Читать книгу Tatiana and Alexander - Paullina Simons - Страница 18
ОглавлениеWith Stepanov, 1943
WHEN ALEXANDER OPENED HIS eyes—did he open them?—it was still black, still cold. He was shaking, his arms around himself. There is no shame in dying in war, in dying young, in dying in a cold cell, in saving your body from humiliation.
Once, when he was convalescing, Tatiana asked without looking at him as she was dressing his wound, did you see the light? And he replied, no, he had not seen.
It was only a partial truth.
Because he had heard …
The gallop of the red horse.
But here all the colors had run dry.
As if in a stupor, Alexander dimly heard the sliding of the metal bolt, the turning of the key. His commander, Colonel Mikhail Stepanov, came into his cell with a flashlight. Alexander was hunched in the corner.
“Ah,” said Stepanov. “So it’s true. You are alive.”
Alexander wanted to shake Stepanov’s hand, but he was too cold and his back was too sore. He did not move and said nothing.
Stepanov crouched by him. “What in the world happened to that truck? And I saw the Red Cross doctor’s death certificate for you myself. I told your wife you were dead. Your pregnant wife thinks you’re dead!”
“Everything is as it should be,” replied Alexander. “It’s good to see you, sir. Try not to inhale. There is not enough oxygen here for both of us.”
“Alexander,” said Stepanov. “You didn’t want to tell her what was happening to you?”
Alexander shook his head.
“But why the truck explosion, the death certificate?”
“I wanted her to think there was no hope for me.”
“Why?”
Alexander didn’t answer.
“Anywhere you go—I will go with you,” Tatiana says. “But if you are staying, then I’m staying, too. I’m not leaving my baby’s father in the Soviet Union.” She bends over an overwhelmed Alexander. “What did you say to me in Leningrad? What kind of a life can I build, you said, knowing I have left you to die—or to rot—in the Soviet Union? I’m quoting you back to you. Those were your words.” She smiles. “And on this one point, I will have to agree with you.” She lowers her voice. “If I left you, no matter which road I took, with ponderous clatter indeed, the Bronze Horseman would pursue me all through that long night into my own maddening dust.”
He couldn’t tell that to his commander. He didn’t know if Tatiana had left the Soviet Union.
“You want a smoke?”
“Yes,” replied Alexander. “But can’t here. Not enough oxygen for a smoke.”
Stepanov pulled Alexander up to his feet. “Stand for a few minutes,” Stepanov said. “Stretch your legs.” He looked at Alexander’s bent-sideways head. “This cell is too small for you. They didn’t expect that.”
“Oh, they did. That’s why they put me here.”
Stepanov stood with his back to the door, while Alexander stood across from him.
“What day is it, sir?” asked Alexander. “How long have I been here? Four, five days?”
“The morning of the sixteenth of March,” said Stepanov. “The morning of your third day.”
Third day! Alexander thought with shock.
Third day! Alexander thought with excitement. That would probably mean that Tania …
He didn’t continue with his thoughts. Very quietly, almost inaudibly, Stepanov leaned forward and Alexander thought he said, “Keep talking loudly, so they can hear, but listen to me so that I can laugh with you when you come back in the clover field, and I will show you how to eat clover.”
Alexander looked at Stepanov’s face, more drawn than ever, his eyes gray, his mouth turned down with sympathy and anxiety. “Sir?”
“I didn’t say anything, Major.”
Shaking off the hallucination in his head, of a meadow, of sun, of clover, Alexander repeated in a low voice, “Sir?”
“Everything’s gone to shit, Major,” whispered Stepanov. “They’re already looking for your wife, but … she seems to have disappeared. I convinced her to go back to Leningrad with Dr. Sayers, just as you asked me. I made it easy for her to leave.”
Alexander said nothing, digging his nails into the palms of his hands.
“But now she’s gone. You know who else disappeared? Dr. Sayers. He had informed me he was going back to Leningrad with your wife.”
Alexander dug his nails harder into his palms to keep himself from looking at Stepanov and from speaking.
“He was on his way to Helsinki, but he was supposed to have gone to Leningrad first!” Stepanov exclaimed. “To drop her off, to pick up his own Red Cross nurse he had left in Grechesky hospital. Listen to me, are you listening? They never reached Leningrad. Two days ago his Red Cross truck was found burned, pillaged and turned over on the Finnish-Soviet border at Lisiy Nos. There was an incident with the Finnish troops and four of our men were shot and killed. No sign of Sayers, or of Nurse Metanova.”
Alexander said nothing. He wanted to pick up his heart from the floor. But it was dark, and he couldn’t find it. He heard it roll away from him, he heard it beating, bleeding, pulsing in the corner.
Stepanov lowered his voice another notch. “And Finnish troops shot and killed, too.”
Silence from Alexander.
“And that’s not all.”
“No?” Alexander thought he said.
“No sign of Dr. Sayers. But …” Stepanov paused. “Your good friend, Dimitri Chernenko, was found shot dead in the snow.”
That was small comfort to Alexander.
But it was some comfort.
“Major, why was Chernenko at the border?”
Alexander did not answer. Where was Tatiana? All he wanted to do was ask that question. Without a truck how could they have gotten anywhere? Without a truck what were they doing—walking on foot through the marshes of Karelia?
“Major, your wife is missing. Sayers is gone, Chernenko is dead—” Stepanov hesitated. “And not just dead. But shot dead in a Finn’s uniform. He was wearing a Finnish pilot’s uniform and carrying Finnish ID papers instead of his domestic passport!”
Alexander said nothing. He had nothing to hide except the information that would cost Stepanov his life.
“Alexander!” Stepanov exclaimed in a hissing whisper. “Don’t shut me out. I’m trying to help.”
“Sir,” Alexander said, attempting to mute his fear. “I’m asking you please not to help me anymore.” He wished he had a picture of her. He wanted to touch her white dress with red roses one more time. Wanted to see her young and with him, standing newly married on the steps of the Molotov church.
The fear, the stabbing panic he felt prohibited Alexander from thinking of Tania past. That’s what he would have to learn to do: forbid himself from looking at her even in his memory.
With trembling hands he made a sign of the cross on himself. “I was all right,” he finally managed to say, “until you came here and told me my wife was missing.” He began to shiver uncontrollably.
Stepanov came closer to Alexander. He took off his own coat and gave it to him. “Here, put this around your shoulders.”
Immediately he heard a voice from the outside yell, “It’s time!”
