Bellagrand: A Novel (63 page)

Then why are we going? he wanted to ask, but his mother was sleeping. Perhaps the answer was the same as the one she had given him a while back, after his father was arrested, and she was arrested, too, because she had been by his side. Alexander had stayed on his own in their apartment until he thought to call Aunt Esther to come and get him. Thank goodness the telephone was still working then. His mother had returned home after four days, but wouldn’t bail out his father. When Harry had finally come home after a month in jail, she was as livid with him as if the wounds were still freshly bleeding. Why do we stay? Alexander asked her that night, after their terrible fighting had subsided, a violent squall dispersing into scattered showers.

And she said, I stay because I love him. I stay because he is my family. Because you deserve to have a father. Everywhere he goes, I go. He is the ship, Alexander. We are just passengers.
Condividiamo l’amarezza.

What if the ship goes down?

We go down, too. When I am dead and opened, his mother had said, the bitter tears still wet in her eyes, you will find your father lying on my heart.

Tonight on the train she said to Harry before she slept, “Let’s hope Macbeth was wrong, husband.
All our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.”

“Who is Macbeth?” Alexander asked.

Harry waved away his mother’s stab at an answer.

“Instead of teaching our son Shakespearean overdramatized nonsense, why don’t you tell him
why
we’re going. Tell him instead about Maxim Gorky’s greatest prose poem, ‘The Snake and the Falcon.’ ”

“Ah, dear Maxim again,” Gina said. “He of the lyrical descriptions of peaceful Arctic retreats for enemies of Bolshevism.” She folded her hands on her lap. “You know it so much better, Harry. Why don’t
you
tell it?”

Harry got up and squeezed in between Gina and Alexander. Putting his arms around his wife and son, kissing one, then the other, he told Alexander a story. “The snake doesn’t understand the falcon. ‘Why don’t you rest here in the dark, in the good slimy moisture?’ the snake sibilates. ‘Why soar to the heavens? Don’t you know the dangers lurking there, the stress and storm awaiting you, the hunter’s gun that will bring you down and destroy your life?’ But the falcon ignores the serpent. It spreads its mighty wings and soars through the skies, its triumphant song resounding ’cross the heavens. One day the falcon is brought down, blood streaming from its heart, and the snake slithers to him and hisses: ‘You fool. I warned you. I told you to stay where I am, in the dark, in the good warm moisture, where no one could find you and harm you.’ With its last breath, the falcon replies: ‘I have soared through the skies, I have scaled dazzling heights, I have beheld the light, I have lived, I have lived!’ ”

“That’s all I wanted my life entire,” Alexander’s now sleeping mother had said. “To be the falcon, and not the serpent.”

Alexander could barely make out the churches in the open valleys between the hills, the low lights, the spires, and the evergreens, all shadow, but for the white crosses lit up by the dim evening lamps. The train raced on, not stopping in the small towns near the hills, towns much like the ones a young girl named Gina Attaviano left behind when she first sailed across the ocean.
That sea I loved,
Alexander whispered, reaching for the faint fading memory of Spanish carnivals and merry carousels,
and once or twice, I touched at isles of paradise.

Epilogue

1936

W
HERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
God!” Harold paces frantically through the kitchen. “You and your mother have been gone for days! Are you going to answer me? I’ve been worried sick. I was out of my mind. I didn’t know what to think.”

Gina is already inside, crumpled, lying down.

“Is your mother all right? She looks . . .”

“She’s fine, Dad, just tired.”

“I thought the worst. Why would you do that to me? I thought the
worst
.”

“And what would that be? Please—tell me.”

“Don’t start again. My God!” Other than this Harold doesn’t answer, can’t answer.

Father and son eventually calm down enough to sit at a wobbly table in the communal kitchen.

Alexander looks awful, and knows it. He is unshaven, haggard, exhausted. But his white-with-anxiety father doesn’t look great either. He looks as if he hasn’t shaved or eaten since his wife and son left.

Alexander agonizes over whether or not to tell his father the truth. Had they succeeded, had his mother succeeded in getting him inside the American consulate, he and his father would not be having this one-sided quarrel. It had felt wrong to Alexander to just up and go without a word to his father, not so much as a note on a scrap of paper. As if there had been no life before the bleak day they took the train from Leningrad to Moscow, no happy summer in Krasnaya Polyana, no hockey on Frog Pond, no fishing, no love. His mother had said, you can write him a long letter
full
of words when you’re out. But he isn’t out. He’s trying to figure out if there is still a need for words.

