Tatiana and Alexander (45 page)

Vikki laughed. “I
care
,” she emphasized, “because I know he wants to. And because I think you would be adorable together.”

“Together? Forget everything. You said dinner.”

“Yes. Dinner together.”

“Together implies a number of dinners. Maybe even Levitt house.”

“And that would be wrong, why?”

“I go to sleep now. You do what you like.”

She couldn’t tell Vikki about the ugly thoughts. She couldn’t tell Vikki about the beautiful thoughts. She couldn’t tell Vikki about the sky, or the sorrow.

How comforting it was to sleep next to another human being. Not to be alone. How comforting it was to feel a breathing body, and a trembling heart, to feel someone’s dark hair on your shoulders, to feel, to feel.

All Vova has to say is, “Don’t worry, Alexander. We’ll take good care of Tania when you’re gone.”

At home she sits helplessly before him in the chair, looking flummoxed.

“Let me ask you,” Alexander says, his voice dripping with sarcasm, and Tatiana says, “Shura, darling—”

“Let me ask you,” he repeats, louder. “Don’t interrupt me.” He is pacing in front of her like a caged animal. “Just tell me, how long do you think you might wait before you let Vova take care of you? Oh, and maybe the guitar-wielding Vlasik, maybe you can ask him what else he wields. Ask him if he delivers the goods. Or would you like me to speak to him personally?”

She looks at him slightly aghast. She says nothing. She is not angry with him, how could she be when she knows he adores her, when she knows all he wants to do is to love her less.

“Answer me, dammit,” he says, taking a menacing step toward her.

She sits in the chair, her hands clasped between her breasts. “I beg you—”

“Beg me all you want,” he returns cruelly. “Would you like me to speak to Vlasik personally? Or are you going to use the words I taught you on him, perhaps when you’re missing me?” His eyes are flaming. He grabs her by her arm and yanks her to her feet.

Tatiana pulls at his hand. “Let go of me.” Backing away from him, she finds herself wedged between her sewing table and the brick wall of the peasant oven. Stepping forward, she tries to get past him into the open space of the cabin, but Alexander doesn’t move out of her way and does not let her pass, shoving her lightly back into the corner with his body. “We’re not done here,” he says.

“Shura!”

“Don’t raise your voice to me!”

“Shura! Stop it!” she says loudly and again attempts to get past him, but he does not let her out of the corner, this time pushing her back with his hands. “I said stop it! Stop. This is all for nothing.”

“To you it’s nothing.”

“Are you out of your mind?” She rams her body against him. “Get out of my way.”

“Make me.”

“Shura!” she screams. She tries very hard not to cry. She is shaking. “Please, stop.” From the effort not to cry, her lower lip begins to tremble. Above her, Alexander slams his head against the wall. And then he steps away.

“What do you think, Alexander, that I will care less you’re leaving if you do this? Keep going. Do you think this will make me glad to see the back of you? That anything in the world is going to make it easier for me once you’re gone?”

“You seem to think so,” Alexander replies, backing farther away from her.

Tatiana watches him, her eyes clearing for a moment. “Wait a minute. This isn’t about me. This isn’t about me at all.” She emits a stifled groan. “It’s you—you think that if you imagine me taking up with every village idiot, your feeling for me will fade? You think, if only Tania betrays me, it will be so much easier for me to die, to leave her, to abandon her.”

“Tania, shut up.”

“No!” she shouts. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Imagine the worst, and then suddenly I’m not your wife, I’m just some slag with no heart, how perfect, and my husband is free. I’m a slag who has found another knocker to replace yours in minutes.” She is so upset that she clenches her fists.

“Tania, I told you, shut the hell up!”

“No!” she yells, jumping on the hearth so she can be a little taller, feel a little braver. “That’s what you want, what you need, to imagine the impossible to rid yourself of me.” Tears trickle down her face. “Well, I don’t give a damn how much you need it,” she says furiously. “I’m not giving it to you. I’m not giving
that
to you. You can have anything else, but I will not pretend to whore myself out just so you can feel better about leaving me.”

“You’re going to stop, do you hear?”

“Or what?” she says. “Make me, Alexander. Because I’m not keeping quiet about this.”

“No, of course not!” he shouts, helplessly kicking their kettle across the room.

“That’s right!” she shouts back. “You won’t have this. You want a fight? I’ll give you a fight for this.”

He grits his teeth and comes for her. “You don’t know what a fight is,” he says, yanking her off the hearth, ripping her dress from her chest to her
hips, pulling her down to the wood floor, holding her down, tearing off her underwear, prying her legs open, descending on her.

