Tatiana and Alexander (6 page)

“Ran out of kerosene,” Alexander said pleasantly. “Have you got more?”

The guard did not have more.

“That’s too bad,” Alexander said.

He slept in the darkness, in a sitting position, in the corner, with his head leaning against the wall. When he woke up it was still pitch black. He didn’t know for sure he had woken up. He dreamed he had opened his eyes, and it was black. He dreamed of Tatiana, and when he woke up, he thought of Tatiana. Dreams and reality were mingled. Alexander didn’t know where the nightmare ended and real life began. He dreamed he closed his eyes and slept.

He felt disconnected from himself, from Morozovo—from the hospital, from his life—and he felt strangely comforted in his detachment. He was cold. That attached him back to his cramped and uncomfortable body. He preferred it the other way. The wound in his back was merciless. He grit his teeth and blinked away the darkness.

Harold and Jane Barrington, 1933

Hitler had become the Chancellor of Germany. President Von Hindenburg had “stepped down.” Alexander felt an inexplicable stirring in the air of something ominous he could not quite put his finger on. He had long stopped hoping for more food, for new shoes, for a warmer winter coat. But in the summer he didn’t need a coat. The Barringtons were spending July at their dacha in Krasnaya Polyana and that was good. They rented two rooms from a Lithuanian widow and her drunken son.

One afternoon, after a picnic of hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes and a little bologna, and vodka for his mother (“Mom, since when do you drink vodka?”), Alexander was lying in the hammock reading when he heard someone behind him in the woods. When he languidly turned his head, he saw his mother and father. They were near the clearing by the lake, throwing pebbles into the water, chatting softly. Alexander was not used to his parents talking quietly, so strident had their relationship become with their conflicting needs and anxieties. Normally he would have looked back into his book. But this quiet chatter, this convivial closeness—he didn’t know what to make of it. Harold took the pebbles out of Jane’s hands and brought her to stand close to him. One of his hands was around her waist. He was holding her other hand. And then he kissed her and they began to dance. They waltzed slowly in the clearing, and Alexander heard his father singing—
singing
!

As they continued to waltz, their bodies spinning in a conjugal embrace, and as Alexander watched his mother and father in a moment they had never had before in front of him and would never have again, he was filled with a happiness and longing he could neither define nor express.

They drew away from one another, looked at him, and smiled.

Uncertainly he smiled back, embarrassed but unable to look away.

They came over to his hammock. His father’s arm was still around his mother.

“It’s our anniversary today, Alexander.”

“Your father is singing the anniversary song to me,” said Jane. “We danced to that song the day we were wed thirty-one years ago. I was nineteen.” She smiled at Harold.

“Are you going to stay in the hammock, son? Read for a while?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” said Harold, taking Jane by the hand and heading with her toward the house.

Alexander looked into his book, but after an hour of turning the pages, he could not see or remember a single word of what he had just read.

Winter came too soon. And during the winter on Thursday evenings after dinner Harold would take Alexander by the hand and walk with him in the cold to Arbat—the Moscow street vendors’ mall of musicians and writers and poets and troubadours and old ladies selling
chachkas
from the days of the Tsar. Near Arbat, in a small, smoke-filled two-room apartment, a group of foreigners and Soviet men, all devout communists, would meet for two hours from eight to ten to drink, smoke and discuss how to make communism work better in the Soviet Union, how to make the classless society arrive faster at their doorstep, a society in which there was no need for the state, for police, for an army because all grounds for conflict had been removed.

“Marx said the only conflict is economic conflict between classes. Once it’s gone, the need for police would be gone. Citizens, what are we waiting for? Is it taking longer than we anticipated?” That was Harold.

Even Alexander chipped in, remembering something he had read: “‘While the state exists, there can be no freedom. When there will be freedom, there will be no state.’” Harold smiled approvingly at his son quoting Lenin.

At the meetings Alexander made friends with sixty-seven-year-old Slavan, a withered, gray man who seemed to have wrinkles even on his scalp, but his eyes were small blue alert stars, and his mouth was always fixed in a sardonic smile. He said little, but Alexander liked the look of his ironic expression and the bit of warmth that came from him whenever he looked Alexander’s way.

