Tatiana and Alexander (3 page)

He didn’t need her explanations.

Except now. Now he needed an explanation. “Dad, the smell of communism? What the hell
is
that?”

“Alexander!” his father exclaimed. “What did your mother teach you? Don’t talk like that. Where do you even pick up that stuff? Your mother and I don’t use that kind of language.”

Alexander didn’t like to disagree with his father, but he wanted to remind him that every time he and his mother argued they used that kind of language—and worse. His father was always under the impression that just because the fighting didn’t concern Alexander, Alexander couldn’t hear it. As if his parents weren’t in the next room, or right next door, or even right in front of him. In Barrington, Alexander had never heard anything. His parents’ bedroom was at the opposite end of the hallway upstairs, there were rooms and doors in between, and he had never heard a thing. It was as it should be.

“Dad,” he tried again. “Please. What is that smell?”

Uncomfortable, his father replied, “That’s just the toilets, Alexander.”

Looking around his bedroom, Alexander asked where they were.

“Outside in the hall.” Harold smiled. “Look on the bright side—you won’t have to go far in the middle of the night.”

Alexander put down his backpack and took off his coat. He didn’t care how cold he was. He wasn’t sleeping in his coat. “Dad,” he said, breathing through his mouth, wanting to retch. “Don’t you know I never get up in the middle of the night? I’m a deep sleeper.”

There was a small cot with a thin wool blanket. After Harold left the room, Alexander went to the open window. It was December, well below freezing. Looking down onto the street from the second floor, Alexander noticed five people lying on the ground in one of the doorways. He left the window open. The fresh cold air would clear out the room.

Going out into the hall, he was going to use the toilet but couldn’t. He went outside instead. Coming back, he undressed and climbed into bed. The day had been long and he was asleep in seconds, but not before he wondered if capitalism had a smell also.

Arriving at Ellis Island, 1943

TATIANA STUMBLED OUT OF
bed and walked to the window. It was morning, and the nurse was going to bring the baby soon for a feed. She pushed the white curtains away. Opening the latch, she tried to lift the window, but it was stuck, the white paint having sealed the frame to the wall. She tugged on it. It popped open and she pulled it up, leaning her head outside. It was a warm morning that smelled like salt water.

Salt water. She breathed in deeply, and then she smiled. She liked that smell. It was unlike the smells that were familiar to her.

The seagulls cutting the air with their screeching were familiar.

The view was not familiar.

New York harbor in the foggy dawn was a misty glass-like expanse of greenish sea, and off in the distance she saw tall buildings, and to the right, through the pervading fog, a statue lifted its right arm in a flame salute.

With fascinated eyes, Tatiana sat by the window and stared at the buildings across the water. They were so tall! And so beautiful, and there were so many of them crowding the skyline, spires, flattops jutting out, proclaiming the mortal man to the immortal skies. The winding birds, the calmness of the water, the vastness of the buildings, and the glass harbor itself emptying out into the Atlantic.

Then the fog lifted and the sun came up into her eyes, and she had to turn away. The harbor became less glassy as ferries and tugboats, all manner of lighters and freighters, and even some yachts, started criss-crossing the bay, sounding their whistles and horns in such cacophonous delight that Tatiana thought about closing the window. She didn’t.

Tatiana had always wanted to see an ocean. She had seen the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea and she had seen many lakes—one Lake Ladoga too many—but never an ocean, and the Atlantic was an ocean on which Alexander once sailed when he was a little boy, watching fireworks on the Fourth of July. Wasn’t it Fourth of July soon? Maybe Tatiana could see some fireworks. She would have to ask Brenda, her nurse, who was
a bit of a cow, and conveyed all her information rather gruffly, the bottom part of her face—and all of her heart—covered by a mouthpiece to protect against Tatiana.

“Yes,” Brenda said. “There will be fireworks. Fourth of July is in two days. They’re not going to be like in the days before the war, but there will be some. But don’t you go worrying about fireworks. You’ve been in America less than a week and you’re asking about fireworks? You’ve got a child to protect against an infectious disease. Have you been outside for a walk today? You know the doctor told you you’ve got to take walks in the fresh air, and keep your mouth covered in case you cough on your baby, and not lift him because that will tire you out—have you been outside? And what about breakfast?” Brenda always talked too fast, Tatiana thought, almost deliberately so that Tatiana wouldn’t understand.

Even Brenda couldn’t ruin breakfast—eggs and ham and tomatoes and milky coffee (dehydrated milk or no). Tatiana ate and drank sitting on her bed. She had to admit that the sheets, the softness of the mattress and the pillows, and the thick woolen blanket were comforts like bread—crucial.

