Tatiana and Alexander by Paullina Simons
“Faith in what?”
“Faith in this life. In me. Faith in doing what I am supposed to.” I don’t want to forget him, she wanted to say.
“Darling, of course you’re doing what you’re supposed to,” Isabella said. “Go on the way all women do when their husbands have died.”
“But what if he is not dead?” Tatiana whispered. “I need some proof to have faith.”
Isabella replied, “But, darling, then it wouldn’t be called faith, would it, if you had proof?”
Tatiana didn’t say anything.
“You grit your teeth and go on,” Isabella said, “just as you have been doing.”
“Dear Isabella,” said Tatiana, “as you know, I’m queen of grit teeth. But every day that moves me farther from him, I hate that day.”
“But that’s when you need faith the most—when it’s darkest around you.” Isabella watched Tatiana thoughtfully. “Honey, it must be better now than it was? You were so sad when you first came to New York. It’s better now?”
“It is, Isabella,” Tatiana replied. On the outside her life was right. But inside was his damn medal. And his damn Orbeli.
“Would you feel better if you had more proof than his death certificate?”
Tatiana made no reply. What could she say?
“Pray he is dead, darling. Pray he is at peace, that he is not tormented anymore. He is not hurting. He is free. He is your guardian angel, looking over you.”
“Isabella,” said Tatiana. “Don’t tell me he is dead, because if I believe that, it’s harder for me to go on living—knowing that with one bullet, I could be with him.”
“Who’d take you,” asked Isabella, “if you died and left your son an orphan?”
“Why not?” said Tatiana. “He died and left his son an orphan.”
“So if it’s easier, believe he is still alive.”
“If he’s still alive, then how can I go on with my life?” Tatiana emitted a cry of such physical pain that Isabella paled and moved her chair away from her.
“Oh, Tania,” Isabella whispered. “How can I help you?”
Tatiana stood up. “You can’t help me.” She called for Anthony, taking her bag from the floor. “Must be pleasant to see things so clearly. Well, why not? You are still with Travis. Your faith is easy—you have living proof right here.”
“And you do, too—here he is,” said Isabella, pointing at Anthony who came bounding out of the den, leaped into his mother’s arms and said, “Mama, I want ice krrreeeem for dinner.”
“All right, son,” said Tatiana.
And he did.
“Mama, how come Timothy has a daddy, and Ricky has a daddy, and Sean has a daddy, too?”
“Honey, what’s your question?” They were walking to school near Battery Park. It was Anthony’s second week in playgroup. Tatiana was intent on introducing Anthony to more children his own age. She thought he was around grown-ups too much. Around Isabella too much. His brow was creased in an adult manner; Tatiana didn’t like it. He spoke too fluently, he was too pensive, too solemn for a boy of two and half. She thought playgroup would do him good.
And now this.
“Why I don’t have a daddy?”
“Baby, you have daddy. He is just not here. Just like Mickey’s daddy, and Bobby’s daddy, and Phil’s, too. Their daddies aren’t here, and their mommies take care of them. You’re lucky. You have your mommy, and Vikki and Isabella—”
“Mama, when is Daddy going to come back? Ricky’s daddy came back. He walks him to school in the morning.”
Tatiana stared into the middle distance.
“Ricky wished for his dad for Christmas. Maybe I can wish for my dad for Christmas.”
“Maybe,” whispered Tatiana.
Anthony didn’t let his mother kiss him at the doors of the school or walk him inside. Squaring his shoulders and creasing his solemn brow, he went through the doors himself, carrying his small lunch bag.
The four stages of grief. First there was shock. And then there was denial. That lasted until this morning. Today, onward to the next stage. Anger. When will acceptance come?
She was so angry at him. He knew perfectly well she didn’t want this life without him. Did he think that she’d be better off in America amid post-war small appliances and radios and the promise of a television than she would have been in the Gulag?
Well, wait. What about Anthony? The boy is not a specter. He is a real boy, he would have been born regardless. What would have happened to him?
She looked into the water on the harbor. How long would it take me to jump and swim, swim like the last fish in the ocean to where it’s winter and the water is cold? I would swim slower and slower and slower, and then I would stop, and maybe on the other side of life he would be waiting for me with his hand outstretched, saying what took you so long to come to me, Tatia? I’ve been waiting and waiting.
She stepped away from the railing of the boat. No. On the other side, he is looking at me, shaking his head, saying, Tania, look at Anthony, he is the perfect son. How lucky you are to lay your hands on him. How I wish I could. Wherever I am—know that’s what I’m thinking. How I wish I could touch my boy.
Anthony needed his mother. Anthony could not be an orphan, not here in America, not there in the Soviet Union. His mother couldn’t abandon him, too. That sweet boy, with his sticky hands, with his chocolate mouth and his black hair. Tatiana coiled when she looked at, when she touched his black hair.
“Shura, let me wash your hair for you,” she says, sitting on the ground, looking out onto the clearing.
“Tania, it’s clean. We just washed this morning.”
“Come on, please. Let’s go swim. Let me wash it for you.”
“All right. Only if I can wash—”
“You can do whatever you like. Just come.”