Tatiana closes her eyes.

He is rough with her. She doesn’t want to hold him at first, but it is impossible not to hold his anguished body. “Soldier…” she manages through her groans. “You can’t take me, you can’t leave me—”

“I can take you,” he whispers.

Suddenly uttering a helpless groan, he pulls away and goes outside, leaving Tatiana on the floor, where she lies curled into a ball, coughing, panting.

He is on the bench, smoking. His hands are shaking. Tatiana, wrapped in a white sheet, stands in front of him. Her voice is shaking. “Tomorrow,” she says, barely able to get the words out, “is our last day here in Lazarevo.” She can’t look at him and he can’t look at her. “Please, let’s not do this.”

“All right, let’s not.”

She lets the sheet fall to the ground and comes close to his knees. “Careful,” Alexander says quietly, glancing at his lit cigarette.

“It’s too late for careful,” replies Tatiana. “Our destruction is close. What do I care about your cigarette?”

For a long time in bed in the dark Alexander holds her to his warm chest, without talking, without moving, nearly without breathing, without finishing what he had started earlier.

Finally he speaks. “I cannot take you with me,” he says. “You’ll be in too much danger. I cannot risk—”

“Shh.” Tatiana kisses his chest. “I know. Shura, I’m yours. You may not like it today, you may not want it tonight, you may wish for it all to be different now, but it remains, and I remain, as always, only yours. Nothing can change that. Not your wrath, your fists, your body, or your death.”

He emits a grinding rasp.

“Darling, honey.” She starts to cry. “We are orphans, Alexander, you and I. All we have is each other. I know that you lost everyone you ever loved, but you’re not going to lose me. I swear to you on my wedding band, and on my maiden ring that you broke, on my heart you’re breaking, and on your life, I swear to you, I will forever be your faithful wife.”

“Tania,” he whispers, “promise you won’t forget me when I die.”

“You won’t die, soldier,” she says. “You won’t die. Live! Live on, breathe on, claw onto life, and do not let go. Promise you will live for me, and I promise you, when you’re done, I will be waiting for you.” She is sobbing. “Whenever you’re done, Alexander, I will be here, waiting for you.”

Such brave words near their death in the moonless Lazarevo.

Life showed itself in small things. In the dockhand sailor who stood near the gangplank of the ferry she boarded each morning, who smiled and said good morning, offered her a cup of coffee, a cigarette, and then sat with her on deck for the thirteen-minute ride. In Benjamin, the second baseman, who ran into her when he was trying to catch a foul ball, knocked her over, and then lay almost directly on top of her, not getting up for a few moments. Enough moments for Edward, the catcher, to come over and say, all right, break it up here, this is a softball game, not Ricardo’s. In Vikki putting lipstick on Tatiana’s face every morning before leaving for work, and kissing her on the cheek, and Tatiana wiping the lipstick off as she left the house.

In the one morning Tatiana not wiping the lipstick off.

And in the one Friday night not saying no to Ricardo’s.

Life showed itself in the stockbroker in his suit in the coffee shop on Church and Wall Street sitting next to Tatiana and Vikki, laughing at their conversation.

In the father of a family Tatiana helped get into the country coming to see her at Ellis and asking her to marry his oldest son, who was a bricklayer and could support her well. The father brought the lad by so Tatiana could take a look for herself. He was a tall, strong, smiling boy of about eighteen, and he looked at Tatiana with the sweet expression of a long-term crush. Tatiana had coffee with him in the Ellis dining room, telling him she was flattered but couldn’t marry him.

Life showed itself in the lunch she had with Edward twice a week.

In the construction workers and the Con Edison workers downtown and the smiling hot dog man who had sold her a Coke and a hot dog.

Tatiana spent all day on the ships, inspecting the new post-war refugees, shepherding them onto the ferry to Ellis, or else at Ellis examining them in the medical rooms. In the afternoons, she went to NYU hospital, walking through all the beds, looking at every male face. If
he
were going to come, he would come into one of those two places—Ellis or NYU. But the war had ended four months ago. So far only a million troops had been sent back home, a good 300,000 through New York.
How many times could Tatiana ask the wounded, where did you fight? Where were you stationed? In Europe? Did you meet any Soviet officers in the POW camps? Did any Soviet soldiers speak English to you? Tatiana met every boat that came in through the Port of New York, looking into the countless faces of the escapees from Europe. How many times could she hear from American soldiers about the horrors they saw in Nazi Germany? How many stories of what happened to Soviet prisoners in German camps? How many accounts of the numbers dead? Of the hundreds of thousands dead, of the millions dead? No plasma, no penicillin could have saved the Soviet men as they were starved by the Germans. How long could she hear the same thing over and over?

