Tatiana and Alexander by Paullina Simons
“Captain,” Alexander replied in English.
Ravenstock shook his head. “You say captain, they told us major, your wife says they took away your rank. I understand nothing. Tomorrow at eight, Captain Belov.” He looked him over. “You may eat in the embassy canteen, or…”
“Brought up to the room will be fine,” said Alexander.
“A military man indeed.” Ravenstock mulled Alexander’s shredded, muddied, bloodied clothes. “Do you have anything else to wear?”
“No.”
“Tomorrow at seven, I will have housekeeping bring you a spare captain’s uniform from headquarters. Please be ready to be escorted to the conference room at seven fifty-five.”
“I’ll be ready.”
“You’re sure you don’t need someone to take a look at your injuries?”
“Thank you, I have someone.”
Ravenstock nodded. “See you tomorrow. Guard, please take them to the sixth-floor residences. Have housekeeping make up a room for them and bring them some dinner. You two must be starving.”
Their room was large, with wood floors, area rugs, three large windows and high ceilings. The ornate crown molding ran around the perimeter of the walls. There were comfortable chairs and a table and even a private bathroom. Alexander dropped all their things on the floor and sat in an upholstered chair. Tatiana walked around the room for a few minutes, looking at the pictures, at the crown molding, at the area rugs, at anything but Alexander.
“So how apoplectic are the Soviets?” he asked from behind her.
“Oh, you know,” she said, not turning around.
“I can imagine.”
“They replaced Stepanov with someone else,” Tatiana said, turning to him.
Alexander’s hands twitched. “He told me when he came to see me in February that he was surprised he had lasted as long as he had. Things are getting particularly nasty for the generals in the post-war Soviet army. Too many campaigns gone wrong, too many men lost, too much blame to lay.” He lowered his head.
“How did he know you were there?”
“He saw my name in the Special Camp rolls.”
“They wouldn’t let me look through the rolls.”
“You are not the military commander of the Soviet garrison in Berlin.”
Tatiana collapsed onto the window ledge and put her face into her hands. “What’s happening?” she said. “I thought the hard part was behind us. I thought this was going to be the easy part.”
“You thought this was going to be the easy part!” Alexander exclaimed. “What about our life has ever been easy? Did you think you would step onto American soil and they would welcome us with a reception?”
“No, but I thought after I explained it to Ravenstock—”
“Perhaps Ravenstock is not familiar with all your powers of persuasion, Tatiana,” said Alexander. “He is a consul, a diplomat. He follows orders and he has to do what’s best for the relations between the two countries.”
“Sam told me to ask for his help. He wouldn’t have—”
“Sam, Sam, and who is this Sam, and why do you think the NKGB will listen to him?”
She wrung her hands. “I knew it,” she said. “We should have never come here! We should have run north where they wouldn’t be expecting us. We should’ve taken a cargo boat to Sweden. Sweden would’ve given us asylum.”
“That’s the first I’m hearing of this plan, Tania.”
“We didn’t have time to think. Berlin, Berlin! Why would I ever have taken you to Berlin if I thought for a second we wouldn’t find help here?”
There was a knock on the door. They looked at each other. Alexander got up to answer it, but Tatiana pointed to the bathroom and said, no, go there, don’t come out, just in case.
It was housekeeping, with dinner and fresh towels.
“Do you have any cigarettes?” Tatiana asked, her voice cracking on every word. “I’ll pay you if you have a pack—or two maybe?” The girl returned with three packs.
“Alexander? Are you all right?” It had been so quiet in the bathroom and Tatiana had been waiting for the girl to come back and didn’t go get him, and it suddenly occurred to her that he could have hurt himself in there, and she ran to the door and pushed it open with such force, screaming, “ALEXANDER!” that she nearly knocked him off his feet.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “Why are you screaming?”
“I don’t—I…you were very quiet, I didn’t—”
He took the cigarettes from her hands.
“Look, they brought you food,” she said, quieter, showing him the food trays. “They brought steak.” She tried to smile. “When was the last time you had steak, Shura?”
“What’s steak?” he said, and tried to smile, too.
They sat down at the table and moved the food around on their plates. Tatiana drank water. Alexander drank water and smoked.
“It’s good, right?”
“It’s good.”
They moved it around some more, not looking at each other, not speaking. It got dark. Tatiana went to turn on the light.
“No, don’t,” he said.
The only light in the room was the short fuse of his cigarette, one after another.
Nothing was said, but there was no silence. Tatiana was screaming inside and she knew Alexander was smoking to mute his own screaming. To drown out hers.
Finally he said, “You learned English well.”
And she said, “I once had a very good teacher,” and started to cry.
“Shh,” he said, looking not at her but past her to the open window. “Russian is somehow easier for us, more familiar.”
“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
“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?”