Читать книгу The Summer Garden - Paullina Simons - Страница 9

The Vanishing

Miami in January! Tropics by the sea. It was eighty degrees and the water was seventy-five. “Better,” said Alexander, smiling. “Much better. Now we stay.”

Sprawled near the calm aqua waves of the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay, Miami Beach and South Beach were a little too … grown up for them with a small boy, with the rampant gambling casinos, the made-up, dressed-up women walking the streets, and the fanned, darkened 1930s Art Deco hotels on the ocean that looked as if men with mortal secrets lived there. Perhaps such hotels were rightful places for the Tatianas and Alexanders of this world—but she couldn’t tell him that. She used Anthony’s moral well-being as her excuse to leave. From South Beach, they drove twelve miles south to Coconut Grove, where it was calmer and neater. Cocoanut Grove, as it was called before the roads and the trains and the tourist trade came in 1896, was just a little town on Biscayne Bay with twenty-eight smart elegant buildings, two large stores doing whopping business, and a luxury hotel. That was then. Now the prosperity was like the sunshine—abundant and unabated. Now there were parks and beaches, marinas, restaurants and stores galore, all etched on the water under the fanning palms.

They stayed at a motel court inland but every day kept drifting out to the bay. Tatiana was worried about the money running through their fingers. She suggested selling the camper. “We can’t stay in it anyway. You need to wash—”

“I’ll wash in the ocean.”

“I need somewhere to cook your food.”

“We’ll eat out.”

“We’re going to go broke.”

“I’ll get work.”

She cleared her throat. “We need a little privacy …”

“Ah, now you’re talking. But forget it, I won’t sell it.”

They were strolling along Bayshore Avenue, past moorings that fingered out into the water. He pointed to a houseboat.

“You want to rent a boat?”

“A houseboat.”

“A what?”

“A boat that is also a house.”

“You want us to live on a boat?” Tatiana said slowly.

Alexander called to his son. “Anthony, how would you like to live in a house that is also a boat?”

The child jumped up and down.

“Anthony,” said his mother, “how would you like to live in a snowy mountain retreat in the north of Canada?”

Anthony jumped up and down.

“Alexander, see? I really don’t think you should be making all your life decisions based on the joy of one small boy.”

Alexander lifted Anthony into his arms. “Bud,” he said, “a house that is moored like a boat and sways like a boat, but never moves from the dock, right on the ocean, doesn’t that sound great?”

Anthony put his arms around his father’s neck. “I said yes, Dad. What more do you want?”

For thirty dollars a week—the same money they didn’t want to pay Mrs. Brewster—they rented a fully furnished houseboat on Fair Isle Street, jutting out into the bay right between Memorial Park and the newly broken construction site for Mercy Hospital. The houseboat had a little kitchen with a small stove, a living room, a bathroom with a toilet—And two bedrooms!

Anthony, of course, just like at Nellie’s, refused to sleep by himself. But this time Tatiana was adamant right back. She stayed with her son for an hour, until he was asleep in his own bed. The mother wanted a room of her own.

When an utterly bare Tatiana, without even a silk nightgown, lay down in a double-size bed in front of Alexander, she thought she was a different woman making love to a different man. It was dark in the bedroom, but he was also naked, no tank tops, no shirts, no battle gear. He was naked and on top of her, and he actually murmured a bit to her, things she hadn’t heard in a very long while, he took it a little slower, slower than he had in a very long while, and for that Tatiana rewarded him with a breathless climax, and a shy plea for a little more, and he obliged, but in a way that was too much for her, holding up her legs against his upright arms and moving so intensely that small thrilling cries of pain and pleasure drowned her parchment throat, followed by a less shy plea for some more … and he even opened his eyes briefly, watching her mouth moaning for him, Oh my God, Shura. She saw his searching face; he whispered, You like that, do you? He kissed her, but Tatiana unclasped from him and began to cry. Alexander sighed and closed his eyes again, and there was no more.

Alexander got ready to go look for work, Tatiana got ready to take their clothes to the Laundromat. There was no Laundromat nearby. “Maybe we should have rented a house closer to the Laundromat.”

He stopped getting his cigarettes and his money and stared at her. “Just so we’re clear,” he said, “a houseboat on the Atlantic, dawn over the water like you saw this morning, or living by the Laundromat? Are you opting for the latter?”

“I’m not opting,” she said, chastised and blushing. “But I can’t wash your clothes in the Atlantic, can I?”

“Wait for me to come back and we’ll decide what to do.”

When he returned in the late afternoon he said, “I found work—Mel’s Marina.”

Tatiana’s face was so crestfallen, Alexander laughed. “Tania, Mel owns a marina right on the other side of Memorial Park, a ten minute walk from here down the ocean promenade.”

“Does Mel have one hand like Jimmy?” asked Anthony.

“No, bud.”

“Does Mel smell like fish like Jimmy?” asked Tatiana.

“Nope. Mel rents boats. He’s looking for someone to maintain them, and also do a tour-ride twice a day around Key Biscayne and South Miami Beach. We go around, look at the sights and then we come back. I get to drive a motor boat.”

“But Alexander,” said Tatiana, “did you tell Mel you don’t know how to drive a motor boat?”

“Of course not. I didn’t tell you I didn’t know how to drive a camper either.”

She shook her head. He was something else.

“Seven thirty to six,” he said. “And he’s paying me twenty dollars. A day.”

“Twenty dollars a day!” Tatiana exclaimed. “Double the money in Deer Isle, and you don’t have to smell like fish. How can he afford to pay you so much?”

“Apparently rich lonely ladies love to take boat rides to far away beaches while waiting for their husbands to return from the war.”

Tatiana turned away from him so he wouldn’t see her face.

From behind, his arms went around her. “And if I’m very good to the ladies,” continued Alexander, moving her braid away to kiss her neck and brushing his groin against her, “sometimes they tip the captain.”

Tatiana knew he was trying to amuse her, to be light with her, and even as a tear ran down her cheek, she said, patting his hand, “Well, if there’s one thing you know how to do, Alexander, it’s be good to the ladies.”

In the morning, at seven, as Alexander was about to leave for the marina, he said to Tatiana, “Come by to see me just before ten. That’s when we go out for our morning tour.” He picked up Anthony, who was still in his pajamas. “Bud, I’m going to take you on the boat with me. You’ll be my co-captain.”

Anthony’s face shined. “Really?” Then his face fell. “I can’t go, Dad.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know how to steer a boat.”

“Neither do I, so we’re even.”

Anthony kissed his father on the mouth.

“Am I coming, too?” Tatiana asked.

“No. You are going to walk a mile to the store and buy food, and do laundry. Or suntan.” He smiled. “Do whatever you like. But come at twelve thirty to pick him up. We can have lunch together before I have to go out again at two.”

Tatiana kissed her husband on the mouth.

He took his boy with him! What happiness, what joy for Anthony. Tatiana did laundry, bought food and a Cuban cookbook, and sandwich meat, and potato salad and rolled everything back home in a newly purchased wooden cart. She opened all the windows to smell the ocean breeze while she made lunch as strings playing the Poco Allegretto from Brahms’s Third Symphony filled her houseboat from the kitchen radio. She loved that piece. She’d heard it played on Deer Isle, too.

Then she ran through Memorial Park to bring her two men food.

Anthony was apparently a hit on the boat. “He was so busy making friends, he forgot to help his dad steer,” said Alexander. “And believe me when I tell you, I needed his help. Never mind, bud. Maybe tomorrow?”

“I can come again with you tomorrow?”

“If you’re a good boy for your mother, how about every day?”

Anthony leaped and hopped all the way home.

For dinner she made plantains and beef brisket from a recipe in her new cookbook.

Alexander liked it.

Tatiana set about cooking in every conceivable way what she called “the greatest New World creation since corn”—plantain. Not soft, not sweet, but otherwise banana-like, it went with everything. She bought flounder and fixed it with Mexican salsa and tomatoes and pineapples. But the plantains were the centerpiece of the plate. Tatiana had never had corn or bananas or plantains until she came to America.

“Heavenly plantains with rum,” she said, theatrically lighting a match and setting the plantains and frying pan on fire. Alexander was worried and skeptical until she spooned them over vanilla ice cream; the plantains were mixed with butter, dark brown caramelized sugar, heavy cream—and rum.

“Okay, I’m sold. Heavenly,” he said. “Please. Just a little more.”

The oven didn’t work properly; it was hard to make real bread in it. It wasn’t like the great big oven she had in her apartment in New York. Tatiana managed small challah rolls, from a recipe she had got from the Ukrainian Jews on the Lower East Side. It had been four months since her last conversation with Vikki. Her stomach went cold every time she thought of her and of Sam. She didn’t want to think about them. She forced herself not think of them.

Tatiana was good at forcing herself not to think of things.

Alexander liked the puffy and slightly sweet rolls. “But what, no plantain salad?” he teased when the three of them were eating their lunch on one of the picnic tables under the moss oaks and pines in Memorial Park.

She bought Alexander white cotton and linen shirts with white cotton slacks. She knew he was most comfortable in khaki or green fatigues and long sleeve crews—but he had to look like a boat captain.

Maintaining the boat took most of his time between tours—he learned to make repairs to the hull, the engine, the bearings, the fittings, the bilge pumps, the plumbing, the safety gear, the rails. He repainted the deck, replaced broken or cracked glass, changed the oil. Whatever it was, if it needed fixing, Alexander fixed it, all in his captain’s whites and shirtsleeves down to his wrists in the sweltering sun.

Mel, terrified of losing Alexander, gave him a raise to twenty-five dollars a day. Tatiana, too, wished she could give Alexander a raise, for the same reason.

In Miami there was a large Spanish population, and no one heard Tatiana’s Russian accent, no one knew her name was Russian. In Miami, Tatiana fit right in. Though she missed the smallness and the tightness and the smells of Deer Isle, though she missed the largesse, the expanse, the blaze of New York, she liked the Miami vanishing.

She made stuffed cabbage, which she knew Anthony liked from their time in New York. Alexander ate it, but after dinner said, “Please don’t cook cabbage again.”

Anthony got upset. He loved cabbage. And there was even a time when his father enjoyed cabbage pie.

But Alexander said no cabbage.