In the end Alexander says nothing. He doesn’t have the heart to tell his father they have been to Moscow, with his mother’s single desperate failed mission to save her son betraying everything his father has held most dear. Alexander knows what his mother has sacrificed with her plea to the Americans. He fears that the three of them have become duly marked, an endangered species, foreigners, spies, saboteurs, traitors. It’s best his father doesn’t know. He has the most to lose, so vocally the Soviets’ most ardent defender all these years.

Alexander is afraid for his mother. He doesn’t want Harold to lose his temper again. His mother is helpless these days and can’t take Harold’s anger. Alexander is not helpless, but he can’t take it either. He doesn’t want them to have another ugly scene. Lord knows there have been enough of them. Alexander lies to protect his mother and to comfort his father. He lies to give them a fraction of peace on what might be the last calm night, the last calm day. On some level he has to admit he feels relieved. It had felt so wrong to flee, to leave his father behind, oblivious and unknowing. It had felt like abandonment. Like betrayal.

“You’re not leaving him behind!” his mother told him, crying, trying to persuade him. “You’re leaving him with me. That’s his place, and it’s my place, too. With him.
I’m
not going. Only you. I made my life. Not you. Your father made his life. Not you.” Sobs filled the long gaps between her words.

And although Alexander is sandpapered raw with anxiety for what’s ahead, he is grateful to see his father again.

He tells Harold he took his mother to Pulkovo, to a sanatorium, to dry her out.

“You took her for three days to Pulkovo?” Harold repeats it slowly as if he doesn’t believe it. “To dry her out?”

“They wouldn’t take her.”

“No?” He scrutinizes Alexander.

“They said she wasn’t sick enough.”

“If your mother is not sick, the word has no meaning.”

Alexander says nothing. He doesn’t understand how his once perfect mother could have fallen so deep into the liquid abyss of the bottomless bottle.

“So it wasn’t a success?”

All Alexander hears is his mother pleading, screaming, crying into the closed face of the consulate guard, as he keeps trying to pull her away,
Please please please help him, we have money, a place to live, help him, help him, help him—

“No, Dad. It was a complete failure.”

Silence. Then from Harold, an echo of Alexander’s own heart, only broken: “What a shame.”

Alexander stares at his father in troubled confusion. Harold’s hands are shaking, his lips are trembling. Alexander can see his father struggling with disbelief, with anguished suspicion. Yet his father’s tortured, exhausted gaze is softened, as his mother’s is softened, by the wellspring of devotion for their only child. Harold’s entire lined countenance seems to grow younger as he gazes at his son, mines his son’s face so intensely, as if, Alexander doesn’t know what, as if Harold is trying to carve the boy’s features into the marble of his memory.

“What is it, Dad?”

“Nothing.” Harold blinks, but doesn’t look away. “You don’t look well.”

“I know. We were on the trains too long.”

“Pulkovo is only a few hours away,” Harold says quietly. “Really, how long could it have been?”

Without a pause: “We were stopped forever between stations.”

“Ah. Perhaps they were fixing the railroad.”

“Or building it.”

Lightly they both nod, no rueful smiles between them.

“Where did you sleep for two nights?”

“On a park bench.”

His father reels away from the table. “You and your
mother
slept on a bench?” Old before his time, Harold lowers his head and stares elsewhere for understanding, for truth, for illusion. “
Everything is mud
,” he whispers.

Alexander forces himself to clear his throat. Reaching out, he puts his hand over his father’s, pats him gently. “Dad, it’s fine. We’re making the best of it. She is not as sick as we feared. That’s good, right? Listen, I’m sorry, but . . . is there any food? I’m starving.”

Harold leaps up, grateful to be spurred into feeble action. He throws some wood inside the stove and in a few minutes is frying up some potatoes with onions. Alexander can’t wait. Standing by his father’s side, he eats straight from the pan, the potatoes half raw, laden with salt and pepper. He
inhales
the food, swallows it almost without chewing.

“There is never enough food, never.”

“It’s terrible to be hungry,” agrees Harold.

“I can’t wait until the Red Army takes me. They feed their soldiers well.”

“Please, God, don’t joke. Now is
not
the time.”

Alexander swears. “I’m such an idiot. Did I eat all there is?”

Harold shakes his head. “No, I ate earlier. Eat, son, eat.”

