Читать книгу Tatiana and Alexander - Paullina Simons - Страница 16
ОглавлениеThe Interrogation, 1943
HE HEARD VOICES OUTSIDE, and the door opened.
“Alexander Belov?”
Alexander was going to say yes but for some reason thought of the Romanovs shot in a small basement room in the middle of the night. Was it the middle of the night? The same night? The next night? He decided to say nothing.
“Come. Now.”
He followed the guard to a small room upstairs, this one not a classroom. It was an old storage area, maybe a nurses’ station.
He was told to sit in the chair. Then he was told to stand up. Then to sit back down again. It was still dark outside. He couldn’t figure out what the time was. When he asked, he was met with a “Shut up!” He decided not to ask again. After a few moments, two men entered the room. One of them was the fat Mitterand, one of them was a man he did not know.
The man shined a bright light into Alexander’s face. He closed his eyes.
“Open your eyes, Major!”
Fat Mitterand said softly, “Vladimir, now now. We can do this another way.”
He liked that they were calling him major. So they still couldn’t get a colonel to interrogate him. As he had suspected, they didn’t have anyone to deal with him here in Morozovo. What they needed to do was get him to Volkhov where things would be different for him, but they didn’t want to risk any more of their men for a drive across the river. They had already failed once. Eventually he would go in a barge, but the ice would have to melt first. He could spend another month in the Morozovo cell. Could he take another minute in it?
Mitterand said, “Major Belov, I am here to inform you that you are under arrest for high treason. We have irrefutable documents accusing you of espionage and treason to your mother country. What say you to these charges?”
“They’re baseless and unfounded,” said Alexander. “Anything else?”
“You are accused of being a foreign spy!”
“Not true.”
“We are told you have been living under a false identity,” said Mitterand.
“Not true, the identity is my own,” said Alexander.
“In front of us we have a few words we would like you to sign, to the effect that we have informed you of your rights under the Criminal Code of 1928, Article 58.”
“I am not signing a single thing,” said Alexander.
“The man next to you in the hospital told us that he thought he heard you speaking English to the Red Cross doctor who came to visit you every day. Is that true?”
“It is not.”
“Why did the doctor come to visit you?”
“I don’t know if you are aware of why soldiers go to the critical ward of a hospital, but I was wounded in action. Maybe you should talk to my superiors. Major Orlov—”
“Orlov is dead!” snapped Mitterand.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Alexander, momentarily flinching. Orlov was a good commanding officer. He was no Mikhail Stepanov, but then who was?
“Major, you stand accused of joining the army under an assumed name. You stand accused of being an American named Alexander Barrington. You stand accused of escaping while en route to a corrective camp in Vladivostok after having been convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and espionage.”
“All bald-faced lies,” said Alexander. “Where is my accuser? I’d like to meet him.” What night was it? Was it at least the next night? Had Tania and Sayers gotten out? He knew that if they had, they would have taken Dimitri with them, and then it would be very difficult for the NKVD to maintain that there was an accuser when the accuser himself disappeared like one of Stalin’s Politburo cabinet ministers. “I want to get to the bottom of this as much as you do,” said Alexander with a helpful smile. “Probably more so. Where is he?”
“You are not to ask questions of us!” Mitterand yelled. “We will ask the questions.” Trouble was, they had no more questions. Rather, they had the same question over and over again: “Are you an American named Alexander Barrington?”
“No,” would reply the American named Alexander Barrington. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Alexander could not tell how long this continued. They shined a flashlight into his face; he closed his eyes. They ordered him to stand up, which Alexander took as an opportunity to stretch his legs. He stood gleefully for what seemed like an hour, and regretted being told to sit back down. He didn’t know it was precisely an hour but to keep himself occupied during the repetitive questioning, he started counting the seconds it took for each round to be completed from “Are you an American named Alexander Barrington?” to “No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
It took seven seconds. Twelve if he drew out his response, if he tapped his feet together, if he rolled his eyes, or if he sighed heavily. Once he started to yawn and could not stop for thirty seconds. That made the time go faster.
