3
Alexander was walking fast down Ligovsky.
They were silent for a few minutes, and then Dimitri, still not catching his breath, said, “Nice family.”
“Very nice,” said Alexander calmly. He was not out of breath. And he did not want to talk to Dimitri about the Metanovs.
“I remember Dasha,” Dimitri said, barely keeping up with Alexander. “I’ve seen her with you a few times at Sadko, haven’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Her sister is something, though, don’t you think?”
Alexander didn’t reply.
Dimitri continued. “Georgi Vasilievich said Tania was nearly seventeen.” His head shuddered. “Seventeen! Remember us at seventeen, Alexander?”
Alexander kept on walking. “Too well.” He wished he could remember himself at seventeen less. Dimitri was talking to him. “I didn’t hear. What?”
“I said,” Dimitri said patiently, “do you think she is a young seventeen or an old seventeen?”
“Too young for you, Dimitri, regardless,” Alexander said coolly.
Dimitri was silent. “She is very pretty,” he finally said.
“Yes. Still too young for you.”
“What do you care? You’re close to the older sister, I’m going to get to know the younger.” Dimitri chuckled. “Why not? We could make a . . . foursome, don’t you think? Two best friends, two sisters . . . there’s a symmetry—”
“Dima,” said Alexander, “what about Elena last night? She told me she liked you. I can introduce you next week.”
Waving him off, Dimitri said, “You actually talked to Elena?” He laughed. “No. I can get dozens like Elena. Besides, why not Elena, too? No. Tatiana is not like the others.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled.
Not a muscle moved on Alexander’s face. Not a tic in his eye, not a tightening of his lips, not a furrowing of his brow. Nothing moved, except his legs, faster and faster down the street.
Dimitri broke into a trot. “Alexander, wait. About Tania . . . I just want to make sure . . . you don’t mind, do you?”
“Of course, not, Dima,” Alexander said evenly. “Why would I?”
“Absolutely!” He slapped Alexander on the back. “You’re a good man. Quick question — do you want me to arrange entertainment for—”
“No!”
“But you’ll be on duty all night. Come on, we’ll have fun like always?”
“No. Not tonight.” He paused. “Not again, all right?”
“But—”
“I’m late,” said Alexander. “I’m going to run. I’ll see you at the barracks.”
UNCHARTED TIDES
THE next morning when Tatiana woke up, the first image in her mind was Alexander’s face. Tatiana did not speak to Dasha, tried in fact not to look at her sister, who, as she was leaving said, “Happy birthday.”
“Yes, Tanechka, happy birthday,” said Mama, hurrying out. “Don’t forget to lock up.”
Papa kissed her on the head and said, “Your brother is seventeen today, too, you know.”
“I know that, Papa.”
Papa worked as a pipe engineer at the Leningrad waterworks plant. Mama was a seamstress at a Nevsky hospital uniform facility. Dasha was an assistant to a dentist. She had worked for him since leaving university two years ago. They had had a romance, but once it was over, Dasha continued there because she liked the job. It paid well and demanded little from her.
Tatiana went to Kirov, where the whole morning she sat in on meetings and patriotic speeches. The manager of her department, Sergei Krasenko, asked if anyone wanted to join the People’s Volunteer Army to dig trenches down south to help defeat the hated Germans.
Today the German was hated. Yesterday he was beloved. What about tomorrow?
Yesterday Tatiana had met Alexander.
Krasenko continued to speak. The fortifications north of Leningrad, along the old frontier with Finland, were to be put into full defensive order. The Red Army suspected that the Finns were going to want Karelia back. Tatiana perked up. Karelia, Finland. Alexander spoke about that yesterday. Alexander . . . Tatiana perked down.
The women listened to Krasenko, but no one sprang up to volunteer for anything. No one, that is, except Tamara, the woman who followed Tatiana on the assembly line. “What have I got to lose?” she whispered with fervor as she scrambled to her feet. Tatiana had suspected that Tamara’s job was just too boring.
Today before lunch she received goggles, a protective mask for her hair, and a brown factory coat. After lunch she was no longer packaging spoons and forks. Now small cylindrical metal bullets came to her down the assembly line. They fell by the dozen into small cardboard containers, and Tatiana’s job was to put the containers into large wooden crates.
At five o’clock Tatiana took off her coat and her mask and goggles, splashed water on her face, retied her hair into a neat ponytail, and left the building. She walked on Prospekt Stachek, along the famous Kirov wall, a concrete structure seven meters tall that ran fifteen city blocks. She walked three of those blocks to her bus stop.
And waiting for her at the bus stop was Alexander.
When she saw him — Tatiana couldn’t help herself — her face lit up. Putting her hand on her chest, she stopped walking for a moment, but he smiled at her and she blushed and, gulping down whatever was in her throat, walked toward him. She noticed that his officer’s cap was in his hands. She wished she had scrubbed her face harder.
The presence of so many words inside her head made her incapable of small talk, just at the time when she needed small talk most. “What are you doing here?” she asked timidly.
“We’re at war with Germany,” Alexander said. “I have no time for pretenses.”
Tatiana wanted to say something, anything, not to let his words linger in the air. So she said, “Oh.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you doing something special tonight?”
“I don’t know. Today is Monday, so everyone will be tired. We’ll have dinner. A drink.” She sighed. In a different world, perhaps, she might have invited him over for dinner on her birthday. Not in this world.
They waited. Somber people stood all around them. Tatiana did not feel somber. She thought, but is this what I’m going to look like when I’m here by myself, waiting for the bus like them?
Is this what I am going to look like for the rest of my life?
