key Biscayne and South Miami Beach. We go around, look at the sights and then we come back. I get to drive a motor boat.”
“But Alexander,” said Tatiana, “did you tell Mel you don’t know how to drive a motor boat?”
“Of course not. I didn’t tell you I didn’t know how to drive a camper either.”
She shook her head. He was something else.
“Seven thirty to six,” he said. “And he’s paying me twenty dollars. A day.”
“Twenty dollars a day!” Tatiana exclaimed. “Double the money in Deer Isle, and you don’t have to smell like fish. How can he afford to pay you so much?”
“Apparently rich lonely ladies love to take boat rides to far away beaches while waiting for their husbands to return from the war.”
Tatiana turned away from him so he wouldn’t see her face.
From behind, his arms went around her. “And if I’m very good to the ladies,” continued Alexander, moving her braid away to kiss her neck and brushing his groin against her, “sometimes they tip the captain.”
Tatiana knew he was trying to amuse her, to be light with her, and even as a tear ran down her cheek, she said, patting his hand, “Well, if there’s one thing you know how to do, Alexander, it’s be good to the ladies.”
In the morning, at seven, as Alexander was about to leave for the marina, he said to Tatiana, “Come by to see me just before ten. That’s when we go out for our morning tour.” He picked up Anthony, who was still in his pajamas. “Bud, I’m going to take you on the boat with me. You’ll be my co-captain.”
Anthony’s face shined. “Really?” Then his face fell. “I can’t go, Dad.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know how to steer a boat.”
“Neither do I, so we’re even.”
Anthony kissed his father on the mouth.
“Am I coming, too?” Tatiana asked.
“No. You are going to walk a mile to the store and buy food, and do laundry. Or suntan.” He smiled. “Do whatever you like. But come at twelve thirty to pick him up. We can have lunch together before I have to go out again at two.”
Tatiana kissed her husband on the mouth.
He took his boy with him! What happiness, what joy for Anthony. Tatiana did laundry, bought food and a Cuban cookbook, and sandwich meat, and potato salad and rolled everything back home in a newly purchased wooden cart. She opened all the windows to smell the ocean breeze while she made lunch as strings playing the Poco Allegretto from Brahms’s Third Symphony filled her houseboat from the kitchen radio. She loved that piece. She’d heard it played on Deer Isle, too.
Then she ran through Memorial Park to bring her two men food.
Anthony was apparently a hit on the boat. “He was so busy making friends, he forgot to help his dad steer,” said Alexander. “And believe me when I tell you, I needed his help. Never mind, bud. Maybe tomorrow?”
“I can come again with you tomorrow?”
“If you’re a good boy for your mother, how about every day?”
Anthony leaped and hopped all the way home.
For dinner she made plantains and beef brisket from a recipe in her new cookbook.
Alexander liked it.
Tatiana set about cooking in every conceivable way what she called “the greatest New World creation since corn”—plantain. Not soft, not sweet, but otherwise banana-like, it went with everything. She bought flounder and fixed it with Mexican salsa and tomatoes and pineapples. But the plantains were the centerpiece of the plate. Tatiana had never had corn or bananas or plantains until she came to America.
“Heavenly plantains with rum,” she said, theatrically lighting a match and setting the plantains and frying pan on fire. Alexander was worried and skeptical until she spooned them over vanilla ice cream; the plantains were mixed with butter, dark brown caramelized sugar, heavy cream—and rum.
“Okay, I’m sold. Heavenly,” he said. “Please. Just a little more.”
The oven didn’t work properly; it was hard to make real bread in it. It wasn’t like the great big oven she had in her apartment in New York. Tatiana managed small challah rolls, from a recipe she had got from the Ukrainian Jews on the Lower East Side. It had been four months since her last conversation with Vikki. Her stomach went cold every time she thought of her and of Sam. She didn’t want to think about them. She forced herself not think of them.
Tatiana was good at forcing herself not to think of things.
Alexander liked the puffy and slightly sweet rolls. “But what, no plantain salad?” he teased when the three of them were eating their lunch on one of the picnic tables under the moss oaks and pines in Memorial Park.
She bought Alexander white cotton and linen shirts with white cotton slacks. She knew he was most comfortable in khaki or green fatigues and long sleeve crews—but he had to look like a boat captain.
Maintaining the boat took most of his time between tours—he learned to make repairs to the hull, the engine, the bearings, the fittings, the bilge pumps, the plumbing, the safety gear, the rails. He repainted the deck, replaced broken or cracked glass, changed the oil. Whatever it was, if it needed fixing, Alexander fixed it, all in his captain’s whites and shirtsleeves down to his wrists in the sweltering sun.
Mel, terrified of losing Alexander, gave him a raise to twenty-five dollars a day. Tatiana, too, wished she could give Alexander a raise, for the same reason.
In Miami there was a large Spanish population, and no one heard Tatiana’s Russian accent, no one knew her name was Russian. In Miami, Tatiana fit right in. Though she missed the smallness and the tightness and the smells of Deer Isle, though she missed the largesse, the expanse, the blaze of New York, she liked the Miami vanishing.
She made stuffed cabbage, which she knew Anthony liked from their time in New York. Alexander ate it, but after dinner said, “Please don’t cook cabbage again.”
Anthony got upset. He loved cabbage. And there was even a time when his father enjoyed cabbage pie.
But Alexander said no cabbage.
“Why?” she asked him when they were outside on their boat deck, bobbing above the water. “You used to like it.”
“I used to like a lot of things,” he replied.
You certainly did, Tatiana thought.
“I saw cabbage that grew as big as three basketballs on the mountain heaps of human ashes and remnants of bones in a death camp called Majdanek in Poland,” said Alexander. “It was freak cabbage like nothing you’ve ever seen, grown out of the ashes of dead Jews. You’d never eat cabbage again either.”
“Not even cabbage pie?” she said softly, trying to lure him away from Majdanek and into Lazarevo.
“Not even cabbage pie, Tania,” replied a not-to-be-lured Alexander. “No more cabbage pie for us.”
Tatiana didn’t cook cabbage anymore.
Anthony was told he was not allowed to leave the table unless his plate was empty.
“I’ll leave when I want,” said Anthony.
Alexander put down his fork. “What did you say?”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” said Anthony, and his father got up from the table so swiftly that Anthony knocked over his chair to run to his mother.
Taking him out of Tatiana’s arms, Alexander set him firmly down. “I can and I will tell you what to do.” His hands were on his son’s shoulders. “Now we’re going to try it again. You will not leave when you want. You will sit, you will finish your food, and when you’re done, you will ask to leave the table. Understand?”
“I’m full!” Anthony said. “Why do I have to finish?”
“Because you have to. Next time, Tania, don’t give him so much.”
“He said he was hungry.”
“Give him seconds. But today he will finish his food.”
“Mommy!”
“No, not Mommy—me! Now finish your food.”
“Mom—”
Alexander’s hands squeezed around Anthony. Anthony finished his food and asked to leave the table. After dinner, Tatiana went outside on the narrow deck where Alexander was sitting and smoking. She crouched carefully, uncertainly, by his side.
“You’ve been too soft on him,” he said. “He has to learn. He will learn.”
“I know. He’s so little, though.”
“Yes, when he is my size, it’ll be too late.”
She sat on the floor of the deck.
After a while Alexander spoke. “He can’t leave food on his plate.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to tell you about your brother starving in Catowice?”
She barely suppressed her sigh. “Only if you want to, darling.” Only if you need to. Because, like you, there are many things I would rather never talk about.
In the POW camp in Catowice, Poland, where the Germans threw Alexander, his lieutenant, Ouspensky, and Pasha into the Soviet half—which meant the death half—Alexander saw that Pasha was weakening. He had no fuel to feed the shell that carried his life. It was worse for Pasha because he had been wounded in the throat. He couldn’t work. What they gave the Soviet men was just enough to kill them slowly. Alexander made a wood spear, and when he was in the forest cutting down trees for firewood, he caught three rabbits, hid them in his coat and, back at camp, cooked them in the kitchen, giving one to the cook, one to Pasha, and splitting one between himself and Ouspensky.
He felt better, but he was still starving. From Tatiana, during Leningrad’s blockade, he learned that as long as he constantly thought about food—about getting it, cooking it, eating it, wanting it, he was not a goner. He’d seen the goners—then in Leningrad, now in Catowice—the last-leggers, as they were called, the men unable to work, who shuffled through the camp’s trash eating what scraps they could find. When one of the goners had died, Alexander, about to dig a grave, found Pasha and three others eating the remains of the dead man’s slops by the fire at the outskirts of the barracks.
Alexander was made a supervisor, which did not endear him to his peers, but it did allow him to get a larger food ration, which he shared with Pasha. He kept Pasha and Ouspensky with him, and they moved into a room that housed only eight people instead of sixty. It was warmer. Alexander worked harder. He killed the rabbits and the badgers, and occasionally he didn’t wait to bring them back to camp. He built a fire and ate them on the spot, half cooked, tearing at them with his teeth. It wasn’t making much of a difference even to him.
And Pasha suddenly stopped being interested in rabbits.
Tatiana’s head was folded over her knees. She needed a better memory of her brother.
In Luga, Pasha is stuffing blueberries into Tatiana’s open mouth. She is begging him to stop, trying to tickle him, trying to throw him off her, but in between mouthfuls of blueberries for himself, he is tickling Tatiana with one hand, stuffing blueberries into her mouth with the other, and pinning her between his legs so she can’t go anywhere. Tatiana finally heaves her small body hard enough to throw Pasha off, onto the pails of blueberries they just brought freshly picked from the woods. The buckets tip over; she screams at him to pick them up and when he doesn’t, she takes handfuls and mashes them into his face, painting his face purple. Saika comes from next door and stares blankly at them from the gate. Dasha comes out from the porch and when sees what they’ve done, she shows them what real screaming is all about.
Alexander smoked, and Tatiana, on weakened legs, struggled up and went back inside, hoping that when Anthony was older they could tell him in a way he would understand, about Leningrad, and Catowice, and Pasha. But she feared he would never understand, living in the land of plantains and plenty.
In the Miami Herald Tatiana found an article about the House of Un-American Activities Committee investigations into communist infiltration of the State Department. The paper was pleased to call it “an ambitious program of investigations to expose and ferret out Communist activities in many enterprises, labor unions, education, motion pictures and most importantly, the federal government.” Truman himself had called for removal of disloyal government employees.
She became so engrossed that Alexander had to raise his voice to get her attention. “What are you reading?”
“Nothing.” She slammed the newspaper shut.
“You’re hiding things in newspapers from me? Show me what you were reading.”
Tatiana shook her head. “Let’s go to the beach.”
“Show me, I said.” He grabbed her, his fingers going into her ribs and his mouth into her neck. “Show me right now, or I’ll …”
“Daddy, stop teasing Mommy,” said Anthony, prying them apart.
“I’m not teasing Mommy. I’m tickling Mommy.”
“Stop tickling Mommy,” said Anthony, prying them apart.
“Antman,” said Alexander, “did you just … call me daddy?”
“Yes. So?”
Bringing Anthony to his lap, Alexander read the HUAC article. “So? They’ve been investigating communists since the 1920s. Why the fascination now?”
“No fascination.” Tatiana started to clear the breakfast plates. “You think there are Soviet spies here?”
“Rampaging through the government. And they won’t rest until Stalin gets his atomic bomb.”
She squinted at him. “You know something about this?”
“I know something about this.” He pointed to his ears. “I listened to quite a bit of chatter and rumor among the rank and file outside my door in solitary confinement.”
“Really?” Tania said that in a mulling tone, but what she was trying to do was to not let Alexander see her eyes. She didn’t want him to see Sam Gulotta’s anxious phone calls in her frightened eyes.
When they didn’t talk about food or HUAC, they spoke about Anthony.
“Can you believe how well he’s talking? He is like a little man.”
“Tania, he comes into bed with us every night. Can we talk about that?”
“He’s just a little boy.”
“He needs to sleep in his own bed.”
“It’s big and he gets scared.”
Alexander bought a smaller bed for Anthony, who didn’t like it and had no interest in sleeping in it. “I thought the bed was for you,” said Anthony to his father.
“Why would I need a bed? I sleep with Mommy,” said Anthony Alexander Barrington.
“So do I,” said Anthony Alexander Barrington.
Finally Alexander said, “Tania, I’m putting my foot down. He can’t come into our bed anymore.”
She tried to dissuade him.
“I know he has nightmares,” Alexander said. “I will take him back to his bed. I will sit with him as long as it takes.”
“He needs his mother in the middle of the night.”
“I need his mother in the middle of the night, his naked mother. He’s going to have to make do with me,” Alexander said. “And she is going to have to make do with me.”
The first night, Anthony screamed for fifty-five minutes while Tatiana remained in the bedroom with a pillow pressed over her head. Alexander spent so long in the boy’s room, he fell asleep on Anthony’s bed.
The following night Anthony screamed for forty-five minutes.
Then thirty.
Then fifteen.
And finally, just whimpers coming from Anthony, as he stood by his mother’s side. “I won’t cry anymore, but please, Mama, can you take me back to my bed?”
“No,” said Alexander, getting up. “I will take you back.”
And the following afternoon as mother and son were walking back home from the boat, Anthony said, “When is Dad going back?”
“Going back where?”
“The place you brought him from.”
“Never, Anthony.” She shivered. “What are you talking about?” The shiver was at the memory of the place she had brought him from, the bloodied, filth-soaked straw on which he lay shackled and tortured, waiting not for her but for the rest of his life in the Siberian resort. Tatiana lowered the boy to the ground. “Don’t ever let me catch you talking like that again.” Or your nightmares now will pale compared to the ones you will have.
“Why does he walk as if he’s got the weight of the whole world on his shoulders?” Alexander asked while walking home. The green and stunning ocean was to their right, through the bending palms. “Where does he get that from?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Hey,” he said, knocking into her with his body. Now that he wasn’t covered with lobster he could do that, knock into her. Tatiana took his arm. Alexander was watching Anthony. “You know what? Let me … I’ll take him to the park for a few minutes while you fix dinner.” He prodded her forward. “Go on now, what are you worried about? I just want to talk to him, man to man.”
Tatiana reluctantly went, and Alexander took Anthony on the swings. They got ice cream, both promising conspiratorially not to tell Mommy, and while they were in the playground, Alexander said, “Ant, tell me what you dream about. What’s bothering you? Maybe I can help.”
Anthony shook his head.
Alexander picked him up and carried him under the trees, setting him down on top of a picnic table while he sat on the bench in front of him so that their eyes were level. “Come on, bud, tell me.” He rubbed Anthony’s little chubby legs. “Tell me so I can help you.”
Anthony shook his head.
“Why do you wake up? What wakes you?”
“Bad dreams,” said Anthony. “What wakes you?”
His father had no answer for that. He still woke up every night. He had started taking ice cold baths to cool himself down, to calm himself down at three in the morning. “What kind of bad dreams?”
Anthony was all clammed up.
“Come on, bud, tell me. Does Mommy know?”
Anthony shrugged. “I think Mommy knows everything.”
“You’re too wise for your own good,” said Alexander. “But I don’t think she knows this. Tell me. I don’t know.”
He cajoled and prodded. Anthony’s ice cream was melting; they kept wiping up the drips. Finally Anthony, looking not at his father’s prying face but at his shirt buttons, said, “I wake up in a cave.”
“Ant, you’ve never been in a cave. What cave?”
Anthony shrugged. “Like a hole in the ground. I call for Mom. She’s not there. Mommy, Mommy. She doesn’t come. The cave starts to burn. I climb outside, I’m near woods. Mommy, Mommy. I call and call. It gets dark. I’m alone.” Anthony looked down at his hands. “A man whispers, Run, Anthony, she is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back. I turn around, but there is no one there. I run into the woods to get away from the fire. It’s very dark, and I’m crying. Mommy, Mommy. The woods go on fire too. I feel like somebody’s chasing me. Chasing and chasing me. But when I turn around, I’m all alone. I keep hearing feet running after me. I’m running too. And the man’s voice is in my ear. She is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back.”
The ice cream dripped through Alexander’s fingers, through Anthony’s fingers. “That’s what you dream about?” Alexander said tonelessly.
“Uh-huh.”
Alexander stared grimly at Anthony, who stared grimly back. “Can you help me, Dad?”
“It’s just a bad dream, bud,” Alexander said. “Come here.” He picked up the boy. Anthony put his head on Alexander’s shoulder. “Don’t tell your mom what you just told me, all right?” he said in a hollow voice, patting the boy’s back, holding him close. “It’ll make her very sad you dream this.” He started walking home, his gaze fixed blinklessly on the road.
After a minute, he said, “Antman, did your mother ever tell you about her dreams when she was a little girl in Luga? No? Because she used to have bad dreams, too. You know what she used to dream about? Cows chasing her.”
Anthony laughed.
“Exactly,” Alexander said. “Big cows with bells and milk udders would go running down the village road after your young mother, and no matter how hard she ran, she couldn’t get away.”
“Did they go moo?” said Anthony. “Here moo, there moo, everywhere moo-moo.”
“Oh, yes.”
In the night Anthony crawled to his mother’s side, and Alexander and Tatiana, both awake, said nothing. Alexander had just come back to bed himself, barely dry. Her arm went around Anthony, and Alexander’s damp icy arm went around Tatiana.
The Body of War
As it began to stay lighter later, they would go swimming when the park beaches emptied. Tatiana hung upside down on the monkey bars, they played ball, they built things in the sand; the beach, the bars, the breaking Atlantic were good and right as rain. Alexander sometimes even took off his T-shirt while he swam in the languid evenings—slowly, obsessively trying to wash away in the briny ocean typhus and starvation and war and other things that could not be washed away.
Tatiana sat near the shoreline, watching father and son frolic. Alexander was supposed to be teaching Anthony how to swim, but what he was doing was picking the boy up and flinging him into the shallow waters. The waves were perfect in Miami for a small boy, for the waves were small also. Son jumped to father, only to be thrown up in the air and then caught again, thrown up in the air very high and then caught again. Anthony squealed, shrieked, splashed, full of monumental joy. And there was Tatiana nearby, sitting on the sand, hugging her knees, one of her hands out in invocation, careful, careful, careful. But she wasn’t saying it to Alexander. She was saying it to Anthony. Don’t hurt your father, son. Be gentle with him. Please. Can’t you see what he looks like?
Her breath burned her chest as she furtively glanced at her husband. Now they were racing into the water. The first time Tatiana had seen Alexander run into the Kama River in Lazarevo, naked except for his shorts—like now—his body was holy. It was gleaming and woundless. And he’d been in battles already, in the Russo-Finnish War; he’d been on the northern rivers of the Soviet Union; he had defended the Road of Life on Lake Ladoga. Like her, he had lived through blighted Leningrad. Why then, since she had left him, had this happened to him?
Alexander’s bare body was shocking to see. His back, once smooth and tanned, was mutilated with shrapnel scars, with burn scars, with whip marks, with bayonet gouges all wet in the Miami sun. His nearfatal injury at the breaking of the Leningrad blockade was still a fist-sized patch above his right kidney. His chest and shoulders and ribs were defaced; his upper arms, his forearms, his legs were covered with knife and gunpowder burn wounds, jagged, ragged, raised.
Tatiana wanted to cry, to cry out. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right that he should carry Hitler and Stalin on his whole body, even here in Miami where the tropical waters touched the sky. The colonel had been right. It wasn’t fair.
And because all the other iniquities were not enough, the men that guarded Alexander tattooed him against his will, as punishment for escape, as a warning against possible transgressions, and as an ultimate slur against his future—as in, if you have a future at all, you will never have an unblemished one.
Tatiana watched him and her pitying heart rolled around the concrete drum of her insides.
On Alexander’s upper left arm was a black tattoo of a hammer and sickle! It was burned into him by the depraved guards at Catowice—so they would know him by his marks. Above the hammer and sickle, on his shoulder there was a mocking tattoo of a major’s epaulet, taunting that Alexander had spent too much time in solitary confinement. Under the hammer and sickle was a large star with twenty-five points on it—one point for each of the years of his Soviet prison sentence. On the inside of his right forearm, the numbers 19691 were burned in blue—the Soviets learned to use the Nazi torture implements with glee.
On his right upper arm a cross was tattooed—Alexander’s only voluntary mark. And above the cross, he was branded with an incongruous SS Waffen Eagle, complete with a swastika, as a symbol of grudging respect from the ill-fated guard Ivan Karolich for Alexander’s never having confessed to anything despite the severe beatings.
The concentration camp numbers were the hardest to hide, being so low on his arm, which was why he didn’t often roll up his sleeves. Jimmy in Deer Isle had asked about the numbers, but Jimmy hadn’t been to war, and so when Alexander said, “POW camp,” Jimmy didn’t follow up and Alexander didn’t elaborate. The blue numbers now, post Holocaust, screamed of Jewish suffering, not Soviet suffering, of someone else’s life, not Alexander’s. But the hammer and sickle, the SS insignia!—all alarms on his arm, ringing to be explained—were impossible to explain away in any context. Death camp numbers and a swastika? There was nothing to do about any of it, except cover it from everyone, even each other.
Tatiana turned to watch a family strolling by, two small girls with their mother and grandparents. The adults took one glimpse at Alexander and gasped; in their flustered collective horror, they shielded the eyes of the little girls; they muttered, they made the sign of the cross—on themselves, and hurried on. Tatiana judged them harshly. Alexander, lifting and throwing Anthony, never noticed.
Whereas once, certainly in Lazarevo with Tatiana, Alexander looked god-like, it was true now, the strangers were right—Alexander was disfigured. That’s all anyone saw, that’s all anyone could look at.
But he was so beautiful still! Hard still, lean, long-legged, wide-shouldered, strapping, impossibly tall. He’d gained some of his weight back, was muscular again after hauling all those lobster traps. On the rare occasions he laughed, the white of his teeth lit up his tanned face. His sheared head looked like a black hedgehog, his milk chocolate eyes softened every once in a while.
But there was no denying it, he was damaged—and nowhere more noticeably than in this, his American life. For in the Soviet Union, Alexander would have been among millions of men who were maimed like him, and he might have thought no more of it as they sent him out in his sheepskin parka to log in their woods, to mine in their quarries. Here in America, Tatiana sent him out in public, not in a parka but in linen, covering him from his neck to his ankles, to man their boats, to fix their engines.
During lovemaking Tatiana tried to forget. What needed to be whole and perfect on Alexander remained whole and perfect. But his back, his arms, his shoulders, his chest: there was nowhere for her to put her hands. She held onto his head, which was marginally better. There was a long ridge at the back of the occipital lobe, there were knife wounds. Alexander carried war on his body like no one Tatiana had ever known. She cried every time she touched him.
Tatiana couldn’t touch Alexander at night and prayed he didn’t know it.
“Come on, you two,” she called to them weakly, struggling to her feet. “Let’s head home. It’s getting late. Stop your horsing around. Anthony, please. What did I tell you? Be careful, I said!” Can’t you see what your father looks like?
Suddenly her two men, one little, one big, both with the straight posture, the unwavering gazes, came and stood in front of her, their legs in the sand, each in an A, their hands on their hips like kettles.
“Ready to go then?” she said, lowering her gaze.
“Mommy,” said her son firmly, “come and play.”
“Yes, Mommy,” said her husband firmly, “come and play.”
“No, it’s time to go home.” She blinked. A mirage in the setting sun made him disappear for a second.
“That’s it,” said Alexander, lifting her into his arms. “I’ve had just about enough of this.” He carried her and flung her into the water. Tatiana was without breath and when she came up for air, he threw himself on her, shaking her, disturbing her, implacably laying his hands on her. Perhaps he wasn’t a mirage after all, his body immersed in water that was so salty he floated and she floated, too, feeling real herself, remembering cartwheeling at the Palace of the Tsars for him, sitting on the tram with him, walking barefoot through the Field of Mars with him while Hitler’s tanks and Dimitri’s malice beat down the doors of their hearts.
Alexander picked her up and threw her in the air, only pretending to catch her. She fell and splashed and shrieked, and scrambling to her feet, ran from him as he chased her onto the sand. She tripped to let him catch her and he kissed her wet and she held on to his neck and Anthony jumped and scrambled onto his back, break it up, break it up, and Alexander dragged them all deeper in and tossed them into the ocean, where they bobbed and swayed like houseboats.
Alexander’s Favorite Color
“Tania, why haven’t you called Vikki?” Alexander asked her at breakfast.
“I’ll call her. We’ve only been here a few weeks,” she said. “Where’s the fire?”
“Try eleven.”
“Eleven weeks? No!”
“I know how much rent I’ve paid. Eleven.”
“I didn’t realize it’s been that long. Why are we still here?” Tatiana muttered, and quickly changed the subject to Thelma, the nice woman she met in the store a few mornings ago. Thelma’s husband had recently come back from Japan. Thelma was looking for something to entertain him with as he seemed a bit down in the dumps. Tatiana had suggested a boat ride, and Thelma had sprung at the idea.
Thelma apparently didn’t make it to the boat that afternoon, nor the next, though all afternoons were equally blue-skied and acceptable. When Tatiana ran into her at the store a few days later, Thelma muttered an excuse but said she and her husband were hoping to get to the boat this afternoon for sure. She asked Tatiana if she came on the boat. Tatiana said no, explaining about her son’s nap and her husband’s dinner and other home things. Thelma nodded in sisterly understanding, doing the home things herself that morning. She was making a hot apple cobbler. Apparently men returning home from the war liked that.
Alexander had been bringing home astonishing amounts of money. One dollar, two dollars, five dollars, twenty dollars.
“Even my math is failing me,” Tatiana said, sitting at the kitchen table with a stash of singles and fives in front of her. “I can’t count this high. Did you make a—hundred dollars today?”
“Hmm.”
“Alexander, I want to know what you’re doing to these women for a hundred dollars a day.”
When he smoked and grinned and didn’t reply, she said, “That was not a rhetorical question. Your wife would like an answer.”
He laughed, and she laughed, ha ha, but the next day when she went to pick up Anthony from the boat, who should she see but Thelma, nattily dressed standing at a distance Tatiana deemed to be too close to her barely salvaged husband. She wasn’t even sure it was Thelma, for in the grocery store Thelma was sans makeup and wore grocery store clothes. Here, her wavy dark hair was curled and teased, she had makeup on … she ….Tatiana wasn’t even sure what it was that was provocative— perhaps the tightness of the skirt around the hips, the bareness of leg underneath, perhaps the wine trollop lips in the middle of a torrid noon, perhaps even the smiling tilt of the coquettish, slatternly head.
“Thelma?” Tatiana said, coming up the plank. “Is that you?”
Thelma snapped around as if she’d heard a voice from the grave. “Oh! Hi.”
“Oh, hi,” said Tatiana, stepping between her and Alexander. She turned to face the woman. “I see you’ve met my husband. Where’s your husband?”
High-heeling away, Thelma waved her off. “He couldn’t make it today.”
Tatiana said nothing—then. But she asked Anthony the next morning, in full hearing of a certain husband having breakfast, about the nice woman on the boat, and Anthony told her that she’d been coming every morning for some time.
“Is that so?”
“No, that is not so,” intervened a certain husband.
“And, Anthony, does the nice woman’s husband come with her?”
“Oh no. She doesn’t have a husband. She told Daddy her husband ran away. She said he didn’t want to be married after the war.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, and, Mommy,” said Anthony, licking his lips, “she brought us an apple cobbler to eat. It was so yummy!”
Tatiana said nothing else. She didn’t even look up. Alexander tilted his head across the table to get her attention, saying nothing himself. When he went to kiss her, he cupped her face and made her look up at him. His eyes were twinkling. He kissed her nice and open, making the lava pit in her stomach nice and open, too, and left for work.
When Tatiana went to pick up Anthony at noon, Thelma wasn’t there.
“Mommy,” Anthony whispered. “I don’t know what Daddy said to her this morning, but she ran from the boat in tears!”
Thelma was never seen again, not even in the grocery store.
At home Alexander said, “You want to come with me tomorrow for the morning ride, for the afternoon ride? You know you can come on the boat with me any time you want.”
“Can I now?”
“Of course. Any time. You haven’t expressed any interest.” He paused. “Until now.”
There was something slightly … Tatiana didn’t know … pointed in his remark. Something accusing. But accusing her of what? Of cooking and cleaning and washing for him? Of braiding her hair and shaving and scrubbing herself pink, and putting on gauzy dresses and sheer panties and musk oil to come to meet him in the evenings? Of letting him have an hour or two with his boy in the mornings?
She contemplated making an issue of it. But an issue of what? She studied him, but he was already past it, as he was past most things, reading the paper, drinking, smoking, talking to Anthony.
Tatiana did come on the boat ride the next morning.
“Your hair is in a crew cut,” a girl murmured to him after she sauntered to stand by his side while Tatiana sat quietly nearby, Anthony on her lap. “Almost like you’re in the army,” the girl persisted when Alexander didn’t reply.
“I was in the army.”
“Oh that’s great! Where did you serve?”
“On the Eastern Front.”
“Oh, wow. I want to know everything! Where is this Eastern Front, anyway? I’ve never heard of it. My father was in Japan. He’s still there.” The girl, who looked to be in her late teens, continued nonstop. “Captain, you’re driving the boat so fast, and it’s getting so windy, and I’m wearing this flouncy skirt. You don’t think it’ll be a problem, do you? The wind isn’t going to kick the skirt up, in an immodest sort of way?” She giggled.
“I don’t think so. Ant, do you want to come, help me steer?”