In a whisper, Stepanov said, “Tell me the truth, did you tell your wife to leave with Sayers for Helsinki? Was that your plan all along?”
Alexander said nothing. He didn’t want Stepanov to know—one life, two, three, was enough. The individual was a million people divided by one million; Stepanov did not deserve to die because of Alexander.
“Why are you being so stubborn? Stop it! Having gotten nowhere, they’re bringing in a new man to question you. Apparently the toughest interrogator they have. He has never failed to get a signed confession. They’ve kept you here nearly naked in a cold cell, and soon they’ll come up with something else to break you; they’ll beat you, they’ll put your feet in cold water, they’ll shine a light in your face until you go mad, the interrogator will deliberately tell you things you will want to kill him for, and you need to be strong for all that. Otherwise you have no chance.”
Alexander said faintly, “Do you think she is safe?”
“No, I don’t think she is safe! Who is safe around here, Alexander?” Stepanov whispered. “You? Me? Certainly not her. They’re looking everywhere for her. In Leningrad, in Molotov, in Lazarevo. If she is in Helsinki, they’ll find out, you know that, don’t you? They’ll bring her back. They were calling the Red Cross hospital in Helsinki this morning.”
“It’s time!” someone yelled again.
“How many times in my life will I have to hear those words?” Alexander said. “I heard them for my mother, I heard them for my father, I heard them for my wife, and now I hear them for me.”
Stepanov took his coat. “The things they accuse you of—”
“Don’t ask me, sir.”
“Deny them, Alexander.”
As Stepanov turned to go, Alexander said, “Sir …” He was so weak he almost couldn’t get the words out. He didn’t care how cold the wall was, he could not stand on his own anymore. He pressed his body against the icy concrete and then sank down to the floor. “Did you see her?”
He lifted his gaze to Stepanov, who nodded.
“How was she?”
“Don’t ask, Alexander.”
“Was she—”
“Don’t ask.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you remember when you brought my son back to me?” Stepanov asked, trying to keep his voice from breaking. “Because of you I had comfort. I was able to see him before he died, I was able to bury him.”
“All right, no more,” said Alexander.
“Who was going to give that comfort to your wife?”
Alexander put his face into his hands.
Stepanov left.
Alexander sat motionlessly on the floor. He didn’t need morphine, he didn’t need drugs, he didn’t need phenobarbital. He needed a bullet in his fucking chest.
The door opened. Alexander had not been given any bread or water, or any clothes. He had no idea how long he had been left undressed in the cold cell.
A man came in who apparently did not want to stand. Behind him a guard brought in a chair and the tall, bald, unpleasant-faced man sat down and in a pleasant-sounding nasal voice said, “Do you know what I’m holding in my hands, Major?”
Alexander shook his head. There was a kerosene lamp between them.
“I’m holding all your clothes, Major. All your clothes and a wool blanket. And look, I’ve got a nice piece of pork for you, on the bone. It’s still warm. Some potatoes too, with sour cream and butter. A shot of vodka. And a nice long smoke. You can leave this damn cold place, have some food, get dressed. How would you like that?”
“I would like that,” Alexander said impassively. His voice wasn’t going to tremble for a stranger.
The man smiled. “I thought you would. I came all the way from Leningrad to talk to you. Do you think we could talk for a bit?”
“I don’t see why not,” Alexander replied. “I don’t have much else to do.”
The man laughed. “No, that’s right. Not much at all.” His non-laughing eyes studied Alexander intently.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You, mostly, Major Belov. A couple of other things.”
“That’s fine.”
“Would you like your clothes?”
“I’m sure,” Alexander said, “that to a smart man like yourself, the answer is obvious.”
“I have another cell for you to go to. It’s warmer, bigger and has a window. Much warmer. It must be twenty-five degrees Celsius in there right now, not like this one, it’s probably no more than five Celsius in here.” The man smiled again. “Or would you like me to translate that into Fahrenheit for you, Major?”
Fahrenheit? Alexander narrowed his eyes. “That won’t be necessary.”
“Did I mention tobacco?”
“You mentioned it.”
“All these things, Major—comfort things. Would you like any of them?”
“Didn’t I answer that question?”
“You answered that question. I have one more for you.”
“Yes?”
“Are you Alexander Barrington, the son of Harold Barrington, a man who came here in December of 1930, with a beautiful wife and a good-looking eleven-year-old son?”
Alexander didn’t blink as he stood in front of the sitting interrogator. “What is your name?” he asked. “Usually you people introduce yourselves.”
“Us people?” The man smiled. “I tell you what. You answer me and I will answer you.”
“What’s your question?”
“Are you Alexander Barrington?”
“No. What is your name?”
The man shook his head.
“What?” said Alexander. “You asked me to answer your question. I did. Now you answer mine.”
“Leonid Slonko,” said the interrogator. “Does that make any difference to you?”
Alexander studied him very carefully. He had heard the name Slonko before. “Did you say you came from Leningrad to talk to me?”
“Yes.”
“You work in Leningrad?”
“Yes.”
“A long time, Comrade Slonko? They tell me you’re very good at your job. A long time in your line of work?”
“Twenty-three years.”
Alexander whistled appreciatively. “Where in Leningrad?”
“Where what?”
“Where do you work? Kresty? Or the House of Detention on Millionnaya?”
“What do you know about the House of Detention, Major?”
“I know it was built during Alexander II’s reign in 1864. Is that where you work?”
“Occasionally I interview prisoners there, yes.”
Nodding, Alexander went on. “Nice city, Leningrad. I’m still not used to it, though.”
“No? Well, why would you be?”
“That’s right, why would I? I prefer Krasnodar. It’s warmer.” Alexander smiled. “And your title, comrade?”
“I’m chief of operations,” Slonko replied.
“Not a military man, then? I didn’t think so.”
Slonko bolted up, holding Alexander’s clothes in his hands. “It just occurred to me, Major,” he said, “that we are finished here.”
“I agree,” said Alexander. “Thanks for coming by.”
Slonko departed in such an angry rush that he left the lamp and the chair. It was some time before the guard came in and took them.
Darkness again.
So debilitating. But nothing so diminishing as fear.
This time he didn’t wait long.
The door opened and two guards came in and ordered him to come with them. Alexander said, “I’m not dressed.”
“You won’t need clothes where you’re going.”
The guards were young and eager—the worst kind. He walked between them, slightly ahead of them, barefoot up the stone stairs, and down the corridor of the school, out the back way to the woods, barefoot in the March slush. Were they going to ask him to dig a hole? He felt the rifles at his back. Alexander’s feet were numb, and his body was going numb, but his chest wasn’t numb, his heart wasn’t numb, and if only his heart could stop hurting, he would be able to take it much better.
