Tatiana and Alexander (28 page)

Alexander went inside and made her tea. Walking over, he handed her the cup and said guiltily, “Here, you drink, let me do this.”

She sat down on a tree stump while he fiddled with the clothes pins.
When he was done, he went to her, watched her for a moment, and then slowly descended to his knees. Tatiana parted her legs to let him closer.

“Tania…” he said in a stilted voice.

She stopped him. “Shh. You don’t have to apologize for anything. Be whatever you want, Shura, just
be
.”

“Why do you do that?” he asked. “Why can’t you just tell me to stop being an idiot? Why can’t you raise your voice, tell me to shut the hell up?”

“Is that what you want, Alexander?” she said. “You want me to fight with you? We have a handful of days left and you want me to fight with you?”

He hugged her. “Not a handful. Eight. Now tell me what can I do for you? What do you want me to do? You want me to carry something for you? Can I chop wood? Make another fire? Chase you through the woods? Can I carry you?”

He heard her say something in a broken, muted whisper that didn’t sound like happiness or even love. It sounded like a gasp torn from a lifetime of grief.

Alexander couldn’t respond, couldn’t look at her. He pretended he hadn’t heard, patted her back, kissed her neck.

Her voice a little happier and thickening, Tatiana answered. “You can do anything you want to me. As you know—I like it all.”

Alexander knew Tatiana loved to be carried by him. She loved to be lifted in his arms, or slung over his back, or carried like a backpack. He knew she was remembering Luga every time he picked her up…Luga, when all of Lazarevo was still ahead of them.

When Leningrad was still ahead of them. When Dasha was alive. When she had a family. Could Alexander love her enough for all of them who once sat around her, drinking their tea, smoking, teasing her, neglecting her, loving her? Could he give her enough?

Yes, he could. For the next few days.

And then what?

Alexander brought her inside and laid her on their bed. The stove was still warm from morning.

“I know what you like…” Alexander whispered. Lifting her dress, he exposed her hips and opened her legs. He loved looking at her as he alternately caressed her and put his mouth on her.

He heard her moaning for him. He stopped touching her for a moment and listened. “Shura…Shura…come up, please, come up.”

He knew what she wanted. And he wanted to give it to her. “What do you want, Tatia?”

“Come on, Shura,” she whispered. “Come on…”

Alexander went back to touching her. “Look at you,” he whispered, lowering his face to her.

He had to stop. He could tell she was moments away. “Not yet, Tania. Who is my good girl…” he whispered. “Who is my beautiful good girl…”

In frustration, she tried to move away. He held her in place, while his careful tender fingers stroked her.

Tatiana was nearly crying from tension. Alexander wanted to put his mouth on her again—but he waited.

She clutched at him, moaning for him to climb to her. He resisted.

Finally she breathed out the words he longed to hear.

Groaning from the excitement of hearing her say it, Alexander whispered, “All right, Tatiasha.” He barely had time to enter her, before he was flooded with her relief. Eight days left, Alexander’s body cried, his tingling throat cried.

Alexander was going sick out of his mind. He was on a suicide mission—he wanted Tatiana to stop loving him before he left. He wanted her to be glad he was leaving.

What he wanted was to
make
her glad he was leaving, not for her to be glad out of her own accord. He wanted to be the one to facilitate this change in her.

Her vulnerability ate at him so much he couldn’t look her in the face.

What was happening to him? It was so hateful.

“Come on, lift me up,” Tatiana said another night. “Lift me, take me standing like I know you love, take me however you want, but please don’t be upset with me, Shura.”

He turned from her.

“Honey,” she whispered. “Husband…Alexander…”

He couldn’t look at her.

Tatiana stood in front of him, topless, nipples erect, her loving face, her wet lips. They forgot the tea, forgot his cigarettes, forgot his anger, forgot it all, all they did, pleading, moaning through the crescent night, was forget it all.

As always. There was nothing else when they were in their cabin.
Just Tania and Shura, and they adored each other, and their hearts were breaking, as they implored the God who made them, let us have this for another wordless moment, let us have
us
for a moment longer. Alexander took her against the wall and kneeling on the hard floor and on the high counter he had made, and on their bed, he took her gently and roughly and slowly and quickly, but in the end his heart was still breaking.

There was a desperation to their lovemaking—a brutal relinquishing of happiness that was as gradual and inevitable as the low tide. Whereas before Tania and Shura were starving for each other and made love to wake the gods to proclaim the eternal
We
to life, now they made love to stave off death, to stem the flood of destruction that awaited them upon his leaving—itself as inevitable as sunset.

