On Sunday evening, July 20, 1969, they all sat with their eyes riveted on the television. Tatiana had been thinking that she wished Anthony were here with them, watching, and Pasha said, as if reading her mind, “Ant would love this.” And Tatiana asked Alexander, “What time is it now in Kontum?” And Alexander replied, “In Kontum it is tomorrow,” as Neil Armstrong took a small step for man, a giant leap for mankind, and set foot on the moon.
And the phone rang.
When the phone rang, Tatiana and Alexander turned their heads away from the TV to stare at one another. Their gazes darkened. It could not be anyone from the United States. Because in the United States everyone was watching Neil Armstrong.
Tatiana couldn’t go pick it up; Alexander went.
When he came back his face was gray.
What would her kids remember about their mother from July 20, 1969?
She struggled off the couch and went to stand with Alexander in the archway to the den. She opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. What? she wanted to say. What?
Ant’s missing, he mouthed inaudibly back. She had to cover her face from them, she had to cover her face from Alexander most of all. She didn’t want him to see her like this. She knew her impassable weakness would frighten her husband. With her faith shaken, his would positively crumble down like his bombed-out village huts. But how does she hide from him that Pushkin’s Queen of Spades, bearing ill will, has entered their house? She is blinded by the ravens, their horny beaks in her eyes.
She was going to ask him not to touch her, but, true to himself, he wasn’t coming anywhere near her.
She had a terrible fifteen minutes by herself in the bedroom. Maybe twenty. Then she flung open the bedroom door.
“What do you mean missing?” Tatiana said when she found Alexander outside. “Missing where?”
Alexander, less able to fling open any doors, sat mutely on the deck watching his sons in the night-time, lit-up pool. Janie was in front of him, adjusting her mask and fins. Tatiana fell silent until he finished helping the girl. No one was interested in the man on the moon anymore.
When Jane plopped away in her fins to jump in the water, Alexander turned to Tatiana.
After his successful recon mission earlier in the month, Anthony had been given a seven-day leave. He was supposed to report back for duty on the 18th of July. He had not.
“Maybe he just forgot when he was supposed to come back,” said Tatiana.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Are they looking for him?”
“Of course they’re looking for him, Tatiana.”
“How many days has it been?”
“Three.”
Vanished with him were his weapons and his MACV-SOG special pass card, which allowed him unrestricted privileges across all South Vietnamese roads and towns. All he had to do was flash the pass and he could get into any plane, any truck, any slick and be taken anywhere he wanted to go. The pass had not been flashed; he had not gotten into anything; had not been taken anywhere.
“Who did he go on leave with?”
“Alone. He signed out to go to Pleiku.” Pleiku was a town fifty kilometers from the Kontum base. Lieutenant Dan Elkins, Anthony’s friend and recon leader, told Richter that the only odd thing in retrospect was Anthony going on leave by himself. He was doing that a lot in the past year. Normally, Dan and Ant, friends since ’66, traveled together to unwind; they would go way down south to Vung Tau, hit the bars, the officers’ clubs, get a little R&R.
The other thing that was odd in retrospect was that Anthony had not yet re-upped for another tour. His current year was ending in August, and he had not yet said he would be renewing his commission.
Tatiana and Alexander were silent, their stares on the splashing kids. “So what does Richter think?”
“I don’t know. I’m not Richter, am I?”
“Alexander!”
“What are you yelling at me for?” He pointed to the nearby children.
She lowered her voice. “What are you all clipped with me for? What does Richter think happened to him?”
“I don’t know!”
“What are you yelling at me for?” Tatiana took a breath. “Did they list him as MIA?”
Motionless at first, Alexander finally shook his head. “He wasn’t in action.”
They stared at each other.
“Where is he?” Alexander asked Tatiana in a faint voice. “Aren’t in you the answers to all things?”
She opened her hands. “Darling, let’s just wait and see. Maybe…”
“Yeah,” said Alexander, abruptly getting up. “Maybe.” Both of them couldn’t speak about it anymore. Thank God for the three wet puppies in the pool, thank God for their irreducible, incontrovertible needs.
But at night after the kids were asleep, they went through Anthony’s letters. They sat on the floor of their bedroom and obsessively read and reread every one, looking for clues, for a single word.
