Tatiana and Alexander (2 page)

She tickles him. He does not seem amused. “All right. Tell me what to do,” she says, lowering her voice two notches. “I will do exactly as you say.”

“Leave Leningrad and go back to Lazarevo instantly,” Alexander tells her. “Go where you will be safe.”

Rolling her eyes, she says, “Come on. I know you can play this game.”

“I know I can,” Alexander says, sitting on her parents’ old sofa. “I just don’t want to. You don’t listen to me about the important things…”

“Those aren’t the important things,” Tatiana says, kneeling in front of him and taking hold of his hands. “If the NKVD come for me, I will know you are gone and I will be happy to stand against the wall.” She squeezes his hands. “I will go to the wall as your wife and never regret a second I spent with you. So let me have this here with you. Let me smell you once more, taste you once more, kiss you once more,” she says. “Now play my game with me, sorrowful as it is to lie down together in wintry Leningrad. Play the miracle with me—to lie down with you at all. Tell me what to do and I will do it.”

Alexander pulls on her hand. “Come here.” He opens his arms. “Sit on top of me.”

She obeys.

“Now take your hands and place them on my face.”

She obeys.

“Put your lips on my eyes.”

She obeys.

“Kiss my forehead.”

She obeys.

“Kiss my lips.”

She obeys. And obeys.

“Tania…”

“Shh.”

“Can’t you see I’m breaking?”

“Ah,” she says. “You’re still in one piece then.”

She sat and watched the dockhand when it was sunny and she sat and watched him when it rained. Or when it was foggy, which is what it was nearly every morning at eight o’clock.

This morning was none of the above. This morning was cold. The pier smelled of fresh water and of fish. The seagulls screeched overhead, a man’s voice shouted.

Where is my brother to help me, my sister, my mother? Pasha, help me, hide in the woods where I know I can find you. Dasha, look what’s happened. Do you even see? Mama, Mama. I want my mother. Where is my family to ask things of me, to weigh on me, to intrude on me, to
never let me be silent or alone, where are they to help me through this? Deda, what do I do? I don’t know what to do.

This morning the dockhand did not go over to see his friend at the next pier for a smoke and a coffee. Instead, he walked across the road and sat next to her on the bench.

This surprised her. But she said nothing, she just wrapped her white nurse’s coat tighter around herself, and fixed the kerchief covering her hair.

In Swedish he said to her, “My name is Sven. What’s your name?”

After a longish pause, she replied. “Tatiana. I don’t speak Swedish.”

In English he said to her, “Do you want a cigarette?”

“No,” she replied, also in English. She thought of telling him she spoke little English. She was sure he didn’t speak Russian.

He asked her if he could get her a coffee, or something warm to throw over her shoulders. No and no. She did not look at him.

Sven was silent a moment. “You want to get on my barge, don’t you?” he asked. “Come. I will take you.” He took her by her arm. Tatiana didn’t move. “I can see you have left something behind,” he said, pulling on her gently. “Go and retrieve it.” Tatiana did not move.

“Take my cigarette, take my coffee, or get on my barge. I won’t even turn away. You don’t have to sneak past me. I would have let you on the first time you came. All you had to do was ask. You want to go to Helsinki? Fine. I know you’re not Finnish.” Sven paused. “But you are very pregnant. Two months ago it would have been easier for you. But you need to go back or go forward. How long do you plan to sit here and watch my back?”

Tatiana stared into the Baltic Sea. “If I knew, would I be sitting here?”

“Don’t sit here anymore. Come,” said the longshoreman.

She shook her head.

“Where is your husband? Where is the father of your baby?”

“Dead in the Soviet Union,” Tatiana breathed out.

“Ah, you’re from the Soviet Union.” He nodded. “You’ve escaped somehow? Well, you’re here, so stay. Stay in Sweden. Go to the consulate, get yourself refugee protection. We have hundreds of people getting through from Denmark. Go to the consulate.”

Tatiana shook her head.

“You’re going to have that baby soon,” Sven said. “Go back, or move forward.”

Tatiana’s hands went around her belly. Her eyes glazed over.

The dockhand patted her gently and stood up. “What will it be? You want to go back to the Soviet Union? Why?”

Tatiana did not reply. How to tell him her soul had been left there?

“If you go back, what happens to you?”