And then she thought, we’re at war. What is the rest of my life even going to look like?
“How did you know I’d be here?”
“Your father told me yesterday you worked at Kirov. I took a chance you’d be waiting for the bus.”
“Why?” she asked lightly. “Have we had so much luck with public transportation?”
Alexander smiled. “You mean we in the sense of the Soviet people? Or do you mean you and I?”
She blushed.
Bus Number 20 came with room for two dozen people. Three dozen piled on. Alexander and Tatiana waited.
“Come, let’s walk,” he said finally, leading her away.
“Walk where?”
“Walk back home. I want to talk to you about something.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “Home is eight kilometers from here.” She glanced at her feet.
“Are your shoes comfortable today?” He was smiling.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, cursing herself for her little-girl awkwardness.
“I’ll tell you what,” he suggested. “Why don’t we walk one long block over to Govorova Ulitsa, and take tram Number 1 from there? Can you walk one long block? Everybody here is waiting for the bus or the trolleybus. We’ll catch tram Number 1 instead.”
Tatiana thought about it. “I don’t think that tram drops me off at my apartment,” she said at last.
“No, it doesn’t, but you can change at the Warsaw railroad station for tram Number 16 that will take you to the corner of Grechesky and Fifth Soviet, or you can change with me for tram Number 2, which will drop me off close to my barracks and you at the Russian Museum.” He paused. “Or we can walk.”
“I’m not walking eight kilometers,” said Tatiana. “No matter how comfortable my shoes are. Let’s go to the tram.” She already knew she would not be getting off at some railroad station to catch another tram back home by herself.
When the tram didn’t come for twenty minutes, Tatiana agreed to walk a few kilometers to tram Number 16. Govorova turned into Ulitsa Skapina and then meandered diagonally northward until it ended in the embankment of the Obvodnoy Canal — the Circular Canal.
Tatiana didn’t want to get to her tram. She didn’t want him to get to his. She wanted to walk along the blue canal. How to tell him that? There were other things, too, to ask him. Always she tried to be less forward. Always she tried to find the right thing to say and didn’t trust the etiquette pendulum swinging in her head, so she simply said nothing, which was perceived either as painful shyness or haughtiness. Dasha never had that problem. She just said the first thing that came into her head.
Tatiana knew she needed to trust her inner voice more. It was certainly loud enough.
Tatiana wanted to ask Alexander about Dasha.
But he began with, “I don’t know how to tell you this. You might think I’m being presumptuous. But . . .” He trailed off.
“If I think you’re being presumptuous,” Tatiana remarked, “you probably are.”
He stayed silent.
“Tell me anyway.”
“You need to tell your father, Tatiana, that he has to get your brother back from Tolmachevo.”
As she heard those words, she saw the imperially ornate Warsaw train station across the street, and she was thinking fleetingly about what it would be like to see Warsaw and Lublin and Swietokryst, and suddenly there was Pasha and Tolmachevo, and . . .
Tatiana wasn’t expecting it. She had wanted something else. Instead, Alexander had mentioned Pasha, whom he did not know and had never met.
“Why?” Tatiana asked at last.
“Because there is some danger,” Alexander said after a pause, “that Tolmachevo will fall to the Germans.”
“What are you talking about?” She did not understand, and even if she did, she would not want to. She would choose not to understand. She didn’t want to get upset. She had been too happy that Alexander had come to see her unbidden, of his own free will. Yet there was something in his voice — Pasha, Tolmachevo, Germans, these three words were flowing together in one sentence, said by a near-stranger with warm eyes in a cool tone. Had he come all the way to Kirov to alarm her? What for?
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Talk to your father about getting Pasha out of Tolmachevo. Why did he send him there?” he exclaimed. “To be safe?” Alexander shuddered, and something passed over his face. Unblinking, she watched him intently for more, for less, for an explanation. But there was nothing else. Not even words.
Tatiana cleared her throat. “There are boys’ camps there. That’s why he sent him.”
He nodded. “I know. Many, many Leningraders sent their boys there yesterday.” His face was blank.
“Alexander, the Germans are down in Crimea,” said Tatiana. “Comrade Molotov said so himself. Didn’t you hear his speech?”
“Yes, they are in Crimea. But we have a border with Europe that’s two thousand kilometers long. Hitler’s army is on every meter of that border, Tania, south from Bulgaria north to Poland.” He paused. She didn’t say anything. “For right now, Leningrad is the safest place for Pasha. Really.”
Tatiana was skeptical. “Why are you so sure?” She became animated. “Why does the radio keep talking about the Red Army being the strongest army in the world? We have tanks, we have planes, we have artillery, we have guns. The radio is not saying what you’re saying, Alexander.” She spoke those words almost as a rebuke.
He shook his head. “Tania, Tania, Tania.”
“What, what, what?” she said, and saw that Alexander, despite his serious face, nearly laughed. That made her nearly laugh herself, despite her own serious face.
“Tania, Leningrad has lived for so many years with a hostile border with Finland only twenty kilometers to the north that we forgot to arm the south. And that’s where the danger is.”
“If that’s where the danger is, then how come you’re sending Dimitri up to Finland where, as you suggest, all is quiet?”
Alexander was silent. “Reconnaissance,” he said at last. Tatiana felt he left something unsaid. “My point is,” he went on, “all of our precautionary defenses are focused in the north. But south and southwest, Leningrad does not have a single division, a single regiment, not one military unit deployed. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“No,” she said, a little defiantly.
“Talk to your father about Pasha,” he repeated.