After two years of meetings, Harold and fifteen others were called into the Party regional headquarters or Obkom—Oblastnyi Kommitet—and asked if the focus of their future meetings could perhaps be something other than how to make communism work better in Russia since that implied it wasn’t working quite so well. After hearing about it from his father, Alexander asked how the Party knew what a group of fifteen drunk men talked about once a week on Thursdays in a city of five mil
lion people. Harold said, himself quoting Lenin, “‘It is true that liberty is precious. So precious that it must be rationed.’ They obviously have ways of finding out what we talk about. Perhaps it’s that Slavan. I’d stop talking to him if I were you.”

“It’s not him, Dad.”

After that the group still met on Thursdays, but now they read aloud from Lenin’s
What Is To Be Done?
or from Rosa Luxembourg’s pamphlets, or from Marx’s
Communist Manifesto
.

Harold often brought up the approval of American communist supporters to show that Soviet communism was slowly being embraced internationally and that it was all just a matter of time. “Look what Isadora Duncan said about Lenin before she died,” Harold would say and quote: “‘Others loved themselves, money, theories, power. Lenin loved his fellow men…Lenin was God, as Christ was God, because God is love, and Christ and Lenin were all love.’”

Alexander smiled approvingly at his father.

During one full night, many hours of it, fifteen men, except for a silent and smiling Slavan, tried to explain to a fourteen-year-old Alexander the meaning of “value subtraction.” How an item—say shoes—could cost less after it was made than the sum total value of its labor and material parts. “What don’t you understand?” yelled a frustrated communist who was an engineer by day.

“The part of how you make money selling shoes.”

“Who said anything about making money? Haven’t you read the
Communist Manifesto
?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you remember what Marx said? The difference between what the factory pays the worker to make the shoes and what the shoes actually cost is capitalist theft and exploitation of the proletariat. That’s what communism is trying to eradicate. Have you not been paying attention?”

“I have, but value subtraction is not just eliminating profit,” Alexander said. “Value subtraction means it’s actually costing more to make the shoes than the shoes can be sold for. Who is going to pay the difference?”

“The state.”

“Where is the state going to find the money?”

“The state will temporarily pay the workers less to make the shoes.”

Alexander was quiet. “So in a period of flagrant worldwide
inflation, the Soviet Union is going to pay the workers
less
? How much less?”

“Less, that’s all.”

“And how are
we
going to buy the shoes?”

“Temporarily we’re not. We’ll have to wear last year’s shoes. Until the state gets on its feet.” The engineer smiled.

“Good one,” Alexander said calmly. “The state got on its feet enough to cover the cost of Lenin’s Rolls Royce, didn’t it?”

“What does Lenin’s Rolls Royce have to do with what we’re talking about?” screamed the engineer. Slavan laughed. “The Soviet Union will be fine,” the engineer continued. “It is in its infancy stages. It will borrow money from abroad if it has to.”

“With all due respect, citizen, no country in the world will lend money to the Soviet Union again,” said Alexander. “It repudiated all of its foreign debt in 1917 after the Bolshevik Revolution. They will not see any foreign money for a long time to come. The world banks are closed to the Soviet Union.”

“We have to be patient. Changes will not happen overnight. And you need to have a more positive attitude. Harold, what have you been teaching your son?”

Harold didn’t reply, but on the way home he said, “What’s gotten into you, Alexander?”

“Nothing.” Alexander wanted to take his father’s hand, like always, but suddenly thought he was too old. He walked alongside him, and then took it anyway. “For some reason, the economics are not working. This revolutionary state is built foremost on economics, and the state has figured out everything except how to pay the labor force. The workers feel less and less like proletariat than like the state-owned factories and machines. We’ve been here over three years. We just finished the first of the Five-Year Plans. And we have so little food, and nothing in the stores, and—” He wanted to say,
and people keep disappearing
, but he kept his mouth shut.

“Well, what do you think is going on in America?” Harold asked. “Thirty per cent unemployment, Alexander. You think it’s better there? The whole world is suffering. Look at Germany: such extraordinary inflation. Now this man Adolf Hitler is promising the Germans the end of all their troubles. Maybe he will succeed. The Germans certainly hope so. Well, Comrades Lenin and Stalin promised the same thing to the Soviet Union. What did Stalin call Russia? The second America,
right? We have to believe, and we have to follow, and soon it will be better. You’ll see.”

“I know, Dad. You may be right. Still, I know that the state has to pay its people somehow. How much less can they pay you? We already can’t afford meat and milk, not that there is any, even if we could. And will they pay you less until—what? They’ll realize they need more money, not less, to run the government, and your labor is their largest variable cost. What are they going to do? Reduce your salary every year until—until what?”

