After Tatiana put Anthony to bed, she went outside.
The first thing Alexander said was, “We haven’t had meat in weeks. I’m as sick of shrimp and flounder as you were of lobsters. Why can’t you buy some meat?”
After hemming and hawing, Tatiana said, “I can’t go to the Center Meat Market. They’ve put a sign in the window—a little war souvenir.”
“So?”
“Sign says, ‘Horse meats not rationed—no points necessary.’”
They both fell mute.
Tatiana is walking down Ulitsa Lomonosova in Leningrad in October 1941, trying to find a store with bread to redeem her ration coupons. She passes a crowd of people. She is small, she can’t see what they’re circling. Suddenly the crowd opens up and out comes a young man holding a bloodied knife in one hand and a hunk of raw meat in the other, and Tatiana can see the opened flesh of a newly killed mare behind him. Dropping his knife on the ground, the man rips into the meat. One of his teeth falls out and he spits it out as he continues to chew frantically. Meat!
“You better hurry,” he says to her with his mouth full, “or there won’t be any left. Want to borrow my knife?”
And Alexander was remembering being in a transit camp after Colditz. There was no food for the two hundred men, who were contained within a barbed wire rectangular perimeter with guards on high posts in the four corners. No food except the horse that every day at noon the guards killed and left in the middle of the starving mess of men with knives. They would give the men sixty seconds with the horse, and then they would open fire. Alexander only survived because he would head immediately for the horse’s mouth and cut out the tongue, hide it in his tunic and then crawl away. It would take him forty seconds. He did it six times, shared the tongue with Ouspensky. Pasha was gone.
Tatiana stood in front of Alexander, leaning against the rail of the deck and listening to the water. He smoked. She drank her tea.
“So what’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Why did you eat by yourself?”
“I didn’t want to be eating dinner with you looking at me with your judging eyes. Don’t want to be judged, Tania”—he pointed at her— “most of all by you. And today, thanks to Ant, I had an unpleasant and unwanted conversation with a crippled Jewish man from Holland who mistook me for a brother in arms only to learn I fought for a country that handed over half of the Polish Jews and all of the Ukrainian Jews to Hitler.”
“I’m not judging you, darling.”
“I’m good for nothing,” Alexander said. “Not even polite conversation. You may be right about me not being able to rebuild my life working off Mel’s boats, but I’m not good for anything else. I don’t know how to be anything. In my life I’ve had only one job—I was an officer in the Red Army. I know how to carry weapons, set mines in the ground, drive tanks, kill men. I know how to fight. Oh, and I know how to burn down villages wholesale. That’s what I know. And I did this all for the Soviet Union!” he exclaimed, staring into the water, not looking at Tatiana, who stood on the deck, staring at him. “It’s completely f*cked up,” he went on. “I’m yelling at Anthony because we have to pretend I’m not what I am. I have to lie to deny what I am. Just like in the Soviet Union. Ironic, no? There I denied my American self, and here I deny my Soviet self.” He flicked his ash into the water.
“But, Shura, you’ve been other things besides a soldier,” Tatiana said, unable to address the truth of the other things he was saying to her.
“Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he snapped. “I’m talking about living a life.”
“Well, I know, but you’ve managed before,” she whispered, turning her body away from him to herself look out onto the dark bay. Where was Anthony to interrupt the conversation she realized belatedly she didn’t want to have? Alexander was right: there were many things she would rather not have out. He couldn’t talk about anything, and she didn’t want to. But now she was in the thick of it. She had to. “We lived a life in Lazarevo,” she said.
“It was a fake life,” said Alexander. “There was nothing real about it.”
“It was the realest life we knew.” Stung at his bitter words, she sank down to the deck.
“Oh, look,” he said dismissively, “it was what it was, but it was a month! I was going back to the front. We pretended we were living while war raged. You kept house, I fished. You peeled potatoes, made bread. We hung sheets on the line to dry, almost as if we were living. And now we’re trying it in America.” Alexander shook his head. “I work, you clean, we dig potatoes, we shop for food. We break our bread. We smoke. We talk sometimes. We make love.” He paused as he glanced at her, remorsefully and yet—accusingly? “Not Lazarevo love.”