They fell silent as they walked side by side through the quiet streets. Subdued was the sunlight, still the leaves, and only Alexander and Tatiana moved languidly through the summer, slowing down at the end of every block, looking at the pavement, looking up to the street signs. Tatiana was thinking, please don’t let this end so soon. What was he thinking?
“Listen,” Alexander said, “about yesterday . . . I’m sorry about the mishap. What could I do? Your sister and I . . . I didn’t know she was your sister. We had met at Sadko—”
“I know. Of course. You don’t have to explain,” interjected Tatiana. He brought it up. That meant so much.
“Oh, but I do. I’m sorry if I’ve” — he paused — “upset you.”
“No, not at all. Everything is fine. She had told me about you. She and you—” Tatiana stopped, wanting to add that she was all right with that, but got stuck on her words. “So what’s Dimitri like? Is he nice? When is he coming back from Karelia?” Did she say that for effect? Tatiana wasn’t sure. She just wanted to change the subject.
“I don’t know. When his entrenching assignment is finished. In a few days.”
“Listen, I’m getting tired. Can we catch a tram?”
“Sure,” Alexander said slowly. “Let’s wait for the Number 16.”
They were seated on the tram when he spoke again. “Tatiana, your sister and I weren’t serious. I will tell her—”
“No!” she exclaimed. The two stolid men in front of her turned around quizzically. “No,” she repeated, more quietly, but no less adamantly. “Alexander, it’s impossible.” She put her hands over her face and then took them away. “She is my older sister. Do you understand?”
I was my mother and father’s only child. His violin words echoed in her chest.
More gently, Tatiana said, “She is my only sister.” She paused. “And she is serious about you.” Did she need to say more? She didn’t think so, but judging by the displeased look on his face, yes, she did. “There will be other boys,” she finally added with a gallant shrug, “but I will never have another sister.”
All Alexander said was, “I’m not a boy.”
“Men, then,” Tatiana stammered. This was too difficult for her.
“What makes you think there will be other men?”
Dumbstruck, Tatiana nonetheless persisted. “Because you make up half the world. But I know for a fact I have only one sister.”
When Alexander didn’t comment, she ventured, “You do like Dasha, don’t you?”
Quietly he replied, “Of course. But—”
“Well, then,” Tatiana interrupted, “it’s settled. No reason to speak any more about it.” She sighed heavily.
“No,” Alexander said, sighing briefly. “Guess not.”
“All right, then.” She stared out the window.
Whenever Tatiana thought of what she might like to be in life, she always thought of her grandfather and the dignity with which he conducted his simple existence. Her grandfather could have been anything, but he chose to become a math teacher. Tatiana didn’t know if it was the teaching of irrefutable math that made Deda approach more intangible issues with the same black-and-white code or if it was the very essence of his character that drew him to math’s absolutes, but whatever it was, Tatiana had always marveled at it. Whenever people asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she invariably said, “I want to be like my grandfather.”
Tatiana knew what Deda would do. He would never step on his sister’s heart.
The tram moved past Insurrection Square. Alexander asked her to get off a few stops before Fifth Soviet, near the redbrick Grechesky Hospital on Second Soviet and Grechesky. “I was born in this hospital,” Tatiana offered, pointing.
“So, Tania, tell me, do you like Dimitri?”
It was a good minute before Tatiana could answer him.
What answer was he looking for? Was he asking as a spy for Dimitri or for himself? And what should she say? If it was for Dimitri and Tatiana said no, she did not like him, then she would hurt Dimitri’s feelings, and she didn’t want to do that.
If it was for Alexander and she said yes, she liked Dimitri, then she would hurt Alexander’s feelings, and she didn’t want to do that either. What were girls supposed to say? Weren’t they supposed to play some kind of game? Lure, pull, pretend.
Alexander was Dasha’s. Did Dasha’s younger sister owe him an honest answer?
Did he want one?
He wanted one.
“No,” she finally said. Tatiana didn’t want to hurt Alexander’s feelings most of all.
She saw by his face that she had given him the right answer.
“Dasha says I should give him a chance though. What do you think?”
“No,” he replied at once.
They were stopped at the corner of Second Soviet and Grechesky Prospekt. The dome of the church across from her building glistened a few hundred meters in the distance. Tatiana couldn’t take the thought of him leaving. Now that he had come, asked the impossible, and been refused, she was afraid she would not see him like this again. Alone like this again.
She couldn’t let him leave just yet. Not just yet. “Alexander,” she asked quietly, looking into his face, “are your . . . mother and father still in Krasnodar?”
“No,” he said. “They’re not in Krasnodar.”
She didn’t look away. His eyes poured into her. “Tania, so many things I can’t explain but want to.”
“So explain,” Tatiana said softly, holding her breath.
“Just remember, what’s happening right now in the Red Army — the confusion, the unpreparedness, the disorganization — none of it can be understood except through the events of the last four years. Do you see?”
Tatiana stood still. “I don’t see. What does it have to do with your parents?”
Alexander stepped a shade closer, shielding her from the setting sun. “My parents are dead. My mother in 1936, my father in 1937.” He lowered his voice even more. “Shot,” he whispered. “By the NKVD — the not-so-secret police. Now I have to go, all right?”
Tatiana’s shocked face must have slowed him, because he patted her on the arm and said, smiling grimly, “Don’t worry. Sometimes things don’t work out the way we hope, do they? No matter how much we plan, or how much we wish. True?”
“No, they don’t,” replied Tatiana, lowering her gaze. For some reason she didn’t think he was talking just about his parents. “Alexander, do you want to—”
“I have to go,” he cut in. “I’ll see you.”
