Tatiana and Alexander by Paullina Simons
On a walk through the camp, Alexander’s group was shown a small enclave built out from the main wall into the industry yard. The enclave contained a concrete execution pit and next to it a crematorium. The Soviet guard told them that that was where the German pigs disposed of the Soviet prisoners of war, shooting them in the neck through a hole in the wall as they stood near a wooden yardstick that measured their height. “No Allied soldier has seen this pit, I can assure you,” the guard told them.
Alexander, shaking his bewildered, scornful head, said, “And why do you think that was?”
For that he received a knock with the rifle and a day in the camp jail.
Alexander started out working in the industry yard, a large fenced-in area where the Soviets took their exercise and chopped wood that was brought in from the forests around Oranienburg. Soon he volunteered to go and log himself. Every morning he was taken out with a convoy at seven fifteen, just after roll call, and did not return until five forty-five. He never stopped working, but for that he was fed a bit better, and he was out in the open air, left with his own thoughts. He liked it until it started getting cold at the end of September. By October he was hating it. He wished half-heartedly he were in one of the warm rooms soldering or hammering, making cups or locks. He didn’t really want to be stuck inside a factory-floor room, but he wouldn’t have minded being warm. He was outside, his boots were falling apart and leaking, held together with jute, and the gloves they had given him had holes in the fingers—an unfortunate flaw for gloves. But at least he was moving his body, metabolizing warmth. The ten men guarding the twenty prisoners were certainly dressed for the weather, but they stood for the entire ten hours, moving from foot to frozen foot. A small satisfaction, Alexander thought.
As it got colder, the cemetery started filling up. Alexander was made to dig graves. The Germans were doing poorly in Soviet-run camps. They had lived through six years of vicious war, but stuck in Special Camp Number 7, they withered and died. More and more were brought in. Clearly there was not enough room. The barracks started getting more and more crowded. The bunkbeds made in the industry yards were placed closer and closer together.
Special Camp Number 7, formerly known as Sachsenhausen, was not run by the military administration of Berlin. It fell under the USSR Government Administration of the Camps, or GULAG.
And there was something about being imprisoned in the Soviet-run Gulag that abjectly pervaded Alexander and the other five thousand Soviet men, gave them a bleak sense of terminal malaise. Many of the men had been in POW camps, they were not unfamiliar with restraints of movement and limits to activity. But even during the worst of the winters in German POW camps, the situation did not feel permanent, did not feel obliterating. They were soldiers then. And there was always hope—of victory, of escape, of liberation. But now there was victory, and liberation meant surrender to the Soviets, and there was no escape from Sachsenhausen into Soviet-occupied Germany. This prison, these days, this sentence felt like the end of hope, the end of faith, the end of everything.
Little by little, the torrent, the torment of memory ebbed.
At war he had imagined her whole—her laughter, her jokes, her cooking. In Catowice and Colditz, he imagined her whole—oh, but didn’t want to.
Here in Sachsenhausen he wanted to imagine her whole, and couldn’t.
Here she had become tainted with the Gulag.
His hands are on her. She is shuddering, her body in spasms breaking up into his hands. Alexander takes hold of her legs as he moves against her, and through it all, she moans and shudders helplessly, every once in a while breathing, “Oh, Shura,” and Alexander is breaking into pieces from his excitement and his terror. The excitement is inside her. The terror is in his hands as he grips her quivering body tighter and pulls out for a moment, hearing her nearly scream in frustration, but he is not having any of it. She is his right now, he will do with her as he needs to. He knows what he needs—to hold her closer than his own heart, to feel her dissolve in his hands, and all around him. The more helpless she is and the more he feels her need, the more he feels like a man. But sometimes what he needs as he holds her tighter is for Lazarevo not to vanish with the moon. He can’t give her that—what she wants most. What he wants most. He gives her what he can.
“You like it, babe?” he whispers.
“Oh, Shura,” she whispers back. She can’t even open her eyes. Her arms go around his neck.
“You’re not done yet,” he says. “God, you’re trembling.”
“Shura, I can’t—I can’t—I can’t—oh, that’s it—”
“Yes, honey, yes. That’s it.”
He closes his eyes, and hears her cry out.
And cry out. And cry out.
He is not stopping.
And cry out.
Now I’m a man, now when I’ve made my holy maiden shiver in my hands, I’ve become a man.
And cry out.
“God, I love you, Tania,” he whispers into her hair, his eyes still closed.
And wants to cry himself.
Her body limp underneath him, she lies, gently stroking his back.
“Done?” he asks.
“Done for,” she replies.
Alexander hasn’t even begun.
That’s the only thing Alexander imagined now. There was no clearing, no moon, no river. There was no bed, no blankets, no grass, no fire. No tickling, no games, no foreplay, no afterplay. There was no end and no beginning. There was only Tania underneath him, and Alexander on top of her, holding her close and tight. Her arms were always around his neck, her legs were always wrapped around him. And she was never silent.
Because she had become tainted with the Gulag, where there were no men.
