Читать книгу The Summer Garden - Paullina Simons - Страница 10

Bare Feet and Backpacks

Alexander drove their Nomad through Texas, across Austin, down to San Antonio. The Alamo was a fascinating bit of history—they all died. He couldn’t get around that fact. Despite the heroism, the bravery, they all died! And Texas lost its battle for independence and continued to belong to Santa Ana. Death to all wasn’t enough for victory. What kind of a fucked-up life lesson was that for Anthony? Alexander decided not to tell his son about it. He’d learn in school soon enough.

Western Texas was just flat road amid the dusty plains as far as the eye could see. Alexander was driving and smoking; he had turned off the radio so he could hear Tatiana better—but she had stopped speaking. She was sitting on the passenger side with her eyes closed. She had been telling him and Anthony soothing stories of some of her pranks in Luga. There were few stories Alexander liked better than of her child self in that village by the river.

Is she asleep? He glances at her, squeezed in around herself in a floral pink wrap dress that comes down to a V in her chest. Her glistening, slightly tender, coral nectar mouth reminds him of things, stirs him up a little. He checks to see what Anthony is doing—the boy is lying down facing away, playing with his toy soldiers. Alexander reaches over and cups a palmful of her breast, and she instantly opens her eyes and checks for Anthony. “What?” she whispers, and no sooner does she whisper than Anthony turns around, and Alexander takes his hand away, an aching prickle of desire mixed with frustration all swollen behind his eyes and in his loins.

Their hostilities in Coconut Grove have been yielding some significant crops for him. Just a small measure of his subsequent closed-mouthedness has been making Tatiana trip over herself to show him that his bitter accusations against her were not true. It doesn’t matter. He knows of course they were true, but he doesn’t mind in the least her cartwheels of palpitating remorse.

At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can’t see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn’t you just stay put? Why couldn’t you feel I was coming for you?

You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn’t I dead?

He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arrived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen’s main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him.

As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw after being beaten and dreaming of her kissing him, and these dreams morph with the memories of last night, and suddenly she is kissing not the scars but the raw oozing wounds, and he is in agony for she is crying and the brine of her tears is eating away the meat of his flesh, and he is begging her to stop because he can’t take it anymore. Kiss something else, he pleads. Anything else. He’s had enough of himself. He is sick of himself. She is tainted not just with the Gulag. She is tainted with his whole life.

Does it hurt when I touch them?

He has to lie. Every kiss she plants on his wounds stirs a sense memory of how he got them. He wanted her to touch him, and this is what he gets. But if he tells her the truth, she will stop. So he lies. No, he says.

She kisses him past the small of his back, down to his legs, to his feet, murmuring to him something about his perfect this and that, he doesn’t even know, and then climbs up and prods him to turn over. She lies astride him, holding his head in her arms while he holds her buttocks in his (now they’re perfect), and kisses his face, not inch by inch but centimeter by centimeter. As she kisses him, she murmurs to him. He opens his eyes. Your eyes, do you want to know what color they are? They’re bronze; they’re copper; they’re ocher and amber; they’re cream and coffee; cognac and champagne. They are caramel.

Not crème brûlée? he asks. And she starts to cry. All right, all right, he says. Not crème brûlée.

She kisses his scarred tattooed arms, his ribboned chest. Now he can see her face, her lips, her hair, all glowing in the flickering fire. His hands lie lightly on her silken head.

Mercifully few wounds on your stomach, she whispers, as she kisses the black line of hair that starts at his solar plexus and arrows down.

Yes, he groans back. Do you know what we call men with wounds on their stomachs? Corpses.

She laughs. He doesn’t laugh, his very good Sergeant Telikov dying slowly with the bayonet in his abdomen. There wasn’t enough morphine to let him die free of pain. Ouspensky had to mercy-shoot him—on Alexander’s orders, and this one time Alexander did turn away. The flinching, the stiffness, the dead, the alive, all here, and there is no morphine, and there is no mercy. There is only Tatiana.

She murmurs, she purrs. A corpse, that’s not you.

He agrees. No, not me.

Her breasts press into his rigid with tension—

He is rupturing. What else do you like? Come on, I’m going to implode. What else? She sits between his legs and her small healing hands finally take him. She rubs him between her palms like she’s about to set him on fire. Her warm hands softly milk him, softly climb rope on him. He is stacked in her clasped fingers when she bends her head to him. Shura … look at you … you are so hard, so beautiful. He desperately wants to keep his eyes open. Her long hair feathers his stomach in rhythm to her motion. Her mouth is so soft, so hot, so wet, her fingers are in rotating rings around him, she is naked, she is tense, her eyes are closed and she moans as she sucks him. He is set on fire. He is in bondage through and through. And now, well past it but utterly within it, he keeps quiet during the day while his hands stretch out in a shudder for her yoke of contrition, for her blaze of repentance at night.

But night isn’t nearly enough. As he keeps telling her, nothing is enough. So now he is trying not to crash the camper.

She sits looking ahead at the sprawling fields, and then suddenly straight at him as if she is about to tell him something. Today her eyes are transparent with sunny yellow rays beaming out from the irises. When they’re not misted or jaded by the fathomless waters of rivers and lakes left behind, the eyes are entirely pellucid—and dangerous. They are clear in meaning, yet bottomless. And what’s worse—they allow all light to pass through. There is no hiding from them. Today, after deeming him acceptable, the eyes turn back to the road, her hands relaxing on her lap, her chest swelling against the pink cotton fabric. He wants to fondle her, to feel her breasts in his hands, feel their soft weightiness, to have his face in them—how long till night? She is so sensitive, he can’t breathe on her without her quivering; in her pink nipples seem to center many of the nerve endings in her body. She has amazing, unbelievable breasts. Alexander’s hands grip the wheel.

Peripherally he sees her look of concern—she thinks he is tormented. Yes, he is made stupid by lust. She leans over slightly and says in her corn husk of a breath, “A penny for your thoughts, soldier.”

Alexander composes his voice before speaking. “I was thinking,” he says calmly, “about freedom. You come, you go, and no one thinks twice about you. Any road, any country road, any state road, from one city to another, never stopped, never checked. No one asks for your internal passport, no one asks about your business. No one cares what you do.”

And what did his wife do? She sat, motionless and—was it tense?—listening to him, her hands no longer relaxed but clenched together, and then pulled open her dress, pulled down her vest and leaning back against the seat, smiled and shut tight her eyes, sitting pushed-up and topless for him for a few panting moments. O Lord, thank you.

Has the sun set? Yes, finally, and the fire is on, and Anthony is asleep, and that’s good, but what Alexander really wants is to see Tatiana in the daylight, without shadows on her, when he can look at her with diurnal lust unadorned by war, by death, by his agonies that pursue him like he pursues her in the choppy black-and-white frames of the used movie camera she made him buy in New Orleans (he’s learned she has a weak spot for new gadgets). Just once, a song in the daylight with nothing else but lust. She too has not been happy, that he knows. Something weighs upon her. She often can’t face him, and he is too fractured to pry. He used to be stronger but not anymore. His strength has been left behind—thousands of miles east, in the christening Kama, in the gleaming Neva, on the icy Lake Ladoga, in the wooded mountains of Holy Cross, in Germany with the blackguard Ouspensky, his lieutenant, his friend, betraying him for years in cold blood, left behind on the frozen ground with the barely buried Pasha. God! Please, no more. He shudders to stave off the fevers. This is what night does to him. But wait—

She stands in front of him, as if she is trying to determine what he wants. Isn’t it obvious? DAYLIGHT! He sits without moving, without speaking and rages inside his burning house. He used to need nothing and want nothing but his stark force upon her open body—and still does—but Tania has given him something else, too. At last, she has given him other things to dream about. She stands glimmering in front of him, blonde and naked, trembling and shy, the color of opalescent milk. He already can’t breathe. She is supple and little, creamy-smooth, her bare body is finally in his groping hands, and her gold hair shimmers down her back. She shimmers. He tears off his clothes and pulls her into his lap, fitting her onto himself while he sucks her nipples as he caresses her hair. He cannot last five minutes with her like that, hard nipples in his mouth, warm breasts in his face, silk hair in his hands, all curled up and molten honey around him, slightly squirming, fluttering, tiny, soft and satiny in his avid lap. Not five minutes. O Lord, thank you.

In New Orleans, on stinging nostalgic impulse, he had bought her a dress he saw in a shop window, an ivory frothy, thin-netted and muslin dress with a slight swing skirt and layers of stiff silk and lace. It was pretty, but regretfully too big for her: she was swimming in muslin snow. The shop didn’t have a smaller size. “Your wife is very petite, sir,” said the corpulent sales woman with a frowning, disapproving glare—either disapproving of Tania for being petite or disapproving of a man Alexander’s size for marrying someone who was. They bought the dress anyway, judgmental beefy sales lady notwithstanding, and that night in their seedy and stifling hotel room, with Anthony in their bed and the fan whooshing the heat around, Alexander silently measured out her smallness—consoling himself with math instead of love, with circumference instead of circumfusion. Her ankles six inches around. Her calves, eleven. The tops of her very bare thighs below the sulcus, eighteen and a half. The tape measure dropped, his hands ringed her thigh, the entire length of his left index finger burning. Her hips, the tape clasped just above the blonde down, thirty-two. Her waist, twenty-one. The tape measure dropped, his hands ringed her waist. Anthony is in the bed, she whispered, Anthony is unsettled.

Her chest, thirty-six. With the nipples erect, thirty-six and a half. Tape measure dropped for good. Anthony is stirring, Shura, please, and the room is tiny and broiling, and just outside the open windows, the sailors below will hear. But math did not suffice that time. Gasping kneeling piety in the corner of the creaking floor just feet away from sleeping Anthony and the laughing sailors barely sufficed.

Now, on the road, he is thirsty, hungry, profoundly aroused; he glances back to see what Anthony is doing, to see if the boy is busy with his bugs, too busy with his bugs to see his father grope blindly for his mother. But Anthony is on the seat behind her, watching him.

“What’ya thinkin’ about, Dad?”

“Oh, you know your dad. A little of this, a little of that.” His voice creaks, too.

