Tatiana and Alexander (44 page)

Out of Colditz, April 1945

THE AMERICANS LIBERATED COLDITZ
in April after three days of fighting, or so it was rumored, for though Alexander heard the gunfire, he saw only a handful of Americans out in the courtyard. He managed to approach a group of them, asking for a cigarette, and, while bending over the lighter flame, he said to one private in English that he was an American named Alexander Barrington and maybe if his story checked out, he could be helped?

And the U.S. soldier laughed and said, “Yeah, and I’m the King of England.”

Alexander opened his mouth and Ouspensky came up to ask for a cigarette himself.

Alexander thought he would have another chance, but there was to be no other chance, because very early the next morning after the American liberation, Soviet officials, a general, two colonels, a deputy associate foreign minister or something, along with a hundred troops, came into Colditz to take the seven Soviet men “to join up with their brothers in the victorious march on defeated Germany.”

They were put on a train. A whole train for only
seven
of them? thought Alexander, but it turned out the train was full of Soviet men. Not all of them were soldiers, some were workers, some were residents of Poland. Thousands of such men were on that train. One, a concrete mixer, said he was living with his family in Bavaria, a wife and three children, when he was apprehended. Others echoed that. “I had a family, too. A mother, two sisters, three nieces after my brother died.” Where were the family members? Alexander wondered. “We left them, left them where they were,” said the man.

“But why didn’t you take your family with you?” inquired Ouspensky, who was shackled to Alexander.

The concrete man didn’t reply.

The train continued slowly west through central Germany. Most of the road signs had been destroyed, it was impossible to tell where they
were. They seemed to have traveled hundreds of kilometers. Alexander saw a small sign that said, Gottinger, 9. Where was Gottinger?

The train was stopped and they were all told to get off. After walking for two hours, they found themselves at what looked like an abandoned POW camp. The NKGB troops—by now Alexander realized they couldn’t be Red Army men, since the Red Army men were all roped to each other—requisitioned the grounds and called it a transit camp.

“A transit camp to where?” ask Ouspensky. No one answered him.

Then they changed the camp’s name to a screening and identification camp.

In this camp they lived for the last two weeks of April 1945, surrounded by barbed wire, watching perimeter lights being put up and watchtowers being hastily built. Then they heard that the war was over, that Hitler was dead.

The day after Germany’s surrender, the fields beyond the electrified barbed wire were mined. Alexander and Ouspensky knew this because they watched at least a half-dozen Soviet men—including the concrete mixer—go to war with those mines and lose.

“What do they know that we don’t know?” Ouspensky asked with suspicion, as they watched with a group of others as the bodies of the escapees were dumped into mass graves.

“Not just that,” said Alexander, “but what do they know that makes them run across a mined field rather than remain in a fairly innocuous transit camp?”

“They don’t want to go home,” said another man.

“Yes, but why?” said Ouspensky.

Alexander lit a cigarette and said nothing.

He wondered why the camp was being run under military discipline, despite having so many civilians in it. There was reveille and taps, there was curfew and military inspection of the barracks and clear assignation of duties. It was all peculiar and puzzling.

A few days later, Ivan Skotonov, deputy associate foreign minister, sent straight from Moscow, came to speak to the men. They were not allowed to stand as a crowd; they were made to stand in rows. It was a windy May day; Skotonov, greasy-haired and in a suit, could barely be heard. Finally he took a loudspeaker. “Citizens! Comrades!” he said. “Proud sons of
Russia! You have helped to defeat an enemy such as our great nation has never known! Your country is proud of you! Your country loves you! Your country needs you again to rebuild, to reconstruct, to help make once again great the land that our Splendid Leader and Teacher Comrade Stalin saved for us. Your country calls for you. You will come back with us, and your country will greet you as heroes and shower you with applause!”

Alexander thought back to the concrete mixer from Bavaria who had left his wife and children behind and then run across a mined field to get back to them.

“What if we don’t want to come back?” someone shouted.

“Yes, we had a life in Innsbruck, why should we have to leave it?”

“Because you are Soviet nationals,” Skotonov shouted back amiably. “You don’t belong in Innsbruck. You belong back home!”