Anthony ran to his father. The girl turned around to glance at Anthony and at Tatiana, who smiled, giving her a little wave.
“Is this your son?”
“Yes.”
“Is that, um … ?”
“My wife, yes.”
“Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t know you were married.”
“I am, though, nonetheless. Tania, come here. Meet … sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
As Tatiana walked past the girl to get to Alexander, she said, “Excuse me,” and added evenly, “I think the wind might indeed kick up that immodesty you were talking about. Better grab on to the skirt.”
Alexander bit his lip. Tatiana stood calmly next to him, her hand on the wheel.
That evening walking home, he said, “I either continue to invite questions or I can grow out my hair.” When she didn’t say anything—because she didn’t think her husband with a head full of shiny black hair would be repellent enough—he prodded her to tell him what she was thinking.
She chewed her lip. “The constant female attention … um … wanted or unwanted?”
“I’m indifferent, babe,” he said, his arm around her. “Though amused by you.”
Tatiana was quiet when Alexander came home the following evening.
“What’s the matter? You’re more glum than usual,” he asked after he came out from the bath.
She protested. “I’m not usually glum.” Then she sighed. “I took a test today.”
“What test?” Alexander sat down at her table. “What does the husband want for dinner?”
“The husband wants plantains and carrots and corn and bread, and shrimp, and hot apple cobbler with ice cream for dinner.”
“Hot apple cobbler?” Alexander smiled. “Indeed. Indeed.” He laughed, buttering his bread roll. “Tell me about this test.”
“In one of my magazines. Ladies Home Journal. There’s a test. ‘How Well Do You Know Your Husband?’”
“One of your magazines?” His mouth was full. “I didn’t know you read any magazines.”
“Well, perhaps it would behoove you to take that test, too, then.”
He was twinkling at her from across the table, buttering another roll. “So how did you do?”
“I failed, that’s how I did,” Tatiana said. “Apparently I don’t know you at all.”
“Really?” Alexander’s face was mock-serious.
Tatiana flung the magazine open to the test page. “Look at these questions. What is your husband’s favorite color? I don’t know. What is his favorite food? I don’t know. What sports does he like best? I don’t know. What is his favorite book? His favorite movie? His favorite song? What’s his favorite flavor ice cream? Does he like to sleep on his back or his side? What was the name of the school he graduated from? I don’t know anything!”
Alexander grinned. “Come on. Not even the back or side question?”
“No!”
Continuing to eat his roll, he got up, took the magazine out of her hands and threw it in the trash. “You’re right.” He nodded. “There is nothing to be done. My wife doesn’t know my favorite ice cream flavor. I demand a divorce.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you think a priest will give us an annulment?” He came up to her, sitting dejectedly in the chair.
“You’re making fun,” Tatiana said, “but this is serious.”
“You don’t know me because you don’t know what my favorite color is?” Alexander sounded disbelieving. “Ask me anything. I’ll tell you.”
“You won’t tell me anything! You don’t talk to me at all!” She started to cry.
Wide-eyed, flummoxed, stopped in mid-laugh, Alexander speechlessly opened his hands. “A second ago, this was all kind of funny,” he said slowly.
“If I don’t even know a simple thing like your favorite color,” Tatiana said, “can you imagine what else I don’t know?”
“I don’t know my own favorite color! Or movie, or book, or song. I don’t know, I don’t care, I never thought about it. Good God, is this what people are thinking about after the war?”
“Yes!”
“Is this what you want to be thinking about?”
“Better than what we’ve been thinking about!”
Anthony, bless his small ways, came out of his bedroom, and, as always, prevented them from ever finishing any discussion until he was well asleep. All the things they talked about had to involve him, be compelling to him. As soon as he heard his mother and father talking in animated tones, he would come and take one of them away.
But later, in their bed, in the dark, Tatiana, who still had on her glum face, said to Alexander, “We don’t know each other. It occurs to me now—perhaps a little belatedly—that we never did.”
“Speak for yourself,” he said. “I know how you’ve lived and I know how you like to be touched. You know how I’ve lived and you know how I like to be touched.”
Oh. Alexander may have known theoretically, intellectually, how Tatiana liked to be touched, but he certainly never touched her that way anymore. She didn’t know why he didn’t, he just didn’t, and she didn’t know how to ask.
“Now, can I make love to you once without you crying?”
Certainly she didn’t want to make him touch her.
“Just once, and please—don’t tell me you’re crying from happiness.”
She tried not to cry when he made love to her. But it was impossible.
The goal was to find a way to live and touch where everything that had happened to them to bring them here could be put away somewhere safe, from where they could retrieve it, instead of it retrieving them any time it felt like it.
In the bedroom they were night animals; the lights were always off. Tatiana had to do something.
“What is that god-awful smell?” Alexander said when he came home from the marina.
“Mommy put mayonnaise in her hair,” said Anthony with a face that said, Mommy washed her face with duck poop.
“She did what?”
“Yes. This afternoon she put a whole jar of mayonnaise in her hair! Dad, she sat with it for hours, and now she can’t get the water hot enough to rinse it out.”
Alexander knocked on the bathroom door.
“Go away,” her voice said.
“It’s me.”
“I was talking to you.”
Opening the door, he came in. She was sitting bedraggled in the bath with her hair wet and slick. She covered her breasts from him.
“Um—what are you doing?” he said, with an impassive face.
“Nothing. What are you doing? How was your afternoon?” She saw his expression. “One wrong word from you, Alexander …” she warned.
“I said nothing,” he said. “Are you going to … come out soon? Make dinner, maybe?”
“The water is lukewarm, and I just can’t get this stuff out. I’m waiting for the tank to reheat.”
“It takes hours.”
“I got time,” she said. “You’re not hungry, are you?”
“Can I help?” Alexander asked, working very, very hard at a straight face. “How about I boil some water on the stove and wash it out?”
Mixing boiling water with the cold, Alexander sat shirtless at the edge of the tub and scrubbed Tatiana’s head with shampoo. Later they had cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup. The tank reheated; Tatiana washed the hair again. The smell seemed to come out, but when the hair dried, it still smelled like mayonnaise. After they put Anthony to bed, Alexander ran the bath for her and washed her hair once more. They ran out of shampoo. They used heavy duty soap. The hair still smelled.
“It’s like your lobsters,” she said.
“Come on, the fish weren’t this bad.”
“Mom almost smells like herself again,” said Anthony when Alexander came home the next day. “Go ahead, Dad, smell her.”
Dad leaned down and smelled her. “Mmm, quite like herself,” he agreed, placing his hand on her hair.
Tatiana knew that today her hair, down to her lower back, glowed gold and was silken and shiny and exceedingly soft. She had bought strawberry shampoo that was berry fresh and washed her coconut-suntan-lotioned body with vanilla scented soap. Tatiana sidled against Alexander, gazing up up up at him. “Do you like it?” she asked, her breath catching.
“As you know.” But he took his hand away and only glanced down down down at her.
She got busy with steak and plantains and tomato roulade.
Later, out on the deck, he said quietly, “Tania, go get your brush.”
She ran to get the brush. Standing behind her—as if in another life—Alexander slowly, carefully, gently brushed out her hair, running his palm down after each stroke of the brush. “It’s very soft,” he whispered. “What in the world did you put mayonnaise in it for?”
“The hair was dry from the coloring, the leaching and then the ocean,” Tatiana replied. “Mayonnaise is supposed to make it smooth again.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Read it in a beauty magazine.” She closed her eyes. It felt so good to have his hands in her hair. Her hot liquid stomach was pulsing.
“You need to stop with the magazines.” Bending, Alexander pressed his mouth into the back of her head, running his lips back and forth against her, and Tatiana groaned, and was embarrassed that she couldn’t stop herself in time.
“If I don’t read them, how else am I going to know how to please my husband?” she said thickly.
“Tatia, you don’t need to read any magazines for that,” he said.
We’ll have to see about that, she thought, in trepidation at her own anticipated audacity, turning around and stretching out her tremulous hand to him.
His hands behind his head, Alexander lay naked in bed on his back, waiting for her. Tatiana locked the door, took off her silk robe and stood in front of him with her long blonde tresses down over her shoulders. She liked the look in his eyes tonight. It wasn’t neutral. When he reached to switch off the light she said, no, leave the light on.
“Leave the light on?” he said. “This is new.”
“I want you to look at me,” Tatiana said, climbing on top of his stomach, spanning him. Slowly she let her hair fall down onto his chest.
“How does it feel?” she murmured.
“Mmm.” His hands on her hips, Alexander arched his stomach into her open thighs.
“Silky, right?” she purred. “So soft, silky … velvety …”
And Alexander groaned.
He groaned! He opened his mouth and an unsuppressed sound of excitement left his throat.
“Feel me, Shura …” she murmured, continuing to rub herself ever so lightly against his bare stomach, her long loose hair fluttering along with her flutters. But it was stirring her up too much; she had to stop. “I thought maybe if the hair was silky,” she whispered, moving her head from side to side as the cascading mane feathered him in silk strands across his chest, “you’d want to put your hands in it … your lips in it again.”
“My hands are on it,” he let out.
“I didn’t say on it. I said in it.”
Alexander stroked her hair.
She shook her head. “No. That’s how you touch it now. I want you to touch it like you touched it then.”
Alexander closed his eyes, his mouth parting. His gripping hands pulled her hips lower on him, while he pulled himself higher. Tatiana felt him so geared up and searching for her that in one second all her grand efforts with mayonnaise were going to come to the very same end that had already been happening in their bed for months.
Quickly she bent to him, moving herself up and away. “Tell me,” she whispered into his face, “why have you stopped caring how I keep my hair?”
“I haven’t stopped.”
“Yes, you have. Come on. You’re talking to me. Tell me why.”
Falling quiet, Alexander took his hands away from her hips and rested them on her knees.
“Tell me. Why don’t you touch me?”
Alexander paused heavily, looking away from her searching eyes. “The hair is not mine anymore. It belongs to the other you, the you of New York and red nail polish and high-heeled dancing, and Vikki, and building a life without me when you thought I was dead—as you absolutely should have. I’m not against you. But that’s what it reminds me of. I’m just telling you.”
Tatiana put her hand on his cheek. “Do you want me to cut it? I’ll cut it all off right now.”
“No.” Alexander moved his face away. They were quiet. “But nothing is ever enough, have you noticed?” he said. “I can’t touch you enough. I can’t make you happy. I can’t say anything right to you. And you can’t take away from me a single thing I’ve fucked up along the way.”
She became deflated. “You’re here, and you’re forgiven for everything,” she said quietly, sitting up and closing her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at his tattooed arms and his scar-ribbon chest.
“Tell me the truth,” Alexander said. “Don’t you sometimes think it’s harder—this—and other stuff like the magazines quizzes—harder for the two of us? That magazine quiz just points up the absurdity of us pretending we’re like normal people. Don’t you sometimes think it would be easier with your Edward Ludlow in New York? Or a Thelma? No history. No memories. Nothing to get over, nothing to claw back from.”
“Would it be easier for you?”
“Well, I wouldn’t hear you cry every night,” Alexander said. “I wouldn’t feel like such a failure every minute of my life.”
“Oh my God! What are you talking about?” Tatiana yanked to get off him, but now it was Alexander who held her in place.
“You know what I’m talking about,” he said, his eyes blazing. “I want amnesia! I want a fucking lobotomy. Could I please never think again? Look what’s happened to us, us, Tania. Don’t you remember how we used to be? Just look what’s happened.”
His long winter’s night bled into Coconut Grove through all the fields and villages in three countries Alexander plundered through to get to the Bridge to Holy Cross, over the River Vistula, to get into the mountains, to escape to Germany, to save Pasha, to make his way to Tatiana. And he failed. Twenty escape attempts—two in Catowice, one ill-fated one in Colditz Castle, and seventeen desperate ones in Sachsenhausen, and he never got to her. He had somehow made all the wrong choices. Alexander knew it. Anthony knew it. With the son asleep, the parents had hours to mindlessly meander through the fields and rivers of Europe, through the streets of Leningrad. That was not to be wished upon.
“Stop it,” Tatiana whispered. “Just stop it! You didn’t fail. You’re looking at it all twisted. You stayed alive, that was all, that was everything, and you know that. Why are you doing this?”
“Why?” he said. “You want it out while sitting naked on top of my stomach with your hair down? Well, here it is. You don’t want it out? Then don’t ask me. Turn the light off, keep the braid in, get your”—Alexander stopped himself—“get off me, and say nothing.”
Tatiana did none of those things. She didn’t want it out, what she wanted, desperately, was him to touch her. Though the aching in her heart from his words was unabated, the aching in her loins from her desire for him was also unabated. She remained on him, watching his face watching her. Gently she stroked his chest, his arms, his shoulders. Bending to him, she flickered her moist soft lips over his face, over his neck, and in a little while, when she felt him calm down, she whispered to him. Shura … it’s me, your Tania, your wife …
“What do you want, Tania, my wife?” His hands grazed up her thighs, up her waist, to her hair.
She was so ashamed of her craving. But the shame didn’t make her crave it any less.
His hands traveled down to her hips, holding her, pulling her open. “What are you clamoring for?” Alexander whispered, his fingers clamoring at her. “Tell me. Speak to me.”
She moved a little higher, rubbing her breasts over his mouth.
Cupping them into his face, Alexander groaned again, his mouth opening underneath them.
Moaning, Tatiana whispered, “I want you to stroke my hair … rub it between your fingers, knead it like you used to. I used to love that, you touching me.” Her body was quivering. “Hold it tight, so tight … yes! like that … touch my blonde hair that you used to love … do you remember? Don’t you remember?”
Very slowly Tatiana moved up on his chest, and up and up and up, until she was kneeling over Alexander’s panting parted mouth. Please, please, darling, Shura, whispered Tatiana, touch me … grasping on to the headboard and lowering herself slightly. Please … touch me like you used to …
This time, Alexander, with no breath left in his lungs, did not have to be asked again. When she felt his hands spreading her open and his warm soft mouth on her for the first time since their return to America, Tatiana nearly fainted. She began to cry. She couldn’t even hold herself up; if it weren’t for the headboard and the wall, she would have surely pitched forward.
“Shh … Tatiasha … shh … I’m looking at you … and what do you know, it turns out that blonde … is my favorite color.”
She couldn’t last three gasping breaths, milling into his mouth, trying to remain upright. Crying, crying, from happiness, from arousal, Please don’t stop, darling, Shura, don’t stop … pulsing into his lips, moaning so loudly the heavens were about to open up … Oh God, oh, yes …Oh Shura … Shura … Shura …
The next morning before work, when he came to the kitchen to get his coffee, Tatiana said to him, deeply blushing, “Alexander, what would you like for breakfast?”
And he, taking her into his arms, lifting her, setting her down on the kitchen counter in front of him, embracing her, madness in his eyes, said, “Oh, now that it’s morning, I’m Alexander again?” His open lips were over her open lips.
Lovers Key
On a moist Sunday—after spring boiled over into summer—Alexander borrowed a one-mast sailboat from Mel and took them out to the bay where they thought the breezes would make them cooler. The humid breezes just made them muggier, but because they were alone out at sea, Alexander undressed to his swimming trunks, and Tatiana wore her bikini swimsuit, and they floated peaceably under the zenith of the Tropic of Cancer sun. Alexander brought two fishing lines and some worms. The wind was good. The headsail was up. Come with me, she murmured, and I will make you fishers of men. They sailed on the serene waters around Key Biscayne, and down south to Lovers Key, where he dropped anchor so they could have some lunch. Anthony fell asleep after helping his dad loosen the ropes on the jib. He had been leaning on his mother and just keeled over. Smiling, Tatiana adjusted the boy, holding him closer, more comfortably. “I know how he feels. This is quite soothing.” She closed her eyes.
Raising anchor, Alexander let the boat float and flounder as he went to sit by her on the white bench at the rudder. He lit a smoke, gave her a drink; they sat and swayed.
The Russian they spoke reminded them of another time. They spoke softer, often they spoke English, but this Sunday on the boat, they were Russian.
“Shura? We’ve been here six months.”
“Yes. It hasn’t snowed.”
“We’ve had three hurricanes, though.”
“I’m not bothered about the hurricanes.”
“What about the heat, the mugginess?”
“Don’t care.”
She considered him.
“I’d be happy to stay,” Alexander said quietly. “This is fine with me.”
“In a houseboat?”
“We can get a real house.”
“And you’d work the boats and the girls all day?”
“I’ve taken a wife, I don’t know what girls are anymore.” He grinned. “I admit to liking the boats, though.”
“For the rest of your life? Boats, water?”
His smile rather quickly disappearing, he leaned away from her.
“Do you recall yourself in the evenings, at night?” Tatiana asked gently, bringing him back with her free hand. The other held the boy.
“What’s that got to do with the water?”
“I don’t think the water is helping,” Tatiana said. “I really don’t.” She paused. “I think we should go.”
“Well, I don’t.”
They stopped talking. Alexander smoked another cigarette.
They floated in the middle of the tropical green ocean with the islands in view.
The water was doing something to Tatiana. It was dismantling her. With every flutter of the water she saw the Neva, the River Neva under the northern sun on the sub-Arctic white night city they once called home, the water rippled and in it was Leningrad, and in Leningrad was everything she wanted to remember and everything she wanted to forget.
He was gazing at her. His eyes occasionally softened under the sticky Coconut Grove sun.
“You’ve got new freckles, above your eyebrows.” He kissed her eyelids. “Golden, soft hair, ocean eyes.” He stroked her face, her cheeks. “Your scar is almost gone. Just a thin white line now. Can barely see it.” The scar she got escaping from the Soviet Union.
“Hmm.”
“Unlike mine?”
“You have more to heal, husband.” Reaching out, she placed her hand on Alexander’s face and then closed her eyes quickly so he couldn’t pry inside her.
“Tatiasha,” he called in a whisper, and then bent to her and kissed her long and true.
It had been a year since she had found him shackled in Sachsenhausen’s isolation chamber. A year since she dredged him up from the bottomdwellers of Soviet-occupied Germany, from the grasping hands of Stalin’s henchmen. How could it have been a year? How long did it seem?
An eternity in purgatory, a hemidemisemiquaver in heaven.
His boat was full of women, old women, young women, widowed women, newly married women, and now there were pregnant women. “I swear,” said Alexander, “I had very little to do with that.” Also returning war veterans. Some were foreigners. One such man, Frederik, with a limp and a cane and a heavy Dutch accent, liked to sit by Alexander as he looked out on the sea. He came in the mornings, because the afternoon tour was too hot for him, and he and Anthony stayed by Alexander’s steering wheel. Anthony would frequently sit on Frederik’s lap. One day, Anthony was playing a clapping game with Frederik and said, “Oh, look you have blue numbers on your arm, too. Dad, look, he’s got numbers on him, just like you.”
Alexander and Frederik exchanged a look. Alexander turned away but not before Frederik’s eyes welled up. Frederik didn’t say anything then, but at noon after they docked, he stayed behind and asked Tatiana if he could talk to Alexander in private. Casting an anxious look at Alexander, she reluctantly left all the sandwiches and took Anthony home for lunch.
“So where were you?” Frederik asked, prematurely old though he was only forty-two. “I was at Treblinka. All the way from Amsterdam to Treblinka. Imagine that.”
Alexander shook his head. He lit a smoke, gave one to Frederik, who shook his head. “You have the wrong impression,” Alexander said.
“Let me see your arm.”
Rolling up his white linen sleeve, Alexander showed him.
“No wrong impression. I’d know these anywhere. Since when are American soldiers branded with German numbers?”
The cigarette wasn’t long enough, the smoke wasn’t long enough. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Alexander said. “I was in a concentration camp in Germany.”
“That’s obvious. Which camp?”
“Sachsenhausen.”
“Oh. It was an SS-training camp.”
“That camp was many things,” said Alexander.
“How did you get there?”
“Long story.”
“We have time. Miami has a large ex-pat Jewish community. You want to come with me tonight to our meeting? We meet on Thursdays. Just a few of us, like me, like you, we get together, talk, drink a little bit. You look like you sorely need to be around other people like yourself.”
“Frederik, I’m not Jewish.”
“I don’t understand,” Frederik said haltingly. “Why would the Germans brand you?”
“The Germans didn’t.”
“Who did then?”
“The Soviets. They ran that camp after the war.”
“Oh, the pigs. I don’t understand anything. Well, come with me anyway. We have three Polish Jews—you didn’t think there were any left, did you?—who were imprisoned by the Soviets after Ukraine went from Soviet to German back to Soviet hands. They’re debating every Thursday which occupation was worse.”
“Well,” said Alexander, “Hitler is dead. Mussolini is dead. Hirohito deposed. Fascism has suddenly gotten a bad name after being all the rage for twenty years. But who’s stronger than ever? The answer should give you a clue.”
“So come, give your two cents. Why would the Sovietskis do that to you if you weren’t Jewish? They didn’t brand American POWs; they were fighting on the same side.”
“If the Soviets knew I was American, they would’ve shot me years ago.”
Frederick looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t understand …”
“Can’t explain.”
“What division did you say you served in?”
Alexander sighed. “I was in Rokossovsky’s Army. His 97th penal battalion.”
“What—that’s not the U.S. Army …”
“I was a captain in the Red Army.”
“Oh, my God.” On Frederik’s face played sharp disbelief. “You’re a Soviet officer?”
“Yes.”
Frederik careened off the plank with his cane so fast, he nearly tipped himself over. “I got the wrong impression about you.” He was wheeling away. “Forget we ever spoke.”
Alexander was visibly upset when he came home. “Anthony!” he said as soon as he walked through the door. “Get over here. I told you this before, I’m going to tell you again, but for absolutely the last time—stop telling strangers about me.”
The boy was perplexed.
“You don’t have to figure it out, you just have to listen. I told you to keep quiet, and you still continue as if I hadn’t made myself clear.”
Tatiana tried to intervene, but Alexander cut her off. “Ant, as punishment tomorrow you’re not going on the boat with me. I’ll take you the next day, but if you ever speak about me to strangers again, you’ll be off the boat for good. You got it?”
The boy cried.
“I didn’t hear you, Anthony.”
“I got it, Dad.”
Straightening up, Alexander saw Tatiana watching them silently from the stove. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put a long-sleeve linen shirt on Anthony’s mouth like you do on my body,” he said, and ate dinner by himself out on the deck.
After Tatiana put Anthony to bed, she went outside.
The first thing Alexander said was, “We haven’t had meat in weeks. I’m as sick of shrimp and flounder as you were of lobsters. Why can’t you buy some meat?”
After hemming and hawing, Tatiana said, “I can’t go to the Center Meat Market. They’ve put a sign in the window—a little war souvenir.”
“So?”
“Sign says, ‘Horse meats not rationed—no points necessary.’”
They both fell mute.
Tatiana is walking down Ulitsa Lomonosova in Leningrad in October 1941, trying to find a store with bread to redeem her ration coupons. She passes a crowd of people. She is small, she can’t see what they’re circling. Suddenly the crowd opens up and out comes a young man holding a bloodied knife in one hand and a hunk of raw meat in the other, and Tatiana can see the opened flesh of a newly killed mare behind him. Dropping his knife on the ground, the man rips into the meat. One of his teeth falls out and he spits it out as he continues to chew frantically. Meat!
“You better hurry,” he says to her with his mouth full, “or there won’t be any left. Want to borrow my knife?”
And Alexander was remembering being in a transit camp after Colditz. There was no food for the two hundred men, who were contained within a barbed wire rectangular perimeter with guards on high posts in the four corners. No food except the horse that every day at noon the guards killed and left in the middle of the starving mess of men with knives. They would give the men sixty seconds with the horse, and then they would open fire. Alexander only survived because he would head immediately for the horse’s mouth and cut out the tongue, hide it in his tunic and then crawl away. It would take him forty seconds. He did it six times, shared the tongue with Ouspensky. Pasha was gone.
Tatiana stood in front of Alexander, leaning against the rail of the deck and listening to the water. He smoked. She drank her tea.
“So what’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Why did you eat by yourself?”
“I didn’t want to be eating dinner with you looking at me with your judging eyes. Don’t want to be judged, Tania”—he pointed at her—“most of all by you. And today, thanks to Ant, I had an unpleasant and unwanted conversation with a crippled Jewish man from Holland who mistook me for a brother in arms only to learn I fought for a country that handed over half of the Polish Jews and all of the Ukrainian Jews to Hitler.”
“I’m not judging you, darling.”
“I’m good for nothing,” Alexander said. “Not even polite conversation. You may be right about me not being able to rebuild my life working off Mel’s boats, but I’m not good for anything else. I don’t know how to be anything. In my life I’ve had only one job—I was an officer in the Red Army. I know how to carry weapons, set mines in the ground, drive tanks, kill men. I know how to fight. Oh, and I know how to burn down villages wholesale. That’s what I know. And I did this all for the Soviet Union!” he exclaimed, staring into the water, not looking at Tatiana, who stood on the deck, staring at him. “It’s completely fucked up,” he went on. “I’m yelling at Anthony because we have to pretend I’m not what I am. I have to lie to deny what I am. Just like in the Soviet Union. Ironic, no? There I denied my American self, and here I deny my Soviet self.” He flicked his ash into the water.
“But, Shura, you’ve been other things besides a soldier,” Tatiana said, unable to address the truth of the other things he was saying to her.
“Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he snapped. “I’m talking about living a life.”
“Well, I know, but you’ve managed before,” she whispered, turning her body away from him to herself look out onto the dark bay. Where was Anthony to interrupt the conversation she realized belatedly she didn’t want to have? Alexander was right: there were many things she would rather not have out. He couldn’t talk about anything, and she didn’t want to. But now she was in the thick of it. She had to. “We lived a life in Lazarevo,” she said.
“It was a fake life,” said Alexander. “There was nothing real about it.”
“It was the realest life we knew.” Stung at his bitter words, she sank down to the deck.
“Oh, look,” he said dismissively, “it was what it was, but it was a month! I was going back to the front. We pretended we were living while war raged. You kept house, I fished. You peeled potatoes, made bread. We hung sheets on the line to dry, almost as if we were living. And now we’re trying it in America.” Alexander shook his head. “I work, you clean, we dig potatoes, we shop for food. We break our bread. We smoke. We talk sometimes. We make love.” He paused as he glanced at her, remorsefully and yet—accusingly? “Not Lazarevo love.”
Tatiana lowered her head, their Lazarevo love tainted by the Gulag.
“Is any of it going to give me another chance to save your brother?” he asked.
“Nothing is going to change what cannot be changed,” she replied, her head close to her knees. “All we can do is change what can be.”
“But, Tania, don’t you know that the things that torture you most are the things you cannot fix?”
“That I know,” she whispered.
“And do I judge you? Let’s see,” said Alexander, “what about taking ice away from the borders of your heart? Is that changeable, you think? No, no, don’t shake your head, don’t deny it. I know what used to be there. I know the wide-eyed joyous sixteen-year-old you once were.”
Tatiana hadn’t shaken her head. She bowed her head; how different.
“You once skipped barefoot through the Field of Mars with me. And then,” said Alexander, “you helped me drag your mother’s body on a sled to the frozen cemetery.”
“Shura!” She got up off the deck on her collapsing legs. “Of all the things we could talk about—”
“On the sled dragged,” he whispered, “your entire family! Tell me you’re not still on that ice in Lake—”
“Shura! Stop!” Her hands went over her ears.
Grabbing her, removing her hands from her head, Alexander brought her in front of him. “Still there,” he said almost inaudibly, “still digging new ice holes to bury them in.”
“Well, what about you?” Tatiana said to him in a lifeless voice. “Every single night reburying my brother after he died on your back.”
“Yes,” Alexander said in his own lifeless voice, letting her go. “That is what I do. I dig deeper frozen holes for him. I tried to save him and I killed him. I buried your brother in a shallow grave.”
Tatiana cried. Alexander sat and smoked—his way of crying—poison right in the throat to quell the grief.
“Let’s go live in the woods, Tania,” he said. “Because nothing is going to make you skip next to me again while walking through the Summer Garden. I’m not the only one who’s gone. So let’s go make fish soup over the fire in our steel helmet, let’s both eat and drink from it. Have you noticed? We have one pot. We have one spoon. We live as if we’re still at war, in the trench, without meat, without baking real bread, without collecting things, without nesting. The only way you and I can live is like this: homeless and abandoned. We have it off with the clothes on our back, before they start shooting again, before they bring reinforcements. That’s where we still are. Not on Lovers Key but in a trench, on that hill in Berlin, waiting for them to kill us.”
“Darling, but the enemy is gone,” Tatiana said, starting to shake, remembering Sam Gulotta and the State Department.
“I don’t know about you, but I can’t live without the enemy,” said Alexander. “I don’t know how to wear the civilian clothes you bought to cover me. I don’t know how not to clean my weapons every day, how not to keep my hair short, how not to bark at you and Anthony, how not to expect you to listen. And I don’t know how to touch you slow or take you slow as if I’m not in prison and the guards are coming any minute.”
Tatiana wanted to walk away but didn’t want to upset him further. She didn’t lift her head as she spoke. “I think you’re doing better,” she said. “But you do whatever you need to. Wear your army clothes. Clean your guns, cut your hair, bark away, I will listen. Take me how you can.” When Alexander said nothing, nothing at all, to help her, Tatiana continued in a frail voice, “We have to figure out a way that’s best for us.”
His elbows were on his knees. Her shoulders were quaking.