“Can I have my son now? I need to feed him.” Her breasts were full.

Brenda slammed the window shut. “Don’t open the window anymore,” she said. “Your child will catch cold.”

“Summer air will make him catch cold?”

“Yes,
moist
, wet summer air will.”

“But you just said me to go outside for walk—”

“Outside air is outside air, inside air is inside air,” Brenda said.

“He has not caught my TB,” Tatiana said, coughing loudly for effect. “Bring me my baby, please.”

After Brenda brought the baby and Tatiana fed him, she went to open the window again and then perched herself up on the window sill, cradling the infant in her arms. “Look, Anthony,” whispered Tatiana in her native Russian. “Do you see? Do you see the water? It is pretty, right? And across the harbor there is a big city with people and streets, and parks. Anthony, as soon as I am better, we will take one of those loud ferry boats and walk on the streets of New York. Would you like that?” Stroking her infant son’s face, Tatiana stared across the water.

“Your father would,” she whispered.

Morozovo, 1943

MATTHEW SAYERS APPEARED BY
Alexander’s bed at around one in the morning and stated the obvious. “You’re still here.” He paused. “Maybe they won’t take you.”

Dr. Sayers was an American and an eternal optimist.

Alexander shook his head. “Did you put my
Hero of the Soviet Union
medal in her backpack?” was all he said.

The doctor nodded.

“Hidden, as I told you?”

“As hidden as I could.”

Now it was Alexander’s turn to nod.

Sayers brought from his pocket a syringe, a vial, and a small medicine bottle. “You’ll need this.”

“I need tobacco more. Have you got any of that?”

Sayers took out a box full of cigarettes. “Already rolled.”

“They’ll do.”

Sayers showed Alexander a small vial of colorless liquid. “I’m giving you ten grains of morphine solution. Don’t take it all at once.”

“Why would I take it at all? I’ve been off it for weeks.”

“You might need it, who knows? Take a quarter of a grain. Half a grain at most. Ten grains is enough to kill two grown men. Have you ever seen this administered?”

“Yes,” said Alexander, Tania springing up in his mind, syringe in her hands.

“Good. Since you can’t start an IV, in the stomach is best. Here are some sulfa drugs, to make sure infection does not recur. A small container of carbolic acid; use it to sterilize your wound if all the other drugs are gone. And a roll of bandages. You’ll need to change the dressing daily.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

They fell silent.

“Do you have your grenades?”

Alexander nodded. “One in my bag, one in my boot.”

“Weapon?”

He patted his holster.

“They’ll take it from you.”

“They’ll have to. I’m not surrendering it.”

Dr. Sayers shook Alexander’s hand.

“You remember what I told you?” Alexander asked. “Whatever happens to me, you’ll take this”—he took off his officer cap, handing it to the doctor—“and you will write me a death certificate and you will tell her that you saw me dead on the lake and then pushed me into an ice hole, and that’s why there is no body. Clear?”

Sayers nodded. “I’ll do what I have to,” he said. “I don’t want to do it.”

“I know.”

They were grim.

“Major…what if I do find you dead on the ice?”

“You will write me a death certificate and you will bury me in Lake Ladoga. Make a sign of the cross on me before you push me in.” He shuddered slightly. “Don’t forget to give her my cap.”

“That guy, Dimitri Chernenko, is always around my truck,” Sayers said.

“Yes. He won’t let you leave without him. Guaranteed. You must take him.”

“I don’t want to take him.”

“You want to save her, don’t you? If he doesn’t come, she has no chance. So stop thinking about the things you can’t change. Just watch out for him. Trust him with nothing.”

“What do I do with him in Helsinki?”

Here Alexander allowed himself a small smile. “I’m not the one to be advising you on that one. Just—don’t do anything to endanger you or Tania.”

“Of course not.”

Alexander spoke. “You must be very careful, nonchalant, casual, brave. Leave with her as soon as you can. You’ve already told Stepanov you’re headed back?” Colonel Mikhail Stepanov was Alexander’s commander.

“I told him I’m headed back to Finland. He asked me to bring…your wife back to Leningrad. He said it would be easier for her if she left Morozovo.”

Alexander nodded. “I already spoke to him. I asked him to let her leave with you. You’ll be taking her with his approval. Good. It’ll be easier for you to leave the base.”

“Stepanov told me it’s policy for soldiers to get transported to the Volkhov side for promotions. Was that duplicity? I can’t understand anymore what’s truth and what’s a lie.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“Does he know what’s happening with you?”

