Anthony didn’t hear his parents argue. He was sure he would hear loud voices, shouting, but he heard nothing. A half-hour later he walked out of his room into silence. Their bedroom door was open. Quietly opening the back door, he glimpsed his father sitting on the deck bench. His mother was in his lap, her arms around him. Their faces were pressed together. They were rocking. Anthony coughed. His father stopped rocking; his mother with her back to Anthony fixed her blouse. Anthony started to say he needed a permission slip signed for a school trip.
“Your mother will be right there. Go.” Alexander didn’t even turn his head when he spoke. Anthony went inside.
In a little while his door opened. He was expecting—and hoping—for his mother, but it was his father who came in. He signed the note, and then sat on the edge of the bed. Anthony’s mouth was twisted. He couldn’t speak to him. He could barely speak about it to his mother, but at least he could cry with her, yell at her, say cruel things to her. He was free to be anything with her. But with his father, he knew he could not be. Still, Anthony was so upset, so angry.
“What’s the matter with you?” Alexander said. “Go ahead. Speak your mind.”
Trying to keep his voice straight, Anthony said, “I don’t understand how you could have not defended her, Dad. They were being so mean to her. Isn’t Amanda supposed to be Mommy’s friend?”
“She’s a foul-weather friend,” said Alexander. “Mommy doesn’t expect much from Amanda, who never disappoints her.” He fell silent for a moment. “But Ant,” he said, “you know that our life is not a parade for acquaintances at the dessert table. You know that. You are my son, but you’re fourteen. Mommy and I are not fourteen. And we are going through adult things that we are not going to explain, either to our casual friends or to you.” Alexander leaned to his son and said quietly, “But you know that when your mother needs real defending, I’m her man.”
Anthony looked up at his father. “I thought tonight was such a time.”
Alexander brushed the hair from Anthony’s forehead. “No,” he said. “Tonight, the mother lion managed fine by herself. Now stop being so overwrought. You’re a boy, and the son of a soldier. Emotions in check, buddy.”
But then his mother came to see him. And he closed his eyes, turning in to her, while she kneeled by his bed and held his head and whispered words to him he barely heard and did not need to. You are a good boy, Antman. You have always been a lovely, protective, open, beautiful boy. And he cried in her arms, and she was all right with it.
Outside Tatiana climbed into Alexander’s lap once more, kissing away the evening from his heart.
Alexander sat cradled in her, smoking, breathing in the night air. “Let me ask you…” he finally said, trying to keep his voice even, keep it from cracking. “Can you explain to me, in a way I can understand, why you and I, of all the people in this world, after all the love that we have made, can’t make one little baby?”
Tatiana groaned, her eyes deeply averted from him, her body shrinking down, curling around herself. “Shura, darling…” Her voice was defeated. “I’m very sorry. Something must be wrong.”
“That much is clear,” said Alexander, his eyes deeply averted from her.
Tatiana stared at Alexander after he said that. And then she got off his lap.
The Soviet Union Baby Boom
It was another Friday night.
Tonight was not a poker night, or a drink with the buddies night, or a downtown with Tyrone and Johnny night. Alexander kept Anthony home with him. They played basketball, had pot roast Tatiana left for them, went to the pictures, had ice cream, came home, played dominoes to hone their skills against her. Anthony was long asleep.
It was three in the morning.
In his black BVDs Alexander was sitting on the couch in the dark living room, his long legs stretched out nearly to the TV, his head thrown back, arms dangling by his sides, a burned down cigarette between his fingers, eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
They weren’t having another baby because they both weren’t here. Alexander Belov wasn’t in America, he was decaying where they didn’t have children after the war that killed fifty million people.
In the United States, two million babies were born in 1946. Three million in 1947 and in 1948, and four million every single year from 1948 to 1956. Women were being sneezed at and they were getting pregnant. Not Alexander’s Soviet woman. Because her husband was a Soviet man, and he was logging in Siberia where he and two million other repatriates were sent after being handed over by the Allies. The soldiers who weren’t killed in the war were sent to Kolyma, to Perm-35, to Aykhal, to Archangelsk. Who else was going to rebuild the Soviet Union?
So while in the decade after the war, England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Austria and, most of all, the United States enjoyed a population explosion unheard of in history, the Soviet Union had a population decrease. How could that be? Where were the men?