Where was he, her Alexander of once? Was he truly gone? The Alexander of the Summer Garden, of their first Lazarevo days, of the hat in his hands, white-toothed, peaceful, laughing, languid, stunning Alexander, had he been left far behind?
Well, Tatiana supposed that was only right.
For Alexander believed his Tatiana of once was gone, too. The swimming child Tatiana of the Luga, of the Neva, of the River Kama.
Perhaps on the surface they were still in their twenties, but their hearts were old.
Mercy Hospital
The following afternoon at 12:30, she wasn’t at the marina. Alexander could usually spot her from a great distance, waiting for them on the docks, even before he entered the no wake zone. But today, he pulled up, he docked, let the women and the old men off as Anthony stood by the plank and saluted them. He waited and waited.
“Where’s Mommy?”
“Good question, son.” Alexander had relented; she had asked him this morning to forgive Anthony, and he did and took the boy with him, admonishing him to keep to himself. Now Ant was here, and his mother wasn’t. Was she upset with him after yesterday’s excruciating conversation?
“Maybe she took a nap and forgot to wake up,” said Anthony.
“Does Mommy usually sleep during the day?”
“Never.”
He waited a little longer and decided to bring the boy home. He himself had to be back by two for the afternoon tour. Anthony, his joy in life unmitigated by external circumstance, stopped and touched every rust spot, every blade of grass that grew where it wasn’t supposed to. Alexander had to put the boy on his shoulders to get home a little faster.
Tatiana wasn’t home either.
“So where’s Mommy?”
“I don’t know, Ant. I was hoping you’d know.”
“So what are we gonna do?”
“We’ll wait, I guess.” Alexander was smoking one cigarette after another.
Anthony stood in front of him. “I’m thirsty.”
“All right, I can get you a drink.”
“That’s not the cup Mommy uses. That’s not the juice Mommy uses. That’s not how Mommy pours it.” Then he said, “I’m thirsty and I’m hungry. Mommy always feeds me.”
“Yes, me too,” said Alexander, but he made him a sandwich with cheese and peanut butter.
He thought for sure she would be back any minute with the laundry or with groceries.
At one thirty, Alexander was running out of options.
He said, “Let’s go, Antman. Let’s take one more look, and if we can’t find her, I guess you’ll have to come with me.”
Instead of walking left to Memorial Park, they decided to walk right on Bayshore, past the construction site for the hospital. There was another small park on the other side. Anthony said sometimes they went there to play.
Alexander saw her from a distance, not at the park, but at the Mercy Hospital construction site, sitting on what looked to be a dirt mound.
When he got closer, he saw she was sitting motionless on a stack of two-by-fours. He saw her from the side, her hair in its customary plait, her hands laid tensely in a cross on her lap.
Anthony saw her and ran. “Mommy!”
She came out of her reverie, turned her head, and her face wrinkled in a contrite scrunch. “Uh-oh,” she said, standing up and rushing to them. “Have I been a bad girl?”
“On so many levels,” Alexander said, coming up to her. “You know I have to get back by two.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, bending to Anthony. “I lost track of time. You okay, bud? I see Daddy fed you.”
“What are you doing?” Alexander asked, but she was pretending to wipe the crumbs off Anthony’s mouth and didn’t reply.
“I see. Well, I have to go,” he said coldly, bending to kiss Anthony on the head.
That evening they were having dinner, almost not talking. Tatiana, trying to make light conversation, mentioned that Mercy Hospital was the first Catholic hospital in the Greater Miami area, a ministry of the Roman Catholic Church, and it was being built in the shape of a cross, when Alexander interrupted her. “So this is what you’ve been doing with your free time?”
“Free time?” she said curtly. “How do you think you get food on your table?”
“I didn’t have food on my table this afternoon.”
“Once.”
“Was that the first time you were sitting there?”
She couldn’t lie to him. “No,” she admitted. “But it’s nothing. I just go and sit.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do, that’s all.”
“Tatiana, let me understand,” Alexander said, and his voice got hard. “You have the Barnacle House to visit, the Vizcaya Palace, the Italianate Gardens, there is shopping, and libraries, there’s the ocean, and swimming and sunbathing, and reading, but what you do with the only two hours you have to yourself all day is go and sit in a dust bowl, watching construction workers build a hospital?”
Tatiana didn’t say anything at first. “As you well know,” she said quietly, “the way you are toward me, I have much more than two hours to myself all day.”
Alexander didn’t say anything.
“So why don’t you call Vikki and ask her to come down and spend a few weeks with you?” he said at last.
“Oh, just stop forcing Vikki on me all the time!” Tatiana exclaimed in a voice so loud it surprised even her.
Alexander stood up from the table. “Don’t raise your fucking voice to me.”
Tatiana jumped up. “Well, stop talking nonsense then!”
His hands slammed the table. “What did I say?”
“You left me and were gone for three days in Deer Isle!” she yelled. “Three days! Did you ever explain to me where you were? Did you ever tell me? And do I bang the table? Meanwhile I sit for five minutes a block away from our house and suddenly you’re all up in arms! I mean, are you even serious?”
“TATIANA!” His fist crashed into the table and dishes rattled off to the floor.
Anthony burst into tears. Holding his hands over his ears, he was saying, “Mommy, Mommy, stop it.”
Tatiana threw up her hands and went to her son. Alexander stormed out.
Inside the bedroom Anthony said, “Mommy, don’t yell at Daddy or he’ll go away again.”
Tatiana wanted to explain that adults sometimes argued but knew Anthony wouldn’t understand. Bessie and Nick Moore argued. Anthony’s mom and dad didn’t argue. The child couldn’t see that they were getting less good at pretending they were both made of china and not flint. At least there was actual participation, though as with all things, one had to be careful what one wished for.
Many hours later Alexander came back and went straight out on the deck.
Tatiana had been lying in bed waiting for him. She put on her robe and went outside. The air smelled of salt and the ocean. It was after midnight, it was June, in the high seventies. She liked that about Coconut Grove. She’d never been in a place where the nighttime temperature remained so warm.
“I’m sorry I raised my voice,” she said.
“What you should be sorry about,” Alexander said, “is that you’re up to no good. That’s what you should be sorry about.”
“I’m just sitting and thinking,” she said.
“Oh, and I was born yesterday? Give me a fucking break.”
She went to sit on his lap. She was going to tell him what he needed to hear. She only wished that just once he would tell her what she needed to hear. “It’s nothing, Shura. Really. I’m just sitting. Mmm,” she murmured, rubbing her cheek against his. His cheek was stubbly. She loved that stubble. His breath smelled of alcohol. She breathed it in; she loved that beer breath. Then she sighed. “Where’ve you been?”
“I walked to one of the casinos. Played poker. See how easy that was? And if you wanted to know where I’d been back in Deer Isle, why didn’t you just ask me?”
Tatiana didn’t want to tell him she was afraid to know. She had gone missing for thirty minutes. He had been lost, gone, missing and presumed dead for years. She wished sometimes he would just think, think of the things she might feel. She didn’t want to be on his lap anymore. “Shura, come on, don’t be upset with me,” Tatiana said, getting off.
“You, too.” He threw down his cigarette as he stood up. “I’m doing my level best,” he said, heading inside.
“Me, too, Alexander,” she said, head down, following him. “Me, too.”
But in bed—she naked, holding him, he naked, holding her, nearly there, nearly at the very end for him—Tatiana clutched him as she used to, feverishly clutched his back and under her fingers, even at the moment of her own breaking abandon, felt his scars under her grasping fingers.
She could not continue. Could not, even at that moment. Especially at that moment. And so she found herself doing what she remembered him doing in Lazarevo when he couldn’t bear to touch her: Tatiana stopped him, pushed him away, and turned her back to him.
She put her face in the pillow, raised her hips and cried, hoping he wouldn’t notice, hoping that even if he did notice, he would be too far gone to care.
She was wrong on all counts. He noticed. And he wasn’t too far gone to care.
“So this is what your level best looks like, huh?” Alexander whispered, out of breath, bending over her, lifting her head off the pillow by her hair. “Presenting your cold back to me?”
“It’s not cold,” Tatiana said, not facing him. “It’s just the only part that’s taken leave of all its senses.”
Alexander jumped off the bed—shaking and unfinished. He turned on the lamp, the overhead light, he opened the shades. Unsteadily she sat up on the bed, covering herself with a sheet. He stood naked in front of her, glistening, unsubsided, his chest heaving. He was incredibly upset.
“How can I even try to find my way,” he said, his voice breaking, “if my own wife recoils from me? I know it isn’t what it used to be. I know it isn’t what we had. But it’s all we have now, and this body is all I’ve got.”
“Darling—please,” Tatiana whispered, stretching out her hands to him. “I’m not recoiling from you.” She couldn’t see him through the veil of her sorrow.
“You think I’m fucking blind?” he exclaimed. “Oh God! You think this is the first time I noticed? You think I’m an idiot? I notice every fucking time, Tatiana! I grit my teeth, I wear my clothes so you don’t see me, I take you from behind, so nothing of me touches you—just like you want.” He enunciated every syllable through his teeth. “You wear clothes in bed with me so I won’t accidentally rub my wounds on you. I pretend not to give a shit, but how long do you think I can keep doing this? How much longer do you think you’re going to be happier on the hard floor?”
She covered her face.
He swept his hand across and knocked her arms away. “You are my wife and you won’t touch me, Tania!”
“Darling, I do touch you …”
“Oh, yes,” he said cruelly. “Well, all I can say is, thank God, I guess, that my tackle is not maimed, or I’d never get any blow. But what about the rest of me?”
Tatiana lowered her weeping head. “Shura, please …”
He yanked her up and out of bed. The sheet fell away from her. “Look at me,” he said.
She was too ashamed of herself to lift her eyes to him. They were standing naked against each other. His angry fingers dug into her arms. “That’s right, you should be fucking ashamed,” he said through his teeth. “You don’t want to face me then, and you can’t face me now. Just perfect. Well, nothing more to say, is there? Come on, then.” He spun her around and bent her over the bed.
“Shura, please!” She tried to get up, but his palm on her back kept her from moving until she couldn’t move if she wanted to. And then he took his palm away.
Behind her, leaning over her, supporting himself solely by his clenched fists on the mattress, Alexander took her like he was in the army, like she was a stranger he found in the woods whom he was going to leave in one to-the-hilt minute without a backward glance, while she helplessly cried and then—even more helplessly, was crying out, now deservedly and thoroughly abased. “And look—no hands, just like you like,” he whispered into her ear. “You want more? Or was that enough lovemaking for you?”
Tatiana’s face was in the blanket.
Himself unfinished, he backed away, and she slowly straightened up and turned to him, wiping her face. “Please—I’m sorry,” she whispered, sitting down weakly on the edge of the bed, covering her body. Her legs were shaking.
“You cover me from other people because you don’t want to look at me yourself. I’m surprised you notice or care that other women talk to me.” He was panting. “You think they’ll run in horror, like you, once they catch a glimpse of me.”
“What—no!” Her arms reached for him. “Shura, you’re misunderstanding me … I’m not frightened, I’m just so sad for you.”
“Your pity,” he said, stepping back from her, “is the absolute last fucking thing I want. Pity yourself that you’re like this.”
“I’m so afraid to hurt you …” Tatiana whispered, her palms openly pleading with him.
“Bullshit!” he said. “But ironic, don’t you think, considering what you’re doing to me.” Alexander groaned. “Why can’t you be like my son, who sees everything and never flinches from me?”
“Oh, Shura …” She was crying.
“Look at me, Tatiana.” She lifted her face. His bronze eyes were blazing, he was loud, he was uncontrollable. “You’re terrified, I know, but here I am”—Alexander pointed to himself, standing naked and scarred and blackly tattooed. “Once again,” he said, “I stand in front of you naked and I will try—God help me—one more fucking time.” Flinging his fists down, he was nearly without breath left. “Here I am, your one man circus freak show, having bled out for Mother Russia, having desperately tried to get to you, now on top of you with his scourge marks, and you, who used to love me, who has sympathized, internalized, normalized everything, you are not allowed to turn away from me! Do you understand? This is one of the unchangeable things, Tania. This is what I’m going to look like until the day I die. I can’t get any peace from you ever unless you find a way to make peace with this. Make peace with me. Or let me go for good.”
Her shoulders rose and fell. “I’m sorry,” Tatiana said as she came to him, putting her arms around him, kneeling on the floor in front of him, holding him, looking up into his face. “Please. I’m sorry.”
Eventually she managed to soothe him back on the bed. Alexander came—not willingly—and lay down beside her. She pulled him on top of her. He climbed where he was led as her hands went around his back. She wrapped her legs around him, holding him intimately and tight.
“I’m sorry, honey, husband, Shura, dearest, my whole heart,” Tatiana whispered into his neck, kissing his throat. With heartbroken fingers she caressed him. “Please forgive me for hurting your feelings. I don’t pity you, don’t turn it that way on me, but I cannot help that I’m desperately sad, wishing so much—for your sake only, not mine—that you could still be what you once were—before the things you now carry. I’m ashamed of myself and I’m sorry. I spend all my days regretting the things I cannot fix.”
“You and me both, babe,” he said, threading his arms underneath her. Their faces were turned away from each other as Alexander lay on top of her, and she stroked the war on his back. Naked and pressed breast to breast they searched for something they had lost long ago, and found it briefly, in a fierce clutch, in a glimmer through the barricades.
The Sands of Naples
Alexander came home mid-morning and said, “Let’s collect our things. We’re leaving.”
“We are? What about Mel?”
“This isn’t about Mel. It’s about us. It’s time to go.”
Apparently Frederik had complained to Mel that the man who was running his boats full of war veterans and war widows was possibly a communist, a Soviet spy, perhaps a traitor. Mel, afraid of losing his customers, had to confront Alexander, but couldn’t bring himself to fire the man who brought him thousands of dollars worth of business. Alexander made it easy for Mel. He denied all charges of espionage and then quit.
“Let’s head out west,” he said to Tatiana. “You might as well show me that bit of land you bought. Where is it again? New Mexico?”
“Arizona.”
“Let’s go. I want to get to California for the grape-picking season in August.”
And so they left Coconut Grove of the see-through salt waters and the wanton women with the bright colored lipstick, they left the bobbing houseboats and Anthony’s crashing dreams, and the mystery of Mercy Hospital and drove across the newly opened Everglades National Park to Naples on the Gulf of Mexico.
Alexander was subdued with her, back to Edith Wharton polite, and she deserved it, but the sand was cool and white, even in scorching noon, and the fire sunsets and lightning storms over the Gulf were like nothing they’d ever seen. So they stayed in the camper on a deserted beach, in a corner of the world, in a spot where he could take off his shirt and play ball with Anthony, while the sun beat on his back and tanned the parts that could be tanned, leaving the scars untouched, like gray stripes.
Both he and the boy were two brown stalks running around the white shores and green waters. All three of them loved the heat, loved the beach, the briny Gulf, the sizzling days, the blinding sands. They celebrated her twenty-third birthday and their fifth wedding anniversary there, and finally left after Anthony’s fourth birthday at the end of June.
They spent only a few days in New Orleans because they discovered New Orleans, much like South Miami Beach, was not an ideal city for a small boy.
“Perhaps next time we can come here without the child,” said Alexander on Bourbon Street, where the nice ladies sitting by the windows lifted up their shirts as the three of them strolled by.
“Dad, why are they showing us their boobies?”
“I’m not sure, son. It’s a strange ritualistic custom common to these parts of the world.”
“Like in that journal where the African girls put weights in their lips to make them hang down past their throats?”
“Something like that.” Alexander scooped up Anthony into his arms.
“But Mommy said the African girls make their lips big to get a husband. Are these girls trying to get a husband?”
“Something like that.”
“Daddy, what did Mommy do to get you to marry her?” Anthony giggled. “Did Mommy show you her boobies?”
“Tania, what are you reading to our child?” said Alexander, flipping a squealing Anthony upside down by his legs to get him to stop asking questions.
“National Geographic,” she said, lightly batting her eyes at him. “But answer your son, Alexander.”
“Yeah, Dad,” said Anthony, red with delight, hanging upside down. “Answer your son.”
“Mommy put on a pretty dress, Antman.” And for a fleeting moment on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, Tatiana and Alexander’s eyes made real contact.
They were glad they had the camper now in their quest, in their summer trek across the prairies. They had cover over their heads, they had a place for Anthony to sleep, to play, a place to put their pot and spoon, their little dominion unbroken by pungent hotel rooms or beaten-up landladies. Occasionally they had to stop at RV parks to take showers. Anthony liked those places, because there were other kids there for him to play with, but Tatiana and Alexander chafed at living in such close proximity to strangers, even for an evening. After Coconut Grove they finally discovered what they liked best, what they needed most—just the three of them in an unhealed but unbroken trinity.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_821883ef-5771-5dbe-951e-4df33d751d89)
Paradise Valley, 1947 (#ulink_821883ef-5771-5dbe-951e-4df33d751d89)
Bare Feet and Backpacks
Alexander drove their Nomad through Texas, across Austin, down to San Antonio. The Alamo was a fascinating bit of history—they all died. He couldn’t get around that fact. Despite the heroism, the bravery, they all died! And Texas lost its battle for independence and continued to belong to Santa Ana. Death to all wasn’t enough for victory. What kind of a fucked-up life lesson was that for Anthony? Alexander decided not to tell his son about it. He’d learn in school soon enough.
Western Texas was just flat road amid the dusty plains as far as the eye could see. Alexander was driving and smoking; he had turned off the radio so he could hear Tatiana better—but she had stopped speaking. She was sitting on the passenger side with her eyes closed. She had been telling him and Anthony soothing stories of some of her pranks in Luga. There were few stories Alexander liked better than of her child self in that village by the river.
Is she asleep? He glances at her, squeezed in around herself in a floral pink wrap dress that comes down to a V in her chest. Her glistening, slightly tender, coral nectar mouth reminds him of things, stirs him up a little. He checks to see what Anthony is doing—the boy is lying down facing away, playing with his toy soldiers. Alexander reaches over and cups a palmful of her breast, and she instantly opens her eyes and checks for Anthony. “What?” she whispers, and no sooner does she whisper than Anthony turns around, and Alexander takes his hand away, an aching prickle of desire mixed with frustration all swollen behind his eyes and in his loins.
Their hostilities in Coconut Grove have been yielding some significant crops for him. Just a small measure of his subsequent closed-mouthedness has been making Tatiana trip over herself to show him that his bitter accusations against her were not true. It doesn’t matter. He knows of course they were true, but he doesn’t mind in the least her cartwheels of palpitating remorse.
At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can’t see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn’t you just stay put? Why couldn’t you feel I was coming for you?
You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn’t I dead?
He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arrived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen’s main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him.
As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw after being beaten and dreaming of her kissing him, and these dreams morph with the memories of last night, and suddenly she is kissing not the scars but the raw oozing wounds, and he is in agony for she is crying and the brine of her tears is eating away the meat of his flesh, and he is begging her to stop because he can’t take it anymore. Kiss something else, he pleads. Anything else. He’s had enough of himself. He is sick of himself. She is tainted not just with the Gulag. She is tainted with his whole life.
Does it hurt when I touch them?
He has to lie. Every kiss she plants on his wounds stirs a sense memory of how he got them. He wanted her to touch him, and this is what he gets. But if he tells her the truth, she will stop. So he lies. No, he says.
She kisses him past the small of his back, down to his legs, to his feet, murmuring to him something about his perfect this and that, he doesn’t even know, and then climbs up and prods him to turn over. She lies astride him, holding his head in her arms while he holds her buttocks in his (now they’re perfect), and kisses his face, not inch by inch but centimeter by centimeter. As she kisses him, she murmurs to him. He opens his eyes. Your eyes, do you want to know what color they are? They’re bronze; they’re copper; they’re ocher and amber; they’re cream and coffee; cognac and champagne. They are caramel.
Not crème brûlée? he asks. And she starts to cry. All right, all right, he says. Not crème brûlée.
She kisses his scarred tattooed arms, his ribboned chest. Now he can see her face, her lips, her hair, all glowing in the flickering fire. His hands lie lightly on her silken head.
Mercifully few wounds on your stomach, she whispers, as she kisses the black line of hair that starts at his solar plexus and arrows down.
Yes, he groans back. Do you know what we call men with wounds on their stomachs? Corpses.
She laughs. He doesn’t laugh, his very good Sergeant Telikov dying slowly with the bayonet in his abdomen. There wasn’t enough morphine to let him die free of pain. Ouspensky had to mercy-shoot him—on Alexander’s orders, and this one time Alexander did turn away. The flinching, the stiffness, the dead, the alive, all here, and there is no morphine, and there is no mercy. There is only Tatiana.
She murmurs, she purrs. A corpse, that’s not you.
He agrees. No, not me.
Her breasts press into his rigid with tension—
He is rupturing. What else do you like? Come on, I’m going to implode. What else? She sits between his legs and her small healing hands finally take him. She rubs him between her palms like she’s about to set him on fire. Her warm hands softly milk him, softly climb rope on him. He is stacked in her clasped fingers when she bends her head to him. Shura … look at you … you are so hard, so beautiful. He desperately wants to keep his eyes open. Her long hair feathers his stomach in rhythm to her motion. Her mouth is so soft, so hot, so wet, her fingers are in rotating rings around him, she is naked, she is tense, her eyes are closed and she moans as she sucks him. He is set on fire. He is in bondage through and through. And now, well past it but utterly within it, he keeps quiet during the day while his hands stretch out in a shudder for her yoke of contrition, for her blaze of repentance at night.
But night isn’t nearly enough. As he keeps telling her, nothing is enough. So now he is trying not to crash the camper.
She sits looking ahead at the sprawling fields, and then suddenly straight at him as if she is about to tell him something. Today her eyes are transparent with sunny yellow rays beaming out from the irises. When they’re not misted or jaded by the fathomless waters of rivers and lakes left behind, the eyes are entirely pellucid—and dangerous. They are clear in meaning, yet bottomless. And what’s worse—they allow all light to pass through. There is no hiding from them. Today, after deeming him acceptable, the eyes turn back to the road, her hands relaxing on her lap, her chest swelling against the pink cotton fabric. He wants to fondle her, to feel her breasts in his hands, feel their soft weightiness, to have his face in them—how long till night? She is so sensitive, he can’t breathe on her without her quivering; in her pink nipples seem to center many of the nerve endings in her body. She has amazing, unbelievable breasts. Alexander’s hands grip the wheel.
Peripherally he sees her look of concern—she thinks he is tormented. Yes, he is made stupid by lust. She leans over slightly and says in her corn husk of a breath, “A penny for your thoughts, soldier.”
Alexander composes his voice before speaking. “I was thinking,” he says calmly, “about freedom. You come, you go, and no one thinks twice about you. Any road, any country road, any state road, from one city to another, never stopped, never checked. No one asks for your internal passport, no one asks about your business. No one cares what you do.”
And what did his wife do? She sat, motionless and—was it tense?—listening to him, her hands no longer relaxed but clenched together, and then pulled open her dress, pulled down her vest and leaning back against the seat, smiled and shut tight her eyes, sitting pushed-up and topless for him for a few panting moments. O Lord, thank you.
Has the sun set? Yes, finally, and the fire is on, and Anthony is asleep, and that’s good, but what Alexander really wants is to see Tatiana in the daylight, without shadows on her, when he can look at her with diurnal lust unadorned by war, by death, by his agonies that pursue him like he pursues her in the choppy black-and-white frames of the used movie camera she made him buy in New Orleans (he’s learned she has a weak spot for new gadgets). Just once, a song in the daylight with nothing else but lust. She too has not been happy, that he knows. Something weighs upon her. She often can’t face him, and he is too fractured to pry. He used to be stronger but not anymore. His strength has been left behind—thousands of miles east, in the christening Kama, in the gleaming Neva, on the icy Lake Ladoga, in the wooded mountains of Holy Cross, in Germany with the blackguard Ouspensky, his lieutenant, his friend, betraying him for years in cold blood, left behind on the frozen ground with the barely buried Pasha. God! Please, no more. He shudders to stave off the fevers. This is what night does to him. But wait—
She stands in front of him, as if she is trying to determine what he wants. Isn’t it obvious? DAYLIGHT! He sits without moving, without speaking and rages inside his burning house. He used to need nothing and want nothing but his stark force upon her open body—and still does—but Tania has given him something else, too. At last, she has given him other things to dream about. She stands glimmering in front of him, blonde and naked, trembling and shy, the color of opalescent milk. He already can’t breathe. She is supple and little, creamy-smooth, her bare body is finally in his groping hands, and her gold hair shimmers down her back. She shimmers. He tears off his clothes and pulls her into his lap, fitting her onto himself while he sucks her nipples as he caresses her hair. He cannot last five minutes with her like that, hard nipples in his mouth, warm breasts in his face, silk hair in his hands, all curled up and molten honey around him, slightly squirming, fluttering, tiny, soft and satiny in his avid lap. Not five minutes. O Lord, thank you.
In New Orleans, on stinging nostalgic impulse, he had bought her a dress he saw in a shop window, an ivory frothy, thin-netted and muslin dress with a slight swing skirt and layers of stiff silk and lace. It was pretty, but regretfully too big for her: she was swimming in muslin snow. The shop didn’t have a smaller size. “Your wife is very petite, sir,” said the corpulent sales woman with a frowning, disapproving glare—either disapproving of Tania for being petite or disapproving of a man Alexander’s size for marrying someone who was. They bought the dress anyway, judgmental beefy sales lady notwithstanding, and that night in their seedy and stifling hotel room, with Anthony in their bed and the fan whooshing the heat around, Alexander silently measured out her smallness—consoling himself with math instead of love, with circumference instead of circumfusion. Her ankles six inches around. Her calves, eleven. The tops of her very bare thighs below the sulcus, eighteen and a half. The tape measure dropped, his hands ringed her thigh, the entire length of his left index finger burning. Her hips, the tape clasped just above the blonde down, thirty-two. Her waist, twenty-one. The tape measure dropped, his hands ringed her waist. Anthony is in the bed, she whispered, Anthony is unsettled.
Her chest, thirty-six. With the nipples erect, thirty-six and a half. Tape measure dropped for good. Anthony is stirring, Shura, please, and the room is tiny and broiling, and just outside the open windows, the sailors below will hear. But math did not suffice that time. Gasping kneeling piety in the corner of the creaking floor just feet away from sleeping Anthony and the laughing sailors barely sufficed.
Now, on the road, he is thirsty, hungry, profoundly aroused; he glances back to see what Anthony is doing, to see if the boy is busy with his bugs, too busy with his bugs to see his father grope blindly for his mother. But Anthony is on the seat behind her, watching him.
“What’ya thinkin’ about, Dad?”
“Oh, you know your dad. A little of this, a little of that.” His voice creaks, too.
Soon they’ll leave western Texas, be in New Mexico. He casts another long look at her clavicle bones, slim shoulders, straight upper arms, eight, at her graceful neck, eleven, her white throat that needs his lips on it. His eyes drift down to her bare feet under her thin cotton skirt; white and delicate as her hands; her feet six, her hands five, less by three than his own—but it’s her feet he’s stuck on; why?—and suddenly he opens his mouth to let out a shallow anguished breath of a deeply unwanted memory. No, no, not that. Please. His head shudders. No. Feet—dirty, large, blacknailed, bruised, lying motionless underneath a raggy old brown skirt attached to the dead body of a gangraped woman he found in the laundry room. It is Alexander’s job to drag her by the feet to the graves he’s just dug for her and the three others who died that day.
He fumbles around for his cigarettes. Tatiana pulls one out, hands it to him with a lighter. Unsteadily he lights up, pulling up the woman’s skirt to cover her face so that earth doesn’t fall on it when he shovels the dirt over her small part of the mass grave. Under her skirt the woman is so viciously mutilated that Alexander cannot help it, he begins to retch.
Then. Now.
He puts his hand over his mouth as the cigarette burns, and inhales quickly.
“Are you okay, Captain?”
There is nothing he can say. He usually remembers that woman at the worst, most inopportune moments.
Eventually his mouth stops the involuntary reflex. Then. Now. Eventually, he sees so much that he becomes dead to everything. He has inured himself, hardened himself so that there’s nothing that arouses a flicker of feeling inside Alexander. He finally speaks as they cross the state line. “Have a joke for me, Tania?” he says. “I could use a joke.”
“Hmm.” She thinks, looks at him, looks to see where Anthony is. He’s far in the back. “Okay, what about this.” With a short cough, she leans into Alexander and lowers her voice. “A man and his young girlfriend are driving in the car. The man has never seen his girl naked. She thinks he is driving too slow, so they decide to play a game. For every five miles he goes above fifty, she will take off a piece of her clothing. In no time at all, he is flying and she is naked. The man gets so excited that he loses control of the car. It veers off the road and hits a tree. She is unharmed but he is stuck in the car and can’t get out. ‘Go back on the road and get help,’ he tells her. ‘But I’m naked,’ she says. He rummages around and pulls off his shoe. ‘Here, just put this between your legs to cover yourself.’ She does as she is told and runs out to the road. A truck driver, seeing a naked crying woman, stops. ‘Help me, help me,’ she sobs. ‘My boyfriend is stuck and I can’t get him out.’ The truck driver says, ‘Miss, if he’s that far in, I’m afraid he’s a goner.’”
Alexander laughs in spite of himself.
In the afternoon after lunch, Tatiana manages to put Anthony down for an unprecedented godsent nap, and in the canopied seclusion of the trees at the empty rest area grounds, Alexander sets Tatiana down on the picnic bench, pulls high her watercolor skirt, kneels between her legs in the glorious daylight and lowers his head to her fragile and perfect perianth, his palms up, under her. She has given him this, like manna from heaven. O Lord, thank you.