“He is the one who told me what’s about to happen to me. They have to take me across the lake. They don’t have a stockade here,” Alexander explained. “But he will tell my wife what I have told her—I’m getting promoted. When the truck blows up, it will be even easier for the NKVD to go along with the official story—they don’t like to explain arrests of their commanding officers. It’s so much easier to say I’ve died.”

“But they do have a stockade here in Morozovo.” Sayers lowered his voice. “I didn’t know it was the stockade. I was asked to go check on two soldiers who were dying of dysentery. They were in a tiny room in the basement of the abandoned school. It was a bomb shelter, divided into tiny cells. I thought they had been quarantined.” Sayers glanced at Alexander. “I couldn’t even help them. I don’t know why they didn’t just let them die, they asked for me so late.”

“They asked for you just in time. This way they died under doctor’s care. An International Red Cross doctor’s care. It’s so legitimate.”

Breathing hard, Dr. Sayers asked, “Are you afraid?”

“For her,” said Alexander, glancing at the doctor. “You?”

“Ridiculously.”

Alexander nodded and leaned back against the chair. “Just tell me one thing, Doctor. Is my wound healed enough for me to go and fight?”

“No.”

“Is it going to open again?”

“No, but it might get infected. Don’t forget to take the sulfa drugs.”

“I won’t.”

Before Dr. Sayers walked away, he said quietly to Alexander, “Don’t worry about Tania. She’ll be all right. She’ll be with me. I won’t let her out of my sight until New York. And she’ll be all right then.”

Faintly nodding, Alexander said, “She’ll be as good as she can be. Offer her some chocolate.”

“You think that’ll do it?”

“Offer it to her,” Alexander repeated. “She won’t want it the first five times you ask. But she will take it the sixth.”

Before Dr. Sayers disappeared through the doors of the ward, he turned around. The two men stared at each other for a short moment, and then Alexander saluted him.

Living in Moscow, 1930

When they were first met at the train station, even before heading to their hotel they were escorted to a restaurant where they ate and drank all evening. Alexander delighted in the fact that his father was right—life seemed to be turning out just fine. The food was passable and there was plenty of it. The bread was not fresh, however, and, oddly, neither was the chicken. The butter was kept at room temperature, so was the water, but the black tea was sweet and hot, and his father even let Alexander have a sip of vodka as they all raised their crystal shot glasses, their boisterous voices yelling,
“Na zdorovye!”
or “Cheers!” His mother said, “Harold! Don’t give the child vodka, are you out of your mind?” She herself was not a drinker, and so she barely pressed the glass to her lips. Alexander drank his vodka out of curiosity, hated it instantly, his throat burning for what seemed like hours. His mother teased him. When it stopped burning, he fell asleep at the table.

Then came the hotel.

Then came the toilets.

The hotel was fetid and dark. Dark wallpaper, dark floors, floors that in places—including Alexander’s room—were not exactly at right angles with the walls. Alexander always thought they needed to be, but what did he know? Maybe the feats of Soviet revolutionary engineering and building construction had not made their mark on America yet. The way his father talked about the Soviet hope, Alexander would not have been surprised to learn that the wheel had not been invented before the Glorious October Revolution of 1917.

The bedspreads on their beds were dark, the upholstery on their couches was dark, the curtains were dark brown, in the kitchen the wood-burning stove was black, and the three cabinets were dark wood. In the adjacent rooms down the dark, badly lit hall lived three brothers from Georgia by the Black Sea, all curly dark-haired, dark-skinned and dark-eyed. They immediately embraced Alexander as one of their own, even though his skin was fair and his hair was straight. They called him Sasha, their little Georgian boy, and made him eat liquid yogurt called
kefir
, which Alexander did not just hate but loathe.

There were many Russian foods that—much to his misfortune—he discovered he loathed. Anything bathed in onions and vinegar he could not share the same table with.

Most of the Russian food placed before them by the other well-meaning compatriots of the hotel was bathed in onions and vinegar.

Except for the Russian-speaking Georgian brothers, the rest of the people on their floor did not speak much Russian at all. There were thirty other people living on the second floor of Hotel Derzhava, which meant “fortress” in Russian; thirty other people who came to the Soviet Union largely for the same reasons the Barringtons did. There was a communist family from Italy, who had been thrown out of Rome in the late twenties, and the Soviet Union took them in as their own. Harold and Alexander thought that was an honorable deed.