“Why?” she asked him when they were outside on their boat deck, bobbing above the water. “You used to like it.”

“I used to like a lot of things,” he replied.

You certainly did, Tatiana thought.

“I saw cabbage that grew as big as three basketballs on the mountain heaps of human ashes and remnants of bones in a death camp called Majdanek in Poland,” said Alexander. “It was freak cabbage like nothing you’ve ever seen, grown out of the ashes of dead Jews. You’d never eat cabbage again either.”

“Not even cabbage pie?” she said softly, trying to lure him away from Majdanek and into Lazarevo.

“Not even cabbage pie, Tania,” replied a not-to-be-lured Alexander. “No more cabbage pie for us.”

Tatiana didn’t cook cabbage anymore.

Anthony was told he was not allowed to leave the table unless his plate was empty.

“I’ll leave when I want,” said Anthony.

Alexander put down his fork. “What did you say?”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” said Anthony, and his father got up from the table so swiftly that Anthony knocked over his chair to run to his mother.

Taking him out of Tatiana’s arms, Alexander set him firmly down. “I can and I will tell you what to do.” His hands were on his son’s shoulders. “Now we’re going to try it again. You will not leave when you want. You will sit, you will finish your food, and when you’re done, you will ask to leave the table. Understand?”

“I’m full!” Anthony said. “Why do I have to finish?”

“Because you have to. Next time, Tania, don’t give him so much.”

“He said he was hungry.”

“Give him seconds. But today he will finish his food.”

“Mommy!”

“No, not Mommy—me! Now finish your food.”

“Mom—”

Alexander’s hands squeezed around Anthony. Anthony finished his food and asked to leave the table. After dinner, Tatiana went outside on the narrow deck where Alexander was sitting and smoking. She crouched carefully, uncertainly, by his side.

“You’ve been too soft on him,” he said. “He has to learn. He will learn.”

“I know. He’s so little, though.”

“Yes, when he is my size, it’ll be too late.”

She sat on the floor of the deck.

After a while Alexander spoke. “He can’t leave food on his plate.”

“I know.”

“Do you want me to tell you about your brother starving in Catowice?”

She barely suppressed her sigh. “Only if you want to, darling.” Only if you need to. Because, like you, there are many things I would rather never talk about.

In the POW camp in Catowice, Poland, where the Germans threw Alexander, his lieutenant, Ouspensky, and Pasha into the Soviet half—which meant the death half—Alexander saw that Pasha was weakening. He had no fuel to feed the shell that carried his life. It was worse for Pasha because he had been wounded in the throat. He couldn’t work. What they gave the Soviet men was just enough to kill them slowly. Alexander made a wood spear, and when he was in the forest cutting down trees for firewood, he caught three rabbits, hid them in his coat and, back at camp, cooked them in the kitchen, giving one to the cook, one to Pasha, and splitting one between himself and Ouspensky.

He felt better, but he was still starving. From Tatiana, during Leningrad’s blockade, he learned that as long as he constantly thought about food—about getting it, cooking it, eating it, wanting it, he was not a goner. He’d seen the goners—then in Leningrad, now in Catowice—the last-leggers, as they were called, the men unable to work, who shuffled through the camp’s trash eating what scraps they could find. When one of the goners had died, Alexander, about to dig a grave, found Pasha and three others eating the remains of the dead man’s slops by the fire at the outskirts of the barracks.

Alexander was made a supervisor, which did not endear him to his peers, but it did allow him to get a larger food ration, which he shared with Pasha. He kept Pasha and Ouspensky with him, and they moved into a room that housed only eight people instead of sixty. It was warmer. Alexander worked harder. He killed the rabbits and the badgers, and occasionally he didn’t wait to bring them back to camp. He built a fire and ate them on the spot, half cooked, tearing at them with his teeth. It wasn’t making much of a difference even to him.

And Pasha suddenly stopped being interested in rabbits.

Tatiana’s head was folded over her knees. She needed a better memory of her brother.

In Luga, Pasha is stuffing blueberries into Tatiana’s open mouth. She is begging him to stop, trying to tickle him, trying to throw him off her, but in between mouthfuls of blueberries for himself, he is tickling Tatiana with one hand, stuffing blueberries into her mouth with the other, and pinning her between his legs so she can’t go anywhere. Tatiana finally heaves her small body hard enough to throw Pasha off, onto the pails of blueberries they just brought freshly picked from the woods. The buckets tip over; she screams at him to pick them up and when he doesn’t, she takes handfuls and mashes them into his face, painting his face purple. Saika comes from next door and stares blankly at them from the gate. Dasha comes out from the porch and when sees what they’ve done, she shows them what real screaming is all about.

Alexander smoked, and Tatiana, on weakened legs, struggled up and went back inside, hoping that when Anthony was older they could tell him in a way he would understand, about Leningrad, and Catowice, and Pasha. But she feared he would never understand, living in the land of plantains and plenty.

In the Miami Herald Tatiana found an article about the House of Un-American Activities Committee investigations into communist infiltration of the State Department. The paper was pleased to call it “an ambitious program of investigations to expose and ferret out Communist activities in many enterprises, labor unions, education, motion pictures and most importantly, the federal government.” Truman himself had called for removal of disloyal government employees.

She became so engrossed that Alexander had to raise his voice to get her attention. “What are you reading?”

“Nothing.” She slammed the newspaper shut.

“You’re hiding things in newspapers from me? Show me what you were reading.”

Tatiana shook her head. “Let’s go to the beach.”

“Show me, I said.” He grabbed her, his fingers going into her ribs and his mouth into her neck. “Show me right now, or I’ll …”

“Daddy, stop teasing Mommy,” said Anthony, prying them apart.

“I’m not teasing Mommy. I’m tickling Mommy.”

“Stop tickling Mommy,” said Anthony, prying them apart.

“Antman,” said Alexander, “did you just … call me daddy?”

“Yes. So?”

Bringing Anthony to his lap, Alexander read the HUAC article. “So? They’ve been investigating communists since the 1920s. Why the fascination now?”

“No fascination.” Tatiana started to clear the breakfast plates. “You think there are Soviet spies here?”

“Rampaging through the government. And they won’t rest until Stalin gets his atomic bomb.”

She squinted at him. “You know something about this?”

“I know something about this.” He pointed to his ears. “I listened to quite a bit of chatter and rumor among the rank and file outside my door in solitary confinement.”

“Really?” Tania said that in a mulling tone, but what she was trying to do was to not let Alexander see her eyes. She didn’t want him to see Sam Gulotta’s anxious phone calls in her frightened eyes.

When they didn’t talk about food or HUAC, they spoke about Anthony.

“Can you believe how well he’s talking? He is like a little man.”

“Tania, he comes into bed with us every night. Can we talk about that?”

“He’s just a little boy.”

“He needs to sleep in his own bed.”

“It’s big and he gets scared.”

Alexander bought a smaller bed for Anthony, who didn’t like it and had no interest in sleeping in it. “I thought the bed was for you,” said Anthony to his father.

“Why would I need a bed? I sleep with Mommy,” said Anthony Alexander Barrington.

“So do I,” said Anthony Alexander Barrington.

Finally Alexander said, “Tania, I’m putting my foot down. He can’t come into our bed anymore.”

She tried to dissuade him.

“I know he has nightmares,” Alexander said. “I will take him back to his bed. I will sit with him as long as it takes.”

“He needs his mother in the middle of the night.”

“I need his mother in the middle of the night, his naked mother. He’s going to have to make do with me,” Alexander said. “And she is going to have to make do with me.”

The first night, Anthony screamed for fifty-five minutes while Tatiana remained in the bedroom with a pillow pressed over her head. Alexander spent so long in the boy’s room, he fell asleep on Anthony’s bed.

The following night Anthony screamed for forty-five minutes.

Then thirty.

Then fifteen.

And finally, just whimpers coming from Anthony, as he stood by his mother’s side. “I won’t cry anymore, but please, Mama, can you take me back to my bed?”

“No,” said Alexander, getting up. “I will take you back.”

And the following afternoon as mother and son were walking back home from the boat, Anthony said, “When is Dad going back?”

“Going back where?”

“The place you brought him from.”

“Never, Anthony.” She shivered. “What are you talking about?” The shiver was at the memory of the place she had brought him from, the bloodied, filth-soaked straw on which he lay shackled and tortured, waiting not for her but for the rest of his life in the Siberian resort. Tatiana lowered the boy to the ground. “Don’t ever let me catch you talking like that again.” Or your nightmares now will pale compared to the ones you will have.

“Why does he walk as if he’s got the weight of the whole world on his shoulders?” Alexander asked while walking home. The green and stunning ocean was to their right, through the bending palms. “Where does he get that from?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Hey,” he said, knocking into her with his body. Now that he wasn’t covered with lobster he could do that, knock into her. Tatiana took his arm. Alexander was watching Anthony. “You know what? Let me … I’ll take him to the park for a few minutes while you fix dinner.” He prodded her forward. “Go on now, what are you worried about? I just want to talk to him, man to man.”

Tatiana reluctantly went, and Alexander took Anthony on the swings. They got ice cream, both promising conspiratorially not to tell Mommy, and while they were in the playground, Alexander said, “Ant, tell me what you dream about. What’s bothering you? Maybe I can help.”

Anthony shook his head.

Alexander picked him up and carried him under the trees, setting him down on top of a picnic table while he sat on the bench in front of him so that their eyes were level. “Come on, bud, tell me.” He rubbed Anthony’s little chubby legs. “Tell me so I can help you.”

Anthony shook his head.

“Why do you wake up? What wakes you?”

“Bad dreams,” said Anthony. “What wakes you?”

His father had no answer for that. He still woke up every night. He had started taking ice cold baths to cool himself down, to calm himself down at three in the morning. “What kind of bad dreams?”

Anthony was all clammed up.

“Come on, bud, tell me. Does Mommy know?”

Anthony shrugged. “I think Mommy knows everything.”

“You’re too wise for your own good,” said Alexander. “But I don’t think she knows this. Tell me. I don’t know.”

He cajoled and prodded. Anthony’s ice cream was melting; they kept wiping up the drips. Finally Anthony, looking not at his father’s prying face but at his shirt buttons, said, “I wake up in a cave.”