“I’m from Poland,” the man shouted back. “From Krakow. Why do
I
have to go back?”

“That part of Poland has been disputed for centuries, and the Soviet Union has decreed that it is part of our Motherland!”

That evening after the speech, twenty-four men attempted to escape. One even unprimed a clean swathe through the mined field before he was stopped by a bullet from the sentry’s rifle. “He was wounded, not killed,” Skotonov assured the skittish mob the following morning. But the man was not seen again.

There seemed to be three types of people in the camp: refugees from the German occupation of places like Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukraine; forced labor workers who were taken in by the Germans for their own war machine; and Red Army soldiers like Alexander and Ouspensky.

These three groups were separated at the end of May, and quartered and fed separately. Little by little the refugees started filtering out of the camp, and then the forced labor workers.

“Always at night, have you noticed?” said Alexander. “We wake up, they’re not here. I wish I could keep my eyes open at three in the morning, I have a feeling we’d see quite a bit going on.”

In the yard while on his daily walk, he met a forced labor man who asked for a cigarette and said to him, “Have you heard? Five of the guys I been with the last four years have disappeared last night. Did you hear them? They were taken out and sentenced, right in the common area.”

“Sentenced for what?” said Ouspensky.

“For treason against the Motherland. For working for the enemy.”

“Maybe they should have explained that they were
forced
to work.”

“They tried. But if they really didn’t want to work for the Germans, why didn’t they try to escape?”

“Maybe we could try to escape,” said Ouspensky. “Huh, Captain?”

A Polish man came up behind them, laughed and said, “There is no escape. Escape to where?” Alexander and Ouspensky turned around. There was now a small crowd standing in the yard. The Polish man shook their hands and said, “Lech Markiewicz. Pleased to make your acquaintance. No escape, citizens. Do you know who delivered me into Soviet hands, all the way from Cherbourg, France?”

They waited.

“The English.”

“And do you know who delivered my friend, Vasia over here, into Soviet hands, all the way from Brussels? The French.”

Vasia nodded.

“And do you know who delivered Stepan into Soviet hands, all the way from Ravensburg, Bavaria, just ten kilometers from Lake Constance and Switzerland? The Americans. That’s right. The Allies are helpfully returning us, millions of us, to the Soviets. In the transit camp I was in before this one, in Lübeck, north of Hamburg, there were refugees from Denmark and Norway. Not soldiers like you, and not forced labor workers like me, but refugees, made homeless by war, trying to find a place to hang their hat in Copenhagen. All returned to the Soviets. So don’t talk to me about escape. Time for escape has long passed. There is nowhere to go anymore. All of Europe used to belong to Hitler. Half of Europe now belongs to the Soviet Union.”

And he laughed and walked away, linking his arms with Vasia and Stepan.

But that night, Lech Markiewicz, an electrician by trade, shorted out the electrified fence and ran. He was not in camp the following morning. No one knew what became of him.

The convoys came each night to take the men away, hundreds by hundreds, and during the day, the camp was maintained as a waystation to somewhere else. They were fed badly, they were allowed a bath once a week, they were regularly shaved and deloused. Yet, little by little new Russians kept coming in, old Russians kept shipping out.

One late July night, Alexander and Ouspensky were woken with all
their quartermates, told to pack what was theirs, and taken out to the back of the camp. Three trucks were waiting for them. They were all paired up and tied to their partners. Alexander was chained to Ouspensky. They were driven some distance in the night, Alexander guessed to a train station, and he was right.

New York, August 1945

ON THE LOWER EAST
Side, Tatiana, Vikki, and Anthony were strolling one summer Saturday, late morning, through the outdoor market under the El on Second Avenue. They were talking, like every person on the street, about the Japanese surrender a week ago following the atomic devastation of Nagasaki. Vikki thought the second bomb was unnecessary. Tatiana pointed out that the Japanese had not surrendered after Hiroshima. “We didn’t give them enough time. Three days, what’s that? We should have given them extra days for their imperial pride. Why else do you think they kept killing us these last three months even though they knew they would never win?”

