Tatiana and Alexander (4 page)

“There I was, going to the bathroom, and I thought, let me go get a drink of water. It’s the middle of the night, mind you, what could be the problem with that? And what did I find in the kitchen but that hound, that filthy animal, with his disgusting paw in my borscht, digging out the meat and eating it! My meat! My borscht! Right out of the pot! Filth!” she called down the hall. “Filth and slime! No respect for people’s property!”

Alexander stood and listened to his mother, who kept on for a few more minutes and then, with angry relish, threw the entire pot of recently cooked soup into the sink. “To think that I would eat anything after that animal’s hands were in it,” she said.

Alexander went back to bed.

The next morning Jane was still talking about it. And the next afternoon, when Alexander came home from school. And the next dinner—which was not delicious borscht but something meatless and stewed that he did not like. Alexander realized he preferred meat to no meat. Meat filled him up like few other things did. His growing body confounded him, but he needed to feed it. Chicken, beef, pork. Fish if there was some. He didn’t care much for an all vegetable dinner.

Harold said to Jane, “Calm down. You’re really getting yourself worked up.”

“How could I not? Let me ask you, do you think that scum washed his hands after he pawed the whore from the train station that was with fifty other filthy scum just like him?”

“You threw the soup out. Why such a fuss?” said Harold.

Alexander tried to keep a serious face. He and his father exchanged a look. When his father didn’t speak, Alexander cleared his throat and said, “Mom, um, may I point out that this is not very socialist of you. Marta’s son has every right to your soup. Just as you have every right to his whore. Not that you would want her, of course. But you would be entitled to her. As you are to his butter. Would you like some of his butter? I’ll go and get some for you.”

Harold and Jane stared at Alexander cheerlessly.

“Alexander, have you lost your mind? Why would I want anything that belongs to that man?”

“That’s my point, Mom. Nothing belongs to him. It’s yours. And nothing belongs to you, either. It’s his. He had every right to rummage in your borscht. That’s what you’ve been teaching me. That’s what the Moscow school teaches me. We are all better for it. That’s why we live like this. To prosper in each other’s prosperity. To rejoice and reap benefit from each other’s accomplishment. Personally, I don’t know why you made so little borscht. Do you know that Nastia down the hall hasn’t had meat in her borscht since last year?” Brightly Alexander looked at his parents.

His mother said, “What in the name of the Lord has gotten into you?”

Alexander finished his cabbagy, oniony dinner and said to his father, “Hey, when’s the next Party meeting? I can’t wait to go.”

“You know what? I think no more meetings for you, son,” said Jane.

“Just the opposite,” said Harold, ruffling Alexander’s hair. “I think he needs more of them.”

Alexander smiled.

They had arrived in Moscow in the winter, and after three months they realized that to get the goods they needed, the white or rye flour, or electric bulbs, they had to go to the private sellers, to the speculators who loitered around railroad stations selling fruit and ham out of their fur-lined coat pockets. There were few of them and their prices were exorbitant. Harold objected to it all, eating the small rationed black bread portions, and borscht without meat, and potatoes without butter but
with plenty of linseed oil—previously thought to be good only for making paint and linoleum and for oiling wood. “We have no money to give away to private traders,” he would say. “We can live one winter without fruit. Next winter there will be fruit. Besides, we don’t have any extra money. Where is this money to buy from speculators coming from?” Jane would not reply, Alexander would shrug because he did not know, but in the dark after Harold was asleep, Jane would creep into his room and whisper to him to go the next day and buy himself oranges so the scurvy wouldn’t get him, and ham so dystrophy wouldn’t get him, or some rare and dubiously fresh milk. “Hear me, Alexander? I’m putting American dollars in your school bag, in the inner pocket, all right?”

“All right, Mom. Where is this American money coming from?”

“Never mind that, son. I brought a little extra, just in case.” She would creep to him and in the dark her mouth would find his forehead. “Things are not expected to be good overnight. Do you know what’s going on in our America? The Depression. Poverty, unemployment, things are difficult all over; these are difficult times. But we are living according to our principles. We are building a new state not on exploitation but on camaraderie and mutual benefit.”

“With a few extra American dollars?” Alexander would whisper.

“With a few extra American dollars,” Jane would agree, gathering his head into her arms. “Don’t tell your father, though. Your father would get very upset. He’d feel as if I’d betrayed him. So don’t tell him.”

“I won’t.”