Soon they’ll leave western Texas, be in New Mexico. He casts another long look at her clavicle bones, slim shoulders, straight upper arms, eight, at her graceful neck, eleven, her white throat that needs his lips on it. His eyes drift down to her bare feet under her thin cotton skirt; white and delicate as her hands; her feet six, her hands five, less by three than his own—but it’s her feet he’s stuck on; why?—and suddenly he opens his mouth to let out a shallow anguished breath of a deeply unwanted memory. No, no, not that. Please. His head shudders. No. Feet—dirty, large, blacknailed, bruised, lying motionless underneath a raggy old brown skirt attached to the dead body of a gangraped woman he found in the laundry room. It is Alexander’s job to drag her by the feet to the graves he’s just dug for her and the three others who died that day.

He fumbles around for his cigarettes. Tatiana pulls one out, hands it to him with a lighter. Unsteadily he lights up, pulling up the woman’s skirt to cover her face so that earth doesn’t fall on it when he shovels the dirt over her small part of the mass grave. Under her skirt the woman is so viciously mutilated that Alexander cannot help it, he begins to retch.

Then. Now.

He puts his hand over his mouth as the cigarette burns, and inhales quickly.

“Are you okay, Captain?”

There is nothing he can say. He usually remembers that woman at the worst, most inopportune moments.

Eventually his mouth stops the involuntary reflex. Then. Now. Eventually, he sees so much that he becomes dead to everything. He has inured himself, hardened himself so that there’s nothing that arouses a flicker of feeling inside Alexander. He finally speaks as they cross the state line. “Have a joke for me, Tania?” he says. “I could use a joke.”

“Hmm.” She thinks, looks at him, looks to see where Anthony is. He’s far in the back. “Okay, what about this.” With a short cough, she leans into Alexander and lowers her voice. “A man and his young girlfriend are driving in the car. The man has never seen his girl naked. She thinks he is driving too slow, so they decide to play a game. For every five miles he goes above fifty, she will take off a piece of her clothing. In no time at all, he is flying and she is naked. The man gets so excited that he loses control of the car. It veers off the road and hits a tree. She is unharmed but he is stuck in the car and can’t get out. ‘Go back on the road and get help,’ he tells her. ‘But I’m naked,’ she says. He rummages around and pulls off his shoe. ‘Here, just put this between your legs to cover yourself.’ She does as she is told and runs out to the road. A truck driver, seeing a naked crying woman, stops. ‘Help me, help me,’ she sobs. ‘My boyfriend is stuck and I can’t get him out.’ The truck driver says, ‘Miss, if he’s that far in, I’m afraid he’s a goner.’”

Alexander laughs in spite of himself.

In the afternoon after lunch, Tatiana manages to put Anthony down for an unprecedented godsent nap, and in the canopied seclusion of the trees at the empty rest area grounds, Alexander sets Tatiana down on the picnic bench, pulls high her watercolor skirt, kneels between her legs in the glorious daylight and lowers his head to her fragile and perfect perianth, his palms up, under her. She has given him this, like manna from heaven. O Lord, thank you.

He is driving through the prairies and he is thirsty. Tania and Ant are playing road games, trying to guess the color of the next car that passes them. Alexander declines to participate, saying he doesn’t want to play any game where Tatiana always wins.

It’s very hot in the camper. They’ve opened the top hatch and all the slotted windows, but it’s just dust and wind blowing at them at forty miles an hour. Her hair is getting tangled. She is flushed; a few miles back she had taken off her blouse and now sits in the slightly damp see-through white vest that cannot constrain her. Being around her all day and night like this is getting to be no good for him. He is becoming slightly crazed by her. All he wants is more. But unlike Lazarevo, where his desire like a river flowed into the sea extempore, here the river is dammed by their seedling who sits awake from morning till night and plays road games.

Ant says a word, like “crab,” and she says one that follows into her head, like “grass.” Alexander doesn’t want to play that game either. Should they stop, have lunch? German dead crabgrass in the middle of the camp, in the middle of February. Beaten, lashed, blood oozing down his back, he is made to stand in the cold grass for six hours and what he thinks about for six hours is that he is thirsty.

He glances at her sitting serenely folded over. She catches him looking and says, “Thirsty?”

Does he nod? He doesn’t know. He knows that she gives him a drink.

Tank, says Anthony, continuing the game.

Commander, says his mother.

Alexander blinks. The camper lurches.

Shura, watch the road, or we’ll crash.

Did she just say that? He’s commanding his tank, and they’re in the middle of the Prussian fields, they’re almost in Poland. The Germans have mined the meadow in retreat, and one of the S-mines has just gone off, in full view of Alexander. It lifted up to his engineer’s lurching chest, paused as if to say, looky who’s here, and exploded. Ouspensky has dug the hole where the engineer fell, and they buried him in it—him and his backpack. Alexander never looks through the backpacks of the fallen, because the things they contain make it impossible for him either to walk away or to continue forward. As the soldier’s outer wear—his uniform, helmet, boots, weapon—contain the outer him, the backpacks contain the inner him. The backpacks contain the soldier’s soul.

Alexander never looks. Unopened it is buried with the timid engineer who had a large blue tattoo of a cross on his chest that the Nazi mine ripped open because the Nazis don’t believe in Jesus.

“Where’s your backpack?” Alexander said to Tatiana.

“What?”

“Your backpack, the one you left the Soviet Union with. Where is it?”

She turned to the passenger window. “Perhaps it’s still with Vikki,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“My mother’s Bronze Horseman book? The photos of your family? Our two wedding pictures? You left them with Vikki?” Alexander was incredulous.

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Why are you asking?”

He didn’t want to tell her why he was asking. The killed landmine engineer had a sweetheart in Minsk—Nina. Pictures of her, letters from her had filled his pack. Ouspensky told Alexander this, even though Alexander had asked him not to. After he knew, he felt bitterly envious, blackly jealous of the amorous letters the meek engineer was sent by a Nina from Minsk. Alexander never got any letters. Once long ago he received letters from Tatiana, and from her sister, Dasha. But those letters, the cards, the photographs, Tania’s white dress with red roses were all at the bottom of the sea or had turned to ashes. He had no more things.

“The letters I wrote you—after I left you in Lazarevo,” said Alexander, “you don’t—you don’t know where they are? You’ve … left them with Vikki?” Perhaps things remained that stirred some feeling in him.

“Darling …” her voice was soothing. “What on heaven’s earth are you thinking about?”

“Can’t you just answer me?” he snapped.

“I have them. I have it all, they’re with me, buried deep in my things. The whole backpack. I never look through it, but I’ll get it for you. I’ll get it when we stop for lunch.”

Relief heaved out of his chest. “I don’t want to look through it either,” he said. He simply needed to know that she is not like him—that she has a soul. Because Alexander’s backpack during his penal battalion days was empty. If Alexander had died and Ouspensky, before burying him, looked through it, he would have found cards, smokes, a broken pen, a small Bible—Soviet-issue, distributed to the Red Army late in the war with false piety—and that is all. If Alexander had died, all his men would have seen that their commander, Captain Belov, had no soul.

But had they looked through the backpack a little more carefully, in the cracking parchment of the New Testament, they would have found a soiled small black-and-white picture of a young girl, maybe fourteen, standing toes turned in like a child, in white braids and a sundress, with a broken and casted arm, next to her dark brother. He was pulling her hair. Her good arm was around him. Pasha and Tania, two striplings. They were laughing—in Luga, a long time ago.

Ninety-Seven Acres

New Mexico. Santa Fe Mountains. Arizona. Tonto Mountains.

Seven thousand feet above sea level the air is thinner, drier. In Santa Fe, Anthony had slept almost through the night. Only a whimper from him at dawn. They all felt it was progress and stayed a little longer, hoping to continue the improvement, but it didn’t last.

The Tonto Mountains were breathtaking, the air so transparent Tatiana could see over the vistas and the valleys and the sloping hills clear to the sun, but they’ve left them behind now, and the air has become like the land, bone-dry, overbaked and opaque with stodgy molecules of heat. She has unbuttoned her blouse, but Alexander is focused on the road. Or is he just pretending he is focused on the road? She has noticed a small but palpable change in him recently. He still doesn’t talk much, but his eyes and breath during the day are less impassive.

She offers him a drink, a cigarette. He takes it all but is not distracted by her this time. She wonders when they can stop, break camp, maybe find a river, swim. The memories of swimming in the Kama prickle her skin with pain, and she stiffens, trying not to flinch and, pulling down her skirt, forces her hands to lie still on her lap. She doesn’t want to think of then. It’s bad enough she has to think of now, when she keeps expecting the police to stop them at every intersection and say, Are you Alexander Barrington, son of Harold Barrington? What, your wife didn’t tell you that at your last campsite when you dared to leave her alone for just a moment, she called her old roommate in New York? Your wife, Mr. Barrington, seems not to tell you many things.

That’s right. Tatiana called long distance through an operator, but Sam Gulotta picked up the phone. She got so frightened, she hung up and she didn’t have enough time to call Aunt Esther, too, but now she is terrified that the operator told Sam where in New Mexico she had called from. People with nothing to hide don’t run, Alexander Barrington, the police will say when they stop the Nomad. Why don’t you come with us, and your wife and son can stay here at the intersection of souls and wait for you to come back as they have been doing, as they’re doing still, waiting for you to return to them. Tell them you won’t be long.

It’s a lie. They will take the casement that is his body, they will take his physical self, for that’s almost all that remains of him anyway, and Tatiana and Anthony will be at that intersection forever. No. It’s better to have him here, even like this—withdrawn, into himself, silent, occasionally fevered, fired up, occasionally laughing, always smoking, always deeply human—than to have just a memory. For the things he does to her at night, they’re not memories anymore. And his sleeping with her. She fights her own sleep every night, tries to stay awake long after he has gone to sleep just so she can feel his arms around her, so she can lie completely entombed and surrounded by the ravaged body he barely saved that now comforts her as nothing else can.