“Ant, you’ve never been in a cave. What cave?”

Anthony shrugged. “Like a hole in the ground. I call for Mom. She’s not there. Mommy, Mommy. She doesn’t come. The cave starts to burn. I climb outside, I’m near woods. Mommy, Mommy. I call and call. It gets dark. I’m alone.” Anthony looked down at his hands. “A man whispers, Run, Anthony, she is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back. I turn around, but there is no one there. I run into the woods to get away from the fire. It’s very dark, and I’m crying. Mommy, Mommy. The woods go on fire too. I feel like somebody’s chasing me. Chasing and chasing me. But when I turn around, I’m all alone. I keep hearing feet running after me. I’m running too. And the man’s voice is in my ear. She is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back.”

The ice cream dripped through Alexander’s fingers, through Anthony’s fingers. “That’s what you dream about?” Alexander said tonelessly.

“Uh-huh.”

Alexander stared grimly at Anthony, who stared grimly back. “Can you help me, Dad?”

“It’s just a bad dream, bud,” Alexander said. “Come here.” He picked up the boy. Anthony put his head on Alexander’s shoulder. “Don’t tell your mom what you just told me, all right?” he said in a hollow voice, patting the boy’s back, holding him close. “It’ll make her very sad you dream this.” He started walking home, his gaze fixed blinklessly on the road.

After a minute, he said, “Antman, did your mother ever tell you about her dreams when she was a little girl in Luga? No? Because she used to have bad dreams, too. You know what she used to dream about? Cows chasing her.”

Anthony laughed.

“Exactly,” Alexander said. “Big cows with bells and milk udders would go running down the village road after your young mother, and no matter how hard she ran, she couldn’t get away.”

“Did they go moo?” said Anthony. “Here moo, there moo, everywhere moo-moo.”

“Oh, yes.”

In the night Anthony crawled to his mother’s side, and Alexander and Tatiana, both awake, said nothing. Alexander had just come back to bed himself, barely dry. Her arm went around Anthony, and Alexander’s damp icy arm went around Tatiana.

The Body of War

As it began to stay lighter later, they would go swimming when the park beaches emptied. Tatiana hung upside down on the monkey bars, they played ball, they built things in the sand; the beach, the bars, the breaking Atlantic were good and right as rain. Alexander sometimes even took off his T-shirt while he swam in the languid evenings—slowly, obsessively trying to wash away in the briny ocean typhus and starvation and war and other things that could not be washed away.

Tatiana sat near the shoreline, watching father and son frolic. Alexander was supposed to be teaching Anthony how to swim, but what he was doing was picking the boy up and flinging him into the shallow waters. The waves were perfect in Miami for a small boy, for the waves were small also. Son jumped to father, only to be thrown up in the air and then caught again, thrown up in the air very high and then caught again. Anthony squealed, shrieked, splashed, full of monumental joy. And there was Tatiana nearby, sitting on the sand, hugging her knees, one of her hands out in invocation, careful, careful, careful. But she wasn’t saying it to Alexander. She was saying it to Anthony. Don’t hurt your father, son. Be gentle with him. Please. Can’t you see what he looks like?

Her breath burned her chest as she furtively glanced at her husband. Now they were racing into the water. The first time Tatiana had seen Alexander run into the Kama River in Lazarevo, naked except for his shorts—like now—his body was holy. It was gleaming and woundless. And he’d been in battles already, in the Russo-Finnish War; he’d been on the northern rivers of the Soviet Union; he had defended the Road of Life on Lake Ladoga. Like her, he had lived through blighted Leningrad. Why then, since she had left him, had this happened to him?

Alexander’s bare body was shocking to see. His back, once smooth and tanned, was mutilated with shrapnel scars, with burn scars, with whip marks, with bayonet gouges all wet in the Miami sun. His nearfatal injury at the breaking of the Leningrad blockade was still a fist-sized patch above his right kidney. His chest and shoulders and ribs were defaced; his upper arms, his forearms, his legs were covered with knife and gunpowder burn wounds, jagged, ragged, raised.

Tatiana wanted to cry, to cry out. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right that he should carry Hitler and Stalin on his whole body, even here in Miami where the tropical waters touched the sky. The colonel had been right. It wasn’t fair.

And because all the other iniquities were not enough, the men that guarded Alexander tattooed him against his will, as punishment for escape, as a warning against possible transgressions, and as an ultimate slur against his future—as in, if you have a future at all, you will never have an unblemished one.

Tatiana watched him and her pitying heart rolled around the concrete drum of her insides.

On Alexander’s upper left arm was a black tattoo of a hammer and sickle! It was burned into him by the depraved guards at Catowice—so they would know him by his marks. Above the hammer and sickle, on his shoulder there was a mocking tattoo of a major’s epaulet, taunting that Alexander had spent too much time in solitary confinement. Under the hammer and sickle was a large star with twenty-five points on it—one point for each of the years of his Soviet prison sentence. On the inside of his right forearm, the numbers 19691 were burned in blue—the Soviets learned to use the Nazi torture implements with glee.

On his right upper arm a cross was tattooed—Alexander’s only voluntary mark. And above the cross, he was branded with an incongruous SS Waffen Eagle, complete with a swastika, as a symbol of grudging respect from the ill-fated guard Ivan Karolich for Alexander’s never having confessed to anything despite the severe beatings.

The concentration camp numbers were the hardest to hide, being so low on his arm, which was why he didn’t often roll up his sleeves. Jimmy in Deer Isle had asked about the numbers, but Jimmy hadn’t been to war, and so when Alexander said, “POW camp,” Jimmy didn’t follow up and Alexander didn’t elaborate. The blue numbers now, post Holocaust, screamed of Jewish suffering, not Soviet suffering, of someone else’s life, not Alexander’s. But the hammer and sickle, the SS insignia!—all alarms on his arm, ringing to be explained—were impossible to explain away in any context. Death camp numbers and a swastika? There was nothing to do about any of it, except cover it from everyone, even each other.

Tatiana turned to watch a family strolling by, two small girls with their mother and grandparents. The adults took one glimpse at Alexander and gasped; in their flustered collective horror, they shielded the eyes of the little girls; they muttered, they made the sign of the cross—on themselves, and hurried on. Tatiana judged them harshly. Alexander, lifting and throwing Anthony, never noticed.

Whereas once, certainly in Lazarevo with Tatiana, Alexander looked god-like, it was true now, the strangers were right—Alexander was disfigured. That’s all anyone saw, that’s all anyone could look at.

But he was so beautiful still! Hard still, lean, long-legged, wide-shouldered, strapping, impossibly tall. He’d gained some of his weight back, was muscular again after hauling all those lobster traps. On the rare occasions he laughed, the white of his teeth lit up his tanned face. His sheared head looked like a black hedgehog, his milk chocolate eyes softened every once in a while.

But there was no denying it, he was damaged—and nowhere more noticeably than in this, his American life. For in the Soviet Union, Alexander would have been among millions of men who were maimed like him, and he might have thought no more of it as they sent him out in his sheepskin parka to log in their woods, to mine in their quarries. Here in America, Tatiana sent him out in public, not in a parka but in linen, covering him from his neck to his ankles, to man their boats, to fix their engines.

During lovemaking Tatiana tried to forget. What needed to be whole and perfect on Alexander remained whole and perfect. But his back, his arms, his shoulders, his chest: there was nowhere for her to put her hands. She held onto his head, which was marginally better. There was a long ridge at the back of the occipital lobe, there were knife wounds. Alexander carried war on his body like no one Tatiana had ever known. She cried every time she touched him.

Tatiana couldn’t touch Alexander at night and prayed he didn’t know it.

“Come on, you two,” she called to them weakly, struggling to her feet. “Let’s head home. It’s getting late. Stop your horsing around. Anthony, please. What did I tell you? Be careful, I said!” Can’t you see what your father looks like?

Suddenly her two men, one little, one big, both with the straight posture, the unwavering gazes, came and stood in front of her, their legs in the sand, each in an A, their hands on their hips like kettles.

“Ready to go then?” she said, lowering her gaze.

“Mommy,” said her son firmly, “come and play.”

“Yes, Mommy,” said her husband firmly, “come and play.”

“No, it’s time to go home.” She blinked. A mirage in the setting sun made him disappear for a second.

“That’s it,” said Alexander, lifting her into his arms. “I’ve had just about enough of this.” He carried her and flung her into the water. Tatiana was without breath and when she came up for air, he threw himself on her, shaking her, disturbing her, implacably laying his hands on her. Perhaps he wasn’t a mirage after all, his body immersed in water that was so salty he floated and she floated, too, feeling real herself, remembering cartwheeling at the Palace of the Tsars for him, sitting on the tram with him, walking barefoot through the Field of Mars with him while Hitler’s tanks and Dimitri’s malice beat down the doors of their hearts.

Alexander picked her up and threw her in the air, only pretending to catch her. She fell and splashed and shrieked, and scrambling to her feet, ran from him as he chased her onto the sand. She tripped to let him catch her and he kissed her wet and she held on to his neck and Anthony jumped and scrambled onto his back, break it up, break it up, and Alexander dragged them all deeper in and tossed them into the ocean, where they bobbed and swayed like houseboats.

Alexander’s Favorite Color

“Tania, why haven’t you called Vikki?” Alexander asked her at breakfast.

“I’ll call her. We’ve only been here a few weeks,” she said. “Where’s the fire?”

“Try eleven.”

“Eleven weeks? No!”

“I know how much rent I’ve paid. Eleven.”

“I didn’t realize it’s been that long. Why are we still here?” Tatiana muttered, and quickly changed the subject to Thelma, the nice woman she met in the store a few mornings ago. Thelma’s husband had recently come back from Japan. Thelma was looking for something to entertain him with as he seemed a bit down in the dumps. Tatiana had suggested a boat ride, and Thelma had sprung at the idea.

Thelma apparently didn’t make it to the boat that afternoon, nor the next, though all afternoons were equally blue-skied and acceptable. When Tatiana ran into her at the store a few days later, Thelma muttered an excuse but said she and her husband were hoping to get to the boat this afternoon for sure. She asked Tatiana if she came on the boat. Tatiana said no, explaining about her son’s nap and her husband’s dinner and other home things. Thelma nodded in sisterly understanding, doing the home things herself that morning. She was making a hot apple cobbler. Apparently men returning home from the war liked that.

