Tatiana and Alexander (47 page)

“Oh, Tania,” Isabella whispered. “How can I help you?”

Tatiana stood up. “You can’t help me.” She called for Anthony, taking her bag from the floor. “Must be pleasant to see things so clearly. Well, why not? You are still with Travis. Your faith is easy—you have living proof right here.”

“And you do, too—here he is,” said Isabella, pointing at Anthony
who came bounding out of the den, leaped into his mother’s arms and said, “Mama, I want ice krrreeeem for dinner.”

“All right, son,” said Tatiana.

And he did.

“Mama, how come Timothy has a daddy, and Ricky has a daddy, and Sean has a daddy, too?”

“Honey, what’s your question?” They were walking to school near Battery Park. It was Anthony’s second week in playgroup. Tatiana was intent on introducing Anthony to more children his own age. She thought he was around grown-ups too much. Around Isabella too much. His brow was creased in an adult manner; Tatiana didn’t like it. He spoke too fluently, he was too pensive, too solemn for a boy of two and half. She thought playgroup would do him good.

And now this.

“Why I don’t have a daddy?”

“Baby, you have daddy. He is just not here. Just like Mickey’s daddy, and Bobby’s daddy, and Phil’s, too. Their daddies aren’t here, and their mommies take care of them. You’re lucky. You have your mommy, and Vikki and Isabella—”

“Mama, when is Daddy going to come back? Ricky’s daddy came back. He walks him to school in the morning.”

Tatiana stared into the middle distance.

“Ricky wished for his dad for Christmas. Maybe I can wish for my dad for Christmas.”

“Maybe,” whispered Tatiana.

Anthony didn’t let his mother kiss him at the doors of the school or walk him inside. Squaring his shoulders and creasing his solemn brow, he went through the doors himself, carrying his small lunch bag.

The four stages of grief. First there was shock. And then there was denial. That lasted until this morning. Today, onward to the next stage. Anger. When will acceptance come?

She was so angry at him. He knew perfectly well she didn’t want this life without him. Did he think that she’d be better off in America
amid post-war small appliances and radios and the promise of a television than she would have been in the Gulag?

Well, wait. What about Anthony? The boy is not a specter. He is a real boy, he would have been born regardless. What would have happened to him?

She looked into the water on the harbor. How long would it take me to jump and swim, swim like the last fish in the ocean to where it’s winter and the water is cold? I would swim slower and slower and slower, and then I would stop, and maybe on the other side of life he would be waiting for me with his hand outstretched, saying what took you so long to come to me, Tatia? I’ve been waiting and waiting.

She stepped away from the railing of the boat. No. On the other side, he is looking at me, shaking his head, saying, Tania, look at Anthony, he is the perfect son. How lucky you are to lay your hands on him. How I wish I could. Wherever I am—know that’s what I’m thinking. How I wish I could touch my boy.

Anthony needed his mother. Anthony could not be an orphan, not here in America, not there in the Soviet Union. His mother couldn’t abandon him, too. That sweet boy, with his sticky hands, with his chocolate mouth and his black hair. Tatiana coiled when she looked at, when she touched his black hair.

“Shura, let me wash your hair for you,” she says, sitting on the ground, looking out onto the clearing.

“Tania, it’s clean. We just washed this morning.”

“Come on, please. Let’s go swim. Let me wash it for you.”

“All right. Only if I can wash—”

“You can do whatever you like. Just come.”

She coiled every time she looked at her son.

That night she went out on the fire escape, without a coat or a hat, and sat mutely breathing in the cold ocean air. It smelled so good.

“Alexander,” Tatiana whispered. “Are you there? Can you hear me? Can you see me?” Up on the fire escape, she lifted her arms to the sky. “How am I doing? Better, right?” She nodded to herself. Better.

New York, every day pulsing as if indeed it was the heartbeat of the world. No dim-out at night anymore, every building illuminated like endless fireworks. There was not a street that was not teeming with people, a
street where the manholes were not open, where steam wasn’t coming out of the underground, an avenue where the men didn’t sit on top of telephone poles and electrical poles, laying new pipe, hanging new wire, breaking down the El. The constant clang of construction, every day from seven in the morning, along with the sirens and the buses, and the honking horns and the yellow cabs. The stores were filled with merchandise, the coffee shops with donuts, the diners with bacon, stores with books and records and Polaroid cameras, music poured every night from the bars and the cafés, oh, and lovers, too, under trees, on benches, lovers in uniform and in suits and in doctors’ coats and nurses’ shoes. And in Central Park where they went every weekend, each blade of grass had a family on it. The lake had a hundred boats in the daytime.