They asked the question 147 times. Mitterand had to take a drink six times to continue. Finally he passed the reins to Vladimir, who needed less to drink and fared much better, even asking Alexander if he wanted a drink. Alexander politely declined, grateful for the diversion. He knew he must never accept anything they offered him. That was their invitation into his graces.
Still not diverting enough. One hundred and forty-seven times later Vladimir said, with naked frustration in his voice and on his face, “Guard, take him back to his cell.” And then he added, “We will make you confess, Major. We know the accusations against you are true and we will do all it takes to make you confess.”
Usually, when the Party apparatchiks interrogated prisoners with the intention of convicting them as soon as possible and sending them to a forced labor camp, everyone knew the charade being played. The interrogators knew the charges were bogus, and the stunned and dazed prisoners knew the charges were bogus, but in the end, the alternatives presented to them were too stark for them to continue to deny the obvious fallacies. Tell us, you-who-have-lived-next-door-to-an-anti-proletarian-revolutionary, that you are in collusion with him, or it will be twenty-five years in Magadan for you. If you confess you will get only ten. That was the choice and the prisoners confessed—to save themselves, or to save their families, or because they were beaten, degraded, broken-down, paralyzed from thought by the barrage of lies. But Alexander wondered if this was the first time since these sham interrogations began decades ago that the prisoner was accused of the actual truth—that he indeed was Alexander Barrington—and the interrogators for the first time were armed with truth, and truth stood in front of them, truth that Alexander had to deny, truth that Alexander had to bury under a barrage of lies if he were to live. He thought about pointing this out to Mitterand and Vladimir but he didn’t think they would either understand or appreciate the grim irony.
After he was taken back to his cell, two guards came in and, with their two rifles pointed at him, ordered Alexander to undress. “So we can launder your uniform,” they said. He undressed down to his BVDs. They asked him to remove his watch and boots and socks. Alexander was unhappy about the socks, for the floor in his cell was numbingly cold. “You need my boots?”
“We will polish them.”
Alexander was grateful for the foresight that had made him move Dr. Sayers’ drugs from his boots to his BVDs.
Reluctantly he handed over the boots, which they snatched from him and left without a word.
After the door had closed and he was left alone, Alexander picked up the kerosene lamp and held it close to his body to warm himself up. He didn’t care about losing oxygen any longer.
The guard saw and yelled not to touch the lamp. Alexander did not put the lamp down. The guard came in and took the lamp out, leaving Alexander cold and in darkness again.
His back wound, though having been bandaged thoroughly by Tatiana, was throbbing. The dressing was wrapped around his stomach. He wished he could wrap his whole body in the white bandage.
He needed as little of his body touching the cold as possible. Alexander stood in the middle of his cell, so that only his feet were on the icy floor. He stood and imagined warmth.
His hands were behind his head, they were behind his back, they were in front of his chest.
He imagined …
Tania standing in front of him, her head on his bare chest, listening for his heart, and then lifting her gaze at him and smiling. She was standing tiptoed on his feet holding on to his arms, as she reached up with her neck extended and lifted her head to him.
Warmth.
There was no morning and no night. There was no brightness and no light. He had nothing to measure time with. The images of her were constant, he could not measure how long he had been thinking of her. He tried counting and found himself swaying from exhaustion. He needed to sleep.
Sleep or cold? Sleep or cold?
Sleep.
He huddled in the corner and shook uncontrollably, trying to stave off misery. Was it the following day, the following night?
The following day from what? The following night from what?
They’re going to starve me to death. They’re going to thirst me to death. Then they will beat me to death. But first my feet will freeze and then my legs and then my insides, they will all turn to ice. And my blood, too, and my heart, and I will forget.