He is driving through the prairies and he is thirsty. Tania and Ant are playing road games, trying to guess the color of the next car that passes them. Alexander declines to participate, saying he doesn’t want to play any game where Tatiana always wins.
It’s very hot in the camper. They’ve opened the top hatch and all the slotted windows, but it’s just dust and wind blowing at them at forty miles an hour. Her hair is getting tangled. She is flushed; a few miles back she had taken off her blouse and now sits in the slightly damp see-through white vest that cannot constrain her. Being around her all day and night like this is getting to be no good for him. He is becoming slightly crazed by her. All he wants is more. But unlike Lazarevo, where his desire like a river flowed into the sea extempore, here the river is dammed by their seedling who sits awake from morning till night and plays road games.
Ant says a word, like “crab,” and she says one that follows into her head, like “grass.” Alexander doesn’t want to play that game either. Should they stop, have lunch? German dead crabgrass in the middle of the camp, in the middle of February. Beaten, lashed, blood oozing down his back, he is made to stand in the cold grass for six hours and what he thinks about for six hours is that he is thirsty.
He glances at her sitting serenely folded over. She catches him looking and says, “Thirsty?”
Does he nod? He doesn’t know. He knows that she gives him a drink.
Tank, says Anthony, continuing the game.
Commander, says his mother.
Alexander blinks. The camper lurches.
Shura, watch the road, or we’ll crash.
Did she just say that? He’s commanding his tank, and they’re in the middle of the Prussian fields, they’re almost in Poland. The Germans have mined the meadow in retreat, and one of the S-mines has just gone off, in full view of Alexander. It lifted up to his engineer’s lurching chest, paused as if to say, looky who’s here, and exploded. Ouspensky has dug the hole where the engineer fell, and they buried him in it—him and his backpack. Alexander never looks through the backpacks of the fallen, because the things they contain make it impossible for him either to walk away or to continue forward. As the soldier’s outer wear—his uniform, helmet, boots, weapon—contain the outer him, the backpacks contain the inner him. The backpacks contain the soldier’s soul.
Alexander never looks. Unopened it is buried with the timid engineer who had a large blue tattoo of a cross on his chest that the Nazi mine ripped open because the Nazis don’t believe in Jesus.
“Where’s your backpack?” Alexander said to Tatiana.
“What?”
“Your backpack, the one you left the Soviet Union with. Where is it?”
She turned to the passenger window. “Perhaps it’s still with Vikki,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“My mother’s Bronze Horseman book? The photos of your family? Our two wedding pictures? You left them with Vikki?” Alexander was incredulous.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Why are you asking?”
He didn’t want to tell her why he was asking. The killed landmine engineer had a sweetheart in Minsk—Nina. Pictures of her, letters from her had filled his pack. Ouspensky told Alexander this, even though Alexander had asked him not to. After he knew, he felt bitterly envious, blackly jealous of the amorous letters the meek engineer was sent by a Nina from Minsk. Alexander never got any letters. Once long ago he received letters from Tatiana, and from her sister, Dasha. But those letters, the cards, the photographs, Tania’s white dress with red roses were all at the bottom of the sea or had turned to ashes. He had no more things.
“The letters I wrote you—after I left you in Lazarevo,” said Alexander, “you don’t—you don’t know where they are? You’ve … left them with Vikki?” Perhaps things remained that stirred some feeling in him.
“Darling …” her voice was soothing. “What on heaven’s earth are you thinking about?”
“Can’t you just answer me?” he snapped.
“I have them. I have it all, they’re with me, buried deep in my things. The whole backpack. I never look through it, but I’ll get it for you. I’ll get it when we stop for lunch.”
Relief heaved out of his chest. “I don’t want to look through it either,” he said. He simply needed to know that she is not like him—that she has a soul. Because Alexander’s backpack during his penal battalion days was empty. If Alexander had died and Ouspensky, before burying him, looked through it, he would have found cards, smokes, a broken pen, a small Bible—Soviet-issue, distributed to the Red Army late in the war with false piety—and that is all. If Alexander had died, all his men would have seen that their commander, Captain Belov, had no soul.
But had they looked through the backpack a little more carefully, in the cracking parchment of the New Testament, they would have found a soiled small black-and-white picture of a young girl, maybe fourteen, standing toes turned in like a child, in white braids and a sundress, with a broken and casted arm, next to her dark brother. He was pulling her hair. Her good arm was around him. Pasha and Tania, two striplings. They were laughing—in Luga, a long time ago.
Ninety-Seven Acres
New Mexico. Santa Fe Mountains. Arizona. Tonto Mountains.
Seven thousand feet above sea level the air is thinner, drier. In Santa Fe, Anthony had slept almost through the night. Only a whimper from him at dawn. They all felt it was progress and stayed a little longer, hoping to continue the improvement, but it didn’t last.
The Tonto Mountains were breathtaking, the air so transparent Tatiana could see over the vistas and the valleys and the sloping hills clear to the sun, but they’ve left them behind now, and the air has become like the land, bone-dry, overbaked and opaque with stodgy molecules of heat. She has unbuttoned her blouse, but Alexander is focused on the road. Or is he just pretending he is focused on the road? She has noticed a small but palpable change in him recently. He still doesn’t talk much, but his eyes and breath during the day are less impassive.
She offers him a drink, a cigarette. He takes it all but is not distracted by her this time. She wonders when they can stop, break camp, maybe find a river, swim. The memories of swimming in the Kama prickle her skin with pain, and she stiffens, trying not to flinch and, pulling down her skirt, forces her hands to lie still on her lap. She doesn’t want to think of then. It’s bad enough she has to think of now, when she keeps expecting the police to stop them at every intersection and say, Are you Alexander Barrington, son of Harold Barrington? What, your wife didn’t tell you that at your last campsite when you dared to leave her alone for just a moment, she called her old roommate in New York? Your wife, Mr. Barrington, seems not to tell you many things.
That’s right. Tatiana called long distance through an operator, but Sam Gulotta picked up the phone. She got so frightened, she hung up and she didn’t have enough time to call Aunt Esther, too, but now she is terrified that the operator told Sam where in New Mexico she had called from. People with nothing to hide don’t run, Alexander Barrington, the police will say when they stop the Nomad. Why don’t you come with us, and your wife and son can stay here at the intersection of souls and wait for you to come back as they have been doing, as they’re doing still, waiting for you to return to them. Tell them you won’t be long.
It’s a lie. They will take the casement that is his body, they will take his physical self, for that’s almost all that remains of him anyway, and Tatiana and Anthony will be at that intersection forever. No. It’s better to have him here, even like this—withdrawn, into himself, silent, occasionally fevered, fired up, occasionally laughing, always smoking, always deeply human—than to have just a memory. For the things he does to her at night, they’re not memories anymore. And his sleeping with her. She fights her own sleep every night, tries to stay awake long after he has gone to sleep just so she can feel his arms around her, so she can lie completely entombed and surrounded by the ravaged body he barely saved that now comforts her as nothing else can.
He measures her to order her. He gets upset when she won’t respond in kind, but she wants to tell him that he cannot be ordered by Aristotelian methods or by Pythagorean theorems. He is what he is. All his parts are in absolute proportion to his sum, but even more important, all are in relative proportion to her sum. Cardinal or counting numbers don’t help. Ordinals or ranking numbers help so long as she stops at 1. Archimedes’s principle won’t help. Certainly she can’t and won’t measure what is measureless, what neither terminates nor repeats, what is beyond even the transcendental of π—though he doesn’t think so—what is beyond polynomials and quadratic formulas, beyond the rational and irrational, the humanist and the logical, beyond the minds of the Cantors and the Dedekinds, the Renaissance philosophers and the Indian Tantrists, what falls instead into the realm of gods and kings, of myth, of dawn of man, of the mystery of mankind—that there is a space inside her designed solely for him and despite clear Euclidian impossibilities not only does everything, in plenary excess, cleave like it’s meant to, but it makes her feel what math cannot explain, what science cannot explain. What nothing can explain.
And yet, inexplicably, he continues to measure her, tracing out fluents of curves and slopes of tangents. His two hands are always on her—on top of her head, against her palms, her feet, her upper arms, ringing her waist, clasping her hips. He is so desperately endearing. She doesn’t know what he thinks π will give him.
Playing with Anthony. Is that not real? Anthony having his father? The dark boy sitting on his lap trying to find the ticklish spot and Alexander laughing, is that not real, not math nor a memory?
Alexander has nearly completely forgotten what it’s like to play, except when he’s in the water, but there had been no water in Texas, barely any in New Mexico, and now they’re in Arid Zona.
Anthony tries land games with his father. He perches on Alexander’s lap, holds the tips of his index fingers together, and says, “Daddy, want to see how strong I am? Hold my fingers in your fist, and I’ll get free.”
Alexander stubs out his cigarette. He holds Anthony’s fingers lightly, and the boy wriggles free. The delight of freeing himself from his daunting father is so great that he wants to play the game again and again. They play it two hundred times. And then the reverse. Alexander holds his index fingers together while Anthony clenches his tiny four-year-old fist over them. When Alexander is unable to get free, Anthony’s joy is something to behold. They play that two hundred times while Tatiana either prepares lunch or dinner, or washes or tidies, or just sits and watches them with a gladdening heart.
Alexander takes Anthony off his knee and says in a throaty, nicotine-stained voice, “Tatia, want to play? Put your fingers into my fist and see if you can wriggle free. Come.” Not a muscle moves on his face, but her heart is no longer just gladdening. It’s quickening, it’s maddening. She knows she shouldn’t, Anthony is right there, but when Alexander calls, she comes. That’s just how it is. She perches on his lap and touches together the tips of her slightly trembling index fingers. She tries not to look into his face, just at her fingers, over which he now places his enormous fist, squeezes lightly, and says, “Go ahead, wriggle free.” Her whole body weakens. She tries, of course, to get free, but she knows this: while as a father Alexander plays one way with Anthony, as a husband, he plays the opposite way with her. She bites her lip to keep from making a single sound.
“Come on, Mommy,” says the uncomprehending child by her side. “You can do it. I did it! Wriggle free.”
“Yes, Tatiasha,” whispers Alexander, squeezing her fingers tighter, looking deep into her face as she sits on his lap. “Come on, wriggle free.”
And she glimpses the smiling soul peeking out.
But when he drives, he is often silent and sullen. She hates it when he reduces himself like this to the worst of his life—it’s hard to draw him away, and sometimes even when he wants to be drawn, he can’t be. And sometimes Tatiana is so full of fears herself of the imminent danger to Alexander at every stop sign that she loses the weapons she needs to draw him away, herself reduced to the worst of her life.
She wishes for something else to swallow them, where the road wouldn’t apprehend her, where his soul wouldn’t apprehend him. Perhaps if they were less human.
She was leading him to Phoenix, but Alexander was too hot; he almost wanted to drive straight on to California. “I thought you wanted to see the ninety-seven acres I bought with your mother’s money,” she said to him.
He shrugged, drank some water. “What I want,” he said, “is to feel water on my body. That’s what I want. Will we get that in Phoenix?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Exactly. I am thus reluctant.”
It took them a day to get from Arizona’s eastern border to Phoenix. They had stopped at a camping site that evening near the Superstition Mountains. Alexander lay down on the wooden deck under the water spout with the cold water pouring down onto his chest and face. Anthony and Tatiana stood at a polite distance and watched him. Anthony asked if his dad was all right.
“I’m not sure,” said Tatiana. “I’d say the odds are fifty-fifty.” Had Alexander insisted a little harder, she would’ve been easily persuaded to keep moving until they reached the Pacific. Not because she didn’t want to show him their desert property, but because she thought there was a possibility that Federal agents would be waiting for them in the only place that belonged to them. Vikki might have mentioned the land to Sam Gulotta. Tatiana suspected she might have mentioned it to Sam herself. She and Sam had developed a friendship over the years. What if they were waiting? The thought was sickening her. But unfortunately Alexander didn’t protest hard enough. Tatiana already knew what she wanted to do—unthinkable though it was: to sell the land! Just sell it at whatever price, take the money, go far into another state, maybe into the vastness of Montana, and never be seen again. She had no illusions: Sam’s allegiance was hardly going to be to her and Alexander. Sam wasn’t Aunt Esther. Tatiana was mute as she thought of these things while her husband lay on the deck drowning himself with running water.
The following morning, they took the Superstition Freeway. “It’s very flat here,” Alexander said.
“Well, it is called Mesa,” said Tatiana. “It means flat.”
“Please tell me the land is not here.”
“Okay, the land is not here.” There were stone mountains in the far distance across the flatlands. “This is too developed.”
“This is too developed?” he said. There were no stores, no gas stations, just farmland on one side, untouched flat desert on the other.
“Yes, this is Tempe,” Tatiana said. “Quite built up. Scottsdale, where we’re headed, is a little Western town. It’s got a few things—a store, a market. You want to see it first? Or …”
“Let’s see this mythical promised land first,” he said.
They continued to drive north through the desert. He was thirsty. She was frightened. The paved road ended, and a gravelly Pima Road began that separated the Phoenix valley from the Salt River Indian Reservation that stretched for miles to the McDowell Mountains. It wasn’t as flat anymore, the blue dusty mountains rising up on all sides far and near, low and wide, in the apocalyptic heat.
“Where are these mountains you told me about?”
“Shura, don’t tell me you don’t see them!” Tatiana pointed straight ahead. The ranges did loom rather large and monolith-like across the saguaros, but Alexander was in a good mood this morning and wanted to tease her.
“What, those? Those aren’t mountains. Those are rocks. I know, because I’ve seen mountains. The Tontos we passed yesterday, those were mountains. The Santa Fe, those were mountains. Also I’ve seen the Urals, I’ve seen the Holy Cross Mountains, completely covered by coniferous forest. Those were mountains.” His mood became less good.
“Now, now …” Tatiana said, reaching over and easing him away with her hand on his thigh. “These are Arizona’s McDowell Mountains. Sedimentary rock on top of granite rock formed from lava two billion years ago. Precambrian rocks.”
“Aren’t you a little geologist.” Alexander grinned. “A capitalist and a geologist.” She was in yellow gingham today, white bobby socks and ballet slipper shoes, her hair pulled back in a braided bun. She didn’t have a bead of perspiration on her face, looking almost serene if only Alexander didn’t look down on her lap and notice her fingers pressed so stiffly against each other, they looked as if they were breaking.
“All right, all right,” he said with a slight frown. “They’re mountains.”
They chugged along north, kicking up dirt with their dusty tires. The McDowell Mountains drew closer. The sun was high. Alexander said they were idiots, morons for taking a trip across the hottest part of the country during the hottest part of the year. If they were smart they would have left Coconut Grove early, driven up to Montana to spend the summer, then carried on to California for the grape-picking.
“You didn’t want to leave Florida, remember?”
“Hmm,” he assented. “Coconut Grove was quite nice for a while.”
They fell quiet.
It was another forty-five minutes of unpaved frontier road with not a house, a fruit stand, a gas station, a storefront, or another soul around before Tatiana told him to make a right on a narrow dirt path that sloped upward.
The path was called Jomax.
Jomax ended in a sun-drenched rocky mountain, and that’s where Alexander stopped, a mile above the valley. Tatiana, her fingers relaxed, a toothy, happy smile on her face, exclaimed, “Oh God! There is nobody here!”
“That’s right,” Alexander said, turning off the ignition. “Because everyone else is in Coconut Grove in the ocean.”
“There is nobody here,” she repeated, almost to herself, and hopped out of the trailer.
Anthony ran off but not before Tatiana stopped him, saying, “Remember what I told you about the cholla, Ant? Don’t go anywhere near it. The wind blows the puffs of needles right under your skin and I won’t be able to get them out.”
“What wind? Let go of me.”
“Anthony,” said Alexander, looking for his lighter, “your mother tells you something, you don’t tell her to let go. Tania, hold on to him for another two minutes until he understands that.”
Tatiana made a face at Anthony, pinched him, and quietly let him go. Alexander’s lighter was in her hands. She flicked it on for him, and he cupped her hand as he lit his cigarette. “Stop being so soft with him,” he said.
Walking away from her to explore a little, Alexander looked north and south, east and west, to the mountains, to the expanse of the entire Phoenix valley lying vast beneath his gaze, its farms all spread out in the overgrown rolling Sonoran Desert. This desert wasn’t like the Mojave he vaguely remembered from childhood. This wasn’t gray sand with gray mounds of dirt as far as the eye could see. This desert in late July was covered in burned-out, abundant foliage. Thousands of saguaro cacti filled the landscape, their brown-green spiky towering pinnacles and their arms reaching thirty, forty feet up to the sun. The mesquite trees were brown, the palo verdes sepia. The underbrush and the motley over-brush were all in hues of the taupe singed earth. All things grew not out of grass, but out of clay and sand. It looked like a desert jungle. It was not at all what Alexander had expected.
“Tania …”
“I know,” she said, coming up against him. “Isn’t it unbelievable?”
“Hmm. That wasn’t quite what I was thinking.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life.” Her voice became tainted with something. “And wait till you see this place in the spring!”
“That implies that we would see it in the spring.”
“Everything blooms!”
“And you know this how?”
“I know this,” Tatiana said with funny solemnity, “because I saw pictures in a book in the library.”
“Oh. Pictures in a book. Do these books mention water?”
She waved her hand dismissively. “The Hohokam Indians back hundreds of years ago saw what I see and wanted to live in this valley so much that they brought water here by a series of canals that led from the Salt River. So back when the mighty British Empire was still using outhouses, the Hohokam Indians were irrigating their crops with running water.”
“How do you know?” he exclaimed.
“The New York Public Library. The white man here still uses the Hohokam canals.”
“So there is a river around here then?” He touched the dry sand with his hands
“Salt River, but far,” Tatiana replied. “With any luck, we’ll never have to see it.”
Alexander had never experienced this kind of stunning heat. Even in Florida, all was tempered by the water. No temperance here. “I’m starting to boil from the inside out,” he said. “Quick, show me our land before my arteries melt.”
“You’re standing on it,” said Tatiana.
“Standing on what?”
“The land.” She motioned around. “This is it. Right here, all of it, at the very top of this hill. From this road due southeast, ninety-seven acres of the Sonoran Desert flush into the mountain. Our property is two acres wide, and—you know—about forty-nine acres deep. We’ll have to get a surveyor. I think it may open up in a pie shape.”
“Kind of like Sachsenhausen?”
Tatiana looked as if she’d been slapped. “Why do you do that?” she said quietly. “This isn’t your prison. This is your freedom.”
Slightly abashed, he said, “You like this?”
“Well, I wouldn’t have bought it if I didn’t like it, Shura.” Tatiana paused. Once again strange trouble passed over her face.
“Tania,” Alexander said, “the place is going to set itself on fire.”
“Look,” she said, “we’ll go, we’ll get it appraised. If the price is right, we’ll sell it. I have no problem selling it. But … don’t you see!” she exclaimed, coming up to him. “Don’t you see the desert? Don’t you see the mountains?” She pointed. “The one right next to ours is Pinnacle Peak; it’s famous. But ours has no name. Maybe we can call it Alexander’s Mountain.” She raised her eyebrows, but he wasn’t playing at the moment, though he noted her mischief for later.
“I see the desert,” Alexander said. “There’s not a single green thing growing anywhere. Except cacti and they don’t need water. I’m not a saguaro. I need water. There is no good river and no lakes.”
“Exactly!” she said, all energized. “No rivers. No Nevas, Lugas, Kamas, Vistulas. No lakes. No Lake Ilmens, no Lake Ladogas. No fields. No clearings. No pines, no pine needles, no birches, no larks, almost no birdsong. Sometimes the swallows come in the summer. But there are no forests over the mountains. There’s no snow. You want those things, you can go into the Grand Canyon in the winter. The Ponderosa pine grows a mile above the ice cold Colorado.” Standing close, she put her intimate hands on him. “And you are a little bit like the mighty saguaro,” she murmured.
Okay, Alexander was noting the playing, he was coming back to it very shortly. “I won’t live anywhere without water, Tatiana Metanova.” He stamped out his cigarette and his arms went around her. “I don’t care what you’re trying to get away from.”
“It’s Tatiana Barrington, Alexander Barrington,” said Tatiana, slipping out of his hold. “And you don’t know anything about what I’m trying to get away from.”
He blinked at her. “I think even here in Arizona there might be a moon. Maybe a crimson moon, Tatia? A large, low, harvest crimson moon?”
She blinked back. “Why don’t you put on your sixty pounds of gear and pick up your weapons, soldier.” Backing away with a swirl, she walked back to the Nomad, while Alexander remained like a post in the sand. In a moment she returned with some water, which he gulped gladly, then went to look for Anthony, finding him near the prickly pears, deeply immersed in a study of rocks. Turned out it wasn’t rocks, it was a lizard, which the boy had pinned to the ground with a sharp cactus needle.
“Ant, isn’t that the cactus your mother told you to stay away from?” Alexander said, crouching by his son and giving him some water.
“No, Dad,” Anthony replied patiently. “Cholla is bad for playing with lizards.”
“Son,” said Alexander, “I don’t think that lizard is playing.”
“Dad, this place is swarming with reptiles!”
“Don’t say that as if it’s a good thing. You know how afraid your mother is of reptiles. Look how you’re upsetting her.”
They peeked out from the prickly pears. The upset mother was leaning back against the Nomad, eyes closed, palms down, sun on her face.
After a while, he returned to her, splashing water on her. That made her open her eyes. Alexander paused to take her in, her square-jawed flushed face, outrageous freckles, serene seaweed eyes. He appraised the rest of her up and down. She was so arousingly tiny. And bewildering. Shaking his head, Alexander hugged her, he kissed her. She tasted as though plums had dried on her lips.
“You are out of your mind, my freckle-faced tadpole,” he said, eventually stepping away, “to have bought this land in the first place. I honestly don’t know what in the world possessed you. But now the die is cast. Come on, Arizona-lover, cholla-expert, before we go see the appraiser, let’s eat. Though we’ll have to go somewhere else to put water on our bodies, won’t we?”
They brought out their flasks, their bread, their ham. Earlier that morning they had bought plums, cherries, tomatoes, cucumbers at a farm stand. They had so much to eat. He rolled out the canopy, they sat under it, where it was a hundred in the shade, and feasted.
“How much did you say you paid for the land?” he asked.
“Fifty dollars an acre.”
Alexander whistled. “This is near Scottsdale?”
“Yes, Scottsdale is only twenty miles south.”
“Hmm. Is it a one horse town?”
“Oh, not anymore, sir!” said a real estate agent in Scottsdale. “Not anymore. There’s the army base, and the GIs, like you, sir, they’re all comin’ back from the war and marrying their sweethearts. You two are newlyweds?”
No one said anything, as the four-year-old child sat near them lining up the real estate brochures in neat rows.
“The housing boom is something to behold,” the realtor went on quickly. “Scottsdale is an up-and-coming town, you just watch and see. We had nobody here, almost as if we weren’t part of the Union, but now that the war is over, Phoenix is exploding. Did you know,” he said proudly, “our housebuilding industry is number one in the country? We’ve got new schools, a new hospital—Phoenix Memorial—a new department store in Paradise Valley. You would like it here very much. Would you be interested in seeing some properties?”
“When are you going to pave the roads?” asked Alexander. He had changed into clean beige fatigues and a dry black T-shirt. Tattoos, scars, blue death camp numbers, no matter—he could not wear a long-sleeve shirt in Arizona. The real estate man kept trying not to glance at the long scar running up Alexander’s forearm into the blue cross. The realtor himself was wearing a wool suit in which he was sweating even in air conditioning.
“Oh, every day, sir, new roads are being paved every day. New communities are being built constantly. This is changing from farm country to a real proper town. The war has been very good for us. We’re in a real boom. Are you from the East? I thought so, by your wife’s accent. Much like your Levittown communities, except the houses are nicer here, if I may be so bold. May I show you a couple of—”
“No,” said Tatiana, stepping forward. “But we would be interested in finding out the going price of our own property here. We’re up north, off Pima Road, near Pinnacle Peak.”
The realtor’s face soured when he heard they weren’t in the market. “Where, near Rio Verde Drive?”
“Yes, a few miles south of there. On Jomax.”
“On what? They just named that road. You have a house there? There’s nothing up there.” He said it as if he didn’t believe her.
“No house, just some property.”
“Well,” he said with a shrug. “My appraiser is out to lunch.”
An hour later, the appraiser and the realtor’s faces were trying to maintain their poker expressions, but it wasn’t working. “How many acres did you say you have?” the appraiser said, a short man with a small head, a large body and an ill-fitting suit.
“Ninety-seven,” repeated Tatiana calmly.
“Well, that’s impossible,” said the appraiser. “I know all the land bought and sold here. I mean, the town of Scottsdale is just now thinking of incorporating—do you know how many acres?—sixty hundred and forty. Three and a half square miles. A smart man bought them last century for three and a half dollars an acre. But that was then. You’re telling me you have ninety-seven acres? A sixth of the land of our whole town? No one sells in large parcels like that. No one would sell you ninety-seven acres.”
Tatiana just stared at him. Alexander just stared at him. He was trying to figure out if this was a ploy, a game, or whether the guy was actually being rude, in which case—
“Land’s too valuable,” stated the appraiser. “Around here we sell one acre, two at most. And up there, there’s nothing but desert. It’s all owned by the Federal Government or the Indians.”
So it was a ploy. Alexander relaxed.
Tatiana was silent. “I don’t know what to tell you. You don’t think I can count to ninety-seven?”
“Can I see the deed, if you don’t mind?”
“Actually, we do mind,” Alexander said. “Are you going to tell us what the land is worth or do we have to go somewhere else?”
The appraiser finally spluttered that being all the way out there, all the way out in the boonies where no one wanted to go, the land now would probably be worth about $25 dollars an acre. “It’s a good price for it—there’s nothing up there, no roads, no electricity. I don’t know why you would buy land in a location so isolated.”
Tatiana and Alexander exchanged a glance.
“Like I said, it’s worth twenty-five dollars,” said the appraiser quickly. “But this is what I can do for you. If you sell, say, ninety-five of those acres, keeping two for yourselves, we can give you a one time deal, take it or leave it, of … forty dollars an acre.”
“Mister,” said Alexander, “we’ll gladly leave it. We paid fifty an acre for that land.”
The appraiser wilted. “You vastly overpaid. But … to get your business, I’ll be glad to give you fifty. Imagine all that money in your pocket. You could buy yourself a brand new house with that. For cash. We have an outstanding development near here in Paradise Valley. You only have the one boy? But perhaps more in your future? How about if I show you some new communities?”
“No, thanks.” Alexander prodded Tatiana to go.
“All right, wait,” said the appraiser. “Sixty dollars an acre. That’s nearly a thousand dollar profit on your original investment. Half a year’s salary to some people.”
Nodding vigorously, Tatiana opened her mouth to speak, but Alexander squeezed her hand to cut her off. “I made that in three weeks driving a boat in Miami,” he said. “We’re not selling our land for a thousand dollar profit.”
“Are you certain about that?” The appraiser glanced at Tatiana beseechingly, looking for her support. Alexander mock-glared at her. She stayed impassive. “Well, then, I’m going to tell you something,” said the appraiser. “If you don’t take your money out of the land now, in a year’s time, it won’t be worth twenty-five an acre. You wait until your boy starts school, you won’t be able to sell your ninety-seven acres for three dollars and fifty cents. All the way up there past the Indians? Forget it. No one of sound mind will want to live north of the reservation. Go ahead, you wait a while. Your land will be worthless by 1950.”
Alexander ushered his family out. They stood on a dusty Western street. They didn’t talk about what the appraiser told them. Alexander wanted to get a cold beer. Tatiana wanted to go to the general store on the corner and buy some ice cream. Anthony wanted a cowboy hat. In the end, Alexander didn’t get a cold beer, because he wouldn’t take his family into a saloon, but Tatiana did get an ice cream, and Anthony did get a hat. They walked around the town square. Alexander didn’t know why, but he liked it, liked the Western feel of it, the frontier expanse and yet the small town intimacy of it. They drove around in their Nomad, saw that much of the farmland around the town square was being turned into housing developments. For dinner they had steak and baked potatoes and corn on the cob at a local restaurant with sawdust on the floor.
He asked her what she wanted to do and she said that perhaps they ought to take one more look at the land before they made a final decision.
It was seven in the evening, and the sun was arching downward. Because the sun was a different color, their mountain turned a different color—the rocks now glowed in three-dimensional orange. Alexander appraised the land himself. “Tania, what are the chances that you had been prescient when you bought this land?” he said, bringing her to him after they walked around a while.
“Slim to none,” Tatiana said, her arms going around his waist, “and Slim has already left town. We definitely should sell it, Shura. Sell it as quick as we can, take our money, go someplace else nice and not as hot.”
Leaning down, he placed his lips on her moist cheek. “You’re so nice and hot, babe,” he whispered. She smelled of vanilla ice cream. She tasted of vanilla ice cream. “But I disagree. I think the appraiser is lying. Either there is a housing boom, or there isn’t. But a housing boom means land increases in value.”
“He’s right, though,” she said. “It’s very out of the way.”
“Out of the way for what?” Alexander shook his head. “I really think we can make a little money here. We’re going to wait a while, then sell it.” He paused. “But Tania, I’m confused about your motives. One minute you want to sell the land for pennies to the lowest bidder. The next you’re breathlessly talking about spring.”
