In the camper next to a sleeping Anthony in their only bed, lying on his back, Alexander said quietly to her, “Maybe you’re right—Burck is not to be trusted. But don’t you think there is a chance that he could be telling the truth?”
“No.”
She was so sure. How could she be so sure?
“Four people told you she had died. One of them was Slonko. Don’t you think when monstrous Slonko was alone with you in your jail cell that he, to get you to admit you were Alexander Barrington, would have told you your mother was alive? ‘Tell me you’re the American we’ve been looking for, and I will personally let you see your mother’? Wouldn’t he have said that?”
“It could’ve been bluster.” Alexander put his arm over his face.
Tatiana took it away, putting her face over his, climbing on top of him.
“A man is talking to another man about his mother! Tell us who you are, Major Belov, and we will let your mother live. That’s bluster?”
“Yes.” He couldn’t help himself; he pushed her off him. She climbed right back.
“Burck wants you to acknowledge that what he’s saying might be true. He wants you to say it’s possible, and then he will immediately know you by your words. That for the silence of your own heart you will sell out everything you believe. And return to the Soviet Union with them. Don’t you remember Germanovsky in Sachsenhausen? Please. You don’t want to give them this, we’re done with them.”
“Are we?”
“Aren’t we?” she said ever so faintly.
He wanted to turn his face from her, but she wouldn’t let him.
They stared at each other in the dark.
Alexander spoke in a depleted voice. “If I went back, how could I help her?”
“You couldn’t. You would be dead. But you should comfort yourself with knowing he told you lies.”
“I have no f*cking comfort. And you don’t know everything. You don’t. You wouldn’t be so cavalier if it were your mother.”
“I’m not cavalier,” Tatiana said. “Don’t hurt me. I’m never cavalier.”
His eyes stinging, Alexander wanted to apologize but couldn’t.
Tatiana whispered, “In my family I was closest to Pasha, not my mother. And I’ll tell you this—if Burck told me Pasha was still alive and was with the enemy in the Polish woods, I would have left him to God. I would not have sent you to go find him.”
“That’s a good thing, because as you know, I f*cked it up.”
“You didn’t, darling,” Tatiana whispered. “You did all you could to rage against fate. Like I did to try to save Matthew Sayers. But every once in a blue while,” she continued, her voice barely an aching breath, “what we do, unfortunately, is just not enough.”
They fell quiet; struggling, stuporous but not quite asleep.
His mother, Gina Borghese, was seventeen when she left Italy to come to America to find a life fit for a modern, progressive young woman. She met Harold Barrington, as American as the Pilgrims; they fell in love—that fine-looking Italian and that fast-talking radical—fell in love, so unprogressive; they married, even worse. She changed her name, became Jane Barrington. They changed. She put away her abiding Catholicism. They became Communists. It felt so right. She was thirty-five when she finally had Alexander, her desperately wanted baby; it seemed less right to want something personal so badly. She was forty-six when they left for the Soviet Union. She was fifty-two when she was arrested. Now she would have been sixty-four. Could she live out twelve years in Perm-35, a feminist, a Communist, an alcoholic, a wife, Alexander’s mother? He had seen his father in his dreams. He had seen Tatiana. He had never seen his mother, not even as a ghostly breath on someone else’s voice to whisper to him, She is gone your mother. She is never coming back. He thought she was buried so deep in the recesses of his heart, and yet it took a shabby little man like Burck one word to uncover Alexander’s mother from her shallow grave.
Deep in the night Tatiana suddenly said, “You’re breathing so raw, Alexander. Don’t torture yourself. Can’t you see past the lies?”
“I can’t,” Alexander whispered, nearly breaking down. “Because I want it desperately to be true.”
“No, you don’t. Oh, Shura…”
“You should understand that better than anyone,” he said. “You who left our only child to go and find me when you thought I might be alive, because you wanted it desperately to be true. You didn’t leave me in the German woods.”
Her eyes were glistening. “It actually was true. You sent me word.”
“Oh, come on. Orbeli? You told me what you thought of my Orbeli.”
Her hands gripped his shoulders. “You said Orbeli, but the word was faith. I went because I believed. But this isn’t even your mother’s one vague word. This is the lying word of a lackey who’s betraying his country.”
He held her in desperation. “I just can’t see the truth of anything anymore.”
“Sometimes I can’t either.” She looked into his face in the blue of night. “You and your lying face and your damn Orbeli,” she whispered.
Alexander moved her off him, laid her down, was over her, was pressed into her, crushing her. Anthony was right there, he didn’t care, he was trying to inhale her, trying to absorb her into himself. “All this time you were stepping out in front of me, Tatiana,” he said. “Now I finally understand. You hid me on Bethel Island for eight months. For two years you hid me and deceived me—to save me. I’m such an idiot,” he whispered. “Wretch or not, ravaged or not, in a carapace or not, there you still were, stepping out for me, showing the mute mangled stranger your brave and indifferent face.”
Her eyes closed, her arms tightened around his neck. “That stranger is my life,” she whispered. They crawled away from Anthony, from their only bed, onto a blanket on the floor, barricading themselves behind the table and chairs. “You left our boy to go find me, and this is what you found…” Alexander whispered, on top of her, pushing inside her, searching for peace.
Crying out underneath him, Tatiana clutched his shoulders.
“This is what you brought back from Sachsenhausen.” His movement was tense, deep, needful. Oh God. Now there was comfort. “You thought you were bringing back him, but, Tania, you brought back me.”
“Shura…you’ll have to do…” Her fingers were clamped into his scars.
“In you,” said Alexander, lowering his lips to her parted mouth and cleaving their flesh, “are the answers to all things.”
All the rivers flowed into the sea and still the sea was not full.
Alexander didn’t get in touch with Burck. The next day they met with Tom Richter, who could not hide his astonishment when he shook the delicate hand of Alexander’s ox-pulling wife, his slight, slim, unassuming, soft and smiling wife.
“I told you,” Sam said quietly to Richter. “Not what you expected.”
“It’s not possible! She looks like she’d be scared of a mouse! And look at her—she’s the size of a peanut!”
“Gentlemen,” said Alexander, coming from behind them and putting his hands over their shoulders, “are you whispering about my wife?”
The size of a peanut she might have been and certainly scared of mice, but the promise Tatiana extracted from Tom Richter was the size of the Giza Pyramid—her husband could join the reserves to go to a quiet army base and translate classified documents in a room; military intelligence behind secure closed doors was fine with her, combat support, if necessary, in the form of intel analysis, perhaps a little training and exercise, but not under any circumstances, for any reason, in any universe could he be pulled up to active duty. She said the wounds he and she received in his ten years at war rendered her incapable of his active combat.
