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“I sent her away,” she said to him as he came in and threw down his bag of library books and jacket on the floor and stood in front of his mother with his arms folded.
“Okay,” he said.
“What are you doing, Alexander?” she asked quietly. He could tell she had been crying.
“I don’t know, Mom. What are you doing?”
“Alexander …”
“What are you concerned about?”
“That I’m not looking after my son,” she replied.
“You’re concerned about that?”
“I don’t want it to be too late,” she said in a small, remorseful voice. “It’s my fault, I know. Lately I haven’t been much of …” She broke off. “But whatever is happening in our family, she can’t come here anymore, not if she wants to keep this from her husband.”
“Like you’re keeping what you do in the afternoons from yours?”
“Like he cares,” retorted Jane.
“Like Vladimir cares,” retorted Alexander.
“Stop it!” she yelled. “What’s the point of this? To wake me up?”
“Mom, I know you will find this hard to believe, but it has nothing to do with you.”
“Alexander,” Jane said bitterly, “indeed I find that very hard to believe. You, the most beautiful boy in all of Russia, you’re telling me you could not have found a young school girl to parry with instead of a woman nearly my age who just happens to be my friend?”
“Who says I haven’t? And would a school girl have gotten you sober?”
“Oh, I see, so this does have something to do with me after all!” She didn’t get up off the couch while Alexander, with his arms crossed, stood in front of her. “Is this what you want to do with your life? Become a toy for bored older women?”
Alexander felt his temper rising. He grit his teeth. His mother was too upsetting for him.
“Answer me!” she said loudly. “Is this what you want?”
“What?” he said, just as loudly. “Does it seem to you as if I’ve got so many more attractive options? Which part do you find so repellent?”
Jane jumped up. “Don’t go forgetting yourself,” she said. “I am still your mother.”
“Then act like my mother!” he yelled.
“I’ve looked after you!”
“And look where it’s gotten all of us—all of us Barringtons making a life for ourselves in Leningrad while you spend half of Dad’s wages on vodka, and still that’s not enough. You’ve sold your jewelry, you’ve sold your books, your silks and your linens for vodka. What’s left, Mom? What else have you got left to sell?”
For the first time in her life, Jane raised her hand and slapped Alexander. He deserved it and knew it, but couldn’t keep himself from saying it.
“Mom, you want to offer me a solution, offer me a solution. You want to tell me what to do—after months of not speaking to me—forget it. I will not listen. You’re going to have to do better.” He paused. “Stop drinking.”
“I’m sober now.”
“Then let’s talk again tomorrow.”
But tomorrow she was drunk.
School started. Alexander busied himself with getting to know a girl named Nadia. One afternoon, Svetlana met him at the school doors. He was laughing with Nadia. Excusing himself, Alexander walked down the block with Svetlana.
“Alexander, I want to talk to you.” They walked to a small park and sat under the autumn trees. “Your mother knows, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Listen … we needed to stop anyway.”
“Stop?” She said the word as if it had never actually occurred to her.
He looked at her with surprise.
“Not stop!” she exclaimed. “Whatever in the world for?”
“Svetlana …”
“Alexander, can’t you see?” she said, trembling and taking hold of his arm. “This is just a test for us.”
He pulled his arm away. “It’s a test I’m meant to fail. I don’t know what you could possibly be thinking. I’m in school. I’m sixteen. You’re a married thirty-nine-year-old woman. How long did you imagine this would go on?”
“When we first started,” she said hoarsely, “I imagined nothing.”
“All right.”
“But now …”
His gaze dropped. “Oh, Sveta …”
She got up off the bench. The throaty cry she emitted hurt Alexander’s lungs—as if he had breathed inside himself her miserable addiction to him. “Of course. I’m ridiculous.” She struggled with her breath. “You’re right. Of course.” She tried to smile. “Maybe one last time?” she whispered. “For old times’ sake? To say goodbye properly?”
Alexander bowed his head by way of replying.
She stumbled a step back from him, composed herself and said as steadily as she could, “Alexander, remember this as you go through your life—you have amazing gifts. Don’t squander them. Don’t give them out meaninglessly, don’t abuse them, don’t take them for granted. You are the weapon you carry with you till the day you die.”