Tatiana shrugged. “What can I say? I’m conflicted.” She chewed her lip. “Would you ever consider … living here?” she asked carefully.
“Never! Feel the air. Feel your face. Why, do you want to live here—” Suddenly Alexander broke off, his eyes widening.
Do you want to live in Arizona, Tatia, the land of the small spring?
He had asked this of her—in another life. “Oh, come now,” he said slowly. “You don’t—you aren’t—no, come on … Oh no!” Alexander let out an incredulous laugh. “I just got it! Just. Oh, I’m good. I’m sharp. I don’t know how we ever won the war. Tania, come on! Recall when I said it.”
“I’m recalling it as if you’re saying it to me now,” she said with crossed arms.
“Well, then surely you know I meant it metaphorically. As in, would you like to live somewhere that’s warm. I didn’t actually mean here!”
“No?” Her no was so quiet.
“Of course no! Is that why you bought the land?”
When Tatiana didn’t reply, Alexander became speechless. There were so many baffling things he didn’t understand about her, he simply didn’t know where to look for answers. “We’re in the middle of an iced over, blockaded, heatless Leningrad,” he said. “The Germans are denying you even the unleavened cardboard and glue that you’re eating instead of bread. I briefly mention a vague warm place I barely remember that I had once driven through with my parents. Damn, I should’ve said Miami. Would you have then bought land there?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not serious. Anthony, come here, stop chasing rattlesnakes. Do you like it here?”
“Dad, this is the funnest place in the whole world.”
“What about this cholla? Is that fun?”
“So fun! Ask Mommy. She says it has evil spirits. She calls it the cactus from hell. Tell him, Mama—it’s worse than war.” He ran off with joy.
“Yes,” said Tatiana, “stay away from the cholla, Alexander.”
He furrowed his brow. “I think the heat has done something to both of you. Tania, inland, we’re so far inland, the air doesn’t even carry water on the wind!”
“I know.” She took a hot gulp of air.
They disengaged, spread out, thinking their separate thoughts. Anthony was picking dried-out fruit off the prickly pear cactus. Tatiana was pulling the dried-out red flowers off the cattail-like ocotillo. And Alexander was smoking and looking at the land and the mountain and the valley below. The sun set peacefully, and as the light of the sun changed once more, the rock hills transformed into a blaze. They put down a blanket, sat shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee and watched the sunset while Anthony played.
Alexander thought Tatiana had been thinking of how to convince him to sell the land or not to sell the land, but what she said to him was more perplexing. She said: “Shura, tell me, in Lazarevo, when you were going to go back to the front … we used to look at the Ural Mountains like this. Tell me, why didn’t you just stay?”
Alexander was taken aback. “What do you mean, stay?”
“You know.” She paused. “Why didn’t you just … not go back?”
“Not go back to my command post? You mean—desert?”
She nodded. “Why didn’t we just run—into the Urals? You could have built us an izba, we could’ve settled there, in the forest, found some precious stones, bartered them, grown things to eat. They would’ve never found us.”
Alexander shook his head, his hands opening in deep question. “Tatiana, what in the name of God,” he said, “are you thinking? What in the world is going through your mind, and more important, why?”
“It’s not a rhetorical question. I would like an answer.”
“An answer to what? Why didn’t I desert the Red Army? For one, my commander, Colonel Stepanov, that nice man—remember him, who let me have twenty-nine Lazarevo days with you—would’ve gone to the firing squad for having a deserter in his brigade. So would my major, and all the lieutenants and sergeants I served with. And you and I would’ve been on the run for the rest of our short, doomed lives. On the run! And they would’ve found us, like they find everybody. Remember I told you about Germanovsky? They found him in Belgium after the war, and he’d never even set foot in the Soviet Union. He was born in France. His father was a diplomat. Germanovsky was given ten years hard labor for not returning when he turned eighteen—fourteen years earlier! That would have been us. Except they would have found us in five minutes, the first time we tried to barter some of that precious Ural malachite to match your eyes. It would’ve been over like lightning, and the five extra minutes we would have had would’ve been spent with one eye looking over our shoulder. In other words, prison. That’s what you wanted—?”
Without letting him finish, she jumped up and walked away. What was she thinking? But at the same time, the sun was on fire, and Alexander had spent too long in dark places below ground, and so he didn’t go after her but sat and finished his cigarette, watching the desert sunset up from a hill.
When Tatiana came back to the blanket she said, “It was just a silly question.” She knocked into his shoulder. “I was musing, not serious.”
“Oh, that’s good. As opposed to what?”
“Sometimes I think crazy thoughts, that’s all.”
“The crazy part, absolutely. What thoughts?” Alexander paused. “How it all might’ve been different?”
“Something like that,” she said staring into space. Then she took his hand. “Sunset’s nice, isn’t it?”
“Sunset’s nice,” said Alexander.
She leaned against him. “Shura, this all might look burned and brown now, but in the spring,” she said in a breathy voice, “the Sonoran Desert is reborn! With pale blue delphinium, white thistle, flame poppy, red ocotillo, blue and yellow palo verdes, and scarlet bugle. We can even plant some lilac sand verbena. You know how much you like lilac,” she cooed. “And prickly pears and pincushion cacti grow here …”
Alexander squeezed her little hand and raised his eyebrows. This was a much better conversation. “Babe,” he said, lowering his voice, and glancing around to make sure Ant wasn’t nearby, “in my lewd soldier’s world pincushion means only one thing, and you can be sure it’s not cacti.”
Tatiana tutted in mock shock, pulled to get away, but Alexander grabbed her, pulled her down onto her back on the blanket, bent over her, and said huskily, “Tell me, is there pussy willow in the desert, too?” watching her flush red, and forgetting all about flame poppy and scarlet bugle.
He let her shove him, scramble up, and run from him. He chased her, he chased Anthony.
He is making a silent movie with her, and she is moving in broken frames, animated and choppy, to the sound of the jerking crank. Her arms do a little flapper dance from side to side; her teeth are gleaming, she is tousle-haired and sunny, she runs after Anthony, her taut hips curve and swivel, she runs back to Alexander, her bouncy breasts bob and sway; she stands in front of him, holding her hands out to him, come, come, but he is holding the shaking camera, he can’t come. Her exquisite mouth puckers, her mouth in black and white—it’s a bow, a blow, a kiss, a gift that keeps on giving—and suddenly, a broken reel. Shura! Shura! Can you hear me? she squeals, and he puts the camera down and chases her, and somewhere in the Siberian juniper he catches her. She bats her eyes that squint upward catlike when she laughs, she parts her mouth and pleads falsely and merrily for release. Someday perhaps they will look back at the movies of this time, movies that will have captured the illusion, the fleeting joy that is their youth. Just as Soviet cameras once captured the snapshots of another her, another him, on the stone steps of wedding churches or near their long lost brothers.
Covered in sweat and sand, Alexander and the boy took off their shirts and fell down on the nylon tent covering while Tatiana dipped a towel into a bucket of water and cooled their chests and faces. Once he had only a soaked towel on his face as he dreamed of her. Now he had a soaked towel and her. He reached out, like a bear—and pawed her. She is here.
“I want the Biscayne Bay now …” croaked Alexander. “The Gulf of Mexico now.”
He got darkness now, and a sleeping son. The stars were all out, even Jupiter. She came out to him after putting Anthony to bed inside the camper, and he was sitting in a plastic folding chair, smoking. Another chair stood by his side.
She started to cry.
“Oh, no,” he said, covering his face.
Patting his shoulder, her voice low, she said with a sniffle, “Thank you.” And then climbed into his lap and held his head to her.
“You understand nothing,” he said, rubbing his cropped hair into her neck. “The lap was always so much better.”
Alexander had pitched a tent for them and built a small careful fire surrounded by stones right in front of it. “You know how I lit the kindling?” he said. “I held it to a rock for five seconds.”
“All righty, now,” she said. “Enough of that.”
They sat facing west, wrapped around each other, looking out onto the dark valley.
“When you weren’t with me,” said Tatiana, “and when I thought you were never going to be with me again, I bought this land on top of the hill. For you. Because of the things you taught me. Just like you always taught me. To be on high ground.”
“That rule is only for floods and war, Tatia. What are the chances of either here?” He stared into the blackness.
“Husband …” she whispered, “you see nothing down there now, but can you imagine in a few years’ time, all the twinkling lights from streets, from houses, from shops, from other souls in the valley? Like New York is lit up, this valley will be lit up, and we could sit here like this and watch it below us.”
“You said a second ago we were selling the land tomorrow!”
“Yes.” Tatiana was warm, open, until a part of her shut off, became tense like her fingers. Her wistful desire to see the desert bloom in the sometime spring was strong, but the trouble in her clenched hands was strong also. “Just a dream, Shura, you know? Just a silly dream.” She sighed. “Of course we’ll sell it.”
“No, we’re not selling it,” Alexander said, turning her to face him. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
She pointed to the tent. “We’re sleeping there?” Her palms went around his neck. “I can’t. My bravery is fake, as you know. I’m scared of scorpions.”
“Nah, don’t worry,” said Alexander, his hands tight around her ribs, his lips pressing into her pulsing throat, his eyes closing. “Scorpions don’t like loud noises.”
“Well, that’s good,” Tatiana murmured, tilting her head upward. “Because they won’t be hearing any.”
She was so wrong about that … christening their ninety-seven acres, and Pinnacle Peak and Paradise Valley, and the moon and the stars and Jupiter in the sky with their tumultuous coupling and her ecstatic moans.
The next morning as they raised camp and packed up to go north to the Grand Canyon, Alexander looked at Tatiana, she looked at him, they turned around and stared at Anthony.
“Did the boy not wake last night?”
“The boy did not wake last night.”
The boy was sitting at the table doing a U.S. puzzle. “What?” he said. “You wanted the boy to wake last night?”
Alexander turned to the road. “Well, isn’t that interesting,” he mused, reaching for his pack of Marlboros. “Something calm to make us sane.”
Missing Time
At Desert View, they stood over the ageless rim of the Grand Canyon and stared west into the blue haze horizon and far down to the snake of the Red River. They drove a few miles west and stopped at Lipan Point and then at Grandview Point. At Moran Point they sat and gawked and walked in silence, even the normally chatty Anthony. They walked along the rim on a wooded path under the Ponderosa pines to Yavapai Point, where they found a secluded spot to sit and watch the sunset. Anthony came too close to the edge, and both Alexander and Tatiana jumped and yelled, and he burst into tears. Alexander held him in a vise, finally relenting and releasing him only after literally drawing a line in the sand and telling the boy not to step an inch over it if he didn’t want a military punishment. Anthony spent the sunset building up that line into a barricade with pebbles and twigs.
The sun in the indigo sky set over the Canyon, painting crimson blue the greening forests of cottonwoods and juniper and spruce. Alexander stopped blinking, for while the sun was setting, the hues of the Canyon had changed, and he could not catch his breath in the silence while the cinnabar heat fell like rust iron mist over two billion years of ancient temples of layered clays and fossiled silt, and from its cream Coconino to its black Vishnu schist, all the ridges and Redwalls and cliffs and ravines, and the Bright Angel shales and the sandstones and limestones from Tonto to Tapeat, all the pink and wine, and lilac and lime, and the Great Unconformity: the billion years of missing time—all was steeped in vermilion.
“God is putting on some light show,” he finally said, taking a breath.
“He’s trying to impress you with Arizona, Shura,” murmured Tatiana.
“Why do the rocks look like that?” asked Anthony. His barricade was nearly a foot high.
“Water, wind, time erosion,” replied Alexander. “The Colorado River below started as a trickle and became a deluge, carving this canyon over millions of years. The river, Anthony, despite your mother’s aversion to it, is a catalyst for all things.”
“It is precisely because of this catalysis that the mother is averse to it,” said the mother as she sat under his arm.
Alexander finally stood up and gave her his hand. “At the end of His geological week, God surveyed His rocks in the most Grand of all the Canyons in all the Earth He had created and all the life that dwelt upon them and behold, it was very good.”
Tatiana nodded in her approval of Alexander. “Who said that? You know what the Navajos say, who live and walk and die in these parts?” She paused trying to remember. “With beauty in front of me, I walk,” she said, stretching out her arms. “With beauty behind me, I walk. With beauty below me, I walk.” Not a sound came from the Canyon below. “With beauty above me, I walk.” She spoke quietly. “It is finished in beauty.” She raised her head. “It is finished in beauty.”
“Hmm,” said Alexander, taking one long inhale of his cigarette, eternally in his mouth. “Substitute what you most believe in for the word beauty,” he said, “and then you’ve really got something.”
In the eerily soundless night at the Yavapai campsite, Anthony was restlessly asleep in one of the two tents, while they kept listening to his stirrings and whimperings, waiting for him to quieten down, sitting huddled under one blanket in front of the fire, a mile from the black maw of the Canyon. They were shivering, their icy demons around the worsted wool.
They didn’t speak. Finally they lay down in front of the fire, face to face. Alexander was holding his breath and then breathing out in one hard lump.
He didn’t say anything at first. He didn’t want to talk to her about things that could not be changed. And yet, pain he could not forget kept creeping in and prickling his heart in a thousand different ways. He imagined other men touching her when he was dead. Other men near what he was near, and her looking up at them, taking their hands to lead them into rooms where she was widowed. Alexander didn’t want the truth if it wasn’t what he wanted to hear; he didn’t know how he would bear the unwelcome truth, and he hadn’t asked her in all the time he’d been back, but here they were, lying together at the Grand Canyon, which seemed like a rightful place for mystical confessions.
He took a breath. “Did you love to go dancing?” he asked.
“What?”
So she wasn’t answering. He fell silent. “When I was in Colditz, that impenetrable fortress, whittling away my life, I wanted to know this.”
“Looks like you’re still there, Shura.”
“No,” he said. “I’m in New York, a fly on the wall, trying to see you without me.”
“But I’m here,” she whispered.
“Yes, but what were you like when you were there? Were you gay?” Alexander’s voice was so sad. “I know you didn’t forget us, but did you want to, so you could be happy again like you once were, dance without pain?” He swallowed. “So you could … love again? Is that what you were thinking sitting on the planks at Mercy Hospital? Wanting to be happy again, wishing you were back there, in New York, reciting Emily Brontë to yourself? Sweet love of youth, forgive if I forget thee …”
He was leading her to temptation of clarity. But he could see she didn’t want clarity. She wanted a jumble that she could deny.
“Okay, Shura, if we’re talking like this, having these things out, then tell me what you meant when you said I was tainted with the Gulag. Tell me what happened to you.”
“No. I—forget it. I was—”
“Tell me what happened to you when you went missing for four days in Deer Isle.”
“It’s getting longer and longer. It was barely three days. First tell me what you were thinking at Mercy Hospital.”
“Okay, fine, let’s not talk about it.”
He pressed his demanding fingers into her back. He put his hands under her cardigan, under her blouse, into her bare shoulders.
He turned her on her back and kneeled astride her, the fire, the maw behind them. No comfort, no peace, he guessed with a sigh, even in the temples of the Grand Canyon.
Anthony’s whimperings turned into full scale miseries. “Mama, Mama!” Tatiana had to rush to him. He calmed down, but she stayed in his tent. Eventually, Alexander crawled in and fit in sideways behind her in the little tent on the hard ground.
“It’s just a stage, Shura,” said Tatiana, as if trying to assuage him. “It too will pass.” She paused. “Like everything.”
Alexander’s impatience and frustration also burned his throat. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he dreams about.”
Tatiana stiffened in his arms.
“Ah!” Alexander raised his head to stare at her in the dark. He could barely see the contours of her face, as the fire diffused muted light through the slightly raised flaps. “You know!”
Tatiana sounded pained when she said yes. Her head remained down. Her eyes were closed.
“All this time you knew?”
She shrugged carefully. “I didn’t want to upset you.”
After a stretch of conflicted silence, Alexander spoke. “I know you think, Tatiana,” he said, “that everything will turn out well, but you’ll see—it won’t. He’s never going to get over the fact that you left him.”
“Don’t say that! He will. He’s just a small boy.”
Alexander nodded, but not in agreement. “Mark my words,” he said. “He won’t.”
“So what are you saying?” she said, upset. “That I shouldn’t have gone? I found you, didn’t I? This conversation is just ridiculous!”
“Yes,” he whispered. “But tell me, if you hadn’t found me, what would you have done? Returned to New York and married Edward Ludlow?” He was indifferent to her stiffness and her tutting. “Anthony for one, rightly or wrongly, thinks that you would have never come back. That you’d still be looking for me in the taiga woods.”
“No, he doesn’t!” Turning sharply to him, Tatiana repeated, “No. He doesn’t.”
“Did you listen to his dream? His mother had a choice. When she left him, she knew there was a very good chance she was leaving him for good. She knew it—and still, she left him. That is his dream. That is what he knows.”
“Alexander! Are you being deliberately cruel? Stop!”
“I’m not being cruel. I just want you to stop pretending that’s not what he’s going through. That it’s just a small thing. You are the big believer in consequences, as you keep telling me. So when I ask you if he’s going to get better, don’t pretend to me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“So why ask me? Obviously you have all the answers.”
“Stop it with the snide.” Alexander took a breath. “Do you know what’s interesting?”
“No. Shh.”
“I have nightmares that I’m in Kolyma,” Alexander said dully. “I’m sharing a cot, a small dirty cot with Ouspensky. We’re still shackled together, huddling under a blanket. It’s viciously cold. Pasha is long gone.” Alexander swallowed past the stones in his throat. “I open my eyes and realize that all this, Deer Isle, Coconut Grove, America, had been the actual dream, just like I feared. This is just another trick the mind plays in the souls of the insane. I jump out of bed and run out of the barracks, dragging Ouspensky’s rotting corpse behind me into the frozen tundra, and Karolich runs after me, chasing me with his weapon. After he catches me—and he always catches me—he knocks me in the throat with the butt of his rifle. ‘Get back to the barracks, Belov,’ he says. ‘It’s another twenty-five years for you. Chained to a dead man.’ When I get out of bed in the night, I can’t breathe, like I’ve just been jabbed in the throat.”
“Alexander,” Tatiana said inaudibly, pushing him away with shaking hands. “I begged you, begged you! I don’t want to hear this!”
“Anthony dreams of you gone. I dream of you gone. It’s so visceral, every blood vessel in my body feels it. How can I help him when I can’t even help myself?”
She groaned in remonstration.
He lay quietly behind her, cut off mid-sentence, mid-pain. He couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t get out of the tent fast enough. He said nothing, just left.
Tatiana lay inside by Anthony. She was cold. When the boy was finally asleep, she crawled out of the tent. Alexander was sitting wrapped in a blanket by the fading fire.
“Why do you always do that?” he said coldly, not turning around. “On the one hand you draw me into ridiculous conversations and are upset I won’t speak to you, but when I speak to you about things that actually gnaw at me, you shut me down like a trap door.”
Tatiana was taken aback. She didn’t do that, did she?
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, you do do that.”
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Then why do you?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help that I can’t talk about Ant’s unspeakable dreams. Or yours.” She was terror-stricken enough.
“Well, run along then, back in the tent.” He continued to sit and smoke.
She pulled on him. He jerked away.
“I said I was sorry,” Tatiana murmured. “Please come back inside. I’m very cold, and you know I can’t go to sleep without you. Come on.” She lowered her voice as she bent to him. “Into our tent.”
In the tent he didn’t undress, remaining in his long johns as he climbed inside the sleeping bag. She watched him for a few moments, as she tried to figure out what he wanted from her, what she should do, what she could do. What did he need?
Tatiana undressed. Bare and unprotected, fragile and susceptible, she climbed into the sleeping bag, squeezing in under his hostile arm. She wanted him to know she wasn’t carrying any weapons.
“Shura, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know all about my boy. I know all about the consequences of my leaving him. But there is nothing I can do now. I just have to try to make him better. And he does have both his parents for my trouble and his trouble. I’m hoping in the end, somewhere down the line, that will mean something to him, having his father. That the balance of things will somehow be restored by the good that’s come from my doing the unforgivable.”
Alexander didn’t say anything. He wasn’t touching her either.
Putting his hand under his crew, she rubbed his stomach. “I’m so cold, Shura,” she whispered. “Look, you’ve got a cold nude girl in your tent.”
“Cold is right,” he said.
Pressing herself against him, Tatiana opened her mouth and he cut her off half-murmur. “Stop this whole speaking thing. Just let me go to sleep.”
She sucked in her breath, held her other words back, and tugged at him, opening her arms to him, but he remained unapproachable. “Forget about comfort, forget about peace,” he said, “but even what kind of relief do you think I’m going to get from you when you’re all clenched up and upset like this? The milk of kindness is not exactly flowing from you tonight.”
“What, and you’re not upset?” she said quietly.
“I’m not bothering you, am I?”
They lay by each other. He unzipped the bag halfway on his side and sat up. After opening the tent flaps for some air, he lit a cigarette. It was cold in the Canyon at night. Shivering, she watched him, considering her options, assessing the various permutations and combinations, factoring in the X-factor, envisioning several moves ahead, and then her hand crept up and lay on his thigh. “Tell me the truth,” Tatiana said carefully. “Tell me here and now, the years without me … in the penal battalion … in the Byelorussian villages—were you really without a woman like you told me or was that a lie?”
Alexander smoked. “It was not a lie, but I didn’t have much choice, did I? You know where I was—in Tikhvin, in prison, at the front with men. I wasn’t in New York dancing with my hair down with men full of live ammo.”
“My hair was never down, first of all,” she said, unprovoked, “but you told me that once, in Lublin, you did have a choice.”
“Yes,” he said. “I came close with the girl in Poland.”
Tatiana waited, listened. Alexander continued, “And then after we were captured, I was in POW camps and Colditz with your brother, and then Sachsenhausen—without him. First fighting with men, then guarded by men, beaten by men, interrogated by men, shot at by men, tattooed by men. Few women in that world.” He shuddered.
“But … some women?”
“Some women, yes.”
“Did you … taint yourself with a Gulag wife?”
“Don’t be absurd, Tatiana,” Alexander said, low and heavy. “Don’t divide my words by your false questions. You know what I said to you has nothing to do with that.”
“Then what did you mean? Tell me. I know nothing. Tell me where you went when you left me in Deer Isle for four days. Were you with a woman then?”
“Tatiana! God!”
“You’re not answering me.”
“No! For God’s sake! Did you see me when I came back? Enough of this already, you’re degrading me.”
“And you’re not degrading me by your worries?” she whispered.
“No! You believed I was dead. In New York you weren’t betraying me, you were continuing your merry widowed life. Big fucking difference, Tania.”
Hearing his tone, Tatiana moved away from the verbal parrying, though what she wanted to say was, “Obviously you don’t think it’s such a big difference.” But she knew when enough was enough with him. “Why won’t you tell me where you went in Maine?” she whispered. “Can’t you see how afraid I am?” She was upset he wasn’t willing to comfort her. He was never willing to comfort her.
“I don’t want to tell you,” Alexander said, “because I don’t want to upset you.”
Tatiana became so scared by his hollow voice that she actually changed the subject to other unmentionables. “What about my brother? Did he have a prison wife?”
Alexander smoked deeply. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
“Oh, great. So there’s nothing you want to talk about.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, good night then.” She swirled away. Really a symbolic gesture, swirling away, turning your narrow naked back to an enormous dressed man next to whom you’re still lying in one sleeping bag.
Alexander sighed into the smoke, inhaled it. With one arm, he flipped her back to him. “Don’t turn away from me when we’re like this,” he said. “If you must have an answer, a laundry girl in Colditz fell in love with Pasha and gave it to him for free.”
Tears came to Tatiana’s eyes. “Yes. He was very good at having girls fall in love with him,” she said quietly. She settled as close as she could into Alexander’s unwelcoming side. “Almost as good as you,” she whispered achingly.
Alexander didn’t say anything.
Tatiana tried hard to stop shivering. “In Luga, in Leningrad, Pasha was always in love with one girl or another.”
“I think he was mistaking love for something else,” said Alexander.
“Unlike you, Shura?” she whispered, desperately wishing for some intimacy from him.
“Unlike me,” was all he said.
She lay mutely. “Did you have yourself a little laundry girl?” Her voice trembled.
“You know I did. You want me to tell you about her?” Throwing his cigarette away, he leaned over her, putting his hand between her thighs. Just like that. No kissing, no stroking, no caressing, no whispering, no preamble, just the hand between her thighs. “She is maddening,” he said. “She is mystifying. She is bewildering, and infuriating.” His other hand went under her head, into her hair.
“She is true.” Tatiana tried to stay still. She was feeling not mystifying but sickly vulnerable at the moment—naked and small in complete blackness with his overwhelming clothed body, too strong for its own good, over her; with his heavy soldier hand on her most vulnerable place. She forgot her mission, which was to bring him comfort from the things that assailed him. “And she gives it to you for free,” she whispered, her hands grasping his jersey.
“You call this free?” he said. Miraculously his rough-tipped fingers were caressing her exceedingly gently. How did he do this? His hands could lift the Nomad if they had to, he had the strongest hands, and they weren’t always gentle with her, but they did tread ever so lightly in a place so sensitive it shamed her before his fingers made her senseless. “You don’t fool me, Tatiana, with your reverse questions,” he said. “I know exactly what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?” she said thickly, trying not to move or moan.
“Turning it around to me. If I, an irredeemable sinner stayed clean, then you certainly did.”
“Obviously, darling, you are not irredeemable …” Her head angled back.
“One less wrong move by burly Jeb, and you would’ve given yourself to him,” said Alexander, pausing both in word and deed. The pause made Tatiana only less steady. “One more right move by Edward, one more forward move by Edward”—Tatiana couldn’t help it, she moved, she gasped—“and you would have given it to him for free.”
She was having trouble speaking. “That’s not true,” she said. “What, you think I couldn’t have?” She turned her face into his chest, her body stiff. “I could have. I knew what they wanted. But I …” She was having trouble thinking. “I didn’t.”
Alexander was breathing hard and said nothing.
“Is this why you are so detached from me?”
“What’s detached, Tania?”
It was ironic at the moment to accuse him of this. The soft rhythmic skates and slips of his fingers became too much for her; clutching him, she whispered inaudibly, wait, wait, but Alexander bent and sucked her nipple into his mouth, slightly increasing his pressure and friction on her, and she had no more inaudible wait, wait, but a very audible yes, yes.
When she could speak again, Tatiana said, “Come on, who are you talking to?” She pulled on his crew. “Look at me, Shura.”
“It’s dark, fire’s out, can’t see a thing.”
“Well, I can see you. You’re so bright, you’re burning my eyes. Now look at me. I’m your Tania. Ask me, ask me anything. I don’t lie to you.” She stopped speaking. I don’t lie to my husband. I do keep some things from my husband. Like: there are men coming up the hill again, coming after you, and I have to do everything in my power to protect you, and so I can’t comfort you as well as I would like to because at the moment I’m attacked in more ways than you know. “In Lazarevo,” she said, reaching for that comfort, for that truth he wanted, feeling for his face above her, “you broke my ring and I gave you my hand, and with it my word. It’s the only word that I keep.”
“Yes,” he whispered, his smoky breath beating to the tense drum of his heart. “I did break your ring once upon a time.” His fingers lightly remained on her. “But in New York you thought I was dead.”
“Yes, and I was mourning you. Perhaps in twenty years’ time I may have married the local liege, but I hadn’t. I wasn’t ready and I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t gay. Your son was in the bedroom. Though I may have danced a few times, you know better than anyone I did not forget my sweet love of youth,” she whispered, adding nearly inaudibly, “I left our little boy because I did not forget and could not forget.”
His apologetic palm was warm and comforting on her. Oh, so he was willing to comfort her.
“No apologies necessary,” she said. “You’re anxious, aren’t you? But I told you the truth back in Germany. I don’t lie to you. I won’t lie to you. I wasn’t touched, Shura. Not even in New York as your merry widow.” She moaned for him.
He was staring at her through the black night, tense, tight. Haltingly he whispered, “Kissed, Tatiana?”
“Never, darling Shura,” she replied, lying on her back, her arms around him. “Never by anyone but you. Why do you flagellate yourself over nothing?”
They kissed raptly, tenderly, openly, softly. “Well, look at the idiotic questions you keep asking me,” he said, throwing off his crew and his long johns like a large bristly hedgehog in a small sack. “Worrying about women in Byelorussia, in Bangor. It’s not nothing, is it? It’s everything.” He climbed on top of her in the unzipped sleeping bag. Her hands went above her head. His hands went over her wrists. His lips were on her.
“And finally,” Alexander said, after he was sated, and her palms were on his back, “there is a little blessed relief.”
The cigarette long stubbed out, she lay in his arms and he continued to caress her. Were they close to sleep? She thought he might be, his hands on her back were getting slower. But here at Yavapai, over the silent shrines of God’s fluvial Canyon carved centimeter by centimeter by a persistent and unyielding and course-changing Red River, was as good a time as any for Tatiana’s own slight erosion of the carapace that covered Alexander.
“Shura, why am I tainted with the Gulag?” she whispered. “Please tell me.”
“Oh, Tania. It’s not you. Don’t you understand? I’m soiled by the unsacred things I’ve seen, by the things I’ve lived through.”
She stroked his body, kissed his chest wounds. “You’re not soiled, darling,” she said. “You’re human and suffering and struggling … but your soul is untouched.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” she whispered, “I see it. From the first moment I touched you on our bus, I saw your soul.” She pressed her lips to his shoulder. “Now tell me.”