We are not men. We do not live like men, and we do not behave like men. We do not hunt for our food—all except me when the guards aren’t looking—we do not protect the women who love us, we do not build shelter for our children, nor do we use the tools God gave us. We use nothing—not our brains to live by, not our strength to live by, not our cocks to live by.
War defined you. You always knew who you were during war. You were a major. A captain. A second lieutenant, a first lieutenant. You were a warrior. You carried weapons, you drove a tank, you led men into battle, you obeyed orders. You had categories and roles and passages. You didn’t always sleep and you weren’t always dry and many times you were hungry, and every once in a while you got shot or shelled or snipered. But even that was expected.
Here we give nothing of ourselves to anyone. We haven’t just become less as human beings, we have become less as men—we lost the very thing that made us what we were. We don’t even fight like we did at war. We were all animals then, but at least we were male animals. We drove forward. We thrust into enemy lines. We penetrated their defense. We broke their ring. We fought as men.
And now we’re being reconstructed before we are sent back to society as eunuchs. Emasculated, we are sent back to our faithless wives, into cities in which we cannot live, into life with which we cannot cope. We have no manhood to offer, not each other, not our women, and not our children.
All we have is our past, which we detest and dissect and wring our hands over. The past in which we were men. And behaved like men. And worked like men. And fought like men.
And loved like men.
If only—
Only nine thousand days like this to go.
Until—
We’re given back to the world we saved from Hitler.
And soon even her breasts were gone from him, and her face, and her voice calling for him. All was gone.
What remained was his male impact upon her female moaning.
And soon even that was gone.
His hands flung up over his right shoulder, he paused in introspection of the wood and crashed down. And with every swing of the axe, Alexander cut apart his life.
Did he think so little of it—to have so quickly given it up? How many times had fate twiste
He had always been in the middle of something else.
Stepanov’s son—there was nothing else he could do that day.
But during the blockade, when he pushed the Finns north to Karelia? He had an automatic weapon against five NKVD men with single-shot rifles. He could have been free.
He swung his axe, dumbstruck by himself.
Alexander could have gone, and forgotten her, and she him. She would have forgotten him and lived through the war, remained in Leningrad, and married. She would have had one child. She never would have known the difference. But Alexander had known the difference. And now they both knew the difference. Now they both were split apart—except she is wearing high heels and red lipstick somewhere, and all the soldiers returning from war are fawning over her and she says, oh I had a husband, and I made some vows but now he is dead, and come dance with me, come, look at my heels and my glorious hair, come dance away the war with me, I live and he is dead, I was sad, and then the war was over and I breathed again and now I’m dancing.
He swung his axe.
I inhale the frozen earth, I inhale ice that fills my lungs, and I breathe out fire.
I didn’t go because I was an arrogant bastard. I thought I could always run. I thought I was fucking immortal. Death would never get me. I was stronger and smarter than death. Stronger and smarter than the Soviet Union. I jumped thirty meters into the Volga, I made my way through half the country with nothing on my back, Kresty didn’t get me, Vladivostok didn’t get me, typhus didn’t get me.
Tatiana got me.
I will be fifty-one when they let me out of here.
He felt so old, having been young with her.
Alexander had been in the woods too long. And the deathly, eerie silence of the forest was icily frightening. He looked around. Suddenly he heard a noise. What was that? It sounded almost familiar. He held his breath.
There it was. In the middle distance, the sound of soft laughter.
Again the soft trilling sound, so familiar his bones ached. Tatiana, he whispered.
She comes to him, and she is pale. She is wearing a polka dot bathing suit, and her hair is long. She comes up to him and sits down on the stump so he can’t cut his wood. He lights a cigarette and watches her mutely. He doesn’t know what to say to her.
“Alexander,” she speaks first. “You’re alive. And you’ve grown so old. What happened to you?”
“How do I look?” he asks.
“You look like you’re nearly fifty.”
“I am fifty.”
She smiles. “You’re fifty, but I am seventeen.” She laughs melodiously. “How unfair life is. La-la-la.”
“Lazarevo, Tania, do you remember it? Our summer of ’42?”
“What summer of ’42? I died in ’41. I’m forever seventeen. Remember Dasha? Dasha! Come! Look who I found.”
“Tania, what do you mean, you died? You didn’t die. Look at you. Wait, don’t call Dasha.”
“Dasha, come! Of course I died. How do you think my sister and I could have survived that Leningrad? We didn’t. We couldn’t. One morning I couldn’t carry the water up anymore. Couldn’t get the rations anymore. We lay down together in our bed, and we were fine. We couldn’t move. I covered us with a blanket. The fire went out. The bread ended. We didn’t get up again.”
“Wait, wait.”
Tania smiles at him, white teeth all, freckles all, braids, breasts, all.
“Tania…what about me? Why didn’t I help you?”
“Help me with what?”
“With bread, with rations? Why didn’t I get you out of Leningrad?”
“What do you mean? We never saw you again after September. Where did you go? You said you were going to marry Dasha, and then you disappeared. She thought you had run out on her.”
