Tatiana and Alexander (17 page)

“You survived.”

“Because I served only two years, and they let me out. I exceeded my production quota for five quarters in a row. They were pleased with my capitalist productivity. They thought the proletariat in me had worked hard enough for the common man.”

Once Alexander placed Vladivostok on a map of the Soviet Union, he knew that, though he had no money and no home, he had to escape if he were to have any chance of living. The city was in the bowels of the world, and if there was a Hades on earth, then to him Vladivostok seemed it. To travel by cattle train through the Ural Mountains, through the west Siberian plain, through the central Siberian plateau, past all of Mongolia, and around all of China to rot in an industrial cement city on a thin strip of land on the shores of the Sea of Japan. Alexander was sure there was no return from the catacomb that was Vladivostok.

For a thousand kilometers Alexander looked out of the small porthole in the train, or out of the doors the guards sometimes left open to give the prisoners some air. He saw his chance when they were coming up to cross the River Volga. I will jump, he thought. The Volga was far down below, the wobbly rail bridge high over a precipice, maybe thirty meters high, a hundred feet by American standards. Alexander didn’t know much about the Volga; was it rocky? Was it deep? Was it fast? But he saw it was wide,
and he knew it emptied a thousand kilometers south in Astrakhan into the Caspian Sea. He didn’t know if he would get another—better—chance. But he knew that if he managed to survive the Volga, he could make his way into one of the southern republics, Georgia, maybe, or Armenia, and then cross the border into Turkey. He wished he had his mother’s American dollars. After they returned from the failed trip to Moscow he had put the book back in the library and then was arrested so quickly he never had a chance to retrieve it. But even without the money, he knew escape or death were his only choices.

He looked down and his stomach twisted. Could he survive? It struck him that he didn’t want to die. He remembered William Miller in Barrington. Nice, blond, popular William Miller. Had been taking swimming lessons since he was five weeks old. He could jump and somersault and hold his breath under water, he could outswim and outjump any other kid in Barrington, including Alexander, who certainly didn’t shy away from trying. And then one summer afternoon when they were eight, they were playing Tarzan in the Olympic-sized pool at William’s house, jumping cannonball into the deep end, into what was supposed to be twelve feet of water. William jumped from a diving board
two
feet high into twelve feet of water. But what William didn’t consider was large-boned Ben down the street, who, at the moment of William’s ill-timed upside-down cannonball, was treading water too close to the diving board. William saw Ben just a millisecond too late and lurched to the left to avoid Ben’s substantial form. William’s head hit the concrete wall of the pool, snapped and popped, and from then on William Miller was wheeled around by a twenty-four-hour-a-day nurse and was fed through a tube in his stomach. Strange? Could it be any more strange than a seventeen-year-old boy, nearly six foot three and 180 pounds, throwing himself down one hundred feet into what might be eight feet of water with boulders for a bottom? Alexander couldn’t recite the immutable laws of physics on that one, but something was telling him they were not in his favor. There was no time to panic and no time to think. He knew he could be jumping to his death. He knew it. His stomach knew it. His exploding heart knew it. But this death would at least be quick. He crossed himself. In Vladivostok he would be dying for the rest of his life.

He mouthed,
help me God
, and jumped from the train with only the prison clothes he was wearing.

A hundred feet was a long way to fall, though it took but a few seconds; the train was nearly on the other side of the river by the time he
reached the water. He had jumped feet first and hoped the Volga was deep enough to withstand his fall. It was. It was also cold and very fast. The river current grabbed him and carried him half a kilometer, fighting the whole way for a gulp of air, and by the time he turned his head to the bridge, the train was just a speck in the distance. It didn’t look as if it had stopped. He wasn’t sure if anyone even noticed, except for the convict next to him, who had been smirking from Leningrad to the Volga, and muttering, “A strapping young lad, just wait till Vladivostok, wait to see what’ll become of ya.”