“Situation here worse than we realized…Communist will to persist very strong…U.S. measures will not deter the Vietnamese…Mom, I’m just gathering intel, don’t worry about me…Most of the indigenous mountain men we train, the Montagnards, speak no English…good guys, the Yards, but no English! Except for one, and I’m always with him because of it. Ha Si knows English better than me. Dad would like him; he is some warrior…Devastating storms…Torrential rains…Oppressive wet heat…Loneliness in the jungle…Sometimes I dream of the lupines in the desert. I must be mistaken. I’ve never seen them in Arizona. Where were we, Mom, where I could’ve seen fields of purple lupines?”
Anthony asked after his brothers and sister, talked a little about his mates: Dan Elkins, Charlie Mercer; about Tom Richter and what a fine commander he was. He did not write about girls. He never mentioned girls, not in his Vietnam letters, not in his conversations from West Point. He had not brought anyone home since his high school prom. He did not talk about his injuries. He did not talk about his battles, or about the men he had lost or saved. Those things they heard about from Richter and from copies of Anthony’s citations.
There was nothing that raised a flag for a numb Tatiana. “He’ll turn up any second,” she said bloodlessly to Alexander. “You’ll see.”
Alexander said nothing, still holding the letters in his hands, grim, mute, white-faced. Tatiana brought him to her on the floor and they sat with Anthony’s letters between them. She held his head and whispered, Shh and It’ll be all right and There’s a simple explanation. He was so crushed in her arms that she stopped talking.
They waited to hear.
A day went by.
And then another.
Richter’s men combed the woods and the trails and the rice paddies in the flat distance between Pleiku and Kontum, searched the hooches, the rivers, the mud, looking for a trace of Anthony, or his weapons, or his ID. He must have stepped on a mine, Richter finally, resignedly, said to Alexander. He must have been booby-trapped. He must have walked into an ambush. The dirt road between Pleiku and Kontum was relatively safe and full of American troops traveling back and forth, but perhaps he veered off course for some reason, perhaps…
But without a trace of evidence, the command could not firmly declare anything.
Tatiana kept praying they wouldn’t find a trace of him.
“He’s not MIA,” she said to Alexander after another three days had passed. “So what are they calling him?” She had followed him into his shed and now stood near him, staring at him.
“Nothing. Just missing.” He didn’t look up from his work table.
“Missing? There’s a designation called missing?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the official name for that designation?”
There was a long pause. “AWOL.”
Tatiana stumbled out of the shed and stopped asking him things.
Three days became a week.
A week turned into two.
She began to step over the stones, to gnaw over all the sticks on the paths of her life, lamenting, exalting, breathing over them, examining them, as if by raking up the limbs of memory she could find the ones that had broken and repair them perhaps, mend them, or yank them away and destroy them, do anything so that on July 20, 1969, Tom Richter would not call them from Vietnam. Maybe if she had died in the blockade. Maybe if she had died on Lake Ladoga, on the Volga, from TB, from her collapsed lung. Maybe if she had not fallen for Alexander’s damnable lies. Go, Tatiana. I’m dead, Tatiana. Leave me dead and go—oh, and remember Orbeli. Maybe if she had stayed in Stockholm when she was seven months pregnant. She would be a Swedish citizen now. Anthony would be a Swedish citizen. No Vietnam War for the Swedes. She knew she mustn’t think like that, knotting herself up inside. If only, if only, if only.
While Tatiana was busy with knots, Alexander was on the phone. He talked to the commander at Yuma, to the commander at Fort Huachuca, to the Director of DIA. He talked to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he talked to the President of the Defense Military School. He talked to Tom Richter nearly every day. Richter who ran MACV-SOG Command Control Central out of Kontum interviewed three hundred people who knew Anthony, who had seen him, here, there, everywhere. He had four RT teams looking for Anthony from Vang Tau to Khe Sahn. No one had seen him.
Part of the difficulty was that SOG soldiers fought secret missions with no dog tags, no identification, no bars or stripes, no whistles of any kind, fighting and falling in complete anonymity. But Anthony had not been on a secret mission. He was on official leave. And now he was absent.
Alexander sat stretched out on the floor of the living room. Janie was on his lap, Harry was on one side, Pasha on the other. Tatiana was lying on her side on the couch behind them, her hand lightly caressing the back of Alexander’s head and neck as they watched Mission:Impossible. The kids sat raptly until the commercial break, during which Janie stood on her head, Pasha bent one of Alexander’s knees over the other and started hitting it with a metal hammer to see if he could get a knee-jerk response and Harry straddled him, hands on his face, asking if Dad could help him make a timer to a balloon water bomb.
“Make a timer?” said Alexander. “You mean, rig a timer, Harry?”