Alexander had been bringing home astonishing amounts of money. One dollar, two dollars, five dollars, twenty dollars.

“Even my math is failing me,” Tatiana said, sitting at the kitchen table with a stash of singles and fives in front of her. “I can’t count this high. Did you make a—hundred dollars today?”

“Hmm.”

“Alexander, I want to know what you’re doing to these women for a hundred dollars a day.”

When he smoked and grinned and didn’t reply, she said, “That was not a rhetorical question. Your wife would like an answer.”

He laughed, and she laughed, ha ha, but the next day when she went to pick up Anthony from the boat, who should she see but Thelma, nattily dressed standing at a distance Tatiana deemed to be too close to her barely salvaged husband. She wasn’t even sure it was Thelma, for in the grocery store Thelma was sans makeup and wore grocery store clothes. Here, her wavy dark hair was curled and teased, she had makeup on … she ….Tatiana wasn’t even sure what it was that was provocative— perhaps the tightness of the skirt around the hips, the bareness of leg underneath, perhaps the wine trollop lips in the middle of a torrid noon, perhaps even the smiling tilt of the coquettish, slatternly head.

“Thelma?” Tatiana said, coming up the plank. “Is that you?”

Thelma snapped around as if she’d heard a voice from the grave. “Oh! Hi.”

“Oh, hi,” said Tatiana, stepping between her and Alexander. She turned to face the woman. “I see you’ve met my husband. Where’s your husband?”

High-heeling away, Thelma waved her off. “He couldn’t make it today.”

Tatiana said nothing—then. But she asked Anthony the next morning, in full hearing of a certain husband having breakfast, about the nice woman on the boat, and Anthony told her that she’d been coming every morning for some time.

“Is that so?”

“No, that is not so,” intervened a certain husband.

“And, Anthony, does the nice woman’s husband come with her?”

“Oh no. She doesn’t have a husband. She told Daddy her husband ran away. She said he didn’t want to be married after the war.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, and, Mommy,” said Anthony, licking his lips, “she brought us an apple cobbler to eat. It was so yummy!”

Tatiana said nothing else. She didn’t even look up. Alexander tilted his head across the table to get her attention, saying nothing himself. When he went to kiss her, he cupped her face and made her look up at him. His eyes were twinkling. He kissed her nice and open, making the lava pit in her stomach nice and open, too, and left for work.

When Tatiana went to pick up Anthony at noon, Thelma wasn’t there.

“Mommy,” Anthony whispered. “I don’t know what Daddy said to her this morning, but she ran from the boat in tears!”

Thelma was never seen again, not even in the grocery store.

At home Alexander said, “You want to come with me tomorrow for the morning ride, for the afternoon ride? You know you can come on the boat with me any time you want.”

“Can I now?”

“Of course. Any time. You haven’t expressed any interest.” He paused. “Until now.”

There was something slightly … Tatiana didn’t know … pointed in his remark. Something accusing. But accusing her of what? Of cooking and cleaning and washing for him? Of braiding her hair and shaving and scrubbing herself pink, and putting on gauzy dresses and sheer panties and musk oil to come to meet him in the evenings? Of letting him have an hour or two with his boy in the mornings?

She contemplated making an issue of it. But an issue of what? She studied him, but he was already past it, as he was past most things, reading the paper, drinking, smoking, talking to Anthony.

Tatiana did come on the boat ride the next morning.

“Your hair is in a crew cut,” a girl murmured to him after she sauntered to stand by his side while Tatiana sat quietly nearby, Anthony on her lap. “Almost like you’re in the army,” the girl persisted when Alexander didn’t reply.

“I was in the army.”

“Oh that’s great! Where did you serve?”

“On the Eastern Front.”

“Oh, wow. I want to know everything! Where is this Eastern Front, anyway? I’ve never heard of it. My father was in Japan. He’s still there.” The girl, who looked to be in her late teens, continued nonstop. “Captain, you’re driving the boat so fast, and it’s getting so windy, and I’m wearing this flouncy skirt. You don’t think it’ll be a problem, do you? The wind isn’t going to kick the skirt up, in an immodest sort of way?” She giggled.

“I don’t think so. Ant, do you want to come, help me steer?”

Anthony ran to his father. The girl turned around to glance at Anthony and at Tatiana, who smiled, giving her a little wave.

“Is this your son?”

“Yes.”

“Is that, um … ?”

“My wife, yes.”

“Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t know you were married.”

“I am, though, nonetheless. Tania, come here. Meet … sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”

As Tatiana walked past the girl to get to Alexander, she said, “Excuse me,” and added evenly, “I think the wind might indeed kick up that immodesty you were talking about. Better grab on to the skirt.”

Alexander bit his lip. Tatiana stood calmly next to him, her hand on the wheel.

That evening walking home, he said, “I either continue to invite questions or I can grow out my hair.” When she didn’t say anything—because she didn’t think her husband with a head full of shiny black hair would be repellent enough—he prodded her to tell him what she was thinking.

She chewed her lip. “The constant female attention … um … wanted or unwanted?”

“I’m indifferent, babe,” he said, his arm around her. “Though amused by you.”

Tatiana was quiet when Alexander came home the following evening.

“What’s the matter? You’re more glum than usual,” he asked after he came out from the bath.

She protested. “I’m not usually glum.” Then she sighed. “I took a test today.”

“What test?” Alexander sat down at her table. “What does the husband want for dinner?”

“The husband wants plantains and carrots and corn and bread, and shrimp, and hot apple cobbler with ice cream for dinner.”

“Hot apple cobbler?” Alexander smiled. “Indeed. Indeed.” He laughed, buttering his bread roll. “Tell me about this test.”

“In one of my magazines. Ladies Home Journal. There’s a test. ‘How Well Do You Know Your Husband?’”

“One of your magazines?” His mouth was full. “I didn’t know you read any magazines.”

“Well, perhaps it would behoove you to take that test, too, then.”

He was twinkling at her from across the table, buttering another roll. “So how did you do?”

“I failed, that’s how I did,” Tatiana said. “Apparently I don’t know you at all.”

“Really?” Alexander’s face was mock-serious.

Tatiana flung the magazine open to the test page. “Look at these questions. What is your husband’s favorite color? I don’t know. What is his favorite food? I don’t know. What sports does he like best? I don’t know. What is his favorite book? His favorite movie? His favorite song? What’s his favorite flavor ice cream? Does he like to sleep on his back or his side? What was the name of the school he graduated from? I don’t know anything!”

Alexander grinned. “Come on. Not even the back or side question?”

“No!”

Continuing to eat his roll, he got up, took the magazine out of her hands and threw it in the trash. “You’re right.” He nodded. “There is nothing to be done. My wife doesn’t know my favorite ice cream flavor. I demand a divorce.” He raised his eyebrows. “Do you think a priest will give us an annulment?” He came up to her, sitting dejectedly in the chair.

“You’re making fun,” Tatiana said, “but this is serious.”

“You don’t know me because you don’t know what my favorite color is?” Alexander sounded disbelieving. “Ask me anything. I’ll tell you.”

“You won’t tell me anything! You don’t talk to me at all!” She started to cry.

Wide-eyed, flummoxed, stopped in mid-laugh, Alexander speechlessly opened his hands. “A second ago, this was all kind of funny,” he said slowly.

“If I don’t even know a simple thing like your favorite color,” Tatiana said, “can you imagine what else I don’t know?”

“I don’t know my own favorite color! Or movie, or book, or song. I don’t know, I don’t care, I never thought about it. Good God, is this what people are thinking about after the war?”

“Yes!”

“Is this what you want to be thinking about?”

“Better than what we’ve been thinking about!”

Anthony, bless his small ways, came out of his bedroom, and, as always, prevented them from ever finishing any discussion until he was well asleep. All the things they talked about had to involve him, be compelling to him. As soon as he heard his mother and father talking in animated tones, he would come and take one of them away.

But later, in their bed, in the dark, Tatiana, who still had on her glum face, said to Alexander, “We don’t know each other. It occurs to me now—perhaps a little belatedly—that we never did.”

“Speak for yourself,” he said. “I know how you’ve lived and I know how you like to be touched. You know how I’ve lived and you know how I like to be touched.”

Oh. Alexander may have known theoretically, intellectually, how Tatiana liked to be touched, but he certainly never touched her that way anymore. She didn’t know why he didn’t, he just didn’t, and she didn’t know how to ask.

“Now, can I make love to you once without you crying?”

Certainly she didn’t want to make him touch her.

“Just once, and please—don’t tell me you’re crying from happiness.”

She tried not to cry when he made love to her. But it was impossible.

The goal was to find a way to live and touch where everything that had happened to them to bring them here could be put away somewhere safe, from where they could retrieve it, instead of it retrieving them any time it felt like it.

In the bedroom they were night animals; the lights were always off. Tatiana had to do something.

“What is that god-awful smell?” Alexander said when he came home from the marina.

“Mommy put mayonnaise in her hair,” said Anthony with a face that said, Mommy washed her face with duck poop.

“She did what?”

“Yes. This afternoon she put a whole jar of mayonnaise in her hair! Dad, she sat with it for hours, and now she can’t get the water hot enough to rinse it out.”

Alexander knocked on the bathroom door.

“Go away,” her voice said.

“It’s me.”

“I was talking to you.”

Opening the door, he came in. She was sitting bedraggled in the bath with her hair wet and slick. She covered her breasts from him.

“Um—what are you doing?” he said, with an impassive face.

“Nothing. What are you doing? How was your afternoon?” She saw his expression. “One wrong word from you, Alexander …” she warned.

“I said nothing,” he said. “Are you going to … come out soon? Make dinner, maybe?”

“The water is lukewarm, and I just can’t get this stuff out. I’m waiting for the tank to reheat.”

“It takes hours.”

“I got time,” she said. “You’re not hungry, are you?”

“Can I help?” Alexander asked, working very, very hard at a straight face. “How about I boil some water on the stove and wash it out?”