Tamara and Her Stories, 1935
There was an old babushka named Tamara who had lived for twenty years on their floor. Her door was always open and sometimes after school Alexander would stop in and talk to her. He noticed that old people loved the company of young people. It gave them an opportunity to impart their life experience to the young. Tamara, sitting in her uncomfortable wooden chair near the window one afternoon, was telling Alexander that her husband was arrested for religious reasons in 1928 and given ten years—
“Wait, Tamara, Mikhailovna, ten years where?”
“Forced labor camp, of course. Siberia. Where else?”
“They convicted him and sent him there to work?”
“To prison …”
“To work for free?”
“Oh, Alexander, you’re interrupting, and I need to tell you something.”
He fell quiet.
“The prostitutes near Arbat were arrested in 1930 and not only were they back on the street months later but had also been reunited with their families in the old cities they used to frequent. But my husband, and the band of religious men, will not be allowed to return, certainly not to Moscow.”
“Only three more years,” Alexander said slowly. “Three more years of forced labor.”
Tamara shook her head and lowered her voice. “I received a telegram from the Kolyma authorities in 1932—without right of correspondence, it said. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Alexander didn’t want even to hazard a guess.
“It means he is no longer alive to correspond with,” said Tamara, her voice shaking and her head lowering.
She told him how, from the church down the block, three priests were arrested and given seven years for not putting away the tools of capitalism, which in their case was the organized and personal and unrepentant belief in Jesus Christ.
“Also forced labor camp?”
“Oh, Alexander!”
He stopped. She continued. “But the funny thing is—have you noticed the hotel down the street that had the harlots right outside a few months ago?”
“Hmm.” Alexander noticed.
“Well, have you noticed how they all disappeared?”
“Hmm.” Alexander noticed that too.
“They were taken away. For disturbing the peace, for disrupting the public good—”
“And for not putting away the tools of capitalism,” Alexander said dryly, and Tamara laughed and touched his head.
“That’s right, my boy. That’s right. And do you know how long they had been given in that forced labor camp that you care so much about? Three years. So just remember—Jesus Christ, seven, prostitutes, three.”
“All right,” said Jane, coming into the room, taking her son by the hand and leading him out. Before she left, she turned around and said in an accusatory tone to Tamara, but addressed to Alexander, “Can we not be learning about prostitutes from toothless old women?”
“Who would you like me to learn about prostitutes from, Mom?” he asked.
“Son, your mother wanted me to talk to you about something.” Harold cleared his throat. Alexander crimped his lips together and sat quietly. His father looked so uncomfortable that Alexander had to sit on his hands to keep himself from laughing. His mother was pretending to clean something in another part of the room. Harold glared in Jane’s direction.
“Dad?” said Alexander in his deepest voice. His voice had broken a few months ago, and he really liked the way his new self sounded. Very grown-up. He also had shot up, growing more than eight inches in the course of the last six months, but he couldn’t seem to put any flesh on his bones. There just wasn’t enough of … anything. “Dad, do you want to go for a walk and talk about it?”
“No!” said Jane. “I can’t hear a thing. Talk here.”
Nodding, Alexander said, “All right, Dad, talk here.” He scrunched up his face and tried to look serious. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were sitting cross-eyed and sticking his tongue out. Harold was not looking at Alexander.
“Son,” said Harold. “You’re getting to be at that age where you’re, well, I’m sure, you’re—and also you’re—you’re a fine boy, and good-looking, I want to help, and soon, or maybe already—and I’m sure that you’re—”
Jane tutted in the background. Harold fell quiet.
Alexander sat for a few seconds, then got up, slapped his father on the back and said, “Thanks, Dad. That was helpful.”
He went into his room, and Harold didn’t follow him. Alexander heard his parents bickering next door, and in a minute there was a knock. It was his mother. “Can I talk to you?”
Alexander trying to keep a composed face, said, “Mom, really, I think Dad said all there was to say, I don’t know if there’s anything to add—”
She sat down on his bed while he sat in the chair near the window. He was going to be sixteen in May. He liked summer. Maybe they would get a room at a dacha in Krasnaya Polyana again like they did last year.