Richter agreed and Alexander spent a month being interviewed and probed and classified and tested and trained at Fort Meade, Maryland, while waiting for the final reserve paperwork to go through. Finally he got a security clearance card and a commission as a captain in the U.S. Army Officer Reserve Corps. Richter even managed to get a sparkly replica of a Congressional Medal for Anthony to whom he had taken a real shine—and even more of a shine to a fantastically flirty though engaged-to-someone-else Vikki who had come to see her Tania and her boyzie-boy.
They had long dinners with Sam and Matt Levine and their wives, went sailing on the Chesapeake with Richter and Vikki. Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss was all anyone talked about. And Dennis Burck quietly and without a trace left the federal government.
After two months with Richter, Tatiana and Alexander went on their way—to Wisconsin, South Dakota, Montana, to the woods in Oregon—through the land of lupine and lotus, to find their way.
FIRST INTERLUDE: SAIKA KANTOROVA, 1938
We children live in a frightening time for Russia.
ALEXANDER BLOK
Pasha
Pasha Metanov always cleaned his own fish, even when he was a little boy. He didn’t ask Babushka to clean it, nor even Mama, who would’ve cleaned his fish, his teeth, his feet and his britches for the rest of his life if he let her—because Pasha was Mama’s only son. He didn’t ask Tania to clean it because he knew she wouldn’t—and didn’t know how. When he was five he asked Deda to show him how to clean the fish, and from then on, he took care of his own dirty work.
The evening after meeting Saika they were having fish soup made out of Pasha’s bass, just the three of them. Pasha caught it and cleaned it and Dasha cooked it. Tania, who neither caught nor cleaned nor cooked, read.
The three siblings were by themselves. Deda, their grandfather, had gone fishing alone while it was still light, and Babushka, their grandmother, was visiting Berta and her mother, Blanca, down the street. “So what do we think? Do we like our new neighbors?” Dasha asked. “Stefan is such a nice boy.”
“He could have no teeth, Dasha, and you’d think he was a nice boy,” said Pasha. “Saika, now that’s a nice girl.” He smiled.
Tatiana said nothing. She was picking the bones out of the fish.
“Oh, no,” said Pasha. “Oh no, oh no, oh no. Dasha, she’s already quiet. What is wrong with her? What is wrong with you?” he boomed. “You don’t like them?”
Tatiana’s mind on this windy June evening was full of the Catholic Queen Margot sacrificing her life to an arranged marriage to the Protestant Henry Navarre to unite the French Catholics and the French Protestants, believing she would never in her life find true love in the prison in which she lived. But Tatiana knew she would—and how. She wanted to get back to Margot and La Môle.
Her brother and sister stopped eating and stared at her.
“Did I say anything? I said nothing.”
“Your silence is screaming to us,” said Pasha.
“And now she says nothing,” Dasha said. “Before you couldn’t shut up with your stupid questions.”
“Oh, leave her alone, Dash. She’s just jealous.” Pasha grinned, banging Tatiana on the head with a wooden spoon.
The spoon flew out of his hands, hit by Tatiana’s quick, no-nonsense fist. “Pasha, if I was jealous of every girl you said hello to, I’d be green all day long.”
With a flare to her dancing brown eyes, Dasha said, “So what was with the inquisition earlier?”
“Just wanted to know where the Pavlovs went, that’s all,” said Tatiana.
“What do you care?”
“I wanted to know. What if I end up where they’re at?”
“I saw a large portrait of a blue peacock in their house!” exclaimed Pasha. “It struck me kind of funny.”
Tatiana jumped on top of the dining table and sat down on it cross-legged. Dasha yelled at her to get off. Tatiana didn’t move. “Exactly, Pasha!” she said. “They haven’t unpacked, they haven’t taken down the Pavlovs’ things, but they put up a portrait of a peacock. Funny indeed. You think maybe they’re ornithophiles?”
“Stefan is a little like a peacock.” Dasha smiled. “With that fine tail to draw me in like a peahen.”
“What about Mark, your boss?” Tatiana said casually. “Does he have a fine tail?”
Oh how Pasha laughed. Indignantly red, Dasha pushed Tatiana off the table. “What do you know about anything? Stay out of adults’ business. I like it better when you’re buried in your silly books.”
“I bet you do, Dasha,” said Tatiana, hitting a laughing Pasha with the flat of her hand as she went to fetch Queen Margot. “I just bet you do.”
Who is Saika?
Saika was an arresting girl with dramatic overemphasized features, as if her creating artist drew her too fast with a charcoal pencil and then slapped on some undiluted paint. Her hair and eyes were the color of char and coal tar, her lips were ruby red and her teeth polar white. The cheekbones were high, the chin pointed, the forehead broad, the nose sharp. It all was sort of right, well-shaped, slick, but all of it together had the effect of too much on too small a canvas that you were standing too close to. You couldn’t look away, but for some reason you wanted to.
The next morning, Saika was by Tatiana’s window. “Hello,” she said, sticking her head in with a smile. “I’m unpacked. Want to come out and play?”
Was she serious? Tatiana never got out of bed in the morning.
“Can I climb in?” Saika asked. “I’ll help you get dressed.”
Tatiana, who slept cool and comfortable in just her underwear was ready to tell Saika to come on in, but something in the girl’s glance stopped her. What was it? Saika’s eyes were too black to discern a dilation of the pupil, and her skin was too dark to blush, but there was something in the unblinking of the almond eye and the parting of the large mouth that puzzled Tatiana. “Uh…I’ll be out in five minutes.” Tatiana drew the shabby window curtain. She slept by herself in a tiny alcove near an old unused stove. Her family hung a curtain across the opening so she could pretend it was a bedroom and not a boarded-up kitchen. She didn’t care. It was the only time in her life she slept by herself.
When she was dressed and brushed, Tatiana ambled with Saika down the morning village road in the fragrant air. She took Saika to Berta’s house. Berta had a cow that needed to be milked. Saika immediately asked why Berta couldn’t milk the cow herself.
“Because she is ancient. She is like fifty! Also she has arthritis. She can’t grasp the udders.”
“So why does she have a cow if she can’t take care of it? She can sell that cow for fifteen hundred rubles.”
Tatiana turned her head to Saika. “Because then she’ll have fifteen hundred rubles and no milk. What would the point be?”
“She can buy the milk.”
“The money will be gone in three months. The cow will produce milk for another seven years.”
“I’m just saying. Why have a cow if you can’t take care of it?”