“You won’t want to hear it.”
“I will. I do.”
Alexander told her about the gangrapes and the deaths on the trains. Tatiana almost said then that he had been right—she did not want to hear it. The savagery didn’t happen that often, he said; it didn’t need to in the camps. On the transport trains, these assaults and consequent deaths had been a daily occurrence. But at Catowice, Colditz, Sachsenhausen, most of the women either sold it, or bartered it, or gave it away free to strangers—quickly, before the guards came and beat them and then took some for themselves.
He told her about the women at Sachsenhausen. When Tatiana said she didn’t remember any women at Sachsenhausen, Alexander replied that by the time she came they had all gone. But before she came, the guards who hated Alexander put him in charge of building a brick wall to replace the barbed-wire fence that separated the women’s two barracks from the men’s sixteen. The guards knew it would put Alexander’s life in danger to build a wall to replace the existing barbed wire—which was so facilitating in the barter of sexual favors. The women backed up to the barbed wife on their hands and knees as if they were washing the floor, while the men kneeled on the ground, careful not to pierce themselves on the rusty protrusions.
Tatiana shivered.
So he built the wall. At five feet tall, it was not tall enough. At night the men skipped over the wall, and the women skipped over the wall. A watch tower was put up and a guard remained there round the clock to prevent connubial activity. The skipping over the wall continued. Alexander was told to make the wall seven feet. One afternoon during construction he was cornered in the barracks by eight angry lifers. They came to him with logging saws and axes. Alexander wasted no time talking. He swung the chain he was holding. It hit one of the men across the head, breaking open his skull. The other men fled.
Alexander finished the wall.
At seven feet, the wall was still not tall enough. One man would stand on another man’s shoulders and hop up onto it, then pull the standing man up. The prison guards electrified the top of the wall and put up another watch tower.
The men sustained some electrical shock damage to their bodies—but continued to climb over to get to the women on the other side.
Tatiana asked why the guards didn’t increase the electrical charge at the top of the barrier to instantly kill the man who touched it. Alexander replied they had to preserve their work force. They would have no one left to fill the logging quotas if they made the charge lethal. Also it took too much electricity. The guards had to light their own barracks. “At the commandant’s house, Karolich had to eat and sleep in comfort, didn’t he, Tatia?”
“He did, Shura. Not much comfort for him now.”
“The motherfucking bastard.”
Tatiana’s hand was on his heart. Her face was pressed into the muscles in his chest, into his Berlin shrapnel scar that was always under her mouth when she lay in his arms.
Alexander was told to build the wall to twelve feet.
One of his helpers said, “They were ready to maim you for a seven-foot wall. For a twelve-foot wall, they’ll kill you for sure.”
“Let them try,” said Alexander, never walking anywhere without the chain wrapped around his right hand. For extra protection he had attached nails to it in the metal shop. He had to use it again—twice.
The wall grew to twelve feet. And still the men climbed over. The electrical wire ran along the top. And still they climbed over. The barbed wire ran along the electrical wire. And still they climbed over.
Venereal diseases, fatal miscarriages, but worse, continuing pregnancies—the most incongruous thing of all—were making it impossible to run the prison. Finally the women were all put into trucks and carted a hundred kilometers east to the tungsten mines. Alexander found out there was a collapse of the mine during one of the explosions and all the women died.
The men stopped climbing over and began to get sick, to attempt suicidal escapes, to hang themselves with sheets, to fall down mine shafts, to cut each other’s throats in petty arguments. The production quotas were still going unfilled. The guards ordered Alexander to knock down the wall and start digging more mass graves.
He stopped speaking. Tatiana lay heavily by his side. She felt suddenly like she was two hundred pounds, not one hundred.
“During the years I’d been away from you, I used to dream of touching you,” Alexander said to Tatiana. “Your comfort is what I imagined. But during this period, all I saw was women being brutalized, and you, instead of staying sacred, diminished, and my thoughts of you became torture. You know how it goes—I lived oxen, so I dreamed oxen. And then you vanished altogether.” He paused, and nodded in the dark. “And that’s what I mean by tainted. And suddenly—after you fled me even in memories—I saw you in the woods, a vision of a phantom very young you. It wasn’t a dream. I saw you! Real like you are now. You were laughing, skipping, seraphic as always, except you had never sat on our bench in Leningrad, you had never worn your white dress the day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. I had patrolled somewhere else, or you had gone somewhere else, and I had no one to cross the street for. And so in these woods, you were looking at me as if you had never known me, as if you had never loved me.” He broke off. “It was then that I began to attempt my own suicidal escapes, all seventeen of them. It was those eyes of yours that pursued me through Sachsenhausen,” said Alexander in a dead voice. “I may have felt nothing, but I could not live, could not last a minute on this earth believing you had felt nothing, too. Your meaningless eyes were the death of me.”
Tatiana was crying. “Oh, God … Shura, husband …” she whispered, her arms, her legs going around him. She climbed on top of him in the sleeping bag. She couldn’t hold him close enough to herself. “It was just a vile dream. My eyes are never meaningless.”
He stared at her, near her face. “Then why do you keep looking at me as if you’re missing something, Tania?”
She couldn’t return his pained gaze, even in the black of night. Taking a breath, she said, “I’m not missing anything. I’m just looking for you. Looking for you in the taiga woods. Looking for the Alexander I left behind a million miles away on the pine needle banks of Lazarevo, or in the critical care tent in Morozovo. That’s what I was thinking of at Mercy Hospital.”
That wasn’t the only thing she had been thinking at Mercy Hospital. Having called Esther that morning, she had found out just how determined, how grave, and how unrelenting Sam Gulotta remained. Her good sense was devoured by fear and she went missing and forgot to keep time. Tonight she swallowed and went on. “What could I do then that I can’t seem to do now? That’s what I think about. What can I do to bring you back? What can I do to make you happy? What can I do to help you? Where are you?”
Alexander fell quiet. He pulled her off him. She lay behind him, kissing him softly on a ridged scar over his spine, hearing his heart thunder out through his shoulder blades.
After a while he spoke. “You want to know where I was in Maine?”
“No.”
“I was trying to find that man.”
“Did you,” asked Tatiana in a faltering voice, putting her forehead on his back, “find him?”
“Obviously not,” Alexander replied. “I felt I had fucked it up, that it was all a bust. I didn’t know who I was. I too didn’t recognize the man who came back with you from Berlin. You had wanted the boy you met in 1941, the boy you loved, the boy you married. I couldn’t find him—but I couldn’t find you either behind your searching eyes. I saw other things there—worry for me, concern. The eyes of compassion you had for Colonel Moore, it’s true, you had in spades for me. But as you know, I didn’t want your pity eyes, your pity hands. The wall between us seemed a hundred feet, not twelve. I couldn’t take it. You had done so nicely for yourself while I had been gone and now I was damned and ruining it. The colonel and me, we both needed to be in that military hospital. He went, but there was no place for me. No place for me there, and not with you either. There was no place for me anywhere in this world,” said Alexander.
He had taken his weapons with him, and left her his money. Tatiana was breathing hard into her hands, trying to keep from completely breaking down. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re saying these things out loud to me. I don’t deserve them.”
“I know,” Alexander said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. Our son needed you. He has his whole life to set right. I thought you could still help him, save him.”
“Oh my God—but what about you?” Tatiana asked. “Shura, you desperately needed my help.” And still do, she wanted to add. She tried to wipe her face, but it was useless.
He turned to her, lay on his side in front of her. “I know.” He touched her eyes, her lips, her heart. “That’s why I came back,” whispered Alexander, his palm fanning her face. “Because I wanted to be saved, Tatiasha.”
Tatiana slept terribly, like she was being repeatedly hit in the throat with the butt of his rifle. They were hoping time would help them. A month here, a month there, a month without mosquitoes and snow, time was like fresh dirt on the shallow graves. Pretty soon the sound of the cannons might mute, the rocket launchers might stop whistling off the ground. Not yet though. On the run for the rest of our short, doomed lives. In other words, prison.
I wanted to be saved, Tatiasha.
“Nearer to thee,” he whispered to her last night before he fell asleep. “Even though it be a cross/that raiseth me.”
Up, up, up, on the run, unsaved, through Desolation Canyon, through the salt flats of Utah, through the Sunrise Peak Mountains, to where there was wine in the valley.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_eb629582-c332-527e-a3ec-42dedf31ec32)
Vianza, 1947 (#ulink_eb629582-c332-527e-a3ec-42dedf31ec32)
Bisol Brut Bobbing Bubbly
And was there ever wine in the valley.
Chardonnay, Cabernet, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Franc and Sauvignon Blanc. But sparkling wine was the most delicious of all, creamy, nutty, fruity, exploding with flavors of green apple and citrus, its bubble trapped in the bottle for maximum fizz and maximum joy.
It was the Italians that drew them in, the Sebastianis, running their tiny California winery on a foggy, winding, tree-canopied, hilly road nestled between other vineyards stretching from the Mayacamas Mountains to the east and the Sonomas to the west. The Sebastianis ran their winery as if they lived in Tuscany. Their yellow stucco Mediterranean house looked like something out of Alexander’s mother’s old country. Alexander could barely whoa the horse and drop the reins, before he was hired on the spot by Nick Sebastiani, who whisked Alexander away at four in the afternoon. It was late August and harvesting season, and the grapes had to come off the vine instantly or something terrible would happen to them, some overripening acidity. They had to be “cooled,” “threshed,” “separated from their skins,” “crushed in steel drums.” That’s what Nick told Alexander as Tatiana remained with Anthony in the unpaved parking lot, trying to figure out what to do next.
Holding his hand, she ambled over to the winery and said hello to Jean Sebastiani, and fifteen minutes later found herself not only drinking and admiring the unfamiliar but pleasant tastes, but accepting a job as a wine server for the outdoor patio area!
Tatiana muttered something about Anthony, and Jean said, “Oh, no, the boy can be your helper. We’ll get even more customers, you’ll see.”
People indeed loved the little helper—and were not entirely averse to the mother helper either. Tatiana continued to constrain herself in vests one size too small while her white limbs peeked out from her white sleeveless dresses as she hurried from table to table. While Alexander worked the fields picking acres of grapes, making seven bucks a day for his twelve hours of trouble, Tatiana was tipped like she was working for the emperors.
Short of quitting, there was nothing Alexander could do—there were too many men willing to work for even less. So Alexander continued to work like he worked and when Nick Sebastiani saw it, he gave him a raise to ten a day and put him in charge of twenty other migrant hand harvesters.
Temporarily they stayed in their camper near the barracks to use the shower facilities. Sebastiani wanted Alexander to live in the barracks with the rest of the workers. Alexander refused. “I’m not staying in the barracks with my family, Tania. What is this, Sachsenhausen? Are you going to be my little labor camp wife?”
“If you wish.”
They went off site to live, renting a room on a second floor of a bed and breakfast two miles down the road. The room was expensive—five dollars a day—but very large. It had a bed the size of which they’d never seen before. Alexander called it a brothel bed, for who else would need a bed this size? He would have been happy with a Deer Isle twin bed, it had been so long since they’d slept in one. Anthony had his own rollaway in the far corner. There was a bath with a shower down the hall, and the dining room downstairs served them breakfast and dinner so Tatiana didn’t have to cook. Alexander and Tatiana both didn’t love that part.
Alexander said as soon as it got cold, they would leave. September came and it was still warm; he liked that. Better still, not only was Tatiana making them a little money, she was drinking some sparkling wine, some Bisol Brut, for which she developed a bit of a taste. After work, she would sit with Anthony, have bread and cheese, and a glass of sparkler. She closed the winery, counted the money, played with the boy, waited for Alexander to finish work, and sipped her drink. By the time they drove to the B&B, had dinner, chocolate cake, more wine, a bath, put Anthony to bed, and she fell down onto the goose down covers, arms flung above her head, Tatiana was so bubbled up, so pliant, so agreeable to all his relentless frenzies, and so ceaselessly and supernally orgasmic that Alexander would not have been a mortal man if he allowed anything to come between his wife and her Bisol Brut. Who would do a crazy thing like quit to go into dry country? This country was flowing with foaming wine, and that is just how they both liked it.
He started whispering to her again, night by night, little by little.
Tania … you want to know what drives me insane?
Yes, darling, please tell me. Please whisper to me.
When you sit up straight like this with your hands on your lap, and your breasts are pushed together, and your pink nipples are nice and soft. I lose my breath when your nipples are like that.
The trouble is, as soon as I see you looking at me, the nipples stop being nice and soft.
Yes, they are quite shameful, he whispers, his breath lost, his mouth on them. But your hard nipples also drive me completely insane, so it’s all good, Tatia. It’s all very very good.
Anthony was segregated from them by an accordion room partition. A certain privacy was achieved, and after a few nights of the boy not being woken up, they got bolder; Alexander did unbelievable things to Tatiana that made her sparkler-fueled moaning so extravagant that he had to invent and devise whole new ways of sustaining his usually impeccable command over his own release.
Tell me what you want. I’ll do anything you want, Tania. Tell me. What can I do—for you?
Anything, darling … anything you want, you do …
There was nothing Gulag about their consuming love in that enchanted bed by the window, the bed that was a quilted down island with four posters and a canopy, with pillows so big and covers so thick … and afterward he lay drenched and she lay breathless, and she murmured into his chest that she should like a soft big bed like this forever, so comforted was she and so very pleased with him. Once she asked in a breath, Isn’t this better than being on top of the hard stove in Lazarevo? Alexander knew she wanted him to say yes, and he did, but he didn’t mean it, and though she wanted him to say it, he knew she didn’t want him to mean it either. Could anything come close to crimson Lazarevo where, having been nearly dead, without champagne or wine or bread or a bed, without work or food or Anthony or any future other than the wall and the blindfold, they somehow managed for one brief moon to live in thrall sublime? They had been so isolated, and in their memories they still remained near the Ural Mountains, in frozen Leningrad, in the woods of Luga when they had been fused and fevered, utterly doomed, utterly alone. And yet!—look at her tremulous light—as if in a dream—in America—in fragrant wine country, flute full of champagne, in a white quilted bed, her breath, her breasts on him, her lips on his face, her arms in rhapsody around him are so comforting, so true—and so real.
You want me to whisper to you, Alexander whispers on another blue night on the quilt, blue night now but heather dawn already much too near. She is on her back, her arms above her head, her gold hair smelling freshly washed of strawberry shampoo. He is propped up over her, loving her taste of chocolate and wine, kissing her open lips, her throat, her clavicles, licking her breasts, her swollen nipples.
Maybe not just whisper? she moans.
He moves lower, happier, presses his face into her stomach, on his knees in front of her; he kisses lingeringly the femoral flesh, listening to her whispering pleas. To draw out his time with her, he caresses her as lightly and arhythmically as he can. When she starts to cry out, he stops, giving her a breath to calm down. She is not becalmed. He pours a little bubbly wine on her—it fizzes, she curves—and licks it off her, softly kisses it off her, softly sucks it off her. She is gasping, she is clenching the quilt. Please, please, she whispers.
His palms are over her inner thighs, so exquisitely open, so alive. Do you know how sweet you are? He kisses her. You’re so soft, so slippery … Tatia, you are so beautiful. His mouth is on her, adoring her.
She gasps, she clutches, she cries out and out and out.
I love you.
And Tatiana cries.
You know that, don’t you? Alexander whispers. I love you. I’m blind for you, wild for you. I’m sick with you. I told you that our first night together when I asked you to marry me, I’m telling you now. Everything that’s happened to us, everything, is because I crossed the street for you. I worship you. You know that through and through. The way I hold you, the way I touch you, my hands on you, God, me inside you, all the things I can’t say during daylight, Tatiana, Tania, Tatiasha, babe, do you feel me? Why are you crying?
Now that is what I call a whisper.
He whispers, she cries, she comes to him in unconditional surrender and cries and cries. Deliverance does not come cheap, not to her, not to him, but it does profoundly come at the price of night.
And in the gray-purple morning, Alexander finds Tatiana by the basin in the bedroom, washing her face and arms. He watches her and then comes to stand behind her. She tilts her head up to him. He kisses her. You’re going to be late, Tatiana says with a small smile. His chest is bursting with the night, aching for her. Saying nothing, he hugs her from behind and then slips her vest down from the shoulders, lathering up and running his wet soapy hands over and around her breasts, cupping them, fondling them. Shura, please, she whispers, quivering, her raw pink-red nipples standing straight out, piercing his palms.
Anthony’s awake. Alexander pulls the wet vest back over her, and she says, well, now that’s useless, isn’t it. Not completely useless, says Alexander, stepping away, watching her in the mirror as she finishes washing, the breasts full, the vest see-through, the nipples large and taut against it. She dances all day in his heart and in his drunken, unquenchable loins.
Something has awakened in him here in the wine valley of the moon. Something that he thought had died.
Perhaps a young woman who was being made love to so thoroughly in the night, who was lavished with such ardent caresses, could not walk around in daylight without all the pores of her skin glistening, exuding her nocturnal exuberance. Perhaps there was no hiding her small sensual self, because the clientele sure beat against her wine trays. They came from everywhere and sat outdoors at her little patio tables, and she, with Anthony by her side, would shimmy up to them, her perpetually pulpy, slightly bruised mouth smiling the words, “Hi. What can I get you?”
Alexander didn’t think it was his son that the city dwellers kept creeping back to in their gray flannel suits on weekdays. Alexander knew this because he himself crept up from the fields one day to have lunch at one of her tables. Actually what he did was sit down at one of her tables, and Anthony came running to him and sat on his lap, and they waited and waited and waited and waited, as their mother and wife flitted about, humming like a hummingbird, laughing, joking with the customers like a comedienne—particularly with two men in pressed suits who took off their trembling hats to speak to her, gawking open-mouthed into her bedroom lips as they ordered more wine. Their expressions made Alexander look down onto his son’s head and say carefully, “Is Mommy always this busy?”
“Oh, Dad, today is a slow day. But look how much I made!” He showed his father four nickels.
Alexander ruffled his hair. “That’s because you’re a good boy, bud, and they all see it.”
Anthony ran off and Alexander continued to watch her. She was wearing a white cotton sheath tank dress, straight, sleeveless and simple, empire-waisted and hemmed just below the knee. One of the men in the flannel suit looked down and said something, pointing to the pink bubble gum toes she had painted, naked for Alexander last Sunday afternoon while Anthony lay sleeping. Tatiana jingled out a little laugh. The flannel man reached up and brushed some strands of hair out of her face. She backed away, her smile fading, and turned to see if Alexander noticed. Oh, he noticed, all right. And so finally she made her way to his table. He sat cross-armed in the round metal chair with spindly legs that scraped across the stone tiles every time he moved.
“Sorry, I took so long,” Tatiana murmured sheepishly to him, with a smile now even for him, in his dungaree overalls, not in a suit. “See how busy I am?”
“I see everything,” Alexander said, studying her face a few moments before he took her hand, turning it palm up, and kissed it, circling her wrist with his fingers. Not letting go, he squeezed her wrist so hard that Tatiana let out a yelp but did not even try to pull away.
“Ouch,” she said. “What’s that for?”
“Only one bear eats from this honey pot, Tatia,” he said, still squeezing her.
Blushing, bending to him, she said in a low mimicking sing-song voice, “Oh, Captain, here’s your apple cobbler, Captain, and is my dress going to blow above my head because you’re going so fast, Captain, and have you noticed my bobbing boobs, Captain?”
Alexander laughed. “Bobbing boobs?” he said quietly, delightfully, kissing her hand again and releasing her. “Oh, I’ve noticed those, babe.”
“Shh!” She ran to bring him food and then perched down by his side, while Anthony climbed on his lap.
“You have time to sit with me?” he said, trying to eat with one hand.
“A little. How’s your morning been?” She brushed a grape twig out of Alexander’s hair. “Anthony, come here, sit on Mommy, let Daddy eat.”
Alexander shook his head, eating quickly. “He’s fine. But I’ve been better. We were getting a shipment of grapes from another vineyard, and half a ton of it fell off my truck.”
“Oh, no.”
“Ant, do you know how much half a ton of grapes is?” Alexander said to his son. “A thousand pounds. I went over a bump in the road.” He shrugged. “What can I tell you? If they don’t want the grapes to fall, they should rebuild the road.”
“Half a ton! What happened to the grapes?” Tatiana asked.
“I don’t know. By the time we noticed and came back for them, the road was picked clean, obviously by unemployed migrants looking for food. Though why anyone would be unemployed is beyond me, there’s so much work.”
“Did Sebastiani yell at you?” asked Anthony, turning around to look at Alexander.
“I don’t let anybody yell at me, bud,” replied Alexander, “but he wasn’t happy with me, no. Said he was going to dock my pay, and I said, you pay me nothing as it is, what’s to dock?” Alexander looked at Tatiana. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. Reminds me of that sack of sugar my grandmother found in Luga in the summer of 1938.”
“Ah, yes the famous sack of sugar.” Dipping a small piece of bread in olive oil, Alexander put it into Tatiana’s mouth. “Not very pleasant, what happened to your grandparents, but I’m suddenly more interested in the truck driver who dropped the sack of sugar in the first place.”
“He got five years in Astrakhan for being cavalier with government property and helping the bourgeoisie,” she said dryly, as he got up to go.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me?” she asked, lifting her face to him.
“In front of the flannel lepers so they can see your lips open? Never,” he replied, running his hand lightly down her braid. “Stay away from them, will you?”
As he was walking past the two men, he knocked into their table so hard their glasses of wine spilled.
“Hey, man, easy!” one of them said, glancing up at Alexander, who slowed down, stopped, and leveled him with such a stare that the man instantly looked away and called for the check.
October warmly came and warmly went. Though foggy at the day’s edges, November remained mild. Alexander didn’t work in the fields anymore or drive trucks; now he was down in the cellars. He hated being in the dark basement all day, for when he started work it was barely light and when he finished it was just after dark. He worked at the steel fermenting drums or the oak barrels, riddling the sparkling wine behind closed cellar doors and dreaming of sunshine. The night visions still ground him down. He stopped trying to figure them out; their mysticism was beyond his scope and his mystic guide was busy navigating through her own unstill waters. Anthony still crawled in next to her toward dawn.
The three of them looked forward to Sundays when they had a whole day to themselves. On Sundays they drove around the Bay area. They saw Sacramento and Montecito, and Carmel by the Sea, so blissful and briny—which was a good way to describe Tania also. It was there that she asked him if he wanted to leave Napa and go to Carmel, but Alexander declined. “I like Napa,” he said, taking her hand across the table as they sat in a small café, eating New England Clam Chowder out of a bread bowl. Anthony was having French fries, dipping them into Tania’s soup.
But Tatiana liked Carmel. “It has no weather. How could you not like a place that has no weather?”
“I like a little weather,” Alexander said.
“For weather we can go south to Santa Barbara.”
“Let’s just stay put for a while, okay?”
“Shura …” Leaving Anthony to her soup, she got up and moved to sit close to Alexander in the booth, holding his hand, caressing his palm, kissing his fingers. “Husband … I was thinking … maybe we could stay in Napa for good?”
“Hmm. Doing what? Harvesting grapes for ten bucks a day? Or,” Alexander said with a small—very small—smile, “selling wine to men?”
Tatiana’s grin was wide. “Neither. We sell our Arizona land, we buy some land here and open our own winery. What do you think? We wouldn’t see any profits for two years while the grapes grew, but then … we could do what the Sebastianis do, just smaller. You already know so much about the business. And I could count the money.” She smiled, her sea eyes foaming. “I’m a very good counter. There are so many little vineyards around here; we could grow to be successful. We’d have a little house, another little baby, live above the winery, and it would be ours, all ours! We’d have a great view of real mountains, like you want. We could go a little north to a place called Alexander’s Valley”—she kissed his cheek—“see, it’s already conveniently named after you. We could start with two acres; it would be plenty to make a living. Hmm? How does that sound?”
“So-so,” said Alexander, his arm going around her, bending to her exalted, turned-up face.
Vanishing Dreams of the Valley of the Moon
Alexander left every morning at six thirty. Tatiana didn’t have to be in until nine. She and Anthony walked the two miles to the winery. After he left, Tatiana sat by the window, paralyzed with fear and indecision. She desperately needed to call Vikki. But the last time she called, Sam had picked up Vikki’s phone.
This morning Tatiana was bent over the sink, retching. She knew she had to call, she needed to know if Alexander was safe, if they were safe—to stay, to begin to live their little life.
She called from a public phone near the common dining room downstairs, knowing it was still five thirty in the morning in New York, and Vikki would be asleep.
The voice on the other end of the line was groggy. “Who is this?”
“It’s Tania, Vik.” She held the phone receiver so tensely in her fingers, she thought it would break. Her mouth was pressed to the mouthpiece, and her eyes were closed. Please. Please.
There was scrambling, dropping of the receiver, sharp cursing. Vikki didn’t say what happened, but the things she did say when she finally got back to the receiver were quite sharp and cursy themselves.
Tatiana backed away from the mouthpiece, seriously contemplating hanging up before she heard another word. She could tell that everything was not all right.
“Tatiana! What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing, we’re fine. Anthony says hello.” But this was said in a low, defeated voice.
“Oh my God. Why haven’t you called Sam, Tania?”
“Oh, that. I forgot.”
“YOU WHAT?”
“We’ve been busy.”
“They sent Federal agents to your aunt’s house in Massachusetts! They’ve been talking to her, to me, to Edward, to the whole hospital. They’ve been looking for you in New Mexico where you called from, and in that stupid place you bought your stupid land; Phoenix, is it?”
Tatiana didn’t know what to say. She was losing her breath.
Federal agents on the path called Jomax.
“Why didn’t you just call him as you promised?”
“I’m sorry. Why was he there last time I called?”
“Tania, he’s practically moved in. Where are you?”
“Vik, what do they want?”
“I don’t know! Call Sam, he’s dying to tell you. Do you know what Sam said to me when I told him I was going to change my telephone number? He told me I’d be arrested for conspiracy because it could mean I was protecting you!”
“Conspiracy to what?” Tatiana said in a small voice.
“I can’t believe Alexander is allowing this.”
There was silence from Tatiana.
“Oh, my God,” Vikki said slowly. “He doesn’t know?”
Silence from Tatiana. Her choices were narrowing. What if there was a wiretap on Vikki’s phone? They’d know where she was, at which B&B, in which valley. Unable to speak any longer, she just hung up.
She called Jean and said she wasn’t feeling well. Jean complained—money talking—and insisted that Tatiana come in regardless of how she was feeling. They had words. Tatiana said, “I quit,” and hung up on her, too.
She couldn’t believe she just quit. What in the world was she going to tell Alexander?
She and Anthony took a bus to San Francisco, where she thought she would be anonymous, but as soon as she heard the streetcar’s stop bell, she knew the sound would be pretty distinct, even to someone living in Washington DC. She went to a wet cold park on the shores of San Francisco Bay, where there were no rails and no clanging, just screaming seagulls, and from a payphone during the late morning called Sam who was still at home.
“Sam?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, Sam.”
“Oh my God. Tania.”
“Sam—”
“OH. MY. GOD.”
“Sam—”
“Oh my God.”
“Sam …”
“Seventeen months, Tania! Do you know what you’ve done? You’re costing me my job! And you’re costing that husband of yours his freedom!”
“SAM—”
“I told you both when he first came back—a debriefing. So simple. Tell us about your life, Captain Barrington. In your own words. A two-hour conversation with minor officials, so easy, so nice; we stamp his file closed, we offer him college tuition, cheap loans, job placement.”
“Sam.”
“And instead? During this unbelievably tense time—have you not been reading the papers?—his file, his OPEN file has traveled from my desk, up to the Secretary of State, across to Secretary of Defense, across to the Justice Department. He’s got J. Edgar Hoover himself looking for him! This Alexander Barrington, who was a major in the Red Army, whose father was a Communist—who let him in? You can’t be a commissioned officer in the Red Army without being a Soviet citizen and a member of the Communist Party. How did a person like that get a U.S. passport? Who approved that? Meanwhile, Interpol is looking for an Alexander Belov … they say he killed sixty-eight of their men while escaping from a military prison. And even HUAC got into this. Now you’ve got them on your back, too! They want to know, is he theirs or ours? Where is his allegiance—now, then, ever? Is he a loyalty risk? Who is this man? And no one can find him even to ask him a simple question—why?”
“Sam!”
“Oh, what have you done, Tatiana? What have you—”
She hung up the phone and sank to the ground. She didn’t know what to do. For the rest of the morning, she sat catatonically on the dewy grass in the fog of the San Francisco Bay while Anthony made friends and played on the swings.
What to do?
Alexander was the only one who could lead her out of this morass, but he would not run from anything. He was not on her side.
And yet he was the only one on her side.
Tatiana saw herself opening the windows on Ellis Island, the first morning she arrived on the boat, after the night her son was born. Not since then had she felt so abandoned and alone.
After extracting a solemn oath from Anthony not to tell his father where they had been, she spent two hours after they got back to Napa poring over the map of California, almost as if it were a map of Sweden and Finland that the Soviet soldier Alexander Belov once pored over, dreaming of escape.
She had to steel herself not to shake. That was the hardest thing. She felt so unsound.
The first thing Alexander said when he walked through the door was, “What happened to you? Jean told me you quit.”
She managed a nice pasty smile. “Oh, hi. Hungry? You must be. Change, and let’s go eat.” She grabbed Anthony.
“Tania! Did you quit?”
“I’ll tell you at dinner.” She was putting on her cardigan.