“Alexander, what your father didn’t mention—”
“Was there something Dad didn’t mention?”
“Son …”
“Please—go ahead.”
“I’m not going to give you a lesson in girls—”
“Thank goodness for that.”
“Listen to me, the only thing I want you to do is remember this—” She paused.
He waited.
“Martha told me one of her derelict sons has had his horn removed!” she whispered. “Removed, Alexander, and do you know why?”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“Because he got frenchified! Do you know what that is?”
“I think—”
“And her other son’s got French pigs all over his body. It’s the most revolting thing!”
“Yes, it—”
“The French curse! The French crown! Syphilis! Lenin died from it eating up his brain,” she whispered. “No one talks about it, but it’s true all the same. Is that what you want for yourself?”
“Hmm …” said Alexander. “No?”
“Well, it’s all over the place. Your father and I knew a man who lost his whole nose because of it.”
“Personally, I’d rather lose the nose than—”
“Alexander!”
“Sorry.”
“This is very serious, son. I have done all I can to raise you a good, clean boy, but look where we are living, and soon you’ll be out on your own.”
“How soon you think?”
“What do you think is going to happen when you don’t know where the harlot you’re with has been?” Jane asked resolutely. “Son, when you grow up, I don’t want you to be a saint or a eunuch. I just want you to be careful. I want you to protect what’s yours at all times. You must be clean, you must be vigilant, and you must also remember that without protection, you will get a girl up the stick, and then what? You’re going to marry someone you don’t love because you weren’t careful?”
Alexander stared at his mother. “Up the stick?” he said.
“She’ll tell you it’s yours and you’ll never know for sure, all you’ll know is that you’re married, and your horn is falling off!”
“Mother,” said Alexander. “Really, you must stop.”
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“How can I not?”
“Your father was supposed to explain to you.”
“He did. I think he did very well.”
Jane got up. “Will you just once stop with your joking around?”
“Yes, Mom. Thanks for coming in. I’m glad we had this chat.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“Absolutely none.”
The Changing of the Hotel’s Name, 1935
One frostbitten late January Thursday, Alexander asked his father as they headed out to their Party meeting, “Dad, why is our hotel’s name changing again? It’s the third time in six months.”
“Surely not the third time.”
“Yes, Dad.” They walked side by side down the street. They weren’t touching. “When we first moved in, it was the Derzhava. Then the Kamenev Hotel. Then the Zinoviev Hotel. Now it’s the Kirov Hotel. Why? And who is this Kirov chap?”
“He was the Leningrad Party Chief,” said Harold.
At their meeting, the old man Slavan laughed raucously after he heard Alexander’s question repeated. He beckoned Alexander to him, patted him on the head and said, “Don’t worry, son, now that’s it’s Kirov, Kirov it will stay.”
“All right, enough now,” Harold said, trying to pull his son away. But Alexander wanted to hear. He pulled away from his father.
“Why, Slavan Ivanovich?”
Slavan said, “Because Kirov is dead.” He nodded. “Assassinated in Leningrad last month. Now there’s a manhunt on.”
“Oh, they didn’t catch his killer?”
“They caught him, all right.” The old man smirked. “But what about all the others?”
“What others?” Alexander lowered his voice.
“All the conspirators,” said the old man. “They have to die, too.”
“It was a conspiracy?”
“Well, of course. Otherwise how can we have a manhunt?”
Harold called sharply for Alexander, and later on, when they were walking home, he said, “Son, why are you so friendly with Slavan? What kinds of things has that man been telling you?”
“He is a fascinating man,” Alexander said. “Did you know he’s been to Akatui? For five years.” Akatui was the Tsarist Siberian hard labor prison. “He said they gave him a white shirt, and in the summer he worked only eight hours and in the winter six, and his shirt never got dirty, and he got a kilo of white bread a day, plus meat. He said they were the best years of his life.”
