CHAPTER THREE
Paradise Valley, 1947
Bare Feet and Backpacks
Alexander drove their Nomad through Texas, across Austin, down to San Antonio. The Alamo was a fascinating bit of history—they all died. He couldn’t get around that fact. Despite the heroism, the bravery, they all died! And Texas lost its battle for independence and continued to belong to Santa Ana. Death to all wasn’t enough for victory. What kind of a f*cked-up life lesson was that for Anthony? Alexander decided not to tell his son about it. He’d learn in school soon enough.
Western Texas was just flat road amid the dusty plains as far as the eye could see. Alexander was driving and smoking; he had turned off the radio so he could hear Tatiana better—but she had stopped speaking. She was sitting on the passenger side with her eyes closed. She had been telling him and Anthony soothing stories of some of her pranks in Luga. There were few stories Alexander liked better than of her child self in that village by the river.
Is she asleep? He glances at her, squeezed in around herself in a floral pink wrap dress that comes down to a V in her chest. Her glistening, slightly tender, coral nectar mouth reminds him of things, stirs him up a little. He checks to see what Anthony is doing—the boy is lying down facing away, playing with his toy soldiers. Alexander reaches over and cups a palmful of her breast, and she instantly opens her eyes and checks for Anthony. “What?” she whispers, and no sooner does she whisper than Anthony turns around, and Alexander takes his hand away, an aching prickle of desire mixed with frustration all swollen behind his eyes and in his loins.
Their hostilities in Coconut Grove have been yielding some significant crops for him. Just a small measure of his subsequent closed-mouthedness has been making Tatiana trip over herself to show him that his bitter accusations against her were not true. It doesn’t matter. He knows of course they were true, but he doesn’t mind in the least her cartwheels of palpitating remorse.
At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can’t see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn’t you just stay put? Why couldn’t you feel I was coming for you?
You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn’t I dead?
He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arrived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen’s main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him.
As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw after being beaten and dreaming of her kissing him, and these dreams morph with the memories of last night, and suddenly she is kissing not the scars but the raw oozing wounds, and he is in agony for she is crying and the brine of her tears is eating away the meat of his flesh, and he is begging her to stop because he can’t take it anymore. Kiss something else, he pleads. Anything else. He’s had enough of himself. He is sick of himself. She is tainted not just with the Gulag. She is tainted with his whole life.
Does it hurt when I touch them?
He has to lie. Every kiss she plants on his wounds stirs a sense memory of how he got them. He wanted her to touch him, and this is what he gets. But if he tells her the truth, she will stop. So he lies. No, he says.
She kisses him past the small of his back, down to his legs, to his feet, murmuring to him something about his perfect this and that, he doesn’t even know, and then climbs up and prods him to turn over. She lies astride him, holding his head in her arms while he holds her buttocks in his (now they’re perfect), and kisses his face, not inch by inch but centimeter by centimeter. As she kisses him, she murmurs to him. He opens his eyes. Your eyes, do you want to know what color they are? They’re bronze; they’re copper; they’re ocher and amber; they’re cream and coffee; cognac and champagne. They are caramel.
Not crème brûlée? he asks. And she starts to cry. All right, all right, he says. Not crème brûlée.
She kisses his scarred tattooed arms, his ribboned chest. Now he can see her face, her lips, her hair, all glowing in the flickering fire. His hands lie lightly on her silken head.
Mercifully few wounds on your stomach, she whispers, as she kisses the black line of hair that starts at his solar plexus and arrows down.
Yes, he groans back. Do you know what we call men with wounds on their stomachs? Corpses.
She laughs. He doesn’t laugh, his very good Sergeant Telikov dying slowly with the bayonet in his abdomen. There wasn’t enough morphine to let him die free of pain. Ouspensky had to mercy-shoot him—on Alexander’s orders, and this one time Alexander did turn away. The flinching, the stiffness, the dead, the alive, all here, and there is no morphine, and there is no mercy. There is only Tatiana.
She murmurs, she purrs. A corpse, that’s not you.
He agrees. No, not me.
