The Summer Garden (94 page)

Part of the difficulty was that SOG soldiers fought secret missions with no dog tags, no identification, no bars or stripes, no whistles of any kind, fighting and falling in complete anonymity. But Anthony had not been on a secret mission. He was on official leave. And now he was absent.

Alexander sat stretched out on the floor of the living room. Janie was on his lap, Harry was on one side, Pasha on the other. Tatiana was lying on her side on the couch behind them, her hand lightly caressing the back of Alexander’s head and neck as they watched
Mission:Impossible
. The kids sat raptly until the commercial break, during which Janie stood on her head, Pasha bent one of Alexander’s knees over the other and started hitting it with a metal hammer to see if he could get a knee-jerk response and Harry straddled him, hands on his face, asking if Dad could help him make a timer to a balloon water bomb.

“
Make
a timer?” said Alexander. “You mean,
rig
a timer, Harry?”

“No, Dad, I want to make a custom timer first, then rig it.”

“Dad, look, I’m standing on my head. Mommy taught me. How am I doing?”

“Dad, do you feel that in your knee?”

“Yes, Pasha, I feel the metal hammering at my knee.”

Alexander tilted his head up and back. Tatiana was gazing at him. She leaned over and kissed his forehead.

“What’s with the forehead?” he said to her. “What is this, Deer Isle?” The commercial break was over—and then the phone rang. In two seconds, all the kids off him, Tatiana’s lips off him, Alexander was up and in the gallery by the receiver, talking quietly, talking low, having forgotten about everything.

“I don’t understand,” Tatiana said to Alexander later that night. “Why are you talking to the Director of Military Intelligence? What would
he
know about Anthony?”

“I’m just trying all the options,” he said. “I’m doing everything I can.”

“That’s good, but why are you calling the commander at Arizona’s military installation? Why would a nice man, who has not left the base in thirty years, know anything about Anthony in Pleiku?”

“Just trying all the options, Tania.” And Alexander turned his back to her.

And so Tatiana turned her back to him, turned her back to the fortress they had built around the two of them, the fortress around which the moat was wide, and the gates were shut, and there was no entry for anyone but them. The things that had brought them together, that had kept them together—no one knew those stories, only they knew them—and Anthony, the boy who had lived Deer Isle with them, who had lived through being orphaned for Berlin with them. Their later children, their later friends, none of them knew. The stories fell into the forested chasms of the past.

The weeks passed.

“Please—let’s just wait and see.” Tatiana kept reciting the hollow words to her increasingly despondent husband. She paced around him every feverish night, never still, not when she cooked, or read to the kids, or lay in bed with him. Some part of her was always moving, always pacing around her pride. “Let’s just…we don’t know anything. Let’s just wait until they find him.”

“Find him where?” Alexander was sitting outside in his chair, smoking. He was not pacing.

“Let’s just see, okay?” she said, back and forth in front of him.

“You’re saying let’s just see if something of him will be found? Let’s see if he stepped on a mine, or if an RPG-7 hit him?” Alexander was loud. “Or if he was in a freak explosion coming back to Kontum? Well, I’m not waiting for that! Are
you
waiting for that?”

“Stop it,” she whispered. Her voice shook. “I’m just telling you to have a little faith, soldier. A little faith, that’s all.” Tatiana’s hands were twisted in front of her.

Alexander stopped speaking. “How do I regain my faith,” he whispered at last, “when there seems to be so little cause for faith?”

She would have wept if she didn’t see him in such desperate need of her comfort. It was the only thing that stopped her from disintegrating on the travertine tile, from turning to ashes. “Please,” Tatiana whispered in an unconvincing voice. “Maybe they’re right, maybe he’s gone AWOL—”

“Yes, let’s hope for that. Maybe he is AWOL,” Alexander said. “Perhaps he is addicted. Perhaps his own opiate of a girl smoked up his head and then some, and now he is in the Ural Mountains with her.”

“I’d rather he be AWOL than dead!”

“If he is AWOL, he’ll be court-martialed,” said Alexander. “After thirty days, there is little difference between AWOL and desertion. Do you really want Ant to be court-martialed for desertion during wartime? He won’t be alive for long, Tania.”

