Tatiana and Alexander (49 page)

In her clothes, Tatiana lay on Anthony’s bed, and put her arm around him. “Stay here,” he said. “Fall asleep with me, Mama.”

They lay quietly. Minutes passed. “Son, everything is going to be all right from now on,” she said. “I promise you. One of your father’s promises. Not your mother’s. Everything is going to be all right.”

Quietly Anthony said, “Was my daddy really a major in the Red Army?”

“Yes.”

Pause. “He wouldn’t have missed.”

“Shh, Anthony.”

Tatiana thought about tomorrow.

Continuing through fear, living through fear. And worse. Living through death. Loving through
him
. Courage, Tatiana. Courage, babe. Get up, get up for me, and go on. Go on, go take care of our son, and I will take care of you.

Her guardian angel Alexander, her sweetest angel Alexander, floating above her veiled in sorrow, whispering to her:
Tania, do you remember what you said to your sister as she was dying on the ice, on the Road of Life, as she was collapsing into the snow unable to walk, you said to her, come on, Dasha, get up. Alexander is trying to save your life. Show him your life means something. Get up and walk to the truck, Dasha.

Well, I’m saying it to you now. Show me your life means something. Get up and walk to the truck, Tania.

Tatiana lay next to Anthony until he was asleep. It was very late, and Vikki was still not home. Finally she got up off the bed, and went to put the pistol away into her backpack. She did not look at anything else there, but she did take the wedding rings from around her neck, kissed them once quickly and placed them in the pack too, to rest with his cap, and his
Bronze Horseman
book and the picture of him receiving his medal for rescuing Yuri Stepanov. To rest with his medal for rescuing Dr. Matthew Sayers from the ice—his
Hero of the Soviet Union
medal. Rings, medals, pictures, book, money, cap. Their two wedding photos.

All of it inside, and Alexander, too.

And Tatiana, too.

New York, January 1946

NEW YEAR’S DAY. TATIANA
, as usual, went ice skating in Central Park with Vikki and Anthony.

After they were done and walking to 59th Street to take a bus home, Vikki was staring at Tatiana.

“What you looking at?”

Vikki didn’t reply.

“What?”

“We’ve passed three phone booths.”

“So?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me to mind Anthony for just a few minutes and run off to make your phone call?”

Tatiana stared down Fifth Avenue.

“No,” she said. “But do you think Edward might be interested in going out with me again?”

Vikki beamed. “I think he’s going to fly to the moon!”

She and Edward were having lunch at NYU hospital, soup and tuna sandwiches. Tatiana really liked tuna with mayo, lettuce and tomato. She had never had tuna before she came to America. Or lettuce.

“Hey,” she said brightly, reaching across the table and taking his hand. “
Mildred Pierce
is hailed as the next masterpiece. Want to go and see it?”

“Sure. When?”

“How about Friday evening? Come over after work. I’ll make you dinner, and then we’ll go.”

Edward paused. “You want me to come over
in the evening?
” he asked slowly.

“Please.”

Edward looked at her hand on his, then at her. “Something is terribly wrong. What is it? Have you found out you only have five days to live?”

“No,” she said. “I found out I have seventy years to live.”

The next day, she was in the examination room at Ellis, filling out papers on one of the Polish refugees, when another nurse walked in and whispered, “There is someone outside to see you.”

Tatiana didn’t look up from the application for residency. “Who?”

“Never saw him before. Says he’s from the State Department.”

Tatiana looked up immediately.

Outside in the corridor, Sam Gulotta stood, dressed in a suit, waiting for her.

“Hello, Tatiana,” he said. “How are you? Did you have a happy New Year?”

“I’m good, yes, and you?” she replied, and then couldn’t say anything else, but reached out slowly, hoping Sam wouldn’t notice, to get hold of the wall behind her.

“I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

Very carefully, she shrugged. She didn’t want him to notice she was shaking. “I didn’t want to bother you anymore. You have been so patient with me over the years…”

Sam looked up and down the hall. “Is there somewhere we can go and talk?”

They went outside and sat on the benches by the swings where Anthony used to play.

“I was hoping you’d call me,” Sam said.

“What’s happened?” she said. “Are they still looking for me?”

He shook his head. Tatiana’s white fingers bored into the sides of the bench. She was grateful for the cold that allowed her teeth an excuse to chatter.

“What?” she whispered. “You have information for me? He is dead?”

“I have something, yes. I have an inquiry on his file. As always, it went to the wrong department—Global Affairs, who forwarded it to Population, Refugees and Migration Bureau. They said it wasn’t their jurisdiction, and sent it to the Department of Justice to EOIR, Executive Office for Immigration Review.” Sam shook his head. “Someone
should explain to them the polar difference between immigration and emigration—”

“Sam,” was all Tatiana said.