Well, the young, the old, the healthy, the sick were in Magadan. Twenty-five percent of all able-bodied Soviet men were in the camps. The maimed were dead. Unlike the United States, where veterans without arms could come home and still sire children, most of the Soviet one-armed veterans were in the earth, because there had not been enough penicillin to save them.
To increase the birth rate, the Soviet government gave periodic amnesty to the Gulag male prisoners. When that was not enough, it abolished abortion. There never had been another form of contraception for women in Soviet Russia, and without abortion available every afternoon from three to five at every hospital clinic in every city, surely there would be a baby boom.
There wasn’t. So condoms were removed from the command production line. Black market condoms became exorbitantly priced. You went to prison for buying them and for selling them. When that was not enough, the government practically abolished marriage. The one woman, one man union clearly wasn’t working in the Soviet Union. There weren’t enough men left for Christian marriage.
Married women, whose husbands’ whereabouts were—ahem—unknown, were given instant, no questions asked, no reasons needed divorce dispensation so they wouldn’t waste valuable time waiting around for their missing spouses. The women became divorced with flourishing ease and then were given bonuses, raises, prizes, medals, time off work, cash in hand for having children by absolutely anyone. Proof of paternity was not necessary. Marriage was not essential—and not encouraged. Cohabitation was not essential—and not encouraged. Not only not encouraged, it was not even possible. There was nowhere for married couples to live. The women lived banded together in communal apartments where the men had once been. One amnestied Gulag man among thirteen desperate women, and suddenly there was a chance at repopulation. Once his business was done, the man could move on to the next communal apartment. It seemed so foolproof: both sexes got exactly what they most wanted. Men got absolute sexual freedom and women got financial security.
Yet even with these enticing procreation stimulus packages, ten years after the war, the population growth was zero! Worse than zero—there were fewer people in Russia in 1955 than there had been in 1945. More people were dying than were being born. Why? Sex wasn’t abolished; where were the children?
It was the women’s fault. They were having sex, all right, but they weren’t idiots. They worked all day, they lived in tight quarters with other women, and those unfortunate enough to become pregnant went to doctors and paid vast sums to get under-the-table abortions. When this was discovered, both the doctors and the women got ten years’ hard labor. To save their skins, the doctors refused to perform abortions. In their unrepentant desperation, the women started performing their own. The women’s mortality rates soared. At the later stages of pregnancy, at five, six, seven months, the babies were delivered by midwives and then aborted right in the communal apartments and thrown out with the communal trash.
The Soviet Government solemnly proclaimed the population was stagnating because of a soaring infant mortality rate.
The women were dying, the babies were dying, and meanwhile the dying men were where Nikolai Ouspensky now was, where Alexander should have been, five thousand kilometers across the tundra, out in the forests from dawn to dusk, building forts and fences, cutting down the pines. That’s where his spirit was, but his strong, healthy body was in Arizona, building a house for every house he had destroyed when he was a tank commander, a penal battalion commander, a leader of wretched men who burned down the towns they vanquished, burned the bridges and the huts and the marketplaces. No more apples or cabbages, no more watches or whorehouses. Alexander had a lifetime of villages to rebuild before he was done. And alongside Ouspensky, he had a lifetime of fences to put up before he was done, fences so the men couldn’t get to the imprisoned women (who got ten years for illegal abortions), who were on their hands and knees lifting up their skirts, presenting themselves through the rusty barbed wire.
In America, Alexander worked for himself building houses so that American men could live in them with their American women and have the children he couldn’t with his Soviet factory-girl wisp of a wife who still got up every morning when it was dark in the winter to go get her family their daily bread, their cardboard bread so that they might live. Dasha, Papa, Mama, Marina, Babushka slept while the bombs fell on the emaciated girl in a white dress as she made her way down the empty snowdrift streets where the dead lay wrapped in sheets. Alexander warned Tatiana to walk only on the left side of the avenues and to wait out the bombing, and Tatiana listened to him, waiting impatiently in doorways in her overcoat and hat, and then, her face to the howling wind, making her way in the blizzard to the store—that was all out.
She was still waiting out the bombing, tubercular, starving, twisting her exhausted body like a vine on which nothing could grow. Alexander could build a lifetime of adobe houses, but no matter how many hours Tatiana put in at Phoenix Memorial, she would never be able to save her grandfather, her mother, her father, her sister, her brother. Who could make babies in this barren landscape of her Soviet womb when sired by the sterile landscape of his Soviet seed?