“No, Dad, I want to make a custom timer first, then rig it.”
“Dad, look, I’m standing on my head. Mommy taught me. How am I doing?”
“Dad, do you feel that in your knee?”
“Yes, Pasha, I feel the metal hammering at my knee.”
Alexander tilted his head up and back. Tatiana was gazing at him. She leaned over and kissed his forehead.
“What’s with the forehead?” he said to her. “What is this, Deer Isle?” The commercial break was over—and then the phone rang. In two seconds, all the kids off him, Tatiana’s lips off him, Alexander was up and in the gallery by the receiver, talking quietly, talking low, having forgotten about everything.
“I don’t understand,” Tatiana said to Alexander later that night. “Why are you talking to the Director of Military Intelligence? What would he know about Anthony?”
“I’m just trying all the options,” he said. “I’m doing everything I can.”
“That’s good, but why are you calling the commander at Arizona’s military installation? Why would a nice man, who has not left the base in thirty years, know anything about Anthony in Pleiku?”
“Just trying all the options, Tania.” And Alexander turned his back to her.
And so Tatiana turned her back to him, turned her back to the fortress they had built around the two of them, the fortress around which the moat was wide, and the gates were shut, and there was no entry for anyone but them. The things that had brought them together, that had kept them together—no one knew those stories, only they knew them—and Anthony, the boy who had lived Deer Isle with them, who had lived through being orphaned for Berlin with them. Their later children, their later friends, none of them knew. The stories fell into the forested chasms of the past.
The weeks passed.
“Please—let’s just wait and see.” Tatiana kept reciting the hollow words to her increasingly despondent husband. She paced around him every feverish night, never still, not when she cooked, or read to the kids, or lay in bed with him. Some part of her was always moving, always pacing around her pride. “Let’s just…we don’t know anything. Let’s just wait until they find him.”
“Find him where?” Alexander was sitting outside in his chair, smoking. He was not pacing.
“Let’s just see, okay?” she said, back and forth in front of him.
“You’re saying let’s just see if something of him will be found? Let’s see if he stepped on a mine, or if an RPG-7 hit him?” Alexander was loud. “Or if he was in a freak explosion coming back to Kontum? Well, I’m not waiting for that! Are you waiting for that?”
“Stop it,” she whispered. Her voice shook. “I’m just telling you to have a little faith, soldier. A little faith, that’s all.” Tatiana’s hands were twisted in front of her.
Alexander stopped speaking. “How do I regain my faith,” he whispered at last, “when there seems to be so little cause for faith?”
She would have wept if she didn’t see him in such desperate need of her comfort. It was the only thing that stopped her from disintegrating on the travertine tile, from turning to ashes. “Please,” Tatiana whispered in an unconvincing voice. “Maybe they’re right, maybe he’s gone AWOL—”
“Yes, let’s hope for that. Maybe he is AWOL,” Alexander said. “Perhaps he is addicted. Perhaps his own opiate of a girl smoked up his head and then some, and now he is in the Ural Mountains with her.”
“I’d rather he be AWOL than dead!”
“If he is AWOL, he’ll be court-martialed,” said Alexander. “After thirty days, there is little difference between AWOL and desertion. Do you really want Ant to be court-martialed for desertion during wartime? He won’t be alive for long, Tania.”
And then her tears came down. No comfort for Alexander. He jumped up and went inside. Tatiana was left alone on the travertine tile.
Thirty days passed.
Their life stopped.
They sat and watched Pasha, Harry, and Janie make joy because they were children and couldn’t help it. They made joy and their parents sat with frozen smiles upon their faces, while the young ones frolicked in the pool and rough-housed with one another and watched Mission:Impossible. The children did their level best to buck up their mother and father. Pasha never stopped reading and talking to them about the things he’d read. Janie never stopped baking with Tatiana, baking meringue pies and puff pastry that she knew her father loved. Harry always felt he had to try harder because he was the third son. (“Anthony may have been first,” Gordon Pasha—the philosopher king, not warrior king—would explain to his younger brother from whom he was inseparable, “but I was the most wanted. Mom and Dad tried fifteen years for me. You Harry-boy, you were just a seven-month-old afterthought. You were supposed to be Janie.”) So Harry tried harder. He made things that he thought would most please his unsmiling but revered father. Out of wood, out of stone, out of blocks of ice, out of branches and cacti and metal, Harry did nothing but whittle, carve, bend, shape and make weapons. He made pistols from soap, he made knives from sticks, and papier-mâché gray tanks. Dozens of his etched and scored and perfect ice hand grenades were in all three freezers. One evening they found him in front of Alexander’s closet, putting on his father’s grenade bandolier stuffed with ice grenades that were dripping all over their bedroom carpet.