Tatiana lowered her head, their Lazarevo love tainted by the Gulag.
“Is any of it going to give me another chance to save your brother?” he asked.
“Nothing is going to change what cannot be changed,” she replied, her head close to her knees. “All we can do is change what can be.”
“But, Tania, don’t you know that the things that torture you most are the things you cannot fix?”
“That I know,” she whispered.
“And do I judge you? Let’s see,” said Alexander, “what about taking ice away from the borders of your heart? Is that changeable, you think? No, no, don’t shake your head, don’t deny it. I know what used to be there. I know the wide-eyed joyous sixteen-year-old you once were.”
Tatiana hadn’t shaken her head. She bowed her head; how different.
“You once skipped barefoot through the Field of Mars with me. And then,” said Alexander, “you helped me drag your mother’s body on a sled to the frozen cemetery.”
“Shura!” She got up off the deck on her collapsing legs. “Of all the things we could talk about—”
“On the sled dragged,” he whispered, “your entire family! Tell me you’re not still on that ice in Lake—”
“Shura! Stop!” Her hands went over her ears.
Grabbing her, removing her hands from her head, Alexander brought her in front of him. “Still there,” he said almost inaudibly, “still digging new ice holes to bury them in.”
“Well, what about you?” Tatiana said to him in a lifeless voice. “Every single night reburying my brother after he died on your back.”
“Yes,” Alexander said in his own lifeless voice, letting her go. “That is what I do. I dig deeper frozen holes for him. I tried to save him and I killed him. I buried your brother in a shallow grave.”
Tatiana cried. Alexander sat and smoked—his way of crying—poison right in the throat to quell the grief.
“Let’s go live in the woods, Tania,” he said. “Because nothing is going to make you skip next to me again while walking through the Summer Garden. I’m not the only one who’s gone. So let’s go make fish soup over the fire in our steel helmet, let’s both eat and drink from it. Have you noticed? We have one pot. We have one spoon. We live as if we’re still at war, in the trench, without meat, without baking real bread, without collecting things, without nesting. The only way you and I can live is like this: homeless and abandoned. We have it off with the clothes on our back, before they start shooting again, before they bring reinforcements. That’s where we still are. Not on Lovers Key but in a trench, on that hill in Berlin, waiting for them to kill us.”
“Darling, but the enemy is gone,” Tatiana said, starting to shake, remembering Sam Gulotta and the State Department.
“I don’t know about you, but I can’t live without the enemy,” said Alexander. “I don’t know how to wear the civilian clothes you bought to cover me. I don’t know how not to clean my weapons every day, how not to keep my hair short, how not to bark at you and Anthony, how not to expect you to listen. And I don’t know how to touch you slow or take you slow as if I’m not in prison and the guards are coming any minute.”
Tatiana wanted to walk away but didn’t want to upset him further. She didn’t lift her head as she spoke. “I think you’re doing better,” she said. “But you do whatever you need to. Wear your army clothes. Clean your guns, cut your hair, bark away, I will listen. Take me how you can.” When Alexander said nothing, nothing at all, to help her, Tatiana continued in a frail voice, “We have to figure out a way that’s best for us.”
His elbows were on his knees. Her shoulders were quaking.
Where was he, her Alexander of once? Was he truly gone? The Alexander of the Summer Garden, of their first Lazarevo days, of the hat in his hands, white-toothed, peaceful, laughing, languid, stunning Alexander, had he been left far behind?
Well, Tatiana supposed that was only right.
For Alexander believed his Tatiana of once was gone, too. The swimming child Tatiana of the Luga, of the Neva, of the River Kama.
Perhaps on the surface they were still in their twenties, but their hearts were old.
Mercy Hospital
The following afternoon at 12:30, she wasn’t at the marina. Alexander could usually spot her from a great distance, waiting for them on the docks, even before he entered the no wake zone. But today, he pulled up, he docked, let the women and the old men off as Anthony stood by the plank and saluted them. He waited and waited.
“Where’s Mommy?”