He measures her to order her. He gets upset when she won’t respond in kind, but she wants to tell him that he cannot be ordered by Aristotelian methods or by Pythagorean theorems. He is what he is. All his parts are in absolute proportion to his sum, but even more important, all are in relative proportion to her sum. Cardinal or counting numbers don’t help. Ordinals or ranking numbers help so long as she stops at 1. Archimedes’s principle won’t help. Certainly she can’t and won’t measure what is measureless, what neither terminates nor repeats, what is beyond even the transcendental of π—though he doesn’t think so—what is beyond polynomials and quadratic formulas, beyond the rational and irrational, the humanist and the logical, beyond the minds of the Cantors and the Dedekinds, the Renaissance philosophers and the Indian Tantrists, what falls instead into the realm of gods and kings, of myth, of dawn of man, of the mystery of mankind—that there is a space inside her designed solely for him and despite clear Euclidian impossibilities not only does everything, in plenary excess, cleave like it’s meant to, but it makes her feel what math cannot explain, what science cannot explain. What nothing can explain.

And yet, inexplicably, he continues to measure her, tracing out fluents of curves and slopes of tangents. His two hands are always on her—on top of her head, against her palms, her feet, her upper arms, ringing her waist, clasping her hips. He is so desperately endearing. She doesn’t know what he thinks π will give him.

Playing with Anthony. Is that not real? Anthony having his father? The dark boy sitting on his lap trying to find the ticklish spot and Alexander laughing, is that not real, not math nor a memory?

Alexander has nearly completely forgotten what it’s like to play, except when he’s in the water, but there had been no water in Texas, barely any in New Mexico, and now they’re in Arid Zona.

Anthony tries land games with his father. He perches on Alexander’s lap, holds the tips of his index fingers together, and says, “Daddy, want to see how strong I am? Hold my fingers in your fist, and I’ll get free.”

Alexander stubs out his cigarette. He holds Anthony’s fingers lightly, and the boy wriggles free. The delight of freeing himself from his daunting father is so great that he wants to play the game again and again. They play it two hundred times. And then the reverse. Alexander holds his index fingers together while Anthony clenches his tiny four-year-old fist over them. When Alexander is unable to get free, Anthony’s joy is something to behold. They play that two hundred times while Tatiana either prepares lunch or dinner, or washes or tidies, or just sits and watches them with a gladdening heart.

Alexander takes Anthony off his knee and says in a throaty, nicotine-stained voice, “Tatia, want to play? Put your fingers into my fist and see if you can wriggle free. Come.” Not a muscle moves on his face, but her heart is no longer just gladdening. It’s quickening, it’s maddening. She knows she shouldn’t, Anthony is right there, but when Alexander calls, she comes. That’s just how it is. She perches on his lap and touches together the tips of her slightly trembling index fingers. She tries not to look into his face, just at her fingers, over which he now places his enormous fist, squeezes lightly, and says, “Go ahead, wriggle free.” Her whole body weakens. She tries, of course, to get free, but she knows this: while as a father Alexander plays one way with Anthony, as a husband, he plays the opposite way with her. She bites her lip to keep from making a single sound.

“Come on, Mommy,” says the uncomprehending child by her side. “You can do it. I did it! Wriggle free.”

“Yes, Tatiasha,” whispers Alexander, squeezing her fingers tighter, looking deep into her face as she sits on his lap. “Come on, wriggle free.”

And she glimpses the smiling soul peeking out.

But when he drives, he is often silent and sullen. She hates it when he reduces himself like this to the worst of his life—it’s hard to draw him away, and sometimes even when he wants to be drawn, he can’t be. And sometimes Tatiana is so full of fears herself of the imminent danger to Alexander at every stop sign that she loses the weapons she needs to draw him away, herself reduced to the worst of her life.

She wishes for something else to swallow them, where the road wouldn’t apprehend her, where his soul wouldn’t apprehend him. Perhaps if they were less human.

She was leading him to Phoenix, but Alexander was too hot; he almost wanted to drive straight on to California. “I thought you wanted to see the ninety-seven acres I bought with your mother’s money,” she said to him.

He shrugged, drank some water. “What I want,” he said, “is to feel water on my body. That’s what I want. Will we get that in Phoenix?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Exactly. I am thus reluctant.”

It took them a day to get from Arizona’s eastern border to Phoenix. They had stopped at a camping site that evening near the Superstition Mountains. Alexander lay down on the wooden deck under the water spout with the cold water pouring down onto his chest and face. Anthony and Tatiana stood at a polite distance and watched him. Anthony asked if his dad was all right.

“I’m not sure,” said Tatiana. “I’d say the odds are fifty-fifty.” Had Alexander insisted a little harder, she would’ve been easily persuaded to keep moving until they reached the Pacific. Not because she didn’t want to show him their desert property, but because she thought there was a possibility that Federal agents would be waiting for them in the only place that belonged to them. Vikki might have mentioned the land to Sam Gulotta. Tatiana suspected she might have mentioned it to Sam herself. She and Sam had developed a friendship over the years. What if they were waiting? The thought was sickening her. But unfortunately Alexander didn’t protest hard enough. Tatiana already knew what she wanted to do—unthinkable though it was: to sell the land! Just sell it at whatever price, take the money, go far into another state, maybe into the vastness of Montana, and never be seen again. She had no illusions: Sam’s allegiance was hardly going to be to her and Alexander. Sam wasn’t Aunt Esther. Tatiana was mute as she thought of these things while her husband lay on the deck drowning himself with running water.

The following morning, they took the Superstition Freeway. “It’s very flat here,” Alexander said.

“Well, it is called Mesa,” said Tatiana. “It means flat.”

“Please tell me the land is not here.”

“Okay, the land is not here.” There were stone mountains in the far distance across the flatlands. “This is too developed.”

“This is too developed?” he said. There were no stores, no gas stations, just farmland on one side, untouched flat desert on the other.

“Yes, this is Tempe,” Tatiana said. “Quite built up. Scottsdale, where we’re headed, is a little Western town. It’s got a few things—a store, a market. You want to see it first? Or …”

“Let’s see this mythical promised land first,” he said.

They continued to drive north through the desert. He was thirsty. She was frightened. The paved road ended, and a gravelly Pima Road began that separated the Phoenix valley from the Salt River Indian Reservation that stretched for miles to the McDowell Mountains. It wasn’t as flat anymore, the blue dusty mountains rising up on all sides far and near, low and wide, in the apocalyptic heat.

“Where are these mountains you told me about?”

“Shura, don’t tell me you don’t see them!” Tatiana pointed straight ahead. The ranges did loom rather large and monolith-like across the saguaros, but Alexander was in a good mood this morning and wanted to tease her.

“What, those? Those aren’t mountains. Those are rocks. I know, because I’ve seen mountains. The Tontos we passed yesterday, those were mountains. The Santa Fe, those were mountains. Also I’ve seen the Urals, I’ve seen the Holy Cross Mountains, completely covered by coniferous forest. Those were mountains.” His mood became less good.

“Now, now …” Tatiana said, reaching over and easing him away with her hand on his thigh. “These are Arizona’s McDowell Mountains. Sedimentary rock on top of granite rock formed from lava two billion years ago. Precambrian rocks.”

“Aren’t you a little geologist.” Alexander grinned. “A capitalist and a geologist.” She was in yellow gingham today, white bobby socks and ballet slipper shoes, her hair pulled back in a braided bun. She didn’t have a bead of perspiration on her face, looking almost serene if only Alexander didn’t look down on her lap and notice her fingers pressed so stiffly against each other, they looked as if they were breaking.

“All right, all right,” he said with a slight frown. “They’re mountains.”

They chugged along north, kicking up dirt with their dusty tires. The McDowell Mountains drew closer. The sun was high. Alexander said they were idiots, morons for taking a trip across the hottest part of the country during the hottest part of the year. If they were smart they would have left Coconut Grove early, driven up to Montana to spend the summer, then carried on to California for the grape-picking.

“You didn’t want to leave Florida, remember?”

“Hmm,” he assented. “Coconut Grove was quite nice for a while.”

They fell quiet.

It was another forty-five minutes of unpaved frontier road with not a house, a fruit stand, a gas station, a storefront, or another soul around before Tatiana told him to make a right on a narrow dirt path that sloped upward.

The path was called Jomax.

Jomax ended in a sun-drenched rocky mountain, and that’s where Alexander stopped, a mile above the valley. Tatiana, her fingers relaxed, a toothy, happy smile on her face, exclaimed, “Oh God! There is nobody here!”

“That’s right,” Alexander said, turning off the ignition. “Because everyone else is in Coconut Grove in the ocean.”

“There is nobody here,” she repeated, almost to herself, and hopped out of the trailer.

Anthony ran off but not before Tatiana stopped him, saying, “Remember what I told you about the cholla, Ant? Don’t go anywhere near it. The wind blows the puffs of needles right under your skin and I won’t be able to get them out.”

“What wind? Let go of me.”

“Anthony,” said Alexander, looking for his lighter, “your mother tells you something, you don’t tell her to let go. Tania, hold on to him for another two minutes until he understands that.”

Tatiana made a face at Anthony, pinched him, and quietly let him go. Alexander’s lighter was in her hands. She flicked it on for him, and he cupped her hand as he lit his cigarette. “Stop being so soft with him,” he said.

Walking away from her to explore a little, Alexander looked north and south, east and west, to the mountains, to the expanse of the entire Phoenix valley lying vast beneath his gaze, its farms all spread out in the overgrown rolling Sonoran Desert. This desert wasn’t like the Mojave he vaguely remembered from childhood. This wasn’t gray sand with gray mounds of dirt as far as the eye could see. This desert in late July was covered in burned-out, abundant foliage. Thousands of saguaro cacti filled the landscape, their brown-green spiky towering pinnacles and their arms reaching thirty, forty feet up to the sun. The mesquite trees were brown, the palo verdes sepia. The underbrush and the motley over-brush were all in hues of the taupe singed earth. All things grew not out of grass, but out of clay and sand. It looked like a desert jungle. It was not at all what Alexander had expected.

“Tania …”

“I know,” she said, coming up against him. “Isn’t it unbelievable?”

“Hmm. That wasn’t quite what I was thinking.”

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life.” Her voice became tainted with something. “And wait till you see this place in the spring!”

“That implies that we would see it in the spring.”

“Everything blooms!”