Forty days.
They couldn’t sleep. They tossed and turned, and made fractured love, praying for oblivion that wouldn’t come.
“I have to know what you’re thinking,” Tatiana finally said after sleepless hours one impossible night. “I don’t want to know. But I have to know. Because you can’t carry it alone. Look at you. Harry made you a beautiful replica of a Claymore mine today—at least I hope it was a replica—and you couldn’t even say thank you. Just tell me—be out with it. Don’t tell me what Richter thinks, or what Dan Elkins thinks. Tell me what you think. You are the only one I listen to.” She sat up in bed.
Alexander was lying on his back, his eyes closed. “Stop looking at me,” he said. “I’m exhausted.”
“Shura, what are you so afraid of? Tell me. Look at me.” She knew he wouldn’t look at her because he didn’t want her to see inside him. And Tatiana had let him turn away because she didn’t want to see inside him either.
Tonight he turned from her, but she climbed over him to face him; she sat on him and poked and prodded him and breathed on him and kept on at him until his choice was to get out of bed or tell her. Alexander did what he always did when he couldn’t talk to her about impossible things. He made love to her.
He had barely dismounted when Tatiana said, “You’ve called every MI man you know. What are you searching for?”
“Holy God! Stop!” Throwing on his BVDs, he went outside into their garden. She threw on her robe and followed him. It was the end of August.
“It’s not obvious?” he said, smoking, pacing around the narrow paths, through the desert flowers.
“No!”
“I’m looking for Ant, Tania.”
“In MI?” She stood in front of him.
He lifted his eyes to her. “Now that so much time has passed,” said a worn-out Alexander, “and there has been no sign of him, and they haven’t found a trace of him, I think”—he paused—“that Anthony might have been taken prisoner.”
Prisoner! Tatiana scrutinized him. Why did he say that so wretchedly? Wasn’t that better than the alternative?
“That’s what I’ve been looking for all along,” he admitted. “Any classfied intel of him in a POW camp.”
They stared at each other, Tatiana becoming grimmer with each breath she took as she tried to absorb the gravity of what he was telling her. She couldn’t touch him, she felt him from across the path so afraid.
“Why are you trying to invent more trouble?” she said, trying to sound casual. “Don’t we have enough? I keep telling you, let’s just wait and see.” She reached for his hand. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”
“After hammering at me for half the night you now don’t want to hear it?” Alexander said with disbelief.
Letting go of him, Tatiana said nothing.
“Tell me,” Alexander said, “if Ant is taken prisoner by the NVA, do you think the KGB might be interested in the fate of an American soldier whose name is Anthony Alexander Barrington?”
“Shura, what did I say? Don’t tell me anymore.” Her hands were at her heart.
“If he was captured—”
“Please don’t speak! I’m begging you.”
She backed away but he came after her, taking her by her arms, his eyes in a blaze. “In Romania,” Alexander said, “they just picked up a 68-year-old man and brought him to Kolyma. Gave him ten years. The man had escaped from a Kazakhstan collective in 1934. In 1934, Tania, and they just picked him up. He was a nobody—a nobody who hopped on a train and kept going.”
“Please stop speaking!”
But Alexander wouldn’t stop. “What do you think—is my meter-thick file open or closed with the KGB?”
“This is absurd, what you’re thinking,” Tatiana said breathlessly. “They’re not—”
“Anthony had three tours in Vietnam without incident and disappeared a month before his fourth was over. You don’t think his luck has run out? You don’t think Pushkin’s Queen of Spades is bearing ill will?”
“No,” she whispered, her body shaking.
“Really? Do you remember Dennis Burck at State? He knew of me, of you, of my parents; he knew everything! If the NVA captured Ant, how many weeks would it be before a lackey behind a desk connected my KGB file with his name? Our old friend the French national Germanovsky managed to get through eleven checkpoints in Belgium before he was finally stopped. That’s how long it took them to find his name in their books. How many checkpoints do you think it will take them to find an Anthony Alexander Barrington?” Alexander let go of her, and stepped away, peering into his hands as if hoping to find different answers to his questions.
Tatiana stepped away too, hurriedly. “You’re worrying yourself unnecessarily.” Her voice was very small. “There are millions of troops and there is so much chaos.”