Her breasts press into his rigid with tension—
He is rupturing. What else do you like? Come on, I’m going to implode. What else? She sits between his legs and her small healing hands finally take him. She rubs him between her palms like she’s about to set him on fire. Her warm hands softly milk him, softly climb rope on him. He is stacked in her clasped fingers when she bends her head to him. Shura…look at you…you are so hard, so beautiful. He desperately wants to keep his eyes open. Her long hair feathers his stomach in rhythm to her motion. Her mouth is so soft, so hot, so wet, her fingers are in rotating rings around him, she is naked, she is tense, her eyes are closed and she moans as she sucks him. He is set on fire. He is in bondage through and through. And now, well past it but utterly within it, he keeps quiet during the day while his hands stretch out in a shudder for her yoke of contrition, for her blaze of repentance at night.
But night isn’t nearly enough. As he keeps telling her, nothing is enough. So now he is trying not to crash the camper.
She sits looking ahead at the sprawling fields, and then suddenly straight at him as if she is about to tell him something. Today her eyes are transparent with sunny yellow rays beaming out from the irises. When they’re not misted or jaded by the fathomless waters of rivers and lakes left behind, the eyes are entirely pellucid—and dangerous. They are clear in meaning, yet bottomless. And what’s worse—they allow all light to pass through. There is no hiding from them. Today, after deeming him acceptable, the eyes turn back to the road, her hands relaxing on her lap, her chest swelling against the pink cotton fabric. He wants to fondle her, to feel her breasts in his hands, feel their soft weightiness, to have his face in them—how long till night? She is so sensitive, he can’t breathe on her without her quivering; in her pink nipples seem to center many of the nerve endings in her body. She has amazing, unbelievable breasts. Alexander’s hands grip the wheel.
Peripherally he sees her look of concern—she thinks he is tormented. Yes, he is made stupid by lust. She leans over slightly and says in her corn husk of a breath, “A penny for your thoughts, soldier.”
Alexander composes his voice before speaking. “I was thinking,” he says calmly, “about freedom. You come, you go, and no one thinks twice about you. Any road, any country road, any state road, from one city to another, never stopped, never checked. No one asks for your internal passport, no one asks about your business. No one cares what you do.”
And what did his wife do? She sat, motionless and—was it tense?—listening to him, her hands no longer relaxed but clenched together, and then pulled open her dress, pulled down her vest and leaning back against the seat, smiled and shut tight her eyes, sitting pushed-up and topless for him for a few panting moments. O Lord, thank you.
Has the sun set? Yes, finally, and the fire is on, and Anthony is asleep, and that’s good, but what Alexander really wants is to see Tatiana in the daylight, without shadows on her, when he can look at her with diurnal lust unadorned by war, by death, by his agonies that pursue him like he pursues her in the choppy black-and-white frames of the used movie camera she made him buy in New Orleans (he’s learned she has a weak spot for new gadgets). Just once, a song in the daylight with nothing else but lust. She too has not been happy, that he knows. Something weighs upon her. She often can’t face him, and he is too fractured to pry. He used to be stronger but not anymore. His strength has been left behind—thousands of miles east, in the christening Kama, in the gleaming Neva, on the icy Lake Ladoga, in the wooded mountains of Holy Cross, in Germany with the blackguard Ouspensky, his lieutenant, his friend, betraying him for years in cold blood, left behind on the frozen ground with the barely buried Pasha. God! Please, no more. He shudders to stave off the fevers. This is what night does to him. But wait—
She stands in front of him, as if she is trying to determine what he wants. Isn’t it obvious? DAYLIGHT! He sits without moving, without speaking and rages inside his burning house. He used to need nothing and want nothing but his stark force upon her open body—and still does—but Tania has given him something else, too. At last, she has given him other things to dream about. She stands glimmering in front of him, blonde and naked, trembling and shy, the color of opalescent milk. He already can’t breathe. She is supple and little, creamy-smooth, her bare body is finally in his groping hands, and her gold hair shimmers down her back. She shimmers. He tears off his clothes and pulls her into his lap, fitting her onto himself while he sucks her nipples as he caresses her hair. He cannot last five minutes with her like that, hard nipples in his mouth, warm breasts in his face, silk hair in his hands, all curled up and molten honey around him, slightly squirming, fluttering, tiny, soft and satiny in his avid lap. Not five minutes. O Lord, thank you.
