Читать книгу The Summer Garden - Paullina Simons - Страница 8

The Carapace

Carapace n. a thick hard case or shell made of bone or chitin that covers part of the body of an animal such as a lobster.

Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at the end of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young woman dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling hands, sat on a bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.

By her side was a small boy, also eating ice cream, his a chocolate. They were casually chatting; the ice cream was melting faster than the mother could eat it. The boy was listening as she sang “Shine Shine My Star” to him, a Russian song, trying to teach him the words, and he, teasing her, mangled the verses. They were watching for the lobster boats coming back. She usually heard the seagulls squabbling before she saw the boats themselves.

There was the smallest breeze, and her summer hair moved slightly about her face. Wisps of it had gotten out of her long thick braid, swept over her shoulder. She was blonde and fair, translucent-skinned, translucent-eyed, freckled. The tanned boy had black hair and dark eyes, and chubby toddler legs.

They seemed to sit without purpose, but it was a false ease. The woman was watching the boats in the blue horizon single-mindedly. She would glance at the boy, at the ice cream, but she gawped at the bay as if she were sick with it.

Tatiana wants a drink of herself in the present tense, because she wants to believe there is no yesterday, that there is only the moment here on Deer Isle—one of the long sloping overhanging islands off the coast of central Maine, connected to the continent by a ferry or a thousand-foot suspension bridge, over which they came in their RV camper, their used Schult Nomad Deluxe. They drove across Penobscot Bay, over the Atlantic and south, to the very edge of the world, into Stonington, a small white town nested in the cove of the oak hills at the foot of Deer Isle. Tatiana—trying desperately to live only in the present—thinks there is nothing more beautiful or peaceful than these white wood houses built into the slopes on narrow dirt roads overlooking the expanse of the rippling bay water that she watches day in and day out. That is peace. That is the present. Almost as if there is nothing else.

But every once in a heartbeat while, as the seagulls sweep and weep, something intrudes, even on Deer Isle.

That afternoon, after Tatiana and Anthony had left the house where they were staying to come to the bay, they heard loud voices next door.

Two women lived there, a mother and a daughter. One was forty, the other twenty.

“They’re fighting again,” said Anthony. “You and Dad don’t fight.”

Fight!

Would that they fought.

Alexander didn’t raise a semitone of his voice to her. If he spoke to her at all, it was never above a moderated deep-well timbre, as if he were imitating amiable, genial Dr. Edward Ludlow, who had been in love with her back in New York—dependable, steady, doctorly Edward. Alexander, too, was attempting to acquire a bedside manner.

To fight would have required an active participation in another human being. In the house next door, a mother and daughter raged at each other, especially at this time in the afternoon for some reason, screaming through their open windows. The good news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. The bad news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. They had waited for him since he left for England in 1942, and now he was back.

He wasn’t participating in the fighting either. As Anthony and Tatiana came out to the road, they saw him parked in his wheelchair in the overgrown front yard, sitting in the Maine sun like a bush while his wife and daughter hollered inside. Tatiana and Anthony slowed down as they neared his yard.

“Mama, what’s wrong with him?” whispered Anthony.

“He was hurt in the war.” He had no legs, no arms, he was just a torso with stumps and a head.

“Can he speak?” They were in front of his gate.

Suddenly the man said in a loud clear voice, a voice accustomed to giving orders, “He can speak but he chooses not to.”

Anthony and Tatiana stopped at the gate, watching him for a few moments. She unlatched the gate and they came into the yard. He was tilted to the left like a sack too heavy on one side. His rounded stumps hung halfway down to the non-existent elbow. The legs were gone in toto.

“Here, let me help.” Tatiana straightened him out, propping the pillows that supported him under his ribs. “Is that better?”

“Eh,” the man said. “One way, another.” His small blue eyes stared into her face. “You know what I would like, though?”

“What?”