“And you know this how?”

“I know this,” Tatiana said with funny solemnity, “because I saw pictures in a book in the library.”

“Oh. Pictures in a book. Do these books mention water?”

She waved her hand dismissively. “The Hohokam Indians back hundreds of years ago saw what I see and wanted to live in this valley so much that they brought water here by a series of canals that led from the Salt River. So back when the mighty British Empire was still using outhouses, the Hohokam Indians were irrigating their crops with running water.”

“How do you know?” he exclaimed.

“The New York Public Library. The white man here still uses the Hohokam canals.”

“So there is a river around here then?” He touched the dry sand with his hands

“Salt River, but far,” Tatiana replied. “With any luck, we’ll never have to see it.”

Alexander had never experienced this kind of stunning heat. Even in Florida, all was tempered by the water. No temperance here. “I’m starting to boil from the inside out,” he said. “Quick, show me our land before my arteries melt.”

“You’re standing on it,” said Tatiana.

“Standing on what?”

“The land.” She motioned around. “This is it. Right here, all of it, at the very top of this hill. From this road due southeast, ninety-seven acres of the Sonoran Desert flush into the mountain. Our property is two acres wide, and—you know—about forty-nine acres deep. We’ll have to get a surveyor. I think it may open up in a pie shape.”

“Kind of like Sachsenhausen?”

Tatiana looked as if she’d been slapped. “Why do you do that?” she said quietly. “This isn’t your prison. This is your freedom.”

Slightly abashed, he said, “You like this?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have bought it if I didn’t like it, Shura.” Tatiana paused. Once again strange trouble passed over her face.

“Tania,” Alexander said, “the place is going to set itself on fire.”

“Look,” she said, “we’ll go, we’ll get it appraised. If the price is right, we’ll sell it. I have no problem selling it. But … don’t you see!” she exclaimed, coming up to him. “Don’t you see the desert? Don’t you see the mountains?” She pointed. “The one right next to ours is Pinnacle Peak; it’s famous. But ours has no name. Maybe we can call it Alexander’s Mountain.” She raised her eyebrows, but he wasn’t playing at the moment, though he noted her mischief for later.

“I see the desert,” Alexander said. “There’s not a single green thing growing anywhere. Except cacti and they don’t need water. I’m not a saguaro. I need water. There is no good river and no lakes.”

“Exactly!” she said, all energized. “No rivers. No Nevas, Lugas, Kamas, Vistulas. No lakes. No Lake Ilmens, no Lake Ladogas. No fields. No clearings. No pines, no pine needles, no birches, no larks, almost no birdsong. Sometimes the swallows come in the summer. But there are no forests over the mountains. There’s no snow. You want those things, you can go into the Grand Canyon in the winter. The Ponderosa pine grows a mile above the ice cold Colorado.” Standing close, she put her intimate hands on him. “And you are a little bit like the mighty saguaro,” she murmured.

Okay, Alexander was noting the playing, he was coming back to it very shortly. “I won’t live anywhere without water, Tatiana Metanova.” He stamped out his cigarette and his arms went around her. “I don’t care what you’re trying to get away from.”

“It’s Tatiana Barrington, Alexander Barrington,” said Tatiana, slipping out of his hold. “And you don’t know anything about what I’m trying to get away from.”

He blinked at her. “I think even here in Arizona there might be a moon. Maybe a crimson moon, Tatia? A large, low, harvest crimson moon?”

She blinked back. “Why don’t you put on your sixty pounds of gear and pick up your weapons, soldier.” Backing away with a swirl, she walked back to the Nomad, while Alexander remained like a post in the sand. In a moment she returned with some water, which he gulped gladly, then went to look for Anthony, finding him near the prickly pears, deeply immersed in a study of rocks. Turned out it wasn’t rocks, it was a lizard, which the boy had pinned to the ground with a sharp cactus needle.

“Ant, isn’t that the cactus your mother told you to stay away from?” Alexander said, crouching by his son and giving him some water.

“No, Dad,” Anthony replied patiently. “Cholla is bad for playing with lizards.”

“Son,” said Alexander, “I don’t think that lizard is playing.”

“Dad, this place is swarming with reptiles!”

“Don’t say that as if it’s a good thing. You know how afraid your mother is of reptiles. Look how you’re upsetting her.”

They peeked out from the prickly pears. The upset mother was leaning back against the Nomad, eyes closed, palms down, sun on her face.

After a while, he returned to her, splashing water on her. That made her open her eyes. Alexander paused to take her in, her square-jawed flushed face, outrageous freckles, serene seaweed eyes. He appraised the rest of her up and down. She was so arousingly tiny. And bewildering. Shaking his head, Alexander hugged her, he kissed her. She tasted as though plums had dried on her lips.

“You are out of your mind, my freckle-faced tadpole,” he said, eventually stepping away, “to have bought this land in the first place. I honestly don’t know what in the world possessed you. But now the die is cast. Come on, Arizona-lover, cholla-expert, before we go see the appraiser, let’s eat. Though we’ll have to go somewhere else to put water on our bodies, won’t we?”

They brought out their flasks, their bread, their ham. Earlier that morning they had bought plums, cherries, tomatoes, cucumbers at a farm stand. They had so much to eat. He rolled out the canopy, they sat under it, where it was a hundred in the shade, and feasted.

“How much did you say you paid for the land?” he asked.

“Fifty dollars an acre.”

Alexander whistled. “This is near Scottsdale?”

“Yes, Scottsdale is only twenty miles south.”

“Hmm. Is it a one horse town?”

“Oh, not anymore, sir!” said a real estate agent in Scottsdale. “Not anymore. There’s the army base, and the GIs, like you, sir, they’re all comin’ back from the war and marrying their sweethearts. You two are newlyweds?”

No one said anything, as the four-year-old child sat near them lining up the real estate brochures in neat rows.

“The housing boom is something to behold,” the realtor went on quickly. “Scottsdale is an up-and-coming town, you just watch and see. We had nobody here, almost as if we weren’t part of the Union, but now that the war is over, Phoenix is exploding. Did you know,” he said proudly, “our housebuilding industry is number one in the country? We’ve got new schools, a new hospital—Phoenix Memorial—a new department store in Paradise Valley. You would like it here very much. Would you be interested in seeing some properties?”

“When are you going to pave the roads?” asked Alexander. He had changed into clean beige fatigues and a dry black T-shirt. Tattoos, scars, blue death camp numbers, no matter—he could not wear a long-sleeve shirt in Arizona. The real estate man kept trying not to glance at the long scar running up Alexander’s forearm into the blue cross. The realtor himself was wearing a wool suit in which he was sweating even in air conditioning.

“Oh, every day, sir, new roads are being paved every day. New communities are being built constantly. This is changing from farm country to a real proper town. The war has been very good for us. We’re in a real boom. Are you from the East? I thought so, by your wife’s accent. Much like your Levittown communities, except the houses are nicer here, if I may be so bold. May I show you a couple of—”

“No,” said Tatiana, stepping forward. “But we would be interested in finding out the going price of our own property here. We’re up north, off Pima Road, near Pinnacle Peak.”

The realtor’s face soured when he heard they weren’t in the market. “Where, near Rio Verde Drive?”

“Yes, a few miles south of there. On Jomax.”

“On what? They just named that road. You have a house there? There’s nothing up there.” He said it as if he didn’t believe her.

“No house, just some property.”

“Well,” he said with a shrug. “My appraiser is out to lunch.”

An hour later, the appraiser and the realtor’s faces were trying to maintain their poker expressions, but it wasn’t working. “How many acres did you say you have?” the appraiser said, a short man with a small head, a large body and an ill-fitting suit.

“Ninety-seven,” repeated Tatiana calmly.

“Well, that’s impossible,” said the appraiser. “I know all the land bought and sold here. I mean, the town of Scottsdale is just now thinking of incorporating—do you know how many acres?—sixty hundred and forty. Three and a half square miles. A smart man bought them last century for three and a half dollars an acre. But that was then. You’re telling me you have ninety-seven acres? A sixth of the land of our whole town? No one sells in large parcels like that. No one would sell you ninety-seven acres.”

Tatiana just stared at him. Alexander just stared at him. He was trying to figure out if this was a ploy, a game, or whether the guy was actually being rude, in which case—

“Land’s too valuable,” stated the appraiser. “Around here we sell one acre, two at most. And up there, there’s nothing but desert. It’s all owned by the Federal Government or the Indians.”

So it was a ploy. Alexander relaxed.

Tatiana was silent. “I don’t know what to tell you. You don’t think I can count to ninety-seven?”

“Can I see the deed, if you don’t mind?”

“Actually, we do mind,” Alexander said. “Are you going to tell us what the land is worth or do we have to go somewhere else?”

The appraiser finally spluttered that being all the way out there, all the way out in the boonies where no one wanted to go, the land now would probably be worth about $25 dollars an acre. “It’s a good price for it—there’s nothing up there, no roads, no electricity. I don’t know why you would buy land in a location so isolated.”

Tatiana and Alexander exchanged a glance.

“Like I said, it’s worth twenty-five dollars,” said the appraiser quickly. “But this is what I can do for you. If you sell, say, ninety-five of those acres, keeping two for yourselves, we can give you a one time deal, take it or leave it, of … forty dollars an acre.”

“Mister,” said Alexander, “we’ll gladly leave it. We paid fifty an acre for that land.”

The appraiser wilted. “You vastly overpaid. But … to get your business, I’ll be glad to give you fifty. Imagine all that money in your pocket. You could buy yourself a brand new house with that. For cash. We have an outstanding development near here in Paradise Valley. You only have the one boy? But perhaps more in your future? How about if I show you some new communities?”

“No, thanks.” Alexander prodded Tatiana to go.

“All right, wait,” said the appraiser. “Sixty dollars an acre. That’s nearly a thousand dollar profit on your original investment. Half a year’s salary to some people.”

Nodding vigorously, Tatiana opened her mouth to speak, but Alexander squeezed her hand to cut her off. “I made that in three weeks driving a boat in Miami,” he said. “We’re not selling our land for a thousand dollar profit.”