All she wanted to ask was, when? but all she said was, “All right.”
Tatiana didn’t want to go back to her apartment, inside the kitchen, inside. She wanted to be on the tram again, or at the bus stop, even at the store, on the street — anywhere, as long as it wasn’t in the apartment without him.
When Tatiana got to her building, she stood dumbly on the landing, mindlessly drawing the outline of the figure eight with her fingers, readying herself for the climb up and beyond.
With a heavy heart she ambled upstairs.
2
The family was discussing the war. There was no birthday dinner, but there was plenty of drink. And plenty of loud argument. What was going to happen to Leningrad? As Tatiana arrived, her father and grandfather were disagreeing on Hitler’s intentions — as if they both knew him personally. All Mama wanted to know was why Comrade Stalin had not spoken to the people. Dasha wanted to know if she should continue working.
“As opposed to what?” snapped an irritated Papa. “Look at Tania. She is barely seventeen, and she doesn’t ask if she should continue working.”
Everybody looked at Tatiana, including Dasha — unhappily.
Tatiana put down her bag. “Seventeen today, Papa.”
“Ah, yes!” Papa exclaimed. “Of course. The day has been so crazy. Let’s drink a toast to Pasha’s health.” He paused. “And to Tania’s.”
The room was somehow smaller because Pasha wasn’t with them.
Tatiana leaned against the wall, wondering when would be a good time to bring up her brother and Tolmachevo. Hardly anyone even noticed she was holding up the wall, except Dasha, who glanced at her from the couch and said, “Why don’t you have some chicken soup? It’s outside on the stove,” and Tatiana thought that was a good idea. In the kitchen, she poured herself two ladlefuls of carrots and a bit of chicken and then sat on the window ledge and looked out into the yard as the soup got cold next to her. She couldn’t eat anything hot. She was burning up inside.
When Tatiana walked back into their rooms, she heard her mother say consolingly to her father, “This war will not continue into winter. By then it will all be over.”
Papa was quiet, rubbing the folds of his shirt. He said, “You know, Napoleon, too, came to the Soviet Union with his armies in June.”
“Napoleon!” Mama screeched. “What does Napoleon have to do with this, Georgi Vasilievich? Please. I beg of you.”
Tatiana opened her mouth to speak, to say something about Tolmachevo, but not only was she not sure of the message she was supposed to relay to her mature, all-knowing, insufferable family, it suddenly occurred to her that she might have to explain how she came by this information on the Germans’ future advance into Russia.
Might? she thought. She closed her mouth.
Papa sat by Mama’s side, looking into his empty glass. “Let’s have another shot,” he said. “And drink to Pasha.”
“Let’s go to Luga!” exclaimed Mama. “Let’s go to our dacha, get away from the city.”
How could Tatiana not say something now? “Maybe,” she coughed up, with the confidence of a lamb, spluttering at her own audacity, “maybe we could bring Pasha back from camp in the meantime.”
Papa, Mama, Dasha, Deda, and Babushka all stared at Tatiana with confusion and remorse, as if, one, they had been surprised she could speak and, two, they were sorry for saying grown-up things in the presence of a child.
Mama started to cry. “We should bring him back. Today is his birthday, and he is all by himself.”
It’s my birthday, too, Tatiana thought. She got up, deciding to go and have a bath.
“Where are you going?” Papa called to her.
“To wash.”
“To wash what?” snapped Mama. “Take some plates into the kitchen, will you?”
“To wash myself,” replied Tatiana, gathering the dirty plates from the table.
Dasha went out, Tatiana didn’t ask where. She suspected it was to see Alexander. She was not one to feel sorry for herself, and she wasn’t going to start now. If there was anything to feel sorry for, it was the turn of events that allowed feeling into her heart, only to have that feeling squashed by the ludicrous hands of fate. She wasn’t going to allow pointless self-pity inside — that angry fiend.
Tatiana forced herself to reread some of Chekhov’s stories, which never failed to ease her with their inertness. Reading seven of his short stories put her right to sleep, the last one about a girl sitting on a bench with an older man.
She kept hearing Deda and Papa argue about the war. Deda said that many people did not view it as sheer tragedy. The idea of war was terrible, but might not war bring freedom to them? Might not this new horror bring in its wake some good? Might it not lift from Russia’s back the savage burden of the Bolsheviks and give the nation a chance for a new, normal, and humane life?
Tatiana heard Papa’s voice, laden with vodka. “Nothing will lift from Russia the savage burden of the Bolsheviks. Nothing will bring us a normal life.”
Tatiana thought Papa was a pessimist. Vodka tended to make him even more morose.
Something had to bring them all a chance for a new life. But what? As if she had any answers. She slept.
She was awakened at one forty-five in the morning by a sound she had never heard before coming from outside. It was a screeching siren piercing the dusky night. She cried out, and her father came over and told her not to worry, it was just an air-raid siren. She wanted to know if she had to get up; were the Germans bombing them already?
“Go to sleep, Tanechka, dear,” said Papa, but how could she, with the siren shrieking and Dasha not home? The siren stopped after a few minutes, but Dasha was still not home.
3
At the morning meeting at Kirov the next day, Tatiana was told that the workday, in honor of the war effort, was extended until seven in the evening, until further notice. Until further notice, Tatiana guessed, was until the war ended. Krasenko informed the workers that he and the Party secretary from Moscow decided to step up production of the KV-1, heavy tank for the defense of Leningrad. Krasenko said that Leningrad would be defended with what tanks, ammunition, artillery they could make at Kirov. Stalin would not redeploy arms from the southern front to the Leningrad front to protect the city.