The following winter, Alexander was twelve and there was still no fresh fruit in Moscow. It was still bitterly cold, and the only difference between the winter of 1931 and the winter of 1930 was that the speculators near the railroads had vanished. They had all been given ten years in Siberia for counter-revolutionary anti-proletarian activity.

Living on Ellis Island, 1943

TATIANA TRIED TO READ
to improve her English while she got better. In the small but well-stocked Ellis library, she found many books in English donated by nurses, by doctors, by other benefactors. The library even had some books in Russian: Mayakovsky, Gorky, Tolstoy. Tatiana read in her room, but reading in English could not keep her attention and when her attention wandered, images of rivers and ice and blood mixed with images of bombing, planes, mortars, and ice holes, and knitting, and sewing, and motionless mothers on sofas with their body bags in their hands and famished frozen sisters on piles of dead bodies and brothers who vanished on exploding trains and fathers who burned down to ashes and grandfathers with infected lungs and grandmothers dying of grief. White camouflage, pools of blood, wet matted black hair, an officer’s cap strewn to the side, lying on the ice, images all so visceral she would have to stagger down the hall and throw up in the shared bathroom and afterwards force herself into learning better and better English that sufficiently commanded her attention so that her mind did not wander and go where the heart could not help but wander, meander into the emptiness in the middle of her chest, a black void that felt so much like fear that when she closed her eyes, her whole body choked on it.

She would lift a sleeping Anthony out of his bassinet and lay him on her chest for comfort, for closeness. But no matter how good Anthony smelled, and how silky his black hair felt against her lips, she could not keep her mind from wandering. If anything…

But she liked to smell him. She liked to undress him if it was sufficiently warm, and feel his chubby pink soft body. She liked to smell his hair and his neck and his milky baby breath. She liked to turn him over and touch his back and his legs and his long feet, and smell the back of his neck. Contentedly he slept and did not wake up, not even with all the prodding and caressing.

“Does this child ever wake up?” asked Dr. Edward Ludlow on one of his rounds.

In slow English Tatiana replied, “Think him as lion. He sleeps twenty hours in day and wakes up in night to hunt.”

Edward smiled. “You must be getting better. You’re making a joke.”

She smiled wanly. Dr. Ludlow was a thin, graceful man of fluid motion. He did not raise his voice, he did not jerk his hands. He was soothing in his eyes, in his speech, in his movements. He had a good bedside manner, a must for a fine doctor. He was in his mid-thirties, Tatiana guessed, and carried himself so upright that she suspected he might have been a military man once. She felt that she could trust him. He had serious eyes.

Dr. Ludlow had delivered Anthony when she had arrived in the Port of New York and gone into labor, a month early. He now came every day to check on her, even though Brenda said that normally he worked at Ellis only a couple of days a week.

Glancing at his watch, Edward said, “It’s almost lunchtime. Why don’t we take a walk if you’re up to it, and eat in the cafeteria? Put on your robe and we’ll go.”

“No, no.” She didn’t like to leave her room. “What about TB?”

He waved her off. “Put on your face mask and walk down the hall.”

Reluctantly she went. They had lunch at one of the narrow rectangular tables lining the large open room with high windows.

“It’s not great,” Edward said, looking at his meal. “I get a little beef. Here, have some of mine.” He cut half of his chipped beef with gravy and put it on her plate.

“Thank you, but look at all food I have,” said Tatiana. “I have white bread. I have margarine. I have potatoes and rice and corn. There is so much food.”

In the dark room she sits and in front of her is a plate and on the plate lies a black hunk of bread the size of a deck of cards. The bread has sawdust in it, and cardboard. She takes a knife and a fork, and cuts it slowly into four pieces. She eats one, chews it deliberately, pushes it with difficulty through her dry throat, eats another and another and finally the last one. She lingers especially on the last one. She knows after this piece is gone there will be no more food until tomorrow morning. She wishes she could be strong enough to save half of the bread until dinner, but she isn’t, she can’t. When she looks up from her plate, her sister, Dasha, is staring at her. Her plate is long empty.

“I wish Alexander was coming back,” says Dasha. “He might have food for us.”

I wish Alexander was coming back, thinks Tatiana.

She shuddered; her potato fell to the floor. She bent and picked it up, dusted it off, and ate it without saying a word.

Edward stared at her, his fork full of beef suspended between the plate and his mouth.

“There is sugar and tea and coffee and condensed milk,” Tatiana tremulously continued. “There is apples and oranges.”

“There’s hardly any chicken, there’s practically no beef, there’s only very little milk and there’s no butter,” Edward said. “The wounded need all the butter we have and we don’t have any, you know they’d get better faster if they had some but they don’t.”