“Are you certain about that?” The appraiser glanced at Tatiana beseechingly, looking for her support. Alexander mock-glared at her. She stayed impassive. “Well, then, I’m going to tell you something,” said the appraiser. “If you don’t take your money out of the land now, in a year’s time, it won’t be worth twenty-five an acre. You wait until your boy starts school, you won’t be able to sell your ninety-seven acres for three dollars and fifty cents. All the way up there past the Indians? Forget it. No one of sound mind will want to live north of the reservation. Go ahead, you wait a while. Your land will be worthless by 1950.”

Alexander ushered his family out. They stood on a dusty Western street. They didn’t talk about what the appraiser told them. Alexander wanted to get a cold beer. Tatiana wanted to go to the general store on the corner and buy some ice cream. Anthony wanted a cowboy hat. In the end, Alexander didn’t get a cold beer, because he wouldn’t take his family into a saloon, but Tatiana did get an ice cream, and Anthony did get a hat. They walked around the town square. Alexander didn’t know why, but he liked it, liked the Western feel of it, the frontier expanse and yet the small town intimacy of it. They drove around in their Nomad, saw that much of the farmland around the town square was being turned into housing developments. For dinner they had steak and baked potatoes and corn on the cob at a local restaurant with sawdust on the floor.

He asked her what she wanted to do and she said that perhaps they ought to take one more look at the land before they made a final decision.

It was seven in the evening, and the sun was arching downward. Because the sun was a different color, their mountain turned a different color—the rocks now glowed in three-dimensional orange. Alexander appraised the land himself. “Tania, what are the chances that you had been prescient when you bought this land?” he said, bringing her to him after they walked around a while.

“Slim to none,” Tatiana said, her arms going around his waist, “and Slim has already left town. We definitely should sell it, Shura. Sell it as quick as we can, take our money, go someplace else nice and not as hot.”

Leaning down, he placed his lips on her moist cheek. “You’re so nice and hot, babe,” he whispered. She smelled of vanilla ice cream. She tasted of vanilla ice cream. “But I disagree. I think the appraiser is lying. Either there is a housing boom, or there isn’t. But a housing boom means land increases in value.”

“He’s right, though,” she said. “It’s very out of the way.”

“Out of the way for what?” Alexander shook his head. “I really think we can make a little money here. We’re going to wait a while, then sell it.” He paused. “But Tania, I’m confused about your motives. One minute you want to sell the land for pennies to the lowest bidder. The next you’re breathlessly talking about spring.”

Tatiana shrugged. “What can I say? I’m conflicted.” She chewed her lip. “Would you ever consider … living here?” she asked carefully.

“Never! Feel the air. Feel your face. Why, do you want to live here—” Suddenly Alexander broke off, his eyes widening.

Do you want to live in Arizona, Tatia, the land of the small spring?

He had asked this of her—in another life. “Oh, come now,” he said slowly. “You don’t—you aren’t—no, come on … Oh no!” Alexander let out an incredulous laugh. “I just got it! Just. Oh, I’m good. I’m sharp. I don’t know how we ever won the war. Tania, come on! Recall when I said it.”

“I’m recalling it as if you’re saying it to me now,” she said with crossed arms.

“Well, then surely you know I meant it metaphorically. As in, would you like to live somewhere that’s warm. I didn’t actually mean here!”

“No?” Her no was so quiet.

“Of course no! Is that why you bought the land?”

When Tatiana didn’t reply, Alexander became speechless. There were so many baffling things he didn’t understand about her, he simply didn’t know where to look for answers. “We’re in the middle of an iced over, blockaded, heatless Leningrad,” he said. “The Germans are denying you even the unleavened cardboard and glue that you’re eating instead of bread. I briefly mention a vague warm place I barely remember that I had once driven through with my parents. Damn, I should’ve said Miami. Would you have then bought land there?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not serious. Anthony, come here, stop chasing rattlesnakes. Do you like it here?”

“Dad, this is the funnest place in the whole world.”

“What about this cholla? Is that fun?”

“So fun! Ask Mommy. She says it has evil spirits. She calls it the cactus from hell. Tell him, Mama—it’s worse than war.” He ran off with joy.

“Yes,” said Tatiana, “stay away from the cholla, Alexander.”

He furrowed his brow. “I think the heat has done something to both of you. Tania, inland, we’re so far inland, the air doesn’t even carry water on the wind!”

“I know.” She took a hot gulp of air.

They disengaged, spread out, thinking their separate thoughts. Anthony was picking dried-out fruit off the prickly pear cactus. Tatiana was pulling the dried-out red flowers off the cattail-like ocotillo. And Alexander was smoking and looking at the land and the mountain and the valley below. The sun set peacefully, and as the light of the sun changed once more, the rock hills transformed into a blaze. They put down a blanket, sat shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee and watched the sunset while Anthony played.

Alexander thought Tatiana had been thinking of how to convince him to sell the land or not to sell the land, but what she said to him was more perplexing. She said: “Shura, tell me, in Lazarevo, when you were going to go back to the front … we used to look at the Ural Mountains like this. Tell me, why didn’t you just stay?”

Alexander was taken aback. “What do you mean, stay?”

“You know.” She paused. “Why didn’t you just … not go back?”

“Not go back to my command post? You mean—desert?”

She nodded. “Why didn’t we just run—into the Urals? You could have built us an izba, we could’ve settled there, in the forest, found some precious stones, bartered them, grown things to eat. They would’ve never found us.”

Alexander shook his head, his hands opening in deep question. “Tatiana, what in the name of God,” he said, “are you thinking? What in the world is going through your mind, and more important, why?”

“It’s not a rhetorical question. I would like an answer.”

“An answer to what? Why didn’t I desert the Red Army? For one, my commander, Colonel Stepanov, that nice man—remember him, who let me have twenty-nine Lazarevo days with you—would’ve gone to the firing squad for having a deserter in his brigade. So would my major, and all the lieutenants and sergeants I served with. And you and I would’ve been on the run for the rest of our short, doomed lives. On the run! And they would’ve found us, like they find everybody. Remember I told you about Germanovsky? They found him in Belgium after the war, and he’d never even set foot in the Soviet Union. He was born in France. His father was a diplomat. Germanovsky was given ten years hard labor for not returning when he turned eighteen—fourteen years earlier! That would have been us. Except they would have found us in five minutes, the first time we tried to barter some of that precious Ural malachite to match your eyes. It would’ve been over like lightning, and the five extra minutes we would have had would’ve been spent with one eye looking over our shoulder. In other words, prison. That’s what you wanted—?”

Without letting him finish, she jumped up and walked away. What was she thinking? But at the same time, the sun was on fire, and Alexander had spent too long in dark places below ground, and so he didn’t go after her but sat and finished his cigarette, watching the desert sunset up from a hill.

When Tatiana came back to the blanket she said, “It was just a silly question.” She knocked into his shoulder. “I was musing, not serious.”

“Oh, that’s good. As opposed to what?”

“Sometimes I think crazy thoughts, that’s all.”

“The crazy part, absolutely. What thoughts?” Alexander paused. “How it all might’ve been different?”

“Something like that,” she said staring into space. Then she took his hand. “Sunset’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Sunset’s nice,” said Alexander.

She leaned against him. “Shura, this all might look burned and brown now, but in the spring,” she said in a breathy voice, “the Sonoran Desert is reborn! With pale blue delphinium, white thistle, flame poppy, red ocotillo, blue and yellow palo verdes, and scarlet bugle. We can even plant some lilac sand verbena. You know how much you like lilac,” she cooed. “And prickly pears and pincushion cacti grow here …”

Alexander squeezed her little hand and raised his eyebrows. This was a much better conversation. “Babe,” he said, lowering his voice, and glancing around to make sure Ant wasn’t nearby, “in my lewd soldier’s world pincushion means only one thing, and you can be sure it’s not cacti.”

Tatiana tutted in mock shock, pulled to get away, but Alexander grabbed her, pulled her down onto her back on the blanket, bent over her, and said huskily, “Tell me, is there pussy willow in the desert, too?” watching her flush red, and forgetting all about flame poppy and scarlet bugle.

He let her shove him, scramble up, and run from him. He chased her, he chased Anthony.

He is making a silent movie with her, and she is moving in broken frames, animated and choppy, to the sound of the jerking crank. Her arms do a little flapper dance from side to side; her teeth are gleaming, she is tousle-haired and sunny, she runs after Anthony, her taut hips curve and swivel, she runs back to Alexander, her bouncy breasts bob and sway; she stands in front of him, holding her hands out to him, come, come, but he is holding the shaking camera, he can’t come. Her exquisite mouth puckers, her mouth in black and white—it’s a bow, a blow, a kiss, a gift that keeps on giving—and suddenly, a broken reel. Shura! Shura! Can you hear me? she squeals, and he puts the camera down and chases her, and somewhere in the Siberian juniper he catches her. She bats her eyes that squint upward catlike when she laughs, she parts her mouth and pleads falsely and merrily for release. Someday perhaps they will look back at the movies of this time, movies that will have captured the illusion, the fleeting joy that is their youth. Just as Soviet cameras once captured the snapshots of another her, another him, on the stone steps of wedding churches or near their long lost brothers.

Covered in sweat and sand, Alexander and the boy took off their shirts and fell down on the nylon tent covering while Tatiana dipped a towel into a bucket of water and cooled their chests and faces. Once he had only a soaked towel on his face as he dreamed of her. Now he had a soaked towel and her. He reached out, like a bear—and pawed her. She is here.

“I want the Biscayne Bay now …” croaked Alexander. “The Gulf of Mexico now.”

He got darkness now, and a sleeping son. The stars were all out, even Jupiter. She came out to him after putting Anthony to bed inside the camper, and he was sitting in a plastic folding chair, smoking. Another chair stood by his side.

She started to cry.

“Oh, no,” he said, covering his face.

Patting his shoulder, her voice low, she said with a sniffle, “Thank you.” And then climbed into his lap and held his head to her.

“You understand nothing,” he said, rubbing his cropped hair into her neck. “The lap was always so much better.”

Alexander had pitched a tent for them and built a small careful fire surrounded by stones right in front of it. “You know how I lit the kindling?” he said. “I held it to a rock for five seconds.”