Whatever Leningrad could produce to defend itself — arms and food — would have to be sufficient.
After that meeting so many workers volunteered for the front that Tatiana thought the factory would be closed down. But no such luck. She and another worker — a worn, middle-aged woman named Zina — returned to their projectile assembly line.
Late in the day the nail gun broke, and Tatiana had to nail the crates shut with a hammer. By seven her back and her arm ached.
Tatiana and Zina walked along the Kirov wall, and before she got to the bus stop, Tatiana saw Alexander’s black-haired head rising above the tide of others.
“I have to go,” Tatiana said, losing a breath and speeding up. “See you tomorrow.”
Zina mumbled something in return.
“Hello,” she greeted him, her heart racing, her voice steady. “What are you doing here?” She was too tired to feign disinterest. She smiled.
“I’m coming to take you home. Did you have a nice birthday? Did you talk to your parents?”
“No,” Tatiana replied.
“No to both?”
“I didn’t talk to them, Alexander,” Tatiana said, avoiding the birthday issue. “Maybe Dasha can talk to them? She is a lot braver than I am.”
“Is she?”
“Oh, much,” said Tatiana. “I’m a big chicken.”
“I tried to talk to her about Pasha. She is even less concerned than you.” He shrugged. “Look, it’s not my place. I’m just doing what I can.” He glanced at the line of people. “We’ll never get on this bus. Want to walk?”
“As long as it is up the tram steps,” she said. “I can’t move today. I’m so tired.” She paused, adjusting her ponytail. “Have you been waiting long?”
“Two hours,” he replied, and Tatiana suddenly felt less tired. She stared at Alexander with surprise.
“You’ve been waiting two hours?” What she didn’t say was, you’ve been waiting two hours for me? “My day has been extended till seven. I’m sorry you waited so long,” she said softly to him.
They fell away from the crowd, crossed the street, and headed toward Ulitsa Govorova.
“Why are you carrying that?” Tatiana asked, pointing to Alexander’s rifle. “Are you on duty?”
“I’m off duty until ten,” he said. “But I’ve been ordered to carry my weapon with me at all times.”
“They’re not here yet, are they?” Tatiana said, trying to be jovial.
“Not yet,” came his short reply.
“Is the rifle heavy?”
“No.” He paused and smiled. “Would you like to carry it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s see. I’ve never held a rifle before.” Taking it from him, she was surprised by how heavy it was and how hard it was to hold it with both hands. She carried it for a while and then gave it back to Alexander. “I don’t know how you do it,” she said. “Carry your weapon and all your other things, too.”
“Not just carry it, Tania, but fire it. And run forward, and fall on the ground, and jump up with it in my hands, with all my other things on my back.”
“I don’t know how you do it.” She wished she could be physically strong like that. Pasha would never beat her at war again.
The tram came, and they got on. It was crowded. Tatiana gave up her seat to an elderly lady, while Alexander looked as if he never intended to sit down. He held on to the brown overhead strap with one hand and his rifle strap with the other. Tatiana held on to the partially rusted metal handle. Every once in a while the tram would lurch and she would bump into him, and every time she would apologize. His body felt as hard as the Kirov wall.
Tatiana wanted to sit down with him alone somewhere and ask him about his parents. Certainly she couldn’t ask him on the tram. And was knowing about his parents a good thing? Wouldn’t knowledge about his life just make her feel closer to him, when what she needed was to feel as far away from him as possible?
Tatiana remained silent as the tram took them to Vosnesensky Prospekt, where they caught tram Number 2 to the Russian Museum.
“Well, I’ll be going,” Tatiana said — extremely reluctantly — after they got off.
“Do you want to sit for a minute?” Alexander suddenly asked. “We can rest on one of the benches in the Italian Gardens. Want to?”
“All right,” Tatiana said, trying not to skip with joy as she walked in little steps next to him.
After they sat down, Tatiana could tell that something was weighing heavily on his mind, something he wanted to say and couldn’t. She hoped it wasn’t about Dasha. She thought, aren’t we past that? She wasn’t. But he was older. He should have been.
“Alexander, what’s that building over there?” she asked, pointing across the street.
“Oh, that’s the European Hotel,” Alexander replied. “That and the Astoria are the best hotels in Leningrad.”
“It looks like a palace. Who is allowed to stay there?”
“Foreigners.”
Tatiana said, “My father went to Poland on business once a few years ago, and when he came back, he told us that in his Warsaw hotel Polish people from Krakow were staying! Can you imagine? We didn’t believe him for a week. How could Polish people be staying in a hotel in Warsaw?” She chuckled. “That’s like me staying at the European over there.”
Alexander looked at her with an amused expression and said, “There are places where people can actually travel as they please in their own country.”
Tatiana waved him off. “I guess,” she said. “Like Poland.” She swallowed hard and cleared her throat. “Alexander . . . I’m so sorry about your mother and father.” She touched him gently on the shoulder. “Please tell me what happened.”
With a suspended breath of relief escaping his mouth, Alexander said, “Your father is right, you know.” He paused. “I’m not from Krasnodar.”
“Really? Where are you from?”
“Have you ever heard of a town called Barrington?”
“No. Where is that?”
“Massachusetts.”
She thought she had misheard. Her eyes became saucers. “Massachusetts?” she gasped. “As in, as in America?”
“Yes. As in America.”
“You’re from Massachusetts, America?” Tatiana said, astonished.
“Yes.”
For a full minute, maybe two, Tatiana could not speak. Her heart drummed deafeningly and electrifyingly in her ears. She willed her jaw to stay shut.
