Tatiana and Alexander (64 page)

“Yes, it hurts more to speak it,” she said.

“Feels so comforting to speak it with you.”

They stared at each other across the table.

“Oh, God,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

“Nothing to do,” he replied.

“Why do they need to speak to you? What’s the point?”

“As always, when ever it’s a military matter, it has to be dealt with in a military way. The Soviets took away my rank when they sentenced me, but they know they will get nowhere with the U.S. military if they say the man seeking safe passage is a civilian. The governor would not even think about it then, the matter would pass straight to Ravenstock. But the Soviets invoke treason, desertion, all highly provocative military words, especially to the Americans, and they know it. I haven’t been a major for three years, yet they call me major, a commissioned high-ranking officer to incite them further. These words beg a correct military response. Which is why they will question me tomorrow.”

“What do you think? How will it go?”

Alexander didn’t reply, which to Tatiana was worse than a bad answer because it left her to imagine the unimaginable.

“No,” she said. “No. I can’t—I won’t—I will not—” She raised her head and squared her shoulders. “They will give me over, too, then. You are not going alone.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I’m—”

“Don’t—be—ridiculous!” Alexander stood up but didn’t come near her. “I don’t…I refuse to have even a theoretical discussion about it.”

“Not theoretical, Shura,” said Tatiana. “They want me, too. I spoke to Ravenstock, remember? Stepanov himself told me. Class enemy list. They want us both handed over.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” he exclaimed. “You’ve really done it, haven’t you?” Suddenly he went to the window and looked outside, as if calculating the distance to the ground from the sixth floor. “Tania, unlike me, you actually carry an American passport.”

“Just a technicality, Alexander.”

“Yes, a vital technicality. Also you’re a civilian.”

“I was a Red Army nurse, on a grant to the Red Cross.”

“They won’t hand you over.”

“They will.”

“No. I will speak to them tomorrow.”

“No! Speak to them? Haven’t you spoken enough? To Matthew Sayers, to Stepanov, you looked me in the eye and lied to my face, isn’t it enough?” She shook her head. “You won’t be speaking to anyone.”

“I will.”

She burst into tears. “What happened to we live together or we die together?”

“I lied.”

“You lied!” She trembled. “Well, I should have known. Know this, they’re
not
taking you back. If you’re going to Kolyma, I’m going, too.”

“You have no idea what you’re saying.”

“You chose me,” Tatiana said in a breaking voice, “then in Leningrad, because I was straight and true.”

“And you chose
me
,” Alexander said, “because you knew I fiercely protected what was mine; as fiercely as Orbeli.”

“Oh, God, I’m not leaving without you. If you go back to the Soviet Union, I go, too.”

“Tania!” Alexander was not sitting anymore. He was standing in front of her, his despondent eyes glistening. “What are you talking about? You’re making me want to tear my hair out, and yours, too. You’re talking as if you’ve forgotten!”

“I haven’t forgotten—”

“The interrogators will torture you until you tell them the truth about me or until you sign the confession they put in front of you. You sign and they shoot me dead on the spot and send you to Kolyma for ten
years, for subverting the principles of the Soviet state by marrying a known spy and saboteur.”

Tatiana put her hands up. “All right, Shura,” she said. “All right.” She saw he was losing control.

He grabbed her by the arms, pulled her up to stand in front of him. “And then do you know what will happen to you in the camps? Lest you think it’s going to be just another adventure. You’ll be stripped naked and bathed by men and then paraded naked down a narrow corridor between a dozen trustees who are always on the look-out for pretty girls—and they will notice a girl like you—and they will offer you a cushy position in the prison canteen or the laundry in exchange for your regular services, and you, being the good woman you are, will refuse, and they will beat you in the hall, and rape you, and then send you out logging, as they have done with all the women since 1943.”

Tatiana, afraid for Alexander and his inflamed heart, said, “Please—”

“You’ll be hauling pine onto flatbeds and by the time you are done, you won’t be able to function as a woman, having lifted what no woman should lift, and then no one will want you, not even the trustee who takes anyone except women loggers because everyone knows they are damaged goods.”

Pale, Tatiana tried to disengage herself from him.

“At the end of your sentence in 1956 you’ll be released back into society, with all the things that once made you what you are gone.” He paused, not letting go of her. “All the things, Tania. Gone.”

All she could manage was a broken “Please….”

“All without our son,” said Alexander, “without the boy who might grow up to change the world, and without me. There you will be—without your front teeth, childless and widowed, broken down and barren, sodomized, dehumanized—going back to your Fifth Soviet apartment. Is that what you prefer?” he asked. “I haven’t seen your life in America, but tell me, will
that
be your choice?”