Mixing boiling water with the cold, Alexander sat shirtless at the edge of the tub and scrubbed Tatiana’s head with shampoo. Later they had cheese sandwiches and Campbell’s tomato soup. The tank reheated; Tatiana washed the hair again. The smell seemed to come out, but when the hair dried, it still smelled like mayonnaise. After they put Anthony to bed, Alexander ran the bath for her and washed her hair once more. They ran out of shampoo. They used heavy duty soap. The hair still smelled.

“It’s like your lobsters,” she said.

“Come on, the fish weren’t this bad.”

“Mom almost smells like herself again,” said Anthony when Alexander came home the next day. “Go ahead, Dad, smell her.”

Dad leaned down and smelled her. “Mmm, quite like herself,” he agreed, placing his hand on her hair.

Tatiana knew that today her hair, down to her lower back, glowed gold and was silken and shiny and exceedingly soft. She had bought strawberry shampoo that was berry fresh and washed her coconut-suntan-lotioned body with vanilla scented soap. Tatiana sidled against Alexander, gazing up up up at him. “Do you like it?” she asked, her breath catching.

“As you know.” But he took his hand away and only glanced down down down at her.

She got busy with steak and plantains and tomato roulade.

Later, out on the deck, he said quietly, “Tania, go get your brush.”

She ran to get the brush. Standing behind her—as if in another life—Alexander slowly, carefully, gently brushed out her hair, running his palm down after each stroke of the brush. “It’s very soft,” he whispered. “What in the world did you put mayonnaise in it for?”

“The hair was dry from the coloring, the leaching and then the ocean,” Tatiana replied. “Mayonnaise is supposed to make it smooth again.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Read it in a beauty magazine.” She closed her eyes. It felt so good to have his hands in her hair. Her hot liquid stomach was pulsing.

“You need to stop with the magazines.” Bending, Alexander pressed his mouth into the back of her head, running his lips back and forth against her, and Tatiana groaned, and was embarrassed that she couldn’t stop herself in time.

“If I don’t read them, how else am I going to know how to please my husband?” she said thickly.

“Tatia, you don’t need to read any magazines for that,” he said.

We’ll have to see about that, she thought, in trepidation at her own anticipated audacity, turning around and stretching out her tremulous hand to him.

His hands behind his head, Alexander lay naked in bed on his back, waiting for her. Tatiana locked the door, took off her silk robe and stood in front of him with her long blonde tresses down over her shoulders. She liked the look in his eyes tonight. It wasn’t neutral. When he reached to switch off the light she said, no, leave the light on.

“Leave the light on?” he said. “This is new.”

“I want you to look at me,” Tatiana said, climbing on top of his stomach, spanning him. Slowly she let her hair fall down onto his chest.

“How does it feel?” she murmured.

“Mmm.” His hands on her hips, Alexander arched his stomach into her open thighs.

“Silky, right?” she purred. “So soft, silky … velvety …”

And Alexander groaned.

He groaned! He opened his mouth and an unsuppressed sound of excitement left his throat.

“Feel me, Shura …” she murmured, continuing to rub herself ever so lightly against his bare stomach, her long loose hair fluttering along with her flutters. But it was stirring her up too much; she had to stop. “I thought maybe if the hair was silky,” she whispered, moving her head from side to side as the cascading mane feathered him in silk strands across his chest, “you’d want to put your hands in it … your lips in it again.”

“My hands are on it,” he let out.

“I didn’t say on it. I said in it.”

Alexander stroked her hair.

She shook her head. “No. That’s how you touch it now. I want you to touch it like you touched it then.”

Alexander closed his eyes, his mouth parting. His gripping hands pulled her hips lower on him, while he pulled himself higher. Tatiana felt him so geared up and searching for her that in one second all her grand efforts with mayonnaise were going to come to the very same end that had already been happening in their bed for months.

Quickly she bent to him, moving herself up and away. “Tell me,” she whispered into his face, “why have you stopped caring how I keep my hair?”

“I haven’t stopped.”

“Yes, you have. Come on. You’re talking to me. Tell me why.”

Falling quiet, Alexander took his hands away from her hips and rested them on her knees.

“Tell me. Why don’t you touch me?”

Alexander paused heavily, looking away from her searching eyes. “The hair is not mine anymore. It belongs to the other you, the you of New York and red nail polish and high-heeled dancing, and Vikki, and building a life without me when you thought I was dead—as you absolutely should have. I’m not against you. But that’s what it reminds me of. I’m just telling you.”

Tatiana put her hand on his cheek. “Do you want me to cut it? I’ll cut it all off right now.”

“No.” Alexander moved his face away. They were quiet. “But nothing is ever enough, have you noticed?” he said. “I can’t touch you enough. I can’t make you happy. I can’t say anything right to you. And you can’t take away from me a single thing I’ve fucked up along the way.”

She became deflated. “You’re here, and you’re forgiven for everything,” she said quietly, sitting up and closing her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at his tattooed arms and his scar-ribbon chest.

“Tell me the truth,” Alexander said. “Don’t you sometimes think it’s harder—this—and other stuff like the magazines quizzes—harder for the two of us? That magazine quiz just points up the absurdity of us pretending we’re like normal people. Don’t you sometimes think it would be easier with your Edward Ludlow in New York? Or a Thelma? No history. No memories. Nothing to get over, nothing to claw back from.”

“Would it be easier for you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t hear you cry every night,” Alexander said. “I wouldn’t feel like such a failure every minute of my life.”

“Oh my God! What are you talking about?” Tatiana yanked to get off him, but now it was Alexander who held her in place.

“You know what I’m talking about,” he said, his eyes blazing. “I want amnesia! I want a fucking lobotomy. Could I please never think again? Look what’s happened to us, us, Tania. Don’t you remember how we used to be? Just look what’s happened.”

His long winter’s night bled into Coconut Grove through all the fields and villages in three countries Alexander plundered through to get to the Bridge to Holy Cross, over the River Vistula, to get into the mountains, to escape to Germany, to save Pasha, to make his way to Tatiana. And he failed. Twenty escape attempts—two in Catowice, one ill-fated one in Colditz Castle, and seventeen desperate ones in Sachsenhausen, and he never got to her. He had somehow made all the wrong choices. Alexander knew it. Anthony knew it. With the son asleep, the parents had hours to mindlessly meander through the fields and rivers of Europe, through the streets of Leningrad. That was not to be wished upon.

“Stop it,” Tatiana whispered. “Just stop it! You didn’t fail. You’re looking at it all twisted. You stayed alive, that was all, that was everything, and you know that. Why are you doing this?”

“Why?” he said. “You want it out while sitting naked on top of my stomach with your hair down? Well, here it is. You don’t want it out? Then don’t ask me. Turn the light off, keep the braid in, get your”—Alexander stopped himself—“get off me, and say nothing.”

Tatiana did none of those things. She didn’t want it out, what she wanted, desperately, was him to touch her. Though the aching in her heart from his words was unabated, the aching in her loins from her desire for him was also unabated. She remained on him, watching his face watching her. Gently she stroked his chest, his arms, his shoulders. Bending to him, she flickered her moist soft lips over his face, over his neck, and in a little while, when she felt him calm down, she whispered to him. Shura … it’s me, your Tania, your wife …

“What do you want, Tania, my wife?” His hands grazed up her thighs, up her waist, to her hair.

She was so ashamed of her craving. But the shame didn’t make her crave it any less.

His hands traveled down to her hips, holding her, pulling her open. “What are you clamoring for?” Alexander whispered, his fingers clamoring at her. “Tell me. Speak to me.”

She moved a little higher, rubbing her breasts over his mouth.

Cupping them into his face, Alexander groaned again, his mouth opening underneath them.

Moaning, Tatiana whispered, “I want you to stroke my hair … rub it between your fingers, knead it like you used to. I used to love that, you touching me.” Her body was quivering. “Hold it tight, so tight … yes! like that … touch my blonde hair that you used to love … do you remember? Don’t you remember?”

Very slowly Tatiana moved up on his chest, and up and up and up, until she was kneeling over Alexander’s panting parted mouth. Please, please, darling, Shura, whispered Tatiana, touch me … grasping on to the headboard and lowering herself slightly. Please … touch me like you used to …

This time, Alexander, with no breath left in his lungs, did not have to be asked again. When she felt his hands spreading her open and his warm soft mouth on her for the first time since their return to America, Tatiana nearly fainted. She began to cry. She couldn’t even hold herself up; if it weren’t for the headboard and the wall, she would have surely pitched forward.

“Shh … Tatiasha … shh … I’m looking at you … and what do you know, it turns out that blonde … is my favorite color.”

She couldn’t last three gasping breaths, milling into his mouth, trying to remain upright. Crying, crying, from happiness, from arousal, Please don’t stop, darling, Shura, don’t stop … pulsing into his lips, moaning so loudly the heavens were about to open up … Oh God, oh, yes …Oh Shura … Shura … Shura …

The next morning before work, when he came to the kitchen to get his coffee, Tatiana said to him, deeply blushing, “Alexander, what would you like for breakfast?”

And he, taking her into his arms, lifting her, setting her down on the kitchen counter in front of him, embracing her, madness in his eyes, said, “Oh, now that it’s morning, I’m Alexander again?” His open lips were over her open lips.

Lovers Key

On a moist Sunday—after spring boiled over into summer—Alexander borrowed a one-mast sailboat from Mel and took them out to the bay where they thought the breezes would make them cooler. The humid breezes just made them muggier, but because they were alone out at sea, Alexander undressed to his swimming trunks, and Tatiana wore her bikini swimsuit, and they floated peaceably under the zenith of the Tropic of Cancer sun. Alexander brought two fishing lines and some worms. The wind was good. The headsail was up. Come with me, she murmured, and I will make you fishers of men. They sailed on the serene waters around Key Biscayne, and down south to Lovers Key, where he dropped anchor so they could have some lunch. Anthony fell asleep after helping his dad loosen the ropes on the jib. He had been leaning on his mother and just keeled over. Smiling, Tatiana adjusted the boy, holding him closer, more comfortably. “I know how he feels. This is quite soothing.” She closed her eyes.

Raising anchor, Alexander let the boat float and flounder as he went to sit by her on the white bench at the rudder. He lit a smoke, gave her a drink; they sat and swayed.

The Russian they spoke reminded them of another time. They spoke softer, often they spoke English, but this Sunday on the boat, they were Russian.