“You’re just teasing me,” she said at last. “I am not that gullible.”
Alexander shook his head. “I’m not teasing.”
“You know why I don’t believe you?”
“Yes,” Alexander said. “You’re thinking, who would want to come here?”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
“Communal living was a great disillusionment for us,” Alexander told Tatiana. “We came here — my father anyway — so full of hope, and suddenly there were no showers.”
“Showers?”
“Never mind. Where was the hot water? We couldn’t even take a bath in the residential hotel we were staying at. Do you have hot water?”
“Of course we don’t. We boil water on the stove and add it to the cold water in the bath. Every Saturday we go to the public bathhouse to wash. Like everybody in Leningrad.”
Alexander nodded. “In Leningrad, in Moscow, in Kiev, in all of the Soviet Union.”
“We’re lucky. In the big cities we actually have running water. In provincial towns they don’t even have that. Deda told me that about Molotov.”
“He is right.” Alexander nodded. “But even in Moscow the toilets flushed sporadically at best; the smell accumulated in the bathrooms. My parents and I, we adjusted somehow. We cooked on firewood and thought we were the Ingalls family.”
“The who?”
“The Ingalls family lived in the American West in the late eighteen hundreds. Yet here we were, and this was socialist utopia. I said to my father once, with some irony, that he was right, this was much better than Massachusetts. He replied that you didn’t build ‘socialism in one country’ without a struggle. For a while I think he really believed it.”
“When did you come?”
“In 1930, right after the 1929 stock market crash.” Alexander looked at her blank expression and sighed. “Never mind. I was eleven. Never wanted to leave Barrington in the first place.”
“Oh, no,” Tatiana whispered.
“Cooking on a little Primus stove with kerosene got us down. Living in the dark. Living with unclean smells, it blackened our spirits in ways we never imagined. My mother took to drink. Well, why not? Everyone drank.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana. Her father drank.
“And after she drank, and the toilet was occupied by other foreigners living in our Moscow palace” — he paused — “not like the European — my mother would trot to the local park and relieve herself in the public toilets there — just a hole in the ground for my mother.” He shivered at those words, and Tatiana shivered, too, in the balmy Leningrad evening. Gently she touched Alexander’s shoulder again, and because he didn’t move away, and because they sat canopied under the covering trees, and because there was not another soul around, Tatiana pressed her slender fingers against the fabric of his uniform and did not take them away.
“On Saturdays,” Alexander continued, “my father and I — like you, your mother, and sister — would go to the public baths and wait two hours in line to get in. My mother went by herself on Fridays, wishing, I think, that she had given birth to a daughter, so she wouldn’t be all alone, so she wouldn’t suffer over me so much.”
“Did she suffer over you?”
“Tremendously. At first I was all right, but as the years went by, I started to blame them for my life. We were living in Moscow at the time. Seventy of us, idealists — and not just idealists, but idealists with children — lived as you do, sharing three toilets and three small kitchens on one long floor.”
“Hmm,” Tatiana said.
“How do you like it?”
She thought. “There are only twenty-five of us on our floor. But . . . what can I say? I like our dacha in Luga better.” She glanced at him. “The tomatoes are fresh, and the morning air smells so clean.”
“Yes!” Alexander exclaimed, as if she had said the magic word: clean.
“And,” she added, “I like not being on top of other people all the time. Having a little bit of . . .” She trailed off. She couldn’t think of the right word.
His legs outstretched, Alexander turned a little more to her, looking into her face.
“You know what I mean?” Tatiana said diffidently.
He nodded. “I do, Tania.”
“So should we rejoice that the Germans attacked us?”
“That’s just trading Satan for the devil.”
Shaking her head, Tatiana said, “Don’t let them catch you talking like that.” But she was youthfully curious. “Which is Satan?”
“Stalin. He is marginally more sane.”
“You and my grandfather,” Tatiana murmured.
“What, your grandfather agrees with me?” Alexander smiled.
“No.” She smiled back. “You agree with my grandfather.”
“Tania, don’t go kidding yourself for a minute. Hitler may be viewed by some people, especially down in the Ukraine, as their deliverer from Stalin, but you’ll see how quickly he will destroy those illusions. The way he destroyed them in Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland. In any case, after the war is over, whatever the outcome for the world, I have a feeling that here in the Soviet Union we will all go back to the same place.” Alexander struggled with his words. “Have you been . . . protected by your family?” he asked with concern. “From the way it has been?”
Pressing her fingers into his shoulder, Tatiana said, “We really haven’t had much personal experience with it.” She didn’t like to talk about it. It frightened her a little. “I once heard that someone at Papa’s work was arrested. And a man and his daughter at the apartment vanished a few years ago, and the Sarkovs came to live in their place.” She contemplated her words. Her father maintained that the mordant and heavyset Sarkovs were NKVD informers. “I have been somewhat protected, yes.”
“Well, not me,” said Alexander, taking out a cigarette and his lighter. “Not at all. And so I cannot turn my mind away from my parents, who came here with such hope and were so crushed by the beliefs they supported almost from birth.” He lit up. “You don’t mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all,” Tatiana said, watching him. She liked his face. “What was it?” she asked. “American living must not be that great if an American like your father could forsake his country.”
Alexander didn’t speak while he smoked the whole cigarette. “Let me tell you exactly what it was: Communism in America in the twenties — the Red Decade — was quite fashionable among the rich.”