But then there was night.

In the ocean, her arm outstretched to God, was Lady Liberty and on the fire escape was Tatiana, sitting in the three-in-the-morning air, listening across the ocean for the breathing of one man.

The fire embers are flickering out. He is finally done. Not only is he done, but asleep, too. He hasn’t moved off her. He had exhausted himself and, spent, nuzzled for a few moments and fell soundly asleep. She doesn’t even try to move him. He is heavy, what bliss. He is on top of her, so close. She can smell him and kiss his wet hair, and his stubbly cheek. She caresses his arms. It’s sinful for her to love his muscled arms so much. “Shura,” she whispers. “Can you hear me, soldier?”

She doesn’t sleep, for a long time cradling him to her, listening to him breathe, hearing the wood turn to ashes and the sound of the crackling rain outside and willowy wind, while inside it is warm, dim, cozy. She listens to his happy breathing. When he sleeps he is still happy. He is not bothered by bad dreams, by sadness. He is not tormented when he sleeps. He is breathing. So peaceful. So fulfilled. So alive.

Why did her present life suddenly start to feel so desperate? On the surface, there was so much. But under the surface she felt herself settling in—as if, as if—

She could close her eyes and imagine life…

Without him.

Imagine forgetting him.

The war was over.

Russia was over.

Leningrad was over.

And Tatiana and Alexander were over, too.

Now she had words to dull her senses. English words, a new name, and covering it all like a warm blanket, a new life in amazing, immoderate, pulsating
America
. A sparkling new identity in a gilded immense new country. God had made it as easy as possible to forget him. To you, I give this, God said. I give you freedom and sun, and warmth, and comfort. I give you summers in Sheep Meadow and Coney Island, and I give you Vikki, your friend for life, and I give you Anthony, your son for life, and I give you Edward, in case you want love again. I give you youth and I give you beauty, in case you want someone other than Edward to love you. I give you New York. I give you seasons, and Christmas! And baseball and dancing and paved roads and refrigerators, and a car, and land in Arizona. I give it all to you. All I ask, is that you forget him and take it.

Her head bowed, Tatiana took it.

A week would fly by, filled with work and the people in whose eyes she could see what she meant to them, and filled with Edward, in whose eyes Tatiana could see what she meant to him, and with blessed, impossible Vikki. Tatiana endlessly saw in Vikki’s eyes what she meant to Vikki. They went to the pictures and took in Broadway shows, and advanced nursing classes at NYU. Tatiana got dressed up in high heels and pretty dresses and went to Ricardo’s, and it was there that she would realize she had lived another week, almost as if she were
meant
to, as if Alexander were indeed becoming…remote.

There was a settling of the stellar dust. Soon the first love would fall into the recesses of memory, like childhood, it would all fall through the cracks in the cement of life, and weeds would grow over it.

But every morning, Tatiana took the ferry to Ellis, and as the boat broke the water of the harbor, she saw Alexander’s eyes, showing her what she had meant to him. Every day of forgetting, of wanting life, was another day of his eyes telling her what she had meant to him.

America, New York, Arizona, the end of war, feverish reconstruction, a baby boom, dancing, her high-heeled shoes, her painted lips—what
she
had meant…

To
him
.

What would she have, had she meant
less
to him? Why, nothing. She would have the Soviet Union, that’s what. Fifth Soviet, two rectangular
rooms, and a domestic passport, and maybe a
dacha
in the summers for her child. She would be fifth in line forever, pulling the quilted hat down over her ears in the blizzard.

Every day of forgetting was a day of increased remorse. How could you forget me so quick, she thought Alexander was saying to her, when I have paid for you with my life?

Quick?

She was getting tiresome even to herself. Quick.

Quicksand into the earth.

Quicksilver into the water.

Quick quick quick, forget him so you can lie down with Jeb. Forget, Tania, so you can lie down with your third and fourth and fifth, Alexander is dead; hi ho, hi ho.

The months, the months, the months, the months.

Alexander, Alexander, Alexander, Alexander.

Tania, Tania
…

That’s you, I know, that’s the pitiless horseman calling me back, calling me back to….