“Good question, son.” Alexander had relented; she had asked him this morning to forgive Anthony, and he did and took the boy with him, admonishing him to keep to himself. Now Ant was here, and his mother wasn’t. Was she upset with him after yesterday’s excruciating conversation?
“Maybe she took a nap and forgot to wake up,” said Anthony.
“Does Mommy usually sleep during the day?”
“Never.”
He waited a little longer and decided to bring the boy home. He himself had to be back by two for the afternoon tour. Anthony, his joy in life unmitigated by external circumstance, stopped and touched every rust spot, every blade of glass that grew where it wasn’t supposed to. Alexander had to put the boy on his shoulders to get home a little faster.
Tatiana wasn’t home either.
“So where’s Mommy?”
“I don’t know, Ant. I was hoping you’d know.”
“So what are we gonna do?”
“We’ll wait, I guess.” Alexander was smoking one cigarette after another.
Anthony stood in front of him. “I’m thirsty.”
“All right, I can get you a drink.”
“That’s not the cup Mommy uses. That’s not the juice Mommy uses. That’s not how Mommy pours it.” Then he said, “I’m thirsty and I’m hungry. Mommy always feeds me.”
“Yes, me too,” said Alexander, but he made him a sandwich with cheese and peanut butter.
He thought for sure she would be back any minute with the laundry or with groceries.
At one thirty, Alexander was running out of options.
He said, “Let’s go, Antman. Let’s take one more look, and if we can’t find her, I guess you’ll have to come with me.”
Instead of walking left to Memorial Park, they decided to walk right on Bayshore, past the construction site for the hospital. There was another small park on the other side. Anthony said sometimes they went there to play.
Alexander saw her from a distance, not at the park, but at the Mercy Hospital construction site, sitting on what looked to be a dirt mound.
When he got closer, he saw she was sitting motionless on a stack of two-by-fours. He saw her from the side, her hair in its customary plait, her hands laid tensely in a cross on her lap.
Anthony saw her and ran. “Mommy!”
She came out of her reverie, turned her head, and her face wrinkled in a contrite scrunch. “Uh-oh,” she said, standing up and rushing to them. “Have I been a bad girl?”
“On so many levels,” Alexander said, coming up to her. “You know I have to get back by two.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, bending to Anthony. “I lost track of time. You okay, bud? I see Daddy fed you.”
“What are you doing?” Alexander asked, but she was pretending to wipe the crumbs off Anthony’s mouth and didn’t reply.
“I see. Well, I have to go,” he said coldly, bending to kiss Anthony on the head.
That evening they were having dinner, almost not talking. Tatiana, trying to make light conversation, mentioned that Mercy Hospital was the first Catholic hospital in the Greater Miami area, a ministry of the Roman Catholic Church, and it was being built in the shape of a cross, when Alexander interrupted her. “So this is what you’ve been doing with your free time?”
“Free time?” she said curtly. “How do you think you get food on your table?”
“I didn’t have food on my table this afternoon.”
“Once.”
“Was that the first time you were sitting there?”
She couldn’t lie to him. “No,” she admitted. “But it’s nothing. I just go and sit.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do, that’s all.”
“Tatiana, let me understand,” Alexander said, and his voice got hard. “You have the Barnacle House to visit, the Vizcaya Palace, the Italianate Gardens, there is shopping, and libraries, there’s the ocean, and swimming and sunbathing, and reading, but what you do with the only two hours you have to yourself all day is go and sit in a dust bowl, watching construction workers build a hospital?”
Tatiana didn’t say anything at first. “As you well know,” she said quietly, “the way you are toward me, I have much more than two hours to myself all day.”
Alexander didn’t say anything.
“So why don’t you call Vikki and ask her to come down and spend a few weeks with you?” he said at last.
“Oh, just stop forcing Vikki on me all the time!” Tatiana exclaimed in a voice so loud it surprised even her.
Alexander stood up from the table. “Don’t raise your f*cking voice to me.”
Tatiana jumped up. “Well, stop talking nonsense then!”
His hands slammed the table. “What did I say?”