“What? Did someone offend you? Say something to you?” His fists clenched.
“No, no, shh, nothing like that.” She didn’t know how she was going to talk to him. When Anthony was with them, it was impossible to have a serious conversation about serious things. Her work was going to have to be quick and subtle. So it was over dinner and wine in the common dining room, at a withdrawn table in the corner, with Anthony coloring in his book, that she said, “Shura, I did quit. I want you to quit, too.”
He sat and considered her. His brow was furled.
“You’re working too hard,” she said.
“Since when?”
“Look at you. All day in the dank basement, working in cellars … what for?”
“I don’t understand the question. I have to work somewhere. We have to eat.”
Chewing her lip, Tatiana shook her head. “We still have money—some of it left over from your mother, some of it from nursing, and in Coconut Grove you made us thousands carousing with your boat women.”
“Mommy, what’s carousing?” said Anthony, looking up from his coloring.
“Yes, Mommy, what’s carousing?” said Alexander, smiling.
“My point is,” Tatiana went on, poker-faced, “that we don’t need you to break your back as if you’re in a Soviet labor camp.”
“Yes, and what about your dream of a winery in the valley? You don’t think that’s back-breaking work?”
“Yes …” she trailed off. What to say? It was just last week in Carmel that they’d had that wistful conversation. “Perhaps it’s too soon for that dream.” She looked deeply down into her plate.
“I thought you wanted to settle here?” Alexander said in confusion.
“As it turns out, less than I thought.” She coughed, stretching out her hand. He took it. “You’re away from us for twelve hours a day and when you come back you’re exhausted. I want you to play with Anthony.”
“I do play with him.”
She lowered her voice. “I want you to play with me, too.”
“Babe, if I play with you any more, my sword will fall off.”
“What sword, Dad?”
“Anthony, shh. Alexander, shh. Look, I don’t want you to fall asleep at nine in the evening. I want you to smoke and drink. I want you to read all the books and magazines you haven’t read, and listen to the radio, and play baseball and basketball and football. I want you to teach Anthony how to fish as you tell him your war stories.”
“Won’t be telling those any time soon.”
“I’ll cook for you. I’ll play dominoes with you.”
“Definitely no dominoes.”
“I’ll let you figure out how I always win.” A Sarah Bernhardt-worthy performance.
Shaking his head, he said slowly, “Maybe poker.”
“Absolutely. Cheating poker then.”
Rueful Russian Lazarevo smiles passed their faces.
“I’ll take care of you,” she whispered, the hand he wasn’t holding shaking under the table.
“For God’s sake, Tania … I’m a man. I can’t not work.”
“You’ve never stopped your whole life. Come on. Stop running with me.” The irony in that made her tremble and she hoped he wouldn’t notice. “Let me take care of you,” Tatiana said hoarsely, “like you know I ache to. Let me do for you. Like I’m your nurse at the Morozovo critical care ward. Please.” Tears came to her eyes. She said quickly, “When there’s no more money, you can work again. But for now … let’s leave here. I know just the place.” Her smile was so pathetic. “Out of my stony griefs, Bethel I’ll raise,” she whispered.
Alexander was silently contemplating her, puzzled again, troubled again.
“I honestly don’t understand,” he said. “I thought you liked it here.”
“I like you more.”

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_4d9c9491-e0a6-5c79-9ffd-8213987321bc)
Bethel Island, 1948 (#ulink_4d9c9491-e0a6-5c79-9ffd-8213987321bc)
Tilting at Windmills
They said farewell to the bittersweet sickly heady scent of ripened effervescent grapes, got into their Nomad and left. Tatiana navigated them south and east of Vianza to lose themselves in the flatness of a thousand square miles of the California Delta, amid the islands that were so close to sea level, some would get flooded every time it rained. A hundred miles from the valley of the wine, at the mouth of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, they found tiny Bethel Island and that’s where they stopped.
Bethel Island. Surrounded by river channels, levees, and antediluvian marsh. Nothing moved in any direction except the herons. The canals were made of glass. The cold November air was still as if it were about to storm.
It didn’t even seem like part of the same country, yet unmistakably was America. On Dutch Slough they rented a wood shack with a long L-shaped dock that jutted out onto the canal. The house had what they needed. A room of their own, and a bathroom. Across the canal was nothing but plains of fields and the horizon.
“Looks like Holland,” Alexander said as they unpacked.
“Would you like to go to Holland someday?” she asked, busy nesting.
“I’m never under any circumstances leaving America. How did you find this place?”
“Looked at a map.”
“So now you’re a cartographer, too?” Alexander grinned. “Would you like a glass of wine, my little geologist, capitalist, cartographer?” He had brought a case of bubbly with them.
The next day at precisely eight in the morning, the mailman on a passing boat barge hooted his horn into their bedroom window. Introducing himself as Mr. Shpeckel, he asked if they would be getting any mail. They said no. But perhaps Aunt Esther wanted to send Anthony a Christmas present? Tatiana said no. They would call Esther at Christmas; that would have to be good enough.
Even though there was going to be no mail, Shpeckel still came by every morning at eight, tooting his horn into their windows just to let them know they had no mail—and to say hello to Alexander, who in his usual military manner was already up, washed and brushed and dressed, and out on the deck with a fishing line. The canals harbored prehistoric sturgeon and Alexander was trying to catch one.
Shpeckel was a 66-year-old man who had lived in Bethel for twenty years. He knew everyone. He knew their business, he knew what they were doing on his island. Some were lifers like him, some vacationers, and some were runners.
“How do you know which are which?” asked Alexander one afternoon when Shpeckel was done with his water route. Alexander had invited him in for a drink.
“Oh, you can always tell,” Shpeckel replied.
“So which ones are we?” Alexander asked, pouring him a glass of vodka, which Shpeckel had admitted to never having before.
They clinked and drank. Alexander knocked his back. Shpeckel carefully sipped his like a mug of tea.
“You are runners,” said Shpeckel, finally downing his and gasping. “Egads, man, I wouldn’t drink this stuff anymore. It’s going to set you on fire. Come to the Boathouse with us on Friday night. We drink good old beer there.”
Alexander politely declined. “But you’re wrong about us. Why do you say we’re runners? We’re not runners.”
Shpeckel shrugged. “Well, I’ve been wrong before. How long are you staying?”
“I have no idea. Not long, I think.”
“Where’s your wife?”
“Hunting and gathering,” he said. Tatiana had gone alone to the store to buy food. She always went alone, dismissing Alexander’s offers of help. “I didn’t catch any sturgeon today.”
There were other fish in the waters. Striped bass, black bass, catfish—and perch. The perch was a Russian fish—here all the way from the Kama River, Alexander thought with amusement as it trembled on his line. Tatiana didn’t mention the existence of Russian perch in American waters as she cleaned it and cooked it and served it. And Alexander didn’t mention that she didn’t mention it.
He did mention, however, what Shpeckel had said to him. “Imagine that, calling us runners. We’re the most rootlessly rooted people I know. We tool around, find a spot, then don’t move from it.”
“He is being silly,” she agreed.
“Did you get me a newspaper?”
Tatiana said she had forgotten. “But the Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was just killed in a ‘fall’ from his office window following the Communist coup in Prague.” She sighed.
“Now my gloomy wife is also a newscaster and a Czechophile. What’s your interest in Masaryk?”
Downtrodden, Tatiana said, “A long time ago, in 1938, Jan Masaryk was the only one who stood up for his country when Czechoslovakia was about to be handed over to Hitler on a plate. He was hated by the Soviets, while Herr Hitler was admired by everyone. Then Hitler took his country, and now the Soviets took his life.” She looked away. “And the world has stood on its head.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Alexander said. “We don’t even have a radio in the house. Did you get a radio as I asked? I can’t keep going outside into the Nomad.”
She forgot that, too.
“Did you get me Time magazine?”
“Tomorrow, darling. Today I got you some nice American books from the 19th century. The Wings of the Dove from Henry James, ghost stories from Poe and the complete works of Mark Twain. If you like something a little more current, here is the excellent The Everlasting Man from 1923.”
The isolation was complete on their last frontier. The house they were living in had a name—on a plaque. It was called Free. The dock they fished on was called My Prerogative. The skies remained gunmetal gray with no sunshine day after day, and the blue herons hid behind the reeds in the fields across the canal, and the swans flew away in lonely formations. The stillness as far as the eye could see was vertical and horizontal.
Well, perhaps not horizontal, for they had a room of their own and a case of sparkling wine.
They drifted through the winter like river rats in the lost world downstream from Suisun Bay.
One March morning in 1948, Shpeckel, with a salute, said after sounding his bugle, “I guess I was wrong about you and your wife, Captain. I’m surprised. Few women can live this life, day in and day out.”
“Well, you have to know who you are,” Alexander called back, a cigarette in his mouth and his fishing rod in the water. “And you don’t know my wife.”
And Tatiana, who heard the exchange from the window, thought that perhaps Alexander didn’t know his wife either.
The boy was remarkable. The boy was so dark haired, so dark eyed, growing so lean. He went on boats; now he was fearless. On Bethel Island, they taught him how to read, in English and Russian, how to play chess, cards, how to make bread. They bought bats and gloves and balls, and spent the cold days outside. The three of them went to the nearby field and in their winter jackets—because the temperature was in the forties—kicked a soccerball, threw a football, hit a baseball.
Anthony learned how to sing—in English and Russian. They bought him a guitar, and music books, and in the long winter afternoons, they taught him notes and chords and songs, and how to read the bass clef and the treble clef, the tones and the semitones. Soon he was teaching them.
And one afternoon, Tatiana, to her horror, watched Anthony change the magazine cartridge in his father’s Colt M1911 in six seconds.
“Alexander! Are you out of your mind?”
“Tania, soon he will be five.”
“Five, not twenty-five!”
“Did you see him?” Alexander was beaming. “Do you see what he is?”
“Do I ever. But you don’t want to be teaching him that.”
“I teach him what I know.”
“You’re not going to teach him everything you know, are you?”
“Oh, sauce in the winter! Come here.”
They hibernated, ate berries, slept, waiting for the ice to melt. Underneath Tatiana was mute. Even to herself she seemed disabled in her dread. For her son, for her husband, she put on her bravest face, but she feared it wasn’t brave enough.
Sitting next to each other, Alexander and Anthony had finished fishing; it was the end of a quiet day, before dinner, and their rods were down. Anthony climbed into Alexander’s lap and was touching the hair on his face.
“What, son?” He was smoking.
“Nothing,” Anthony said quietly. “Did you shave today?”
“Not today, not yesterday.” He couldn’t remember the last time he shaved.
Anthony rubbed Alexander’s face, then kissed his cheek. “When I grow up, am I going to have black stubble like you?”
“Unfortunately yes.”
“It’s so bristly. Why does Mommy always say how much she likes it?”
“Mommy sometimes likes strange things.” Alexander smiled.
“Am I going to be tall like you?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Big like you?”
“Well, you are my son.”
“Am I going to … be like you?” Anthony whispered.
Alexander took a careful look at the boy’s upturned blinkless gaze. Leaning down he kissed him. “Maybe, bud. You and only you will decide what kind of man you want to be.”
“Ticklish, like you?” Anthony pulled up his father’s flannel shirtsleeve and tickled his forearm and the inside of his elbow. He tickled him under the arms.
Alexander put the cigarette out. “Watch out,” he said, holding the boy to him, “because in a minute there’ll be no mercy for you.”
Anthony squealed, his arms around Alexander, whose arms were around Anthony. The chair was nearly falling over. Suddenly Anthony pressed his head to Alexander’s ear. “Daddy, don’t turn around, because this will frighten you, but Mommy is standing behind us.”
“Is Mommy looking particularly frightening this evening?”
“Yes. She’s crying. Don’t turn around, I said.”
“Hmm,” Alexander said. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she’s jealous we’re playing?”
“No,” said Alexander. “She is not a jealous mom.”
He whispered to Anthony, who nodded and slowly climbed down from his father. They both turned around to face her. She stood there blankly, her face still wet.
“One two three—go!” said Alexander. They ran, and she ran from them; they chased her into the house, and brought her down onto the carpet, and she was laughing and she was crying.
Alexander was sitting outside down the long dock, in his quilted patchwork winter jacket, smoking, fishing. He hadn’t shaved in weeks, and his hair had grown shaggy. Tatiana knew if she drew attention to it, ran her hands through it, looked at it too long, he might cut it. So she watched him from behind as he sat on his little chair, with a rod in the water and a cigarette in his mouth, humming. He was always humming when he was trying to catch that prehistoric sturgeon.
Tatiana couldn’t help herself. Wiping her face, she walked down the dock to his chair, pressed her face to his head, kissed his temple, his bearded cheek. “What’s this for?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she whispered. “I like your pirate beard.”
“Well, your Captain Morgan will be done soon. I’m trying to catch us a fish.”
“Don’t make me cry, Shura.”
“All right, Tania. You too. You with your kissing. What is it with you and the boy lately?”
She held his head to her, in the space at her neck. “Come inside, darling,” she whispered. “Let’s go in. Your bath is hot and ready.” Her lips were on his hair.
“It’s really grown out, hasn’t it?” he said absent-mindedly. But when he came back inside he didn’t cut it.
Later that night, in complete darkness, after a hot conjugal bath, after love, Alexander asked her, breathed out to her, “Babe, what are you so afraid of?”
Tatiana couldn’t tell him. “We’re hanging in there,” he said. “Ant’s doing great.”
“You shouldn’t have told me your dream,” Tatiana said dully. “That’s what I think about now—I’m awake and in Germany watching you being dragged away by Karolich.” She was glad it was dark and he couldn’t see her face. “What if this little life, us, is all just an illusion. And will soon be gone.”
“Yes,” was all he said.
Restlessly they slept, and then settled down again, to blessed silence.
Lost in Suisun Bay
“How long do you plan to keep me here?” It was spring, they had been in Bethel six months. She couldn’t stop herself from twitching. “Day in, day out, weeks, months, years? Tell me. Is this where we’re staying? Is this what I’m doing? Should I get Shpeckel’s job when he dies? Should I put in for it now, in case there’s a waiting list?”
“Shura.”
Alexander was contemplative. “Are you hiding me from myself? Are we here because you think I can’t function out there?”
“Of course not.”
“So why are you hiding me?”
“I’m not, darling.” Tatiana rubbed his back, feathered his scars. “You’re worrying yourself for nothing. Go to sleep.”
But Alexander wasn’t sleepy. “What? You can’t imagine me in an office?” he asked. “In a suit all day, sitting at a desk, selling stocks, bonds, insurance, going to visit you in a winery in my drab flannel suit, coming from my city office?”
She was all coiled up inside. “I can imagine you visiting me.”
“My father wanted me to be an architect,” Alexander said. “A fine thing—an architect in the Soviet Union. He wanted me to build with the Communists, bridges, roads, workers’ houses.”
“Yes.”
“And I spent my life blowing up fucking houses. Perhaps I can be in demolition work.”
“No, not you.” Please could it be the end of this conversation. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.”
But Alexander continued. “Is that what I’m doing here? Figuring it out? Who I am? I spent my whole life asking myself this question. There in the Soviet Union, here in Suisun Bay. No easy answers to that one, me with SS Eagles, and hammer and sickles on my arms.”
You are an American, Alexander Barrington, Tatiana wanted to say to him. An American, who fought in the Red Army and married a Russian girl from Leningrad who can’t live without her soldier. That’s who you are.
“My mother and father knew who they were.”
It was the absolute last thing Tatiana wanted to talk about. Her body was a spring; in a minute she was going to catapult away from him.
“They have nothing to do with you,” she said, and couldn’t say anymore.
“The Communist and the radical feminist, the Soviet émigrés, oh, they knew who they were.” Alexander sat up and lit a cigarette. “You can only hope in today’s climate, no one will find out about my mother and father, because who then is going to give me permanent work? I might as well be a murderer out on work release.” He blew smoke rings above the bed.
Tatiana couldn’t endure it, she coiled away. “Jimmy hired you, Mel hired you, Sebastiani hired you …”
“Yes, until just one man says: what are the numbers on your arm, Alexander? and we’re off. I don’t know what happened back in Vianza, but something did because it was a slice of heaven, but we didn’t stay, did we? What are we going to do? Every time someone asks us a question, we run? Where in the army did you serve, Alexander? and we go right in the bunker, Tania? Is that how we’re going to live?”
Tatiana didn’t know how they were going to live. She didn’t know if they would ever get to have a normal life, like other people, like other married couples, simple, calm, small, nice. What was a normal life for the two of them? She didn’t know how long she could keep him remote in a bunker, in splendid isolation, secluded from all men.
Stepping Out For Love
Alexander wanted to see Idaho, Hell’s Canyon. He wanted to see Mount Rushmore, Yosemite, Mount Washington, Yellowstone National Park, the wheat fields of Iowa.
No, she kept saying, let’s stay here just a little longer. Weeks passed.
I’ll come to the store with you. Help you with shopping.
No, stay here, catch us a fish, Shura.
I’m going to go to the Boathouse, have a drink with the postman.
Let’s go to Sacramento on Sunday. Find a Catholic church, have brunch afterward at the Hyatt Regency, walk on Main Street, show Anthony the Capitol building, have ice cream.
I don’t want to. I have things to do. I have to wash-clean-cook-bake-peel-scale. I want you to build me a chest for my knick-knacks, a bench to sit on, fix the posts in the fence, planks on the dock. Let’s go for a boat ride on the canals instead.
Her reluctance to leave reminded him of wintry Deer Isle—it’s snowing and she is still not saying, let’s go. This is how it still was. Metaphorically snowing, and she was staying put.
He didn’t mind it in the beginning, this slowness. It left him alone with himself while he fished and listened to the call of the herons, and taught Anthony to row a boat and to play baseball and soccer, while Anthony read to him from his children’s books as Alexander held the fishing line. The soul was repairing itself little by little. And it was on Bethel Island, with his mother and father twenty-four hours by his side, watching over him, talking to him, playing with him, that Anthony stopped waking up with nightmares in the middle of the night and settled down to silence inside himself.
And it was on Bethel Island that Alexander stopped needing ice cold baths at three in the morning—the hot sudsy dimly lit baths with her soapy hands and soapy body in the late evening sufficing.
But eventually, one Sunday morning in July 1948, Alexander said, let’s go to Sacramento, and he wasn’t asking.
They went to Sacramento. They went to a Catholic mass and then had brunch at the Hyatt Regency.
In the late afternoon they were strolling down Main Street, window shopping, when a police car pulled up to the curb and out jumped two officers and ran toward—
For a second it was unclear what they were running toward, and in that second, Tatiana stepped out in front of Alexander, covering half of him with her small body. Paying no attention to the Barringtons, the police officers ran into the grocery store.
Tatiana stepped away. Alexander, after a double take, his eyes widening, continued to stare at her.
When they were having an ice cream soda at a drug store, he was sitting across from her, studying her, waiting for her to volunteer.
“Tania …” he drew out.
She was chatting to Ant, not meeting Alexander’s eye, volunteering nothing.
“Yes?”
“What was that back there?”
“What?”
“Back there, with the police.”
“I don’t know what you’re referring to. I stepped out of their way.” Still not looking at him.
“You didn’t step out of their way. You stepped out in front of me.”
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“No. You stepped in front of me, as if …” Alexander didn’t even know how to say it. His eyes narrowed, his heart narrowed, he saw something, understood a little bit, not much, but something. “Did you think they were coming for … me?”
“That’s silly.” Studying her soda. “Anthony, you want whipped cream?”
“Tania, why did you think they were coming for me?”
“I didn’t think so at all.” She tried to smile.
He took her face into his hands. She averted her gaze.
“You won’t look at me? Tania! What’s happening?”
“Nothing. Honest.”
He let go of her. His heart was doing odd things in his chest.
That evening Alexander found her in the back of the house—when she thought he was having a bath—cocking and recocking his P-38. She was grimly aiming it from the shoulder, her legs apart, holding it with both hands.
Alexander backed away, stumbled to the dock, sat in his chair, smoked. When he came back inside, he stood in front of her. She had put away his weapon. “Tania,” he said. “What the fuck is going on?”
His voice was too loud in the house, with Anthony just steps away in his bedroom.
“Nothing, nothing at all,” she said quietly. “Please, let’s just—”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“There is nothing to tell, honey.”
He grabbed his jacket and said he was going out. “By the way, you forgot to lock the magazine catch on the P-38,” he said coldly. “It’s at the bottom of the grip.” He left without giving Tatiana a chance to reply.
Alexander came home hours later. There was no food on the stove, and she was sitting stiff, like a board bent in the middle, at the little kitchen table.
She jumped up when he walked in the door. “My God! Where have you been? It’s been four hours!”
“Wherever I’ve been, I’d be coming home hungry,” was all he said.
She made him a cold chicken sandwich, heated up some soup while he stood silently near the stove. He took his plate and his cigarette outside. He thought for sure she would follow him out but she didn’t. After quickly eating he came back in the house, where she was still sitting behind the kitchen table.
“You don’t want to have this conversation in the house with Anthony,” Alexander said. “Come outside.”
“I’m not having this conversation.”
In two strides he was near her, pulling her up from the table.
“Okay, okay,” she whispered, before he even opened his mouth. “Okay.”
Outside on the deck Alexander stood before her in the growing darkness, silent but for the hushed rippling off the water, the distant rustle of trees from a small cool wind.
“Oh, Tatiana,” said Alexander. “What have you done?”
She said nothing.
“I called Aunt Esther,” he said. “She wasn’t an easy egg to crack. Then I called Vikki. I know everything.”
“You know everything,” she said without inflection, stepping away from him and shaking her head. “No. You know nothing.”
“I’ve been wondering why in two years you haven’t called your friend. Why you’re poring over maps. Why you’re shielding me from officers of law. Why you’re practicing with my weapon.” Alexander spoke low and pained. “Now I know.”
Abruptly she turned away, and he grabbed her and spun her back to him. “Two years ago—two years!—we could’ve stopped in DC on the way to Florida. What are you proposing we do now?”
“Nothing,” Tatiana said, pulling away from his hands. “We do nothing now. That’s what we do.”
“You do see how from their point of view it looks as if we’ve been on the run?”
“I don’t care how it looks.”
“We’re not fugitives. We have nothing to hide.”
“No?”
“No! One conversation with the generals at Defense and the diplomats at State would’ve put this whole thing behind us.”
“Oh, Alexander,” said Tatiana with a shake of her head, “you once saw through so much. Since when did you become so naïve?”
“I’m not naïve! I know what’s going on, but since when did you become so cynical?”
“They already talked to you in Berlin. Why do you think they want to talk to you again?”
“It’s procedure!” he yelled.
“It’s not procedure!” she yelled back. Their voices carried down the black canals, echoing down the water tunnels. She lowered her voice. “Don’t you understand anything? Interpol is looking for you, too.”
“You know this how?”
“Because Sam told me, that’s how.”
Alexander fell back in his chair. “You talked to Sam?” he said aghast. “You knew this, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t tell you a lot of things.”
“Obviously. When did you talk to him?”
She wouldn’t say.
“When?” He raised his voice. “Tania! When? Hard way or easy way, you’re going to tell me. You might as well tell it to me easy.”
“Eight months ago,” she whispered.
“Eight months ago!” he yelled.
“Oh, why did you have to call Esther? Why?” Tatiana threw her arms down in defeat.
“Is this why we left Napa? Oh my God.” He glared at her with sharp reproach. “All this time, moving from place to place, wringing your hands, falling silent on me, asking me about desertion to the Urals. What games you played, knowing this.” Alexander was so disappointed, he was forced to look away from her. How could the Tatiana he thought he knew keep secrets from him so well? And what was so wrong with him that he never prodded, never pursued, never pushed, even though he sensed and suspected that something was wrong? Alexander couldn’t look at her.
Tatiana continued to stand in front of him and not speak.
“We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” he said finally. “We’re leaving and going to Washington.”
“No!”
“No?”
“That’s right, no. Absolutely under no circumstances. We stay put. We go nowhere. Unless it’s to the woods in Oregon.”
“I’m not going to the woods in Oregon,” said Alexander. “I’m not hiding out in the Urals. Or Bethel Island.”
Tatiana bent to him, raising her voice, carrying it far. “We’re not going, and that’s it,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
He frowned at her angry face. “Well, I’m going.”
Her mouth trembled as she straightened up. “Oh, that’s just perfect, you’re going, you, like you’re all by yourself, only you. Returning to the front, are you? Well, then, you’re going to have to go without me, Alexander. This time if you go, you go alone. Anthony and I aren’t coming with you.”
He got up so furiously he knocked the chair down behind him and the plates and the glasses and his cigarettes. Tatiana backed away, her hands up; he took one lunging step toward her. “Oh, that’s just fucking priceless!”
“Shura, stop!”
He loomed too close to her on the dock. “You’re threatening me with leaving?”
“I’m not threatening you with leaving!” she yelled. “You’re the one who’s telling me you’re going by yourself. I’m telling you we’re not going!”
“We are!”
“No!”
Anthony came out, having been awakened by their raised voices, and stood warily on the edge of the dock. Raggedly panting, they stared at each other. Then Tatiana took the boy inside and didn’t come back out.
After a long while Alexander returned to the house to find her under the covers. He sat on the bed, and she turned away in a coil.
“What, that’s it?” he said. “You walked away, in the middle, got into bed, and that’s it?”
“What more is there?” she said tonelessly.
“My own government is looking for me,” he said. “I won’t have it.”
Tatiana shuddered.
“Don’t you understand—they’re going to come for me, Tania,” said Alexander. “One day, they’ll find me, working on a farm somewhere, picking grapes, making wine, driving a boat, catching lobster, and the statute of limitations won’t run out on me.”
“Yes, it will,” she said. “After ten years it will.”
“Are you joking?” he whispered into her back. “Ten years? What are you talking about? What am I, in espionage? I’ve done nothing wrong!”
“Well, if you go back, they’re going to cuff you and put you away for obstructing justice, for running from the law, or even for treason. You’ll be in prison though you did nothing wrong. Or worse—they’ll …” She was speaking into the pillow, Alexander could barely hear her.
“So what do you propose?” he said. “Living your life hoping you’re going to stay one step ahead of the United States government?”
“I can’t have this argument with you, Shura,” said Tatiana. “I just can’t.”
Alexander turned her to face him, she turned back. He moved her to him, she moved away, pulling the blankets over her head. He removed all the pillows, all the blankets and threw them on the floor, leaving her naked on the empty sheet. She covered her body from him. He pulled her hands away; she struggled against him. He bent to her bare stomach, to the soft gold space below her navel, pressed his mouth to it, whispering to her, touch me, touch my head. She was shaking and didn’t. He lay on top of her naked body in all his clothes, flat on her, but since there was no peace inside her, there was no peace for him. Piercing her sadness with his sadness, barely undressing, he made deaf mute love to her and then they lay deaf mute, unable to utter the things that were piercing them—he thought he had made himself so clear, and she thought she hadn’t made herself clear enough.
Her back was to him. His back was to her. “I won’t live like this,” said Alexander. “This was my life in the Soviet Union, trapped, running, lying, afraid. This can’t be my life in America. This can’t be what you want for us.”
“I just want you,” she said. “I’ll take you in the Ural Mountains, I don’t care how many men you kill with your desertion. I know, it’s unforgivable, but I don’t care. I will take you running and trapped and lying. I will take you any way. I don’t care how difficult it will be. Everything has been difficult.”
“Tania, please. You don’t mean it.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “How little you know me. Better take that magazine quiz again, Shura.”
“That’s right,” he said, “I obviously don’t know you at all. How could you have kept this from me?”
Tatiana didn’t reply; a gasp was all that came from her.
Alexander unrolled her out of her fetal ball, holding her wrists away from her face. “All this time you deceived me, and now you say you won’t come with me?”
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, you are so blind! I’m begging you, begging you, please see reason. Listen to me. We can’t go to them.”
“I lived in a prison already,” said Alexander, squeezing her wrists, bearing down on her. “Don’t you understand? I want a different life with you.”
“See, that’s the difference between us. I just want a life with you,” said Tatiana, not struggling against him at all, lying fragile and open under his hands. “I told you this back in Russia. I didn’t care if we lived in my cold Fifth Soviet room with Stan and Inga at our door. All I wanted was to live there with you. I don’t care if we live here on Bethel Island, or in one small room on Deer Isle. Soviet Union, Germany, here—it doesn’t matter. I just want it with you.”
“On the run, hiding out, forever scared?” he said. “That’s how you want it?”
“Any which way,” she said, crying. “Just with you.”
“Oh, Tania,” he said, letting go of her.
She crawled to him, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Not now, not in Russia, not ever,” she said with sobbing anger, “did you ever protect yourself for my sake, for Anthony’s sake!”
“Shh,” he said, opening his arms. “Come here. Shh.”
But she wouldn’t come, her hands clenched in supplication. “Please, let’s not go,” she said. “For Anthony. He needs a father.”
“Tania …”
“For me,” she whispered.
Frozen in time they remained on the bed in a November Leningrad embrace.
“I swore to myself in Berlin,” she said into his chest, “that they would never have you again.”
“I know,” Alexander said. “So what are you going to do? Inject me full of morphine like you planned to, kill me like you wouldn’t kill Colonel Moore?” He extended his upturned forearm to her, tapping on his tattooed blue numbers. “Go ahead. Right here, Tatiana.”
“Oh, stop it, just stop it!” she whispered madly, slapping his arm away.
They didn’t speak the rest of the night.