He remembered the ten-year-old Cub Scout, the American boy, the Soviet boy. The bare trees were ghostly but for a moment he was happy to smell the cold air and to see the gray sky. It’s going to be all right, he thought. If Tania is in Helsinki and remembers what I told her, then she would have convinced Sayers to leave as soon as possible. Perhaps they’ve gone already. Perhaps they’re already in Stockholm. And then nothing else matters.
“Turn around,” one of the guards said.
“Do I stop walking first?” Alexander said. His teeth chattered.
“Stop walking,” said the flustered guard, “and turn around.”
He stopped walking. He turned around.
“Alexander Belov,” said the shorter guard in the most pompous voice he could muster, “you have been found guilty of treason and espionage against our Motherland during the time of war against our country. The punishment for military treason is death, to be carried out immediately.”
Alexander stood still. He put his feet together and his hands at his side. Unblinkingly he looked at the guards. They blinked.
“Well, now what?” he asked.
“The punishment for treason is death,” the short guard repeated. He came over to Alexander, proffering a black blindfold. “Here,” he said. Alexander noticed the young man’s hands were shaking.
“How old are you, Corporal?” he asked quietly.
“Twenty-three,” replied the guard.
“Funny—me too,” said Alexander. “Just think, three days ago I was a major in the Red Army. Three days ago I had a Hero of the Soviet Union medal pinned to my chest. Amazing, isn’t it?”
The guard’s hands continued to shake as he lifted the blindfold to Alexander’s face. Alexander backed away and shook his head. “Forget it. And I’m not turning around, either.”
“I’m just following orders, Major,” said the young guard, and Alexander suddenly recognized him as one of the corporals who had been in the emplacement with him three months ago at the storming of the Neva to break the Leningrad blockade. He was the corporal Alexander had left on the anti-aircraft gun as he ran out to help Anatoly Marazov.
“Corporal … Ivanov?” Alexander said. “Well, well. I hope you do a better job shooting me than you did blowing up those fucking Luftwaffe planes that nearly killed us.”
The corporal wouldn’t even look at Alexander. “You’re going to have to look at me when you aim, Corporal,” Alexander said, standing tall and straight. “Otherwise you will miss.”
Ivanov went to stand by the other guard. “Please turn away, Major,” he said.
“No,” Alexander said, his hands at his sides, and his eyes on the two men with rifles. “Here I am. What are you afraid of? As you can see I’m nearly naked and I’m unarmed.”
He pulled himself up taller. The two guards were paralyzed. “Comrades,” said Alexander. “I will not be the one to issue you an order to lift your rifles. You’re going to have to do that on your own.”
The other corporal said, “All right, lift your rifle, Ivanov.”
They lifted their rifles. Alexander looked into the barrel of one of the guns. He blinked. O God, please look after Tania all alone in the world.
“On three,” said the corporal, as the two men cocked their rifles.
“One—”
“Two—”
Alexander looked into their faces. They were both so afraid. He looked into his own heart. He was cold, and he felt that he had unfinished business on this earth, business that couldn’t wait an eternity. Instead of seeing the trembling corporals, Alexander saw his eleven-year-old face in the mirror of his room in Boston the day he was leaving America. What kind of man have I become? he thought. Have I become the man my father wanted me to be? His mouth tightened. He didn’t know. But he knew that he had become the man he himself wanted to be. That would have to be good enough at a time like this, he thought, squaring his shoulders. He was ready for “three.”
But “three” did not come.
“Wait!” He heard a voice shout from the side. The guards put down their rifles. Slonko, dressed in a warm coat, felt hat and leather gloves, walked briskly to Alexander. “Stand down, Corporals.” Slonko threw a coat he was carrying onto Alexander’s back. “Major Belov, you’re a lucky man. General Mekhlis himself has issued a pardon on your behalf.” He put his hand on Alexander. Why did that make Alexander shudder?
“Come. Let’s go back. You need to get dressed. You’ll freeze in this weather.”
Alexander studied Slonko coldly. He had once read about Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s similar experience with Alexander II’s guards who were ready to execute him. Dostoyevsky was spared at the last minute with a show of mercy from the emperor and exiled instead. That experience of looking death in the face and then being shown mercy transformed Dostoyevsky. Alexander, on the other hand, did not have time to look so deep into his soul as to be changed even for five minutes. He thought it wasn’t mercy they were showing him but a ruse. He was calm before, and he remained calm now except for an occasional shiver from his skin to his bones. Also, unlike Dostoyevsky, he had stared death in the face too often in the last six years to have been daunted by it now.
Alexander followed Slonko back to the school building with the two corporals bringing up the rear. In a small, warm room he found his clothes and his boots and food on a table. Alexander got dressed, his body shaking. He put his feet into his socks, which had been—surprisingly—laundered, and rubbed his feet for a long time to get the blood flowing again. He saw some black spots on his toes and momentarily worried about frostbite, infection, amputation; but only momentarily because the wound in his back was on fire. Corporal Ivanov came and offered him a glass of vodka to warm his insides. Alexander drank the vodka and asked for some hot tea.
Having slowly eaten his food in the warm room and drunk his tea, Alexander felt full and sleepy. Not just sleepy, close to unconsciousness. The black spots on his feet became fainter and grayer. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them again, Slonko sat in front of him. “Your life has been saved by General Mekhlis himself,” Slonko said. “He wanted to show we are not unreasonable and that we believe in mercy.”
Alexander made no move even to nod. It required all he had to stay awake.
“How do you feel, Major Belov?” asked Slonko, getting out a bottle of vodka and two glasses. “Come, we’re both reasonable men. Let’s have a drink. We have no differences.”
Alexander acknowledged Slonko by shaking his head. “I ate, and I had my tea,” he said. “I feel as good as I possibly can.” He couldn’t keep himself upright.
“I want to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“You seem to want a lie from me, and I cannot give it to you. No matter how cold you make me.” He pretended to blink. Really he was just closing his eyes.
“Major, we spared your life.”
With great effort, Alexander opened them again. “Yes, but why? Did you spare it because you believed in my innocence?”
Slonko shrugged. “Look, it’s so simple.” He pushed a piece of paper in front of Alexander. “All you need to do is sign this document in front of you that says you understand your life has been spared. You will be sent to exile in Siberia, and you will live out your days in peace and away from the war. Would you like that?”