He didn’t want to risk getting out of the water until he could no longer see the bridge. He swam with the current, maybe five kilometers, and finally became tired and crawled out. It was summer and drying off was quick. Alexander dug some potatoes out of the ground, ate them raw, took off his clothes, made himself a bed out of leaves, and a lean-to canopy out of twigs (thank God for Cub Scouts) and then slept. When he woke up, his clothes were damp and his legs sore. He didn’t know how to make himself new clothes, so he built a fire, dried the clothes and turned them inside out, so the prison gray wouldn’t be as clearly visible. He smeared green leaves all over himself to further disguise the color, some mud, some strawberry pulp, and when the clothes were unrecognizable as having been issued by the NKVD, he set out again, staying close to the river.

Alexander traveled downstream on the Volga on barges and fishing boats, offering his fishing services until one fisherman asked him for his domestic passport. After that, Alexander veered away, walking deeper inland, hoping to find his way to the mountains between Georgia and Turkey. He stayed away from fisherman and from farmers—he knew sooner or later someone from whom he could not get away would ask for his domestic passport. His had been taken from him, and he had been issued a prison workbook; certainly he could not have shown that. He burned it.

Traveling without accepting help had the great disadvantage of slowness. Walking would only get him thirty or less kilometers a day. Alexander had to risk hitching rides in horse carriages to get south a little faster.

It was the fifteen-year-old girl working in the fields through which he was passing who stopped him. Long enough to ask for a drink, to ask for some bread, to ask if there was any work he could do to make some spare cash. She brought him home by the hand to her open-hearted parents. She of the large warm calloused farmer’s hand, she of the thick long light-brown hair, the round face, the round flesh, the perspiration around the neck and the arms, and a glistening chest
on which a small gold cross lay, nearly horizontally, so healthy and young was she.

Alexander didn’t get as far as Georgia. He ended up staying in Belyi Gor, a village near Krasnodar by the Black Sea, still in the republic of Russia where—because he had noticed Larissa and it was August and harvesting season—he offered his fieldhand services to the farmer’s family, the Belovs. Yefim and Maritza Belov had four sons, Grisha, Valery, Sasha, Anton, and a daughter.

The Belovs had no room for him in their small farmhouse, but he stayed gladly in the barn, slept on hay, worked from sunup to sundown and at night thought about Larissa. She smiled at him with her parted mouth, pretending to be constantly out of breath. Alexander knew it was a ruse, but it worked, for he had been starved and needed feeding. His body had been too tense for too long, on the run and on guard. Larissa was the promise of relief.

But Alexander stayed away. Her brothers were not the trifling types. Working in the fields digging potatoes, carrots, onions, threshing wheat for the collective farm or
kolkhoz
without the help of animals had made them like oxen, and living around their adolescent, tumescent, eager sister had made them more than a little wary of migrant workers like Alexander, who took off their shirts and worked in their trousers, getting slicker and more tanned by each sun-drenched day. Alexander was seventeen, but he looked like a man and ate like a man, and worked like a man. In all ways, he had the appetites of a man and the heart of one. Larissa saw it. The brothers saw it. He stayed away. He offered to make hay bales. He offered to chop winter wood for the family. He offered to build them a new—bigger—table, hoping he would remember from the childhood days with his father what it was like to use the saw, a plane, hammer and nails. He offered all this, hoping his work would keep him out of the fields and in the barn.

Of course the more Alexander remained aloof, the more Larissa pushed forward, becoming as brazen as a fifteen-year-old girl could get living in a small farmhouse with her parents and four brothers.

It was late August in scorching Krasnodar by the Black Sea. And one afternoon when he was in the barn tying up the hay into neat stacks, he saw the light stream on the ground and when he turned around, the light stream was gone, blacked out by Larissa who stood in front of him.

In his hands he held a pitchfork, a ball of twine, and a knife. She asked him in a low voice what he was doing. Making hay bales, he was
going to reply, but realized she knew and he didn’t have to say a word. Under different circumstances, he would have not stopped himself. He could barely stop himself now. But the girl was trouble; he felt it.

“Larissa, this is going to end in no good,” he said.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, sauntering closer. She was barefoot and was wearing what was barely a dress. “It’s godlessly hot out there. I came in for a little shade in the middle of the day. You don’t mind, do you?”

He turned his back to her, bending to the hay. “Your brothers will kill me.”