“I don’t know. Why did Germans? They knew their war was lost in 1943.”

“That’s because Hitler was a madman.”

“And Hirohito, what was he?” Suddenly, Tatiana was stopped—no, besieged—by a family of what seemed like sixty. Actually it was six people, a husband, a wife, and their four teenaged children. First, they grabbed Tatiana’s hands, then her arms, then enveloped her entire body.

“Tania? Tania? Are you there?” Vikki said.

Stroking Tatiana’s hair, the woman murmured in Ukrainian. The man wiped his eyes and handed Anthony an ice cream and a lollipop, which Anthony took with a two-year-old smile and promptly dropped on the sidewalk.

“Who are these people?” Vikki asked.

“Mama knows a wot of people,” said Anthony, tugging at Tatiana’s skirt.

Straightening up, Vikki muttered, “That’s certainly true. Just no men.”

“Ice kweem, Mama. I want ice kweem.”

The family talked to Tatiana in Ukrainian and she spoke Russian back to them. They kissed her hands and at last moved on. With Anthony, Tatiana and Vikki moved on, too.

“Tatiana!”

“What?”

“Are you going to explain to us the scene we just witnessed?”

“Anthony needs no explanation, do you, honey?”

“No, Mama. Need ice kweem.”

After getting her son another ice cream and a lollipop, Tatiana glanced at Vikki and shrugged. “What? Slavic people very emotional.”

“They weren’t overreacting. They were genuflecting. I think they sprinkled gold dust at your feet. By their hand gestures alone, I could tell they were about to sacrifice their firstborn at your altar.”

Tatiana laughed. “Listen, I tell you, it was nothing. Few months ago, they came in to Port of New York. The man had sent his wife and children at beginning of German occupation of Ukraine to Turkey. He was POW for two years, then escaped into Turkey and spent over year looking for them in Ankara. Finally found them in 1944. They arrived month ago in July in PNY without papers but in good health. But we getting too many refugees. The man, even without papers, could stay, because he do work, do something. Lay bricks, paint, whatever. But his wife can’t sew, can’t knit and can’t speak English. She lived in Turkey for three years begging on streets for her children.” Tatiana shook her head. “I wish they spoke bit of English. Everything would be much more easy. So what can I do? They were all going to be sent back.” She leaned down, adjusting the baseball cap on Anthony’s head and wiping the vanilla ice cream off his chin. “Imagine their reaction when I say husband can stay but rest have to go back. Go back where? they asked me. Go back to Ukraine? We escaped! We are going straight to camps, we are never coming out. Five women, do you know what would happen to us in camps? So what I can do, Vikki? I went and found mother job cleaning house for shop owner. The daughters become baby-sitters for shop owner’s three young children. They stayed in Ellis until I got INS man to issue them temporary visas.” Tatiana shrugged. “It’s crazy over at Ellis, these days, crazy. They want to send everybody back. Just today, man was being sent back to Lithuania, and there was nothing wrong with him, he had little infection in his right ear! They put him in detention center, and tomorrow, he was going back just like that. Because his ear was red!” Tatiana was flushed in the face. “I found this poor thing, sitting in room bawling his eyes out. He said his wife had been in United States waiting for him for two years. They were tailors. So I checked his ear out—”

“Wait, wait, what INS man?” Vikki asked. “You don’t mean the vulture, the viper, Vittorio, the marauder, Vassman?”

“Yes, him. He nice man.”

Vikki laughed. “His own mother can’t get a parking space in her son’s garage. You got him to issue temporary visas? What did you have to do for him?”

“I made
pirozhki
for his ailing mother and
blinchiki
for him and told him he was making success of very difficult job.”

“Did you go to bed with him?”

Tatiana sighed. “You impossible.”

“Edward, have you heard what Tania is doing at Ellis?”

“Oh, I know all about it.”

They were having lunch at the Ellis cafeteria, which was now full of nurses and doctors, since Ellis had become, once again, a refugee port. One of those nurses was not Brenda, who, to everybody’s enormous surprise, quit in June 1945 when her husband came home from the Pacific. No one even knew that Brenda had a husband.

