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And Pasha suddenly stopped being interested in rabbits.
Tatiana’s head was folded over her knees. She needed a better memory of her brother.
In Luga, Pasha is stuffing blueberries into Tatiana’s open mouth. She is begging him to stop, trying to tickle him, trying to throw him off her, but in between mouthfuls of blueberries for himself, he is tickling Tatiana with one hand, stuffing blueberries into her mouth with the other, and pinning her between his legs so she can’t go anywhere. Tatiana finally heaves her small body hard enough to throw Pasha off, onto the pails of blueberries they just brought freshly picked from the woods. The buckets tip over; she screams at him to pick them up and when he doesn’t, she takes handfuls and mashes them into his face, painting his face purple. Saika comes from next door and stares blankly at them from the gate. Dasha comes out from the porch and when sees what they’ve done, she shows them what real screaming is all about.
Alexander smoked, and Tatiana, on weakened legs, struggled up and went back inside, hoping that when Anthony was older they could tell him in a way he would understand, about Leningrad, and Catowice, and Pasha. But she feared he would never understand, living in the land of plantains and plenty.
In the Miami Herald Tatiana found an article about the House of Un-American Activities Committee investigations into communist infiltration of the State Department. The paper was pleased to call it “an ambitious program of investigations to expose and ferret out Communist activities in many enterprises, labor unions, education, motion pictures and most importantly, the federal government.” Truman himself had called for removal of disloyal government employees.
She became so engrossed that Alexander had to raise his voice to get her attention. “What are you reading?”
“Nothing.” She slammed the newspaper shut.
“You’re hiding things in newspapers from me? Show me what you were reading.”
Tatiana shook her head. “Let’s go to the beach.”
“Show me, I said.” He grabbed her, his fingers going into her ribs and his mouth into her neck. “Show me right now, or I’ll …”
“Daddy, stop teasing Mommy,” said Anthony, prying them apart.
“I’m not teasing Mommy. I’m tickling Mommy.”
“Stop tickling Mommy,” said Anthony, prying them apart.
“Antman,” said Alexander, “did you just … call me daddy?”
“Yes. So?”
Bringing Anthony to his lap, Alexander read the HUAC article. “So? They’ve been investigating communists since the 1920s. Why the fascination now?”
“No fascination.” Tatiana started to clear the breakfast plates. “You think there are Soviet spies here?”
“Rampaging through the government. And they won’t rest until Stalin gets his atomic bomb.”
She squinted at him. “You know something about this?”
“I know something about this.” He pointed to his ears. “I listened to quite a bit of chatter and rumor among the rank and file outside my door in solitary confinement.”
“Really?” Tania said that in a mulling tone, but what she was trying to do was to not let Alexander see her eyes. She didn’t want him to see Sam Gulotta’s anxious phone calls in her frightened eyes.
When they didn’t talk about food or HUAC, they spoke about Anthony.
“Can you believe how well he’s talking? He is like a little man.”
“Tania, he comes into bed with us every night. Can we talk about that?”
“He’s just a little boy.”
“He needs to sleep in his own bed.”
“It’s big and he gets scared.”
Alexander bought a smaller bed for Anthony, who didn’t like it and had no interest in sleeping in it. “I thought the bed was for you,” said Anthony to his father.
“Why would I need a bed? I sleep with Mommy,” said Anthony Alexander Barrington.
“So do I,” said Anthony Alexander Barrington.
Finally Alexander said, “Tania, I’m putting my foot down. He can’t come into our bed anymore.”
She tried to dissuade him.
“I know he has nightmares,” Alexander said. “I will take him back to his bed. I will sit with him as long as it takes.”
“He needs his mother in the middle of the night.”
“I need his mother in the middle of the night, his naked mother. He’s going to have to make do with me,” Alexander said. “And she is going to have to make do with me.”
The first night, Anthony screamed for fifty-five minutes while Tatiana remained in the bedroom with a pillow pressed over her head. Alexander spent so long in the boy’s room, he fell asleep on Anthony’s bed.
The following night Anthony screamed for forty-five minutes.