“Shura? We’ve been here six months.”

“Yes. It hasn’t snowed.”

“We’ve had three hurricanes, though.”

“I’m not bothered about the hurricanes.”

“What about the heat, the mugginess?”

“Don’t care.”

She considered him.

“I’d be happy to stay,” Alexander said quietly. “This is fine with me.”

“In a houseboat?”

“We can get a real house.”

“And you’d work the boats and the girls all day?”

“I’ve taken a wife, I don’t know what girls are anymore.” He grinned. “I admit to liking the boats, though.”

“For the rest of your life? Boats, water?”

His smile rather quickly disappearing, he leaned away from her.

“Do you recall yourself in the evenings, at night?” Tatiana asked gently, bringing him back with her free hand. The other held the boy.

“What’s that got to do with the water?”

“I don’t think the water is helping,” Tatiana said. “I really don’t.” She paused. “I think we should go.”

“Well, I don’t.”

They stopped talking. Alexander smoked another cigarette.

They floated in the middle of the tropical green ocean with the islands in view.

The water was doing something to Tatiana. It was dismantling her. With every flutter of the water she saw the Neva, the River Neva under the northern sun on the sub-Arctic white night city they once called home, the water rippled and in it was Leningrad, and in Leningrad was everything she wanted to remember and everything she wanted to forget.

He was gazing at her. His eyes occasionally softened under the sticky Coconut Grove sun.

“You’ve got new freckles, above your eyebrows.” He kissed her eyelids. “Golden, soft hair, ocean eyes.” He stroked her face, her cheeks. “Your scar is almost gone. Just a thin white line now. Can barely see it.” The scar she got escaping from the Soviet Union.

“Hmm.”

“Unlike mine?”

“You have more to heal, husband.” Reaching out, she placed her hand on Alexander’s face and then closed her eyes quickly so he couldn’t pry inside her.

“Tatiasha,” he called in a whisper, and then bent to her and kissed her long and true.

It had been a year since she had found him shackled in Sachsenhausen’s isolation chamber. A year since she dredged him up from the bottomdwellers of Soviet-occupied Germany, from the grasping hands of Stalin’s henchmen. How could it have been a year? How long did it seem?

An eternity in purgatory, a hemidemisemiquaver in heaven.

His boat was full of women, old women, young women, widowed women, newly married women, and now there were pregnant women. “I swear,” said Alexander, “I had very little to do with that.” Also returning war veterans. Some were foreigners. One such man, Frederik, with a limp and a cane and a heavy Dutch accent, liked to sit by Alexander as he looked out on the sea. He came in the mornings, because the afternoon tour was too hot for him, and he and Anthony stayed by Alexander’s steering wheel. Anthony would frequently sit on Frederik’s lap. One day, Anthony was playing a clapping game with Frederik and said, “Oh, look you have blue numbers on your arm, too. Dad, look, he’s got numbers on him, just like you.”

Alexander and Frederik exchanged a look. Alexander turned away but not before Frederik’s eyes welled up. Frederik didn’t say anything then, but at noon after they docked, he stayed behind and asked Tatiana if he could talk to Alexander in private. Casting an anxious look at Alexander, she reluctantly left all the sandwiches and took Anthony home for lunch.

“So where were you?” Frederik asked, prematurely old though he was only forty-two. “I was at Treblinka. All the way from Amsterdam to Treblinka. Imagine that.”

Alexander shook his head. He lit a smoke, gave one to Frederik, who shook his head. “You have the wrong impression,” Alexander said.

“Let me see your arm.”

Rolling up his white linen sleeve, Alexander showed him.

“No wrong impression. I’d know these anywhere. Since when are American soldiers branded with German numbers?”

The cigarette wasn’t long enough, the smoke wasn’t long enough. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Alexander said. “I was in a concentration camp in Germany.”

“That’s obvious. Which camp?”

“Sachsenhausen.”

“Oh. It was an SS-training camp.”

“That camp was many things,” said Alexander.

“How did you get there?”

“Long story.”

“We have time. Miami has a large ex-pat Jewish community. You want to come with me tonight to our meeting? We meet on Thursdays. Just a few of us, like me, like you, we get together, talk, drink a little bit. You look like you sorely need to be around other people like yourself.”

“Frederik, I’m not Jewish.”

“I don’t understand,” Frederik said haltingly. “Why would the Germans brand you?”

“The Germans didn’t.”

“Who did then?”

“The Soviets. They ran that camp after the war.”

“Oh, the pigs. I don’t understand anything. Well, come with me anyway. We have three Polish Jews—you didn’t think there were any left, did you?—who were imprisoned by the Soviets after Ukraine went from Soviet to German back to Soviet hands. They’re debating every Thursday which occupation was worse.”

“Well,” said Alexander, “Hitler is dead. Mussolini is dead. Hirohito deposed. Fascism has suddenly gotten a bad name after being all the rage for twenty years. But who’s stronger than ever? The answer should give you a clue.”

“So come, give your two cents. Why would the Sovietskis do that to you if you weren’t Jewish? They didn’t brand American POWs; they were fighting on the same side.”

“If the Soviets knew I was American, they would’ve shot me years ago.”

Frederick looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t understand …”

“Can’t explain.”

“What division did you say you served in?”

Alexander sighed. “I was in Rokossovsky’s Army. His 97th penal battalion.”

“What—that’s not the U.S. Army …”

“I was a captain in the Red Army.”

“Oh, my God.” On Frederik’s face played sharp disbelief. “You’re a Soviet officer?”

“Yes.”

Frederik careened off the plank with his cane so fast, he nearly tipped himself over. “I got the wrong impression about you.” He was wheeling away. “Forget we ever spoke.”

Alexander was visibly upset when he came home. “Anthony!” he said as soon as he walked through the door. “Get over here. I told you this before, I’m going to tell you again, but for absolutely the last time—stop telling strangers about me.”

The boy was perplexed.

“You don’t have to figure it out, you just have to listen. I told you to keep quiet, and you still continue as if I hadn’t made myself clear.”

Tatiana tried to intervene, but Alexander cut her off. “Ant, as punishment tomorrow you’re not going on the boat with me. I’ll take you the next day, but if you ever speak about me to strangers again, you’ll be off the boat for good. You got it?”

The boy cried.

“I didn’t hear you, Anthony.”

“I got it, Dad.”

Straightening up, Alexander saw Tatiana watching them silently from the stove. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put a long-sleeve linen shirt on Anthony’s mouth like you do on my body,” he said, and ate dinner by himself out on the deck.

After Tatiana put Anthony to bed, she went outside.

The first thing Alexander said was, “We haven’t had meat in weeks. I’m as sick of shrimp and flounder as you were of lobsters. Why can’t you buy some meat?”

After hemming and hawing, Tatiana said, “I can’t go to the Center Meat Market. They’ve put a sign in the window—a little war souvenir.”

“So?”

“Sign says, ‘Horse meats not rationed—no points necessary.’”

They both fell mute.

Tatiana is walking down Ulitsa Lomonosova in Leningrad in October 1941, trying to find a store with bread to redeem her ration coupons. She passes a crowd of people. She is small, she can’t see what they’re circling. Suddenly the crowd opens up and out comes a young man holding a bloodied knife in one hand and a hunk of raw meat in the other, and Tatiana can see the opened flesh of a newly killed mare behind him. Dropping his knife on the ground, the man rips into the meat. One of his teeth falls out and he spits it out as he continues to chew frantically. Meat!

“You better hurry,” he says to her with his mouth full, “or there won’t be any left. Want to borrow my knife?”

And Alexander was remembering being in a transit camp after Colditz. There was no food for the two hundred men, who were contained within a barbed wire rectangular perimeter with guards on high posts in the four corners. No food except the horse that every day at noon the guards killed and left in the middle of the starving mess of men with knives. They would give the men sixty seconds with the horse, and then they would open fire. Alexander only survived because he would head immediately for the horse’s mouth and cut out the tongue, hide it in his tunic and then crawl away. It would take him forty seconds. He did it six times, shared the tongue with Ouspensky. Pasha was gone.

Tatiana stood in front of Alexander, leaning against the rail of the deck and listening to the water. He smoked. She drank her tea.

“So what’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Why did you eat by yourself?”

“I didn’t want to be eating dinner with you looking at me with your judging eyes. Don’t want to be judged, Tania”—he pointed at her—“most of all by you. And today, thanks to Ant, I had an unpleasant and unwanted conversation with a crippled Jewish man from Holland who mistook me for a brother in arms only to learn I fought for a country that handed over half of the Polish Jews and all of the Ukrainian Jews to Hitler.”

“I’m not judging you, darling.”

“I’m good for nothing,” Alexander said. “Not even polite conversation. You may be right about me not being able to rebuild my life working off Mel’s boats, but I’m not good for anything else. I don’t know how to be anything. In my life I’ve had only one job—I was an officer in the Red Army. I know how to carry weapons, set mines in the ground, drive tanks, kill men. I know how to fight. Oh, and I know how to burn down villages wholesale. That’s what I know. And I did this all for the Soviet Union!” he exclaimed, staring into the water, not looking at Tatiana, who stood on the deck, staring at him. “It’s completely fucked up,” he went on. “I’m yelling at Anthony because we have to pretend I’m not what I am. I have to lie to deny what I am. Just like in the Soviet Union. Ironic, no? There I denied my American self, and here I deny my Soviet self.” He flicked his ash into the water.

“But, Shura, you’ve been other things besides a soldier,” Tatiana said, unable to address the truth of the other things he was saying to her.

“Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he snapped. “I’m talking about living a life.”

“Well, I know, but you’ve managed before,” she whispered, turning her body away from him to herself look out onto the dark bay. Where was Anthony to interrupt the conversation she realized belatedly she didn’t want to have? Alexander was right: there were many things she would rather not have out. He couldn’t talk about anything, and she didn’t want to. But now she was in the thick of it. She had to. “We lived a life in Lazarevo,” she said.

“It was a fake life,” said Alexander. “There was nothing real about it.”

“It was the realest life we knew.” Stung at his bitter words, she sank down to the deck.