“I don’t know,” said Alexander. “But I’m not signing anything.”
“You have to sign, Major. You are our prisoner. You have to do as you’re told.”
“I have nothing to add to what I already told you.”
“Don’t add, just sign.”
“I’m not putting my name on anything.”
“And exactly what would your name be?” Slonko said suddenly. “Do you even know?”
“Very well,” said Alexander, his head bobbing forward.
“I can’t believe you’re making me drink by myself, Major. I find it almost rude.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink, Comrade Slonko. It’s so easy to fall into the abyss.”
Slonko lifted his eyes from the vodka and stared at Alexander for what seemed to be minutes. Finally he said slowly, “You know, a long time ago, I knew a woman, a very beautiful woman who used to drink.”
No reply was required of Alexander, so he made none.
“Yes. She was something. She was very brave and suffered terribly not to have a drink in prison. When we picked her up for questioning, she was drunk. It took her several days to get sober. When she became sober, we talked for a long time. I offered her a drink, and she took it, and I offered her a piece of paper to sign and she signed it gratefully. She wanted only one thing from me—do you know what it was?”
Alexander managed to shake his head. That’s where he heard the name Slonko!
“To spare her son. That was the only thing she asked. To spare her only son—Alexander Barrington.”
“That was good of her,” said Alexander. He clenched his hands together to still them. He willed his body to remain still. He wanted to be like the chair, like the desk, like the blackboard. He didn’t want to be like the glass rattling in the March wind. Any minute now the glass was going to pop out of the frame. Like the stained glass in a church in Lazarevo.
“Let me ask you, Major,” Slonko said amiably, downing his drink and tapping the empty glass on the wooden table. “If you yourself were going to ask for one thing before you were put to death, what would it be?”
“To have a cigarette,” Alexander replied.
“Not for mercy?”
“No.”
“Do you know your father also begged me to show you mercy?”
Alexander paled.
Slonko said in English, “Your mother begged me to fuck her but I refused.” He paused, and then smiled. “At first.”
Alexander ground his teeth together. Nothing else on him moved. In Russian he said, “Are you speaking to me, comrade? Because I speak only Russian. They tried to get me to learn French in school, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very good at languages.” After that he said nothing. His mouth was dry.
“I’m going to ask you again,” said Slonko. “I’m going to ask you patiently and politely. Are you Alexander Barrington, son of Jane and Harold Barrington?”
“I will answer you patiently and politely,” said Alexander patiently and politely. “Though I have been asked this a hundred and fifty times already. I am not.”
“But Major, why would the person who told us this lie? Where would he get this information from? He couldn’t have made it up. He knew details about your life no one could have had any idea about.”
“Where is this person?” Alexander said. “I’d like to see him, I’d like to ask him if he is sure it’s me he is talking about. I for one am certain he made a mistake.”
“No, he is sure you’re Alexander Barrington.”
Alexander raised his voice. “If he is so sure, let him identify me. He is an upstanding comrade, this man you talk about? He is a proper Soviet citizen? He is not a traitor, he has not spat on his country? He served it proudly as I have? He’s been decorated, he never shied away from battle, no matter how one-sided, no matter how hard-won? This man you speak of, he is an example to us all, correct? Let me meet the paragon of new Soviet consciousness. Let him look at me, point his finger and say, “This is Alexander Barrington.” Alexander smiled. “And then we will see.”
Now it was Slonko’s turn to pale. “I came from Leningrad to talk to you like a reasonable man,” he hissed, losing some of that effacing false humility, baring his teeth, narrowing his eyes.
“And I am certainly glad to talk to you,” Alexander said, feeling his own dark eyes darken. “As always I am happy to talk to an earnest Soviet operator, who seeks the truth, who will stop at nothing to find it. And I want to help you. Bring my accuser here. Let’s clear up this matter once and for all.” Alexander stood up and took one half-menacing step in the direction of the desk. “But once we get this cleared up, I want my besmirched name back.”
“Which name would that be, Major?”
“My rightful name. Alexander Belov.”
“Do you know that you look like your mother?” Slonko said suddenly.
“My mother has long died. Of typhus. In Krasnodar. Surely your moles told you that?”
“I’m talking about your real mother. The woman who would suck off any guard to get a shot of vodka.”
Alexander did not flinch. “Interesting. But I don’t think my mother, who was a farmer’s wife, had ever seen a guard.”
Slonko spat and left.
A guard came to stand over Alexander. It was not Corporal Ivanov. All Alexander wanted to do was close his eyes and fall asleep. But every time he closed his eyes, the guard rammed the butt of the rifle under his chin with a call to wake up. Alexander had to learn to sleep with his eyes open.
The bleak sun set and the room became dark. The corporal turned on the bright light, and shined it into Alexander’s face. He became rougher with the rifle. The third time he tried to slam the barrel into Alexander’s throat, Alexander grabbed the barrel, twisted it out of the guard’s hands and turned it on him. Standing over him, he said, “All you have to do is ask me not to fall asleep. No stronger measures are required. Can you do that?”
“Give me my rifle back.”
“Answer me.”
“Yes, I can do that.”
He gave the guard the weapon back. The guard took it, and struck Alexander in the forehead with the butt of the rifle. He flinched, saw black for a moment but made no sound. The guard left the classroom and returned shortly with his replacement, Corporal Ivanov, who said, “Go ahead, Major. Close your eyes. When they come I will yell. You will open your eyes then, yes?”
“Instantly,” Alexander said in a grateful voice, closing his eyes in the most uncomfortable of chairs, which had a short back and no arms. He hoped he wouldn’t fall over.
“That’s what they do, you know,” he heard Ivanov say. “They keep you from sleeping day and night, they don’t feed you, they keep you naked, wet, cold, in darkness at day and in light at night until you break down and say white is black and black is white and sign their fucking paper.”
“Black is white,” Alexander said without opening his eyes.
“Corporal Boris Maikov signed their fucking paper,” said Ivanov. “He was shot yesterday.”
“What about the other one? Ouspensky?”
“He’s back in the infirmary. They realized he had only one lung. They’re waiting for him to die. Why waste a bullet on him?”
Alexander was too exhausted to speak. Ivanov lowered his voice another notch, and said, “Major, I heard Slonko arguing with Mitterand a few hours ago. He said to Mitterand, ‘Don’t worry. I will break him or he will die.’”
Alexander made no reply.
He heard Ivanov’s whispering. “Don’t let them break you, Major.”
Alexander didn’t answer. He was sleeping.