Their feverish arrhythmic, broken, violent coupling was a cry to the gods, to any gods who would listen. Pleasure was mixed with a propellant ache; the greater the pleasure, the emptier the heart was after.

Five days left.

The following rainy night on the floor by the fire, he once again stopped himself from release. Alexander thought if he stopped himself, maybe he could stop time.

How long can he keep himself? How long can he watch her, how much longer can he hear her voice, smell her breath when she moaned and when she whispered, like now, what was she saying…I can’t even hear her, I want to finish, but no, I can’t…“What, Tania?”

“Alexander, please don’t leave me.”

“Babe, don’t worry,” he said. “There is life after grieving. Look at us.
We
felt again.” He kissed her. “You will want to love again, and you will.” Alexander wanted to add,
thank God
, but he didn’t mean it. My heart on a fucking stake, twisting in the fire.

“Wait, stop, honey, stop, Shura, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe—”

But Alexander wouldn’t stop. Until he was finally done. It took her long minutes to get her breath back, while he lay on the floor and smoked. The ash fell on the hardwood. It fell on his chest. He didn’t even brush it off. Tatiana brushed it off.

When she was calmer, Tatiana whispered, “Sometimes when you
hold me like that, when you constrict me the way you do, when you suffocate me, when I feel your hands on my throat, over my face, when my lungs are crushed by you and your body is on me, I can’t help thinking you almost wish I
would
stop breathing.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Is it?”

“Absolutely.”

“You hold me, Shura, as if you don’t want me to live past this.” Tatiana paused. “Past us.”

“Crazy.”

Four days left.

“I don’t want you to touch me anymore.” These words were spoken by Tatiana as Alexander was holding her against the wall. “I’m serious,” she said. “I don’t want you to make love to me. I want you to stop. I don’t want to need you anymore. I don’t want to love you anymore.”

“All right,” he whispered, not letting her go, not moving away from the wall.

“What are we going to do? What am
I
going to do? You’ll be dead, but what am I going to do the rest of my life in Lazarevo?”

“I’ll be back, Tatia,” Alexander said.

“You’ll be dead. And I’ll be alone in Soviet Russia.”

“I won’t be dead.”

“There is no place for us here,” she said.

He disagreed. “The Ural Mountains were three hundred million years in the making. We found a place among the round hills. This is our place.”

“Please don’t.” Her body shook. “They were once larger, these mountains. They are nearly flattened out by erosion, by time. But they’re still standing.”

“Yes. And we with them,” whispered Alexander, squeezing her to him. “But this is just the beginning of your life, Tatiana. You’ll see. After three hundred million years you’ll still be standing, too.”

They weren’t looking at each other.

“Yes,” she whispered. “But not with you.”

Alexander was leaving tomorrow. Today he couldn’t look at her, couldn’t touch her, couldn’t talk to her. He didn’t know how he was going to go on. He didn’t know how she was going to go on.

He knew he would have to. He knew she would have to.

But how?

Where did they teach you how to live after you’d lost it all?

Who taught you how to go on after you had lost everything?

Tatiana.

Tatiana taught me how to go on after she had lost everything.

Alexander got up early, went for his swim, but afterward didn’t come inside like always. Instead he sat on the bench outside and smoked, smoked with closed eyes, so he wouldn’t see Lazarevo.

Just behind his closed eyes were the birches and the pines and the cones on the ground and the gray-green mountains beyond the rushing river. He smelled the remnants of the fire, he wanted tea, he wanted another cigarette. He wanted his life to be over.

He was getting
that
wish, wasn’t he?

“Tania, I’m telling you, don’t cry. That was our deal, do you hear me? I can’t take it.”

“Am I crying?” she said.

“I’m serious,” Alexander said. “I can’t do this. I need you—”

“You know what?” she said to him. “All the things you need me to be, I can’t be right now. I’ll be what I can.” She was crying.

His throat burning, Alexander lay next to her. Side by side they steeled themselves in their bed, and she cradled his head to her breasts, and she whispered and whispered and whispered and by the time she was done, his hair was damp from her tears. But she wasn’t done. She was never done. Her capacity to heal him, to harvest her love in him was endless.

“There was once a time,” she said, “when you placed your hand on my chest, and I thought my whole life was in front of me. In front of the Hermitage. In front of that broken man and his crates of art. Do you remember?”

“How could I forget?” Alexander said. “I never forget that man.”

Tatiana turned her face to him. They kissed. She cradled against him, tiny against him, she lay buried in his chest, and Alexander knew she was listening to his heart. She did that all that time; it was comforting and disquieting.