“Oh, yes. I just wanted to explain the bureaucracy of our government. Everything moves in geological time. Let me tell you what the inquiry is: it’s very short. An Allied American soldier, PFC Paul Markey of the 273rd Infantry Division contacted the State Department—
last summer
, no less—asking if they had any information about an American named Alexander Barrington.”

Tatiana swayed and sank into the bench.

For a very long time she remained mute.

“Tania?”

“Yes?” In a voice that wasn’t hers. “Sam, who is Private Markey?”

“Private First Class Paul Markey of Des Moines, Iowa. Twenty-one years old, three years in the armed forces. I called his home last week. Spoke to his mother.” Sam lowered his head. “He was returned from Europe and discharged from duty last summer, I guess that’s when he made the inquiry. I’m afraid there is bad news about him. In October he took his own life.”

Tatiana sucked in her breath. Blinked. “Sam, no, I’m sorry for him, but…I mean,
who
is Paul Markey? Where was he?”

“I know little about him except his inquiry, which he made verbally by phone.”

“Who did he speak to at PRM?”

“A woman by the name of Linda Clark.”

“Should we go talk to her?”

“I already have. She is the one who got me the notes of that conversation.”

Tatiana held her breath.

“Paul Markey told her that when his regiment liberated Colditz Castle—a fortress used as an Oflag during the war—when the Americans liberated Colditz on April 16, 1945, among the hundreds of Allied officers, there were a few Soviet officers, half a dozen, maybe. One of them approached Markey in surprisingly good clean English, asking for his help. He said he was an American named Alexander Barrington, and asked if Markey could check out his story and help him.”

Tatiana started to cry. Her shoulders shook and the tears ran between her fingers with which she covered her face. Sam’s hand was on her back, patting her gently.

A few minutes went by. Tatiana calmed down. “I knew he lied to
me. I just knew,” she whispered. “I could feel it in my bones, I had no proof, but I knew.”

“What about the death certificate?”

“Fake, all fake.” She sucked in a pained groan. “Just to make me leave Soviet Union.”

“How did he end up in Colditz all the way from Leningrad?”

“Like I already tell you. He was put in penal battalion. When Soviet army pushed Germans out of Soviet Union, he went with his battalion. Obviously he ended up in POW camp, this Colditz.”

“Do you want me to tell you the rest of what Markey told Clark?”

“Yes,” she said with a short sob. “What happened to the liberated men?”

“Everybody but the Soviets went home. Markey told Clark that the morning after liberation, on April 17, a Soviet convoy came into Colditz and took the handful of Soviet officers away, including that man.”

“Took them where?”

“Markey did not know. He told Linda Clark that he returned to the United States in the summer and made the call out of curiosity. In October, Consular Affairs called his home in Iowa to tell him that indeed Alexander Barrington had been born in the United States but had been residing in the Soviet Union since 1930. Three days after that Markey took his own life, his mother told me.”

Tatiana was quiet, trying to compose her voice. “What kind of liberation is that?” she finally said. “Americans come in to liberate Colditz. Why didn’t the Soviets also get liberated? Why was he there even a day later?”

Sam said nothing.

Tatiana looked up and wiped her face. “Sam?”

“What?”

“I thought I was asking rhetorical question, but by your heavy silence I suspect question has answer.”

He was silent.

“Sam!”

“Why do you do that? Sam what?” He sighed. “Look, this is just what I hear, I can’t confirm or deny this, but the buzz in the State Department, connected to a much larger buzz from the Defense Department, was that the liberating Americans were ordered to keep any Soviet officers or refugees in place until the Red Army came to pick them up.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“Where did this order come from?”

“From up the ranks.”

“How high up the ranks?”

Sam didn’t answer for many ticking seconds. “All the way,” he finally said.

That night, Tatiana came home and said, “Vikki, we have to take little trip.”

Vikki fell back on the sofa. “No, God, no. Please. Every time you say the word little, it means somewhere unbelievably far. Where to, this time?”

“Iowa. Poor Edward. I’m afraid I will have to cancel our plans.”

“Iowa? No! I refuse. Go by yourself. I’m not going. Anthony is not going. We refuse. Do you hear me?”

Looking out the train window, Vikki was saying to Anthony, “Look, it’s quite pretty here, so many fields. What do you think they grow on these fields, Anthony?”

“Wheat,” he said. “Corn.”

Vikki glanced at Tatiana, who sat pretending to be immersed in a book. “Anthony, and you know this how?”

“That’s what Mama calls them. Wheat fields. Corn fields.”

“Oh.”

Tatiana smiled.

Des Moines was a city rising up out of those fields. It was brutally cold in Iowa in January. Vikki said she had not expected it. “Why did I think it was warm here? They keep talking about the dust bowl droughts. How can you have a drought in frigid temperatures?”