Then thirty.
Then fifteen.
And finally, just whimpers coming from Anthony, as he stood by his mother’s side. “I won’t cry anymore, but please, Mama, can you take me back to my bed?”
“No,” said Alexander, getting up. “I will take you back.”
And the following afternoon as mother and son were walking back home from the boat, Anthony said, “When is Dad going back?”
“Going back where?”
“The place you brought him from.”
“Never, Anthony.” She shivered. “What are you talking about?” The shiver was at the memory of the place she had brought him from, the bloodied, filth-soaked straw on which he lay shackled and tortured, waiting not for her but for the rest of his life in the Siberian resort. Tatiana lowered the boy to the ground. “Don’t ever let me catch you talking like that again.” Or your nightmares now will pale compared to the ones you will have.
“Why does he walk as if he’s got the weight of the whole world on his shoulders?” Alexander asked while walking home. The green and stunning ocean was to their right, through the bending palms. “Where does he get that from?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Hey,” he said, knocking into her with his body. Now that he wasn’t covered with lobster he could do that, knock into her. Tatiana took his arm. Alexander was watching Anthony. “You know what? Let me … I’ll take him to the park for a few minutes while you fix dinner.” He prodded her forward. “Go on now, what are you worried about? I just want to talk to him, man to man.”
Tatiana reluctantly went, and Alexander took Anthony on the swings. They got ice cream, both promising conspiratorially not to tell Mommy, and while they were in the playground, Alexander said, “Ant, tell me what you dream about. What’s bothering you? Maybe I can help.”
Anthony shook his head.
Alexander picked him up and carried him under the trees, setting him down on top of a picnic table while he sat on the bench in front of him so that their eyes were level. “Come on, bud, tell me.” He rubbed Anthony’s little chubby legs. “Tell me so I can help you.”
Anthony shook his head.
“Why do you wake up? What wakes you?”
“Bad dreams,” said Anthony. “What wakes you?”
His father had no answer for that. He still woke up every night. He had started taking ice cold baths to cool himself down, to calm himself down at three in the morning. “What kind of bad dreams?”
Anthony was all clammed up.
“Come on, bud, tell me. Does Mommy know?”
Anthony shrugged. “I think Mommy knows everything.”
“You’re too wise for your own good,” said Alexander. “But I don’t think she knows this. Tell me. I don’t know.”
He cajoled and prodded. Anthony’s ice cream was melting; they kept wiping up the drips. Finally Anthony, looking not at his father’s prying face but at his shirt buttons, said, “I wake up in a cave.”
“Ant, you’ve never been in a cave. What cave?”
Anthony shrugged. “Like a hole in the ground. I call for Mom. She’s not there. Mommy, Mommy. She doesn’t come. The cave starts to burn. I climb outside, I’m near woods. Mommy, Mommy. I call and call. It gets dark. I’m alone.” Anthony looked down at his hands. “A man whispers, Run, Anthony, she is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back. I turn around, but there is no one there. I run into the woods to get away from the fire. It’s very dark, and I’m crying. Mommy, Mommy. The woods go on fire too. I feel like somebody’s chasing me. Chasing and chasing me. But when I turn around, I’m all alone. I keep hearing feet running after me. I’m running too. And the man’s voice is in my ear. She is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back.”
The ice cream dripped through Alexander’s fingers, through Anthony’s fingers. “That’s what you dream about?” Alexander said tonelessly.
“Uh-huh.”
Alexander stared grimly at Anthony, who stared grimly back. “Can you help me, Dad?”
“It’s just a bad dream, bud,” Alexander said. “Come here.” He picked up the boy. Anthony put his head on Alexander’s shoulder. “Don’t tell your mom what you just told me, all right?” he said in a hollow voice, patting the boy’s back, holding him close. “It’ll make her very sad you dream this.” He started walking home, his gaze fixed blinklessly on the road.
After a minute, he said, “Antman, did your mother ever tell you about her dreams when she was a little girl in Luga? No? Because she used to have bad dreams, too. You know what she used to dream about? Cows chasing her.”