Lazarevo…

We lived it in our rapture and abandon as if we knew even then it had to last us our whole life.

Do you see our rumpled bed, our kerosene lamp? Do you see the kettle of water I boiled for you and do you see the counter top you had built for me, for the potatoes we never got, and for our cabbage pie? Do you see the cigarettes I rolled for you and the clothes I washed for you and do you see my hands on you, and my lips, and my ear pressing against your chest to listen to your beating heart, tell me, do you see all this before you and around you and inside you, too?

God keep you if you are alive, you unrelenting Alexander.

But if you are an angel watching over me, don’t come here, don’t follow me into the Superstition Mountains, don’t come here where it’s black around me and cold. I live in the desert, watching the winds and the wildflowers in the spring.

Don’t go here.

Come with me instead to the place I fly to, follow me over the oceans and the seas and the rivers between us, take my hand and let me lead you down through the pine cones, through the pine needles to wet
our feet with the River Kama, as the sun peeks over the barren edges of the Urals, promising us one more day, and one less day every sunrise times twenty-nine, one more day, one less day, and gone again. Come with me into the river, flow with me as you and I swim across to the other shore against the rushing current. You swim slightly afraid I’m going to be carried away downstream into the Caspian Sea. I call
swim faster, faster,
and you smile and swim faster, your eyes on me. You’re always just ahead, your shining face to me. Come with me there for one more morning, one more fire, one more cigarette, one more swim, one more smile, one more, one more, one more,
alskär
into the eternity we call Lazarevo, my Alexander.

Oranienburg, Germany, 1945

ALEXANDER DIDN’T KNOW WHAT
month it was when the train finally stopped for good and they were told to get out. He had long been removed from Ouspensky and chained to a small, blond, pleasant lieutenant Maxim Misnoy, who spoke little and slept much. Ouspensky, with a broken jaw, now traveled in a different car.

During their time on the train, Maxim Misnoy told Alexander a little about his life. He had volunteered for the front when the Germans invaded Russia in 1941. By 1942, Misnoy had yet to be issued a revolver for his empty holster. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans four times and escaped three times. He was liberated from Büchenwald by the Americans, but, being a loyal Red Army soldier, traveled to the Elbe to join the Russians in the Battle of Berlin. For his heroism, he had been given the
Order of the Red Star
. In Berlin afterward he was apprehended and sentenced to fifteen years for treason. He was too pleasant to be angry about it.

After alighting from the train, they were made to march in double file for two kilometers through a road in the woods to a path in the tall trees that led to a white ornate gatehouse. They passed a large yellow house before the gates. On top of the gatehouse was a clock, and flanking the clock were two machine-gun sentries.

“Büchenwald?” Alexander asked Misnoy.

“No.”

“Auschwitz?”

“No, no.”

The iron lettering on the gate read
“Arbeit Macht Frei.”

“What do you think that means?” asked a man from behind them in line.

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” replied Alexander.

“No,” said Misnoy. “It means, ‘Work will set you free.’”

“Like I was saying.”

Misnoy laughed. “This must be a Class One camp. For political prisoners. Probably Sachsenhausen. In Büchenwald, the engraving didn’t say that. It was for more serious, more permanent offenders.”

“Like you?”

“Like me.” He smiled pleasantly. “Büchenwald read, ‘
Jedem das Seine
. To Each His Own.’”

“The Germans are so fucking inspiring,” said Alexander.

It was Sachsenhausen, they were told by the new camp commandant, a repulsive fat man by the name of Brestov, who could not speak without spitting. Sachsenhausen was built at the same time as Büchenwald, and was a full-time forced labor camp and a part-time extermination camp, mainly for the homosexuals who worked at the brick factory just outside the gates, for the few Jews who had found their way here, and certainly for the Soviets—nearly all the Soviet officers who entered the gates were buried within them. It was now called Special Camp Number 7 by the Soviets, implying of course that there were at least six more just like it.

As they were led through the camp, Alexander noticed that most of the prisoners walking from barracks to canteen or laundry, or working in the industry yard, did not have the hangdog Russian look. They had the tall, unbent Aryan look.

He turned out to be right. The majority in the camp were Germans. The Soviets were taken to a special place, slightly beyond the main camp walls. Sachsenhausen was built in the shape of an isosceles triangle, but the Nazis had discovered during the war that there was no room to house the Allied POWs in the forty barracks within camp walls. So twenty additional brick barracks were built, jutting out on the right side of the camp at the farthest corner from the gatehouse. The Nazis called it Class II and that’s where the Allies were kept.