“Maybe they do not want to get better faster. Maybe they like it here,” Tatiana said, and found Edward studying her again. She thought of something. “Edward, you say you have milk?”

“Not much, but yes, regular milk, not condensed.”

“Bring me some milk and a large vat, and long wooden spoon. Maybe ten liters of milk, twenty. The more the better. Tomorrow we will have butter.”

Edward said, “What does milk have to do with butter?”

Now it was Tatiana’s turn to study Edward, who smiled and said, “I’m a doctor, not a farmer. Eat, eat. You need it. And you’re right. Despite everything, there is still plenty.”

Morozovo, 1943

THEY CAME FOR HIM
a few hours into the night. Alexander, sleeping in the chair, was roughly shaken awake by four men in suits, motioning him to stand.

Slowly he stood.

“You’re going to Volkhov to get promoted. Hurry. There is no time to waste. We’ve got to get across the lake before it gets light. The Germans bomb Ladoga constantly.” The sallow man who was speaking in hushed tones was obviously in charge. The other three never opened their mouths.

Alexander picked up his rucksack.

“Leave that here,” said the man.

“Well, I’m a soldier. I always take my ruck with me if it’s all the same to you.”

“Have you got your sidearm?”

“Of course.”

“Let’s have that.”

Alexander took a step toward them. He was a head taller than the tallest. They looked like thugs in their drab gray winter coats. On top of the coats they had small blue stripes, the symbol of the NKVD—the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs—the way the Red Cross was a symbol of international empathy. “Let me understand what you’re asking me,” he said quietly but not
that
quietly.

“So it’s easier for you,” the first man stammered. “You’re wounded, no? It must be hard for you to carry all your gear—”

“This isn’t all my gear. These are just my few personal things. Let’s go,” Alexander said loudly, moving out from the side of the bed, pushing them out of his way. “Now, comrades. We’re wasting time.” It was not an even fight. He was an officer, a major. He couldn’t see their rank in their shoulder bars or demeanor. They had no authority until they were out of the building and took his away from him. This police liked
to do its work in private, in the dark. They did not like to be overheard by barely sleeping nurses, by barely sleeping soldiers. This police liked it to seem as if everything was just as it should be. A wounded man was being taken in the middle of the night across the lake to get a promotion. What was so out of the ordinary about that? But they had to leave his gun with him to continue with the pretense. As if they could have taken it away.

As they were walking out, Alexander noticed that the two beds next to him were empty. The soldier with the breathing difficulties and another had gone. He shook his head. “Are they going to get promoted, too?” he asked dryly.

“No questions, just go,” said one of the men. “Quickly.”

Alexander had slight trouble walking quickly.

As he made his way through the corridor, he wondered where Tatiana was sleeping. Was it behind one of those doors? Was she there now, somewhere? Still so close. He took a deep breath, almost as if he were smelling for her.

The armored truck was waiting outside behind the building. It was parked next to Dr. Sayers’s Red Cross jeep. Alexander recognized the white and red emblem in the dark. As they got closer to their truck, a silhouette hobbled out from the shadows. It was Dimitri. He was hunched over his casted arm, and his face was a black pulp with a swollen protuberance instead of a nose—earlier courtesy of Alexander.

He stood for a moment and said nothing. Then, “Going somewhere, Major Belov?” His hissing voice placed special emphasis on Belov. It sounded like
Beloffffff
.

“Don’t come close to me, Dimitri,” Alexander said.

Dimitri, as if heeding the advice, took a step back, then opened his mouth and laughed silently. “You can’t hurt me anymore, Alexander.”

“Nor you me.”

“Oh, believe me,” said Dimitri in a smooth sweet-sour voice, “I can still hurt you.” And right before Alexander was pushed into the NKVD truck by the militia men, Dimitri threw his head back as if in studied delirium and wagged a shaking finger at Alexander, baring the yellow teeth under his bloodied nose and narrowing his slit eyes.

Alexander turned his head, squared his shoulders, and without even looking in Dimitri’s direction as he jumped into the truck, said very loudly and clearly and with as much satisfaction as he could get his voice to muster, “Oh, fuck you.”

“Get in the truck and shut up,” barked one of the NKVD men to Alexander, and to Dimitri: “Go back to your ward, it’s past curfew. What are you doing skulking around here?”

In the back of the truck, Alexander saw his two shivering ward mates. He hadn’t expected two other people, two Red Army
soldiers
, to be in the truck with him. He had thought it would be just him and the NKVD men. No one to risk or sacrifice except them and himself. Now what?