In New Orleans, on stinging nostalgic impulse, he had bought her a dress he saw in a shop window, an ivory frothy, thin-netted and muslin dress with a slight swing skirt and layers of stiff silk and lace. It was pretty, but regretfully too big for her: she was swimming in muslin snow. The shop didn’t have a smaller size. “Your wife is very petite, sir,” said the corpulent sales woman with a frowning, disapproving glare—either disapproving of Tania for being petite or disapproving of a man Alexander’s size for marrying someone who was. They bought the dress anyway, judgmental beefy sales lady notwithstanding, and that night in their seedy and stifling hotel room, with Anthony in their bed and the fan whooshing the heat around, Alexander silently measured out her smallness—consoling himself with math instead of love, with circumference instead of circumfusion. Her ankles six inches around. Her calves, eleven. The tops of her very bare thighs below the sulcus, eighteen and a half. The tape measure dropped, his hands ringed her thigh, the entire length of his left index finger burning. Her hips, the tape clasped just above the blonde down, thirty-two. Her waist, twenty-one. The tape measure dropped, his hands ringed her waist. Anthony is in the bed, she whispered, Anthony is unsettled.
Her chest, thirty-six. With the nipples erect, thirty-six and a half. Tape measure dropped for good. Anthony is stirring, Shura, please, and the room is tiny and broiling, and just outside the open windows, the sailors below will hear. But math did not suffice that time. Gasping kneeling piety in the corner of the creaking floor just feet away from sleeping Anthony and the laughing sailors barely sufficed.
Now, on the road, he is thirsty, hungry, profoundly aroused; he glances back to see what Anthony is doing, to see if the boy is busy with his bugs, too busy with his bugs to see his father grope blindly for his mother. But Anthony is on the seat behind her, watching him.
“What’ya thinkin’ about, Dad?”
“Oh, you know your dad. A little of this, a little of that.” His voice creaks, too.
Soon they’ll leave western Texas, be in New Mexico. He casts another long look at her clavicle bones, slim shoulders, straight upper arms, eight, at her graceful neck, eleven, her white throat that needs his lips on it. His eyes drift down to her bare feet under her thin cotton skirt; white and delicate as her hands; her feet six, her hands five, less by three than his own—but it’s her feet he’s stuck on; why?—and suddenly he opens his mouth to let out a shallow anguished breath of a deeply unwanted memory. No, no, not that. Please. His head shudders. No. Feet—dirty, large, blacknailed, bruised, lying motionless underneath a raggy old brown skirt attached to the dead body of a gangraped woman he found in the laundry room. It is Alexander’s job to drag her by the feet to the graves he’s just dug for her and the three others who died that day.
He fumbles around for his cigarettes. Tatiana pulls one out, hands it to him with a lighter. Unsteadily he lights up, pulling up the woman’s skirt to cover her face so that earth doesn’t fall on it when he shovels the dirt over her small part of the mass grave. Under her skirt the woman is so viciously mutilated that Alexander cannot help it, he begins to retch.
Then. Now.
He puts his hand over his mouth as the cigarette burns, and inhales quickly.
“Are you okay, Captain?”
There is nothing he can say. He usually remembers that woman at the worst, most inopportune moments.
Eventually his mouth stops the involuntary reflex. Then. Now. Eventually, he sees so much that he becomes dead to everything. He has inured himself, hardened himself so that there’s nothing that arouses a flicker of feeling inside Alexander. He finally speaks as they cross the state line. “Have a joke for me, Tania?” he says. “I could use a joke.”