And then at night, she collected Anthony from Isabella’s and she and Vikki had dinner there and chatted about books and movies and the latest fashion trend. And then they went home and put Anthony to bed. And then they would sit on the couch and read, or talk. And the next day it would begin again.

And then another week would begin.

And another.

And another.

Every month she went with Anthony to visit Esther and Rosa. They had no news.

Every month she called Sam Gulotta. He had no news.

New York’s new construction was happening at a rate seven times the rest of the country’s. The refugees to Ellis stopped being refugees and became immigrants once more. The veterans left NYU except for the long-term ward. Every week, she checked her post office box. But no one wrote to her. She waited for him against all reason, and danced on Saturday night, and went to the movies on Friday night, and cooked dinner and played softball in Central Park, and read books in English, and went out with Vikki and loved her boy, and through it all, she looked at every man’s face that came her way, at every man’s back, hoping for his face, for his back. If he could have come to her, he would have. He didn’t.

If he could have found a way to escape, he would have. He didn’t. If he were alive, she would have heard from him.

She hadn’t.

“This is just the beginning of your life, Tatiana,” he says to her. “After three hundred million years, you’ll still be standing, too.”

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

The Motherland, 1945

THE TRAIN WAS STOPPED
, once, twice, fifteen times along the way, the way to where? Alexander told Ouspensky they would know when it was their turn. But they didn’t. They changed trains always in the middle of the night. Alexander felt as though he were hallucinating when he rattled his chains across the tracks, up the metal steps. He couldn’t wait to lie down on the wooden shelf and close his eyes.

Alexander’s train pushed east on the tracks. The train car shook the bodies of the chained men headed from war back to the Motherland, while Alexander and Nikolai ate thin gruel out of one bowl that spilled each time the train lurched.

Over the plains and the forests and over the Elbe, the train continued.

Alexander covered his face with the crook of his arm. The Kama was covered in ice. Through the night in front of him was her laughing, freckled face.

Through the mountains the train sped, past the pines and the moss and the stone treasure caves.

Days and days and nights and nights, a cycle of the moon, and still they were not done.

They had gruel for breakfast, for dinner.

It got cold inside the train car at night. The northern German plateau lay vast around them.

He slept.

He dreamed of her.

She wakes up screaming, and sits up in bed pushing away something in front of her. Alexander, murky from sleep, sits up slightly behind her. “Tania,” he says and gets hold of one of her arms. With astonishing strength, she rips herself away from him in defined fear and fury and without even turning around, with the back of her clenched fist, punches him square in the face. He is unprepared and has no time to move. His nose opens up like a dam. He is less sleepy. Concerned for her, he grabs her by the arms, this time much tighter, and says in his loudest, deepest voice, “Tania!” All the while
the blood streams from his nose down his mouth and chin and chest. It is the middle of the night, and the bright blue moon outside illuminates just enough of the cabin to see her bare silhouette panting in front of him, and to see black drops falling on the white sheet.

Tania comes to, breathes and starts to shake. He figures it is safe to let go of her arms.

“Oh, Shura,” she says, “you wouldn’t believe the dream I just had,” and then turns to him and gasps. “Dear God, what happened to you?”

Alexander sits and holds the bridge of his nose.

Tatiana jumps over him, jumps from the bed, runs to get a towel, climbs back up and sits against the wall, pulling him to her. “Come here,” she said, “come here, quick.” She cradles his head against her knees, keeping him slightly elevated as she holds his nose with the towel.

“Dis is great,” Alexander says, “but I can’t breede.” He gets up for a moment, spits out blood, and lies back down on her, lifting the towel slightly away from his mouth.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Tania whispers. “I didn’t mean to—but you won’t believe the dream I had.”

“I had better beed caught with adother womad,” Alexander says.

“Worse,” she replies. “You were alive, but motionless, lying in front of me, and you were being fed to me piece by piece. They—”

“Who’s they?”

“Couldn’t see their faces. They were pinning my arms back, and one was cutting flesh from your side and shoving it in my mouth.”

He looks up at her. “You were eating me alive?” he asks.

She gulps.

Alexander raises his eyebrows.

“A chunk of your side”—she touches him below his right rib—“was missing.”

“How do you know I was alive?”

“Only your eyes were moving, blinking, pleading with me to help you.” She closes her eyes. “Oh, God…”

“So you were helping me by punching your captors?”

She nods, looking down at him with misty eyes. “What did I do?” she whispers.