Leningrad, 1935
In Leningrad, the Barringtons found two small rooms next to each other in a communal apartment in a ramshackle nineteenth-century building. Alexander found a new school, unpacked his few books, his clothes, and continued being fifteen. Harold found work as a carpenter in a table-making factory. Jane stayed home and drank. Alexander stayed away from the two rooms they called home. He spent much of his time walking around Leningrad, which he liked better than Moscow. The pastel stucco buildings, the white nights, the river Neva; he found Leningrad historic and romantic with its gardens and palaces and wide boulevards and small rivers and canals criss-crossing the never-sleeping city.
At sixteen, as he was obliged to, Alexander registered for the Red Army as Alexander Barrington. That was his rebellion. He was not changing his name.
In their communal apartment they tried to keep to themselves—having so little for each other and nothing for other people—but a married couple on the second floor of their building, Svetlana and Vladimir Visselsky, made friendly approaches. They lived in one room with Vladimir’s mother, and at first were quite taken with the Barringtons and lightly envious of the two rooms they had for themselves. Vladimir was a road engineer, Svetlana worked at a local library and kept telling Jane there was a job for her there, too. Jane got a job there, but was unable to get up in the mornings to go to work.
Alexander liked Svetlana. In her late thirties, she was well-dressed, attractive, witty. Alexander liked the way she talked to him, almost as if he were an adult. He was restless during the summer of 1935. Emotionally and financially broke, his parents did not rent a dacha. The summer in the city without a way to make new friends did not appeal much to Alexander, who did nothing but walk around Leningrad by day and read by night. He got a library card where Svetlana worked, and often found himself sitting and talking to her. And, very occasionally, reading. Frequently she walked home with him.
His mother brightened a bit under Svetlana’s casual attention but soon went back to drinking in the afternoons.
Alexander spent more and more of his days at the library. When she walked home with him, Svetlana would offer him a cigarette, which he stopped refusing, or some vodka, which he continued to refuse. The vodka he could take or leave. The cigarettes he thought he could take or leave too, but he had gradually begun to look forward to their bitter taste in his mouth. The vodka altered him in ways he did not like, but the cigarettes provided a calming crutch to his adolescent frenzy.
One afternoon they had come home earlier than usual to find his mother in a stupor in her bedroom. They went to his room to sit down for a second, before Svetlana had to go back downstairs. She offered Alexander another cigarette, and as she did so, she moved closer to him on the couch. He studied her for a moment, wondering if he was misreading her intentions, and then she took the cigarette out of her mouth and put it into his, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t bite.”
So he was not misreading her intentions.
He was sixteen and he was ready.
Her lips moved to his mouth. “Are you afraid?” she said.
“I’m not,” he said, throwing the cigarette and the lighter on the floor. “But you should be.”
They spent two hours together on the couch, and afterward Svetlana moved from the room and down the hall with the shaken walk of someone who had come into the battle thinking it was going to be an easy conquest and was now stumbling away having lost all her weapons.
Stumbling away past Harold, who was coming home from work, and who passed Svetlana in the hall with a nod and a “You don’t want to stay for dinner?”
“There is no dinner,” Svetlana replied weakly. “Your wife is still asleep.”
Alexander closed his own door and smiled.
Harold cooked dinner for himself and Alexander, who spent the rest of the evening holed up in his room pretending to read, but really just waiting for tomorrow.
Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.
Another afternoon of Svetlana, and another, and another.
For a month in the summer she and Alexander met in the late afternoons.
He enjoyed Svetlana. She never failed to tell him exactly what he needed to do to bring her pleasure, and he never failed to do exactly as he was told. Everything he learned about patience and perseverance, he learned from her. Combined with his own natural tendency to stay until the job was done, the result was that Svetlana left work earlier and earlier. He was flattered. His summer flew by.
On the weekends when Svetlana came over with her husband to visit the Barringtons, and she and Alexander barely acknowledged their intimacy, he found the sexual tension to be almost an end in itself.
Then Svetlana began to question the evenings he spent out.
Trouble was, now that Alexander had seen what was on the other side of the wall, all he wanted was to be on the other side of the wall, but not just with Svetlana.
He would have gladly continued with her and made time with girls his own age, but one Sunday evening as the five of them were sitting down to a dinner of potatoes and a little herring, Vladimir, Svetlana’s husband said to no one in particular, “My Svetochka, I think, needs to get a second job. The library has apparently reduced her hours to part-time.”
“But then when would she come and visit my wife?” said Harold, spooning another helping of potatoes onto his plate. They were all crowded in Alexander’s parents’ room around the small table.
“You come and visit me?” asked Jane of Svetlana. No one at the table responded for a moment. Then Jane nodded. “Of course you do. Every day. I see you in the afternoon.”
“You girls must have a great time around here,” said Vladimir. “She always comes home full of such good spirits. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was having a raucous affair.” He laughed in the tone of a man who thought the very idea of his wife’s having an affair was so absurd as to be almost delicious.
Svetlana herself threw her head back and laughed. Even Harold chuckled. Only Jane and Alexander sat stonily. For the rest of the dinner Jane said nothing to anyone but got drunker and drunker. Soon she was passed out on the couch while the rest of them cleaned up. The next day, when Alexander came home, he found his mother waiting for him in his room, somber and sober.
“I sent her away,” she said to him as he came in and threw down his bag of library books and jacket on the floor and stood in front of his mother with his arms folded.
“Okay,” he said.
“What are you doing, Alexander?” she asked quietly. He could tell she had been crying.
“I don’t know, Mom. What are you doing?”
“Alexander …”
“What are you concerned about?”
“That I’m not looking after my son,” she replied.
“You’re concerned about that?”
“I don’t want it to be too late,” she said in a small, remorseful voice. “It’s my fault, I know. Lately I haven’t been much of …” She broke off. “But whatever is happening in our family, she can’t come here anymore, not if she wants to keep this from her husband.”
“Like you’re keeping what you do in the afternoons from yours?”
“Like he cares,” retorted Jane.
“Like Vladimir cares,” retorted Alexander.
“Stop it!” she yelled. “What’s the point of this? To wake me up?”
“Mom, I know you will find this hard to believe, but it has nothing to do with you.”
“Alexander,” Jane said bitterly, “indeed I find that very hard to believe. You, the most beautiful boy in all of Russia, you’re telling me you could not have found a young school girl to parry with instead of a woman nearly my age who just happens to be my friend?”
“Who says I haven’t? And would a school girl have gotten you sober?”