“You left me and were gone for three days in Deer Isle!” she yelled. “Three days! Did you ever explain to me where you were? Did you ever tell me? And do I bang the table? Meanwhile I sit for five minutes a block away from our house and suddenly you’re all up in arms! I mean, are you even serious?”
“TATIANA!” His fist crashed into the table and dishes rattled off to the floor.
Anthony burst into tears. Holding his hands over his ears, he was saying, “Mommy, Mommy, stop it.”
Tatiana threw up her hands and went to her son. Alexander stormed out.
Inside the bedroom Anthony said, “Mommy, don’t yell at Daddy or he’ll go away again.”
Tatiana wanted to explain that adults sometimes argued but knew Anthony wouldn’t understand. Bessie and Nick Moore argued. Anthony’s mom and dad didn’t argue. The child couldn’t see that they were getting less good at pretending they were both made of china and not flint. At least there was actual participation, though as with all things, one had to be careful what one wished for.
Many hours later Alexander came back and went straight out on the deck.
Tatiana had been lying in bed waiting for him. She put on her robe and went outside. The air smelled of salt and the ocean. It was after midnight, it was June, in the high seventies. She liked that about Coconut Grove. She’d never been in a place where the nighttime temperature remained so warm.
“I’m sorry I raised my voice,” she said.
“What you should be sorry about,” Alexander said, “is that you’re up to no good. That’s what you should be sorry about.”
“I’m just sitting and thinking,” she said.
“Oh, and I was born yesterday? Give me a f*cking break.”
She went to sit on his lap. She was going to tell him what he needed to hear. She only wished that just once he would tell her what she needed to hear. “It’s nothing, Shura. Really. I’m just sitting. Mmm,” she murmured, rubbing her cheek against his. His cheek was stubbly. She loved that stubble. His breath smelled of alcohol. She breathed it in; she loved that beer breath. Then she sighed. “Where’ve you been?”
“I walked to one of the casinos. Played poker. See how easy that was? And if you wanted to know where I’d been back in Deer Isle, why didn’t you just ask me?”
Tatiana didn’t want to tell him she was afraid to know. She had gone missing for thirty minutes. He had been lost, gone, missing and presumed dead for years. She wished sometimes he would just think, think of the things she might feel. She didn’t want to be on his lap anymore. “Shura, come on, don’t be upset with me,” Tatiana said, getting off.
“You, too.” He threw down his cigarette as he stood up. “I’m doing my level best,” he said, heading inside.
“Me, too, Alexander,” she said, head down, following him. “Me, too.”
But in bed—she naked, holding him, he naked, holding her, nearly there, nearly at the very end for him—Tatiana clutched him as she used to, feverishly clutched his back and under her fingers, even at the moment of her own breaking abandon, felt his scars under her grasping fingers.
She could not continue. Could not, even at that moment. Especially at that moment. And so she found herself doing what she remembered him doing in Lazarevo when he couldn’t bear to touch her: Tatiana stopped him, pushed him away, and turned her back to him.
She put her face in the pillow, raised her hips and cried, hoping he wouldn’t notice, hoping that even if he did notice, he would be too far gone to care.
She was wrong on all counts. He noticed. And he wasn’t too far gone to care.
“So this is what your level best looks like, huh?” Alexander whispered, out of breath, bending over her, lifting her head off the pillow by her hair. “Presenting your cold back to me?”
“It’s not cold,” Tatiana said, not facing him. “It’s just the only part that’s taken leave of all its senses.”
Alexander jumped off the bed—shaking and unfinished. He turned on the lamp, the overhead light, he opened the shades. Unsteadily she sat up on the bed, covering herself with a sheet. He stood naked in front of her, glistening, unsubsided, his chest heaving. He was incredibly upset.
“How can I even try to find my way,” he said, his voice breaking, “if my own wife recoils from me? I know it isn’t what it used to be. I know it isn’t what we had. But it’s all we have now, and this body is all I’ve got.”
“Darling—please,” Tatiana whispered, stretching out her hands to him. “I’m not recoiling from you.” She couldn’t see him through the veil of her sorrow.