Vikki told Edward the Lower East Side story.

Edward nodded, looking fondly at Tatiana; in fact, looking at Tatiana in a way that made Tatiana look away and Vikki’s eyes widen. “Vik,” he said, “the entire Ellis Island knows about Tatiana. Why do you think they don’t let her go on the refugee boats anymore? She lets in every single person on those boats. They know of her halfway across the ocean. Oh, to get into Tatiana’s inspection line, to get her to touch them.”

“The refugees I understand. But how does she get Vassman to issue them visas?”

“She hypnotizes him every morning. If that doesn’t work, she slips something into his coffee.”

“You’re implying she sees him in the
morning?
”

“You two have to finish, all right?” said Tatiana. “You just have to stop.”

Edward continued. “Just the other day, I had three women come looking for her on a Saturday afternoon. They took a ferry to Ellis to look for her.”

“Much like your wife used to look for you?” Tatiana asked mildly.

“No, not quite,” Edward returned. “My soon to be former wife was not coming to offer me her life services the way these people come to Ellis seeking you.”

“I don’t know what you talking about,” Tatiana said. “They come to bring me apples.”

“Apples, a shirt, four books.” He smiled. “You weren’t there. I told them I could give them your address—”

“Edward!” The girls shouted in unison.

He laughed. “Apples delivered right to your door, no?”

“No.” Tatiana said.

At the newspaper stand, the man who sold Tatiana and Vikki the
Tribune
looked at Tatiana and said, “You’re Nurse Tatiana, aren’t you?”

Instantly alert, Tatiana said, “Who wants to know?”

The kiosk man smiled. “They call you the Angel of Ellis. Take the paper. Don’t pay me. Take it. I have a hundred customers because of you.”

As they walked away, Vikki said, “I’m beginning to understand. Oh, my God. You’re not doing it for
them
.”

“Doing what?”

“You’re doing it for
you
. You said to that man,
who wants to know
, as if you’re waiting for the person who wants to know if you’re Nurse Tatiana.”

“Wrong again. How can you be so wrong in one day?”

“Who are you waiting for?”

“It remains from old days,” Tatiana said. “Someone looking for you, it’s bad sign.”

“You’re full of shit. Who are you waiting for?”

“No one.”

“When do you find the time? You have a child. You have two jobs. And I live with you. When do you have time to lead a secret life?”

“What secret? I do nothing. Occasionally I ask our building super if they looking for another doorman. Is that so hard?”

“I don’t know. I don’t ask. Why should
you
?”

“Because it costs me nothing,” Tatiana replied. “But now Diego from Romania is gainfully employed.”

“What a gas you are,” said Vikki, as she opened the door, putting her arm around Tatiana. “Is this your legacy to America?”

“It is not my legacy,” said Tatiana, walking inside. “It is my thanks.”

Vikki was frequently not home in the evenings. She went out dancing, and to the pictures, she went to dinner, she met friends at bars. When she came home late at night, she often had had too much to drink and wanted to talk, and Tatiana, usually awake no matter what time Vikki came home, obliged her. One evening, though, Tatiana was already in bed sleeping. This did not deter Vikki, who threw off her dress and climbed in next to her. Vikki put her hands over her head and then sighed extravagantly.

“Yes?” said Tatiana.

“Oh, you’re not asleep?”

“Not anymore.”

Vikki took her hands away from her face. She looked tipsy. “Oh, Tania, Tania. I couldn’t get a taxi. Walked all the way home from Astor Place in my high heels. I’m so sore.”

Tatiana heard Vikki crying. Drinking at night tended to make all the Italian emotions come out in Vikki. Tatiana reached over and stroked Vikki’s hair. “What’s the matter, Gelsomina?”

“What am I looking for, Tania? What? I went out with a real idiot tonight, no, such a creep. Todd. From last week.”

“I told you stay away from him.”

“He was so nice at first.”

“You mean last week?”

“Yes. But this week he is all demanding and creepy. Roughed me up outside Ricardo’s. Grabbed me too hard. Thank God a car drove by. He wanted to come home with me and wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

“Why should he? You said yes to him first time you saw him.”