“Hmm.” She thinks, looks at him, looks to see where Anthony is. He’s far in the back. “Okay, what about this.” With a short cough, she leans into Alexander and lowers her voice. “A man and his young girlfriend are driving in the car. The man has never seen his girl naked. She thinks he is driving too slow, so they decide to play a game. For every five miles he goes above fifty, she will take off a piece of her clothing. In no time at all, he is flying and she is naked. The man gets so excited that he loses control of the car. It veers off the road and hits a tree. She is unharmed but he is stuck in the car and can’t get out. ‘Go back on the road and get help,’ he tells her. ‘But I’m naked,’ she says. He rummages around and pulls off his shoe. ‘Here, just put this between your legs to cover yourself.’ She does as she is told and runs out to the road. A truck driver, seeing a naked crying woman, stops. ‘Help me, help me,’ she sobs. ‘My boyfriend is stuck and I can’t get him out.’ The truck driver says, ‘Miss, if he’s that far in, I’m afraid he’s a goner.’”
Alexander laughs in spite of himself.
In the afternoon after lunch, Tatiana manages to put Anthony down for an unprecedented godsent nap, and in the canopied seclusion of the trees at the empty rest area grounds, Alexander sets Tatiana down on the picnic bench, pulls high her watercolor skirt, kneels between her legs in the glorious daylight and lowers his head to her fragile and perfect perianth, his palms up, under her. She has given him this, like manna from heaven. O Lord, thank you.
He is driving through the prairies and he is thirsty. Tania and Ant are playing road games, trying to guess the color of the next car that passes them. Alexander declines to participate, saying he doesn’t want to play any game where Tatiana always wins.
It’s very hot in the camper. They’ve opened the top hatch and all the slotted windows, but it’s just dust and wind blowing at them at forty miles an hour. Her hair is getting tangled. She is flushed; a few miles back she had taken off her blouse and now sits in the slightly damp see-through white vest that cannot constrain her. Being around her all day and night like this is getting to be no good for him. He is becoming slightly crazed by her. All he wants is more. But unlike Lazarevo, where his desire like a river flowed into the sea extempore, here the river is dammed by their seedling who sits awake from morning till night and plays road games.
Ant says a word, like “crab,” and she says one that follows into her head, like “grass.” Alexander doesn’t want to play that game either. Should they stop, have lunch? German dead crabgrass in the middle of the camp, in the middle of February. Beaten, lashed, blood oozing down his back, he is made to stand in the cold grass for six hours and what he thinks about for six hours is that he is thirsty.
He glances at her sitting serenely folded over. She catches him looking and says, “Thirsty?”
Does he nod? He doesn’t know. He knows that she gives him a drink.
Tank, says Anthony, continuing the game.
Commander, says his mother.
Alexander blinks. The camper lurches.
Shura, watch the road, or we’ll crash.
Did she just say that? He’s commanding his tank, and they’re in the middle of the Prussian fields, they’re almost in Poland. The Germans have mined the meadow in retreat, and one of the S-mines has just gone off, in full view of Alexander. It lifted up to his engineer’s lurching chest, paused as if to say, looky who’s here, and exploded. Ouspensky has dug the hole where the engineer fell, and they buried him in it—him and his backpack. Alexander never looks through the backpacks of the fallen, because the things they contain make it impossible for him either to walk away or to continue forward. As the soldier’s outer wear—his uniform, helmet, boots, weapon—contain the outer him, the backpacks contain the inner him. The backpacks contain the soldier’s soul.
Alexander never looks. Unopened it is buried with the timid engineer who had a large blue tattoo of a cross on his chest that the Nazi mine ripped open because the Nazis don’t believe in Jesus.
“Where’s your backpack?” Alexander said to Tatiana.
“What?”
“Your backpack, the one you left the Soviet Union with. Where is it?”
She turned to the passenger window. “Perhaps it’s still with Vikki,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“My mother’s Bronze Horseman book? The photos of your family? Our two wedding pictures? You left them with Vikki?” Alexander was incredulous.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Why are you asking?”