“A cigarette. I never have one anymore; can’t bring it to my mouth, as you can see. And they”—he flipped his head to the back—“they’d sooner croak than give me one.”

Tatiana nodded. “I’ve got just the thing for you. I’ll be right back.”

The man turned his head from her to the bay. “You won’t be back.”

“I will. Anthony,” she said, “come sit on this nice man’s lap until Mama comes back—in just one minute.”

Anthony was glad to do it. Picking him up, Tatiana placed him on the man’s lap. “You can hold on to his neck.”

After she ran to get the cigarettes, Anthony said, “What’s your name?”

“Colonel Nicholas Moore,” the man replied. “But you can call me Nick.”

“You were in the war?”

“Yes. I was in the war.”

“My dad, too,” said Anthony.

“Oh.” The man sighed. “Is he back?”

“He’s back.”

Tatiana returned and, lighting the cigarette, held it to Nick’s mouth while he smoked with intense deep breaths, as if he were inhaling the smoke not just into his lungs but into his very core. Anthony sat on his lap, watching his face inhale with relief and exhale with displeasure as if he didn’t want to let the nicotine go. The colonel smoked two in a row, with Tatiana bent over him, holding the cigarettes one by one to his mouth.

Anthony said, “My dad was a major but now he’s a lobsterman.”

“A captain, son,” corrected Tatiana. “A captain.”

“My dad was a major and a captain,” said Anthony. “We’re gonna get ice cream while we wait for him to come back to us from the sea. You want us to bring you an ice cream?”

“No,” said Nick, leaning his head slightly into Anthony’s black hair. “But this is the happiest fifteen minutes I’ve had in eighteen months.”

At that moment, his wife ran out of the house. “What are you doing to my husband?” she shrieked.

Tatiana scooped Anthony off the man’s lap. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said quickly.

“You won’t be back,” said Nick, gaping after her.

Now they were sitting on the bench eating ice cream.

Soon there was the distant squawk of gulls.

“There’s Daddy,” Tatiana said breathlessly.

The boat was a twenty-foot lobster sloop with a headsail, though most fishing boats were propelled by gas motors. It belonged to Jimmy Schuster, whose father, upon passing on, passed it on to him. Jimmy liked the boat because he could go out in it and trawl for lobsters on his own—a one-man job, he called it. Then his arm got caught in the pot hauler, the rope that pulls the heavy lobster traps out of the water. To free himself, he had to cut off his hand at the wrist, which saved his life—and him from going to war—but now, with no small irony, he needed deckhands to do the grunt work. Trouble was, all the deckhands had been in Hürtgen Forest and Iwo Jima the last four years.

Ten days ago Jimmy had got himself a deckhand. Today, Jimmy was in the cockpit aft, and the tall silent one was standing pin straight, at attention, in orange overalls and high black rubber boots, staring intently at the shore.

Tatiana stood from the bench in her white cotton dress, and when the boat was close enough, still a bay away, she flung her arm in a generous wave, swaying from side to side. Alexander, I’m here, I’m here, the wave said.

When he was close enough to see her, he waved back.

They moored the boat at the buyers’ dock and opened the catches on the live tanks. Jumping off the boat, the tall man said he would be right back to off-load and clean up and, rinsing his hands quickly in the spout on the dock, walked up from the quay, up the slope to the bench where the woman and the boy were sitting.

The boy ran down to him. “Hey,” he said and then stood shyly.

“Hey, bud.” The man couldn’t ruffle Anthony’s hair: his hands were mucky.

Under his orange rubber overalls, he was wearing dark green army fatigues and a green long-sleeved army jersey, covered with sweat and fish and salt water. His black hair was in a military buzzcut, his gaunt perspiring face had black afternoon stubble over the etched bones.

He came up to the woman in pristine white who was sitting on the bench. She raised her eyes to greet him—and raised them and raised them, for he was tall.

“Hey,” she said. It was a breathing out. She had stopped eating her ice cream.