“What are you afraid of?” Harold said, squeezing Alexander’s reluctant hand. “When you get big, you will have meaningful work. You still want to be an architect? You will. You will have a career.”

“I’m afraid,” said Alexander, extricating himself from his father, “that it’s just a matter of time before I am, before we
all
become nothing more than fixed capital.”

Edward and Vikki, 1943

TATIANA WAS SITTING BY
the window, holding her two-week-old baby with one hand and a book with the other. Her eyes were closed, and then she heard a breath, and instantly opened her eyes.

Edward Ludlow was standing a few feet away from her with an expression of curiosity and concern. She could understand. She had been very silent since her baby was born. She did not think that was so unusual. Many people who came here, leaving their life behind, must have been silent, as if the enormity of what was behind and what was ahead was just dawning on them in their small white rooms as they stared at the robes of Lady Liberty. “I was worried about you dropping the baby,” he said. “I didn’t mean to startle you…”

She showed him how tightly she was holding Anthony. “Don’t worry.”

“What are you reading?”

She looked at her book. “I’m not reading, just…sitting.” It was
The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems
by Aleksandr Pushkin.

“Are you all right? It’s the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

She rubbed her eyes. The baby was still sleeping. “This child not sleep at night, only day.”

“Much like his mother.”

“Mother on his schedule.” She smiled. “Everything all right?”

“Yes, yes,” said Dr. Ludlow hurriedly. “I wanted to let you know that an INS worker is here to talk to you.”

“What he want?”

“What does he want? He wants to give you a chance to stay in the United States.”

“I thought because my son…because he was born on American ground…”

“American soil,” Dr. Ludlow corrected her gently. “The Attorney General needs to look at your case personally.” He paused. “We don’t
have many stowaways coming to the United States during war, you have to understand. Especially from the Soviet Union. It’s unusual.”

Tatiana said, “Does he feel is safe to come here? Did you say him I have TB?”

“I told him. He’ll be wearing a mask. How are you feeling, by the way? Any blood in the cough?”

“None. And fever is gone. I feel better.”

“You’ve been going out a bit?”

“Yes, salty air is good.”

“Yes.” He stared at her solemnly. She stared solemnly back. “The salt air is good.” He cleared his throat and continued. “The nurses are all amazed your boy hasn’t caught TB.”

“Explain to them, Edward,” said Tatiana, “that if ten thousand people come to see me every day for whole year and I had TB every day for whole year, only ten to sixteen people contract disease from me.” She paused. “It’s not so contagious as people think. So send in INS man if he thinks he strong enough. But tell him odds. And tell him I don’t speak so good English.”

Smiling, Edward said her English was just fine and asked if she wanted him to stay.

“No. No, thank you.”

The INS man, Tom, talked to her for fifteen minutes to see if she spoke rudimentary English. Tatiana spoke rudimentary English. He asked about her skills. She told him she was a nurse, and that she could also sew and cook.

“Well, there is certainly a shortage of nurses during the war,” he said.

“Yes, much of it here at Ellis,” said Tatiana. She thought of Brenda being in the wrong profession.

“We don’t get many cases like you.”

She made no reply.

“You want to stay in the United States?”

“Of course.”

“You think you could get a job, to help in the war effort?”

“Of course.”

“Not be a public charge? That’s very important to us in time of war. You understand? The attorney general comes under scrutiny every time he lets a person like you slip through his fingers. The country is in turmoil. We must make sure you stay productive, and that you have allegiance to this country, not your old country.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “As soon as my TB goes and they let me work, I will get job. I will be nurse, or seamstress, or cook. I will be all three, if need to. I will do what I have to after I am good again.”

As if suddenly remembering she had TB, Tom stood up and went to the door, tightening the mask around his mouth. “Where will you live?” he said in a muffled voice.

“I want to stay here.”

“After you get better, you’ll have to get an apartment.”

“Yes. Do not worry.”

He nodded, writing something down in his book. “And the name you want to go by? I saw on the documents you brought with you that you got out of the Soviet Union as a Red Cross nurse named Jane Barrington.”

“Yes.”

“How fake are those documents?”

“I do not understand what you mean.”

Tom fell silent. “Who is Jane Barrington?”

Now Tatiana was silent. “My husband’s mother,” she said at last.

Tom sighed. “Barrington? Not very Russian.”

“My husband was American.” She lowered her gaze.