“Oh, I see, so this does have something to do with me after all!” She didn’t get up off the couch while Alexander, with his arms crossed, stood in front of her. “Is this what you want to do with your life? Become a toy for bored older women?”
Alexander felt his temper rising. He grit his teeth. His mother was too upsetting for him.
“Answer me!” she said loudly. “Is this what you want?”
“What?” he said, just as loudly. “Does it seem to you as if I’ve got so many more attractive options? Which part do you find so repellent?”
Jane jumped up. “Don’t go forgetting yourself,” she said. “I am still your mother.”
“Then act like my mother!” he yelled.
“I’ve looked after you!”
“And look where it’s gotten all of us—all of us Barringtons making a life for ourselves in Leningrad while you spend half of Dad’s wages on vodka, and still that’s not enough. You’ve sold your jewelry, you’ve sold your books, your silks and your linens for vodka. What’s left, Mom? What else have you got left to sell?”
For the first time in her life, Jane raised her hand and slapped Alexander. He deserved it and knew it, but couldn’t keep himself from saying it.
“Mom, you want to offer me a solution, offer me a solution. You want to tell me what to do—after months of not speaking to me—forget it. I will not listen. You’re going to have to do better.” He paused. “Stop drinking.”
“I’m sober now.”
“Then let’s talk again tomorrow.”
But tomorrow she was drunk.
School started. Alexander busied himself with getting to know a girl named Nadia. One afternoon, Svetlana met him at the school doors. He was laughing with Nadia. Excusing himself, Alexander walked down the block with Svetlana.
“Alexander, I want to talk to you.” They walked to a small park and sat under the autumn trees. “Your mother knows, doesn’t she?”
“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Listen … we needed to stop anyway.”
“Stop?” She said the word as if it had never actually occurred to her.
He looked at her with surprise.
“Not stop!” she exclaimed. “Whatever in the world for?”
“Svetlana …”
“Alexander, can’t you see?” she said, trembling and taking hold of his arm. “This is just a test for us.”
He pulled his arm away. “It’s a test I’m meant to fail. I don’t know what you could possibly be thinking. I’m in school. I’m sixteen. You’re a married thirty-nine-year-old woman. How long did you imagine this would go on?”
“When we first started,” she said hoarsely, “I imagined nothing.”
“All right.”
“But now …”
His gaze dropped. “Oh, Sveta …”
She got up off the bench. The throaty cry she emitted hurt Alexander’s lungs—as if he had breathed inside himself her miserable addiction to him. “Of course. I’m ridiculous.” She struggled with her breath. “You’re right. Of course.” She tried to smile. “Maybe one last time?” she whispered. “For old times’ sake? To say goodbye properly?”
Alexander bowed his head by way of replying.
She stumbled a step back from him, composed herself and said as steadily as she could, “Alexander, remember this as you go through your life—you have amazing gifts. Don’t squander them. Don’t give them out meaninglessly, don’t abuse them, don’t take them for granted. You are the weapon you carry with you till the day you die.”
They did not see each other again. Alexander got himself a card at a different library. Vladimir and Svetlana stopped coming over. At first Harold was curious why they no longer visited and then he forgot about them. Alexander knew his father’s inner life was too unsettled to worry about why he no longer saw people he didn’t like very much to begin with.
Fall turned into winter. 1935 turned into 1936. He and his father celebrated New Year’s by themselves. They went to a local beer bar, where his father bought him a glass of vodka and tried to talk to him. The conversation was brief and strained. Harold Barrington—in his own sober, defiant way—was oblivious to his son and his wife. The world his father lived in Alexander did not know, stopped understanding, didn’t want to understand even if he could have. He knew that his father would have liked Alexander to side with him, to understand him, to believe in him, the way he did when he was younger. But Alexander did not know how to do that anymore. The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.
Giving Up One Room, 1936
Could it get less tolerable?
Shortly.
An undergrown man from Upravdom—the housing committee—arrived at their doorstep one dark January Saturday morning, accompanied by two people with suitcases, and waved about a piece of paper, informing the Barringtons that they were going to have to give up one of their rooms to another family. Harold didn’t have the strength to argue. Jane was too drunk to object. It was Alexander who raised his voice but only briefly. There was no point. There was no one to go to, to correct this.
“You can’t tell me this is unjust,” the smirking Upravdom member said to Alexander. “You have two nice rooms for the three of you. There are two of them, and they have no rooms at all. She is pregnant. Where is your socialist spirit, comrade soon-to-be Comsomol?” The Comsomols were young members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Alexander and Harold moved the cot and his small dresser and his few personal belongings and his bookshelf. Alexander put his cot next to the window, and the dresser and bookshelf between himself and his parents as an angry barrier. When his father wanted to know if he was upset, Alexander barked, “It’s been my dream to share a room with you at sixteen. I know you don’t want any privacy either.” They talked in English, which was more natural and more colloquial, and provided an opportunity to say the word privacy, a word that did not exist in Russian.
The next morning when Jane woke up she wanted to know what Alexander was doing in their room. It was a Sunday.
“I’m here for good,” said Alexander, and went out. He took a train to Peterhof and walked the grounds by himself, sullen and confused. The feeling he had had all his young life—that he was brought on this earth for something special—had not left Alexander, not quite; what it did was dissipate inside him, became translucent in his blood vessels. It no longer pulsed through his body. He was no longer filled with a sense of purpose. He was filled with a sense of despair.
I could have lived through it all if only I continued to have the feeling that at the end of childhood, at the end of adolescence, there was something else in this life that would be mine, that I could make with my bare hands, and once I had made it, I could say, I did this to my life. I made my life so.
Hope.
It was gone from Alexander on this sunny crisp Sunday, and the feeling of purpose had vanished, was vanquished in his veins.
The End, 1936
Harold stopped bringing vodka into the house.
“Dad, you don’t think Mom will be able to get vodka any other way?”
“With what? She has no money.”
Alexander didn’t mention the thousands of American dollars his mother had been hoarding since the day they came to the Soviet Union.
“Stop talking about me as if I’m not here!” Jane shouted.
They looked at her with surprise. Afterward Jane started stealing money from Harold’s pockets and going to buy the vodka herself. Harold started keeping his money out of the house. Jane was then caught in someone else’s apartment, going through their things, already drunk on some French perfume she had found.
Alexander began to be afraid that the next natural step for his mother would be to drink her way through the money she had brought with them from America. It wouldn’t end until all the money was gone. First the Soviet rubles she had saved from her job in Moscow, then the American dollars. It would take his mother a year to buy vodka with all her dollars on the black market, but buy it she would, gone the money would be, and then what?