“Oh, look,” he said dismissively, “it was what it was, but it was a month! I was going back to the front. We pretended we were living while war raged. You kept house, I fished. You peeled potatoes, made bread. We hung sheets on the line to dry, almost as if we were living. And now we’re trying it in America.” Alexander shook his head. “I work, you clean, we dig potatoes, we shop for food. We break our bread. We smoke. We talk sometimes. We make love.” He paused as he glanced at her, remorsefully and yet—accusingly? “Not Lazarevo love.”

Tatiana lowered her head, their Lazarevo love tainted by the Gulag.

“Is any of it going to give me another chance to save your brother?” he asked.

“Nothing is going to change what cannot be changed,” she replied, her head close to her knees. “All we can do is change what can be.”

“But, Tania, don’t you know that the things that torture you most are the things you cannot fix?”

“That I know,” she whispered.

“And do I judge you? Let’s see,” said Alexander, “what about taking ice away from the borders of your heart? Is that changeable, you think? No, no, don’t shake your head, don’t deny it. I know what used to be there. I know the wide-eyed joyous sixteen-year-old you once were.”

Tatiana hadn’t shaken her head. She bowed her head; how different.

“You once skipped barefoot through the Field of Mars with me. And then,” said Alexander, “you helped me drag your mother’s body on a sled to the frozen cemetery.”

“Shura!” She got up off the deck on her collapsing legs. “Of all the things we could talk about—”

“On the sled dragged,” he whispered, “your entire family! Tell me you’re not still on that ice in Lake—”

“Shura! Stop!” Her hands went over her ears.

Grabbing her, removing her hands from her head, Alexander brought her in front of him. “Still there,” he said almost inaudibly, “still digging new ice holes to bury them in.”

“Well, what about you?” Tatiana said to him in a lifeless voice. “Every single night reburying my brother after he died on your back.”

“Yes,” Alexander said in his own lifeless voice, letting her go. “That is what I do. I dig deeper frozen holes for him. I tried to save him and I killed him. I buried your brother in a shallow grave.”

Tatiana cried. Alexander sat and smoked—his way of crying—poison right in the throat to quell the grief.

“Let’s go live in the woods, Tania,” he said. “Because nothing is going to make you skip next to me again while walking through the Summer Garden. I’m not the only one who’s gone. So let’s go make fish soup over the fire in our steel helmet, let’s both eat and drink from it. Have you noticed? We have one pot. We have one spoon. We live as if we’re still at war, in the trench, without meat, without baking real bread, without collecting things, without nesting. The only way you and I can live is like this: homeless and abandoned. We have it off with the clothes on our back, before they start shooting again, before they bring reinforcements. That’s where we still are. Not on Lovers Key but in a trench, on that hill in Berlin, waiting for them to kill us.”

“Darling, but the enemy is gone,” Tatiana said, starting to shake, remembering Sam Gulotta and the State Department.

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t live without the enemy,” said Alexander. “I don’t know how to wear the civilian clothes you bought to cover me. I don’t know how not to clean my weapons every day, how not to keep my hair short, how not to bark at you and Anthony, how not to expect you to listen. And I don’t know how to touch you slow or take you slow as if I’m not in prison and the guards are coming any minute.”

Tatiana wanted to walk away but didn’t want to upset him further. She didn’t lift her head as she spoke. “I think you’re doing better,” she said. “But you do whatever you need to. Wear your army clothes. Clean your guns, cut your hair, bark away, I will listen. Take me how you can.” When Alexander said nothing, nothing at all, to help her, Tatiana continued in a frail voice, “We have to figure out a way that’s best for us.”

His elbows were on his knees. Her shoulders were quaking.

Where was he, her Alexander of once? Was he truly gone? The Alexander of the Summer Garden, of their first Lazarevo days, of the hat in his hands, white-toothed, peaceful, laughing, languid, stunning Alexander, had he been left far behind?

Well, Tatiana supposed that was only right.

For Alexander believed his Tatiana of once was gone, too. The swimming child Tatiana of the Luga, of the Neva, of the River Kama.

Perhaps on the surface they were still in their twenties, but their hearts were old.

Mercy Hospital

The following afternoon at 12:30, she wasn’t at the marina. Alexander could usually spot her from a great distance, waiting for them on the docks, even before he entered the no wake zone. But today, he pulled up, he docked, let the women and the old men off as Anthony stood by the plank and saluted them. He waited and waited.

“Where’s Mommy?”

“Good question, son.” Alexander had relented; she had asked him this morning to forgive Anthony, and he did and took the boy with him, admonishing him to keep to himself. Now Ant was here, and his mother wasn’t. Was she upset with him after yesterday’s excruciating conversation?

“Maybe she took a nap and forgot to wake up,” said Anthony.

“Does Mommy usually sleep during the day?”

“Never.”

He waited a little longer and decided to bring the boy home. He himself had to be back by two for the afternoon tour. Anthony, his joy in life unmitigated by external circumstance, stopped and touched every rust spot, every blade of grass that grew where it wasn’t supposed to. Alexander had to put the boy on his shoulders to get home a little faster.

Tatiana wasn’t home either.

“So where’s Mommy?”

“I don’t know, Ant. I was hoping you’d know.”

“So what are we gonna do?”

“We’ll wait, I guess.” Alexander was smoking one cigarette after another.

Anthony stood in front of him. “I’m thirsty.”

“All right, I can get you a drink.”

“That’s not the cup Mommy uses. That’s not the juice Mommy uses. That’s not how Mommy pours it.” Then he said, “I’m thirsty and I’m hungry. Mommy always feeds me.”

“Yes, me too,” said Alexander, but he made him a sandwich with cheese and peanut butter.

He thought for sure she would be back any minute with the laundry or with groceries.

At one thirty, Alexander was running out of options.

He said, “Let’s go, Antman. Let’s take one more look, and if we can’t find her, I guess you’ll have to come with me.”

Instead of walking left to Memorial Park, they decided to walk right on Bayshore, past the construction site for the hospital. There was another small park on the other side. Anthony said sometimes they went there to play.

Alexander saw her from a distance, not at the park, but at the Mercy Hospital construction site, sitting on what looked to be a dirt mound.

When he got closer, he saw she was sitting motionless on a stack of two-by-fours. He saw her from the side, her hair in its customary plait, her hands laid tensely in a cross on her lap.

Anthony saw her and ran. “Mommy!”

She came out of her reverie, turned her head, and her face wrinkled in a contrite scrunch. “Uh-oh,” she said, standing up and rushing to them. “Have I been a bad girl?”

“On so many levels,” Alexander said, coming up to her. “You know I have to get back by two.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, bending to Anthony. “I lost track of time. You okay, bud? I see Daddy fed you.”

“What are you doing?” Alexander asked, but she was pretending to wipe the crumbs off Anthony’s mouth and didn’t reply.

“I see. Well, I have to go,” he said coldly, bending to kiss Anthony on the head.

That evening they were having dinner, almost not talking. Tatiana, trying to make light conversation, mentioned that Mercy Hospital was the first Catholic hospital in the Greater Miami area, a ministry of the Roman Catholic Church, and it was being built in the shape of a cross, when Alexander interrupted her. “So this is what you’ve been doing with your free time?”

“Free time?” she said curtly. “How do you think you get food on your table?”

“I didn’t have food on my table this afternoon.”

“Once.”

“Was that the first time you were sitting there?”

She couldn’t lie to him. “No,” she admitted. “But it’s nothing. I just go and sit.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just do, that’s all.”

“Tatiana, let me understand,” Alexander said, and his voice got hard. “You have the Barnacle House to visit, the Vizcaya Palace, the Italianate Gardens, there is shopping, and libraries, there’s the ocean, and swimming and sunbathing, and reading, but what you do with the only two hours you have to yourself all day is go and sit in a dust bowl, watching construction workers build a hospital?”

Tatiana didn’t say anything at first. “As you well know,” she said quietly, “the way you are toward me, I have much more than two hours to myself all day.”

Alexander didn’t say anything.

“So why don’t you call Vikki and ask her to come down and spend a few weeks with you?” he said at last.

“Oh, just stop forcing Vikki on me all the time!” Tatiana exclaimed in a voice so loud it surprised even her.

Alexander stood up from the table. “Don’t raise your fucking voice to me.”

Tatiana jumped up. “Well, stop talking nonsense then!”

His hands slammed the table. “What did I say?”

“You left me and were gone for three days in Deer Isle!” she yelled. “Three days! Did you ever explain to me where you were? Did you ever tell me? And do I bang the table? Meanwhile I sit for five minutes a block away from our house and suddenly you’re all up in arms! I mean, are you even serious?”

“TATIANA!” His fist crashed into the table and dishes rattled off to the floor.

Anthony burst into tears. Holding his hands over his ears, he was saying, “Mommy, Mommy, stop it.”

Tatiana threw up her hands and went to her son. Alexander stormed out.

Inside the bedroom Anthony said, “Mommy, don’t yell at Daddy or he’ll go away again.”

Tatiana wanted to explain that adults sometimes argued but knew Anthony wouldn’t understand. Bessie and Nick Moore argued. Anthony’s mom and dad didn’t argue. The child couldn’t see that they were getting less good at pretending they were both made of china and not flint. At least there was actual participation, though as with all things, one had to be careful what one wished for.

Many hours later Alexander came back and went straight out on the deck.

Tatiana had been lying in bed waiting for him. She put on her robe and went outside. The air smelled of salt and the ocean. It was after midnight, it was June, in the high seventies. She liked that about Coconut Grove. She’d never been in a place where the nighttime temperature remained so warm.

“I’m sorry I raised my voice,” she said.

“What you should be sorry about,” Alexander said, “is that you’re up to no good. That’s what you should be sorry about.”

“I’m just sitting and thinking,” she said.

“Oh, and I was born yesterday? Give me a fucking break.”

She went to sit on his lap. She was going to tell him what he needed to hear. She only wished that just once he would tell her what she needed to hear. “It’s nothing, Shura. Really. I’m just sitting. Mmm,” she murmured, rubbing her cheek against his. His cheek was stubbly. She loved that stubble. His breath smelled of alcohol. She breathed it in; she loved that beer breath. Then she sighed. “Where’ve you been?”

“I walked to one of the casinos. Played poker. See how easy that was? And if you wanted to know where I’d been back in Deer Isle, why didn’t you just ask me?”