He didn’t want to tell her why he was asking. The killed landmine engineer had a sweetheart in Minsk—Nina. Pictures of her, letters from her had filled his pack. Ouspensky told Alexander this, even though Alexander had asked him not to. After he knew, he felt bitterly envious, blackly jealous of the amorous letters the meek engineer was sent by a Nina from Minsk. Alexander never got any letters. Once long ago he received letters from Tatiana, and from her sister, Dasha. But those letters, the cards, the photographs, Tania’s white dress with red roses were all at the bottom of the sea or had turned to ashes. He had no more things.
“The letters I wrote you—after I left you in Lazarevo,” said Alexander, “you don’t—you don’t know where they are? You’ve…left them with Vikki?” Perhaps things remained that stirred some feeling in him.
“Darling…” her voice was soothing. “What on heaven’s earth are you thinking about?”
“Can’t you just answer me?” he snapped.
“I have them. I have it all, they’re with me, buried deep in my things. The whole backpack. I never look through it, but I’ll get it for you. I’ll get it when we stop for lunch.”
Relief heaved out of his chest. “I don’t want to look through it either,” he said. He simply needed to know that she is not like him—that she has a soul. Because Alexander’s backpack during his penal battalion days was empty. If Alexander had died and Ouspensky, before burying him, looked through it, he would have found cards, smokes, a broken pen, a small Bible—Soviet-issue, distributed to the Red Army late in the war with false piety—and that is all. If Alexander had died, all his men would have seen that their commander, Captain Belov, had no soul.
But had they looked through the backpack a little more carefully, in the cracking parchment of the New Testament, they would have found a soiled small black-and-white picture of a young girl, maybe fourteen, standing toes turned in like a child, in white braids and a sundress, with a broken and casted arm, next to her dark brother. He was pulling her hair. Her good arm was around him. Pasha and Tania, two striplings. They were laughing—in Luga, a long time ago.
Ninety-Seven Acres
New Mexico. Santa Fe Mountains. Arizona. Tonto Mountains.
Seven thousand feet above sea level the air is thinner, drier. In Santa Fe, Anthony had slept almost through the night. Only a whimper from him at dawn. They all felt it was progress and stayed a little longer, hoping to continue the improvement, but it didn’t last.
The Tonto Mountains were breathtaking, the air so transparent Tatiana could see over the vistas and the valleys and the sloping hills clear to the sun, but they’ve left them behind now, and the air has become like the land, bone-dry, overbaked and opaque with stodgy molecules of heat. She has unbuttoned her blouse, but Alexander is focused on the road. Or is he just pretending he is focused on the road? She has noticed a small but palpable change in him recently. He still doesn’t talk much, but his eyes and breath during the day are less impassive.
She offers him a drink, a cigarette. He takes it all but is not distracted by her this time. She wonders when they can stop, break camp, maybe find a river, swim. The memories of swimming in the Kama prickle her skin with pain, and she stiffens, trying not to flinch and, pulling down her skirt, forces her hands to lie still on her lap. She doesn’t want to think of then. It’s bad enough she has to think of now, when she keeps expecting the police to stop them at every intersection and say, Are you Alexander Barrington, son of Harold Barrington? What, your wife didn’t tell you that at your last campsite when you dared to leave her alone for just a moment, she called her old roommate in New York? Your wife, Mr. Barrington, seems not to tell you many things.
That’s right. Tatiana called long distance through an operator, but Sam Gulotta picked up the phone. She got so frightened, she hung up and she didn’t have enough time to call Aunt Esther, too, but now she is terrified that the operator told Sam where in New Mexico she had called from. People with nothing to hide don’t run, Alexander Barrington, the police will say when they stop the Nomad. Why don’t you come with us, and your wife and son can stay here at the intersection of souls and wait for you to come back as they have been doing, as they’re doing still, waiting for you to return to them. Tell them you won’t be long.
It’s a lie. They will take the casement that is his body, they will take his physical self, for that’s almost all that remains of him anyway, and Tatiana and Anthony will be at that intersection forever. No. It’s better to have him here, even like this—withdrawn, into himself, silent, occasionally fevered, fired up, occasionally laughing, always smoking, always deeply human—than to have just a memory. For the things he does to her at night, they’re not memories anymore. And his sleeping with her. She fights her own sleep every night, tries to stay awake long after he has gone to sleep just so she can feel his arms around her, so she can lie completely entombed and surrounded by the ravaged body he barely saved that now comforts her as nothing else can.