Berta was very surprised to see Tatiana so early in the morning, throwing up her arthritic hands and exclaiming, “Bozhe moi! Who died? Even my mother is still sleeping.” She was a small, round, dark-haired woman, with sharp button eyes, “Not fifty, you impossible child,” she said, “but sixty-six.” Her hands may have been crippled, but she still made Tatiana and Saika tea and eggs, and while the girls ate, her gravel hands sifted through the grains of Tatiana’s soft hair. Saika watched it all.
They brought the fresh milk back to Dasha and then went out into the fields, on the outskirts of Luga, across the long grasses. Tatiana said to Saika that she imagined that’s what the prairies in America must look like—long grasses on rolling fields out to the horizons.
“Are you dreaming of America, Tania?” Saika said, and Tatiana, flustered, said no, no, not dreaming, just imagining prairies.
Saika told Tatiana she didn’t know where she was born (how could she not?) but she spent her last few years in a small town called Saki in northern Azerbaijan in the Caucasus Mountains. Azerbaijan was a tiny republic nestled under Georgia and above Iran. Iran! It might as well have been a prehistoric universe full of ferns and mastodons, that’s how remote it was from Tatiana’s understanding. “And from there, we came by train to here. After the summer my father’s new post will be north in Kolpino.”
“New post? What does he do?”
Saika shrugged. “What do adults do? He leaves in the morning. He comes home in the evening. My mother asks how his day was. He says it was fine. The next day it starts again. Sometimes he travels.” She paused. “Does your father travel?”
“Yes,” Tatiana said proudly, as if her father’s traveling was a reflection of her personal glory, as if she was just fantastic for raising a father who traveled. “He has gone to Poland for a month. He is going to bring me back a dress!”
“Oh, a dress,” said Saika, as if she couldn’t care less. “We haven’t been to Poland, but we’ve been to a few other places. Georgia. Armenia. Kazakhstan. To Baku on the Caspian Sea.”
“My, you’ve been all over,” Tatiana said with a touch of white envy. She didn’t want Saika not to have traveled. She just wished she had traveled a bit herself. All she’d ever seen was Leningrad and Luga.
They sat on a rock in the field, and Tatiana showed Saika how to eat the sweet meat out of a clover flower. Saika said she had never eaten it before.
“They don’t have clover in the Caucasus Mountains?” asked Tatiana, surprised that Saika could have lived without once touching the ubiquitous three-lobed weed.
“We lived on a farm in the mountains, herded sheep. I don’t know, maybe there was clover.”
“You were shepherds?”
“Of sorts.”
There was that vague qualification again. “What does that mean?”
Saika smiled. “I don’t think we were very good shepherds. We kept herding the sheep into the wolf’s mouth.” Tatiana turned to get a better look at Saika, who was smiling as she said it. “Just joking. It wasn’t sheep, Tania. We actually herded goats.” She made a derisive sound. “I don’t want to talk about it. I hate goats. Disgusting filthy animals.”
Tatiana didn’t reply. She never thought much about goats—but she smelled something suddenly that made her slide away from Saika. Embarrassed at her reaction—but there was that odor again!—Tatiana forced herself to sit still as she looked down at Saika’s hands, which were oddly unwashed for so early in the morning. Tatiana wanted to ask about the dirt under the nails, and the darkened tint to some of the pores of the skin, the rough brown texture of the ridges and grooves of Saika’s fingers, but then glanced further down and noticed too the unwashed feet in the sandals and wondered what Saika could have been doing at seven in the morning to have gotten herself into such a filthy state. Then Saika spoke, and the breath left Saika’s mouth and traveled across the summer meadow air to Tatiana’s nose and Tatiana realized that the smell that made her move away was Saika’s sour breath.
Tatiana got up. Saika walked in front of Tatiana, and as she did so, the whiff of her body got into Tatiana’s nose. Saika smelled of mold and ammonia. A baffled Tatiana looked at Saika, whose hands were raised above her head as she stretched. Yet Saika’s hair was shiny as if it had just been washed, and her face was not dirty. She wasn’t actually unwashed, she just smelled and looked unwashed.
The two girls stood in front of each other. The dark-haired girl wore an indigo dress. The blonde-haired girl wore a pale print dress. Saika was a head taller and her feet were one and a half times larger, and as Tatiana looked closer she noticed that the second and third toes on Saika’s feet grew out in a V. She stared inappropriately long and finally pointed. “Huh. I never saw that before. What is that?”
Saika glanced down. “Oh, that. Yeah. I have a fused joint.” She shrugged. “My father jokes that I have cloven feet.”
“Cloven feet?” Tatiana said faintly. “What does he mean by that?”
“I don’t know. You sure do ask a lot of questions, girl. Let me ask you a question. Can we go play with Pasha?”
Slowly they started walking back to Luga. “Tell me about him. What do you all do for fun around here?”
“What do kids do in the summer? Nothing,” Tatiana replied. When Saika laughed, Tatiana said, “No, really. Nothing. Last week, for example, we spent two days seeing how long a blueberry string we could make. Turned out about ten meters. Other times we fish. We swim, we argue.”
“Argue about what?”
“Europe, mainly. Hitler. Germany. I don’t know.”
“Come on,” Saika said. “You must do something else around these parts other than argue about Hitler and swim.” She raised her eye brows.
Like what? Tatiana wanted to ask. And what did the raising of the eye brows mean? “No, not really,” she said slowly.
“Well, we’re going to have to change that, won’t we?” said Saika.
Tatiana coughed slightly as they walked to the river to the other kids, attempting to steer the conversation back to how the children fished or berry-picked or idly spent their hazy summers.
How Idle Children Spend their Hazy Summers
Anton Iglenko was Tatiana’s best friend and he played great football and constantly begged for Tatiana’s small Leningrad-bought supplies of chocolate. Anton had three older brothers, Volodya, Kirill, and Alexei, all of them Pasha’s friends and all under direct nonnegotiable orders from Pasha to stay away from Tatiana, all except for Volodya’s friend Misha, who didn’t leave Tatiana’s side and hated Anton. There was also Oleg, who never played anything.
The only other girl in their group was Natasha with long brown hair, a bookworm even worse than Tatiana, always trying to engage Tatiana in one conversation or another about who was a better writer, Dumas or Dickens, Gogol or Gorky. Cousin Marina, who was not a reader, was coming in two weeks and would inflate the girl numbers and equalize the games.
Tatiana stood politely to the side while the new raven-haired girl held court among the eager-for-a-new-face throng, who had all known each other since birth.
“Who is the boy sitting under the tree?” Saika whispered, pointing. “He hasn’t come over to say hello to me.”