Tatiana didn’t want to tell him she was afraid to know. She had gone missing for thirty minutes. He had been lost, gone, missing and presumed dead for years. She wished sometimes he would just think, think of the things she might feel. She didn’t want to be on his lap anymore. “Shura, come on, don’t be upset with me,” Tatiana said, getting off.

“You, too.” He threw down his cigarette as he stood up. “I’m doing my level best,” he said, heading inside.

“Me, too, Alexander,” she said, head down, following him. “Me, too.”

But in bed—she naked, holding him, he naked, holding her, nearly there, nearly at the very end for him—Tatiana clutched him as she used to, feverishly clutched his back and under her fingers, even at the moment of her own breaking abandon, felt his scars under her grasping fingers.

She could not continue. Could not, even at that moment. Especially at that moment. And so she found herself doing what she remembered him doing in Lazarevo when he couldn’t bear to touch her: Tatiana stopped him, pushed him away, and turned her back to him.

She put her face in the pillow, raised her hips and cried, hoping he wouldn’t notice, hoping that even if he did notice, he would be too far gone to care.

She was wrong on all counts. He noticed. And he wasn’t too far gone to care.

“So this is what your level best looks like, huh?” Alexander whispered, out of breath, bending over her, lifting her head off the pillow by her hair. “Presenting your cold back to me?”

“It’s not cold,” Tatiana said, not facing him. “It’s just the only part that’s taken leave of all its senses.”

Alexander jumped off the bed—shaking and unfinished. He turned on the lamp, the overhead light, he opened the shades. Unsteadily she sat up on the bed, covering herself with a sheet. He stood naked in front of her, glistening, unsubsided, his chest heaving. He was incredibly upset.

“How can I even try to find my way,” he said, his voice breaking, “if my own wife recoils from me? I know it isn’t what it used to be. I know it isn’t what we had. But it’s all we have now, and this body is all I’ve got.”

“Darling—please,” Tatiana whispered, stretching out her hands to him. “I’m not recoiling from you.” She couldn’t see him through the veil of her sorrow.

“You think I’m fucking blind?” he exclaimed. “Oh God! You think this is the first time I noticed? You think I’m an idiot? I notice every fucking time, Tatiana! I grit my teeth, I wear my clothes so you don’t see me, I take you from behind, so nothing of me touches you—just like you want.” He enunciated every syllable through his teeth. “You wear clothes in bed with me so I won’t accidentally rub my wounds on you. I pretend not to give a shit, but how long do you think I can keep doing this? How much longer do you think you’re going to be happier on the hard floor?”

She covered her face.

He swept his hand across and knocked her arms away. “You are my wife and you won’t touch me, Tania!”

“Darling, I do touch you …”

“Oh, yes,” he said cruelly. “Well, all I can say is, thank God, I guess, that my tackle is not maimed, or I’d never get any blow. But what about the rest of me?”

Tatiana lowered her weeping head. “Shura, please …”

He yanked her up and out of bed. The sheet fell away from her. “Look at me,” he said.

She was too ashamed of herself to lift her eyes to him. They were standing naked against each other. His angry fingers dug into her arms. “That’s right, you should be fucking ashamed,” he said through his teeth. “You don’t want to face me then, and you can’t face me now. Just perfect. Well, nothing more to say, is there? Come on, then.” He spun her around and bent her over the bed.

“Shura, please!” She tried to get up, but his palm on her back kept her from moving until she couldn’t move if she wanted to. And then he took his palm away.

Behind her, leaning over her, supporting himself solely by his clenched fists on the mattress, Alexander took her like he was in the army, like she was a stranger he found in the woods whom he was going to leave in one to-the-hilt minute without a backward glance, while she helplessly cried and then—even more helplessly, was crying out, now deservedly and thoroughly abased. “And look—no hands, just like you like,” he whispered into her ear. “You want more? Or was that enough lovemaking for you?”

Tatiana’s face was in the blanket.

Himself unfinished, he backed away, and she slowly straightened up and turned to him, wiping her face. “Please—I’m sorry,” she whispered, sitting down weakly on the edge of the bed, covering her body. Her legs were shaking.

“You cover me from other people because you don’t want to look at me yourself. I’m surprised you notice or care that other women talk to me.” He was panting. “You think they’ll run in horror, like you, once they catch a glimpse of me.”

“What—no!” Her arms reached for him. “Shura, you’re misunderstanding me … I’m not frightened, I’m just so sad for you.”

“Your pity,” he said, stepping back from her, “is the absolute last fucking thing I want. Pity yourself that you’re like this.”

“I’m so afraid to hurt you …” Tatiana whispered, her palms openly pleading with him.

“Bullshit!” he said. “But ironic, don’t you think, considering what you’re doing to me.” Alexander groaned. “Why can’t you be like my son, who sees everything and never flinches from me?”

“Oh, Shura …” She was crying.

“Look at me, Tatiana.” She lifted her face. His bronze eyes were blazing, he was loud, he was uncontrollable. “You’re terrified, I know, but here I am”—Alexander pointed to himself, standing naked and scarred and blackly tattooed. “Once again,” he said, “I stand in front of you naked and I will try—God help me—one more fucking time.” Flinging his fists down, he was nearly without breath left. “Here I am, your one man circus freak show, having bled out for Mother Russia, having desperately tried to get to you, now on top of you with his scourge marks, and you, who used to love me, who has sympathized, internalized, normalized everything, you are not allowed to turn away from me! Do you understand? This is one of the unchangeable things, Tania. This is what I’m going to look like until the day I die. I can’t get any peace from you ever unless you find a way to make peace with this. Make peace with me. Or let me go for good.”

Her shoulders rose and fell. “I’m sorry,” Tatiana said as she came to him, putting her arms around him, kneeling on the floor in front of him, holding him, looking up into his face. “Please. I’m sorry.”

Eventually she managed to soothe him back on the bed. Alexander came—not willingly—and lay down beside her. She pulled him on top of her. He climbed where he was led as her hands went around his back. She wrapped her legs around him, holding him intimately and tight.

“I’m sorry, honey, husband, Shura, dearest, my whole heart,” Tatiana whispered into his neck, kissing his throat. With heartbroken fingers she caressed him. “Please forgive me for hurting your feelings. I don’t pity you, don’t turn it that way on me, but I cannot help that I’m desperately sad, wishing so much—for your sake only, not mine—that you could still be what you once were—before the things you now carry. I’m ashamed of myself and I’m sorry. I spend all my days regretting the things I cannot fix.”

“You and me both, babe,” he said, threading his arms underneath her. Their faces were turned away from each other as Alexander lay on top of her, and she stroked the war on his back. Naked and pressed breast to breast they searched for something they had lost long ago, and found it briefly, in a fierce clutch, in a glimmer through the barricades.

The Sands of Naples

Alexander came home mid-morning and said, “Let’s collect our things. We’re leaving.”

“We are? What about Mel?”

“This isn’t about Mel. It’s about us. It’s time to go.”

Apparently Frederik had complained to Mel that the man who was running his boats full of war veterans and war widows was possibly a communist, a Soviet spy, perhaps a traitor. Mel, afraid of losing his customers, had to confront Alexander, but couldn’t bring himself to fire the man who brought him thousands of dollars worth of business. Alexander made it easy for Mel. He denied all charges of espionage and then quit.

“Let’s head out west,” he said to Tatiana. “You might as well show me that bit of land you bought. Where is it again? New Mexico?”

“Arizona.”

“Let’s go. I want to get to California for the grape-picking season in August.”

And so they left Coconut Grove of the see-through salt waters and the wanton women with the bright colored lipstick, they left the bobbing houseboats and Anthony’s crashing dreams, and the mystery of Mercy Hospital and drove across the newly opened Everglades National Park to Naples on the Gulf of Mexico.

Alexander was subdued with her, back to Edith Wharton polite, and she deserved it, but the sand was cool and white, even in scorching noon, and the fire sunsets and lightning storms over the Gulf were like nothing they’d ever seen. So they stayed in the camper on a deserted beach, in a corner of the world, in a spot where he could take off his shirt and play ball with Anthony, while the sun beat on his back and tanned the parts that could be tanned, leaving the scars untouched, like gray stripes.

Both he and the boy were two brown stalks running around the white shores and green waters. All three of them loved the heat, loved the beach, the briny Gulf, the sizzling days, the blinding sands. They celebrated her twenty-third birthday and their fifth wedding anniversary there, and finally left after Anthony’s fourth birthday at the end of June.

They spent only a few days in New Orleans because they discovered New Orleans, much like South Miami Beach, was not an ideal city for a small boy.

“Perhaps next time we can come here without the child,” said Alexander on Bourbon Street, where the nice ladies sitting by the windows lifted up their shirts as the three of them strolled by.

“Dad, why are they showing us their boobies?”

“I’m not sure, son. It’s a strange ritualistic custom common to these parts of the world.”

“Like in that journal where the African girls put weights in their lips to make them hang down past their throats?”

“Something like that.” Alexander scooped up Anthony into his arms.

“But Mommy said the African girls make their lips big to get a husband. Are these girls trying to get a husband?”

“Something like that.”

“Daddy, what did Mommy do to get you to marry her?” Anthony giggled. “Did Mommy show you her boobies?”

“Tania, what are you reading to our child?” said Alexander, flipping a squealing Anthony upside down by his legs to get him to stop asking questions.

“National Geographic,” she said, lightly batting her eyes at him. “But answer your son, Alexander.”

“Yeah, Dad,” said Anthony, red with delight, hanging upside down. “Answer your son.”

“Mommy put on a pretty dress, Antman.” And for a fleeting moment on Bourbon Street in the French Quarter, Tatiana and Alexander’s eyes made real contact.

They were glad they had the camper now in their quest, in their summer trek across the prairies. They had cover over their heads, they had a place for Anthony to sleep, to play, a place to put their pot and spoon, their little dominion unbroken by pungent hotel rooms or beaten-up landladies. Occasionally they had to stop at RV parks to take showers. Anthony liked those places, because there were other kids there for him to play with, but Tatiana and Alexander chafed at living in such close proximity to strangers, even for an evening. After Coconut Grove they finally discovered what they liked best, what they needed most—just the three of them in an unhealed but unbroken trinity.