Tom opened the door. “Is that the name you want to use to get your permanent residency card?”

“Yes.”

“No Russian name for you?”

She thought about it.

Tom came closer to her. “Sometimes refugees who come here like to cling to a little bit of their past. Maybe they leave just the first name the same. Change the last name. Think about it.”

“Not me,” she replied. “Change all. I don’t want to—how you put it? Cling to anything.”

He wrote something down in his book. “Jane Barrington it is, then.”

When he left, Tatiana opened her
Bronze Horseman
book as she sat once more by the window, looking out onto the New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty. She touched the picture of Alexander she had kept in there; without looking at it she touched his face and his uniformed body, and she whispered small short words in Russian to comfort
herself
this time, not Alexander, not his child, but herself. Shura,
Shura, Shura, whispered Jane Barrington, once known as Tatiana Metanova.

Tatiana’s days consisted of feeding Anthony and changing Anthony and washing Anthony’s few nightgowns and cloth diapers in the bathroom sink and going on short, fragrant walks outside the hospital and sitting on benches with Anthony wrapped in blankets in her arms. Brenda brought her breakfast to her room. Tatiana ate lunch and dinner in her room. Unless Anthony was sleeping, Tatiana had him in her arms. She looked at only two things: the New York harbor and her son. But whatever comfort she received from holding her baby was dissipated from being alone day in and day out. Brenda and Dr. Ludlow called it convalescing. Tatiana called it solitary confinement.

One morning at the end of July, tired of herself, of sitting in her room, Tatiana decided to take a walk down the corridor while Anthony was sleeping.

She heard groans from the corridor and followed the groans into a ward filled with wounded men. Brenda was on duty—the only one on duty—looking less than pleased with her lot and showing the wounded men exactly how she felt. Grumbling, curt, displeasingly surly, she was washing out a wound on a soldier’s leg despite repeated and loud pleas from the soldier to either do it more gently or to shoot him.

Tatiana walked over and asked Brenda if she needed help, to which Brenda replied that she certainly didn’t need a sick girl making her prisoners sicker, and could Tatiana immediately go back to her room. Not moving, Tatiana stood, stared at Brenda, stared at the raw hole in the soldier’s thigh, at the soldier’s eyes, and said, “Let me bandage leg, let me help you. Look, I have mask over my nose and mouth. You got four men screaming for you on other side of hospital. One just lose a tooth in his morning coffee. One have raging fever. One is oozing blood through his ear.”

Brenda let go of the bucket and the soldier’s leg and left, though Tatiana could see that for a moment Brenda had struggled with what actually gave her more displeasure: taking care of the soldiers or letting Tatiana have her way.

Tatiana finished washing out the wound; the soldier never peeped, looking soothed and asleep; either asleep or dead, Tatiana concluded as she bandaged his leg, still without motion from him, and moved on.

She disinfected an arm wound and a head wound, started an IV, and administered morphine, wishing for a bit of morphine for herself to dull her inner aching, at the same time thinking how lucky the German submarine men were to have had the luck to be brought to American shores for imprisonment and convalescence.

Suddenly Brenda appeared and, as if surprised that Tatiana was still in the ward, asked her to immediately go back to her room before she infected all her patients with TB, sounding almost as if she cared what happened to the patients.

As Tatiana was heading back, out in the corridor by the water fountain, she saw a tall, slim girl in a nurse’s uniform standing and crying. Long-haired and long-legged, she was quite beautiful; if you didn’t look at her mascara-streaked, tear-streaked, swollen eyes and cheeks. Tatiana needed a drink of water, and so with great discomfort she proceeded past the girl, stopping just half a foot away from her to get to the fountain. The girl sobbed loudly. Tatiana put her hand on the girl’s elbow and said, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” the girl sobbed.

“Oh.”

The girl continued to cry. She held a slightly moist cigarette in her hands. “If you only knew how freakishly miserable I am at the moment.”

“Can I do anything?”

The girl looked out of her wet hands at Tatiana. “Who are you?”

“You can call me Tania.”

“Aren’t you the TB stowaway?”

“I am better now,” Tatiana said quietly.

“You’re not Tania. I processed your documents myself. Tom gave them to me. You’re Jane Barrington. Oh, what do I care? My life is in shambles and we’re talking about your name. I wish I had your problems.”

Trying quickly to find the words to say something comforting in English, Tatiana said, “It could be worse.”

