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But Alexander wasn’t sleepy. “What? You can’t imagine me in an office?” he asked. “In a suit all day, sitting at a desk, selling stocks, bonds, insurance, going to visit you in a winery in my drab flannel suit, coming from my city office?”
She was all coiled up inside. “I can imagine you visiting me.”
“My father wanted me to be an architect,” Alexander said. “A fine thing—an architect in the Soviet Union. He wanted me to build with the Communists, bridges, roads, workers’ houses.”
“Yes.”
“And I spent my life blowing up fucking houses. Perhaps I can be in demolition work.”
“No, not you.” Please could it be the end of this conversation. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.”
But Alexander continued. “Is that what I’m doing here? Figuring it out? Who I am? I spent my whole life asking myself this question. There in the Soviet Union, here in Suisun Bay. No easy answers to that one, me with SS Eagles, and hammer and sickles on my arms.”
You are an American, Alexander Barrington, Tatiana wanted to say to him. An American, who fought in the Red Army and married a Russian girl from Leningrad who can’t live without her soldier. That’s who you are.
“My mother and father knew who they were.”
It was the absolute last thing Tatiana wanted to talk about. Her body was a spring; in a minute she was going to catapult away from him.
“They have nothing to do with you,” she said, and couldn’t say anymore.
“The Communist and the radical feminist, the Soviet émigrés, oh, they knew who they were.” Alexander sat up and lit a cigarette. “You can only hope in today’s climate, no one will find out about my mother and father, because who then is going to give me permanent work? I might as well be a murderer out on work release.” He blew smoke rings above the bed.
Tatiana couldn’t endure it, she coiled away. “Jimmy hired you, Mel hired you, Sebastiani hired you …”
“Yes, until just one man says: what are the numbers on your arm, Alexander? and we’re off. I don’t know what happened back in Vianza, but something did because it was a slice of heaven, but we didn’t stay, did we? What are we going to do? Every time someone asks us a question, we run? Where in the army did you serve, Alexander? and we go right in the bunker, Tania? Is that how we’re going to live?”
Tatiana didn’t know how they were going to live. She didn’t know if they would ever get to have a normal life, like other people, like other married couples, simple, calm, small, nice. What was a normal life for the two of them? She didn’t know how long she could keep him remote in a bunker, in splendid isolation, secluded from all men.
Stepping Out For Love
Alexander wanted to see Idaho, Hell’s Canyon. He wanted to see Mount Rushmore, Yosemite, Mount Washington, Yellowstone National Park, the wheat fields of Iowa.
No, she kept saying, let’s stay here just a little longer. Weeks passed.
I’ll come to the store with you. Help you with shopping.
No, stay here, catch us a fish, Shura.
I’m going to go to the Boathouse, have a drink with the postman.
Let’s go to Sacramento on Sunday. Find a Catholic church, have brunch afterward at the Hyatt Regency, walk on Main Street, show Anthony the Capitol building, have ice cream.
I don’t want to. I have things to do. I have to wash-clean-cook-bake-peel-scale. I want you to build me a chest for my knick-knacks, a bench to sit on, fix the posts in the fence, planks on the dock. Let’s go for a boat ride on the canals instead.
Her reluctance to leave reminded him of wintry Deer Isle—it’s snowing and she is still not saying, let’s go. This is how it still was. Metaphorically snowing, and she was staying put.
He didn’t mind it in the beginning, this slowness. It left him alone with himself while he fished and listened to the call of the herons, and taught Anthony to row a boat and to play baseball and soccer, while Anthony read to him from his children’s books as Alexander held the fishing line. The soul was repairing itself little by little. And it was on Bethel Island, with his mother and father twenty-four hours by his side, watching over him, talking to him, playing with him, that Anthony stopped waking up with nightmares in the middle of the night and settled down to silence inside himself.
And it was on Bethel Island that Alexander stopped needing ice cold baths at three in the morning—the hot sudsy dimly lit baths with her soapy hands and soapy body in the late evening sufficing.
But eventually, one Sunday morning in July 1948, Alexander said, let’s go to Sacramento, and he wasn’t asking.
They went to Sacramento. They went to a Catholic mass and then had brunch at the Hyatt Regency.
In the late afternoon they were strolling down Main Street, window shopping, when a police car pulled up to the curb and out jumped two officers and ran toward—
For a second it was unclear what they were running toward, and in that second, Tatiana stepped out in front of Alexander, covering half of him with her small body. Paying no attention to the Barringtons, the police officers ran into the grocery store.
Tatiana stepped away. Alexander, after a double take, his eyes widening, continued to stare at her.
When they were having an ice cream soda at a drug store, he was sitting across from her, studying her, waiting for her to volunteer.
“Tania …” he drew out.
She was chatting to Ant, not meeting Alexander’s eye, volunteering nothing.
“Yes?”
“What was that back there?”
“What?”
“Back there, with the police.”
“I don’t know what you’re referring to. I stepped out of their way.” Still not looking at him.
“You didn’t step out of their way. You stepped out in front of me.”
“I had nowhere else to go.”