Grim but determined, Tatiana said quietly, “You survived. I will, too.”

“That
was
you surviving!” Alexander yelled. “You didn’t die in that scenario, did you? You want death? That’s different.” He let go of her and stepped away. “Death, all right. You will die from the cold, from the hunger. Leningrad didn’t kill you; Kolyma will for sure. Ninety per cent of all the
men
who are sent there die. You will die after performing an abortion on yourself, from infection, from peritonitis, from pellagra,
from TB, which will kill you for certain, or you’ll be beaten to death after your streetcar gang rape.” He paused. “Or before.”

She put her hands over her ears. “God, Shura, stop,” she whispered.

He shuddered. She shuddered, too.

Alexander drew her to him, into his chest, into his arms. Though every breath out of him sounded as though exhaled from a throat lined with glass spikes, she felt better pressed against him.

“Tania, I survived because God made me a strong man. No one was going to get near me. I could shoot, I could fight, and I was not afraid of killing anybody who approached me. What about you? What would you have done?” His hand went on top of her head, and then he lifted her face to him. Pulling her arms away, he pushed Tatiana backward, and she fell on the bed. Sitting next to her, he said, “You can’t protect yourself against
me
—and I love you as much as it is possible for a man to love a woman.” He shook his head. “Tatiasha, that world was not meant for a woman like you—which is why God didn’t send you into it.”

She placed her hand on his face. “But why would He send
you
into it?” she asked with quiet bitterness. “You—the king among men.”

He didn’t want to speak anymore.

She wanted to and couldn’t.

He went to have a shower, and she curled into a ball in the chair by the window near the bed.

When he came out, just a towel around his waist, he said, “Will you come and look at my gash? I think it’s getting infected.”

He was right. He knew about such things. He sat very still while she gave him a shot of penicillin and cleaned the rip on his chest and shoulder with carbolic acid. “I’m going to stitch it,” she said, taking out her surgical thread, suddenly remembering that she had used surgical thread to sew the Red Cross emblem onto a Finnish truck that took her out of the Soviet Union. She swayed from her weakness. She couldn’t save Matthew Sayers.

“Don’t stitch it, it’s been too long already,” Alexander said.

“No, it needs it. It will prevent infection, it’ll heal better.” How did she continue to speak?

She took out a syringe to anesthetize the area and he took her hand and said, “What’s this?” He shook his head. “Stitch away, Tania. Just give me a cigarette first.”

He needed eight stitches. After she was done, she placed her lips on the wound. “Sore?” she whispered.

“Didn’t feel a thing,” he said, taking another drag of the cigarette.

She bandaged his shoulder, his arm down to his elbow, bandaged his hand that was raw from gunpowder burns. She didn’t want him to see her face so close, but she cried as she took care of him and she could tell by his breathing how hard it was for him to listen to her, to be so close to her without touching her. She knew he could not bring himself to touch her the closer they were to the very end.

“Would you like some morphine?”

“No,” he said. “Then I’m unconscious all night.”

She stumbled away a step.

“Shower was good,” he said. “White towels. Hot water. So good, so unexpected.”

“Yes,” she said. “There are many comforts in America.”

They turned away from each other. He left the bathroom, she went into the shower. When she came out wrapped in towels, he was already asleep, on his back, naked over the quilt. She covered him and then sat in the chair by the bed and watched him, her hand inside her nurse’s bag, touching the morphine syrettes.

Tatiana could not, would not allow him to be taken back to Russia. God would have him before the Soviet Union ever had him again.

Taking her nurse’s bag with her, she climbed under the covers, to his naked body, and spooned him from behind. She held him in her arms and cried into his shorn head. The Soviet Union had left only skin and bones on him.

And then he spoke. “Anthony,” he said, “is he a nice boy?”

“Yes,” she replied. “The nicest.”

“And he looks like you?”

“No, husband, he looks like you.”

“That’s too bad,” said Alexander, and turned to Tatiana.

They lay naked face to face.

Their regrets, their breath, their two souls twisted between them, bleeding and shouting grief into the unquiet night.

“With or without me, you have lived and will always live by only one standard,” he said.

“I tried harder for you. Wanted to do even better for you. I imagined what
you
might have wanted for the both of us, and I tried to live it.”

“No.
I
tried harder for you,” said Alexander. “I wanted to do better for you. I held you before my eyes, hoping whatever I did, however I managed, you would be pleased. That you would nod at me and say, you did all right, Alexander. You did all right.”

A pause.

A hoot of an owl.

Maybe a bat flapping by.

Dogs barking.

“You did all right, Alexander.”