“Break my nose, I think,” he says casually.

Tania starts to cry.

“I’m joking,” he says, reaching for her. “I’m joking, Tatia. It’s just a nosebleed. It’ll stop in a minute.”

Alexander catches her remorseful expression. Remnants of the dream are lodged in her squared jaw, in the tense bones of her face.

“I’m all right,” he says. He turns his head and kisses her breast next to him and then presses his cheek against her as she holds him to her, squeezing the bridge of his nose with one hand and stroking his hair with the other.

“You were alive,” she whispers, “and pieces of you were being fed to me. Do you understand?”

“Extremely well,” Alexander says. “I’m bleeding to prove it.”

Tania kisses his head. Soon he stops bleeding. “I’ll go and wash off. Tomorrow we’ll deal with the sheets.”

“Wait—don’t go. I’ll get something to clean you with. Hop down, can you get down? We have water in the cabin. Do you want me to help? Here, hold my arm.”

“Tania,” says Alexander, holding her arm, hopping down and perching on the hearth, “I have a nosebleed. I’m not dying.”

“No, you’re going to be quite bruised tomorrow.” She wets a small towel, sits on the hearth and gently cleans the blood off his face and neck and chest. “I’m dangerous,” she murmurs. “Look what I did to you.”

“Hmm. I’ll say this—I’ve never felt you that crazed before. You were in that state. I sometimes see men in war like that when their normal strength becomes the strength of ten people.”

“I’m sorry. Come, you’re all cleaned up. Don’t have a bad dream about me, Shura, all right?”

“Where you’re lying in front of me and I’m eating you?” he asks, smiling. “That would be a terrible dream.”

“Not that one, or any other one, either. Climb up. Do you need my help?”

“I think I can manage.”

She says she will be right back and leaves, returning a minute later with the towel washed in the Kama’s cold night-time water. “Here, put this on to stop the swelling. Maybe you won’t be too black and blue tomorrow.”

He lies on his back with a wet cold towel covering his face. “I can’t sleep like this,” he says in a muffled voice.

“Who wants to sleep?” he hears her say, as she kneels between his legs. He groans through the towel. “What can I do to make it up to you?” he hears her ask.

“I can’t think of anything…”

“No?”

She purrs, her gossamer fingers stroking him, her warm mouth breathing on him. He is in her mouth, and the cold wet towel is covering his face.

The train stopped, they disembarked and were arranged in columns outside the small, war-ruined station. Alexander got his boots on; he was sure they weren’t his. They were too small for his feet. They stood groggily in the dark, illuminated hazily by one flickering floodlight. A lieutenant guard broke open a piece of paper out of the envelope and in a pretentious voice read aloud that the seventy men in front of him were accused of crimes against the state.

“Oh, no,” whispered Ouspensky.

Alexander stood impassively. He wanted to be back on the wooden shelf. And nothing surprised him anymore. “Don’t worry, Nikolai.”

“Stop talking!” the soldier yelled. “Treason, colluding with the enemy, working against Russia in the enemy’s prisoner camps, cooking for the enemy, building for the enemy, cleaning weapons for the enemy. The law is very clear against treason. You are all remanded under the provisions of Article 58, code 1B and will be incarcerated for no less than fifteen years in a series of Zone II corrective work camps ending with Kolyma. Your term begins when you will start to shovel coal into our steam train to refuel it. Coal is there by the side of the tracks. So are shovels. Your next stop will be a work camp in eastern Germany. Now, let’s move it.”

“Oh, no, not Kolyma,” said Ouspensky. “There must be some mistake.”

“I’m not finished!” yelled the guard. “Belov, Ouspensky, step forward!”

They shuffled forward a few steps, dragging the chains behind them. “You two, aside from allowing yourselves to fall into enemy hands which carries an automatic fifteen-year prison term, have also been charged with espionage and sabotage during times of war. Captain Belov, you are to be stripped of your rank and title, as you are, Lieutenant Ouspensky. Captain Belov, your term is extended to twenty-five years. Lieutenant Ouspensky, your term is extended to twenty-five years.”

Alexander stood as if the words had not been spoken to him.

Ouspensky said, “Did you hear me? There must be some kind of mistake. I’m not going away for twenty-five years, speak to the general—”

“My orders for you are clear! See?” He waved a document in front of Ouspensky’s nose.

Ouspensky shook his head. “No, you don’t understand, there’s definitely been a mistake. I have it on good authority…” He glanced at Alexander, who was looking at him with cold bemusement.

Ouspensky did not speak again while they were shoveling the coal into the furnace of the train and then into storage compartments, but when they were back in their berth, he was seething in a way Alexander could not understand.