“Hey,” he said. He didn’t touch her. “Your ice cream is melting.”

“Oh, I know.” She licked all around the wafer cone, trying to stem the tide but it was no use, the vanilla had turned to condensed milk and was dripping. He watched her. “I can never seem to finish it before it melts,” she muttered, getting up. “You want the rest?”

“No, thank you.” She took a few more mouthfuls before she threw the cone in the trash. He motioned to her mouth.

She licked her lips to clean away the remaining vanilla milk. “Better?”

He didn’t answer. “We’ll have lobsters again tonight?”

“Of course,” she said. “Whatever you want.”

“I still have to go back and finish.”

“Yes, of course. Should we, um, come down to the dock? Wait with you?”

“I want to help,” said Anthony.

Tatiana vigorously shook her head. She would not be able to get the fish smell off the boy.

“You’re so clean,” said Alexander. “Why don’t you stay here with your mother? I’ll be done soon.”

“But I want to help you.”

“Well, come down then, maybe we’ll find something for you to do.”

“Yes, nothing that involves touching fish,” muttered Tatiana.

She didn’t care much for Alexander’s job as a lobsterman. He reeked of fish when he returned. Everything he touched smelled of it. A few days ago, when she had been very slightly grumbling, almost teasing, he said, “You never complained in Lazarevo when I fished,” not teasing. Her face must have looked pretty crestfallen because he said, “There’s no other work for a man in Stonington. You want me to smell like something else, we’ll have to go somewhere else.”

Tatiana didn’t want to go somewhere else. They just got here.

“About the other thing …” he said. “I won’t bring it up again.”

That’s right, don’t bring up Lazarevo, their other moment by the sea near eternity. But that was then—in the old bloodsoaked country. After all, Stonington—with warm days and cool nights and expanses of still and salty water everywhere they looked, the mackerel sky and the purple lupines reflecting off the glass bay with the white boats—it was more than they ever asked for. It was more than they ever thought they would have.

With his one good arm, Jimmy was motioning for Alexander.

“So how did you do today?” Tatiana asked him, trying to make conversation as they headed down to the dock. Alexander was in his big heavy rubber boots. She felt impossibly small walking by his side, being in his overwhelming presence. “Did you have a good catch?”

“Okay today,” he replied. “Most of the lobsters were shorts, too small; we had to release them. A lot of berried females, they had to go.”

“You don’t like berried females?” She moved closer, looking up at him.

Blinking lightly, he moved away. “They’re good, but they have to be thrown back in the water, so their eggs can hatch. Don’t come too close, I’m messy. Anthony, we haven’t counted the lobsters. Want to help me count them?”

Jimmy liked Anthony. “Buddy! Come here, you want to see how many lobsters your dad caught today? We probably have a hundred lobsters, his best day yet.”

Tatiana leveled her eyes at Alexander. He shrugged. “When we get twelve lobsters in one trap and have to release ten of them, I don’t consider that a good day.”

“Two legals in one trap is great, Alexander,” said Jimmy. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of this. Come here, Anthony, look into the live-well.”

Keeping a respectful distance, Anthony peered into the tank where the lobsters, already banded and measured, were crawling on top of one another. He told his mother he didn’t care much for their claws, even bound. Especially after what his father told him about lobsters: “They’re cannibals, Ant. Their claws have to be tied up or they would eat each other right in the tank.”

Anthony said to Jimmy, his voice trying not to crack, “You already counted them?”

Alexander shook his head at Jimmy. “Oh, no, no,” Jimmy quickly said. “I was busy hosing down the boat. I just said approximately. Want to count?”

“I can’t count past twenty-seven.”

“I’ll help you,” said Alexander. Taking out the lobsters one by one, he let Anthony count them until he got to ten, and then carefully, so as not to break their claws, placed them in large blue transfer totes.

At last Alexander said to Anthony, “One hundred and two.”