“All righty, now,” she said. “Enough of that.”

They sat facing west, wrapped around each other, looking out onto the dark valley.

“When you weren’t with me,” said Tatiana, “and when I thought you were never going to be with me again, I bought this land on top of the hill. For you. Because of the things you taught me. Just like you always taught me. To be on high ground.”

“That rule is only for floods and war, Tatia. What are the chances of either here?” He stared into the blackness.

“Husband …” she whispered, “you see nothing down there now, but can you imagine in a few years’ time, all the twinkling lights from streets, from houses, from shops, from other souls in the valley? Like New York is lit up, this valley will be lit up, and we could sit here like this and watch it below us.”

“You said a second ago we were selling the land tomorrow!”

“Yes.” Tatiana was warm, open, until a part of her shut off, became tense like her fingers. Her wistful desire to see the desert bloom in the sometime spring was strong, but the trouble in her clenched hands was strong also. “Just a dream, Shura, you know? Just a silly dream.” She sighed. “Of course we’ll sell it.”

“No, we’re not selling it,” Alexander said, turning her to face him. “And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

She pointed to the tent. “We’re sleeping there?” Her palms went around his neck. “I can’t. My bravery is fake, as you know. I’m scared of scorpions.”

“Nah, don’t worry,” said Alexander, his hands tight around her ribs, his lips pressing into her pulsing throat, his eyes closing. “Scorpions don’t like loud noises.”

“Well, that’s good,” Tatiana murmured, tilting her head upward. “Because they won’t be hearing any.”

She was so wrong about that … christening their ninety-seven acres, and Pinnacle Peak and Paradise Valley, and the moon and the stars and Jupiter in the sky with their tumultuous coupling and her ecstatic moans.

The next morning as they raised camp and packed up to go north to the Grand Canyon, Alexander looked at Tatiana, she looked at him, they turned around and stared at Anthony.

“Did the boy not wake last night?”

“The boy did not wake last night.”

The boy was sitting at the table doing a U.S. puzzle. “What?” he said. “You wanted the boy to wake last night?”

Alexander turned to the road. “Well, isn’t that interesting,” he mused, reaching for his pack of Marlboros. “Something calm to make us sane.”

Missing Time

At Desert View, they stood over the ageless rim of the Grand Canyon and stared west into the blue haze horizon and far down to the snake of the Red River. They drove a few miles west and stopped at Lipan Point and then at Grandview Point. At Moran Point they sat and gawked and walked in silence, even the normally chatty Anthony. They walked along the rim on a wooded path under the Ponderosa pines to Yavapai Point, where they found a secluded spot to sit and watch the sunset. Anthony came too close to the edge, and both Alexander and Tatiana jumped and yelled, and he burst into tears. Alexander held him in a vise, finally relenting and releasing him only after literally drawing a line in the sand and telling the boy not to step an inch over it if he didn’t want a military punishment. Anthony spent the sunset building up that line into a barricade with pebbles and twigs.

The sun in the indigo sky set over the Canyon, painting crimson blue the greening forests of cottonwoods and juniper and spruce. Alexander stopped blinking, for while the sun was setting, the hues of the Canyon had changed, and he could not catch his breath in the silence while the cinnabar heat fell like rust iron mist over two billion years of ancient temples of layered clays and fossiled silt, and from its cream Coconino to its black Vishnu schist, all the ridges and Redwalls and cliffs and ravines, and the Bright Angel shales and the sandstones and limestones from Tonto to Tapeat, all the pink and wine, and lilac and lime, and the Great Unconformity: the billion years of missing time—all was steeped in vermilion.

“God is putting on some light show,” he finally said, taking a breath.

“He’s trying to impress you with Arizona, Shura,” murmured Tatiana.

“Why do the rocks look like that?” asked Anthony. His barricade was nearly a foot high.

“Water, wind, time erosion,” replied Alexander. “The Colorado River below started as a trickle and became a deluge, carving this canyon over millions of years. The river, Anthony, despite your mother’s aversion to it, is a catalyst for all things.”

“It is precisely because of this catalysis that the mother is averse to it,” said the mother as she sat under his arm.

Alexander finally stood up and gave her his hand. “At the end of His geological week, God surveyed His rocks in the most Grand of all the Canyons in all the Earth He had created and all the life that dwelt upon them and behold, it was very good.”

Tatiana nodded in her approval of Alexander. “Who said that? You know what the Navajos say, who live and walk and die in these parts?” She paused trying to remember. “With beauty in front of me, I walk,” she said, stretching out her arms. “With beauty behind me, I walk. With beauty below me, I walk.” Not a sound came from the Canyon below. “With beauty above me, I walk.” She spoke quietly. “It is finished in beauty.” She raised her head. “It is finished in beauty.”

“Hmm,” said Alexander, taking one long inhale of his cigarette, eternally in his mouth. “Substitute what you most believe in for the word beauty,” he said, “and then you’ve really got something.”

In the eerily soundless night at the Yavapai campsite, Anthony was restlessly asleep in one of the two tents, while they kept listening to his stirrings and whimperings, waiting for him to quieten down, sitting huddled under one blanket in front of the fire, a mile from the black maw of the Canyon. They were shivering, their icy demons around the worsted wool.

They didn’t speak. Finally they lay down in front of the fire, face to face. Alexander was holding his breath and then breathing out in one hard lump.

He didn’t say anything at first. He didn’t want to talk to her about things that could not be changed. And yet, pain he could not forget kept creeping in and prickling his heart in a thousand different ways. He imagined other men touching her when he was dead. Other men near what he was near, and her looking up at them, taking their hands to lead them into rooms where she was widowed. Alexander didn’t want the truth if it wasn’t what he wanted to hear; he didn’t know how he would bear the unwelcome truth, and he hadn’t asked her in all the time he’d been back, but here they were, lying together at the Grand Canyon, which seemed like a rightful place for mystical confessions.

He took a breath. “Did you love to go dancing?” he asked.

“What?”

So she wasn’t answering. He fell silent. “When I was in Colditz, that impenetrable fortress, whittling away my life, I wanted to know this.”

“Looks like you’re still there, Shura.”

“No,” he said. “I’m in New York, a fly on the wall, trying to see you without me.”

“But I’m here,” she whispered.

“Yes, but what were you like when you were there? Were you gay?” Alexander’s voice was so sad. “I know you didn’t forget us, but did you want to, so you could be happy again like you once were, dance without pain?” He swallowed. “So you could … love again? Is that what you were thinking sitting on the planks at Mercy Hospital? Wanting to be happy again, wishing you were back there, in New York, reciting Emily Brontë to yourself? Sweet love of youth, forgive if I forget thee …”

He was leading her to temptation of clarity. But he could see she didn’t want clarity. She wanted a jumble that she could deny.

“Okay, Shura, if we’re talking like this, having these things out, then tell me what you meant when you said I was tainted with the Gulag. Tell me what happened to you.”

“No. I—forget it. I was—”

“Tell me what happened to you when you went missing for four days in Deer Isle.”

“It’s getting longer and longer. It was barely three days. First tell me what you were thinking at Mercy Hospital.”

“Okay, fine, let’s not talk about it.”

He pressed his demanding fingers into her back. He put his hands under her cardigan, under her blouse, into her bare shoulders.

He turned her on her back and kneeled astride her, the fire, the maw behind them. No comfort, no peace, he guessed with a sigh, even in the temples of the Grand Canyon.

Anthony’s whimperings turned into full scale miseries. “Mama, Mama!” Tatiana had to rush to him. He calmed down, but she stayed in his tent. Eventually, Alexander crawled in and fit in sideways behind her in the little tent on the hard ground.

“It’s just a stage, Shura,” said Tatiana, as if trying to assuage him. “It too will pass.” She paused. “Like everything.”

Alexander’s impatience and frustration also burned his throat. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he dreams about.”

Tatiana stiffened in his arms.

“Ah!” Alexander raised his head to stare at her in the dark. He could barely see the contours of her face, as the fire diffused muted light through the slightly raised flaps. “You know!”

Tatiana sounded pained when she said yes. Her head remained down. Her eyes were closed.

“All this time you knew?”

She shrugged carefully. “I didn’t want to upset you.”

After a stretch of conflicted silence, Alexander spoke. “I know you think, Tatiana,” he said, “that everything will turn out well, but you’ll see—it won’t. He’s never going to get over the fact that you left him.”

“Don’t say that! He will. He’s just a small boy.”

Alexander nodded, but not in agreement. “Mark my words,” he said. “He won’t.”

“So what are you saying?” she said, upset. “That I shouldn’t have gone? I found you, didn’t I? This conversation is just ridiculous!”

“Yes,” he whispered. “But tell me, if you hadn’t found me, what would you have done? Returned to New York and married Edward Ludlow?” He was indifferent to her stiffness and her tutting. “Anthony for one, rightly or wrongly, thinks that you would have never come back. That you’d still be looking for me in the taiga woods.”

“No, he doesn’t!” Turning sharply to him, Tatiana repeated, “No. He doesn’t.”

“Did you listen to his dream? His mother had a choice. When she left him, she knew there was a very good chance she was leaving him for good. She knew it—and still, she left him. That is his dream. That is what he knows.”

“Alexander! Are you being deliberately cruel? Stop!”

“I’m not being cruel. I just want you to stop pretending that’s not what he’s going through. That it’s just a small thing. You are the big believer in consequences, as you keep telling me. So when I ask you if he’s going to get better, don’t pretend to me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“So why ask me? Obviously you have all the answers.”

“Stop it with the snide.” Alexander took a breath. “Do you know what’s interesting?”

“No. Shh.”

“I have nightmares that I’m in Kolyma,” Alexander said dully. “I’m sharing a cot, a small dirty cot with Ouspensky. We’re still shackled together, huddling under a blanket. It’s viciously cold. Pasha is long gone.” Alexander swallowed past the stones in his throat. “I open my eyes and realize that all this, Deer Isle, Coconut Grove, America, had been the actual dream, just like I feared. This is just another trick the mind plays in the souls of the insane. I jump out of bed and run out of the barracks, dragging Ouspensky’s rotting corpse behind me into the frozen tundra, and Karolich runs after me, chasing me with his weapon. After he catches me—and he always catches me—he knocks me in the throat with the butt of his rifle. ‘Get back to the barracks, Belov,’ he says. ‘It’s another twenty-five years for you. Chained to a dead man.’ When I get out of bed in the night, I can’t breathe, like I’ve just been jabbed in the throat.”

