There were times when Alexander wasn’t unfailingly polite.
Like one particular afternoon when there was no wind and Jimmy was hung over—or was it when Jimmy was hung over and there was no wind? In any case, Alexander had returned early when she wasn’t expecting him and came looking for her when she was still in Nellie’s potato fields. Anthony was inside the house, having milk with Nellie. Tatiana, her hands grimy from the earth, her face flushed, her hair in tangles, stood up in the field to greet him in her sleeveless chintz summer dress, tight in the torso, slim down the hips, open down the neckline. “Hey,” she said with happy surprise. “What are you doing back so early?”
He didn’t speak. He kissed her, and this time it wasn’t calm and it wasn’t without ardor. Tatiana didn’t even have a chance to raise her hands in surrender. He took her deep in the fields, on the ground, covered in potato leaves, the dress becoming as grimy as her hands. The only foreplay was his yanking the dress off her shoulders to bare her breasts to his massive hands and pulling the dress up over her hips.
“Look what you did,” she whispered afterward.
“You look like a peasant milkmaid in that dress.”
“Dress is ruined now.”
“We’ll wash it.” He was still panting but already distant.
Tatiana leaned to him, murmuring softly, looking into his face, trying to catch his eye, hoping for intimacy. “Does the captain like his wife to look like a peasant milkmaid?”
“Well, obviously.” But the captain was already getting up, straightening himself out, giving her his hand to help her off the ground.
Since Alexander came back, Tatiana had become fixated on his hands, and on her own by contrast. His hands were like the platter on which he carried his life. They were large and broad, dark and square, with heavy palms and heavy thumbs, but with long thick flexible fingers—as if he could play the piano as well as haul lobster trawls. They were knuckled and veined, and the palms were calloused. Everything was calloused, even the fingertips, roughened by carrying heavy weapons over thousands of miles, hardened by fighting, burning, logging, burying men. His hands reflected all manner of eternal struggles. You didn’t need to be a soothsayer, or a psychic or a palmreader, you needed not a single glance at the lines in the palms but just one cursory look at the hands and you knew instantly: the man they belonged to had done everything—and was capable of anything.
And then take Tatiana and her own square hands. Among other things, her hands had worked in a weapons factory, they had made bombs and tanks and flamethrowers, worked the fields, mopped floors, dug holes in snow and in the ground. They had pulled sleds along the ice. They had taken care of dead men, of wounded men, of dying men; her hands had known life, and strife—yet they looked like they soaked in milk all day. They were tiny, unblemished, uncalloused, unknuckled, unveined, palms light, fingers slender. She was embarrassed by them—they were soft and delicate like a child’s hands. One would conclude that her hands had never done a day’s work in their life—and couldn’t!
And now, in the middle of the afternoon, after touching her in places unsuitable to the genteel propriety of Nellie’s cultivated potato fields, Alexander gave her his enormous dark hand to help her off the ground, and her white one disappeared into his warm fist as he pulled her to her feet.
“Thank you.”
“Thank you.”
When they first got to Deer Isle, in the evenings, after Anthony was finally asleep, they climbed up the steep hill to where their Nomad was parked off road near the woods. Once inside, Alexander took the clothes off her—he insisted she be bare for him—though most of the time he did not undress himself, leaving on his T-shirt or his sleeveless tank. Tatiana asked once. Don’t you want to undress, too? He said no. She didn’t ask again. He kissed her; with his hands he touched her to soften her; but never said a word. He never called her name. He would kiss her, clasp her body to him, present himself to her eager mouth—sometimes too forcefully, though she didn’t mind—and then he would deliver himself unto her. She moaned, she couldn’t help herself, and there had once been a time when he lived for her moaning. He himself never made a sound anymore, not before, not during, and not even at the end. He aspirated at the end; made an H. Sometimes not even a capital H.
Many things were gone from them. Alexander didn’t use his mouth on her anymore, or whisper all manner of remarkable things to her anymore, or caress her from top to bottom, or turn the kerosene light on—or even open his eyes.