“I die most likely,” she barely whispered.

“If you go forward, what happens to you?”

“I live most likely.”

He clapped his hands. “What kind of a choice is that? You must go forward.”

“Yes,” said Tatiana, “but how do I live like this? Look at me. You think, if I could, I wouldn’t?”

“So you’re here in the Stockholm purgatory, watching me move my paper day in and day out, watching me smoke, watching me. What are you going to do? Sit with your baby on the bench? Is that what you want?”

Tatiana was silent.

The first time she laid eyes on him she was sitting on a bench, eating ice cream.

“Go forward.”

“I don’t have it in me.”

He nodded. “You have it. It’s just covered up. For you it’s winter.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. Summer’s here. The ice will melt.”

Tatiana struggled up from the bench. Walking away, she said in Russian, “It’s not the ice anymore, my seagoing philosopher. It’s the pyre.”

In Morozovo Hospital, March 13, 1943

IN THE DARK EVENING
, in a small fishing village that had been turned into Red Army headquarters for the Neva operation of the Leningrad front, a wounded man lay in a military hospital waiting for death.

For a long time he lay with his arms crossed, not moving until the lights went out and the critical ward grew tired and quiet.

Soon they would be coming for him.

He was a young man just twenty-three, ravaged by war. Months of lying wounded in bed threw a pallor on his face. He was unshaven, and his black hair was cropped close to his scalp. His eyes, the color of toffee, were blanks as he stared into the far distance. Alexander Belov looked grim but he was not a cruel man, and he looked resigned but he was not a cold man.

Months earlier on the ice during the Battle of Leningrad, Alexander had run out for his lieutenant Anatoly Marazov, who lay on the river Neva with a bullet in his throat. Alexander ran out to the hopeless Anatoly, and so did a doctor with no sense—an International Red Cross doctor from Boston named Matthew Sayers, who fell through the ice, and whom Alexander had to pull out and drag across the river to the armored truck for cover. The Germans were trying to blow up the truck from the air, and in their attempts they blew up Alexander instead.

It was Tatiana who had pulled him back from the four horsemen who came for him, counting his good and bad works on their black-gloved fingers. Tatiana, whom he had told,
“Leave Leningrad and go back to Lazarevo instantly.”
Lazarevo, deep at the foot of the Ural Mountains, a small fishing village buried in the pine woods, nestled on the shores of the Kama River, Lazarevo, where for an instant in time she could have been safe.

But she was like the doctor: she had no sense. No, she said to him. She was not going. And she said
no
to the four horsemen, shaking her fist at them. It’s too early for you to claim him. And then defiantly: I won’t let
you take him. I will do everything in my power to keep you from taking him.

And she did. With her own blood, she had kept them from Alexander. She poured her blood inside him, she drained her arteries and filled his veins, and he was saved.

Alexander may have owed Tatiana his life but Dr. Sayers owed Alexander his, and he was going to take Alexander and Tatiana to Helsinki, from where they would make their way to the United States. With Tatiana’s help they concocted a plan, and for months Alexander lay in the hospital while his back healed and carved figures and cradles and spears out of wood and imagined driving through America with her, their hurt all vanished, just the two of them, singing to the radio.

He had lived on the fleeting wings of hope. It was such a translucent hope. He knew it even as he drowned in it. It was the hope of a man surrounded by the enemy, who, as he makes his last run to safety, his back turned, prays he will have a chance to dive into a pit of life before the enemy reloads, before they send the heavy artillery out. He hears their guns, he hears their shouts behind him, but still he runs, hoping for a reprieve from the whistle of the shell. Dive into hope, or die in despair.
Dive into the River Kama.

Alexander’s fate was sealed. He wondered how long ago it had been sealed, but he did not want an answer to that question.

Since he left his small room in Boston back in December 1930, that’s how long.

Alexander could not leave Russia. But one small thread of hope still dangled in front of him. One small flicker of the waning candle.

To get Tatiana out of the Soviet Union, Alexander Belov grit his teeth and closed his eyes. He clenched his fists and backed away from her; he pushed her away, he let her go.

There was only one thing left for him to do in his old life, and that was to stand up and salute the doctor who could save his wife. For now there was nothing to do but wait.