Tatiana glanced over. “That’s Oleg,” she said. “I told you about him. He is not in a playing mood.”
“When will he be in a playing mood?”
“When Hitler is dead,” Tatiana replied lightly. “He is a bit overwrought about—well, you want to see? I’ll show you. Oleg!” She called to the skinny brown boy nestled under the birches.
Reluctantly, as if it were a great effort, Oleg stood up and walked over. He nodded to Saika, he did not shake hands, and when Tatiana, poking him in the ribs, asked if he wanted to play hide and seek, he said, “Oh, great, yes, go ahead, play your little games. Czechoslovakia is about to fall, but you go ahead and play,” and went back under the trees.
Tatiana stared at Saika with a you see? “Oleg,” she explained, as they followed him to his hiding spot, “is distraught not only at the crisis in international relations, but—”
“I’m distraught only at your lack of interest in the outside world,” Oleg exclaimed.
“We’re very interested,” Tatiana said. “We’re interested in the fish in the river, and in the blueberries in the woods, and in the potatoes in the fields and in the amount of milk the cow brings us because that will determine whether we can have sour cream next week.”
“Go ahead. Make fun. Foreign Minister Masaryk and I only hope that sacrificing his fledgling country will be the only price the world pays for peace.”
Saika said she found him delightful. Tatiana replied that yes, they all took frequent delight in Oleg, who put up with them for only so long and then spat and ran the other way.
“Not too far, though,” Saika said. “Just under the tree.”
“He wants to save our immortal souls.” Tatiana smiled. “He can’t be doing that all the way from his dacha.”
“Oh, the immortal soul is such a bourgeois concept,” said Saika dismissively. “Oleg,” she said, “what are you afraid of? There will be no war. No one will go to war for little Czechoslovakia.”
“So how big does a country have to be before someone will go to war to defend it from Hitler?” asked Oleg.
Saika laughed. “Bigger than Czechoslovakia.”
“No one will go to war for Austria either.”
“Why would anyone want to?” Saika said. “The Austrians wanted the Germans in. Didn’t you see the results of the referendum they had two months ago? Ninety-nine percent of all Austrians welcomed Hitler.”
“The referendum was rigged,” said Oleg.
A shrugging Saika continued, “And now in the Sudetenland elections, the Germans won many votes. Did you hear what Herr Hitler said when he argued for the annexation of Sudetenland? ‘It is intolerable,’ he said, ‘to think of a large portion of our people exposed to the democratic hordes who threaten us.’ Herr Hitler also has no patience for democracy, like our Comrade Lenin.”
“Czechoslovakia is not his people,” said Oleg, frowning. “And Herr Hitler, as you reverentially call him, is amassing his troops along the Maginot line. Tell me, after Austria and Czechoslovakia, what’s next?”
“France!” Saika happily exclaimed. “Belgium, Holland. Spain will go to Franco soon—he’s winning that silly civil war against the factioned communists.”
“Now there’s a house divided against itself,” said Tatiana.
Saika shrugged. “Never heard of that expression,” she said, “but sounds right. Spain is Franco’s. Italy is already in Germany’s pocket. France will be next.”
“Do you think England will go to war for France?” Oleg asked caustically.
Saika laughed. “Certainly not for France,” she said.
“Exactly. France will fall. And then?”
“And then what?” Saika asked with a benign smile.
“Is Hitler going to be facing west during his entire expansion?” asked Oleg. “You don’t think he’ll turn east? To the Soviet Union?”
“Oh, he might turn east,” Saika said, crouching near Oleg who moved away from her warily. “But so what?”
“When he mobilizes his troops along the Ukraine and Byelorussia, will you still say, so what?”
“Yes, I will still say so what,” said Saika. “He will not step one foot into the Soviet Union. He is afraid of the Red Army. So who cares about what’s going on in the rest of the world?”
“I care,” said Oleg, glancing at Tatiana. “I care that Mussolini is firing Jews from top government posts. I care that the British are reneging on their promise to the Jews for a national home. I care that Anthony Eden quit over what he perceives as Chamberlain’s weakness.”
“Chamberlain is not weak,” said Saika. “He just doesn’t care either—like me. He wants the British boys to stay alive for their mothers. He has seen Verdun—a million young men lost for nothing. He wants no part of another war. Do you? Don’t you want to stay alive for your mother, Oleg?”
“Oleg’s mother died last year,” said Tatiana from behind.
“That explains everything.” Saika got up. “Come, Oleg. Take the load off your shoulders. Let’s go swim. You think because you worry, the generals will behave differently?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Oleg said. “I cannot engage in pointless fun when the world is in chaos. When the future of the world is at stake.”
Tatiana pulled Saika away, and when they were walking back to the bank of the river, she said with an impressed whistle, “How do you know so much?”
Leaning into her, Saika said, “I make it my business, Tania, to know everything.”
Why did that send a small shiver on a hot day down Tatiana’s spine?
The Swim Race to the Swift
The lazy day passed, searching for hornets’ nests and playing cat’s cradles, with two football games and one fall from a tree. There was a poetry reading from Blok (“For the last time/old world/we bid you/come.”) and a nap. There was some blueberry eating, there was a war game in the woods, and then it was late afternoon. The boys were arm wrestling, while the girls were braiding each other’s hair. The boys were fishing—with homemade sticks instead of fishing lines. Oleg and Saika engaged in another fiery discussion on whether a command economy—such as National Socialism in Germany or Communism in the Soviet Union—could perform as well in times of peace as it could in times of war (Saika thought it definitely could—and would).
And Pasha said, “Tania, let’s race.”
“Don’t want to.” Tatiana was sitting cross-legged on the ground, playing a cat’s cradle string game with Natasha.
“Does Tatiana even know how to swim?” Saika teased, leaving Oleg alone.
Tatiana didn’t want to explain. She had no bathing suit and didn’t want to be swimming in her underwear and vest today in front of Saika—which was ironic, since she never thought twice about swimming in front of Anton or Misha or Oleg.
But Pasha was coaxing her and Saika was coaxing her and Misha, who didn’t think she could win today, was coaxing her, and then they were all softly laughing, except Saika who was loudly laughing. And so Tatiana, never one to shy away from one of Pasha’s challenges undressed to her underwear and vest. Was she imagining it, or was that a smirk on Saika’s face? The afternoon tide filled the air with fresh water and leaning wet white cherry blossoms, and the sun was high and reluctant in the sky.
Tatiana and Pasha climbed down the slope to the bank. The object was to fling yourself wholeheartedly into the river on “THREE!” and then swim fifty meters to the other side.