Without that money, Alexander was finished.
Alexander had to get his mother sober for long enough to let him hide the money in a place that was not home. He knew that if she found out he had taken it without her knowledge or permission her hysteria would not cease until Harold knew of her treachery. Once Harold knew his wife had mistrusted him from the moment they left the United States, mistrusted him even in her love and her respect, mistrusted him and his motives and his ideals and all the dreams he thought she shared with him from the very start, once he knew that, Alexander felt his father would not recover. And he didn’t want to be responsible for his father’s future, all he wanted was the money to help him be responsible for his own. That’s what his sober mother wanted, too. He knew that. Sober, she would let him hide the money. The trick was to get her sober.
Over the course of one difficult and contemptible weekend Alexander tried to dry out his mother. She, in her convulsing rage, flooded him with such obscenities and vitriol that finally even Harold said, “Oh, for God’s sake, give her a drink and tell her to shut up.”
But Alexander didn’t give her a drink. He sat by her, and he read aloud from Dickens, in English, and he read Pushkin to her, in Russian, and he read her the funniest of Zoshchenko’s anecdotes, and he fed her some soup and he fed her some bread, and gave her coffee, and put cold wet towels on her head, but still she wouldn’t stop ranting. Harold, in a quiet moment, asked Alexander, “What did she mean about you and Svetlana, what was she talking about?”
“Dad, haven’t you learned by now, you have to shut her off? You can’t listen to a word she is saying.”
“No, no, of course not,” muttered Harold thoughtfully, walking away from Alexander, though not far, because there wasn’t anywhere in the narrow room to go.
On Monday, after his father left for work, Alexander cut school and spent all day convincing his morosely, miserably sober mother that her money needed to be put in a safe place. Alexander tried to explain to her, first patiently and quietly, then impatiently and shouting, that if something, God forbid, were to happen to them, and they were arrested—
“You’re talking nonsense, Alexander. Why would they arrest us? We’re their people. We’re not living well, but then we shouldn’t be living any better than the rest of the Russians. We came here to share their fate.”
“We’re doing that gallantly,” said Alexander. “Mom, wise up. What do you think happened to the other foreigners that lived with us in Moscow?” He paused. His mother considered. “Even if I’m wrong, I’m saying it’s not going to hurt us to be a little prudent and hide the money. Now how much money is left?”
After thinking for a few moments, Jane said she did not know. She let Alexander count it. There was ten thousand dollars and four thousand rubles.
“How many dollars did you bring with you from America?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe seventeen thousand. Maybe twenty.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“What? Some of that money went to buy you oranges and milk in Moscow, or did you forget already?”
“I didn’t forget,” Alexander replied in a weary voice. How much for the oranges and milk, he wanted to know. Fifty dollars? A hundred?
Jane, smoking and watching Alexander, narrowed her eyes at him. “If I let you hide the money, will you let me have a drink, as a thank you?”
“Yes. Just one.”
“Of course. One small one is all I want. I feel much better when I’m sober, you know. But just one small drink to get me through the heebie-jeebies would help me stay sober, you know that, don’t you?”
Alexander wanted to ask his mother just how naïve she thought he was. He said nothing.
“All right,” said Jane. “Let’s get it over with. Where are you planning to hide it?”
Alexander suggested gluing the money into the back binding of a book, producing one of his mother’s good, thick-covered hardbacks to show exactly what he meant.
“If your father finds out, he will never forgive you.”
“He can add it to the list of things he won’t forgive me for. Go on, Mom. I have to get to school. After the book is ready, I’m putting it in the library.”
Jane stared at the book Alexander was proposing. It was her ancient copy of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems. “Why don’t we glue it inside the Bible we brought from home?”
“Because finding a Pushkin book in the Pushkin section of the Leningrad library is not going to alert anyone. But finding a Bible in English anywhere in the Russian library just might.” He smiled. “Don’t you think?”
Jane almost smiled back. “Alexander, I’m sorry I haven’t been well.”
He lowered his head.
“I don’t want to talk to your father about this anymore because he no longer has any patience for me, but I’m having trouble with our life.”
“We know,” Alexander said. “We’ve noticed.”
She put her arms around him. He patted her on the back. “Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“This money, Alexander,” she said, looking up at him, “you think it will help you somehow?”
“I don’t know. Having it is better than not having it.”
He took the book with him, and after school went to the Leningrad public library and in the back, in the three-aisle-wide Pushkin section, found a place on a bottom shelf for his book. He put it between two scholarly-looking tomes that had not been checked out since 1927. He thought it was a good bet no one would check out his book, either. But still, it didn’t feel completely safe. He wished there were a better hiding place for it.
When Alexander came home later that evening, his mother was drunk again, showing none of the remorseful affection he had seen in her eyes earlier in the day. He ate dinner quietly with his father, while listening to the radio.
“School good?”
“Yes. It’s fine, Dad.”
“You have good friends?”
“Sure.”
“Any good friends who are girls?” His father was trying to make conversation.
“Some friends who are girls, yes.”
His father cleared his throat. “Nice Russian girls?”
Smiling, Alexander asked, “Compared with what?”
Harold smiled. “Do the nice Russian girls,” he asked carefully, “like my boy?”
Alexander shrugged. “They like me all right.”
Harold said, “I remember you and Teddy hung out with that girl, what was her name again?”
“Belinda.”
“Yes! Belinda. She was nice.”
“Dad.” Alexander laughed. “We were eight. Yes, she was nice for an eight-year-old.”
“Oh, but what a crush on you she had!”
“And what a crush on her Teddy had.”
“That about sums up all the relationships on God’s earth.”
They went out for a drink. “I miss our home in Barrington a little,” Harold admitted to Alexander. “But it’s only because I have not lived a different way long enough. Long enough to change my consciousness and make me into the person I’m supposed to be.”
“You have lived this way long enough. That’s why you miss Barrington.”
“No. You know what I think, son? I think it’s not working so well here, because it’s Russia. I think communism would work much better in America.” He smiled beseechingly at Alexander. “Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, Dad, for God’s sake.”
Harold didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Never mind. I’m going over to Leo’s for a little while. You want to come?”
The choice was, either go back home to the room with his unconscious mother or sit in a smoked-out room with his father’s communist cronies regurgitating obscure parts of Das Kapital and talking about bringing the war back home.
Alexander wanted to be with his father but alone. He went home to his mother. He wanted to be alone with somebody.