Alexander’s father, Harold Barrington, wanted him to become a member of the Communist youth group, the Young Pioneers of America, in their town when Alexander turned ten. The group had a tiny membership, Harold had said, and they needed strength. Alexander refused. He was already in the Cub Scouts, he told his father. Barrington was a small town in eastern Massachusetts, named after the Barringtons, who had lived there since Benjamin Franklin. Alexander’s progenitor had fought in the Revolutionary War. In the nineteenth century the Barringtons produced four mayors, and three of Alexander’s forebears served and died in the Civil War.
Alexander’s father wanted to make his own mark on the Barrington clan. He wanted to go his own way. Alexander’s mother, Gina, came from Italy at the turn of the century when she was eighteen to embrace the American way of life, and when she changed her name to Jane and married Harold Barrington at nineteen, she embraced it with her heart. She had left her family in Italy to go her own way, too.
At first Jane and Harold were radicals, then they were socialist democrats, and then they were Communists. They lived in a country that let them, and they embraced Communism with all their hearts. A modern, progressive woman, Jane Barrington did not want to have children, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, said she didn’t have to.
After eleven years of being a radical with Harold, Jane decided she wanted to have children. It took her five years of miscarriages to have one child — Alexander — who was born to her in 1919 when she was thirty-five and Harold thirty-seven.
Alexander lived and breathed the Communist doctrine from the time he was old enough to understand English. In the comfort of his American home, surrounded by a blazing fire and woolen blankets, Alexander spoke words like “proletariat, equality, manifesto, Leninism,” before he was old enough to know what they meant.
When he was eleven, his parents decided to live the words they had been speaking. Harold Barrington was constantly getting himself arrested for less-than-peaceful demonstrations on the streets of Boston, and finally he went to the American Civil Liberties Union and asked for their help in seeking voluntary asylum in the USSR. To do it he was willing and ready to renounce his American citizenship and move to the Soviet Union, where he could be one with the people. No social classes. No unemployment. No prejudice. No religion. The Barringtons did not admire the no-religion part, but they were progressive, intellectual people, who were willing and able to put God aside to help build the great Communist experiment.
Harold and Jane Barrington surrendered their passports, and when they first arrived in Moscow, they were feted and fed as royalty. Only Alexander seemed to notice the smell in the bathrooms, the lack of soap, and the brazenly destitute with rags on their feet who collected outside their restaurant windows, waiting for the dirty dishes to be brought into the kitchen so they could eat the scraps. The drunken squalor in the beer bars to which Harold Barrington took Alexander was so depressing that Alexander finally stopped going. He didn’t care how much he wanted to be with his father.
At the residential hotel where they were staying, they received special treatment, along with other expatriates from England, Italy, and Belgium.
Harold and Jane got their new Soviet passports, thereby permanently severing their ties with the United States. As a minor, Alexander would not be getting his Soviet passport until he was sixteen and had to register for the compulsory military service.
Alexander went to school, learned Russian, made many friends. He was slowly adjusting to his new life when in 1935 the Barringtons were told that they would have to leave their rent-free accommodation and fend for themselves. The Soviet government could no longer keep them. The trouble was, the Barringtons could not find a room for themselves in Moscow. Not a single room in any communal apartment anywhere. They moved to Leningrad and, after weeks of going from one housing committee to another, finally found two rooms in a squalid building on the south side of the Neva. Harold found work at Izhorsk factory. Jane’s drinking increased. Alexander kept his head down and concentrated on school.
It all ended in May 1936, the month Alexander turned seventeen years old.
Jane and Harold Barrington were arrested in the least expected way — but also the most ordinary. One day she did not come home from the market.
All Harold wanted was somehow to get a message to Alexander, but they had had bitter words and he had not seen the boy in two nights.
Four days after his wife’s disappearance, there was a soft knock on Harold’s door at three in the morning.
What Harold did not know was that representatives of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs had already come for Alexander.
A man named Leonid Slonko was Jane’s interrogator at the Big House. “What funny things you say, Comrade Barrington,” he said to her. “How did I know you were going to say them?”
“You’ve never met me before,” she said.
“I’ve met thousands like you.”
Really, thousands, she wanted to say. Are there really thousands of us coming from the United States?
“Yes, thousands,” confirmed Slonko, as if she’d spoken. “They all come. To make us better, to live the capitalist-free life. Communism requires a sacrifice, you know that. You must put away your bourgeois aesthetic and look at us as a new reformed Soviet woman and not as an American.”
“I have put away my bourgeois aesthetic,” Jane said. “I’ve given away my home, my job, my friends, my entire life. I came here and started a new life because I believed. All you had to do was not betray me.”
“And how did we do that? Did we do that by feeding you? By clothing you? By giving you a job? A place to live?”
“Then why am I here?” she asked.
“Because it is you who have betrayed us,” said Slonko. “We cannot abide your disillusionment when we are trying to rebuild the human race for the benefit of all mankind. When we are trying to eradicate poverty and misery from this earth.”
Slonko added, “And let me ask you, Comrade Barrington, when you expressed contempt for our country by calling on the U.S. embassy in Moscow a few weeks ago, did you perhaps forget that you have given up your allegiance to the United States by advocating the overthrow of democracy? By being connected with the Popular Front? By giving up your American citizenship? You are not an American citizen. They do not care whether you live or die.” Slonko laughed. “How silly all of you are. You come here from your countries, decrying their governments, their customs, their ways of life that are repulsive to you. Yet at the first sign of trouble, who is it that you contact?” Slonko slapped the table. “Be assured, comrade, that the American government couldn’t care less about you right now. They’ve forgotten who you are. The file on you and your husband and your son has been sealed by the U.S. Department of Justice and put into a vault. You are ours now.”