“You think I’m f*cking blind?” he exclaimed. “Oh God! You think this is the first time I noticed? You think I’m an idiot? I notice every f*cking time, Tatiana! I grit my teeth, I wear my clothes so you don’t see me, I take you from behind, so nothing of me touches you—just like you want.” He enunciated every syllable through his teeth. “You wear clothes in bed with me so I won’t accidentally rub my wounds on you. I pretend not to give a shit, but how long do you think I can keep doing this? How much longer do you think you’re going to be happier on the hard floor?”
She covered her face.
He swept his hand across and knocked her arms away. “You are my wife and you won’t touch me, Tania!”
“Darling, I do touch you…”
“Oh, yes,” he said cruelly. “Well, all I can say is, thank God, I guess, that my tackle is not maimed, or I’d never get any blow. But what about the rest of me?”
Tatiana lowered her weeping head. “Shura, please…”
He yanked her up and out of bed. The sheet fell away from her. “Look at me,” he said.
She was too ashamed of herself to lift her eyes to him. They were standing naked against each other. His angry fingers dug into her arms. “That’s right, you should be f*cking ashamed,” he said through his teeth. “You don’t want to face me then, and you can’t face me now. Just perfect. Well, nothing more to say, is there? Come on, then.” He spun her around and bent her over the bed.
“Shura, please!” She tried to get up, but his palm on her back kept her from moving until she couldn’t move if she wanted to. And then he took his palm away.
Behind her, leaning over her, supporting himself solely by his clenched fists on the mattress, Alexander took her like he was in the army, like she was a stranger he found in the woods whom he was going to leave in one to-the-hilt minute without a backward glance, while she helplessly cried and then—even more helplessly, was crying out, now deservedly and thoroughly abased. “And look—no hands, just like you like,” he whispered into her ear. “You want more? Or was that enough lovemaking for you?”
Tatiana’s face was in the blanket.
Himself unfinished, he backed away, and she slowly straightened up and turned to him, wiping her face. “Please—I’m sorry,” she whispered, sitting down weakly on the edge of the bed, covering her body. Her legs were shaking.
“You cover me from other people because you don’t want to look at me yourself. I’m surprised you notice or care that other women talk to me.” He was panting. “You think they’ll run in horror, like you, once they catch a glimpse of me.”
“What—no!” Her arms reached for him. “Shura, you’re misunderstanding me…I’m not frightened, I’m just so sad for you.”
“Your pity,” he said, stepping back from her, “is the absolute last f*cking thing I want. Pity yourself that you’re like this.”
“I’m so afraid to hurt you…” Tatiana whispered, her palms openly pleading with him.
“Bullshit!” he said. “But ironic, don’t you think, considering what you’re doing to me.” Alexander groaned. “Why can’t you be like my son, who sees everything and never flinches from me?”
“Oh, Shura…” She was crying.
“Look at me, Tatiana.” She lifted her face. His bronze eyes were blazing, he was loud, he was uncontrollable. “You’re terrified, I know, but here I am”—Alexander pointed to himself, standing naked and scarred and blackly tattooed. “Once again,” he said, “I stand in front of you naked and I will try—God help me—one more f*cking time.” Flinging his fists down, he was nearly without breath left. “Here I am, your one man circus freak show, having bled out for Mother Russia, having desperately tried to get to you, now on top of you with his scourge marks, and you, who used to love me, who has sympathized, internalized, normalized everything, you are not allowed to turn away from me! Do you understand? This is one of the unchangeable things, Tania. This is what I’m going to look like until the day I die. I can’t get any peace from you ever unless you find a way to make peace with this. Make peace with me. Or let me go for good.”
Her shoulders rose and fell. “I’m sorry,” Tatiana said as she came to him, putting her arms around him, kneeling on the floor in front of him, holding him, looking up into his face. “Please. I’m sorry.”
Eventually she managed to soothe him back on the bed. Alexander came—not willingly—and lay down beside her. She pulled him on top of her. He climbed where he was led as her hands went around his back. She wrapped her legs around him, holding him intimately and tight.