“I just want to meet a nice man who loves me. What’s wrong with that?”

Did Dasha go out every Friday and Saturday night after work and get involved with her boss, a married dentist, because she wanted to meet a nice man who loved her, too? And then she met a nice man, a tall Red Army officer in Sadko. (“Tania, wait till you meet him. You’ve never met anyone so handsome!”)

“Nothing.”

“I want that Harry back. Harry—he was such a sweetie.”

He was a drunk. Tatiana didn’t say anything.

“I want Jude back, or Mark, or even my former husband. Before the
war ended it was better. Now they come back and they want us, they just don’t know how to treat us. They want us to be like their war buddies.”

“Do we know how to treat them?”

“I want my loving heart back,” said Vikki, crying. “You know what I’m afraid of? That I will turn out like my mother. Rootless. I don’t want to be like her. They say we all turn out like our mothers, you believe that?” Before Tatiana had a chance to answer, Vikki went on. “My mother left me, left New York, went abroad, traveled, loved, I guess, but ended up in a home somewhere in Montecito, imagine, I don’t even know where Montecito is and my mother found a loony bin there.”

“I’m sorry for her. And about her.”

“You know what I think sometimes?” Vikki whispered with a small sob. “Sometimes I think I want my mother back. Isn’t that ridiculous?”

“No,” said Tatiana. “I want
my
mother back.”

“Did you have a good mother?”

“I don’t know. She was my mother, that’s all.”

“Did you have a good sister?”

“I had a very good sister,” Tatiana whispered. “She carried me on her back when I was young and protected me from bad boys her whole life. I want them all back. My sister, my brother.” She closed her eyes.
Pasha and Tania holding on to the same rope, swinging over the River Luga, one swing, two, three, letting go, and falling in, Pasha and Tania running flat out to the banks of the Luga, taking a running jump and diving in
.

“But don’t you want love, too? I want love. A nice two-bedroom Levitt house in the suburbs of Long Island, a car, two kids. I want what my grandparents have. For forty-three years they’ve had each other.”

“Vikki, you don’t want that. You don’t want kids. It’s not for you. You have wandering heart.”

Vikki squinted in the dark at Tatiana. Mascara was spread in black globs under Vikki’s eyes. “I
could
have that.”

Without taking her hand away from Vikki’s hair, Tatiana shook her head.

“What do you know about anything? You never leave this apartment.”

“Where do I have to go? I’m home.”

“Do you?” asked Vikki, reaching out and touching Tatiana’s hair. “Do
you
have a wandering heart?”

“I wish I did.”

Vikki moved over and put her arms around Tatiana, who shut tight her eyes and lay nestled into Vikki, the way she once, a lifetime ago, used to sleep at the Fifth Soviet apartment, nestled into Dasha.

“Tania,” said Vikki, “how could you have not given yourself to anyone all this time?”

Tatiana made no reply.

“Have you been with a man other than your husband?”

Tatiana moved away in the bed. To bear it in the night next to someone else was beyond her strength, beyond her limits. “No,” she said in a low voice. “I fell in love when I was sixteen. I never loved anyone else. I never been with anyone else.”

“Oh, Tania. My Grammy was right about you. She said that girl is still getting over her Travis.”

Tatiana said nothing. Vikki inched over, putting her arms around her again.

“But you have his son. Isn’t he a comfort to you?”

“When I don’t think of his father, yes.”

“But don’t you want love again? Happiness? Marriage? God, Tatiana,” Vikki breathed out. “You have…so much to give.” She held Tatiana closer. “Edward’s divorce has come through. Why don’t you go to dinner with him? Why do you always keep him at lunch length?”

“Edward deserves better than me.”

“Edward doesn’t think so. I don’t think so.”

Tatiana laughed lightly, caressing Vikki’s arms. “I’ll get there,” she whispered. “You said so yourself, I’ll get there.”

Hours in the dark, and they were not sleeping. Vikki sobered up a bit, drank some water. She was smoking and lying in bed under the covers.

“Please tell me you’ll go to dinner with him. What can one dinner hurt?”

“What do you matter about all this?”