There was a family from Belgium, and two from England. The British families Alexander liked most because they spoke something resembling the English he knew. But Harold didn’t like Alexander continuing to speak English, nor did he like the British families very much, nor the Italians, nor really anyone on that floor. Every chance he got, Harold tried to dissuade Alexander from associating with the Tarantella sisters, or with Simon Lowell, the chap from Liverpool, England. Harold Barrington wanted his son to make friends with Soviet girls and boys. He wanted Alexander to be immersed in the Moscow culture and to learn Russian, and Alexander, wanting to please his father, did.

Harold had no problem finding employment in Moscow. During his life in America he, who didn’t
have
to work, had dabbled in everything, and though he could do few things expertly, he did many things well, and what he didn’t know he learned quickly. In Moscow the authorities placed him in a printing plant for
Pravda
, the Soviet newspaper, for ten hours a day cranking the mimeograph machine. He came home every night with his fingers ink-stained so dark blue they looked black. He could not wash the ink off.

He could have also been a roofer, but there wasn’t much new construction in Moscow—“not yet,” Harold would say, “but
very very
soon.” He could have been a road builder, but there wasn’t much road building or repairing in Moscow—“not yet, but
very very
soon.”

Alexander’s mother followed his father’s cues; she endured everything—except the shabbiness of the facilities. Alexander teased her (“Dad, do you approve of Mom’s scrubbing out the smell of the proletariat? Mom, Dad doesn’t approve, stop cleaning.”), but Jane would nonetheless spend an hour scrubbing the communal bathtub before she could get in it. She would clean the toilet every day after work—before she made dinner. Alexander and his father waited for their food.

“Alexander, I hope you wash your hands every time you leave that bathroom—”

“Mom, I’m not a child,” said Alexander. “I know to wash my hands.” He would take a long sniff. “Oh, l’eau de communism. So pungent, so strong, so—”

“Stop it. And in school, too. Wash your hands everywhere.”

“Yes, Mom.”

Shrugging, she said, “You know, no matter how bad things smell around here they’re not as bad as down the hall. Have you smelled Marta’s room?”

“How could you not? The new Soviet order is especially strong in there.”

“Do you know why it’s so bad? She and her two sons live in there. Oh, the filth, the stench.”

“I didn’t know she had two sons.”

“Oh, yes. They came from Leningrad to visit her last month and stayed for good.”

Alexander grinned. “Are you saying they’re stinking up the place?”

“Not them,” Jane replied with a repugnant sneer. “The whores they bring with them from the Leningrad rail station. Every other night they have a new harlot in there with them. And they do stink up the place.”

“Mom, you’re so judgmental. Not everyone is able to buy Chanel perfume as they pass through Paris. Maybe you should offer the whores some—for
French
cleansing.” Alexander was pleased at his own joke.

“I’m going to tell your father on you.”

Father, who was right there, said, “Maybe if you stop talking to our eleven-year-old son about whores, all would be well.”

“Alexander, darling, Merry Christmas Eve.” Having changed the subject, Jane smiled wistfully. “Dad doesn’t like us to remember the meaningless rituals—”

“It’s not that I don’t like to,” interjected Harold. “I just want them placed in their proper perspective—past and gone and unnecessary.”

“And I agree with him completely,” Jane calmly continued, “but it does get you in the chest once in a while, doesn’t it?”

“Particularly today,” said Alexander.

“Yes. Well, that’s all right. We had a nice dinner. You’ll get a present on New Year’s like all the other Soviet boys.” She paused. “Not from Father Christmas, from us.” Another pause. “You don’t believe in Santa Claus anymore, do you, son?”

“No, Mom,” Alexander said slowly, not looking at his mother.

“Since when?”

“Since just now,” he replied, standing up and gathering the plates off the table.

Jane Barrington found work lending books at a university library but after a few months was transferred to the reference section, then to the maps, then to serving lunch in the university cafeteria. Every night, after cleaning the toilets, she cooked a Russian dinner for her family, once in a while lamenting the lack of mozzarella cheese, the absence of olive oil to make good spaghetti sauce, or of fresh basil, but Harold and Alexander didn’t care. They ate the cabbage and the sausage and the potatoes and the mushrooms, and black bread rubbed with salt, and Harold requested that Jane learn how to make a thick beef borscht in the tradition of good Russian women.

Alexander was asleep when his mother’s shouting woke him. He reluctantly got out of his bed and came into the hall. His mother in her white nightgown was yelling obscenities at one of Marta’s sons, who was skulking down the hall not turning around. In her hands, Jane held a pot.

“What’s going on?” said Alexander. Harold had not gotten up.