One of the NKVD men grabbed his ruck. Alexander yanked it away. The man did not let go. “It looks as if it’s hard for you to carry it,” he said, struggling. “I’ll take it and give it back to you on the other side.”

Shaking his head, Alexander said, “No, I’ll keep it.” He wrenched it from the man.

“Belov—”

“Sergeant!” said Alexander loudly. “You’re talking to an officer. Major Belov to you. Leave my belongings alone. Now, let’s start driving. We’ve got a long way ahead of us.” Smiling to himself, he turned away, dismissing the man. His back didn’t hurt as badly as he had imagined: he was able to walk, jump up, talk, bend, sit down on the floor of the truck. But his weakness upset him.

The truck’s idling motor revved up and they began driving away—from the hospital, from Morozovo, from Tatiana. Alexander took a deep breath and turned to the two men sitting in front of him.

“Who the fuck are you?” he said. The words were gruff but the tone was resigned. He looked them over briefly. It was dark, he could barely make out their features. They were huddled against the wall of the truck, the smaller one wore glasses, the larger one sat, body wrapped in his coat, head wrapped in a bandage, and only his eyes, nose, and mouth showed. His eyes were bright and alert, discernible even in the dark, even at night. Bright perhaps wasn’t quite the right word. Mischievous. You couldn’t say the same about the smaller man’s eyes. They were lackluster.

“Who are you?” Alexander repeated.

“Lieutenant Nikolai Ouspensky. This is Corporal Boris Maikov. We were wounded in Operation Spark, on January fifteenth, over on the Volkhov side—we were housed in a field tent until we—”

“Stop,” Alexander said, putting his hand out. Before he continued with them he wanted to shake their hands. He wanted to feel what they were made of. Ouspensky was all right—his handshake was steady and friendly and unafraid. His hand was strong. Not frail Maikov’s.

Alexander sat back against the truck and felt for the grenade in his boots. Damn it. He could hear Ouspensky’s rattling breathing. Ouspensky was the one Tania had moved next to Alexander and put a tent around, the one with only one lung, the one who could not hear or speak. Yet here he was sitting, breathing on his own, hearing, speaking.

“Listen, both of you,” said Alexander. “Summon your strength. You’re going to need it.”

“For getting a medal?” Maikov said suspiciously.

“You’re going to be getting a posthumous medal if you don’t get hold of yourself and stop shaking,” said Alexander.

“How do you know I’m shaking?”

“I can hear your boots knocking together,” Alexander replied. “Quiet, soldier.”

Maikov turned to Ouspensky. “I told you, Lieutenant, this didn’t seem right, to be woken in the middle of the night—”

“And I told you to shut up,” said Alexander.

There was a bit of dull blue light coming in from the narrow window in the front of the truck.

“Lieutenant,” Alexander said to Ouspensky, “can you stand up? I need you to stand up and block the view from the window.”

“Last time I heard that, my quartermate was getting some blow,” said Ouspensky with a smile.

“Well, rest assured, no one is getting blow here,” Alexander said. “Stand up.”

Ouspensky obeyed. “Tell us the truth.
Are
we getting promoted?”

“How should I know?” Once Nikolai blocked the small window, Alexander took off his boot and pulled out one of the grenades. It was dark enough that neither Maikov nor Ouspensky saw what he was doing.

He crawled to the back of the truck and sat with his back against the doors. There were only two NKVD men in the front cabin. They were young, they had no experience, and no one wanted to cross the lake: the danger of German fire was ever-present and unwelcome. The driver’s lack of experience broadcast itself in his inability to drive the truck faster than twenty kilometers an hour. Alexander knew that if the Germans were monitoring Soviet army activity from their positions in Sinyavino, the truck’s leisurely speed would not escape their reconnaissance agents. He could walk across the ice faster.

“Major, are
you
getting promoted?” asked Ouspensky.

“That’s what they told me, and they let me keep my gun. Until I hear otherwise, I’m optimistic.”

“They didn’t let you keep your gun. I saw. I heard. They just didn’t have the strength to take it from you.”

“I’m a critically injured man,” Alexander said, taking out a cigarette. “They could have taken it from me if they wanted to.” He lit up.

“Have you got another one?” said Ouspensky. “I haven’t smoked in three months.” He looked Alexander over. “Nor seen anyone but my nurses.” He paused. “I’ve heard your voice, though.”

“You don’t want to smoke,” Alexander said. “From what I understand, you have no lungs.”