“Unenviable,” grumbled Harold. “Listen, I don’t want you talking to him so much. Sit by us.”
“Hmm,” said Alexander. “You all smoke too much. It burns my eyes.”
“I’ll blow my smoke the other way. But Slavan is a troublemaker. Stay away from him, do you hear?” He paused. “He is not going to last long.”
“Last long where?”
Two weeks later, Slavan disappeared from the meetings.
Alexander missed the nice old man and his stories.
“Dad, people keep disappearing from our floor. That lady Tamara is gone.”
“Never liked her,” put in Jane, sipping her vodka. “I think she is sick in the hospital. She was old, Alexander.”
“Mom, two young men in suits are living in her room. Are they going to share that room with Tamara when she returns from the hospital?”
“I know nothing about that,” said Jane firmly, and just as firmly poured herself another drink.
“The Italians have left. Mom, did you know the Italians have left?”
“Who?” said Harold loudly. “Who is disappearing? The Frascas have not disappeared. They are on vacation.”
“Dad, it’s winter. Vacation where?”
“The Crimea. In some resort near Krasnodar. Dzhugba, I think. They’re coming back in two months.”
“Oh? What about the van Dorens? Where have they gone? Also the Crimea? Someone new is living in their room, too. A Russian family. I thought this was a floor only for foreigners?”
“They moved to a different building in Moscow,” said Harold, picking at his food. “The Obkom is just trying to integrate the foreigners into Soviet society.”
Alexander put down his fork. “Did you say moved? Moved where? Because Nikita is sleeping in our bathroom.”
“Who is Nikita?”
“Dad, you haven’t noticed that there is a man in the bathtub?”
“What man?”
“Nikita.”
“Oh. How long has he been there?”
Alexander exchanged a blank look with his mother. “Three months.”
“He’s been in the bathtub for three months? Why?”
“Because there is not a single room for him to rent in all of Moscow. He came here from Novosibirsk.”
“Never seen him,” Harold said in a voice that implied that since he had never seen Nikita, Nikita must not exist. “What does he do when I want to have a bath?”
Jane said, “Oh, he leaves for a half-hour. I give him a shot of vodka. He goes for a walk.”
“Mom,” said Alexander, eating cheerfully, “his wife is coming to join him in March. He begged me to talk to everybody on the floor to ask if we could have our baths earlier in the evening, to let them have a bit of—”
“All right, you two, you’re having me on,” said Harold.
Alexander and his mother exchanged a look, and then Alexander said, “Dad, go check it out. And when you come back, you tell me where the van Dorens could have moved to in Moscow.”
When Harold came back, he shrugged and said, “That man is a hobo. He is no good.”
“That man,” said Alexander, looking at his mother’s vodka glass, “is the head engineer for the Baltic fleet.”
A month later, in February 1935, Alexander came home from school and heard his mother and father fighting—again. He heard his name shouted out once, twice.
His mother was upset for Alexander. But he was fine. He spoke Russian fluently. He sang and drank beer and played hockey on the ice in Gorky Park with his friends. He was all right. Why was she upset? He wanted to go in and tell her he was fine, but he never liked to interrupt his parents’ fights.
Suddenly he heard something being thrown, and then someone being hit. He ran into his parents’ room and saw his mother on the floor, her cheek red, his father bending over her. Alexander ran to his father and shoved him in the back. “What are you doing, Dad?” he yelled. He kneeled down next to his mother.
She half sat up and glared at Harold. “Fine thing you’re showing your son,” she said. “You brought him to the Soviet Union for this, to show him how to treat a woman? His wife, perhaps?”
“Shut up,” said Harold, clenching his fists.
“Dad!” Alexander jumped to his feet. “Stop!”
“Your father has abandoned us, Alexander.”
“I’m not abandoning you!”
Squaring off, Alexander pushed his father in the chest.