Now, Special Camp Number 7 was split into two zones—Zone I in the main camp as “preventive detention” for the German civilians and soldiers picked up during the Soviet advance on Germany, and Zone II, in the additional housing, for the German officers released by Western Allies but recaptured and tried by Soviet military tribunals for crimes against the Soviet Union. The Soviets were also kept in Zone II.

Though in the same general area as the German officers, the Soviets had six or seven barracks all to themselves, they ate at separate times and had separate roll call, but Alexander wondered how long it would be before the camp, stretched to its limits, would start intermingling its prisoners, treating them all as enemies of the Soviet Union.

The first thing Alexander and his group of men were ordered to do when they got to the camp was build a perimeter fence around a square area just to the side of their barracks. This was to be a cemetery for those who died in Special Camp Number 7. Alexander thought it was quite prescient of the NKGB to be so forward-thinking as to be building a cemetery before there were any casualties. He wondered where the Germans had buried prisoners who had died—Stalin’s son, for one.

On a walk through the camp, Alexander’s group was shown a small enclave built out from the main wall into the industry yard. The enclave contained a concrete execution pit and next to it a crematorium. The Soviet guard told them that that was where the German pigs disposed of the Soviet prisoners of war, shooting them in the neck through a hole in the wall as they stood near a wooden yardstick that measured their height. “No Allied soldier has seen this pit, I can assure you,” the guard told them.

Alexander, shaking his bewildered, scornful head, said, “And why do you think
that
was?”

For that he received a knock with the rifle and a day in the camp jail.

Alexander started out working in the industry yard, a large fenced-in area where the Soviets took their exercise and chopped wood that was brought in from the forests around Oranienburg. Soon he volunteered to go and log himself. Every morning he was taken out with a convoy at seven fifteen, just after roll call, and did not return until five forty-five. He never stopped working, but for that he was fed a bit better, and he was out in the open air, left with his own thoughts. He liked it until it started getting cold at the end of September. By October he was hating it. He wished half-heartedly he were in one of the warm rooms soldering or hammering, making cups or locks. He didn’t really want to be stuck inside a factory-floor room, but he wouldn’t have minded being warm. He was outside, his boots were falling apart and leaking, held together with jute, and the gloves they had given him had holes in the fingers—an unfortunate flaw for gloves. But at least he was moving his body, metabolizing warmth. The ten men guarding the twenty prisoners were certainly dressed for the weather, but they stood for the entire ten hours, moving from foot to frozen foot. A small satisfaction, Alexander thought.

As it got colder, the cemetery started filling up. Alexander was made to dig graves. The Germans were doing poorly in Soviet-run camps. They had lived through six years of vicious war, but stuck in Special Camp Number 7, they withered and died. More and more were
brought in. Clearly there was not enough room. The barracks started getting more and more crowded. The bunkbeds made in the industry yards were placed closer and closer together.

Special Camp Number 7, formerly known as Sachsenhausen, was not run by the military administration of Berlin. It fell under the USSR Government Administration of the Camps, or GULAG.

And there was something about being imprisoned in the Soviet-run Gulag that abjectly pervaded Alexander and the other five thousand Soviet men, gave them a bleak sense of terminal malaise. Many of the men had been in POW camps, they were not unfamiliar with restraints of movement and limits to activity. But even during the worst of the winters in German POW camps, the situation did not feel permanent, did not feel obliterating. They were soldiers then. And there was always hope—of victory, of escape, of liberation. But now there was victory, and liberation meant surrender to the Soviets, and there was no escape from Sachsenhausen into Soviet-occupied Germany. This prison, these days, this sentence felt like the end of hope, the end of faith, the end of everything.

Little by little, the torrent, the torment of memory ebbed.

At war he had imagined her whole—her laughter, her jokes, her cooking. In Catowice and Colditz, he imagined her whole—oh, but didn’t want to.

Here in Sachsenhausen he wanted to imagine her whole, and couldn’t.

Here she had become tainted with the Gulag.