He wrapped his arms around her and pressed his lips to her forehead. “Tatiana, my wife, we never had a future. We’ll live tonight for five minutes from now,” he whispered. “That’s how we always lived, you and I, and we will live like that again, one more night, in a white warm bed.”

“Be my comfort, come away with me,” said Tatiana, weeping. “Rise up and come away, my beloved.”

His hand caressed her back. “You know what saved me through my years in the battalion and in prison?” he said. “
You
. I thought, if you could get out of Russia, through Finland, through the war, pregnant, with a dying doctor, with
nothing
but yourself, I could survive
this
. If you could get through Leningrad, as you every single morning got up and slid down the ice on the stairs to get your family water and their daily bread, I thought, I could get through this. If you survived
that
I could survive
this
.”

“You don’t even know how badly I did the first years. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“You had my son. I had nothing else but you, and how you walked with me through Leningrad, across the Neva and Lake Ladoga and held my open back together and clotted my wounds, and washed my burns, and healed me, and saved me. I was hungry and you fed me. I had nothing but Lazarevo.” Alexander’s voice broke. “And your immortal blood. Tatiana, you were my only life force. You have no idea how hard I tried to get to you again. I gave myself up to the enemy, to the Germans for you. I got shot at for you and beaten for you and betrayed for you and convicted for you. All I wanted was to see you again. That you came back for me, it’s
everything
, Tatia. Don’t you understand? The rest is nothing to me. Germany, Kolyma, Dimitri, Nikolai Ouspensky, the Soviet Union, all of it, nothing. Forget them all, let them all go. You hear?”

“I hear,” Tatiana said. We walk alone through this world, but if we’re lucky, we have a moment of belonging to something, to someone, that sustains us through a lifetime of loneliness.

For an evening minute I touched him again and grew red wings and was young again in the Summer Garden, and had hope and eternal life.

Berlin, July 1946

THE NEXT MORNING THEY
woke at six. At seven, housekeeping brought breakfast and a U.S. commissioned uniform for Alexander. They laundered Tatiana’s nursing uniform.

Alexander had coffee and toast and six cigarettes. Tatiana had coffee and toast but couldn’t keep it down.

At seven fifty-five, two armed guards escorted Alexander and Tatiana to the third floor. They sat down silently in the antechamber in wooden chairs.

At eight, the doors opened and John Ravenstock came out. “Good morning, you two. Much better in clean clothes, no?”

Alexander stood up.

Ravenstock glanced at Tatiana. “Nurse Barrington, you might want to wait in your room. We’re likely to be a good few hours.”

“I will wait right here,” said Tatiana.

“Suit yourself,” Ravenstock said.

Alexander walked behind the consul. Before he disappeared inside he turned around. Tatiana was standing. She saluted him. He saluted her.

Six men sat at a long conference table, while Alexander remained standing.

John Ravenstock introduced Military Governor Mark Bishop (“We’ve met”), Phillip Fabrizzio, the U.S. ambassador, and the generals for the three branches of the U.S. armed forces stationed in Berlin—Army, Air Force, Marines.

“So?” Bishop said. “What have you got to say for yourself, Captain Belov?”

“Excuse me, Governor?”

“Do you speak English?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Because of you we have an international situation brewing here in Berlin. The Soviets are demanding,
insisting
, that the minute you come through our doors we surrender an Alexander Belov to the proper Soviet authorities. Your wife, however, is telling us that you are an American citizen. Indeed Ambassador Fabrizzio has read your file and things seem to be a bit murky with the nationality of a man named Alexander Barrington. And look, I don’t know what you did or didn’t do for the Soviets before they threw you in Sachsenhausen. But one thing I
do
know—in the last four days you killed a battalion of their men and they are demanding justice for them.”

“I find it ironic that the Soviet military command here in Berlin, or anywhere for that matter, should suddenly care about their men, when I myself buried at least two thousand of their men in Sachsenhausen during time of peace.”

“Yes, well, Sachsenhausen is a camp for convicted criminals.”

“No, sir, soldiers like me. Soldiers like you. Lieutenants, captains, majors, one colonel. Oh, and that’s not including the seven hundred German men—high-ranking officers and civilians—who have been either buried or cremated there.”

“Do you deny killing their men, Captain?”

“No, sir. They were coming to kill me and my wife. I had no choice.”

“You did escape, however?”

“Yes.”

“The Commandant of the Special Camp claims you are an inveterate escapee.”

“Yes, I was not happy with the living conditions. I was voting with my feet.”

The generals exchanged looks. “You were convicted of treason, is that correct?”

“It is correct that that is what I was convicted of, yes.”

“Do you deny charges of treason?”

“Whole-heartedly.”