“On her?” Alexander says, aghast. “What about you?”
“What about me?” she asks brightly.
“What about our talk at St. Isaac’s? What about Luga?”
“What St. Isaac’s? What Luga? Dasha, where are you? You won’t believe who I ran into!”
“Tania,” he says. “Why are you acting as if you don’t know me? Why are you pretending? You’re breaking my heart. Please stop. Please say something to comfort me.”
She stops bouncing, bounding, skipping, flinging her braids around, stops cold, looks at him and says, “Alex, what are you—”
“What did you just call me?”
“Alex—”
“You’ve never called me that.”
“What do you mean? We called you that all the time.”
Alexander is desperately trying to wake up. He can’t dream this anymore. He will go mad. Except he is awake. The axe is in front of him. She is skipping on one leg. “Luga, Tania? What about Luga?”
“Luga is where our dacha was. We thought we’d go back there after the war, but we never made it.”
“How do you know me?” he asks. “How do you know who I am?”
“What do you mean?” Peals of her soft laughter ripple the water in the river. “You’re my sister’s guy.”
“How did you and I meet?”
“She introduced us. She’d been talking about you for weeks. Finally you came for dinner.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. July sometime.”
“What about June? June 22? You met me in June, didn’t you? The war started and you and I met at the bus stop, remember?”
“June 22? Of course we didn’t.”
“Did you have ice cream on the bench?”
“Yes…”
“Didn’t a soldier—me—see you from across the street?”
“There was no soldier,” she says adamantly. “The street was empty. I had my ice cream and the bus came to take me to Nevsky Prospekt. I went to Yelisey, got some caviar. Didn’t last us long. Didn’t help us through the winter.”
“But where was I?” he cries.
“I don’t know,” she chirps, jumping up and down. “I never saw anyone.”
Ashen, he stares into her face. Not a flicker of affection moves across it. “Why didn’t I help your sister during the blockade?” he barely gets out.
Lowering her voice in an excited whisper, she says, “I don’t know if this is true about you, Alexander, but Dimitri told us that you escaped! Escaped and ran to America—all by yourself. Can that be true? Did you leave us all behind and run?” She laughs. “That’s so delicious. America! Wow. Dasha, come here.” She turns to Alexander. “Dasha and I talked and talked about it through the winter months. Even as we lay in bed our last morning, we said, can you believe, Alexander must be warm now and full. Was there heat in America during the war? White bread?”
Alexander has long ceased to stand. He has dropped to his knees on the snow. “Tania…” he says desperately, looking up at her. “Tatia…”
“What did you call me?”
“Tatiasha, my wife, Tania, mother of my only child, don’t you remember our Lazarevo?”
“Where?” she says frowning. “Alexander, you’re acting so odd. What are you talking about? I’m not your wife. I was not anybody’s wife.” She laughs briefly and shrugs. “Child? You perfectly well know I never even had a boyfriend.” Her eyes twinkle. “I had to live through my angel sister. Dasha, come here, look who I found. Tell me more about this Alexander of yours. What was he like?” She skips away without a backward glance. And soon her laughter fades away.
Alexander dropped his axe, got up and started walking.
They caught him in the woods and brought him back, and after two weeks in the camp jail, Alexander picked the lock on the leg chains with a pin he carried in his boots. They rechained him and took away the boots. He picked the lock on the leg chains with a small straight piece of straw he found on the cement floor of the isolation cell. They beat him and strung him up by his legs upside down for twenty-four hours
After that he was left on the straw in the jail, his arms chained above his head, and three times a day someone came in and shoved bread down his throat.
One day, Alexander turned his head away and refused the bread. He took the water.
The next day, he refused the bread again.
They stopped bringing it.
One night he opened his eyes; he was cold and thirsty. He was filthy and his body hurt. He could not move it. He tried to sweep up some straw to cover himself with. It was no use. He turned his head to the left and stared at the dark wall. He turned his head to the right and blinked.
Harold Barrington was sitting on his haunches against the wall. He was wearing slacks and a white shirt, his hair was brushed. He looked young, younger than Alexander. He was quiet for a long time. Alexander didn’t blink; he was afraid his father would be gone if he did.
“Dad?” he whispered.
“Alexander, what’s happening to you?”
“I don’t know. It’s all over for me.”
“Our adopted country has turned its back on you.”
“Yes.”
“Have you married?”
“I married.”
“Where is your wife?”
“I don’t know.” Alexander paused. “I haven’t seen my wife in many years.”
“Is she waiting for you?”
“I think she is long past that. She is living her own life.”
“Are you? Are you living your own life?”
“Yes,” Alexander said. “I’m living my own life, too. I’m living the life I made for myself.”
Harold was silent in the dark. “No, son,” he said. “You’re living the life I made for you.”
Alexander was so afraid to blink.
“I had thought you would go far, Alexander. Your mother and I both thought so.”
“I know, Dad. I was all right there for a little while.”
“I imagined a different life for you.”