“You see?” said Jimmy. “Four for you, Anthony. That leaves ninety-eight for me. And they’re all perfect, as big as can be, right around a five-inch carapace—which means shell, bud. We’ll get 75 cents a piece for them. Your dad is going to make me almost seventy-five dollars today. Yes,” he said, “because of your dad, I can finally make a living.” He glanced at Tatiana, standing a necessary distance away from the spillage of the boat. She smiled politely; Jimmy nodded curtly and didn’t smile back.

As the buyers started to pour in from the fish market, from the general store, from the seafood restaurants as far away as Bar Harbor, Alexander washed and cleaned the boat, cleaned the traps, rolled up the line, and went down dock to buy three barrels of bait herring for the next day, which he placed into bags and lowered them into the water. The herring catch was good today, he had enough to bait 150 lobster traps for tomorrow.

He got paid ten dollars for the day’s work, and was scrubbing his hands with industrial-strength soap under the water spout when Jimmy came up to him. “Want to wait with me and sell these?” He pointed to the lobsters. “I’ll pay you another two dollars for the evening. After, we can go for a drink.”

“Can’t, Jimmy. But thanks. Maybe another time.”

Jimmy glanced at Tatiana, all sunny and white, and turned away.

They walked up the hill to the house.

Alexander went to take a bath, to shave, to shear his hair, while Tatiana, placing the lobsters in the refrigerator to numb them, boiled the water. Lobsters were the easiest thing to cook, 10–15 minutes in salted boiling water. They were delicious to eat, breaking the claws, taking the meat out, dipping them in melted butter. But sometimes she did think that she would rather spend two dollars on a lobster in a store once a month than have Alexander spend thirteen hours on a boat every day and get four lobsters for free. Didn’t seem so free. Before he was out of the bathroom, she stood outside the door, knocked carefully and said, “You need anything?”

There was quiet inside. She knocked louder. The door opened, and he towered in front of her, all fresh and shaved and scrubbed and dressed. He was wearing a clean green jersey and fatigues. She cleared her throat and lowered her gaze. Barefoot she stood with her lips level with his heart. “Need anything?” she repeated in a whisper, feeling so vulnerable she was having trouble breathing.

“I’m fine,” he said, walking sideways past her. “Let’s eat.”

They had the lobsters with melted butter, and carrot, onion and potato stew. Alexander ate three lobsters, most of the stew, bread, butter. Tatiana had found him emaciated in Germany. He ate for two men now, but he was still war thin. She ladled food onto his plate, filled his glass. He drank a beer, water, a Coke. They ate quietly in the little kitchen, which the landlady allowed them to use as long as they were either done by seven or made dinner for her, too. They were done by seven, and Tatiana left some stew for her.

“Alexander, does your … chest hurt?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“It felt a little pulpy last night …” She looked away, remembering touching it. “It’s not healed yet, and you’re doing all that trap hauling. I don’t want it to get reinfected. Perhaps I should put some carbolic acid on it.”

“I’m fine.”

“Maybe a new dressing?”

He didn’t say anything, just raised his eyes to her, and for a moment between them, from his bronze-colored eyes to her sea-green passed Berlin, and the room at the U.S. Embassy where they had spent what they both were certain was their last night on earth, when she stitched together his shredded pectoral and wept, and he sat like a stone and looked through her— much like now. He said to her then, “We never had a future.”

Tatiana looked away first—she always looked away first—and got up.

Alexander went outside to sit in the chair in front of the house on the hill overlooking the bay. Anthony tagged along behind him. Alexander sat mutely and motionlessly, while Anthony milled about the overgrown yard, picking up rocks, pine cones, looking for worms, for beetles, for ladybugs.

“You won’t find any ladybugs, son. Season for them’s in June,” said Alexander.

“Ah,” said Anthony. “Then what’s this?”

Tilting over to one side, Alexander looked. “I can’t see it.”

Anthony came closer.