“I have one lung, and my nurse has been keeping me artificially sick so I don’t get sent back to the front. That’s what she did for me.”

“Did she?” asked Alexander, trying not to close his eyes at the image of Nikolai’s nurse—the small, clear-eyed bright sunny morning of a girl, the crisp Lazarevo morning of a sweet blonde girl.

“She brought in ice and made me breathe the cold fumes to get my lungs rattling and working. I wish she would have done a little more for me.”

Alexander handed him a cigarette. He wanted Nikolai to stop talking. He did not think Ouspensky would be particularly pleased to discover that Tatiana had saved him only long enough to be now sent into Mekhlis’s clutches.

Taking out his Tokarev pistol, Alexander got up, pointed at the back door and fired, blowing out the padlock. Maikov squealed. The truck slowed down. There was obviously some confusion in the driver’s cabin as to the source of the noise. Now down on the floor, Ouspensky was no longer blocking the window. Alexander had seconds before the truck stopped. Flinging the doors open, he pulled the pin out of the grenade, pulled himself above the roof of the creeping vehicle and threw the grenade forward. It landed a few meters in front of the truck’s path; seconds later there was a shattering explosion. He had just enough time to hear Maikov bleat, “What is that—” when he was thrown from the truck onto the ice. The pain he felt in the unhealed wound in his back was so jolting he thought his scars were tearing apart a millimeter at a time.

The truck jerked and began to rumble to a sliding stop. It skidded, teetered and fell sideways onto the ice, crunching to a halt at the ice hole made by Alexander’s grenade. The hole was smaller than the truck, but
the truck was heavier than the broken ice. The ice cracked and the hole became wider.

Alexander got up and ran limping to the back doors, motioning for the two men to crawl to him. “What was that?” Maikov cried. He had bumped his head and his nose was bleeding.

“Jump out of the truck!” Alexander yelled.

Ouspensky and Maikov did as he commanded—just in time, as the front end of the truck slowly sank beneath the surface of the Ladoga. The drivers must have been knocked unconscious by the impact against the glass and ice. They were making no attempts to get out.

“Major, what the hell—”

“Shut up. The Germans will begin shooting at the truck in three or four minutes.” Alexander had no intention of actually dying on the ice. Before he saw Ouspensky and Maikov, he had had a small hope he might be alone, and would, after blowing up the truck with the NKVD men in it, make his way back to the Morozovo shores and into the woods. All of his hopes seemed to have this one common denominator nowadays: short-fucking-lived.

“You want to stay here and observe the efficient German army in action, or you want to come with me?”

“What about the drivers?” asked Ouspensky.

“What about them? They are NKVD men. Where do you think those drivers were taking you at dawn?”

Maikov tried to stand up. Before he could say another word, Alexander pulled him down onto the ice.

They weren’t far from the shore, maybe two kilometers. It was pre-dawn. The cabin of the truck was submerged and cracking a larger hole in the ice, large enough soon for the whole truck to fit through.

“Pardon me, Major,” Ouspensky said, “but you’re talking out of your ass. I’ve never done anything wrong in my entire military career. They haven’t come for me.”

“No,” Alexander said. “They’ve come for me.”

“Who the fuck are
you
?”

The truck was disappearing into the water.

Ouspensky stared at the ice, at the shivering, dumbfounded and bleeding Maikov, at Alexander, and laughed. “Major, perhaps you could tell us your plans for what the three of us are going to do alone on the open ice once the truck sinks?”

“Don’t worry,” said Alexander with a heavy sigh. “I guarantee you, we won’t be alone for long.” He nodded in the direction of the distant
Morozovo shore and took out his two pistols. The headlights of a light army vehicle were getting closer. The jeep stopped fifty meters from them, and out of it jumped five men with five machine guns all pointing at Alexander. “Stand up! Stand up on the ice!”

Ouspensky and Maikov stood instantly, hands in the air, but Alexander didn’t like to take orders from inferior officers. He would not stand up and with good reason. He heard the whistling sound of a shell and put his hands over his head.

When he looked, two of the NKVD men were lying face down, while the other three were crawling to Alexander, rifles aimed at him, hissing,
stay down, stay down
. Maybe the Germans will kill them before I have a chance to, Alexander thought. He tried to make out the shore. Where was Sayers? The NKVD jeep was stationary, providing a convenient practice target for the Germans. When the NKVD men got very close, Alexander suggested to them that maybe they should get back inside their vehicle and return to Morozovo with all deliberate speed.