They stand in the silent kitchen. His back stooped, Harold steps away, watching his son scrape clean the cast-iron pan with a wooden spoon. Eventually he takes the empty pan away. “It’ll get better. Sit. I’ll make you some tea. I just got a second job. Nights and weekends. I’ll be making a few extra rubles.”

“What are you doing?”

“Carpentry, believe it or not. Benches, tables.” Harold smiles. “I
know
. Don’t look so shocked. Amazing, though, isn’t it? The past always catches up with us.”

“Doesn’t it just. Grandpa would be proud of you.”

“You think so?” Harold shakes his head. “Why do I doubt it?”

Alexander rattles the rickety table. “Perhaps they can find you a spirit level at your new job?” He smiles.

“Hey, my table is perfectly level,” says Harold. “This floor is uneven.” His mouth twists. “In any case,” he quickly carries on, “we’ll have extra for food. You know my friend Slava? He says he can get us white bread. And for a hundred rubles, even some meat. We’ll save. Maybe for your seventeenth birthday next month we’ll have enough to celebrate with a half-kilo of pork. Would you like that?”

Alexander says nothing for a few moments.

“How much would you need? To get food.”

Harold shrugs. “I don’t know, two hundred? For pork, some bread. And chocolate.” He smacks his lips. “It’s been such a long time since I’ve had chocolate. Never thought I’d miss it as I do. I’m drooling just thinking about it.”

Alexander watches his father, affection etched on his young face. Reaching into the inner breast pocket of his parka, he peels off a few bills from the hidden stash inside.

“Here.” He slides four hundred rubles across the table as if he’s playing poker. Years ago, when they were still living in Moscow, desperately hungry, they had changed half of his mother’s money into rubles on the black market. They spent nearly all of them on food.

Harold stares at the money as if he’s never seen rubles before. “Where did you get this?”

“When Mom was still working at the Leningrad library,” Alexander says, “I would make her give it to me, so she wouldn’t spend it unwisely.” Father and son look away from each other. They both can’t bear to think about what’s been happening to their wife and mother. “So take it and buy us some food from Slava. Not in May, but now. I need food now. Get it, but hurry back, and we’ll have a feast. Get some
kvas
to drink. Get some butter, too. We’ll eat like kings. I’ll wake Mom when you come back. She’ll be happy to have a little butter with her white bread.”

Slowly, Harold reaches for the money. “I understand nothing,” he says. “I can’t save fifty rubles, but you can take four hundred from your barely working mother?”

“Mom and I don’t have bills to pay, Dad,” Alexander says. “You do.”

“You’re sitting in front of me with more money than I make in six months. What’s going on?”

I don’t know what’s going on, Alexander thinks. “What don’t you understand?”

“I’ll tell you what I don’t understand. Why didn’t you use it to buy yourself food? Why are you coming back ravenous with a fistful of rubles?”

Alexander squeezes his father’s hand that’s clutching the money. “We didn’t want to eat without you,” he says. “Now will you stop asking questions and go? You go, and I’ll wait.”

Harold gets up. He puts on his coat and hat, and before leaving the kitchen where Alexander sits, shadowed, solemn, studying the grain of the square table, he walks over to his son, leans to him, pats his stubbled cheek, and kisses his black head. “You’re a good boy, bud.”

“I know. And you’re a good dad. But you’d be a better one if you brought back some grub.”

In the crooked doorway, Harold glances back. “I just want to say . . .”

Alexander tensely waits.

Tears spring to Harold’s eyes. Alexander looks away.

Black moments tick by.

“I don’t know where you went. You don’t want to tell me. That’s fine. But I hope you and your mother didn’t do anything stupid to put you in danger. I told you how careful you must be. You saw what happened to Mario and Viktor.”

Alexander turns toward the darkened window. “How can I not be in danger, Dad?” One of the glass panes is cracked, and the cold April wind is whistling through. “I’m the man without a country.”

Harold nearly doesn’t continue; his legs won’t hold him. “
You
are your country now!” He opens wide his hands, then makes a shape like a barricade. “Build walls around you, a fortress. Arm yourself. Protect yourself. Find a way to keep yourself.”

For a moment they stare wordlessly at one another.

“Son, promise me you’ll find a way.”

“I want to be ignorant of all mysteries, but free,” Alexander says.

Harold leaves to get his family butter and bread from the black market with the rubles his wife had stockpiled, just in case.

Like a statue Alexander fruitlessly remains, palms down, into the long night.

What did his father say to him in Russian just before he left? Quoting his mother quoting Isaiah.
I have engraved you on the palms of my hands
.
Your walls are ever before me.