And then her tears came down. No comfort for Alexander. He jumped up and went inside. Tatiana was left alone on the travertine tile.

Thirty days passed.

Their life stopped.

They sat and watched Pasha, Harry, and Janie make joy because they were children and couldn’t help it. They made joy and their parents sat with frozen smiles upon their faces, while the young ones frolicked in the pool and rough-housed with one another and watched
Mission:Impossible
. The children did their level best to buck up their mother and father. Pasha never stopped reading and talking to them about the things he’d read. Janie never stopped baking with Tatiana, baking meringue pies and puff pastry that she knew her father loved. Harry always felt he had to try harder because he was the third son. (“Anthony may have been first,” Gordon Pasha—the philosopher king, not warrior king—would explain to his younger brother from whom he was inseparable, “but
I
was the most wanted. Mom and Dad tried fifteen years for me. You Harry-boy, you were just a seven-month-old afterthought. You were supposed to be Janie.”) So Harry tried harder. He made things that he thought would most please his unsmiling but revered father. Out of wood, out of stone, out of blocks of ice, out of branches and cacti and metal, Harry did nothing but whittle, carve, bend, shape and make weapons. He made pistols from soap, he made knives from sticks, and papier-mâché gray tanks. Dozens of his etched and scored and perfect ice hand grenades were in all three freezers. One evening they found him in front of Alexander’s closet, putting on his father’s grenade bandolier stuffed with ice grenades that were dripping all over their bedroom carpet.

Forty days.

They couldn’t sleep. They tossed and turned, and made fractured love, praying for oblivion that wouldn’t come.

“I have to know what you’re thinking,” Tatiana finally said after sleepless hours one impossible night. “I don’t
want
to know. But I
have
to know. Because you can’t carry it alone. Look at you. Harry made you a beautiful replica of a Claymore mine today—at least I hope it was a replica—and you couldn’t even say thank you. Just tell me—be out with it. Don’t tell me what Richter thinks, or what Dan Elkins thinks. Tell me what
you
think. You are the only one I listen to.” She sat up in bed.

Alexander was lying on his back, his eyes closed. “Stop looking at me,” he said. “I’m exhausted.”

“Shura, what are you so afraid of? Tell me. Look at me.” She knew he wouldn’t look at her because he didn’t want her to see inside him. And Tatiana had let him turn away because she didn’t want to see inside him either.

Tonight he turned from her, but she climbed over him to face him; she sat on him and poked and prodded him and breathed on him and kept on at him until his choice was to get out of bed or tell her. Alexander did what he always did when he couldn’t talk to her about impossible things. He made love to her.

He had barely dismounted when Tatiana said, “You’ve called every MI man you know. What are you searching for?”

“Holy God! Stop!” Throwing on his BVDs, he went outside into their garden. She threw on her robe and followed him. It was the end of August.

“It’s not obvious?” he said, smoking, pacing around the narrow paths, through the desert flowers.

“No!”

“I’m looking for Ant, Tania.”

“In MI?” She stood in front of him.

He lifted his eyes to her. “Now that so much time has passed,” said a worn-out Alexander, “and there has been no sign of him, and they haven’t found a trace of him, I think”—he paused—“that Anthony might have been taken prisoner.”

Prisoner! Tatiana scrutinized him. Why did he say that so wretchedly? Wasn’t that better than the alternative?

“That’s what I’ve been looking for all along,” he admitted. “Any classfied intel of him in a POW camp.”

They stared at each other, Tatiana becoming grimmer with each breath she took as she tried to absorb the gravity of what he was telling her. She couldn’t touch him, she felt him from across the path so afraid.

“Why are you trying to invent more trouble?” she said, trying to sound casual. “Don’t we have enough? I keep telling you, let’s just wait and see.” She reached for his hand. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”

“After hammering at me for half the night you now don’t want to hear it?” Alexander said with disbelief.

Letting go of him, Tatiana said nothing.

“Tell me,” Alexander said, “if Ant is taken prisoner by the NVA, do you think the KGB might be interested in the fate of an American soldier whose name is Anthony Alexander Barrington?”