His hands are on her. She is shuddering, her body in spasms breaking up into his hands. Alexander takes hold of her legs as he moves against her, and through it all, she moans and shudders helplessly, every once in a while breathing, “Oh, Shura,” and Alexander is breaking into pieces from his excitement and his terror. The excitement is inside her. The terror is in his hands as he grips her quivering body tighter and pulls out for a moment, hearing her nearly scream in frustration, but he is not having any of it. She is his right now, he will do with her as he needs to. He knows what he needs—to hold her closer than his own heart, to feel her dissolve in his hands, and all around him. The more helpless she is and the more he feels her need, the more he feels like a man. But sometimes what he needs as he
holds her tighter is for Lazarevo not to vanish with the moon. He can’t give her that—what she wants most. What he wants most. He gives her what he can.

“You like it, babe?” he whispers.

“Oh, Shura,” she whispers back. She can’t even open her eyes. Her arms go around his neck.

“You’re not done yet,” he says. “God, you’re trembling.”

“Shura, I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—oh, that’s it—”

“Yes, honey, yes. That’s it.”

He closes his eyes, and hears her cry out.

And cry out. And cry out.

He is not stopping.

And cry out.

Now I’m a man, now when I’ve made my holy maiden shiver in my hands, I’ve become a man.

And cry out.

“God, I love you, Tania,” he whispers into her hair, his eyes still closed.

And wants to cry himself.

Her body limp underneath him, she lies, gently stroking his back.

“Done?” he asks.

“
Done
for,”
she replies.

Alexander hasn’t even begun.

That’s the only thing Alexander imagined now. There was no clearing, no moon, no river. There was no bed, no blankets, no grass, no fire. No tickling, no games, no foreplay, no afterplay. There was no end and no beginning. There was only Tania underneath him, and Alexander on top of her, holding her close and tight. Her arms were always around his neck, her legs were always wrapped around him. And she was never silent.

Because she had become tainted with the Gulag, where there were no men.

We are not men. We do not live like men, and we do not behave like men. We do not hunt for our food—all except me when the guards aren’t looking—we do not protect the women who love us, we do not build shelter for our children, nor do we use the tools God gave us. We use nothing—not our brains to live by, not our strength to live by, not our cocks to live by.

War defined you. You always knew who you were during war. You were a major. A captain. A second lieutenant, a first lieutenant. You
were a warrior. You carried weapons, you drove a tank, you led men into battle, you obeyed orders. You had categories and roles and passages. You didn’t always sleep and you weren’t always dry and many times you were hungry, and every once in a while you got shot or shelled or snipered. But even that was expected.

Here we give nothing of ourselves to anyone. We haven’t just become less as human beings, we have become less as men—we lost the very thing that made us what we were. We don’t even fight like we did at war. We were all animals then, but at least we were male animals. We
drove
forward. We
thrust
into enemy lines. We
penetrated
their defense. We
broke
their ring. We fought as
men
.

And now we’re being reconstructed before we are sent back to society as eunuchs. Emasculated, we are sent back to our faithless wives, into cities in which we cannot live, into life with which we cannot cope. We have no manhood to offer, not each other, not our women, and not our children.

All we have is our past, which we detest and dissect and wring our hands over. The past in which we were men. And behaved like men. And worked like men. And fought like men.

And loved like men.

If only—

Only nine thousand days like this to go.

Until—

We’re given back to the world we saved from Hitler.

And soon even her breasts were gone from him, and her face, and her voice calling for him. All was gone.

What remained was his male impact upon her female moaning.

And soon even that was gone.

His hands flung up over his right shoulder, he paused in introspection of the wood and crashed down. And with every swing of the axe, Alexander cut apart his life.

Did he think so little of it—to have so quickly given it up? How many times had fate twisted him to Finland? When he was young, hadn’t he refused the path given to him, offering excuses to the gods instead?

He had always been in the middle of something else.

Stepanov’s son—there was nothing else he could do that day.

But during the blockade, when he pushed the Finns north to Karelia? He had an automatic weapon against five NKVD men with single-shot rifles. He could have been free.

He swung his axe, dumbstruck by himself.

Alexander could have gone, and forgotten her, and she him. She would have forgotten him and lived through the war, remained in Leningrad, and married. She would have had one child. She never would have known the difference. But Alexander
had
known the difference. And now they both knew the difference. Now they both were split apart—except she is wearing high heels and red lipstick somewhere, and all the soldiers returning from war are fawning over her and she says, oh I had a husband, and I made some vows but now he is dead, and come dance with me, come, look at my heels and my glorious hair, come dance away the war with me, I live and he is dead, I was sad, and then the war was over and I breathed again and now I’m dancing.