“Still can’t see it.”

Anthony came closer, his hand out, the index finger with the ladybug extended.

Alexander’s face was inches away from the ladybug. “Hmm. Still can’t see it.”

Anthony looked at the ladybug, looked at his father and then slowly, shyly climbed into his lap and showed him again.

“Well, well,” said Alexander, both hands going around the boy. “Now I see it. I sit corrected. You were right. Ladybugs in August. Who knew?”

“Did you ever see ladybugs, Dad?”

Alexander was quiet. “A long time ago, near a city called Moscow.”

“In the … Soviet Union?”

“Yes.”

“They have ladybugs there?”

“They had ladybugs—until we ate them all.”

Anthony was wide-eyed.

“There was nothing else to eat,” said Alexander.

“Anthony, your father is just joking with you,” said Tatiana, walking out, wiping her wet hands on a tea towel. “He is trying to be funny.”

Anthony peered into Alexander’s face. “That was funny?”

“Tania,” Alexander said in a far away voice. “I can’t get up. Can you get my cigarettes for me?”

She left quickly and came out with them. Since there was only one chair and nowhere for her to sit, she placed the cigarette in Alexander’s mouth and, bending over him, her hand on his shoulder, lit it for him while Anthony placed the bug into Alexander’s palm.

“Dad, don’t eat this ladybug.” One of his little arms went around Alexander’s neck.

“I won’t, son. I’m full.”

“That’s funny,” said Anthony. “Mama and I met a man today. A colonel. Nick Moore.”

“Oh, yeah?” Alexander looked off into the distance, taking another deep drag of the cigarette from Tatiana’s hands as she was bent to him. “What was he like?”

“He was like you, Dad,” Anthony replied. “He was just like you.”

Red Nail Polish

In the middle of the night, the boy woke up and screamed. Tatiana went to comfort him. He calmed down, but would not let her leave him alone in his bed, even though it was just across the nightstand. “Alexander,” she whispered, “are you awake?”

“I am now,” he said, getting up. Moving the nightstand out of the way, he pushed the two twin beds together so Anthony could lie next to his mother. They tried to get comfortable, Alexander against the wall spooning Tatiana spooning Anthony, who instantly fell asleep in his mother’s arms. Tatiana only pretended to fall back to sleep. She knew that in a moment Alexander would get up and leave the bed.

And in a moment, he was gone. She whispered after him. Shura, darling. After a few minutes, she got up, put on a robe and walked outside. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the yard. She looked for him all the way down to the dock. Alexander was sitting on the bench where Tatiana usually sat waiting for him to come back from the sea. She saw the flare of the cigarette in his mouth. He was naked except for his skivvies, and he was shivering. His arms were crossed over himself, and his body was rocking back and forth.

She stopped walking.

She didn’t know what to do.

She never did know what to do.

Turning around, she stumbled back to their room and lay in bed blinkless, staring beyond Anthony’s sleeping head until Alexander came back, icy and shaking, and fitted in behind her. She didn’t move and he said nothing, made no noise. Just his cold arm went around her. They lay there until four when he got up to go to work. As he ground the coffee beans in the pestle, she buttered a fresh roll for him, filled his water containers and made a sandwich for him to take on the boat. He ate, drank his coffee, and then left, his free hand traveling under her chemise for a moment to rest on her bare buttocks and then between her legs.

They had been on Deer Isle exactly five minutes, breathing in the salt water of the afternoon and seeing the lobster boats returning to shore, and already Tatiana said that a month would not be long enough to spend here. Their agreement was just a month in every state and then onward. Forty-eight states, forty-eight months, beginning with Deer Isle. “A month won’t be enough here,” she repeated when Alexander said nothing.

“Really?” And nothing more.

“You don’t think it’s great here?”

A small ironic something crossed his silent mouth in reply.