“Not like in Belgium after a world war, no,” he said.
“Millions of Vietnamese troops. They’re not looking for American troops who were once Red Army soldiers. Besides, Anthony is twenty-six and obviously not you. It’s 1969. Even if he were…captured, no one would piece anything together. Better for him to be taken prisoner but be alive, Shura. Believe me,” said Tatiana, taking another step away from him, and another, “I know something about this.”
“And I too,” said Alexander, stepping away from her with his torture wounds and torture tattoos from the German camps and the Soviet camps, “know something about this.”
The days ticked by.
The ill will penetrated even their white immaculate kitchen, where not a single unkind word had crossed the island in eleven years. Now they stood at opposite ends of the black granite block, not touching, not speaking. It was night; the babies, as they still called their giant children, were asleep. Tatiana had just finished making dough for tomorrow’s breakfast bread. Alexander had just finished closing up for the night. They were pretending to drink tea.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Alexander said at last. “Tell me where he is, and I will go find him.”
“I don’t know where he is, I’m not a clairvoyant—and what are you talking about? I don’t want you to go anywhere. It was then—then!—I wanted you to tell him not to go.”
“I did tell him not to go.”
“You should’ve stopped him.”
“He is a commissioned lieutenant! Should I have called Richter and told him daddy was forbidding a twenty-two-year-old to go to war?”
“Stop making fun of me.”
“I’m not making fun of you. But honestly, what do you think I should have done?”
“More. Less. Something else.”
“Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”
“I wish we had done something sooner!” Tatiana exclaimed. “We had been so proud, so casual.”
“Who was casual?” said Alexander. “You?” He shook his head. “Not me. I didn’t want this for him, and he knew it. He could have gone anywhere.” His voice cracked. “He could have been anything. He was the one who wanted this for himself.”
“And why do you think that was?” Tatiana said acidly.
Alexander’s hands slammed flat down on the island. “And how would you have liked me to fix that?”
“You should have convinced him not to go,” she said. “Eventually he would’ve listened to you.”
“He would have listened to me least of all! He would have done the opposite of anything I advised him. That’s why I tried to keep my mouth shut—”
“You should’ve tried harder not to. You knew what was at stake.”
“Tania, this country is at war! And not only are we at war, but we’re at war to keep Vietnam from going the way of the Soviet Union, of China, of Korea, of Cuba. Who better than you and me knows what that means? Who better than Ant knows what that means? How could I have kept him from that?”
“Oh, we certainly all know,” said Tatiana. “Aren’t we so smart. Now look at us. We should’ve seen this coming: the future. We should’ve seen the whole thing.”
“And prevented it?”
“Yes!” she cried. “You knew what he was risking! You knew!”
“Come on, now you’re just being…unreasonable,” Alexander said. “And that’s the kindest thing I can think of.”
Tatiana was shaking her head. “I don’t think I’m unreasonable. Not at all. You should have stopped it.”
“How?” he yelled.
“Maybe if you hadn’t come back from Berlin in your military dress greens, he wouldn’t have become so enamored of them. Maybe if you stopped wearing your battle fatigues every chance you got, but no! Maybe if you stopped handing him your officer’s cap in Deer Isle, like I asked!”
“Well, maybe you should have stopped telling him I had been a soldier every chance you got, but no!” said Alexander. “Maybe you should have paraded my wounds to him less. I wasn’t the one flaunting my stupid Hero of the Soviet Union medal in front of him!”
“Oh? And teaching him how to load your weapon when he was five?” Tatiana yelled right back. “Teaching him how to shoot when he was twelve? What, you think I couldn’t smell sulfur, potassium nitrate on your clothes when I’d come back from work? When you teach your twelve-year-old how to fire your weapons, when you take your sixteen-year-old to Yuma to test new missile launchers with you, what do you think he’s going to do with his life?”
“I don’t know, Tania,” Alexander said, rubbing his face, closing his eyes. “You mean, maybe if you and I had been two completely different people, this wouldn’t be happening?”
“Oh, so clever. Well, look at him now, wearing his dress whites, Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, carrying all his Claymore mines and M-16 rifles, and missing. What good are those medals to him, your cap to him, your rifle to him?” Tatiana cried. “He’s missing!”
“I know he’s missing!”
“Where is he? You’ve been in MI for twenty years—has that been good for nothing?”
“I know very well what weapons the Soviets are developing. But no, they don’t seem to be sending me dossiers with Anthony’s location on them.”