“Shura, what did I say? Don’t tell me anymore.” Her hands were at her heart.

“If he was captured—”

“Please don’t speak! I’m begging you.”

She backed away but he came after her, taking her by her arms, his eyes in a blaze. “In Romania,” Alexander said, “they just picked up a 68-year-old man and brought him to Kolyma. Gave him ten years. The man had escaped from a Kazakhstan collective in 1934. In 1934, Tania, and they
just
picked him up. He was a nobody—a nobody who hopped on a train and kept going.”

“Please stop speaking!”

But Alexander wouldn’t stop. “What do you think—is my meter-thick file open or closed with the KGB?”

“This is absurd, what you’re thinking,” Tatiana said breathlessly. “They’re not—”

“Anthony had three tours in Vietnam without incident and disappeared a month before his fourth was over. You don’t think his luck has run out? You don’t think Pushkin’s Queen of Spades is bearing ill will?”

“No,” she whispered, her body shaking.

“Really? Do you remember Dennis Burck at State?
He
knew of me, of you, of my parents; he knew
everything
! If the NVA captured Ant, how many weeks would it be before a lackey behind a desk connected my KGB file with his name? Our old friend the French national Germanovsky managed to get through eleven checkpoints in Belgium before he was finally stopped. That’s how long it took them to find his name in their books. How many checkpoints do you think it will take them to find an Anthony Alexander Barrington?” Alexander let go of her, and stepped away, peering into his hands as if hoping to find different answers to his questions.

Tatiana stepped away too, hurriedly. “You’re worrying yourself unnecessarily.” Her voice was very small. “There are millions of troops and there is so much chaos.”

“Not like in Belgium after a world war, no,” he said.

“Millions of Vietnamese troops. They’re not looking for American troops who were once Red Army soldiers. Besides, Anthony is twenty-six and obviously not you. It’s 1969. Even if he were…captured, no one would piece anything together. Better for him to be taken prisoner but be alive, Shura. Believe me,” said Tatiana, taking another step away from him, and another, “
I
know something about this.”

“And I too,” said Alexander, stepping away from her with his torture wounds and torture tattoos from the German camps and the Soviet camps, “know something about this.”

The days ticked by.

The ill will penetrated even their white immaculate kitchen, where not a single unkind word had crossed the island in eleven years. Now they stood at opposite ends of the black granite block, not touching, not speaking. It was night; the babies, as they still called their giant children, were asleep. Tatiana had just finished making dough for tomorrow’s breakfast bread. Alexander had just finished closing up for the night. They were pretending to drink tea.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Alexander said at last. “Tell me where he is, and I will go find him.”

“I don’t
know
where he is, I’m not a clairvoyant—and what are you talking about? I don’t want you to go anywhere. It was then—
then
!—I wanted you to tell
him
not to go.”

“I did tell him not to go.”

“You should’ve stopped him.”

“He is a commissioned lieutenant! Should I have called Richter and told him daddy was forbidding a twenty-two-year-old to go to war?”

“Stop making fun of me.”

“I’m not making fun of you. But honestly, what do you think I should have done?”

“More. Less. Something else.”

“Oh, why didn’t
I
think of that?”

“I wish we had done something sooner!” Tatiana exclaimed. “We had been so proud, so casual.”

“Who was casual?” said Alexander.
“You
?” He shook his head. “Not me. I didn’t want this for him, and he knew it. He could have gone anywhere.” His voice cracked. “He could have been
anything
. He was the one who wanted this for himself.”

“And why do you think
that
was?” Tatiana said acidly.

Alexander’s hands slammed flat down on the island. “And how would you have liked me to fix
that
?”

“You should have convinced him not to go,” she said. “Eventually he would’ve listened to you.”

“He would have listened to me least of all! He would have done the opposite of anything I advised him. That’s why I tried to keep my mouth shut—”

“You should’ve tried harder not to. You knew what was at stake.”

“Tania, this country is at war! And not only are we at war, but we’re at war to keep Vietnam from going the way of the Soviet Union, of China, of Korea, of Cuba. Who better than you and me knows what that means? Who better than Ant knows what that means? How could
I
have kept him from
that
?”