She coiled every time she looked at her son.
That night she went out on the fire escape, without a coat or a hat, and sat mutely breathing in the cold ocean air. It smelled so good.
“Alexander,” Tatiana whispered. “Are you there? Can you hear me? Can you see me?” Up on the fire escape, she lifted her arms to the sky. “How am I doing? Better, right?” She nodded to herself. Better.
New York, every day pulsing as if indeed it was the heartbeat of the world. No dim-out at night anymore, every building illuminated like endless fireworks. There was not a street that was not teeming with people, a street where the manholes were not open, where steam wasn’t coming out of the underground, an avenue where the men didn’t sit on top of telephone poles and electrical poles, laying new pipe, hanging new wire, breaking down the El. The constant clang of construction, every day from seven in the morning, along with the sirens and the buses, and the honking horns and the yellow cabs. The stores were filled with merchandise, the coffee shops with donuts, the diners with bacon, stores with books and records and Polaroid cameras, music poured every night from the bars and the cafés, oh, and lovers, too, under trees, on benches, lovers in uniform and in suits and in doctors’ coats and nurses’ shoes. And in Central Park where they went every weekend, each blade of grass had a family on it. The lake had a hundred boats in the daytime.
But then there was night.
In the ocean, her arm outstretched to God, was Lady Liberty and on the fire escape was Tatiana, sitting in the three-in-the-morning air, listening across the ocean for the breathing of one man.
The fire embers are flickering out. He is finally done. Not only is he done, but asleep, too. He hasn’t moved off her. He had exhausted himself and, spent, nuzzled for a few moments and fell soundly asleep. She doesn’t even try to move him. He is heavy, what bliss. He is on top of her, so close. She can smell him and kiss his wet hair, and his stubbly cheek. She caresses his arms. It’s sinful for her to love his muscled arms so much. “Shura,” she whispers. “Can you hear me, soldier?”
She doesn’t sleep, for a long time cradling him to her, listening to him breathe, hearing the
Why did her present life suddenly start to feel so desperate? On the surface, there was so much. But under the surface she felt herself settling in—as if, as if—
She could close her eyes and imagine life…
Without him.
Imagine forgetting him.
The war was over.
Russia was over.
Leningrad was over.
And Tatiana and Alexander were over, too.
Now she had words to dull her senses. English words, a new name, and covering it all like a warm blanket, a new life in amazing, immoderate, pulsating America. A sparkling new identity in a gilded immense new country. God had made it as easy as possible to forget him. To you, I give this, God said. I give you freedom and sun, and warmth, and comfort. I give you summers in Sheep Meadow and Coney Island, and I give you Vikki, your friend for life, and I give you Anthony, your son for life, and I give you Edward, in case you want love again. I give you youth and I give you beauty, in case you want someone other than Edward to love you. I give you New York. I give you seasons, and Christmas! And baseball and dancing and paved roads and refrigerators, and a car, and land in Arizona. I give it all to you. All I ask, is that you forget him and take it.
Her head bowed, Tatiana took it.
A week would fly by, filled with work and the people in whose eyes she could see what she meant to them, and filled with Edward, in whose eyes Tatiana could see what she meant to him, and with blessed, impossible Vikki. Tatiana endlessly saw in Vikki’s eyes what she meant to Vikki. They went to the pictures and took in Broadway shows, and advanced nursing classes at NYU. Tatiana got dressed up in high heels and pretty dresses and went to Ricardo’s, and it was there that she would realize she had lived another week, almost as if she were meant to, as if Alexander were indeed becoming…remote.
There was a settling of the stellar dust. Soon the first love would fall into the recesses of memory, like childhood, it would all fall through the cracks in the cement of life, and weeds would grow over it.
But every morning, Tatiana took the ferry to Ellis, and as the boat broke the water of the harbor, she saw Alexander’s eyes, showing her what she had meant to him. Every day of forgetting, of wanting life, was another day of his eyes telling her what she had meant to him.
America, New York, Arizona, the end of war, feverish reconstruction, a baby boom, dancing, her high-heeled shoes, her painted lips—what she had meant…
To him.
What would she have, had she meant less to him? Why, nothing. She would have the Soviet Union, that’s what. Fifth Soviet, two rectangular rooms, and a domestic passport, and maybe a dacha in the summers for her child. She would be fifth in line forever, pulling the quilted hat down over her ears in the blizzard.
Every day of forgetting was a day of increased remorse. How could you forget me so quick, she thought Alexander was saying to her, when I have paid for you with my life?
Quick?
She was getting tiresome even to herself. Quick.
Quicksand into the earth.
Quicksilver into the water.
Quick quick quick, forget him so you can lie down with Jeb. Forget, Tania, so you can lie down with your third and fourth and fifth, Alexander is dead; hi ho, hi ho.
The months, the months, the months, the months.
Alexander, Alexander, Alexander, Alexander.
Tania, Tania…
That’s you, I know, that’s the pitiless horseman calling me back, calling me back to….
Lazarevo…
We lived it in our rapture and abandon as if we knew even then it had to last us our whole life.