Shura. Naked in the Nomad was the only time in their new life Tatiana called him by that beloved diminutive now. Sometimes she felt as if he wanted to put his hands to his ears so he wouldn’t hear her. It was dark in the camper, so dark; there was never light to see anything. And he wore his clothes. Shura. I can’t believe I’m touching you again.
There were no Edith Wharton novels in the camper, no Age of Innocence. He took her until she had nothing more to give, but still he took her until there was nothing.
“Soldier, darling, I’m here,” Tatiana would whisper, her arms opened, stretched out to him in helplessness, in surrender.
“I’m here, too,” Alexander would say, not whispering, getting up, getting dressed. “Let’s go back downhill. I hope Anthony is still sleeping.” That was the afterglow. Him giving her his hand to help her up.
She was defenseless, she was starved herself, she was open. She would give it to him any way he needed it, but still…
Oh, it didn’t matter. Just that there was something so soldierly and unhusbandly about how silently and rapaciously Alexander needed to still the cries of war.
Near tears one night, she asked him what was the matter with him—with them—and he replied, “You have become tainted with the Gulag.” And then they were interrupted by a child’s maniacal screams from down below. Already dressed, Alexander ran.
“Mama! Mama!”
Old Mrs. Brewster had trotted into his room, but she only terrified Anthony more.
“MAMA! MAMA!”
Alexander held him, but Anthony didn’t want anyone but his mother.
And when she ran in, he didn’t want her either. He hit her, he turned away from her. He was hysterical. It took her over an hour to calm him down. At four Alexander got up to go to work, and after that night Tatiana and Alexander stopped going to the camper. It stood abandoned in the clearing up the hill between the trees as they, both clothed, and in silence, with a pillow or his lips or his hand over her mouth to stifle her moaning, danced the tango of life, the tango of death, the tango of the Gulag, creaking every desperate bedspring in the twin bed across from Anthony’s restless sleeping.
They tried to come together during the day when the boy wasn’t looking. Trouble was, he was always looking. By the end of long napless Sundays, Alexander was mute with impatience and discontent.
One late Sunday afternoon Anthony was supposed to be in the front yard playing with bugs. Tatiana was supposed to be cooking dinner, Alexander was supposed to be reading the newspaper, but what he was actually doing was sitting beneath her billowing skirts on the narrow wooden chair that leaned against the wall of the kitchen, and she was standing astride him. They were panting, her legs were shaking; he was supporting her shifting weight with his hands on her hips, moving her in spasms. Near the moment of Tatiana’s greatest distress, Anthony walked into the kitchen.
“Mama?”
Tatiana’s mouth opened in a tortured O. Alexander whispered Shh. She held her breath, unable to turn around, overwhelmed by the stillness, the hardness, the fullness of him so thoroughly inside her. She dug her long nails into Alexander’s shoulders and tried not to scream, and all the while Anthony stood behind his mother.
“Anthony,” said Alexander, his voice almost calm. “Can you give us a minute? Go outside. Mommy will be right there.”
“That man, Nick, is in his yard again. He wants a cigarette.”
“Mom will be right there, bud. Go outside.”
“Mama?”
But Tatiana could not turn around, could not speak.
“Go outside, Anthony!” said Alexander.
In the short term, Anthony left, Tatiana took a breath, Alexander took her to the bedroom, barricaded the door, and resolved them, but in the long term she didn’t know what to do.
One thing they didn’t do is talk about it.
“Would you like some more bread, some more wine, Alexander?” she would ask with open hands.
“Yes, thank you, Tatiana,” he would reply with lowered head.
The Captain, the Colonel, and the Nurse
“Dad, can I come on the boat with you?” Anthony turned his face up to his father, sitting next to him at the breakfast table.
“No, bud. It’s dangerous on a lobster boat for a little boy.”
Tatiana studied them both, listening, absorbing.
“I’m not little. I’m big. And I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll help.”
“No, bud.”
Tatiana cleared her throat. “Alexander, if I come, um, I can look after Ant.”
“Jimmy’s never had a woman on his boat before, Tania. He’ll have a heart attack.”
“No, you’re right, of course. Ant, you want some more oatmeal?”
Anthony’s head remained down as he ate his breakfast.