“That’s where you’re so wrong, missy. It’s as bad as can be. Nothing worse can happen. Nothing.”

Tatiana noticed the wedding band on the girl’s finger, and her sympathy flowed. “I am sorry.” She paused. “Is it about your husband?”

Without looking away from her hands, the girl nodded.

“It is terrible thing,” said Tatiana. “I know. This war…”

The girl nodded. “It’s the pits.”

“Your husband…he is not coming back?”

“
Isn’t
coming back?” the girl exclaimed. “That’s the whole point! He is very much coming back. Very much so. Next week.”

Tatiana took a puzzled step away.

“Where are you going? You look like you’re ready to fall down. It’s not your fault he is coming back. Don’t look so upset. I guess worse things have happened to girls at war, I just don’t know of any. You want to go grab a coffee? Want a cigarette?”

Tatiana paused. “I have coffee with you.”

They sat down in the long dining room at one of the rectangular tables. Tatiana sat across from the girl who introduced herself as Viktoria Sabatella (“But call me Vikki.”), shook Tatiana’s hand vigorously and said, “You here with your parents? I haven’t seen any immigrants come this way in months. The boats are not bringing them in. So few—what? You’re sick?”

“I am better now,” said Tatiana. “I am here with myself.” She paused. “With my son.”

“Get out!” Viktoria slammed her coffee cup on the table. “You don’t have a son.”

“He almost month old.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“God, they start early where you’re from. Where are you from?”

“Soviet Union.”

“Wow. How’d you get this baby anyway? You have a husband?”

Tatiana opened her mouth, but Vikki went on as if the question had not been asked. Before she drew her next breath, she told Tatiana that she herself had never known her father (“Dead, or gone, all the same”) and barely knew her mother (“Had me too young”) who was in San Francisco, living with two men (“Not in the same apartment”) and pretending to be either sick (“Yes, mentally”) or dying (“From all that
passion
”). Vikki had been raised by her maternal grandparents (“They love Mumsy but they don’t approve of her”) and was living with them still (“Less fun than you might think”). She had originally wanted to be a journalist, then a manicurist (“In both professions you work with your hands; I thought it was a natural progression”) and finally decided (“Was forced to, more like it,”) to go into nursing when the European war looked like it would suck the United States into it. Tatiana was listening quietly and attentively when Vikki suddenly looked at her and said, “Got a husband?”

“Once.”

“Yeah?” Vikki sighed. “Once. Would that I had a husband once—”

At that moment their conversation was interrupted by a painfully angular, very tall, immaculately dressed woman in a white brim hat, walking briskly through the dining hall, swinging her white purse and yelling, “Vikki! I’m talking to you! Vikki! Have you seen him?”

Vikki sighed and rolled her eyes at Tatiana. “No, Mrs. Ludlow. I haven’t seen him today. I think he is still cross-town at NYU. He is here on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.”

“Afternoons? He’s not at NYU! And how do you know his schedule so well?”

“I’ve worked with him for two years.”

“Well, I’ve been married to him for eight and I still don’t know where the hell he is.” She came up to the table and towered over the two girls. She eyed Tatiana suspiciously. “Who are
you
?”

Tatiana pulled up her cloth mask from her neck to her mouth. Vikki stepped in. “She is from the Soviet Union. She barely speaks English.”

“Well, she should learn, shouldn’t she, if she expects to earn her keep in this country. We’re at war, we have no business supporting wards.” And swinging her purse, nearly hitting Tatiana on the head, the woman swept from the dining room.

“Who she?” asked Tatiana.

Vikki waved her hand. “Never mind her. The less you know about her, the better. That’s Dr. Ludlow’s crazy wife. She storms in here once a week looking for her husband.”

“Why she keep losing him?”

Vikki laughed. “The question I think should be why does Dr. Ludlow let himself be lost so often.”

“All right, why?”

Vikki waved Tatiana off. Tatiana understood. Vikki did not want to be talking about Dr. Ludlow. With a small smile, Tatiana appraised Vikki. Now that she had stopped crying, Tatiana could see that Vikki was a striking girl, a proper girl who was pretty and knew it and did everything to make sure everyone knew it. Her hair was shiny and long and swept over her face and shoulders, her eyes were outlined in black eyeliner and runny mascara, and her full lips had traces of bright red lipstick. Her white uniform was tight on her long-limbed figure and came just a touch too high above the knee. Tatiana wondered how the wounded men responded to so much…Vikki.