She was as resolute as ever, as fully loving, as completely giving, intensely tender, unbearably moving, as always affecting him utterly. But
there was something else. She was holding him so desperately, crying over him, almost as if she were mourning him already, almost as if she were already grieving. She made love to him without letting go of his head, choking him against her and crying, as if she were not just saying goodbye, but saying goodbye to him for good.

As if she were leaving herself with him because he needed her more. She was saying goodbye not only to him but to herself. There you go, Alexander, Tatiana was saying, take me and go. Have it all. There will be nothing left, but I will grow something new for myself. The Tania you love will remain with you. Take her. And he did, until there was nothing left.

Her warm wet space engulfed him. He was not returning to the womb, he was giving himself back to eternity. He was closing his eyes and surrendering to the universe that loved them and believed in their youth. To the stars and the mystery moon and the River Kama rushing onward to its thousand-kilometer trek, for ten million years feeding into the Caspian Sea. Long after Tania and Shura will have returned to the earth, the river, the pines, the mountains, the imploding stars would still be here, constant and changeless over Lazarevo. They were eternal, and Alexander’s Tatiana, too…she was eternal, moaning softly against his neck, warm breath, warm breasts and lips and legs around him, surrounding him, all things to him.

Limpid morning became desert evening. He wished he could help her, but he knew what they were losing, better than she who was still an innocent. But he knew everything.

Alexander knew what was ahead.

It was tomorrow.

He was leaving.

It was tomorrow.

He had left.

It was tomorrow.

And he was without her.

Sam Gulotta, Washington DC, July 1944

T
ATIANA COULDN’T LEAVE
A
LEXANDER’S
medal alone. Couldn’t leave Orbeli alone. She took an unprecedented day off, took Anthony with her, went to Pennsylvania Station, bought a train ticket and traveled to Washington DC where she found the United States Department of Justice on Pennsylvania Avenue. After four hours of shuffling from the Executive Office for Immigration Review to the Office of Immigration and Naturalization, to the National Central Bureau or Interpol Office, she finally found a clerk who told her she was in the wrong building and the wrong department entirely and needed to go to the Department of State on C Street. She and Anthony went to a small coffee shop where they had soup and, with their ration cards, warm bacon sandwiches. It remained a small marvel to her that delicious meat products were readily available in a country at war.

At the Department of State, Tatiana slogged from the Bureau of European Affairs to the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration and finally found the Office of Consular Affairs where she, with her tired legs and tired baby, would not move from the receptionist’s desk until she was put in touch with someone who knew something about expatriate emigration
out
of the United States.

That is how she met Sam Gulotta.

Sam was an athletic-looking man in his thirties with curly brown hair. Tatiana thought he looked less like an under secretary for consular affairs than a physical education teacher, and she wasn’t far wrong—he told her that he coached his son’s Junior League baseball team in the afternoons and summer camps. Fingers tapping, Sam leaned over the scuffed wooden counter messy with scattered papers and said, “Now what’s this all about?”

Tatiana took a deep breath, held the cranky Anthony to her chest and said, “Here?”

“As opposed to where? Over dinner? Yes, here.” He smiled when he said it. He wasn’t gruff, but it was five o’clock on a government Thursday.

“Mr. Gulotta, when I was in Soviet Union, I met and married a man who come to Moscow as young boy. I think he was still American citizen.”

“Really?” Gulotta said. “What are you doing in the States? And what is your name now?”

“My name is Jane Barrington,” said Tatiana, taking out her residence card and showing it to him. “I have permanent residence in United States. Soon to be citizen. But my husband…how to explain?” She took a breath and told him, beginning with Alexander and ending with the Red Cross death certificate and Dr. Sayers smuggling her out of the Soviet Union.

Gulotta listened silently and then said, “You are telling me too much, Jane Barrington.”

“I know. I need your help. I want to find out what happen to my husband,” she replied in a faint voice.

“You know what happened to him. You have the death certificate.”

How to explain the
Hero of the Soviet Union
medal? Gulotta would not have understood. Who could? How to explain Orbeli?

“Maybe he not dead?”

“Mrs. Barrington, you have much more information on that than I have.”

How to explain to an American the penal battalions? She tried.

“Mrs. Barrington, excuse me for interrupting,” Gulotta interrupted. “What penal battalions? What ranking officers? You have the death certificate. Your husband, whoever he was, wasn’t arrested. He drowned. He is out of
my
jurisdiction.”

“Mr. Gulotta, I think maybe he not drowned. I think maybe certificate was fake and he was arrested and maybe he in one of those penal battalions now.”

“Why would you think that?”

That, she could not adequately explain. She couldn’t even try. “Due to unforeheard circumstances—”

“Unforeheard?” Gulotta could not help a small smile.