Harold shoved Alexander and then hit him open-handed across the face. Jane gasped. Alexander swayed but did not fall. Harold went to strike him again, but this time Alexander moved away. Jane grabbed Harold’s legs, yanked, and sent him down on his back. “Don’t you dare touch him!” she yelled.
Harold was on the floor, Jane, too; only Alexander was standing. They couldn’t look at one another; everyone was panting. Alexander wiped his bleeding lip.
“Harold,” Jane said, still on her knees. “Look at us! We’re being destroyed by this fucking country.” She was crying. “Let’s go home, let’s start over.”
“Are you crazy?” hissed Harold, looking from Alexander to Jane. “Do you even know what you’re saying?”
“I do.”
“Have you forgotten that we gave up our U.S. citizenship? Have you forgotten that at the moment you and I are citizens of no country; that we’re waiting for our Soviet citizenship to come through? You think America is going to want us back? Why, they practically kicked us out. And how do you think the Soviet authorities are going to feel once they find out we’re turning our backs on them, too?”
“I don’t care what the Soviet authorities think.”
“God, you are so naïve!”
“Is that what I am? What does that make you? Did you know it was going to be like this and brought us here anyway? Brought your son here?”
He stared at her with disappointment. “We didn’t come for the good life. The good life we could have had in America.”
“You’re right. And we had it. We’ll make do with what we have here, but Harold, Alexander is not meant to be here. At least send him back home.”
“What?” Harold could not find his voice to say it above a whisper.
“Yes.” She was helped off the floor by Alexander as she stood in front of Harold. “He is fifteen. Send him back home!”
“Mom!” said Alexander.
“Don’t let him die in this country—can’t you see? Alexander sees it. I see it. Why can’t you?”
“Alexander doesn’t see it. Do you, son?”
Alexander was silent. He did not want to side against his father.
“You see?” Jane exclaimed triumphantly. “Please, Harold. Soon it will be too late.”
“You’re talking rubbish. Too late for what?”
“Too late for Alexander,” Jane said brokenly, pale with despair. “For him, forget your pride for just one second. Before he has to register for the Red Army when he turns sixteen in May, before tragedy befalls us all, while he is still a U.S. citizen, send him back. He has not relinquished his rights to the United States of America. I will stay with you, I will live out my life with you—but—”
“No!” Harold exclaimed in an aghast voice. “Things didn’t turn out the way I had hoped, look, I’m sor—”
“Don’t be sorry for me, you bastard. Don’t be sorry for me—I lay down in this bed with you. I knew what I was doing. Be sorry for your son. What do you think will happen to him?”
Jane turned away from Harold.
Alexander turned away from his parents. He went to the window and looked outside. It was February and night.
Behind him, he heard his mother and father.
“Janie, come on, it’ll be all right. You’ll see. Alexander will be better off here eventually. Communism is the future of the world, you know this as well as I do. The wider the chasm between the rich and the poor in the world, the more essential communism is going to become. America is a lost cause. Who else is going to care about the common man, who else will protect his rights but the communist? We’re just living through the toughest part. But I have no doubt—communism is the future.”
“God!” Jane exclaimed. “When will you ever stop?”
“Can’t stop now,” he said. “We’re going to see this through to the end.”
“That’s right,” Jane said. “Marx himself wrote that capitalism produces above all its own gravediggers. Do you think that perhaps he wasn’t talking about capitalism?”
“Absolutely,” agreed Harold, while Alexander looked the other way. “The communists hate to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. The fall of capitalism is inevitable. The fall of selfishness, greed, individuality, personal attainment.”
“The fall of prosperity, comfort, humane living conditions, privacy, liberty,” said Jane, spitting the words out, as Alexander doggedly stared out the window. “The second America, Harold. The second fucking America.”
Without turning back, Alexander saw his father’s angry face and his mother’s despairing one, and he saw the gray room with the falling plaster, and the broken lock held together by tape, and he smelled the washroom from ten meters away, and he was silent.