“No. You stepped in front of me, as if …” Alexander didn’t even know how to say it. His eyes narrowed, his heart narrowed, he saw something, understood a little bit, not much, but something. “Did you think they were coming for … me?”
“That’s silly.” Studying her soda. “Anthony, you want whipped cream?”
“Tania, why did you think they were coming for me?”
“I didn’t think so at all.” She tried to smile.
He took her face into his hands. She averted her gaze.
“You won’t look at me? Tania! What’s happening?”
“Nothing. Honest.”
He let go of her. His heart was doing odd things in his chest.
That evening Alexander found her in the back of the house—when she thought he was having a bath—cocking and recocking his P-38. She was grimly aiming it from the shoulder, her legs apart, holding it with both hands.
Alexander backed away, stumbled to the dock, sat in his chair, smoked. When he came back inside, he stood in front of her. She had put away his weapon. “Tania,” he said. “What the fuck is going on?”
His voice was too loud in the house, with Anthony just steps away in his bedroom.
“Nothing, nothing at all,” she said quietly. “Please, let’s just—”
“Are you going to tell me?”
“There is nothing to tell, honey.”
He grabbed his jacket and said he was going out. “By the way, you forgot to lock the magazine catch on the P-38,” he said coldly. “It’s at the bottom of the grip.” He left without giving Tatiana a chance to reply.
Alexander came home hours later. There was no food on the stove, and she was sitting stiff, like a board bent in the middle, at the little kitchen table.
She jumped up when he walked in the door. “My God! Where have you been? It’s been four hours!”
“Wherever I’ve been, I’d be coming home hungry,” was all he said.
She made him a cold chicken sandwich, heated up some soup while he stood silently near the stove. He took his plate and his cigarette outside. He thought for sure she would follow him out but she didn’t. After quickly eating he came back in the house, where she was still sitting behind the kitchen table.
“You don’t want to have this conversation in the house with Anthony,” Alexander said. “Come outside.”
“I’m not having this conversation.”
In two strides he was near her, pulling her up from the table.
“Okay, okay,” she whispered, before he even opened his mouth. “Okay.”
Outside on the deck Alexander stood before her in the growing darkness, silent but for the hushed rippling off the water, the distant rustle of trees from a small cool wind.
“Oh, Tatiana,” said Alexander. “What have you done?”
She said nothing.
“I called Aunt Esther,” he said. “She wasn’t an easy egg to crack. Then I called Vikki. I know everything.”
“You know everything,” she said without inflection, stepping away from him and shaking her head. “No. You know nothing.”
“I’ve been wondering why in two years you haven’t called your friend. Why you’re poring over maps. Why you’re shielding me from officers of law. Why you’re practicing with my weapon.” Alexander spoke low and pained. “Now I know.”
Abruptly she turned away, and he grabbed her and spun her back to him. “Two years ago—two years!—we could’ve stopped in DC on the way to Florida. What are you proposing we do now?”
“Nothing,” Tatiana said, pulling away from his hands. “We do nothing now. That’s what we do.”
“You do see how from their point of view it looks as if we’ve been on the run?”
“I don’t care how it looks.”
“We’re not fugitives. We have nothing to hide.”
“No?”
“No! One conversation with the generals at Defense and the diplomats at State would’ve put this whole thing behind us.”
“Oh, Alexander,” said Tatiana with a shake of her head, “you once saw through so much. Since when did you become so naïve?”
“I’m not naïve! I know what’s going on, but since when did you become so cynical?”
“They already talked to you in Berlin. Why do you think they want to talk to you again?”
“It’s procedure!” he yelled.
“It’s not procedure!” she yelled back. Their voices carried down the black canals, echoing down the water tunnels. She lowered her voice. “Don’t you understand anything? Interpol is looking for you, too.”
“You know this how?”
“Because Sam told me, that’s how.”
Alexander fell back in his chair. “You talked to Sam?” he said aghast. “You knew this, and you didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t tell you a lot of things.”
“Obviously. When did you talk to him?”
She wouldn’t say.
“When?” He raised his voice. “Tania! When? Hard way or easy way, you’re going to tell me. You might as well tell it to me easy.”
“Eight months ago,” she whispered.
“Eight months ago!” he yelled.
“Oh, why did you have to call Esther? Why?” Tatiana threw her arms down in defeat.
“Is this why we left Napa? Oh my God.” He glared at her with sharp reproach. “All this time, moving from place to place, wringing your hands, falling silent on me, asking me about desertion to the Urals. What games you played, knowing this.” Alexander was so disappointed, he was forced to look away from her. How could the Tatiana he thought he knew keep secrets from him so well? And what was so wrong with him that he never prodded, never pursued, never pushed, even though he sensed and suspected that something was wrong? Alexander couldn’t look at her.
Tatiana continued to stand in front of him and not speak.
“We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” he said finally. “We’re leaving and going to Washington.”
“No!”
“No?”
“That’s right, no. Absolutely under no circumstances. We stay put. We go nowhere. Unless it’s to the woods in Oregon.”
“I’m not going to the woods in Oregon,” said Alexander. “I’m not hiding out in the Urals. Or Bethel Island.”
Tatiana bent to him, raising her voice, carrying it far. “We’re not going, and that’s it,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