“They don’t have droughts in wintertime, Vikki,” said Tatiana, buttoning her coat. “Come on, we’ll take
a
taxi.”

“You and your taxis. Is this person expecting us?”

“I wrote her.”

“Did she write you back?”

“Not really.”

“Not really? Is there a middle ground with something like that? Did she or did she not write you?”

“I know she was going to, but we are coming to see her so soon, she didn’t get chance to.”

“I see. So we’re barging in uninvited on a farm widow who has just lost her son?”

The small Markey farmhouse was on the outskirts of Des Moines. Their silo nearby was obscured by snow drifts and trees, giving the impression that it had not been used for some time. The door to the house was opened by a frail, pale woman who nonetheless smiled and said, “Tatiana? Come in. I been expecting you. I’m Mary Markey. This your son? Anthony, come with me.” Stretched out her hand. “I just made corn muffins, you can help me serve them. Do you like corn muffins?”

Vikki and Tatiana followed them into the kitchen with Vikki whispering, “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Show up in strangers’ homes and have them invite you in as if they’ve known you all their lives?”

The kitchen was neat and plain and old. They sat behind the wooden kitchen table and drank coffee and had corn muffins. Then Vikki took Anthony out in the snow. Mary cupped her mug of coffee and said, “Tatiana, I want to help you. Since you wrote, I been trying to remember what my boy said to me. You understand, I didn’t see him in three years, and when he came back he was all closed up. Closed up to me, to his old friends, to the world. The girl he used to see in high school married someone else. Who’d wait that long when you’re so young? So Paul would sit around here, or he’d go in the truck down to the local bar. He talked a little about opening the farm again, but with his dad gone that seemed so unlikely.” She paused. Tatiana waited. “And he seemed so detached. And then he just gone and killed hisself, too many guns around here, so I been kind of reeling from it and much of what he said to me flew my mind.”

“I understand. I’m sorry. Anything you can recall would be helpful.”

“I know Paul got that phone call a few days before he died. He didn’t tell me nothing, just sat here at this table for the rest of the afternoon. Refused dinner. Went out for a drink, came back, and late at night was sitting here again, or out in the back on the porch. I asked,
believe me, I asked several times what the matter was. Finally he said, ‘Mom, we liberated that castle and there was a man there who said he was an American, and I didn’t believe him. I said…something smart in return. And I didn’t see him after that…and the next day, the Red Army came to get their POWs. Except that this man’s perfect English stuck in my memory. So when I came back stateside, I called Washington, just to put my mind at ease.’ He sort of made a choking sound then. He said, ‘The phone call I got this afternoon? Someone from the State Department. That man
was
an American once upon a time. He was an American, trapped there somehow.’ And I tried to say something comforting like, well, he was just sent back to his own country. Just like you was sent back to your own country. And Paul waved me off and said, ‘Mom, you don’t understand. Our orders—my orders—were to keep all the Soviet officers under surveillance until their army came to reclaim them.’

“‘So?’ I said.

“‘Why does an army need to reclaim them? Why don’t they just go back in mobs and crowds, of their own accord, like we did, like the English did? Our armies didn’t come to reclaim
us
. But the point is, that man wasn’t a Soviet.’ I didn’t understand, you know? I told him that there was nothing he could have done, and he said, ‘I don’t feel better because I’m helpless, Mother.’ And he wring his hands so, and I said, ‘Son, but what does the Soviet Union have to do with you?
You’re
not sending those people back.’ And he put his head down on the table and said, ‘Maybe I could have done something for just that one.’”

Tatiana got up and came round Mary’s side of the table. She put her arms around the woman. “And he did, Mary. He did.”

Mary nodded.

“I’m very sorry.”

“I’ll be all right. My other daughter lives nearby. I been alone since my husband died in ’38. I’ll be all right.” She looked up. “Do you think that man was your husband?”

“Without a doubt,” replied Tatiana.

On the train back, Tatiana was engrossed in the way the snow lay on the fields outside her window. Anthony was asleep. So was Vikki, Tatiana thought, but then Vikki opened one eye, then the other, and said, “So what now?”

Tatiana didn’t answer.

“So what now?” Vikki repeated.

“I don’t have all answers, Vik,” replied Tatiana. “I don’t know what now.”

But suddenly the world made a bit of sense again. Alexander was not in the lake.

Somewhere in the world Alexander was still living. In the largest country in the world, sprawled over one sixth of the earth’s land mass, one half tundra and permafrost, one quarter steppe, one eighth coniferous forest, part desert, part arable land, with the largest lake in the world, the largest sea in the world, the largest protected border in the world, the largest socialist experiment in the world, was Alexander.