Before the Soviet Union, the only world that had made sense to him was America, where his father could get up on the pulpit and preach the overthrow of the U.S. government, and the police that protected that government would come and remove his father from the pulpit and put him into a Boston cell to sleep off his insurrectionist zeal, and then in the next day or two they would let him out so he could recommence with renewed fervor preaching to the curious the lamentable deficiencies of 1920s America. And according to Harold there were plenty, though he himself admitted to Alexander that he could not for the life of him understand the immigrants who poured into New York and Boston, who lived in deplorable conditions working for pennies and put generations of Americans to shame because they lived in deplorable conditions and worked for pennies with such joy—a joy that was diminished only by the inability to bring more of their family members to the United States to live in deplorable conditions and work for pennies.
Harold Barrington could preach revolution in America and that made perfect sense to Alexander, because he read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and John Stuart Mill told him that liberty didn’t mean doing what you damn well pleased, it meant saying what you damn well pleased. His father was upholding Mill in the greatest tradition of American democracy; what was so wrong with that?
What didn’t make sense to him when he had arrived in Moscow was Moscow. As the years passed, Moscow made only less and less sense to him; the privation, the senselessness, the discomfort encroached upon his youthful spirit. He had stopped holding his father’s hand on the way to Thursday meetings; what he keenly felt absent from his own hand, however, was an orange in the winter.
Hailing Russia as the “second America,” Comrade Stalin proclaimed that in a few years the Soviet Union would have as many railroads, as many paved roads, as many single family houses, as the United States. He said that America had not industrialized as fast as the USSR was industrializing because capitalism made progress chaotic, whereas socialism spearheaded progress on all fronts. The U.S. was suffering thirty-five per cent unemployment, unlike the Soviet Union which had near full employment. The Soviets were all working—proof of their superiority—while the Americans were succumbing to the welfare state because there were no jobs. That was clear, nothing confusing about that. Then why was the sense of malaise so pervasive?
But Alexander’s feelings of confusion and malaise were peripheral. What wasn’t peripheral was youth. And he was young, even in Moscow.
He turned back to his mother, handing her a napkin to wipe her face while wiping his own with his sleeve. Before walking out and leaving them to their misery, Alexander said to his father, “Don’t listen to her. I will not go to America alone. My future is here, for better or worse.” He came a little closer. “But don’t hit my mother again.” Alexander was already several inches taller than Harold. “If you hit her again, you’ll have to deal with me.”
A week later Harold was removed from his job as a printer because as the new laws would have it, foreigners were no longer allowed to operate printing machinery, no matter how proficient they were and how loyal to the Soviet state. Apparently there was too much opportunity for sabotage, for printing false papers, false affidavits, false documents, false news information, and for disseminating lies to subvert the Soviet cause. Many foreigners had been caught doing just that and then distributing their malicious propaganda to hard-working Soviet citizens. So no more printing for Harold.
He was redeployed to a tool-making factory, melting metal into screw-drivers and ratchets.
That job lasted a few weeks. Apparently it also wasn’t safe. Foreigners had been caught making knives and weapons for themselves instead of tools for the Soviet state.
He was then employed as a shoemaker, which amused Alexander (“Dad, what do you know about making shoes?”).
That job lasted only a few days. “What? Shoe-making isn’t safe either?” Alexander asked.
Apparently it wasn’t. Foreigners had been known to make galoshes and mountain boots for good Soviet citizens to escape through marshes and through mountains.
A somber Harold came home one April evening in 1935 and instead of cooking (it was Harold who cooked dinner for his family now), sat down heavily at the table and said that a Party Obkom man had come to see him at the school where he was working as a floor sweeper and asked him to find a new place to live. “They want us to find our own rooms. Be a little more independent.” He shrugged. “It’s only right. We’ve had it relatively easy the last four years. We need to give something back to the state.” He paused and lit a cigarette.
Alexander saw his father glance at him furtively. He coughed and said, “Well, Nikita has disappeared. Maybe we can take his bathtub.”