Deciding he did not wish to be taken out of bed in his hospital clothes, Alexander asked the night shift nurse to bring him his Class A major’s uniform and his officer dress cap. He shaved with his knife and a bit of water by the side of his bed, dressed and then sat in the chair, arms folded. When they came for him, as he knew they would, he wanted to go with as much dignity as the lackeys for the NKVD would allow. He heard loud snoring from the man in the bed next to him, hidden from view by the isolation tent.

Tonight—what was Alexander’s reality? What was it that determined Alexander’s consciousness? And more important, what would happen to him in an hour or two when everything Alexander had ever been would come into question? When the secret police chairman General Mekhlis would lift his beady, lard-encrusted eyes and say to him, “Tell us who you are, Major,” what would be Alexander’s answer?

Was he Tatiana’s husband?

Yes.

“Don’t cry, honey.”

“Don’t come, yet. Please. Don’t. Not yet.”

“Tania, I have to go.” He told Colonel Stepanov he was going to be back for Sunday night roll call and he could not be late.

“Please. Not yet.”

“Tania, I’ll get another weekend leave—” He is panting. “After the Battle of Leningrad. I’ll come back here. But now…”

“Don’t, Shura, please don’t.”

“You’re holding me so tight. Release your legs.”

“No. Stop moving. Please. Just…”

“It’s nearly six, babe. I have to go.”

“Shura, darling, please…don’t go.”

“Don’t come, don’t go. What can I do?”

“Stay right here. Inside me. Forever inside me. Not yet, not yet.”

“Shh, Tania, shh.”

And five minutes later, he is bolting out the door. “I’ve got to run, no, don’t walk me to the barracks. I don’t want you walking by yourself at night. You still have the pistol I gave you? Stay here. Don’t watch me walk down the corridor. Just—come here.” He envelops her in his coat, hugging her into himself, kissing her hair, her lips. “Be a good girl, Tania,” he says. “And don’t say goodbye.”

She salutes him. “I’ll see you, the captain of my heart,” says Tatiana, her tears having fallen down her face from Friday till Sunday.

Was he a soldier in the Red Army?

Yes.

Was he the man who had entrusted his life to Dimitri Chernenko, a worthless demon disguised as a friend?

Yes, again.

But once, Alexander had been an American, a Barrington. He spoke like an American. He laughed like an American. He played summer games like an American, and swam like one and took his life for granted like one. He had friends he thought he was going to have for
life, and once there were forests of Massachusetts that Alexander called home, and a child’s bag where he hid his small treasures—the shells and the eroded glass bits he had found on Nantucket Sound, the wrapper from one of the cotton candies, bits of twine and string, a photograph of his friend Teddy.

Once there was a time he had a mother, her tanned, made-up, large-eyed familiar face laughing into his memory.

And when the moon was blue and the sky black and the stars beaming down their light on him, for a stitch in eternity Alexander had found what he thought was going to elude him all of his Soviet life.

Once.

Alexander Barrington was coming to an end. Well, he wasn’t going to go quietly.

He put on his three military valor medals and his medal of the
Order of the Red Star
for driving a tank across the barely frozen lake, he put on his cap, sat in the chair by his bed and waited.

Alexander knew how the NKVD came for people like him. They needed to cause as little commotion as possible. They came in the middle of the night, or they came in a crowded train station while you were on your way to a Crimean resort. They came in a fish market, they came through a neighbor who wanted you to come into his room for just a sec. They asked to sit next to you in the canteen where you were having your
pelmeni
. They hemmed and hawed their way through a store and asked you to join them in the special order department. They sat next to you on a bench in the park. They were always polite and quiet and smartly dressed. The car that would pull up to the curb to take you to the Big House and the concealed pistols they carried were nowhere in sight. One woman, who had been arrested in the middle of a crowd, started to scream loudly and climbed a lamppost and continued carrying on so that even the normally indifferent passers-by stopped and stared; she made the NKVD work impossible. They had to leave her alone, and she, instead of disappearing somewhere to the middle of the country, went home to sleep, and they came for her in the night.