And then you raced back.
Tatiana saluted him as they stood facing the Luga. “I’ll see you on the other side, brother,” she said.
He saluted her. “Yes, I’ll look back and there you’ll be.”
“Onetwothree!”
Pasha, oh Pasha, small, strong, swift, laughably competitive, trying to trip his smaller, weaker sister. She wasn’t as strong, not as a runner, not as a swimmer. Her legs were not as muscular. Tatiana had slender girl thighs; she was a tiny lean foal.
They ran in—leaped in—with joy, and then swam as fast as they could, front stroke, breast stroke, frog stroke, doggy-paddle stroke. The current in the afternoon moved swiftly, the river was almost on full, the flow was strong.
Pasha was winning at the twenty-meter mark, but the relentless Tatiana, a few meters behind him, called out, “Don’t forget to breathe, Pasha.”
“Don’t forget to lose, Tania,” he called back, gaining half a meter on her. But at the thirty-meter mark, his lead began to slip. Tatiana didn’t even increase her tempo. Trying not to swallow water, she kept moving. Pasha was slowing down; his kicking, splashing legs were near Tatiana’s head—on purpose, she knew. At the forty-five-meter mark, taking a deep breath, she propelled herself forward past him, touched bottom, and ran out, jumping up and down jubilantly, dripping, panting and breathless, her wet hair clinging to her delighted face.
Pasha was less jubilant. “I cannot tell you how annoying you are,” he said calmly, shaking himself off.
“Says the vanquished.” Tatiana jumped on him, and they fell into the water, and a laughing Pasha said, “Get away from me. I can’t breathe.”
She got off him. “Race back?”
“Forget it.”
“Next time, Pasha.”
“That’s right. Next time, Tania.”
They swam slowly back across, on their backs, just their legs kicking. Tatiana was looking up at the cloudless sky and the distant pale June sun. Reaching out, she took hold of Pasha’s hand.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She moved to let go. He didn’t let go.
Their friends were gathered in a cluster on the pebbly needly banks. Saika said, “All right, Tania. Now I’ll race you.”
“Yeah, Tania,” said Oleg. “Go ahead. Girls’ war. Sort of like Belgium against France. Even I want to see. Natasha here never races.”
“I’m a reader, not a racer,” said Natasha proudly, clutching her Gogol (Dead Souls). “Besides, the girls can’t win against Tania.”
“We’ll see about that.” Without a word, Saika threw off her dress. And then her bra. And then her underwear. And then she was naked.
The children for a moment stopped playing. Even Natasha looked up from Councilor Chichikov’s exploits with the souls of the deceased village peasants. Tatiana quickly averted her eyes but not before she noted Saika’s well-developed body, the sloping breasts, the dark nipples, the prominent mound of thick black hair, the widening hips. She had hair under her arms, and Tatiana just began to think that Saika at fifteen looked as advanced as Dasha at twenty-one when Saika turned around to walk to the river, and the boys and girls inhaled in a collective gasp.
Saika’s back was ruined with raised thick coiled white scars, criss-crossing her back like ropes from her shoulder blades into the small of her spine.
Tatiana’s quickened breath must have given her away. Saika stopped walking and turned around. “What?”
It was Pasha who broke the shocked and nervous silence. “What happened to your back, Saika?”
“What? Oh, that? Nothing.”
“Must have gone and done something pretty bad,” said Oleg.
“I must have. Tania, are you just going to stand there gaping or are you going to race?”
Tatiana gave her brother a troubled look before going down to the waterline. She no longer thought about her vest or her smallness. Racing suddenly seemed offensive. “Saika, maybe we should do this another day.”
“Why? Another day my back will be just as scarred.” There was no emotion in her voice.
Tatiana looked back at Pasha, Anton, Oleg, Natasha, Misha, Kirill, Volodya. No one knew what to feel. They were embarrassed and uncomfortable. Tatiana frowned.
“If you’re not up to it…” Saika drew out.
“No, no, I’m always up to it,” Tatiana said. “On three then?”
“On three.”
But it wasn’t quite on three. It was more on two and a half. Before Tatiana could utter the word “three” Saika ran into the water, all shaking flesh and hair.
Tatiana sprinted and dived in head first, literally flying past Saika, who stopped instantly and said, “Wait, that’s not fair.”
Tatiana stopped reluctantly.
“I didn’t know you could leap in like that.”
“I didn’t know on three meant right before three,” Tatiana rejoined, swimming back. “You didn’t hear me complaining.”
“Well, you should’ve complained if you didn’t like it.”
“It didn’t matter.”
“It’s not fair,” Saika repeated, rubbing her wet breasts.
“All right,” said Tatiana. “Let’s do it again.”
They did it again. This time almost on three, and this time, Tatiana didn’t long-jump in.
Saika was strong and she was fast. But she was also heavier than Tatiana, and that body must have weighed her down, because Tatiana had to slow down at the twenty-meter mark, and again at the thirty-meter mark, and by the time they were at forty meters, Tatiana was swimming so slowly that she thought she could float on her back faster than Saika was swimming, spluttering in the water, out of breath, panting, wheezing. Tatiana stopped using her arms. Then she started dog-paddling but stopped using her legs. Her breathing was three beats above normal. Finally she let Saika stagger out of the water first and collapse on the shore. “That was hard won,” Saika panted. “But a good race.”
Still in the water, Tatiana bent backwards and dunked her head to slick back her hair and then came out and sat next to Saika.
Saika said, “You did really well for such a small thing.” She couldn’t get her breath.
“Thank you,” Tatiana said quietly.
“When you’re ready we’ll swim back.”
“How’s now then?”
“Let’s wait a second.” Saika was still panting.
It took them a long time to make it back. Saika could barely move her legs and kept floating downriver in the current.
“Saika, if you’re not careful, you’ll end up in the Baltic Sea,” Tatiana said. “Look how far we’ve gotten away from the others. Let’s swim a little harder.”
Saika couldn’t swim a little harder.
The first thing Pasha said when they finally stepped on the bank was, “Tania, what happened to you in that race? You looked like you died out there.”
Saika swirled to look at Tatiana for one dark and icy blink. The unholy expression fast passed from Saika’s face but not from Tatiana’s memory.
“Put on your clothes, Saika,” Tatiana said, turning away. “I have to go home.”
Something about Tatiana
Walking back home from the river, wet, hungry and tired, they passed a flock of old women in long robes, Bibles in their hands. The women’s faces lit up at Tatiana, who smiled, sighed slightly and hid behind Pasha.