“They say you had deserted the Red Army when they were coming to resupply you and after meandering through the woods, you willingly surrendered yourself to the enemy and fought alongside them against your own people.”

“I did give myself up to the enemy. I had not had any reinforcements in two weeks, I was out of bullets and out of men on a defense line of
forty thousand Germans. I never fought against my own people. I was in Catowice and then Colditz. But surrendering
was
against the law for Soviet soldiers, so I am guilty as charged.”

The generals were silent. “You are lucky to still be alive, Captain,” said General Pearson of the Marines. “We heard that out of six million Soviet prisoners of war, the Germans let five million die.”

“I am sure that figure is not inflated, General. Perhaps if Stalin had signed the Geneva Agreement, more would be alive. The English and the Americans POW weren’t all killed, were they?”

There was no answer from the generals.

“So what is your rank now?”

“I have no rank. My rank was taken away from me when I was sentenced for treason.”

“Why are the Soviets calling you Major Belov, then?” Bishop asked.

Half-smiling, Alexander shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Captain Belov, why don’t you start at the beginning, from the moment your parents left America and came to the Soviet Union, and tell us what has happened to you? That will help us greatly. We have too much conflicting information here. The NKGB has been looking for an Alexander Barrington for ten years. But they also maintain you are Alexander Belov. We don’t even know if that is one and the same man. Why don’t you tell us who you are, Captain.”

“Be glad to, sir. Request permission to sit.”

“Granted,” said Bishop. “Guard, bring this man some cigarettes, and some water.”

Alexander had been in for six hours. Tatiana thought he could have been taken away through a secret passage, but she kept hearing dim voices through the thick wood doors.

She paced, she sat—she crouched, she rocked. Her life and his floating before her eyes in the anteroom of the United States Embassy in Berlin.

They were learning to swim, and each minute did not get easier, each day did not bring new relief. Each day brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on the train coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, crying for Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and
Yuri Stepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on the Ladoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming for Alexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.

But there he is! With the cap in his hands, crossing the street for his white dress with red roses, there he is, every day coming to Kirov, stone upon stone, corpse upon corpse, there he is, in the Field of Mars under the lilacs with his rifle and she is barefoot next to him, and he is whirling her around on the steps of their wedding church, waltzing with her under the red moon of their wedding night, coming out of the Kama, coming at her broken and destroyed, bare, smiling, smoking, drowning Alexander. He is not gone yet. He is not vanished. Perhaps what remains of him can still be saved.

And there he is once again, standing on the river Vistula, looking out onto the rest of what’s left of his life. One path leads to death; the other to salvation. He doesn’t know which road to take, but in his eyes is the girl on the bench, and across the river is the Bridge to Holy Cross.

When Alexander was finished, the generals sat still, the ambassador sat still, the consul sat still.

“Whew, Captain Belov,” said Bishop, “that’s some life you got there. How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

Bishop whistled.

General Pearson of the United States Marines said, “You’re telling us that your wife, without knowing where you were, came to Germany bearing weapons, found the camp you were in, found your cell, found you, and orchestrated your escape out of the maximum security Special Camp Number 7?”

“Yes, sir.” Alexander paused. “Perhaps we can keep the reference to my wife out of this tribunal’s report?”

John Ravenstock was quiet. The generals were quiet. “And what would you call yourself, Captain, if your American citizenship were reinstated?”

“Anthony Alexander Barrington,” he said.

The men stared at Alexander. He stood up and saluted them.

The door opened and the seven of them came out of the conference room. Alexander walked out last. He saw Tatiana struggle up from her chair, but she couldn’t stand without holding on to it, and she looked so alone and forsaken, he was afraid that she would break down in front of half a dozen strangers. Yet he wanted to say something to her, something to comfort her, and so slightly nodding his head, he said, “We are going home.”

She inhaled, and her hand covered her mouth.

And then because she was Tatiana and because she couldn’t help herself, and because he wouldn’t have it any other way, she ran to him and was in his arms, generals or no generals. She flung her arms around him, she embraced him, her wet face was in his neck.

His head was bent to her, and her feet were off the ground.

Though much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are
—

Unyielding.

Barrington, Leningrad, Luga, Ladoga, Lazarevo, Ellis Island, the mountains of Holy Cross, their lost families, their lost mothers and fathers, their brothers in arms and brothers are etched on their souls and their fine faces and like the mercurial moon, like Jupiter over Maui, like the Perseus galaxy with its blue, imploding stars they remain, as the stellar wind whispers over the rivers all run red, over the oceans and the seas, murmuring through the moonsilver skies…

Tatiana…

Alexander…

But the bronze horseman is still.