“I’m sorry, honey, husband, Shura, dearest, my whole heart,” Tatiana whispered into his neck, kissing his throat. With heartbroken fingers she caressed him. “Please forgive me for hurting your feelings. I don’t pity you, don’t turn it that way on me, but I cannot help that I’m desperately sad, wishing so much—for your sake only, not mine—that you could still be what you once were—before the things you now carry. I’m ashamed of myself and I’m sorry. I spend all my days regretting the things I cannot fix.”
“You and me both, babe,” he said, threading his arms underneath her. Their faces were turned away from each other as Alexander lay on top of her, and she stroked the war on his back. Naked and pressed breast to breast they searched for something they had lost long ago, and found it briefly, in a fierce clutch, in a glimmer through the barricades.
The Sands of Naples
Alexander came home mid-morning and said, “Let’s collect our things. We’re leaving.”
“We are? What about Mel?”
“This isn’t about Mel. It’s about us. It’s time to go.”
Apparently Frederik had complained to Mel that the man who was running his boats full of war veterans and war widows was possibly a communist, a Soviet spy, perhaps a traitor. Mel, afraid of losing his customers, had to confront Alexander, but couldn’t bring himself to fire the man who brought him thousands of dollars worth of business. Alexander made it easy for Mel. He denied all charges of espionage and then quit.
“Let’s head out west,” he said to Tatiana. “You might as well show me that bit of land you bought. Where is it again? New Mexico?”
“Arizona.”
“Let’s go. I want to get to California for the grape-picking season in August.”
And so they left Coconut Grove of the see-through salt waters and the wanton women with the bright colored lipstick, they left the bobbing houseboats and Anthony’s crashing dreams, and the mystery of Mercy Hospital and drove across the newly opened Everglades National Park to Naples on the Gulf of Mexico.
Alexander was subdued with her, back to Edith Wharton polite, and she deserved it, but the sand was cool and white, even in scorching noon, and the fire sunsets and lightning storms over the Gulf were like nothing they’d ever seen. So they stayed in the camper on a deserted beach, in a corner of the world, in a spot where he could take off his shirt and play ball with Anthony, while the sun beat on his back and tanned the parts that could be tanned, leaving the scars untouched, like gray stripes.
Both he and the boy were two brown stalks running around the white shores and green waters. All three of them loved the heat, loved the beach, the briny Gulf, the sizzling days, the blinding sands. They celebrated her twenty-third birthday and their fifth wedding anniversary there, and finally left after Anthony’s fourth birthday at the end of June.
They spent only a few days in New Orleans because they discovered New Orleans, much like South Miami Beach, was not an ideal city for a small boy.
“Perhaps next time we can come here without the child,” said Alexander on Bourbon Street, where the nice ladies sitting by the windows lifted up their shirts as the three of them strolled by.
“Dad, why are they showing us their boobies?”
“I’m not sure, son. It’s a strange ritualistic custom common to these parts of the world.”
“Like in that journal where the African girls put weights in their lips to make them hang down past their throats?”
“Something like that.” Alexander scooped up Anthony into his arms.
“But Mommy said the African girls make their lips big to get a husband. Are these girls trying to get a husband?”
“Something like that.”
“Daddy, what did Mommy do to get you to marry her?” Anthony giggled. “Did Mommy show you her boobies?”
“Tania, what are you reading to our child?” said Alexander, flipping a squealing Anthony upside down by his legs to get him to stop asking questions.
“National Geographic,” she said, lightly batting her eyes at him. “But answer your son, Alexander.”
“Yeah, Dad,” said Anthony, red with delight, hanging upside down. “Answer your son.”
“Mommy put on a pretty dress, Antman.” And for a fleeting moment on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, Tatiana and Alexander’s eyes made real contact.
They were glad they had the camper now in their quest, in their summer trek across the prairies. They had cover over their heads, they had a place for Anthony to sleep, to play, a place to put their pot and spoon, their little dominion unbroken by pungent hotel rooms or beaten-up landladies. Occasionally they had to stop at RV parks to take showers. Anthony liked those places, because there were other kids there for him to play with, but Tatiana and Alexander chafed at living in such close proximity to strangers, even for an evening. After Coconut Grove they finally discovered what they liked best, what they needed most—just the three of them in an unhealed but unbroken trinity.