They did not see each other again. Alexander got himself a card at a different library. Vladimir and Svetlana stopped coming over. At first Harold was curious why they no longer visited and then he forgot about them. Alexander knew his father’s inner life was too unsettled to worry about why he no longer saw people he didn’t like very much to begin with.
Fall turned into winter. 1935 turned into 1936. He and his father celebrated New Year’s by themselves. They went to a local beer bar, where his father bought him a glass of vodka and tried to talk to him. The conversation was brief and strained. Harold Barrington—in his own sober, defiant way—was oblivious to his son and his wife. The world his father lived in Alexander did not know, stopped understanding, didn’t want to understand even if he could have. He knew that his father would have liked Alexander to side with him, to understand him, to believe in him, the way he did when he was younger. But Alexander did not know how to do that anymore. The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.
Giving Up One Room, 1936
Could it get less tolerable?
Shortly.
An undergrown man from Upravdom—the housing committee—arrived at their doorstep one dark January Saturday morning, accompanied by two people with suitcases, and waved about a piece of paper, informing the Barringtons that they were going to have to give up one of their rooms to another family. Harold didn’t have the strength to argue. Jane was too drunk to object. It was Alexander who raised his voice but only briefly. There was no point. There was no one to go to, to correct this.
“You can’t tell me this is unjust,” the smirking Upravdom member said to Alexander. “You have two nice rooms for the three of you. There are two of them, and they have no rooms at all. She is pregnant. Where is your socialist spirit, comrade soon-to-be Comsomol?” The Comsomols were young members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Alexander and Harold moved the cot and his small dresser and his few personal belongings and his bookshelf. Alexander put his cot next to the window, and the dresser and bookshelf between himself and his parents as an angry barrier. When his father wanted to know if he was upset, Alexander barked, “It’s been my dream to share a room with you at sixteen. I know you don’t want any privacy either.” They talked in English, which was more natural and more colloquial, and provided an opportunity to say the word privacy, a word that did not exist in Russian.
The next morning when Jane woke up she wanted to know what Alexander was doing in their room. It was a Sunday.
“I’m here for good,” said Alexander, and went out. He took a train to Peterhof and walked the grounds by himself, sullen and confused. The feeling he had had all his young life—that he was brought on this earth for something special—had not left Alexander, not quite; what it did was dissipate inside him, became translucent in his blood vessels. It no longer pulsed through his body. He was no longer filled with a sense of purpose. He was filled with a sense of despair.
I could have lived through it all if only I continued to have the feeling that at the end of childhood, at the end of adolescence, there was something else in this life that would be mine, that I could make with my bare hands, and once I had made it, I could say, I did this to my life. I made my life so.
Hope.
It was gone from Alexander on this sunny crisp Sunday, and the feeling of purpose had vanished, was vanquished in his veins.
The End, 1936
Harold stopped bringing vodka into the house.
“Dad, you don’t think Mom will be able to get vodka any other way?”
“With what? She has no money.”
Alexander didn’t mention the thousands of American dollars his mother had been hoarding since the day they came to the Soviet Union.
“Stop talking about me as if I’m not here!” Jane shouted.
They looked at her with surprise. Afterward Jane started stealing money from Harold’s pockets and going to buy the vodka herself. Harold started keeping his money out of the house. Jane was then caught in someone else’s apartment, going through their things, already drunk on some French perfume she had found.
Alexander began to be afraid that the next natural step for his mother would be to drink her way through the money she had brought with them from America. It wouldn’t end until all the money was gone. First the Soviet rubles she had saved from her job in Moscow, then the American dollars. It would take his mother a year to buy vodka with all her dollars on the black market, but buy it she would, gone the money would be, and then what?
Without that money, Alexander was finished.
Alexander had to get his mother sober for long enough to let him hide the money in a place that was not home. He knew that if she found out he had taken it without her knowledge or permission her hysteria would not cease until Harold knew of her treachery. Once Harold knew his wife had mistrusted him from the moment they left the United States, mistrusted him even in her love and her respect, mistrusted him and his motives and his ideals and all the dreams he thought she shared with him from the very start, once he knew that, Alexander felt his father would not recover. And he didn’t want to be responsible for his father’s future, all he wanted was the money to help him be responsible for his own. That’s what his sober mother wanted, too. He knew that. Sober, she would let him hide the money. The trick was to get her sober.