“Alexander,” Tatiana said inaudibly, pushing him away with shaking hands. “I begged you, begged you! I don’t want to hear this!”

“Anthony dreams of you gone. I dream of you gone. It’s so visceral, every blood vessel in my body feels it. How can I help him when I can’t even help myself?”

She groaned in remonstration.

He lay quietly behind her, cut off mid-sentence, mid-pain. He couldn’t take it anymore. He couldn’t get out of the tent fast enough. He said nothing, just left.

Tatiana lay inside by Anthony. She was cold. When the boy was finally asleep, she crawled out of the tent. Alexander was sitting wrapped in a blanket by the fading fire.

“Why do you always do that?” he said coldly, not turning around. “On the one hand you draw me into ridiculous conversations and are upset I won’t speak to you, but when I speak to you about things that actually gnaw at me, you shut me down like a trap door.”

Tatiana was taken aback. She didn’t do that, did she?

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Yes, you do do that.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Then why do you?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help that I can’t talk about Ant’s unspeakable dreams. Or yours.” She was terror-stricken enough.

“Well, run along then, back in the tent.” He continued to sit and smoke.

She pulled on him. He jerked away.

“I said I was sorry,” Tatiana murmured. “Please come back inside. I’m very cold, and you know I can’t go to sleep without you. Come on.” She lowered her voice as she bent to him. “Into our tent.”

In the tent he didn’t undress, remaining in his long johns as he climbed inside the sleeping bag. She watched him for a few moments, as she tried to figure out what he wanted from her, what she should do, what she could do. What did he need?

Tatiana undressed. Bare and unprotected, fragile and susceptible, she climbed into the sleeping bag, squeezing in under his hostile arm. She wanted him to know she wasn’t carrying any weapons.

“Shura, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I know all about my boy. I know all about the consequences of my leaving him. But there is nothing I can do now. I just have to try to make him better. And he does have both his parents for my trouble and his trouble. I’m hoping in the end, somewhere down the line, that will mean something to him, having his father. That the balance of things will somehow be restored by the good that’s come from my doing the unforgivable.”

Alexander didn’t say anything. He wasn’t touching her either.

Putting his hand under his crew, she rubbed his stomach. “I’m so cold, Shura,” she whispered. “Look, you’ve got a cold nude girl in your tent.”

“Cold is right,” he said.

Pressing herself against him, Tatiana opened her mouth and he cut her off half-murmur. “Stop this whole speaking thing. Just let me go to sleep.”

She sucked in her breath, held her other words back, and tugged at him, opening her arms to him, but he remained unapproachable. “Forget about comfort, forget about peace,” he said, “but even what kind of relief do you think I’m going to get from you when you’re all clenched up and upset like this? The milk of kindness is not exactly flowing from you tonight.”

“What, and you’re not upset?” she said quietly.

“I’m not bothering you, am I?”

They lay by each other. He unzipped the bag halfway on his side and sat up. After opening the tent flaps for some air, he lit a cigarette. It was cold in the Canyon at night. Shivering, she watched him, considering her options, assessing the various permutations and combinations, factoring in the X-factor, envisioning several moves ahead, and then her hand crept up and lay on his thigh. “Tell me the truth,” Tatiana said carefully. “Tell me here and now, the years without me … in the penal battalion … in the Byelorussian villages—were you really without a woman like you told me or was that a lie?”

Alexander smoked. “It was not a lie, but I didn’t have much choice, did I? You know where I was—in Tikhvin, in prison, at the front with men. I wasn’t in New York dancing with my hair down with men full of live ammo.”

“My hair was never down, first of all,” she said, unprovoked, “but you told me that once, in Lublin, you did have a choice.”

“Yes,” he said. “I came close with the girl in Poland.”

Tatiana waited, listened. Alexander continued, “And then after we were captured, I was in POW camps and Colditz with your brother, and then Sachsenhausen—without him. First fighting with men, then guarded by men, beaten by men, interrogated by men, shot at by men, tattooed by men. Few women in that world.” He shuddered.

“But … some women?”

“Some women, yes.”

“Did you … taint yourself with a Gulag wife?”

“Don’t be absurd, Tatiana,” Alexander said, low and heavy. “Don’t divide my words by your false questions. You know what I said to you has nothing to do with that.”

“Then what did you mean? Tell me. I know nothing. Tell me where you went when you left me in Deer Isle for four days. Were you with a woman then?”

“Tatiana! God!”

“You’re not answering me.”

“No! For God’s sake! Did you see me when I came back? Enough of this already, you’re degrading me.”

“And you’re not degrading me by your worries?” she whispered.

“No! You believed I was dead. In New York you weren’t betraying me, you were continuing your merry widowed life. Big fucking difference, Tania.”

Hearing his tone, Tatiana moved away from the verbal parrying, though what she wanted to say was, “Obviously you don’t think it’s such a big difference.” But she knew when enough was enough with him. “Why won’t you tell me where you went in Maine?” she whispered. “Can’t you see how afraid I am?” She was upset he wasn’t willing to comfort her. He was never willing to comfort her.

“I don’t want to tell you,” Alexander said, “because I don’t want to upset you.”

Tatiana became so scared by his hollow voice that she actually changed the subject to other unmentionables. “What about my brother? Did he have a prison wife?”

Alexander smoked deeply. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

“Oh, great. So there’s nothing you want to talk about.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, good night then.” She swirled away. Really a symbolic gesture, swirling away, turning your narrow naked back to an enormous dressed man next to whom you’re still lying in one sleeping bag.

Alexander sighed into the smoke, inhaled it. With one arm, he flipped her back to him. “Don’t turn away from me when we’re like this,” he said. “If you must have an answer, a laundry girl in Colditz fell in love with Pasha and gave it to him for free.”

Tears came to Tatiana’s eyes. “Yes. He was very good at having girls fall in love with him,” she said quietly. She settled as close as she could into Alexander’s unwelcoming side. “Almost as good as you,” she whispered achingly.

Alexander didn’t say anything.

Tatiana tried hard to stop shivering. “In Luga, in Leningrad, Pasha was always in love with one girl or another.”

“I think he was mistaking love for something else,” said Alexander.

“Unlike you, Shura?” she whispered, desperately wishing for some intimacy from him.

“Unlike me,” was all he said.

She lay mutely. “Did you have yourself a little laundry girl?” Her voice trembled.

“You know I did. You want me to tell you about her?” Throwing his cigarette away, he leaned over her, putting his hand between her thighs. Just like that. No kissing, no stroking, no caressing, no whispering, no preamble, just the hand between her thighs. “She is maddening,” he said. “She is mystifying. She is bewildering, and infuriating.” His other hand went under her head, into her hair.

“She is true.” Tatiana tried to stay still. She was feeling not mystifying but sickly vulnerable at the moment—naked and small in complete blackness with his overwhelming clothed body, too strong for its own good, over her; with his heavy soldier hand on her most vulnerable place. She forgot her mission, which was to bring him comfort from the things that assailed him. “And she gives it to you for free,” she whispered, her hands grasping his jersey.

“You call this free?” he said. Miraculously his rough-tipped fingers were caressing her exceedingly gently. How did he do this? His hands could lift the Nomad if they had to, he had the strongest hands, and they weren’t always gentle with her, but they did tread ever so lightly in a place so sensitive it shamed her before his fingers made her senseless. “You don’t fool me, Tatiana, with your reverse questions,” he said. “I know exactly what you’re doing.”

“What am I doing?” she said thickly, trying not to move or moan.

“Turning it around to me. If I, an irredeemable sinner stayed clean, then you certainly did.”

“Obviously, darling, you are not irredeemable …” Her head angled back.

“One less wrong move by burly Jeb, and you would’ve given yourself to him,” said Alexander, pausing both in word and deed. The pause made Tatiana only less steady. “One more right move by Edward, one more forward move by Edward”—Tatiana couldn’t help it, she moved, she gasped—“and you would have given it to him for free.”

She was having trouble speaking. “That’s not true,” she said. “What, you think I couldn’t have?” She turned her face into his chest, her body stiff. “I could have. I knew what they wanted. But I …” She was having trouble thinking. “I didn’t.”

Alexander was breathing hard and said nothing.

“Is this why you are so detached from me?”

“What’s detached, Tania?”

It was ironic at the moment to accuse him of this. The soft rhythmic skates and slips of his fingers became too much for her; clutching him, she whispered inaudibly, wait, wait, but Alexander bent and sucked her nipple into his mouth, slightly increasing his pressure and friction on her, and she had no more inaudible wait, wait, but a very audible yes, yes.

When she could speak again, Tatiana said, “Come on, who are you talking to?” She pulled on his crew. “Look at me, Shura.”

“It’s dark, fire’s out, can’t see a thing.”

“Well, I can see you. You’re so bright, you’re burning my eyes. Now look at me. I’m your Tania. Ask me, ask me anything. I don’t lie to you.” She stopped speaking. I don’t lie to my husband. I do keep some things from my husband. Like: there are men coming up the hill again, coming after you, and I have to do everything in my power to protect you, and so I can’t comfort you as well as I would like to because at the moment I’m attacked in more ways than you know. “In Lazarevo,” she said, reaching for that comfort, for that truth he wanted, feeling for his face above her, “you broke my ring and I gave you my hand, and with it my word. It’s the only word that I keep.”

“Yes,” he whispered, his smoky breath beating to the tense drum of his heart. “I did break your ring once upon a time.” His fingers lightly remained on her. “But in New York you thought I was dead.”

“Yes, and I was mourning you. Perhaps in twenty years’ time I may have married the local liege, but I hadn’t. I wasn’t ready and I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t gay. Your son was in the bedroom. Though I may have danced a few times, you know better than anyone I did not forget my sweet love of youth,” she whispered, adding nearly inaudibly, “I left our little boy because I did not forget and could not forget.”