It was true. Jane had gone to the U.S. embassy in Moscow two weeks before her arrest. She had taken the train with Alexander. She must have been followed. The reception she got at the embassy was chilly at best: the Americans had no interest in helping either her or her son.
“Was I followed?” she asked Slonko.
“What do you think?” he said. “You’ve shown that your fealty is a fickle thing. We were right to follow you. We were right not to trust you. Now you will be tried for treason under Article 58 of the Soviet Constitution. You know that, too. You know what’s ahead of you.”
“Yes,” she said. “I just wish it would come quicker.”
“What would be the point of that?” Slonko was a big, imposing man of advancing age, but he still looked strong and skilled. “You understand how you look to the Soviet government. You have broken with the country you were born in, then spat on the country that provided for you and your family. You were doing quite well in America, quite well — you, the Barringtons of Massachusetts — until you decided to change your life. You came here. Fine, we said. We were convinced you were all spies. We watched you because we were cautious, not vindictive. We watched you and then we wanted you to stand on your own two feet. We promised you we would take care of you, but for that we needed your undying loyalty. Comrade Stalin expects — no, requires — nothing less.
“You went to the embassy because you changed your mind about us the way you changed your mind about America. They said, sorry, but we don’t know you. We said, sorry, but we don’t want you. So what’s there for you to do? Where do you go? They won’t have you, we don’t want you. You have shown us you cannot be trusted. Now what?”
“Now death,” said Jane. “But I beg you, spare my only son.” She lowered her head. “He was just a young boy. He never surrendered his U.S. citizenship.”
“He surrendered it when he registered for the Red Army and became a Soviet citizen,” said Slonko.
“But the U.S. State Department doesn’t have a subversive file on him. He never joined the Communists there, he is not part of this. I beg you—”
“Why, comrade,” Slonko said, “he is the most dangerous of you all.”
Jane saw her husband once before appearing in front of a tribunal presided over by Slonko. After a speedy trial, she was put in front of the firing squad, turned blind to the wall.
Until his arrest Harold Barrington’s concern for Alexander did not outweigh his despair at being caught with his dreams around his ankles.
He had been in prison before; incarceration did not bother him. Being in prison for his beliefs was a badge of honor, and he had worn that badge proudly in America. “I have sat in some of the best jails in Massachusetts,” Harold used to say. “In New England no one compares to me in what I endure for my beliefs.”
The Soviet Union had turned out to be a land of soup kitchens. Communism wasn’t working as well in Russia as everyone hoped because it was Russia. It would work great in America, Harold thought. That was the place for Communism. Harold wanted to bring it back home.
Home.
He couldn’t believe he was still calling it home.
The Soviet Union was well and good, but it wasn’t his home, and the Soviet Communists knew it. They were done protecting him, no matter how much he had refused to believe it. Now he was the enemy of the people. He understood.
Harold derided America. He despised America with its shallowness and false morality, he hated the individualist ethic, and he thought the idea of democracy was embraced only by a special kind of idiot. But now that he was sitting in a Soviet concrete cell, Harold wanted to get his boy back to this America, at any cost, at any price.
The Soviet Union couldn’t save Alexander. Only America could do that.
What have I done to my son? Harold thought. What have I left behind for him? Harold couldn’t remember what Communism was anymore. All he saw was Alexander’s admiring face as Harold stood on a pulpit in Greenwich, Connecticut, screaming invective on a Saturday afternoon in 1927.
Who is the boy I call Alexander? If I don’t know, how will he? I found my way, but how will he find his in a country that does not want him?
All Harold wanted during his year of endless interrogations, denials, pleas, and confusion was to see Alexander once before he died. He called on Slonko’s humanity.
“Don’t call on my humanity,” Slonko said. “I have none. Also, humanity has nothing to do with Communism, with creating a higher social order. That, comrade, takes discipline, perseverance, and a certain detached attitude.”
“Not just detached,” said Harold, “but severed.”
“Your son will not be coming to visit you,” Slonko said. “Your son is dead.”
Speechless, Tatiana sat next to Alexander as both her hands caressed his arm up and down. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, wanting desperately to touch his face but unable to bring herself to do so. “Alexander, you hear me? I’m so sorry.”
“I hear you. It’s all right, Tania,” he said, getting up. “My parents are gone, but I’m still here. That’s something.”
She could not move from the bench. “Alexander, wait, wait. How did you get from ‘Barrington’ to ‘Belov?’ And what happened to your father? Did you ever see your parents again?”
He looked at his watch. “What happens to time when I’m with you?” he muttered. “I have to run. We’ll save that for another day.” He gave her his hand to help her up. “A later day.”
Her heart swelled. There would be another day, then? Slowly they walked out of the park. “Have you told Dasha any of this?” Tatiana asked.
“No, Tatiana,” Alexander replied, not looking at her.
She was treading softly next to him. “I’m glad you told me,” she said at last.
“Yes, me, too,” said Alexander.
“Promise you’ll tell me the rest someday?”
“Someday I’ll make that promise.” He smiled.
“I can’t believe you’re from America, Alexander. That’s definitely a first for me.” She blushed when she said it.
He bent and kissed her gently on the cheek. His lips were warm and his stubble prickly. “Be careful walking home,” Alexander said after her. Her heart aching, Tatiana nodded, watching him walk away with a feeling that resembled despair.
What if he turned around and saw her? How silly she must look standing there staring at him. Before she could think another thought, Alexander turned around. Caught, she tried to move, her slow legs betraying her confusion. He saluted her. What must he think, seeing me gaping at him as he walks away. She wished she had more guile and made a vow to herself to get some. And then she raised her hand and saluted him back.