“I…”

“Do you mean unforeseen?”

“Yes.” Tatiana blushed. “My English—I still learning—”

“You’re doing very well. Please continue.”

In the corner over the wide counter under the fluorescent lights, a middle-aged, overweight woman squinted grimly at Tatiana with delighted disapproval. “Mr. Gulotta,” said Tatiana. “Are you right person for me to talk to? Maybe there someone else?”

“I don’t know if I’m the right person.” He squinted at her himself over the counter. “Since I don’t know why you’re here. I could be the wrong person. But my boss has already left for the day. Tell me what you need.”

“I want you to find out what happened to my husband.”

“Is that all?” he said with irony.

“Yes,” she said without irony.

“Let me see what I can do. Would next week be soon enough for you?”

Now she understood. “Mr. Gulotta—”

He clasped his hands. “Listen to me. I don’t think I’m the right person after all. I don’t think there is a right person in this entire department—heck, in this entire government who can help you. Tell me again your husband’s name.”

“Alexander Barrington.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Were you working for State Department in 1930? That’s when he and his family emigrated.”

“No, I was still at university then. But that’s not the point.”

“I told you—”

“Oh, yes, unforeheard circumstances.”

Tatiana turned around and was about to walk away when she felt his hand on her arm. He had stepped out from the counter and was now on her side. “Don’t go yet. It’s quitting time. Why didn’t you come to me earlier in the day?”

“Mr. Gulotta, I took five
A.M
. train to come from New York. I have only these two days off, Thursday and Friday. I spent until now walking between State and Justice Department buildings. You first person talking to me. I was going to White House next.”

“I think our President is busy. Something about an invasion of Normandy. I hear there’s a war on.”

“Yes,” said Tatiana. “I was nurse in that war. I am still nurse in that war. Can Soviets help you? They our allies now. All you want is little information.” She squeezed her hands in a palsy around the handle bars of the baby carriage.

Sam Gulotta stared at her.

Tatiana might have given up, but Sam had good eyes. Listening, seeing, feeling eyes.

“Look up his file,” she continued. “You must have file on people who emigrate to Soviet Union? How many people can there be? Look
up his file. Maybe something there. You’ll see—he was just small boy when he left America.”

Sam made a small disbelieving sound, somewhere between a chortle and a groan. “All right, say I look up his file, and learn that yes, indeed, he was a small boy when he left the United States. So what? You already know that.”

“Maybe there will be something else. Soviet Union and United States communicate, yes? Maybe you find out what happened to him. For certain.”

“How much more certain than a death certificate can I get?” Gulotta muttered, and then louder said, “all right, say I find out, by some miracle, that your husband is still alive. Then what?”

“You let me worry about then what,” said Tatiana.

Sam sighed. “Come back tomorrow morning. Come back at ten. I will try to locate his file. What year did you say his family left?”

“Nineteen thirty, December,” Tatiana said, smiling at last.

She stayed with Anthony in a small hotel on C Street near the State Department. It pleased her to get a room in a hotel. No trepidation, no refusal, no demand for papers. She wanted a room, she produced three dollars, she got a nice room with a bathroom. That simple. No one looked at her twice even after they heard the Russian accent.

The next morning she came back to Consular Affairs before nine and sat on the bench for an hour with her son on her lap, playing with his fingers, looking at a picture book. Gulotta came out at nine forty-five and motioned for her to follow him to his office. “Sit, Mrs. Barrington,” he said. In front of him lay a dossier ten inches thick. For a few moments, maybe a minute, he didn’t say anything. His hands were on the file and his eyes were on it too. Then he sighed heavily. “What relation did you say you are to Alexander Barrington?”

“His wife,” Tatiana said in a small voice.

“Jane Barrington?”

“Yes.”

“Jane Barrington was the name of Alexander’s mother.”

“I know. That’s why I took it. I’m not Alexander’s mother,” Tatiana said, glancing at him suspiciously as he studied her suspiciously. “I took her name to get out of Soviet Union.” She tried to figure out what he was worried about. “What you worried about? That I’m communist?”

“What is your real name?”

“Tatiana.”

“Tatiana what? What was your Soviet name?”

“Tatiana Metanova.”

Sam Gulotta stared at her for what seemed to her to be solemn hours. His hands, clenched around the dossier, never unclenched, not even when he said, “May I call you Tatiana?”

“Of course.”

“Did you say you got out of the Soviet Union as a Red Cross nurse?”

“Yes.”

“Well, well,” Gulotta said. “You were very lucky.”

“Yes.” She looked down into her hands.