“Why would they do that? You’re working so hard. They’ll applaud you.” She came closer. He could smell the summer sweat on her body. She inhaled. She could smell his.

“Stop.”

She took another step toward him and stopped. His back was still to her but with his peripheral vision he saw her jump on top of a wooden stable gate. “I’ll just sit here and watch you,” he heard her say.

He watched
her
for a moment, and then went back to his work. His body was nearly giving out. In one moment, he thought, in one moment, I could have such sweet relief, and it would take but a moment. No harm done. She was close enough to him that he could smell her farm fresh body, her washed hair, her breath. He closed his eyes momentarily.

“Alexander,” she said huskily. “Look. I want to show you something.”

Aching, reluctant, desperate, he looked. She slowly pulled up her skirt and slightly opened her legs. Her hips were just below Alexander’s eye level. His gaze stopped between her bare thighs. A groan escaped him.

“Come here, Alexander.”

He came. Pushing her hands away, he stood between her legs, and pulled down her dress to expose her body. Panting, perspiring, ravenous, he raised his head to her lips and then feverishly bent to her breasts, while his fingers caressed her, the softness, the warmth…she was moaning as she clutched the bar—and then laughter sounded right outside the barn, and Larissa tried to push Alexander away. He wasn’t moving from her.

Larissa shoved him hard, jumping down from the beam, and the light was on the grass, and Grisha, her oldest brother, came in and said, “Larisska, there you are, I’ve been looking all over for you. Get out of here. Stop trying to corrupt our Alexander. Can’t you see he’s got real
work to do? Go to Mama. She wants to know why you haven’t gotten the cows from the pasture yet. The
kolkhoznik
will be here for the milk soon.”

“I’m going,” said Larissa, walking past Alexander. Grisha left first, and before Larissa disappeared she turned around and with a delicious smile on her face whispered, “Alexander, next time we won’t be interrupted and my mouth will be
all
over you, I promise. And afterward I will call you Shura, instead of Sasha like my brother. Just you wait.”

Alexander could think about nothing else for the rest of the day, or the evening, or certainly the night alone in his barn. But the next day something happened that stopped him from self-immolation. It was Larissa’s pale face in the morning. When he approached her, she put her hands up and without looking at him said, “I’m not feeling well.”

“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ll make you feel better.”

She pushed him weakly away and, without glancing at him, said, “Stay away, Alexander. Do yourself a favor. Stay away from me.”

Perplexed he went to do his work. He didn’t see her for the rest of the day, but in the evening during dinner, Larissa’s now extremely pale face was accompanied by fever. The fever was higher the following evening and was miserably followed by a red raised rash on her face a day later.

Oh no, the grown-ups said in a panic. She is
sick
.

And then came Alexander’s fever and his rash, but by the time he was sick, no one said
oh no
in a panic. Because the horseman of the apocalypse sat atop a pale horse that they all knew was typhus, the incurable, contagious, deadly pestilence. The headache that preceded the onset of the disease was so severe, so throbbing, so eye-poppingly wretched that by the time the 105°F fever and the scabby, scratchy, inflamed rash came, Alexander welcomed the distracting delirium that accompanied it. The brothers were feverish and Larissa was hemorrhaging, and then the parents were delirious, and Larissa was dead. One minute pressed against Alexander’s burning hands, the next dead and unburied as they were all too weak to dig a hole for her, and so she lay in the
izba
, and they all panted feebly and waited for the horseman to come for them. And it did.

In the end, only Larissa’s father, Yefim, and Alexander remained. They had not been outside in many days, weeks maybe? They held on to each other and drank water, and prayed, and Alexander started praying in English, mixing it with Russian, pleading for peace, for his mother and father, pleading for their lives, praying for America, for health, for his life, for his mother, for Teddy, Belinda, Boston, Barrington, for the woods, for death finally because he couldn’t take it anymore,
and then he saw Yefim’s tormented eyes watching him, felt Yefim’s hand on him, heard Yefim’s bleeding mouth whispering to him, “Son, don’t die, don’t die here like this. Go back to your father and mother. Find your way back home. Where is your home, son?”