“What’s wrong?” asked Saika, but before she could say anything else, the old women were upon them. They extricated Tatiana from Pasha, their crinkled hands all over her, stroking her hair, putting the sign of the cross on her forehead, kissing her hands.
“Tanechka,” they cooed, “how is our darling this evening?”
“Your darling is fine,” answered Pasha for Tatiana, yanking her away.
Tatiana introduced Saika. The women nodded but did not shake hands with the girl, nor did Saika offer her own hand. They stood awkwardly, Tatiana still in their midst, in their fold, in their skirts.
Pasha explained to Saika that these women had baptized him and Tania in 1924.
“Baptism is so provincial, ladies,” said Saika to the women. “Our new laws of 1929 clearly state—no religious instruction of young children until they are of age. Do you still go around baptizing children who cannot choose for themselves?” Everyone fell quiet. “Do you?” she repeated, undaunted by their silence.
“Well, no, not anymore,” replied one of the women.
After an unsuitable silence, Tatiana spoke. “Are you baptized, Saika?”
“No, I do not belong to the cult of Christ,” Saika replied. “My ancestors used to be something called the Yezidi. We did not baptize.”
The women’s mouths opened. “Not the Yezidi!”
“Ah, informed village women,” said Saika. “Well, well. Yes, but I’m not really part of that anymore, ladies. Now I’m a Pioneer.”
“Are you in a League of Militant Atheists?” Pasha smiled. “Or are you a member of the Group of Godless Youth?”
“No, but when I turn eighteen I will become a Comsomol—a vigorous, modern, free-thinking member of the new world.”
Immensely curious, Tatiana pulled herself away, calling for Saika, who stared down the old women before she caught up to the Metanovs, kicking up the dirt road with her worn brown sandals as they walked in silence. “What is it, Tania?” Saika asked. “Why are the old so enamored with you? That Berta this morning couldn’t keep her hands off you, why?”
“Tell her, Tania.”
“Pasha, shut up.”
“All the old people in Luga think Tania can save them from death.”
“Pasha, shut up!”
Pasha was, as always, undeterred. “Saika, seven years ago, there was a fire in one of the village huts. Blanca Davidovna, the oldest person in the village, was alone in it. Her daughter Berta, whom you saw this morning pawing Tania, was in Leningrad. And our Tania ran into that house and got Blanca out, while the hut burned to the ground. Of course when our mother found out, she nearly killed Tania for going in there.” Pasha laughed. “That would’ve been ironic, wouldn’t it, Tanechka?” Pasha leaned in to his sister and tickled her damp neck.
“Pasha, will you please stop it,” Tatiana said in a stern voice.
“How did you get her out, Tania?” asked Saika.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I was barely seven.”
“But why did you go in there in the first place?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I was barely seven. I thought I heard her calling.”
“Yes—from the other side of the village!” Pasha laughed. “You should hear Blanca Davidovna tell that story.” Pasha’s eyes went all aglow as he mimicked the older woman. “Oh, our Taaaaanechka, she just took my hand and led me—led me, I tell you, out of my burning house! If you think those old women were bad, wait till you see Blanca with Tania.”
“Pasha, I swear, if you don’t stop it…”
Telling Saika about the incident filled Tatiana with uncharacteristic anxiety. The mystery of the fire, of her seven-year-old self running into that house, had been bizarre even to her, considering how easily frightened she was of all kinds of uncontrollable things. She didn’t like to talk about it, she didn’t like to think about it, and she certainly didn’t like the way Saika kept staring at her. Tatiana firmly felt that she didn’t want Saika knowing things about her that Tatiana couldn’t understand or explain, even to herself.
Something About Saika
That evening in the hammock in their small weed-covered yard, Saika played the lute for them. It made Pasha speechless. Saika was a girl of many talents, Tatiana was realizing. Saika held the three-string panduri, and played it as if she were born to it. She played them national Georgian tunes they’d never heard of, many Azeri melodies, and then some Soviet war marches.
“Very fine, Saika,” said Pasha with a whistle. “Very fine indeed.”
Saika laughed coquettishly. Tatiana glanced at Pasha. Could her brother still be besotted with a malodorous girl who couldn’t swim and had such marks on her back? No, she decided. He didn’t look particularly besotted anymore.
“You do play nicely, Saika,” Tatiana said.
“And when I play, I get into people’s hearts,” Saika said. “I made quite a bit of pocket money playing my lute in Saki.”
Tatiana was swinging her feet and listening to the crickets when Saika, also swinging in the hammock, said, “My mother is a fortune teller, you know.”
“A what?”
“You know, a lady who tells the future. You don’t have them here in Luga? I thought every village had them. I thought it was a requirement.”
Pasha and Tatiana said nothing. Blanca Davidovna, deeply religious and fully believing she was sinning, still occasionally looked at the palms and the tea leaves. Did that count?
Saika jumped up from the hammock. “Come to my house right now,” she said. “My mother is the best. She’ll tell you your future.”
Tatiana shook her head. “It’s getting late, Saika,” she said. “Maybe another time.”
“No. Come now. What are you, afraid? Pasha, you gonna let your sister cow you down?”
A curious Pasha could never resist a challenge, and he dragged Tatiana with him. Pasha was very curious. Leaning into him, Tatiana whispered, “If only you knew how to read, you would right now recall the story of Bluebeard. Idle curiosity, my dear Pasha, often leads to deep regret.”
“Yes, well, when I’m a silly woman, I’ll worry about it,” he whispered back.
“Pasha, don’t you smell her?”
“What are you talking about?”
“She smells so sour. Every time you go near her, you don’t want to hold your nose?”
“Tania, you’ve gone mad. Really, you have. She smells fine. Be quiet.”
Inside Saika’s house, the mother, Shavtala, was nowhere to be found. The doors to the bedrooms were closed. The children perched on the sofa in the dark living room that smelled heavily of smoke, and waited. “She’ll be out any minute,” said Saika. “I see you’re looking at our books, Tania. What kind of books do you like?”
“All kinds.” The Kantorovs had odd things up on their shelves. Tatiana couldn’t take her eyes off the picture of a large blue peacock over the mantel.
“You don’t like the books we have, Tania?” Saika shrugged. “Well, your Dickens, your Dumas do not write about anything I’m interested in. I like Gorky. I like Mayakovsky. I like Blok.”
“Yes, I see,” said Tatiana, reluctantly drawing her gaze away from the vivid bird. “Gorky is dead. Mayakovsky dead. Blok dead. What about Osip Mandelstam? You like him? He’s the best we’ve got, and he’s not dead—yet.”
“Who?”
Through one open casement window, Tatiana heard the click of the crickets, the rustling of the leaves—and then through the air, above the crickets and over the leaves…came a wailing howl.