“That’s great, Alexander, charming,” Tatiana said, crossing her arms. “Despite your sarcasm, you still don’t know anything. We should have known better and been smarter. Made better decisions.”
“Holy Mother of God!” Alexander ran his hands through his hair. “Are we analyzing all our decisions? How far back are we going? Every minuscule decision we had made over the years that might have led to Anthony’s frame of mind at the moment of his choosing West Point among six universities, at the moment of his choosing to extend his tour for the fourth time? Do you really want to do this?”
“He did not become what he became in a vacuum,” Tatiana said. “And, as you well know, those decisions were not so minuscule.” She stared at him pointedly. “And yes, they all affected him.”
“Yes!” Alexander yelled. “Starting with the very first one.”
They fell silent. Tatiana held her breath. Alexander held his breath.
“I’m not talking about the decision to have him,” he said, not even trying to keep his voice down. “He didn’t begin with himself. He began with us. And believe it or not, we began before the moment you went crawling in the snow and bleeding in a truck across Finland and Sweden with him in your womb.”
“Yes,” she snapped. “We certainly did begin before that, didn’t we? But how far back do you want to go, to change your fate, Alexander Belov?”
“All the way, Tatiana Metanova,” Alexander said, his fists on the granite, swiping their china cups of tea across the island onto the limestone floor and storming out of the kitchen. “All the way to crossing that f*cking street.”
There was nothing to say after that. There was just nothing to say. Anthony was gone. Alexander had crossed the street, and now his son was lost, and there was nothing to do but run to the ringing phone, play with three babies, work, go to Yuma. Look at each other. Go to sleep with each other, back against back staring into walls, trying to find the answers there, or belly to belly, trying to find the answers there, too.
They walked around with gritted teeth, they slammed doors against their life.
The weeks became months, and like days they passed, the long gray line becoming longer and grayer with each passing day.
Add another lash onto Alexander’s back. Add another lowering of Tatiana’s head as she took care of her children and her house and ran the Phoenix Red Cross Chapter, barely raising her eyes to Alexander. The Sonoran Desert with lowered eyes, with fears so deep, each thought just another hammer upon the heart, each memory another sickle on the back, until there was almost nothing left under the scar tissue, neither Alexander nor Tatiana.
Just the boy climbing into the bed with them at three in the morning, crushed by his nightmares, in which his mother left him to go find his father, knowing she might never come back, and in his dreams never did.
Just the boy’s mother, sixteen years old with her family in the small Fifth Soviet room, her feet up on the wall, on the morning war started for Soviet Russia, on June 22, 1941, hearing the voice of her beloved Deda saying to her, “What are you thinking Tania? The life you know is over. From this day forward nothing will be as you imagined.”
How right he was. Not two hours later, Tatiana was sitting eating ice cream in her white dress and red sandals, her hair blowing all around her face.
Leningrad is still with them, everywhere they turn. Anthony missing is their continuing eternal struggle against their fate.
Their sweet boy, his brown body in Coconut Grove, walking the line, behind his mother, his hands apart, laughing, trying to keep his balance, imitating her. Swinging upside down like a monkey on the bars, like her. Sitting on top of his father’s shoulders, tapping him on his scarred and sheared head, saying, faster, faster, and Alexander, not knowing babies, or children, or boys, running faster, faster, trying to forget he was Harold Barrington’s son as he tried to become Anthony Barrington’s father.
And Harold Barrington saying to a young Alexander, “We’re going to the Soviet Union because I want it to make you into the man you are meant to be.”
And it did.
And Alexander Barrington saying to a young Anthony, “You decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be.”
And he did.
The sins, the scars, the wishes, the desires, the dreams of the fathers, all in that one small boy on Bethel Island learning how to fish, sitting patiently waiting for the prehistoric sturgeon that wasn’t coming, now lost. Now gone.
Oh my God, Tatiana thought, is this what my father and mother went through when our Pasha went missing? How little I understood.
Tatiana and Alexander lost their way. After Anthony went missing, they all went missing, all went lost in the woods of the wretched imaginings of the things that could have befallen him.
One evening Alexander came home late from work to find Tatiana lying fetal in the bedroom on top of the bed while the small ones were by themselves in the playroom.
“Come on, Tania,” he said quietly, giving her his hand. “We still have three other children. They can’t find their way either. You have to help them. Without you, they’ve got nothing.”
“I keep waiting for the next stage,” Tatiana whispered, struggling up. “What is it? When will it come?”
“Don’t wish for it, babe,” said Alexander. “It’ll be here soon enough.”