His apologetic palm was warm and comforting on her. Oh, so he was willing to comfort her.

“No apologies necessary,” she said. “You’re anxious, aren’t you? But I told you the truth back in Germany. I don’t lie to you. I won’t lie to you. I wasn’t touched, Shura. Not even in New York as your merry widow.” She moaned for him.

He was staring at her through the black night, tense, tight. Haltingly he whispered, “Kissed, Tatiana?”

“Never, darling Shura,” she replied, lying on her back, her arms around him. “Never by anyone but you. Why do you flagellate yourself over nothing?”

They kissed raptly, tenderly, openly, softly. “Well, look at the idiotic questions you keep asking me,” he said, throwing off his crew and his long johns like a large bristly hedgehog in a small sack. “Worrying about women in Byelorussia, in Bangor. It’s not nothing, is it? It’s everything.” He climbed on top of her in the unzipped sleeping bag. Her hands went above her head. His hands went over her wrists. His lips were on her.

“And finally,” Alexander said, after he was sated, and her palms were on his back, “there is a little blessed relief.”

The cigarette long stubbed out, she lay in his arms and he continued to caress her. Were they close to sleep? She thought he might be, his hands on her back were getting slower. But here at Yavapai, over the silent shrines of God’s fluvial Canyon carved centimeter by centimeter by a persistent and unyielding and course-changing Red River, was as good a time as any for Tatiana’s own slight erosion of the carapace that covered Alexander.

“Shura, why am I tainted with the Gulag?” she whispered. “Please tell me.”

“Oh, Tania. It’s not you. Don’t you understand? I’m soiled by the unsacred things I’ve seen, by the things I’ve lived through.”

She stroked his body, kissed his chest wounds. “You’re not soiled, darling,” she said. “You’re human and suffering and struggling … but your soul is untouched.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” she whispered, “I see it. From the first moment I touched you on our bus, I saw your soul.” She pressed her lips to his shoulder. “Now tell me.”

“You won’t want to hear it.”

“I will. I do.”

Alexander told her about the gangrapes and the deaths on the trains. Tatiana almost said then that he had been right—she did not want to hear it. The savagery didn’t happen that often, he said; it didn’t need to in the camps. On the transport trains, these assaults and consequent deaths had been a daily occurrence. But at Catowice, Colditz, Sachsenhausen, most of the women either sold it, or bartered it, or gave it away free to strangers—quickly, before the guards came and beat them and then took some for themselves.

He told her about the women at Sachsenhausen. When Tatiana said she didn’t remember any women at Sachsenhausen, Alexander replied that by the time she came they had all gone. But before she came, the guards who hated Alexander put him in charge of building a brick wall to replace the barbed-wire fence that separated the women’s two barracks from the men’s sixteen. The guards knew it would put Alexander’s life in danger to build a wall to replace the existing barbed wire—which was so facilitating in the barter of sexual favors. The women backed up to the barbed wife on their hands and knees as if they were washing the floor, while the men kneeled on the ground, careful not to pierce themselves on the rusty protrusions.

Tatiana shivered.

So he built the wall. At five feet tall, it was not tall enough. At night the men skipped over the wall, and the women skipped over the wall. A watch tower was put up and a guard remained there round the clock to prevent connubial activity. The skipping over the wall continued. Alexander was told to make the wall seven feet. One afternoon during construction he was cornered in the barracks by eight angry lifers. They came to him with logging saws and axes. Alexander wasted no time talking. He swung the chain he was holding. It hit one of the men across the head, breaking open his skull. The other men fled.

Alexander finished the wall.

At seven feet, the wall was still not tall enough. One man would stand on another man’s shoulders and hop up onto it, then pull the standing man up. The prison guards electrified the top of the wall and put up another watch tower.

The men sustained some electrical shock damage to their bodies—but continued to climb over to get to the women on the other side.

Tatiana asked why the guards didn’t increase the electrical charge at the top of the barrier to instantly kill the man who touched it. Alexander replied they had to preserve their work force. They would have no one left to fill the logging quotas if they made the charge lethal. Also it took too much electricity. The guards had to light their own barracks. “At the commandant’s house, Karolich had to eat and sleep in comfort, didn’t he, Tatia?”

“He did, Shura. Not much comfort for him now.”

“The motherfucking bastard.”

Tatiana’s hand was on his heart. Her face was pressed into the muscles in his chest, into his Berlin shrapnel scar that was always under her mouth when she lay in his arms.

Alexander was told to build the wall to twelve feet.

One of his helpers said, “They were ready to maim you for a seven-foot wall. For a twelve-foot wall, they’ll kill you for sure.”

“Let them try,” said Alexander, never walking anywhere without the chain wrapped around his right hand. For extra protection he had attached nails to it in the metal shop. He had to use it again—twice.

The wall grew to twelve feet. And still the men climbed over. The electrical wire ran along the top. And still they climbed over. The barbed wire ran along the electrical wire. And still they climbed over.

Venereal diseases, fatal miscarriages, but worse, continuing pregnancies—the most incongruous thing of all—were making it impossible to run the prison. Finally the women were all put into trucks and carted a hundred kilometers east to the tungsten mines. Alexander found out there was a collapse of the mine during one of the explosions and all the women died.

The men stopped climbing over and began to get sick, to attempt suicidal escapes, to hang themselves with sheets, to fall down mine shafts, to cut each other’s throats in petty arguments. The production quotas were still going unfilled. The guards ordered Alexander to knock down the wall and start digging more mass graves.

He stopped speaking. Tatiana lay heavily by his side. She felt suddenly like she was two hundred pounds, not one hundred.

“During the years I’d been away from you, I used to dream of touching you,” Alexander said to Tatiana. “Your comfort is what I imagined. But during this period, all I saw was women being brutalized, and you, instead of staying sacred, diminished, and my thoughts of you became torture. You know how it goes—I lived oxen, so I dreamed oxen. And then you vanished altogether.” He paused, and nodded in the dark. “And that’s what I mean by tainted. And suddenly—after you fled me even in memories—I saw you in the woods, a vision of a phantom very young you. It wasn’t a dream. I saw you! Real like you are now. You were laughing, skipping, seraphic as always, except you had never sat on our bench in Leningrad, you had never worn your white dress the day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. I had patrolled somewhere else, or you had gone somewhere else, and I had no one to cross the street for. And so in these woods, you were looking at me as if you had never known me, as if you had never loved me.” He broke off. “It was then that I began to attempt my own suicidal escapes, all seventeen of them. It was those eyes of yours that pursued me through Sachsenhausen,” said Alexander in a dead voice. “I may have felt nothing, but I could not live, could not last a minute on this earth believing you had felt nothing, too. Your meaningless eyes were the death of me.”

Tatiana was crying. “Oh, God … Shura, husband …” she whispered, her arms, her legs going around him. She climbed on top of him in the sleeping bag. She couldn’t hold him close enough to herself. “It was just a vile dream. My eyes are never meaningless.”

He stared at her, near her face. “Then why do you keep looking at me as if you’re missing something, Tania?”

She couldn’t return his pained gaze, even in the black of night. Taking a breath, she said, “I’m not missing anything. I’m just looking for you. Looking for you in the taiga woods. Looking for the Alexander I left behind a million miles away on the pine needle banks of Lazarevo, or in the critical care tent in Morozovo. That’s what I was thinking of at Mercy Hospital.”

That wasn’t the only thing she had been thinking at Mercy Hospital. Having called Esther that morning, she had found out just how determined, how grave, and how unrelenting Sam Gulotta remained. Her good sense was devoured by fear and she went missing and forgot to keep time. Tonight she swallowed and went on. “What could I do then that I can’t seem to do now? That’s what I think about. What can I do to bring you back? What can I do to make you happy? What can I do to help you? Where are you?”

Alexander fell quiet. He pulled her off him. She lay behind him, kissing him softly on a ridged scar over his spine, hearing his heart thunder out through his shoulder blades.

After a while he spoke. “You want to know where I was in Maine?”

“No.”

“I was trying to find that man.”

“Did you,” asked Tatiana in a faltering voice, putting her forehead on his back, “find him?”

“Obviously not,” Alexander replied. “I felt I had fucked it up, that it was all a bust. I didn’t know who I was. I too didn’t recognize the man who came back with you from Berlin. You had wanted the boy you met in 1941, the boy you loved, the boy you married. I couldn’t find him—but I couldn’t find you either behind your searching eyes. I saw other things there—worry for me, concern. The eyes of compassion you had for Colonel Moore, it’s true, you had in spades for me. But as you know, I didn’t want your pity eyes, your pity hands. The wall between us seemed a hundred feet, not twelve. I couldn’t take it. You had done so nicely for yourself while I had been gone and now I was damned and ruining it. The colonel and me, we both needed to be in that military hospital. He went, but there was no place for me. No place for me there, and not with you either. There was no place for me anywhere in this world,” said Alexander.

He had taken his weapons with him, and left her his money. Tatiana was breathing hard into her hands, trying to keep from completely breaking down. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re saying these things out loud to me. I don’t deserve them.”

“I know,” Alexander said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. Our son needed you. He has his whole life to set right. I thought you could still help him, save him.”

“Oh my God—but what about you?” Tatiana asked. “Shura, you desperately needed my help.” And still do, she wanted to add. She tried to wipe her face, but it was useless.

He turned to her, lay on his side in front of her. “I know.” He touched her eyes, her lips, her heart. “That’s why I came back,” whispered Alexander, his palm fanning her face. “Because I wanted to be saved, Tatiasha.”

Tatiana slept terribly, like she was being repeatedly hit in the throat with the butt of his rifle. They were hoping time would help them. A month here, a month there, a month without mosquitoes and snow, time was like fresh dirt on the shallow graves. Pretty soon the sound of the cannons might mute, the rocket launchers might stop whistling off the ground. Not yet though. On the run for the rest of our short, doomed lives. In other words, prison.

I wanted to be saved, Tatiasha.

“Nearer to thee,” he whispered to her last night before he fell asleep. “Even though it be a cross/that raiseth me.”

Up, up, up, on the run, unsaved, through Desolation Canyon, through the salt flats of Utah, through the Sunrise Peak Mountains, to where there was wine in the valley.