Anthony laughed.
“Exactly,” Alexander said. “Big cows with bells and milk udders would go running down the village road after your young mother, and no matter how hard she ran, she couldn’t get away.”
“Did they go moo?” said Anthony. “Here moo, there moo, everywhere moo-moo.”
“Oh, yes.”
In the night Anthony crawled to his mother’s side, and Alexander and Tatiana, both awake, said nothing. Alexander had just come back to bed himself, barely dry. Her arm went around Anthony, and Alexander’s damp icy arm went around Tatiana.
The Body of War
As it began to stay lighter later, they would go swimming when the park beaches emptied. Tatiana hung upside down on the monkey bars, they played ball, they built things in the sand; the beach, the bars, the breaking Atlantic were good and right as rain. Alexander sometimes even took off his T-shirt while he swam in the languid evenings—slowly, obsessively trying to wash away in the briny ocean typhus and starvation and war and other things that could not be washed away.
Tatiana sat near the shoreline, watching father and son frolic. Alexander was supposed to be teaching Anthony how to swim, but what he was doing was picking the boy up and flinging him into the shallow waters. The waves were perfect in Miami for a small boy, for the waves were small also. Son jumped to father, only to be thrown up in the air and then caught again, thrown up in the air very high and then caught again. Anthony squealed, shrieked, splashed, full of monumental joy. And there was Tatiana nearby, sitting on the sand, hugging her knees, one of her hands out in invocation, careful, careful, careful. But she wasn’t saying it to Alexander. She was saying it to Anthony. Don’t hurt your father, son. Be gentle with him. Please. Can’t you see what he looks like?
Her breath burned her chest as she furtively glanced at her husband. Now they were racing into the water. The first time Tatiana had seen Alexander run into the Kama River in Lazarevo, naked except for his shorts—like now—his body was holy. It was gleaming and woundless. And he’d been in battles already, in the Russo-Finnish War; he’d been on the northern rivers of the Soviet Union; he had defended the Road of Life on Lake Ladoga. Like her, he had lived through blighted Leningrad. Why then, since she had left him, had this happened to him?
Alexander’s bare body was shocking to see. His back, once smooth and tanned, was mutilated with shrapnel scars, with burn scars, with whip marks, with bayonet gouges all wet in the Miami sun. His nearfatal injury at the breaking of the Leningrad blockade was still a fist-sized patch above his right kidney. His chest and shoulders and ribs were defaced; his upper arms, his forearms, his legs were covered with knife and gunpowder burn wounds, jagged, ragged, raised.
Tatiana wanted to cry, to cry out. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right that he should carry Hitler and Stalin on his whole body, even here in Miami where the tropical waters touched the sky. The colonel had been right. It wasn’t fair.
And because all the other iniquities were not enough, the men that guarded Alexander tattooed him against his will, as punishment for escape, as a warning against possible transgressions, and as an ultimate slur against his future—as in, if you have a future at all, you will never have an unblemished one.
Tatiana watched him and her pitying heart rolled around the concrete drum of her insides.
On Alexander’s upper left arm was a black tattoo of a hammer and sickle! It was burned into him by the depraved guards at Catowice—so they would know him by his marks. Above the hammer and sickle, on his shoulder there was a mocking tattoo of a major’s epaulet, taunting that Alexander had spent too much time in solitary confinement. Under the hammer and sickle was a large star with twenty-five points on it—one point for each of the years of his Soviet prison sentence. On the inside of his right forearm, the numbers 19691 were burned in blue—the Soviets learned to use the Nazi torture implements with glee.
On his right upper arm a cross was tattooed—Alexander’s only voluntary mark. And above the cross, he was branded with an incongruous SS Waffen Eagle, complete with a swastika, as a symbol of grudging respect from the ill-fated guard Ivan Karolich for Alexander’s never having confessed to anything despite the severe beatings.