“No more Red Cross in the Soviet Union. Verboten. Forbidden. A few months ago the U.S. State Department asked to have the Red Cross to help at the Soviet hospitals and the Soviet POW camps, and Foreign Minister Molotov himself refused. Quite amazing for you to have left.” He looked at her with renewed surprise. She wanted to look down again.

“Tatiana, let me tell you about Alexander Barrington and his parents. He left the United States with his parents in 1930. Harold and Jane Barrington sought voluntary asylum in the Soviet Union despite repeated requests from us not to do so. We could not guarantee their safety. Despite his seditionary activities on our soil, Harold Barrington was still an American citizen and we had an obligation to him and his family. Do you know how many times Harold Barrington was arrested? Thirty-two. His son had been arrested with him, according to our records, three times. Twice he spent his summer vacation in a juvenile detention center because both his parents were in jail and they preferred their son to spend his summer vacation in jail rather than with relatives—”

“What relatives?” interrupted Tatiana.

“Harold had a sister, Esther Barrington.”

Alexander had only ever mentioned his father’s sister once in passing. Gulotta’s low voice was disturbing Tatiana, as if he were measuring his words so as not to spill the really awful news behind them.

“Can you tell me what all this means?” Tatiana said. “What you saying to me?”

“Let me finish. True, their son did not rescind his U.S. citizenship, but his parents rescinded, they surrendered their passports in 1933. Then in 1936 Alexander’s mother came to the U.S. consulate asking for asylum for her son.”

“I know. That trip cost her her life.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Gulotta. “But this is where our jurisdiction over Alexander ends. By the time he escaped on his way to prison, he was already a Soviet citizen.”

“Yes.”

“In 1936, the Soviet authorities came to us asking for our help in finding Alexander Barrington. They said he was a criminal and a fugitive, and we no longer had any right to grant him safe passage should he come to us, and in fact we were bound by international treaty to turn him over to the Soviet Union.” Gulotta paused. “We were asked to immediately notify the Soviet authorities should Alexander Barrington come asking us for asylum, since he was a Soviet citizen and a political criminal who had escaped justice.”

Tatiana stood up.

“He belongs to them,” said Gulotta. “Not us. We can’t help you.”

“Thank you for your time,” Tatiana said, her voice trembling, placing her hands on the handles of Anthony’s carriage. “I sorry to bother you.”

Gulotta stood up himself. “Our relations with the Soviet Union are stabilized because we’re fighting on the same side. But the feeling of mistrust is mutual. What happens when the war is over?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “What happens when war is over?”

“Wait,” Gulotta said, coming around his desk and going to stand in front of his office door before he opened it for her.

“I go now,” she barely said. “I must get train back.”

“Wait,” he repeated, putting his hand out. “For a second, sit.”

“I don’t want to sit anymore.”

“Listen to me,” Gulotta said, motioning her to sit. She was grateful to fall into the chair. “There is one more thing…” He sat in the chair next to her. Anthony grabbed hold of his leg. Gulotta smiled. “Have you remarried?”

“Of course I haven’t,” she said faintly.

Gulotta looked at the boy.

“That’s his child,” said Tatiana.

Gulotta didn’t speak for a while. “Don’t talk about this to anyone. About Alexander Barrington. Don’t go to the Justice Department, don’t go to the INS offices in New York or Boston. Don’t go looking for his relatives.”

“Why?”

“Not today, not tomorrow, not next year. Don’t trust them. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You don’t want them making
inquiries either on his behalf or out of some misplaced affection. If I contact the Soviets asking them for information on Alexander Barrington they will be less than accommodating. If I ask them the whereabouts of a man named Alexander Belov, who is really Alexander Barrington, if he is still alive, that might only lead the Soviet authorities to him.”

“I understand that even better than you think I do,” Tatiana said, looking down at her boy and away from Gulotta.

“You said you have residency here?”

She nodded.

“Get your citizenship as soon as possible. Your boy, he’s an American citizen or—”

“He’s American.”

“That’s good. Good.” He cleared his throat. “There is one more thing…”

She said nothing.

“According to his files, last year, in March 1943, the Soviet authorities contacted the State Department about one of their citizens, a Tatiana Metanova, who was wanted for espionage, desertion, and treason, and was suspected of escaping to the West. They sent a telegraph wire asking if a Tatiana Metanova had either sought asylum in the United States or had tried to make inquiries about her husband—an Alexander Belov who is suspected of being Alexander Barrington. Tatiana Metanova apparently has not revoked her Soviet citizenship. Last year we said she had not contacted us. They asked us to get in touch with them if she did and requested she be denied asylum status.”