She looked at Pasha.
Saika said quickly, “Tell me about Mandelstam.”
Tatiana lowered her voice. “Where is Mandelstam? The official word is that he has pneumonia and is on his deathbed. But my Deda says very soon they will say he killed himself after poetic torments.” Tatiana said the word Deda reverentially.
Saika’s eyes flared. “Your grandfather says that, does he? And who is they?”
The howls continued.
Tatiana was puzzled by them. “Saika…?” she said.
“Tania, shh.” That was Pasha.
“I thought your grandfather was a math teacher,” said Saika, “not a rumormonger.”
The piercing sounds were making it difficult for Tatiana to carry on a normal conversation. “Oh, dear!” she finally exclaimed. “What is that? Is that coming from this house?”
Pasha stared down at the unswept wood floor.
“I don’t know,” Saika said calmly. “Look, it’s stopped now. But tell me—what does your grandfather know about the traitor Mandelstam?”
“Who said he was a traitor?” Tatiana lowered her voice. “All that gorgeous poetry he wrote around the time of the revolution and then later in exile—gone, excised! And he is excised, too. As if he never existed.” Almost in a whisper herself, Tatiana said, “Perhaps my whisper/was already born/before my lips.”
“That’s how enemies of the State are treated,” said Saika. “Excised as if they never existed. Not even a whisper left. Nothing left.”
“The poet Mandelstam is an enemy of the State?” Tatiana said with surprise.
“Of course,” said Saika. “He is a man who believes in the self more than he believes in the State. The self is dead! The Writers’ Union expressly told him, told everyone, Socialist Realism only. No personal poetry. He went directly against all precepts and laws set forth in the doctrine. For that he became an enemy of the State.”
It was Tatiana’s turn to be silent. “Saika, I thought you didn’t know who Mandelstam was.”
Saika said carelessly, “Oh, I know something about him.”
“Yes,” Tatiana said, “for a goat herder’s daughter, for someone who lived in the mountains, who did not read books or newspapers, you sure do know a lot about…a lot of things.” In Tatiana’s tone was a flickering sparrow of darkening confusion, but in Saika’s tone as she answered was a swollen puff of peacock pride.
“I told you, Tania. I make it my business to know everything. Which is why I want Mama to read your fortune.”
Loud high-pitched inhuman cries resumed suddenly.
Pasha jumped up. “You know what? We have to go.”
“No, no, stay,” said Saika. “She’ll be out in a minute.”
“No. Come on, Tania.” He grabbed her hand, pulling her up.
“Saika, what is that sound?” said Tatiana. “Those beastly cries will wake the dead! Please tell me that’s not your mother.”
“Tania, let’s go!”
“Pasha is right, Tania,” said Saika, sitting quietly on the couch. “You really should run along.”
Pasha yanked on Tatiana’s arm. But she was concerned, worried. She stared at the closed doors, at the open windows. “No…it’s…out there…it sounds like…caterwauling.”
“Must be cats then,” said Saika. “Or coyotes.”
“Coyotes…” Tatiana repeated. “Carnivorous canines? In Luga?” She turned to her brother. “Do we have wolves in Luga, Pasha?”
“I don’t know, Tania.” Pasha was headed outside, dragging Tatiana behind him. “You with your questions. Will you ever stop?”
“Another time then,” Saika called after them. “My mother will read your fortune another time.”
They were out in the night air. It was no better outside. The shrieks were coming from the Kantorov house, and they were knife-like. Across the weedy yards, over the broken fence and the overgrown grass, in their little summer dacha, Dasha and Babushka were peering outside, muttering obscenities and slamming shut all the crusty windows. When Tatiana and Pasha came inside their house, small and compact Deda, still like smooth and clear glass, was sitting calmly, his magnificent head of salt-and-pepper hair focused over his tangled fishing lines. He sat in his chair on the screened porch almost as if he were deaf.
Babushka was not deaf. Larger than him, gray and imperious, after slamming the windows and muttering, “Indecent! Simply indecent!” over and over, she ran out of words. She put on the little radio, turned the sound up high. They caught only static.
No one knew what to say. Except for Deda who was busy with his lines, everyone kept casting nervous glances toward Tatiana.
Babushka said, “Do we have any mountain ash? Some superstitions believe that the rowan tree or mountain ash drives away evil spirits.”
“Anna!” That was Deda atypically raising his voice to Babushka. “Have you got nothing, nothing else to do? Mountain ash?”
Tatiana laughed.
Late that night, after Babushka and Deda were long in bed, Dasha, Pasha, and Tatiana were sitting on the small porch around the kerosene lamp talking about Saika and her scars. “She got completely naked in front of all of you?” Dasha said incredulously. “Tomorrow I will tell her not to do that again. Or I swear, I will tell her mother.”
Pasha coughed. Dasha coughed.
Tatiana smiled. “Her mother, the, um, loud fortune teller?” she said.
Oh, such coughing from her brother and sister!
“Come on, Tania, aren’t you a little interested?” said Pasha, shifting the subject slightly. “A real fortune teller! I mean, that’s exciting, no? Someone who sees through unfathomable things to the future, to the path of your life? We’ve never met anyone like that. Blanca Davidovna and her tea leaves don’t count. Aren’t you curious?”
“No,” Tatiana replied. “Not in the slightest.” She was sitting on the floor between Dasha’s legs, watching Pasha shuffle cards, while Dasha was braiding her hair, splitting it, kneading it, caressing her head, tying up the white-gold down feathers with satin ribbons. As her hands moved across Tatiana’s head, Tatiana closed her eyes, feeling sleepy in the late night with her brother and sister.
“Why not?” said Pasha.
“Yeah, Tania,” said Dasha. “Even I’m interested in hearing what she has to say.”
A relaxed and murmuring Tatiana said, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, for inwardly they are ravening wolves…” Amused at her own joke, at her reference to wolves, at her funny family, Tatiana laughed.
Pasha and Dasha didn’t laugh. “Who says she is a false prophet?” said Dasha. “Where did you hear that?”
“Blanca Davidovna.”
“Um, but, do you have any questions, Tania?” Pasha said with another one of his peculiar coughs, like he had a fish bone stuck in his throat. “For me…or, say, for Dasha?”
“Well, if you two clever-clogs have the answers,” Tatiana said, blinking at him with amused affection, “why are you running to the loud fortune teller?”
A Fateful Visit
Mama came for the weekend on Friday night from Leningrad. But Mama did not come alone. Mama brought Mark with her. Mark! Dasha’s dentist boss.