There was no room for the Barringtons in all of Moscow. After a month of looking, Harold came home from work and said, “Listen, the Obkom man came to see me again. We can’t stay here. We have to move.”
“By when?” Jane exclaimed.
“Two days from now. They want us out.”
“But we have nowhere to go!”
Harold sighed. “They offered me a transfer to Leningrad. There is more work—an industrial plant, a carpentry plant, an electricity plant.”
“What, no electricity plants in Moscow, Dad?”
Harold ignored Alexander. “We’ll go there. There’ll be more rooms available. You’ll see. Janie, you’ll get a job at the Leningrad public library.”
“Leningrad?” Alexander exclaimed. “Dad, I’m not leaving Moscow. I got friends here, school. Please.”
“Alexander, you’ll start a new school. Make new friends. We have no choice.”
“Yes,” Alexander said loudly. “But once we had a choice, didn’t we?”
“Alexander! You will not raise your voice to me,” Harold said. “Do you hear?”
“Loud and clear!” shouted Alexander. “I’m not going. Do you hear?”
Harold jumped up. Jane jumped up. Alexander jumped up.
Jane said, “No, stop it, stop it, you two!”
“You will not speak to me this way,” Harold said. “We are moving, and I don’t want to talk another minute about it.”
He turned to his wife and said, “Oh, and one more thing.” Sheepishly, he coughed. “They want us to change our name. To something more Russian.”
Alexander scoffed. “Why now? Why after all these years?”
“Because!” Harold shouted, losing control. “They want us to show our allegiance! You’re going to be sixteen next month. You’re going to register for the Red Army. You need a Russian name. The fewer questions, the better. We need to be Russians now. It will be easier for us.” He lowered his gaze.
“God, Dad,” Alexander exclaimed. “Will this ever stop? We can’t even keep our name anymore? It’s not enough to kick us out of our home, to move us to another city? We need to lose our name, too? What else have we got?”
“We are doing the right thing. Our name is an American name. We should have changed it long ago.”
“That’s right,” said Alexander. “The Frascas didn’t. The van Dorens didn’t. And look what happened to them. They’re on vacation. Extended vacation, right, Dad?”
Harold raised his hand to Alexander, who pushed him away. “Don’t touch me,” he said coldly.
Harold tried again. Alexander pushed him away again, but this time he didn’t let go of his father’s hands. He did not want his mother to see him lose his temper, his poor mother, who stood shaking and crying, clasping her hands at her two men, pleading, “Darlings, Harold, Alexander, I beg you, stop it, stop it.”
“Tell him to stop it!” Harold said. “You’ve raised him like this. No respect for anybody.”
His mother came over to Alexander and grabbed hold of his arms. “Please, son,” she said. “Calm down. It’ll be all right.”
“You think so, Mom? We’re moving cities, we’re changing our name just like this hotel. You call that all right?”
“Yes,” she said. “We still have each other. We still have our lives.”
“How the definition of being all right changes,” said Alexander, extricating himself from his mother and taking his coat.
“Alexander, don’t walk out that door,” said Harold. “I forbid you to walk out that door.”
Alexander turned to his father, looked him in the eye, and said, “Go ahead and stop me.”
He left and did not come back home for two days. And then they packed up and left the Kirov Hotel.
His mother was drunk and unable to help carry the suitcases to the train.
When did Alexander first begin to feel, to know, to sense that something was desperately wrong with his mother? That was the point: something wasn’t desperately wrong with her all at once. At first she had been slightly not herself, and it wasn’t for Alexander to say what was the matter with his adult parent. His father could have seen, but his father had no eyes. Alexander knew his father was the kind of man who simply could not keep the personal and the global in his head at the same time. But whether Harold was aware and plainly ignored it, or whether he was actually oblivious, didn’t matter, and it didn’t change the simple fact that Jane Barrington gradually, without fanfare, without much to-do, much introduction and much warning permanently ceased to be the person she once was and became the person she wasn’t.