The next morning, as Harold and Alexander were getting ready for their day, Jane, still inebriated from the night before, held on to Alexander’s hand for a moment and said, “Stay behind, son, I have to talk to you.”
After Harold left, Jane said in a hurried voice, “Collect your things. Where is that book? You have to run and get it.”
“What for?”
“You and I are going to Moscow.”
“Moscow?”
“Yes. We’ll get there by nightfall. Tomorrow first thing in the morning I’ll take you to the consulate.” They’ll keep you there until they contact the State Department in Washington. And then they’ll send you home.”
“What?”
“Alexander, yes. I’ll take care of your father.”
“You can’t take care of yourself.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Jane. “My fate is sealed. But yours is wide open. Concern yourself only with you. Your father goes to his meetings. He thinks by playing with the grown-ups he won’t be punished. But they have his number. They have mine. But you, Alexander, you have no number. I have to get you out.”
“I’m not going without you or Dad.”
“Of course you are. Your father and I will never be allowed to return. But you will do very well back home. I know it’s hard in America these days, there aren’t many jobs, but you’ll be free, you’ll have your life, so come and stop arguing. I’m your mother. I know what I’m doing.”
“Mom, you’re taking me to Moscow to surrender me to the Americans?”
“Yes. Your Aunt Esther will look after you until you graduate secondary school. The State Department will arrange for her to meet your ship in Boston. You’re still only sixteen, Alexander, the consulate won’t turn you away.”
Alexander had been very close to his father’s sister once. She adored him, but she had an ugly fight with Harold over Alexander’s dubious future in the Soviet Union, and they had not spoken or written since.
“Mom, two things,” he said. When I turned sixteen, I registered for the Red Army. Remember? Mandatory conscription. I became a Soviet citizen when I joined. I have a passport to prove that.”
“The consulate doesn’t have to know that.”
“It’s their business to know it. But the second thing is …” Alexander broke off. “I can’t go without saying goodbye to my father.”
“Write him a letter.”
The train ride was long. He had twelve hours to sit and think. How his mother managed those hours without a drink, he didn’t know. Her hands were shaking badly by the time they arrived at the Leningrad Station in Moscow. It was night; they were tired and hungry. They had no place to sleep. They had no food. It was a fairly mild late April, and they slept on a bench in Gorky Park. Alexander had strong bittersweet memories of himself and his friends playing ice hockey in Gorky Park.
“I need a drink, Alexander,” Jane whispered. “I need a drink to take an edge off my life. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”
“Mother,” said Alexander, putting his steady hand on her to keep her from getting up. “If you leave, I will go straight to the station and take the next train back to Leningrad.”
Deeply sighing, Jane moved closer to Alexander and motioned to her lap. “Lie down, son. Get some sleep. We have a long day tomorrow.”
Alexander put his head on his mother’s shoulder and eventually slept.
The next morning they had to wait an hour at the consulate gate until someone came to see them—only to tell them they could not come in. Jane gave her name and a letter explaining about her son. They waited restlessly for another two hours until the sentry called them over and said the consul was unable to help them. Jane pleaded to be let in for just five minutes. The sentry shook his head and said there was nothing he could do. Alexander had to restrain his mother. Eventually he led her away and returned by himself to speak to the guard. The man apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said in English. “They did look into it, if you want to know. But the file on your mother and father has been sent back to the State Department in Washington.” The man paused. “Yours, too. Since you’re Soviet citizens, you’re not under our jurisdiction anymore. There is nothing they can do.”
“What about political asylum?”
“On what grounds? Besides, you know how many Soviets come this way asking for asylum? Dozens every day. On Mondays, near a hundred. We’re here by invitation from the Soviet government. We want to maintain our ties to the Soviet community. If we started accepting their people, how long do you think they’d allow us to stay here? You’d be the last one. Just last week, we relented and let a widowed Russian father with two small children pass. The father had relatives in the United States and said he would find work. He had a useful skill, he was an electrician. But there was a diplomatic scandal. We had to give him back.” The sentry paused. “You’re not an electrician, are you?”
“No,” replied Alexander. “But I am an American citizen.”
The sentry shook his head. “You know you can’t serve two masters in the military.”
Alexander knew. He tried again. “I have relatives in America. I will live with them. And I can work. I’ll drive a cab. I will sell produce on the street corner. I will farm. I will cut down trees. Whatever I can do, I will do.”
The sentry lowered his voice. “It’s not you. It’s your father and mother. They’re just too high profile for the consulate to get involved. Made too much of a fuss when they came here. Wanted everyone to know them. Well, now everyone knows them. Your parents should have thought twice about relinquishing their U.S. citizenship. What was the hurry? They should have been sure first.”
“My father was sure,” said Alexander.
The trip back from Moscow was only as long as the trip to Moscow; why did it seem decades longer? His mother was mute. The countryside was flat bleak fields; there was still no food.
Jane cleared her throat. “I desperately wanted to have a baby. It took me ten years and four miscarriages to have you. The year you were born the worldwide flu epidemic tore through Boston, killing thousands of people, including my sister, your father’s parents and brother, and many of our close friends. Everybody we knew lost someone. I went to the doctor for a check-up because I was feeling under the weather and was terrified it might be the dreaded flu. He told me I was pregnant. I said, how can it be, we’ll fall sick, we’ve given up our family inheritance, we are broke, where are we going to live, how will we stay healthy, and the doctor looked at me and said, “The baby brings his own food.”
She took Alexander’s hand. He let her.
“You, son—you brought your own food. Harold and I both felt it. When you were born, Alexander—when you were born, it was late at night, and you came so suddenly, I didn’t even have time to go to the hospital. The doctor came, delivered you in our bed, and said that you seemed in a great hurry to get on with living. You were the biggest baby he had ever seen, and I still remember, after we told him we were naming you Anthony Alexander after your great grandfather, he lifted you, all purple and black-haired, and exclaimed, “Alexander the great!” Because you were so big, you see.” She paused. “You were such a beautiful boy,” she whispered.
Alexander took his hand away and turned to the window.
“Our hopes for you were extraordinary. I wish you could imagine the kinds of things we dreamed for you as we strolled down the Boston Pier with you in the carriage and all the old ladies stopping to gaze at the baby with hair so black and eyes so shining.”
The flat fields were rushing by.
“Ask your father—ask him—when next you can, if his dreams for you ever included this for his only son.”
“I just didn’t bring enough food, did I, Mom?” said Alexander, with hair so black and eyes so shining.