The concentration camp numbers were the hardest to hide, being so low on his arm, which was why he didn’t often roll up his sleeves. Jimmy in Deer Isle had asked about the numbers, but Jimmy hadn’t been to war, and so when Alexander said, “POW camp,” Jimmy didn’t follow up and Alexander didn’t elaborate. The blue numbers now, post Holocaust, screamed of Jewish suffering, not Soviet suffering, of someone else’s life, not Alexander’s. But the hammer and sickle, the SS insignia!—all alarms on his arm, ringing to be explained—were impossible to explain away in any context. Death camp numbers and a swastika? There was nothing to do about any of it, except cover it from everyone, even each other.
Tatiana turned to watch a family strolling by, two small girls with their mother and grandparents. The adults took one glimpse at Alexander and gasped; in their flustered collective horror, they shielded the eyes of the little girls; they muttered, they made the sign of the cross—on themselves, and hurried on. Tatiana judged them harshly. Alexander, lifting and throwing Anthony, never noticed.
Whereas once, certainly in Lazarevo with Tatiana, Alexander looked god-like, it was true now, the strangers were right—Alexander was disfigured. That’s all anyone saw, that’s all anyone could look at.
But he was so beautiful still! Hard still, lean, long-legged, wide-shouldered, strapping, impossibly tall. He’d gained some of his weight back, was muscular again after hauling all those lobster traps. On the rare occasions he laughed, the white of his teeth lit up his tanned face. His sheared head looked like a black hedgehog, his milk chocolate eyes softened every once in a while.
But there was no denying it, he was damaged—and nowhere more noticeably than in this, his American life. For in the Soviet Union, Alexander would have been among millions of men who were maimed like him, and he might have thought no more of it as they sent him out in his sheepskin parka to log in their woods, to mine in their quarries. Here in America, Tatiana sent him out in public, not in a parka but in linen, covering him from his neck to his ankles, to man their boats, to fix their engines.
During lovemaking Tatiana tried to forget. What needed to be whole and perfect on Alexander remained whole and perfect. But his back, his arms, his shoulders, his chest: there was nowhere for her to put her hands. She held onto his head, which was marginally better. There was a long ridge at the back of the occipital lobe, there were knife wounds. Alexander carried war on his body like no one Tatiana had ever known. She cried every time she touched him.
Tatiana couldn’t touch Alexander at night and prayed he didn’t know it.
“Come on, you two,” she called to them weakly, struggling to her feet. “Let’s head home. It’s getting late. Stop your horsing around. Anthony, please. What did I tell you? Be careful, I said!” Can’t you see what your father looks like?
Suddenly her two men, one little, one big, both with the straight posture, the unwavering gazes, came and stood in front of her, their legs in the sand, each in an A, their hands on their hips like kettles.
“Ready to go then?” she said, lowering her gaze.
“Mommy,” said her son firmly, “come and play.”
“Yes, Mommy,” said her husband firmly, “come and play.”
“No, it’s time to go home.” She blinked. A mirage in the setting sun made him disappear for a second.
“That’s it,” said Alexander, lifting her into his arms. “I’ve had just about enough of this.” He carried her and flung her into the water. Tatiana was without breath and when she came up for air, he threw himself on her, shaking her, disturbing her, implacably laying his hands on her. Perhaps he wasn’t a mirage after all, his body immersed in water that was so salty he floated and she floated, too, feeling real herself, remembering cartwheeling at the Palace of the Tsars for him, sitting on the tram with him, walking barefoot through the Field of Mars with him while Hitler’s tanks and Dimitri’s malice beat down the doors of their hearts.
Alexander picked her up and threw her in the air, only pretending to catch her. She fell and splashed and shrieked, and scrambling to her feet, ran from him as he chased her onto the sand. She tripped to let him catch her and he kissed her wet and she held on to his neck and Anthony jumped and scrambled onto his back, break it up, break it up, and Alexander dragged them all deeper in and tossed them into the ocean, where they bobbed and swayed like houseboats.
Alexander’s Favorite Color
“Tania, why haven’t you called Vikki?” Alexander asked her at breakfast.
“I’ll call her. We’ve only been here a few weeks,” she said. “Where’s the fire?”