“Will the day ever come when I will be free?”

“Yes, in twenty-five years.”

“I mean free of you,” said Ouspensky, trying to turn from Alexander. “When I won’t be chained with you, bunked with you, assisting you.”

“Hey, why are you so pessimistic? I heard the Kolyma camps are co-ed. Maybe you can pick yourself a little camp wife.”

They sat down together on the shelves. Alexander lay down instantly and closed his eyes. Ouspensky grumbled that he was uncomfortable and had no room next to a man as large as Alexander. The train lurched forward and he fell off the shelf.

“What’s wrong with you?” Alexander said, extending his hand to help him up. Ouspensky did not take it.

“I shouldn’t have listened to you. I shouldn’t have surrendered, I should have minded my own business, and I’d be a free man.”

“Ouspensky, have you not been paying attention? Refugees, forced labor workers, people who lived in Poland, in Romania, all the way in Bavaria! From Italy, from France, from Denmark, from Norway. They’re all being sent back, all under the same conditions. What makes you think you, of all of them, would be a free man?”

Ouspensky didn’t reply. “Twenty-five years! You got twenty five-years, too, don’t you even give a shit anymore?”

“Oh, Nikolai.” Alexander sighed. “No. Not anymore. I’m twenty-six years old. They’ve been sentencing me to prison terms in Siberia since I was seventeen.” Had he served out his first one in Vladivostok, he’d be nearly done by now.

“Exactly! You, you. Christ, it’s all about you. My whole life since the cursed day bad fucking luck had me in a bed next to you in Morozovo has been all about you. Why should I get twenty-five fucking years just because some damn nurse put me in the adjacent bed?” He railed and rattled his chains. The other prisoners, trying to sleep, told him in no uncertain terms to “Shut the fuck up.”

“That damn nurse,” said Alexander quietly, “was my wife.” He paused. “And so you see, dear Nikolai, how inexorably your fate is linked with mine.”

For many minutes Ouspensky didn’t speak.

“Did not know that,” he said at last. “But of course. Nurse Metanova. That’s where I heard her name before. I couldn’t figure out why Pasha’s last name sounded so familiar.” He fell quiet. “Where is she now?”

“I don’t know,” said Alexander.

“Does she ever write you?”

“You know I get no letters. And I write no letters. I have one plastic pen that doesn’t work.”

“But I mean, there she was, in the hospital, and then suddenly she was gone. Did she go back to her family?”

“No, they’re dead.”

“Your family?”

“Dead, also.”

“So where is she?” he exclaimed in a high-pitched voice.

“What is this, Ouspensky? An interrogation?”

Ouspensky fell silent.

“Nikolai?”

Ouspensky did not reply.

Alexander closed his eyes.

“They promised me,” Ouspensky whispered. “They swore to me,
swore
that I would be all right.”

“Who did?” Alexander didn’t open his eyes.

Ouspensky did not reply.

Alexander opened his eyes. “Who did?” He sat up straight. Ouspensky backed away slightly but not far enough, chained as he was to Alexander.

“Nobody, nobody,” he mumbled, and then, with a surreptitious glance at Alexander, he shrugged.

“Oh, it’s as old as the sea,” he said, trying to sound casual. “They came to me in 1943, soon after they arrested us, and told me I had two choices—I could be executed by firing squad for crimes committed under Article 58. That was my first choice. I thought about it and asked what my second choice was. They told me,” he continued, in the deliberate and flat tone of a man who doesn’t care much about anything, “that you were a dangerous criminal, but that you were needed for the war effort. However, they suspected you of heinous crimes against the
state, but because ours was the kind of society that abided by laws of the constitution and wanted to preserve your rights—they would spare your life long enough for you to hang yourself.”

That’s why Ouspensky had never left his side. “And did they ask you to be my noose, Ouspensky?” asked Alexander, gripping his leg irons.

Ouspensky didn’t reply.

“Oh, Nikolai,” Alexander said in a dead voice.

“Wait—”

“Don’t tell me anymore.”

“Listen—”

“No!’ Alexander shouted, throwing himself on Ouspensky. Grabbing him by the scruff of his neck, helpless and irate, Alexander smashed his head against the wall of the train. “Don’t tell me anymore.”

Red and panting, Ouspensky, who did nothing to free himself, whispered hoarsely, “Listen to me—”

Again Alexander smashed Nikolai’s head against the wall.

Someone said, “Keep it down over there,” but feebly. No one wanted to get involved. One less man was one more hunk of bread for someone else.