In the morning, without saying a word to each other and barely one to Anthony they packed their things and left Bethel Island. Mr. Shpeckel waved goodbye to them from his boat, a regretful look about him in the pale sunrise. “What did I tell you, Captain?” he called after Alexander. “I always knew you were runners.”
After a traveling day of stunning silence, somewhere in the drifting sands of Nevada, Alexander whispered, cradling her in the sleeping bag, “They won’t have me again. I promise you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Not them, not me.”
“Come on, I’ll take care of it. Trust me.”
“Trust you?” Tatiana said. “I trusted you so much I believed your lying face and left the Soviet Union, pregnant, thinking you were dead.”
“You weren’t alone. You were supposed to be with the doctor,” he whispered. “Matthew Sayers was getting you out.”
“Yes. You didn’t count on him getting suddenly dead.” She took a breath. “Don’t speak to me. You want me to do what you want, I’ll do what you want, but don’t speak to me, don’t try to make it better.”
“I can’t make it better,” he said. “I want you to make it better.”
He knew that beyond Sam Gulotta and the irate Americans, she was afraid of the Soviets most of all. He was not blameless, he was not innocent. She had reason to be afraid.
He couldn’t see her face. “Tania,” said Alexander, quietly, non-challengingly, caressing her, “you want to fix us? Help me set this right. I know you don’t want to live with this debilitating fear. You’ve been unable to think straight. Help us. Please. Make yourself free. Make me free.”
On another black night near Hell’s Canyon in Idaho, Alexander said to her, “How could you have kept something like this from me? Something this big, this grave? We are meant to go through this together, hand in hand. Like lovers.” He was in the sleeping bag, lying on top of her back, tethered to her, their hands threaded.
“Go through what together?” she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Your surrender to the authorities? Which is what you’re doing after the first second you heard they were looking for you? Gee, I wonder why I didn’t tell you. It’s a mystery.”
“Had you told me, we would have fixed it back then, instead of trying to plug up the hole in the Titanic now.”
“The Titanic was doomed as soon as it hit that iceberg,” said Tatiana. “Nothing could’ve saved it. So you’ll excuse me if I tell you that I hate your metaphors.”
Finally Tatiana gave Alexander Sam Gulotta’s number. Alexander called from a public phone booth, Sam called back and they spent a tense hour on the phone, Tatiana listening to Alexander’s end of the conversation and biting her nails. When he hung up, he said Sam agreed to meet them in ten days in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Anthony, sensing that something was remiss, made barely any demands on his washed-out parents. He read, he played his guitar, he drew pictures and played with his soldiers. But in the middle of the night, he started to wake up again and crawl into the tent with his mother. She had to start putting her nightgown on again.
Without stories, or laughing, or joking, they meandered through their America, north through the rivers of Montana, south through the Black Hills of Wyoming and the Badlands of South Dakota. Grimly through the days they drove across the country, they lived in the tents, they cooked over fires, ate out of one bowl. They fastened together and then slept fitted together, one metal bowl inside the other, she buried in his chest, pressed into his heart, swallowed by his ruined body. He didn’t know what was happening. He felt all his instincts were abandoning him, he couldn’t find his way out of the blind mire of her terror. They were exhausted by their demons, by the worry in the day, by the fears in the night. They prayed for sleep, but when it came it was broken and black. They prayed for sun, but each sun just got them closer to the Washington DC of their nightmares.

CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_64e75e56-c76b-5193-ba33-cb0b6c5f588e)
Jane Barrington, 1948 (#ulink_64e75e56-c76b-5193-ba33-cb0b6c5f588e)
Sam Gulotta
Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of DC, Tatiana said, “Stop the camper.” He did stop—at the designated meeting point, at a gas station. They got out; he filled the tank, went to go get them Cokes, cigarettes, candy for Anthony, who was running around raising dust. They were meeting Sam at eight in the morning; it was seven-thirty.
Tatiana had put on the sheer ivory muslin and tulle dress Alexander had bought for her in New Orleans; she had taken it in herself on Bethel Island; after all, her mother had been a seamstress. She had brushed out her hair and left it down. In the summer morning breeze, the diaphanous dress floated up slightly and the wisps of her sundried hair blew around her face.
“Thank you for looking so lovely for me,” said Alexander.
She managed a “You’re welcome.” She tried to speak to him, but her voice wouldn’t work. It was unseemly in the zenith of a bright Godlike summer morning to be filled with so much anxiety. He lit a cigarette as they waited. He was wearing his U.S. captain’s Class A dress uniform he had been given by the U.S. consul in Berlin. He had shaved and cropped short his hair.
Tatiana had at first insisted she was going to be by Alexander’s side through everything. Trouble was, there was no one to leave the boy with. She said she would call Vikki and ask her to come help, but as soon as Anthony, who was milling nearby, obviously listening to adult conversations, had heard the name Vikki in conjunction with his own, he started to cry and clinging to his mother’s leg, said please, please, don’t leave me alone with Vikki.
And though Tatiana was horrified, she was not so horrified as to not want to call her friend. It was Alexander who put his foot down. They were not going to both leave Ant now when he needed his mother again.
Standing at the camper, Tatiana said bitterly, to no one in particular, “I can’t believe we’re subjecting ourselves to this. Who would have found us in our vast America? We’d have been lost forever.”
“How many times do you intend to step out in front of me, Tatiana,” Alexander asked, “to hide me from the Communists?”
“The rest of my life, if that’s what it takes.”
He turned to her, and something in his eyes opened and cleared and focused on her. He stared into something he was obviously trying very hard to understand. “What did you just say?”
She turned her upset face away from his questioning gaze.
“Oh, I am such a fucking idiot,” said Alexander—as Sam Gulotta drove up in his old Ford sedan.
Sam shook Alexander’s hand, and then stood in front of Tatiana without speaking. He was wearing an atypically rumpled suit, and his face was weary. His curly hair had started to go gray at the edges and thin on top; he looked less sturdy though he had coached his sons’ baseball games for many years. “You look well, Tatiana. Very well.” He cleared his throat, and looked away. Sam, who never noticed her, looked away! “Marriage obviously agrees with you,” he said. “I got married again myself.” His first wife had died in a plane crash at the start of the war, bringing supplies to the troops. Tatiana wanted to say that the second marriage didn’t seem to agree with him quite so well but of course didn’t. Her arms were crossed on her chest.
Sam said, “So finally you saw reason.”
“Not me,” she retorted.
“Well, since he’s the one who’s going have to pay for your shenanigans, I’m glad one of you had some sense.”
“I’m not paying for her shenanigans,” said Alexander.
Tatiana waved them both off. “Sam, don’t pretend you don’t understand why in today’s climate I might not be completely forthcoming with bringing you my husband.”
“Yes,” said Sam. “But why were you not forthcoming with bringing me your husband back in 1946?”
“Because we were done with all of you!” Tatiana exclaimed. “And he’s already talked this to death in Berlin. That’s not in his file for all to see?” Alexander put his hand out to quieten her. Anthony was nearby.
“It is in his file,” Sam said evenly. “But I told you, the military tribunal in Berlin had their own protocol and we have ours. After he got here he had to talk to us. Which part of that didn’t you understand?”
“Oh, I understood. But why can’t you leave him alone?” She stepped in front of Alexander. “A hundred million people—don’t you have something better to do? Who is he bothering? You know he is not in an espionage ring, collecting information for the Soviets. You know he’s not hiding. And you know perfectly well that the last thing he of all people needs is to have your little State Department get their hooks in him.”
Alexander put his hands on Tatiana’s shoulders to stop her from heaving. Sam stood powerlessly in front of her. “Had you called me two years ago,” Sam said, “this would’ve been behind you. Now everybody in three government departments is stuck on the fact that he’s been hiding!”
“Traveling, not hiding. Do they know the difference?”
“No! Because they haven’t debriefed him. And Defense really needed to debrief him. It’s only because of your obstinacy that it’s snowballed to this level.”
“Don’t blame it on me, you with your incessant phone calls to Vikki! What did you think I was going to think?”
Alexander fixed his hold on Tatiana’s shoulders. “Shh,” he said.
“No shh. And you know what, Sam?” Tatiana snapped, still under Alexander’s hands. “Why don’t you spend less time looking for my husband and a little more time looking at your State Department? I don’t know if you’ve been reading the papers the last few years, but all I’m saying is, you might want to first clean your own house before searching all over the country to clean mine.”
“Why don’t you come and talk to John Rankin of the House of Un-American Activities Committee,” Sam said impatiently. “Because he’s waiting for you. Perhaps you can illuminate him about what you know about our State Department. He loves to talk to people like you.”
Alexander’s hold constricted around her. “All right, you two,” he said. He turned Tatiana to him. “That’s enough,” he said quietly, staring her down. “We have to go.”
“I’m coming with you!” Tatiana exclaimed. “I don’t care what I promised. I’ll take Ant with me—”
“Sam, excuse us for a minute,” Alexander said, pulling Tatiana with him behind their camper. She was panting in desperation. He brought her flush against him and took her face in his hands. “Tatia, stop,” he said. “You told me you were going to stay calm. You promised. Come on. The boy is right here.”
She was shaking.
“You’re going to wait here,” he said, his steadying hand spreading around her gauzy back, holding her close, comforting her. “As you promised me, God help me. Just sit and wait. No matter what happens, we will come back. This is what Sam said. One way or another, I’m going to come back, but you have to wait. Don’t go off. The boy is with you now, and you have to be good. Now swear to me again you’ll be good.”
“I’ll be good,” she whispered. She only hoped her face wasn’t showing him what she was feeling. But then Anthony jumped between them and was in her arms, and she was forced to pretend to calm down.
Before they left, Sam ruffled Anthony’s hair. “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll do my best to take care of your dad.”
“Okay,” said Anthony, his arm around his mother’s neck. “And I’ll take care of my mom.”
Tatiana backed away. Alexander nodded. She nodded. They stood for a moment. She saluted him. He saluted her. Anthony’s hands were around his mother. “Mommy, how come you salute Dad first?”
“He’s higher in rank, bud,” she whispered.
Her face must have been so contorted that Alexander’s words failed him. He just said, “Dear God, have a little faith, will you?” But he said it to her turned and squared back. The boy was in her arms.
“When did she become this overwrought?” Sam asked as they drove to the State Department in his sedan. He shook his head. “She used to be so much calmer.”
“Really?”
Sam obviously wanted to talk about her. “Absolutely. You know when she first came to me, she was a stoic. A young petite widowed mother, spoke in a low voice, polite, never talked back, barely knew how to speak English. As time went on and she kept calling, she remained polite and quiet. She would come to DC sometimes, we would have lunch, sit quietly. I mean, she was so placid. I guess the only thing until the end that should have given me a clue was that she called every single month, without fail. But toward the end, when I got word about you in Colditz, she transformed into … into—I don’t even know. A completely different woman.”
“No, no,” said Alexander. “Same woman. The quiet and polite is a ruse. When it’s going her way, she is quiet and polite. Just don’t cross her.”
“It’s true, I’ve seen that! The consul in Berlin has seen that. Did you know the man asked to be reassigned after she dealt with him?”
“The U.S. Consul to Berlin?” said Alexander. “Try the Soviet Communist Party-trained Commandant to the Special Camp at Sachsenhausen. I don’t even want to guess what happened to him after she was done with his little special camp.”
Soon they were driving along the Potomac, heading south. Alexander turned to the window, fanning out his hand over the glass.
On the fourth floor of the State Department on C Street, a block north of Constitution Avenue and the Mall, Sam introduced Alexander to a brand-new, just-out-of-law-school lawyer named Matt Levine, who had the smallest office known to man, smaller than the prison cells Alexander spent so much time in, a six by six cubicle with an imposing wooden desk and three chairs. The three men huddled together so close and uncomfortable that Alexander had to ask Levine to open the small window for an illusion of space.
Even in a suit, Matt Levine looked barely old enough to shave, but there was a certain shortstop look about him that Alexander liked. Also it didn’t hurt that the first thing he said to Alexander was, “Don’t worry. We’ll lick this thing,” even though he spent three subsequent hours reviewing Alexander’s file and telling him that they were completely fucked.
“They’ll ask about your uniform.” Levine appraised him admiringly.
“Let them ask.”
“They’ll ask about your parents. There are some unbelievably damning things about them.”
“Let them ask.” This part he wished he could avoid.
“They’ll ask why you haven’t contacted State.”
That Tania.
“Did you know Gulotta here thinks we can blame the whole thing on your wife?” Levine grinned.
“Does he?”
“But I told him old soldiers don’t like to blame their troubles on their women. He insisted though.”
Alexander looked from Sam to Levine and back again. “Are you guys fucking with me?”
“No, no,” Sam said, half-seriously. “I really considered blaming it all on her. It’s not even a lie: you actually didn’t know we’d been looking for you—though ignorance is not a legal defense. But she can plead spousal privilege since she can’t testify against you, and we’re done. What do you think?”
“Hmm,” Alexander drew out. “What’s plan B?”
They didn’t have a plan B.
“I will object to everything. That’s my plan B.” Levine smiled. “I just passed my bar exam. I’m retained by State as legal counsel. You’re only my second case. But don’t worry, I’m ready. Remember, don’t be riled.” He squinted his eyes at Alexander. “Are you … easily riled?”
The guy was scrappy. “Let’s just say I’m not not easily riled,” Alexander replied. “But I’ve been provoked by tougher men than these.” He was thinking about Slonko, the man who interrogated his mother, his father, and finally—years later—himself. It hadn’t gone well for Slonko. Alexander decided not to tell the just-passed-the-bar-exam Levine about the intricacies of Soviet NKVD interrogation—half naked in a freezing dark cell, starved and beaten, without witnesses, being pummeled with vicious insinuations about Tatiana.
Alexander was perspiring in his heavy uniform. He was not used to being this close to other people. He stood up, but there was nowhere to go. Sam was nervously chewing his nails in between tying and retying his tie.
“Some hay will almost certainly be made over your citizenship issue,” Levine told Alexander. “Be careful of those questions. You’ll see. There’ll be some dueling between the departments.”
Alexander mulled a question of his own. “Do you think”—he didn’t want to ask—“that extradition might, um, come up?”
Sam and Levine exchanged fleeting frank glances, and Levine mumbled, all averted, “I shouldn’t think so,” and Sam, also averted, said, “If all fails, we’re reverting to plan A: Save your ass, blame your wife.”
Sam told him the hearing would be conducted by seven men: two from State (“One of whom will be me”), two from Justice (one Immigration and Naturalization, one FBI), and two from Defense (“One lieutenant, one old colonel; I think you might like young Tom Richter; he’s been very interested in your file”) and the most important person at the hearing—Congressman John Rankin, the senior member from the House of Un-American Activities Committee, who would come to determine if Alexander had ties to the Communist Party at home or abroad. After the session was over, the seven men would put the question to vote by majority. John Rankin would be the one to cast the tiebreaker—if it came to that.
“He’ll also be the one to determine whether or not you need to be investigated by the full HUAC,” Sam said. “I don’t have to tell you,” he added, telling Alexander nonetheless, “at all costs, try to avoid that.”
“Yes,” said Levine, “if you go on to meet with HUAC, you’re fucked. So no matter how rude anyone is, be polite, apologize and say, yes, sir, absolutely, sir, and I’m sorry, sir.”
“You’re very lucky in some respects,” Sam said (Alexander agreed), “you really couldn’t be getting a hearing at a better time.”
“Oh, yeah?” Alexander desperately needed a smoke, but he didn’t think there was enough oxygen in the office to light one small cigarette.
“HUAC is about to launch an explosive investigation into one of our own,” said Levine. “Count your blessings. Alger Hiss, you heard of him?”
Alexander had. Alger Hiss had been the director of a committee presiding over the founding of the United Nations. Hiss had been leading the charge on the U.N. since 1944. He nodded.
“Hiss was at Yalta with Roosevelt and Churchill, he was the President’s adviser, and now he’s been accused by a former communist colleague of being a Soviet spy—since the 1930s!”
“That’s one high-up man facing some high-up charges,” noted Alexander.
“No shit,” said Sam. “Point is, HUAC is busy with much bigger fish than you, so they want you, need you, to be square and on the up and up. So be on the up and up, will you?”
“Yes, sir,” said Alexander, standing up and heading for the door, out of the stifling room. “Absolutely, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but I have to have a fucking smoke, or I’m going to die, sir.”
Lieutenant Thomas Richter
Alexander was grateful that the room in which he met with the representatives of State, Defense and Justice across the National Mall was bigger than Matt Levine’s office. The room in a Congressional testimonial room on the second floor of the Old Executive Building near the Capitol was narrow and long, with a row of tall open windows to his right that overlooked trees and gardens. The half-pack of cigarettes he smoked en route from State to Old Executive calmed him but did not quell his hunger or thirst. It was mid-afternoon.
He downed a glass of water, asked for another, asked if he could smoke, and sat tensely—and smokelessly—behind a small wooden table across from a raised wooden platform. Soon seven men filed in. Alexander watched them. They took their places, took a long good look at him, who was standing in front of them, appraised him, sat. He remained standing.
They were serious and well-dressed. Four of the men were in their fifties, two looked to be Alexander’s age and one was 39-year-old Sam, who could’ve used a smoke himself. And Sam said Tania was overwrought. Tania was a woman—what was Sam’s excuse? The two from Defense, one young, one old, were in full military dress. There were microphones in front of everyone. A stenographer, a court reporter, a bailiff were present. The bailiff said there would be no chair at the hearing and the members were therefore allowed to direct questions to Alexander and to each other.
After Alexander raised his right hand and swore to tell the truth and the meeting was called to order, but nearly before he finished saying, “So help me God,” the young soldier from Defense opened his mouth.
“Lieutenant Thomas Richter,” the soldier said. “Tell me, why are you wearing a U.S. military uniform? Officer’s dress greens no less?”
“I’m a military man,” Alexander said. “I own no suit. The dress greens were given to me by Mark Bishop, the U.S. Military Governor of Berlin.” It was better than lobstering dungarees. Or a Red Army uniform. He liked Richter’s question. It was as if Richter had invited Alexander to set himself slightly outside the order of this civilian committee.
“So what do you call yourself nowadays?” Richter continued. “Do we refer to you as Commander? Captain? Major? Judging from your file, you seem to have had a number of ranks.”
“I was major for only a few weeks,” said Alexander. “I was wounded and arrested, after which I was demoted back to captain as punishment. I served as commander of a Railroad Patrol in General Meretskov’s 67th Army and of a penal battalion in General Rokossovsky’s 97th Army—as captain in both capacities. Upon my last conviction in 1945, the Red Army stripped me of my rank and title.”
“Well, you seem like a military man to me,” remarked Richter. “You say you served as an officer from 1937 to 1945? I see you received the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. There is no higher military honor in the Red Army. As I understand, it’s the equivalent of our Congressional Medal of Honor.”
“Mister Barrington,” interrupted an elderly, desiccated man, introducing himself as Mr. Drake from the Department of Justice. “Major, Captain, Mister. Medals, years of service, titles, ranks—none of these things are at issue or our concern or the purpose of this meeting, frankly.”
“I beg the pardon of the gentleman from Justice,” said Richter. “But the establishment and verification of Captain Barrington’s military history is of prime concern to the members of Defense at this meeting, and is the reason we’re here. So if you’ll excuse me …”
“Could the gentleman from Defense allow me to ask just one question, if I may. Just one,” Drake said sonorously. “Mr. Barrington, as I’m sure you’re aware, this committee is very troubled that you came to this country two years ago on special asylum privilege from the U.S. Government, and yet this is the first time we’re meeting you face to face.”
“State your question, Mr. Drake,” said Alexander.
Richter suppressed a smile.
Drake coughed. “I see no record of your asylum application.”
“State your question, Mr. Drake,” repeated Alexander.
“Objection!” That was Matt Levine. “You see no record of my client’s asylum application because my client did not come to this country on asylum. He returned to the country of his birth as a U.S. citizen with a full passport and all his rights as a citizen intact. Mr. Barrington, tell the Court how long your family had resided in Massachusetts prior to 1930.”
“Since the 1600s,” said Alexander. He went on to explain that there were indeed some special and sensitive circumstances surrounding his return, but that he believed he had fulfilled his obligations after meeting in July 1946 with Sam Gulotta, the details of which were in the public record.
Drake pointed out that it was also in the public record that Alexander Barrington’s file was open until the final formal debriefing—which had not taken place.
Sam said into his microphone, “I wish to elaborate on Mr. Barrington’s statement. I did indeed meet and speak at length with him, and had not made the urgency and necessity for a full debriefing clear. I apologize to the members of this hearing for my oversight.”
Tania was right about Sam.
“Mr. Gulotta is correct,” Alexander said. “As soon as I was aware that the State Department needed to speak to me, I contacted him and returned immediately.”
“I will attest to that,” Sam said. “Mr. Barrington voluntarily, without an arrest or a subpoena, returned to Washington.”
“Why have you not contacted us earlier, Mr. Barrington?” asked Drake. “Why were you in hiding?”
“I have been traveling,” Alexander said. “I was not in hiding.” He was being hidden—a vital difference. “I was not aware I had outstanding business with the U.S. Government.”
“Where have you been traveling?”
“Maine, Florida, Arizona, California.”
“By yourself?”
Alexander very nearly lied. If seven copies of his file were not lying in front of the men behind the long table, he would have. “No, not by myself. My wife and son are with me.”
“Why did you hesitate, Mr. Barrington?” asked the man from State sitting next to Sam. He had not introduced himself, though it was his first question. He was portly and in his fifties, with beads of perspiration gluing his combed-over slick hair to his wet scalp. His brown tie was to one side; his teeth were bad.
“I hesitated,” Alexander replied, “because my debriefing here today has nothing to do with my family.”
“Doesn’t it though?”
Alexander blinked, taking half a breath. “Not with my wife and son, no.”
The man from State cleared his throat. “Mr. Barrington,” he said, “tell me, please, how many years have you been married?”
Something from Slonko came to him—Slonko, standing just three feet away in Alexander’s cell, holding the specter of a defenseless pregnant Tatiana over Alexander’s head. After another slight pause Alexander said, “Six.”
“So—you got married in 1942?”
“Correct,” Alexander said tersely. He hated being questioned about Tatiana. Slonko had inferred that well, which is why he kept pushing. A little too far, as it turned out.
“And your son—what is his name?”
Alexander thought he had misheard. “You want to know my son’s name?”
“Objection! Relevance!” Levine rattled the windows yelling out that one.
“Withdrawn,” said the man from State. “How old is your son?”
“Five.” Alexander said through his teeth.
“Born in 1943?”
“Correct.”
“But Mr. Barrington, you just told us you didn’t return to this country until 1946.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s only two years ago. And your son is five?”
“Objection!” exclaimed Levine. “How is this relevant?”
“I’ll tell you how it’s relevant,” said the man from State. “Things are not quite adding up. Am I the only one who can count? Mr. Gulotta, are Mr. Barrington’s wife and son American citizens?”
“Yes, they are,” said Sam, his eyes steady on Alexander, as if to say, it’s all right. But remember? Yes, sir, absolutely, sir. I’m sorry, sir.
“So where could Mr. Barrington, a soldier in the Red Army, have possibly married a U.S. citizen in 1942 to have a child by in 1943?” A mulling silence fell over the room. “This is why I was inquiring as to the name of the boy. Pardon me for the indelicacy of my next question, Mr. Barrington, but … is it your child?”
Alexander was frigid. “My wife and child are none of your business, Mr.—”
“Burck,” said the man. “Dennis Burck. Foreign Service. Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Eastern European and Soviet Affairs. Where in the world did you marry your American wife, Mr. Barrington, that she could have become with child in 1942?”
Alexander pushed away from the table, but Levine, elbowing him, jumped up. “Objection! The wife and child are not under a subpoena from this committee. They do not fall under the jurisdiction of these proceedings, therefore I ask that all questions regarding them are to be excised from the record! I request a recess. If the hearing members want to learn more about Mr. Barrington’s wife, they are welcome to subpoena her!”
“All I’m trying to ascertain here, Counsel,” said Burck, “is the veracity of Mr. Barrington’s statements. After all, the man has been in hiding for two years. Perhaps he has reasons to hide.”
“Mr. Burck,” said Levine, “if you have proof regarding my client’s veracity, or lack thereof, by all means, bring it to the attention of this hearing. But until then, I request that no more scurrilous aspersions be made and that we move forward.”
“Why can’t Mr. Barrington answer my simple question?” Burck persisted. “I know where I married my wife. Why can’t he tell me where he married his—in 1942?”
Alexander had to hide his clenching hands under the table. He had to protect himself. He didn’t understand this man Burck, he didn’t know the man, and perhaps these questions were harmless and just the normal order of operations. Perhaps. But he understood himself, and he knew himself. And he had spent too long being interrogated along these lines when it wasn’t normal and it wasn’t harmless, when her name, her safety, her security, her life was flung over his neck like a noose. Tell us who you are, Major Belov, because your pregnant wife is in our custody. She is not safe, she is not in Stockholm, she is with us, and we have ways of making her talk. And now here—did he hear Burck correctly, or was he just paranoid: We know who your wife is. We know how she got here. She is here on our privilege. There was simply nothing that could make Alexander lose reason quicker than explicit or implicit threats against Tatiana. He had to protect himself—for her sake. He didn’t want Burck to know she was his Achilles heel. He sat up square-shouldered and with a force of his will placed his hands flat down on the table.
“My wife is not here to defend herself, Mr. Burck,” Alexander said in a low voice. “Nor is she being debriefed. I will not answer any further questions regarding her.”
Lieutenant Richter, sitting erect and unperspiring in his uniform, leaned into his microphone. “With all due respect to the other members, we’re not here to assess the length and quality of Captain Barrington’s marriage. This is not one of the questions put before this committee. This is an executive closed session to assess the security risk this man poses to the United States. I second the counsel’s request for a recess.”
The members took recess to confer. While waiting, Matt Levine whispered to Alexander, “I thought you said you weren’t going to get riled?”
“That was riled?” said Alexander, taking a long drink. That wasn’t riled.
“Don’t you understand, I want them to subpoena your wife,” Levine said.
“Not me.”
“Yes. She’ll plead spousal privilege to every single fucking question and we’ll be out of here in an hour.”
“I need to smoke. Can I smoke now?”
“They told you no.”
The seven men returned to the order of business. They concurred with counsel, and Dennis Burck was forced to move on.
But he didn’t move far.
“Let’s return to your record then, Mr. Barrington,” said Burck. Didn’t anyone else have any questions for Alexander? “I had a chance to review your Military Tribunal papers from Berlin in 1946. Fascinating bit of business.”
“If you say so.”
“So then, just to assert, as per the record, Alexander Barrington and Major Alexander Belov are one and the same man?”
“They are.”
“Why then did you describe yourself as a civilian man, Mr. Barrington, when your record clearly states that you were a Red Army major who escaped a military prison and killed a number of Soviet soldiers after a protracted battle? Are you aware that the Soviets want you extradited?”
“Objection!” yelled Levine. “This meeting is not concerned with the demands of Soviet Russia. This is a U.S. committee.”
“The Soviet Government says this man falls under their jurisdiction, and that this is a military matter. Now, once again—Mr. Barrington, are you or are you not aware that the Soviets want you extradited?”
Alexander was silent. “I am aware,” he said at last, “that the Red Army stripped me of my rank and title in 1945 when they sentenced me to twenty-five years in prison for surrendering to German forces.”
Richter whistled. Twenty-five years, he mouthed.
“No,” said Burck. “Your record states that you were sentenced for desertion.”
“I understand. But the rank and title is removed upon conviction for desertion or surrender.”
“Well, perhaps the title was not removed,” said Burck with a gentle expression, “because there was no conviction.”
Alexander paused. “Pardon me, but then why was I in the Soviet prison, if there was no conviction?”
Burck’s demeanor stiffened.
“My point is,” said Alexander, “I cannot be a deserter in 1945 and a major in 1946.” He took a breath, not wanting to leave his name besmirched with desertion. “Just for the record,” he said, “I was neither.”
“Your record says you are a Red Army major. Are you saying your record is wrong, Mr. Barrington?” said Burck. “Incomplete? Perhaps less than truthful?”
“I’ve already explained I was a major for only a few weeks in 1943. My direct statement to the tribunal in Berlin regarding my years in the Red Army is clear and unequivocal. Perhaps we need to go over it.”
“I move to go over the commander’s record,” joined in Richter, opening his notes, and then proceeded to ask two hours of questions about Alexander’s years in the Red Army. He was single-minded and relentless. He was interested in Alexander’s war experience, in the weapons the Soviets used, in their military campaigns in and around Leningrad, and through Latvia, Estonia, Byelorussia and Poland. He asked about Alexander’s arrests, interrogations, and years in the penal battalion without supplies or trained soldiers. He asked so many questions about the Soviet activities in Berlin that Burck, who was otherwise quiet, finally piped up with an exasperated request that they move on to the order of business.
“This is our order of business,” said Richter.
“I just don’t see how these alleged Soviet activities in Berlin are relevant to the assessment of the man before us,” said Burck. “I thought we were trying to determine if this man is a communist. When do you think we could begin determining that?”
That was when John Rankin from HUAC finally leaned into his microphone and spoke for the first time. He was a tall stiff gentleman in his sixties, who spoke with a deep Southern accent. A Democrat, Rankin had been a member of Congress since the twenties. He was grave, purposeful, and humorless. Alexander thought Rankin was a military man himself, something about his no nonsense demeanor as he had sat and listened.

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