Do you see our rumpled bed, our kerosene lamp? Do you see the kettle of water I boiled for you and do you see the counter top you had built for me, for the potatoes we never got, and for our cabbage pie? Do you see the cigarettes I rolled for you and the clothes I washed for you and do you see my hands on you, and my lips, and my ear pressing against your chest to listen to your beating heart, tell me, do you see all this before you and around you and inside you, too?
God keep you if you are alive, you unrelenting Alexander.
But if you are an angel watching over me, don’t come here, don’t follow me into the Superstition Mountains, don’t come here where it’s black around me and cold. I live in the desert, watching the winds and the wildflowers in the spring.
Don’t go here.
Come with me instead to the place I fly to, follow me over the oceans and the seas and the rivers between us, take my hand and let me lead you down through the pine cones, through the pine needles to wet our feet with the River Kama, as the sun peeks over the barren edges of the Urals, promising us one more day, and one less day every sunrise times twenty-nine, one more day, one less day, and gone again. Come with me into the river, flow with me as you and I swim across to the other shore against the rushing current. You swim slightly afraid I’m going to be carried away downstream into the Caspian Sea. I call swim faster, faster, and you smile and swim faster, your eyes on me. You’re always just ahead, your shining face to me. Come with me there for one more morning, one more fire, one more cigarette, one more swim, one more smile, one more, one more, one more, alskär into the eternity we call Lazarevo, my Alexander.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Oranienburg, Germany, 1945
ALEXANDER DIDN’T KNOW WHAT month it was when the train finally stopped for good and they were told to get out. He had long been removed from Ouspensky and chained to a small, blond, pleasant lieutenant Maxim Misnoy, who spoke little and slept much. Ouspensky, with a broken jaw, now traveled in a different car.
During their time on the train, Maxim Misnoy told Alexander a little about his life. He had volunteered for the front when the Germans invaded Russia in 1941. By 1942, Misnoy had yet to be issued a revolver for his empty holster. He had been taken prisoner by the Germans four times and escaped three times. He was liberated from Büchenwald by the Americans, but, being a loyal Red Army soldier, traveled to the Elbe to join the Russians in the Battle of Berlin. For his heroism, he had been given the Order of the Red Star. In Berlin afterward he was apprehended and sentenced to fifteen years for treason. He was too pleasant to be angry about it.
After alighting from the train, they were made to march in double file for two kilometers through a road in the woods to a path in the tall trees that led to a white ornate gatehouse. They passed a large yellow house before the gates. On top of the gatehouse was a clock, and flanking the clock were two machine-gun sentries.
“Büchenwald?” Alexander asked Misnoy.
“No.”
“Auschwitz?”
“No, no.”
The iron lettering on the gate read “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
“What do you think that means?” asked a man from behind them in line.
“Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” replied Alexander.
“No,” said Misnoy. “It means, ‘Work will set you free.’”
“Like I was saying.”
Misnoy laughed. “This must be a Class One camp. For political prisoners. Probably Sachsenhausen. In Büchenwald, the engraving didn’t say that. It was for more serious, more permanent offenders.”
“Like you?”
“Like me.” He smiled pleasantly. “Büchenwald read, ‘Jedem das Seine. To Each His Own.’”
“The Germans are so fucking inspiring,” said Alexander.
It was Sachsenhausen, they were told by the new camp commandant, a repulsive fat man by the name of Brestov, who could not speak without spitting. Sachsenhausen was built at the same time as Büchenwald, and was a full-time forced labor camp and a part-time extermination camp, mainly for the homosexuals who wo
As they were led through the camp, Alexander noticed that most of the prisoners walking from barracks to canteen or laundry, or working in the industry yard, did not have the hangdog Russian look. They had the tall, unbent Aryan look.
He turned out to be right. The majority in the camp were Germans. The Soviets were taken to a special place, slightly beyond the main camp walls. Sachsenhausen was built in the shape of an isosceles triangle, but the Nazis had discovered during the war that there was no room to house the Allied POWs in the forty barracks within camp walls. So twenty additional brick barracks were built, jutting out on the right side of the camp at the farthest corner from the gatehouse. The Nazis called it Class II and that’s where the Allies were kept.
Now, Special Camp Number 7 was split into two zones—Zone I in the main camp as “preventive detention” for the German civilians and soldiers picked up during the Soviet advance on Germany, and Zone II, in the additional housing, for the German officers released by Western Allies but recaptured and tried by Soviet military tribunals for crimes against the Soviet Union. The Soviets were also kept in Zone II.
Though in the same general area as the German officers, the Soviets had six or seven barracks all to themselves, they ate at separate times and had separate roll call, but Alexander wondered how long it would be before the camp, stretched to its limits, would start intermingling its prisoners, treating them all as enemies of the Soviet Union.
The first thing Alexander and his group of men were ordered to do when they got to the camp was build a perimeter fence around a square area just to the side of their barracks. This was to be a cemetery for those who died in Special Camp Number 7. Alexander thought it was quite prescient of the NKGB to be so forward-thinking as to be building a cemetery before there were any casualties. He wondered where the Germans had buried prisoners who had died—Stalin’s son, for one.