He measures her to order her. He gets upset when she won’t respond in kind, but she wants to tell him that he cannot be ordered by Aristotelian methods or by Pythagorean theorems. He is what he is. All his parts are in absolute proportion to his sum, but even more important, all are in relative proportion to her sum. Cardinal or counting numbers don’t help. Ordinals or ranking numbers help so long as she stops at 1. Archimedes’s principle won’t help. Certainly she can’t and won’t measure what is measureless, what neither terminates nor repeats, what is beyond even the transcendental of π—though he doesn’t think so—what is beyond polynomials and quadratic formulas, beyond the rational and irrational, the humanist and the logical, beyond the minds of the Cantors and the Dedekinds, the Renaissance philosophers and the Indian Tantrists, what falls instead into the realm of gods and kings, of myth, of dawn of man, of the mystery of mankind—that there is a space inside her designed solely for him and despite clear Euclidian impossibilities not only does everything, in plenary excess, cleave like it’s meant to, but it makes her feel what math cannot explain, what science cannot explain. What nothing can explain.
And yet, inexplicably, he continues to measure her, tracing out fluents of curves and slopes of tangents. His two hands are always on her—on top of her head, against her palms, her feet, her upper arms, ringing her waist, clasping her hips. He is so desperately endearing. She doesn’t know what he thinks π will give him.
Playing with Anthony. Is that not real? Anthony having his father? The dark boy sitting on his lap trying to find the ticklish spot and Alexander laughing, is that not real, not math nor a memory?
Alexander has nearly completely forgotten what it’s like to play, except when he’s in the water, but there had been no water in Texas, barely any in New Mexico, and now they’re in Arid Zona.
Anthony tries land games with his father. He perches on Alexander’s lap, holds the tips of his index fingers together, and says, “Daddy, want to see how strong I am? Hold my fingers in your fist, and I’ll get free.”
Alexander stubs out his cigarette. He holds Anthony’s fingers lightly, and the boy wriggles free. The delight of freeing himself from his daunting father is so great that he wants to play the game again and again. They play it two hundred times. And then the reverse. Alexander holds his index fingers together while Anthony clenches his tiny four-year-old fist over them. When Alexander is unable to get free, Anthony’s joy is something to behold. They play that two hundred times while Tatiana either prepares lunch or dinner, or washes or tidies, or just sits and watches them with a gladdening heart.
Alexander takes Anthony off his knee and says in a throaty, nicotine-stained voice, “Tatia, want to play? Put your fingers into my fist and see if you can wriggle free. Come.” Not a muscle moves on his face, but her heart is no longer just gladdening. It’s quickening, it’s maddening. She knows she shouldn’t, Anthony is right there, but when Alexander calls, she comes. That’s just how it is. She perches on his lap and touches together the tips of her slightly trembling index fingers. She tries not to look into his face, just at her fingers, over which he now places his enormous fist, squeezes lightly, and says, “Go ahead, wriggle free.” Her whole body weakens. She tries, of course, to get free, but she knows this: while as a father Alexander plays one way with Anthony, as a husband, he plays the opposite way with her. She bites her lip to keep from making a single sound.
“Come on, Mommy,” says the uncomprehending child by her side. “You can do it. I did it! Wriggle free.”
“Yes, Tatiasha,” whispers Alexander, squeezing her fingers tighter, looking deep into her face as she sits on his lap. “Come on, wriggle free.”
And she glimpses the smiling soul peeking out.
But when he drives, he is often silent and sullen. She hates it when he reduces himself like this to the worst of his life—it’s hard to draw him away, and sometimes even when he wants to be drawn, he can’t be. And sometimes Tatiana is so full of fears herself of the imminent danger to Alexander at every stop sign that she loses the weapons she needs to draw him away, herself reduced to the worst of her life.
She wishes for something else to swallow them, where the road wouldn’t apprehend her, where his soul wouldn’t apprehend him. Perhaps if they were less human.