When Tatiana saw them through her window coming down the dusty road, she jumped from her bed and ran to the porch on the other side of the house, where she shook her sister, who was reading a newspaper, and hissed, “Mama brought Mark, Dasha. Mark!” What a mire. And by Dasha’s horrified face, it looked as if Tatiana didn’t know the half of it. And perhaps she didn’t, but she did know that in the last week, after all the chores and the housework and the dinner and the cleaning were done, Dasha fixed herself up, put on nice clothes, and disappeared for long walks in the woods with Stefan.
Mark came in, still in his suit, a balding man in his thirties. There was awkward confusion. Dasha fussed, bleated, giggled—and finally offered him a cup of tea. Babushka offered him something stiffer. Deda, as always, said nothing.
They had dinner. The conversation was stilted and broken. Dasha and Mark made small talk about the weather, and Leningrad, and white nights, and work. Deda and Mark made small talk about Hitler and Italy and Abyssinia and Spain. Tania stayed quiet. An exhausted Mama sat near Pasha and asked quiet questions only of him. How was he feeling? How was he sleeping? How was he fishing? How was Tatiana behaving?
At ten in the evening, when it seemed much too late for social visits, Tatiana heard a knock on the porch door. Deda sent Tania. Stefan and Saika stood outside.
Dasha nearly groaned out loud.
Tatiana stood quietly in front of them and said nothing. Finally it was Babushka who came forward and said, “Tatiana Georgievna! What in the world is wrong with you? Tell your friends to come in. Come in, please. Come in.”
Tatiana sighed, going to sit next to Dasha, who had moved a little away from Mark. Dasha struggled to her feet as Saika and Stefan came in.
Poor Dasha looked so flummoxed that Deda was forced to intercede with the introductions. And unsmiling Stefan shook hands with a smiling Mark.
For a few minutes Deda sat constitutionally quiet and then said he was going to bed, dragging Babushka with him. “Leave the young ones alone, Anna,” he said. “They’ll work it all out. They always do.”
Tatiana didn’t think so. She asked if anyone wanted to play dominoes. Her family usually refused to play dominoes with her, but Mark absent-mindedly played six times. And lost six times. Pasha to make him feel better said he would never win even if he was rapt on his tiles.
The conversation they made was wretched. Mark kept repeating that for him this was a rare weekend off. He was a dentist and Dasha worked for him when it wasn’t summer. He must have noticed Stefan’s cold stares at Dasha because he clammed up, and then conversation really ground down. Not soon enough, Stefan got up and said they had to be going.
That’s when Saika handed Dasha her shawl and said, “You left it in our house, Dasha, the other night after you came back from your walk with Stefan.”
Tatiana, deeply frowning, looked away. It was a train wreck. What was Saika doing? Tatiana excused herself and disappeared to her room, and in a moment Saika knocked on her window, asking if she wanted to sneak outside. Tatiana did not.
After the light was turned off and she was nearly asleep, she heard voices in the yard. At first she thought it was Saika again, but it was Dasha and Mark, she trying to be quiet, he trying to be loud.
Tatiana didn’t want to hear a single word, but since she couldn’t shut her window without proclaiming her wakefulness, she put a pillow over her head and started humming. Only when Dasha’s voice became louder, did curiosity and sadness for her sister get the better of Tatiana, and she removed the pillow to listen.
“Why did I come here?” Mark was saying. “I came here because I wanted to be with you, Dasha. And I thought you wanted to be with me.”
“This is a dead end between us,” said Dasha. “I know you think we’re having quite a romance, and I’m certainly not expecting more, I’m not asking you for more. Staying late after work in your office is enough for me in Leningrad. But I didn’t realize you felt I owed you even in Luga.”
Tatiana started humming. Mark said something.
“That’s what you want, right?” Dasha said. “Me to give myself to you for fifteen minutes during our lunch break, or between patients, on the reception sofa before you run home to your wife, while I go home to sleep in bed with my sister? Is there more, Mark? Because I didn’t realize there was. I thought that we were pretty much squeezing every drop out of the dry rag that is our relationship.”
Hummm…
Mark said something. It sounded like, “But I love you.”
“Did you love me when I got pregnant last year”—
Oh no! HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!
—“What did you say to me then? You must have been saying I love you, but what I heard was, Dasha, there’s nothing we can do. We have nowhere to go. That must have been your I love you. And I knew you were right. Did I complain? Did I ask you to come with me to the clinic? No. I went by myself after work, and stood in line like all the other women, and afterward, another woman, a complete stranger, helped me walk home. The next day, I came into work. You and I went on as before. Oh, and by the way, I love you, too, Mark.” Dasha was crying.
Hummm…
“I’m resigned to my life,” Dasha said. “Resigned to my life at twenty-one.” Tatiana couldn’t hum loud enough to drown out her sister’s breaking voice. “But you know what? I think I prefer five hot minutes in the woods with Stefan to two years on that freezing sofa with you.”
“I love you, I do,” Mark said faintly. “I came to tell you I’m planning to tell my wife I’m leaving.”
“You better do more than figure out how to tell her, Mark,” said Dasha. “You better figure out how to leave her.”
“I thought we could stay in the office until the council found us a new place.”
“In the office? What, on the couch?” Dasha paused. Quietly they said some things Tatiana blessedly couldn’t hear. Then Dasha said, “Why can’t you just tell her she has to go live somewhere else? Tell her she has to leave, not you. Why does she get to stay? It’s your apartment. It’s registered to you. It’s her problem if there’s nowhere for her to live.”
Mark said something Tatiana couldn’t hear, but what she did hear was Dasha’s subsequent, “Are you kidding me? Oh my God! Oh my God!”
“She just told me last week,” Mark said quickly. “I didn’t know. She says it’s illegal now anyway to get rid of it.”
“Now, there’s a reason to keep a baby!” yelled Dasha.
“Well, she said she didn’t want to get rid of it.”
“She told you she was going to have a baby and you’re standing here under the cherry blossoms with me figuring out a way to leave her?”
Tatiana heard struggling, wrestling, slaps, footsteps, tears, heard Dasha walking away, crying, saying, “You are such a prize, Mark. You are such a f*cking prize.”
Mark stayed outside smoking. Tatiana heard him even through the pillow over her head, kicking branches, muttering, lighting cigarette after cigarette.
He left to go back to Leningrad the following foggy morning at dawn. No one saw him go except Tatiana who watched his stooped back and his bag in his hand as he shuffled down the road. She watched him until he disappeared from sight and the cows went out to pasture, their bells clanging.
Tatiana could not even read her book, lying on her side, pitying her poor sister.