Over the course of one difficult and contemptible weekend Alexander tried to dry out his mother. She, in her convulsing rage, flooded him with such obscenities and vitriol that finally even Harold said, “Oh, for God’s sake, give her a drink and tell her to shut up.”
But Alexander didn’t give her a drink. He sat by her, and he read aloud from Dickens, in English, and he read Pushkin to her, in Russian, and he read her the funniest of Zoshchenko’s anecdotes, and he fed her some soup and he fed her some bread, and gave her coffee, and put cold wet towels on her head, but still she wouldn’t stop ranting. Harold, in a quiet moment, asked Alexander, “What did she mean about you and Svetlana, what was she talking about?”
“Dad, haven’t you learned by now, you have to shut her off? You can’t listen to a word she is saying.”
“No, no, of course not,” muttered Harold thoughtfully, walking away from Alexander, though not far, because there wasn’t anywhere in the narrow room to go.
On Monday, after his father left for work, Alexander cut school and spent all day convincing his morosely, miserably sober mother that her money needed to be put in a safe place. Alexander tried to explain to her, first patiently and quietly, then impatiently and shouting, that if something, God forbid, were to happen to them, and they were arrested—
“You’re talking nonsense, Alexander. Why would they arrest us? We’re their people. We’re not living well, but then we shouldn’t be living any better than the rest of the Russians. We came here to share their fate.”
“We’re doing that gallantly,” said Alexander. “Mom, wise up. What do you think happened to the other foreigners that lived with us in Moscow?” He paused. His mother considered. “Even if I’m wrong, I’m saying it’s not going to hurt us to be a little prudent and hide the money. Now how much money is left?”
After thinking for a few moments, Jane said she did not know. She let Alexander count it. There was ten thousand dollars and four thousand rubles.
“How many dollars did you bring with you from America?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe seventeen thousand. Maybe twenty.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“What? Some of that money went to buy you oranges and milk in Moscow, or did you forget already?”
“I didn’t forget,” Alexander replied in a weary voice. How much for the oranges and milk, he wanted to know. Fifty dollars? A hundred?
Jane, smoking and watching Alexander, narrowed her eyes at him. “If I let you hide the money, will you let me have a drink, as a thank you?”
“Yes. Just one.”
“Of course. One small one is all I want. I feel much better when I’m sober, you know. But just one small drink to get me through the heebie-jeebies would help me stay sober, you know that, don’t you?”
Alexander wanted to ask his mother just how naïve she thought he was. He said nothing.
“All right,” said Jane. “Let’s get it over with. Where are you planning to hide it?”
Alexander suggested gluing the money into the back binding of a book, producing one of his mother’s good, thick-covered hardbacks to show exactly what he meant.
“If your father finds out, he will never forgive you.”
“He can add it to the list of things he won’t forgive me for. Go on, Mom. I have to get to school. After the book is ready, I’m putting it in the library.”
Jane stared at the book Alexander was proposing. It was her ancient copy of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems. “Why don’t we glue it inside the Bible we brought from home?”
“Because finding a Pushkin book in the Pushkin section of the Leningrad library is not going to alert anyone. But finding a Bible in English anywhere in the Russian library just might.” He smiled. “Don’t you think?”
Jane almost smiled back. “Alexander, I’m sorry I haven’t been well.”
He lowered his head.
“I don’t want to talk to your father about this anymore because he no longer has any patience for me, but I’m having trouble with our life.”
“We know,” Alexander said. “We’ve noticed.”
She put her arms around him. He patted her on the back. “Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“This money, Alexander,” she said, looking up at him, “you think it will help you somehow?”
“I don’t know. Having it is better than not having it.”
He took the book with him, and after school went to the Leningrad public library and in the back, in the three-aisle-wide Pushkin section, found a place on a bottom shelf for his book. He put it between two scholarly-looking tomes that had not been checked out since 1927. He thought it was a good bet no one would check out his book, either. But still, it didn’t feel completely safe. He wished there were a better hiding place for it.
When Alexander came home later that evening, his mother was drunk again, showing none of the remorseful affection he had seen in her eyes earlier in the day. He ate dinner quietly with his father, while listening to the radio.