For Alexander they had previously come one afternoon after school. He was with a friend, and two men came up to him and told him he had forgotten about his meeting with his history teacher, could he possibly step back in for a moment and speak to him? He knew right away, he smelled their lies on them. Not budging, he grabbed his friend’s arm and shook his head. His friend left
—precipitously—
knowing when he wasn’t wanted. Alexander remained alone with the two men, reviewing his options. When he saw
the black car slowly pull up to the curb, he knew his options were narrowing. He wondered if they would shoot him in the back in broad daylight while there were other people around. He decided they wouldn’t and took off. They gave chase, but they were in their thirties, not seventeen. Alexander lost them in a few minutes, side-stepped into an alley, hid and made his way to a market near St. Nicholas church. After buying a bit of bread, he was afraid to go home. He thought they would go there next to look for him. Alexander spent the night outdoors.

The next morning he went to school, thinking he would be safe in the classroom. The principal himself brought a note to Alexander, saying he was needed in the office.

As soon as he left the room, he was grabbed and quietly taken outside and placed inside the car already waiting at the curb.

In the Big House he was beaten and then transferred to the Kresty prison where he awaited the resolution of his fate. He had few illusions.

But however they came for him tonight, Alexander knew they would not want to make a ruckus in the middle of a military hospital critical ward. The charade, the pretense they were using—of taking him across to Volkhov to be promoted to lieutenant colonel—would serve the
apparatchiks
well until they got him alone. Alexander’s goal was to make sure he did not get to Volkhov, where the facilities for his “trial” and execution were well set up. Here in Morozovo, among the inexperienced and bumbling, he had a much better chance of living.

He knew that Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code of 1928 didn’t even specify him as a political prisoner. If he was accused of crimes against the state, then he was a criminal, and would be sentenced accordingly. The code, in fourteen sections, defined his offences only in the most general terms. He didn’t need to be an American, he didn’t need to be a refugee from Soviet justice, he didn’t need to be a foreign provocateur. He didn’t need to be a spy or a flag waver. He didn’t even need to commit a crime. Intention was just as criminal and equally punishable. Intention to betray was as severely looked upon as betrayal itself. The Soviet government prided itself on this clear sign of superiority to the Western constitutions, which senselessly waited for the criminal act before meting out punishment.

All actual or intended action aimed at weakening either the Soviet state or the Soviet military strength was punishable by death. And not just action. Inaction, too, was counter-revolutionary.

And as for Tatiana…Alexander knew that one way or another, the Soviet Union would have shortened her life. Long ago Alexander had
planned to run to America—leaving her behind, the wife of a Red Army deserter. Or Alexander was going to die at the front—leaving her widowed and alone in the Soviet Union. Or his
friend
Dimitri was going to point out Alexander to the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, as indeed he had done—leaving her as Alexander Barrington’s sole survivor, the Russian wife of an American “spy” and a class enemy of the people. These were the choking choices of Alexander and the unlucky girl who became his wife.

When Mekhlis asks me who I am, am I going to salute him and say, I am Alexander Barrington and not look back?

Could he do that? Not look back?

He didn’t think he could do that.

Arriving in Moscow, 1930

Eleven-year-old Alexander felt nauseated. “What is that smell, Mom?” he asked, as the three of them entered a small, cold room. It was dark, and he couldn’t see well. When his father turned on the light, it wasn’t much better. The bulb was dim and yellow. Alexander breathed through his mouth and asked his mother again. His mother did not reply. She took off her prim hat and her coat, and then when she realized it was too cold in the room, she put her coat back on and lit a cigarette.

Alexander’s father walked around with a manly gait, touching the old dresser, the wooden table, the dusty window coverings, and said, “This is not bad. This will be great. Alexander, you have your own room, and your mother and I will stay here. Come, I’ll show you your room.”

Alexander followed him. “But the smell, Dad…”

“Don’t worry.” Harold smiled. “You know your mother will clean. Besides, it’s nothing. Just…many people living close together.” He squeezed Alexander’s hand. “It’s the smell of communism, son.”

It had been late at night when they were finally brought to their residential hotel. They had arrived in Moscow at dawn that morning after a sixteen-hour train ride from Prague. Before Prague they had traveled twenty hours by train from Paris, where they had spent two days waiting either for papers or permission or a train, Alexander wasn’t sure. He liked Paris, though. The adults were fretting, and he ignored them as much as possible. He was busy reading his favorite book,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Whenever he wanted to tune out the adults, he
opened Tom Sawyer and felt better. Then of course, his mother afterward would try to explain what had just gone on between her and his father, and Alexander wished he had a way to tell her to follow Dad’s lead and not say anything.