On the surface, Stonington had everything they needed: a general store, a variety store, a hardware store. The general store sold newspapers, magazines and, most important, cigarettes. It also sold coffee beans and chocolate. On North and South Deer Isle, there were cows—thus milk, cheese and butter—and chickens that laid eggs. Grain was shipped in by the shipload. There was plenty of bread. Plenty of apples, peaches, pears, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, carrots, turnips, radishes, eggplant, zucchini. There was cheap and plentiful lobster, trout, sea bass, pike. There even was beef and chicken, not that they ever ate it. Who’d ever believe the country had been through a Depression and a world war?

Alexander said ten dollars a day wouldn’t be enough to live on.

Tatiana said it would be plenty.

“What about high-heeled shoes? Dresses for you? Coffee? My cigarettes?”

“Definitely not enough for cigarettes.” She forced a smile, seeing his face. “I’m joking. It’s enough for everything.”

She didn’t want to mention that the amount he was spending on cigarettes was nearly what they were spending on food for the week for all three of them. But Alexander was the only one working. He could spend his money on whatever he liked.

She had been talking English to him as she drank her Sunday coffee. He was responding in Russian to her as he smoked his Sunday cigarettes and read his Sunday paper.

“There’s trouble brewing in Indochina,” he said in Russian. “The French owned it, and lost it to the Japanese during the war. The Japanese lost the war, but they don’t want to leave. The French, rescued by the victors and thus on the side of victory, want their colony back. The Japanese are protesting. While staying neutral, the U.S. are helping their ally France, but they’re really between a rock and a hard place since they’re also helping Japan.”

“I thought Japan is no longer allowed to have an army?” Tatiana asked in English.

And he replied in Russian, “They’re not. But they had a standing army in Indochina, and short of the U.S. forcing them out, the Japanese refuse to lay down their arms.”

She asked in English, “What’s your interest in all this?”

He replied in Russian, “Ah. In all this—because there just isn’t enough trouble—Stalin for decades has been courting a peasant farmer named Ho Chi Minh, paying for his little educational trips to Moscow, feeding him vodka and caviar, teaching him the Marxist dialectic by the warm fire and giving him some old Shpagins and mortars, and some nice American Lend-Lease Studebakers while training and educating his little band of Vietminh right on Soviet soil.”

“Training the Vietminh to fight the Japanese whom the Soviets fought and hate?”

“Believe it or not, no. To fight the former Soviet allies, the colonial French. Ironic?” Alexander stubbed out his cigarette, put down his paper. “Where’s Anthony?” he said in a low voice in English, but before he could even reach for her wrist, Anthony walked into the kitchen.

“I’m here, Dad,” he said. “What?”

They needed a room for just themselves, but Anthony didn’t think so, and besides, the old landlady didn’t have one. The choice was one tiny room next to the kitchen in a vertical house overlooking the bay—with two twin beds, and a bath and toilet down the hall—or their camper with one full bed, and no bath and no toilet.

They had looked at other houses. One had a family of five living in it. One had a family of three. One a family of seven, all women. Generations and generations of women, filling up the white houses, and old men going out on the boats during the day. And younger men—sometimes whole, sometimes not—trickling back from war.

Mrs. Brewster lived alone. Her only son was not back, though Tatiana didn’t think he was out with the troops. Something in the way the old lady said, oh he had to go away for a little while. She was sixty-six years old and had been a widow for forty-eight of them: her husband died in the Spanish-American War.

“In 1898?” Tatiana whispered to Alexander.

He shrugged. His heavy hand was squeezing her shoulder, telling her he didn’t much like Mrs. Brewster, but Tatiana was happy to have his hand on her in any capacity. “This is your husband, right?” Mrs. Brewster had said suspiciously before she rented out the rooms to them. “He’s not just some …” She waved her hand around. “Because I won’t have that in my house.”

Alexander stood mute. The three-year-old said, “Have what?”

The landlady narrowed her eyes at Anthony. “This your father, boy?”

“Yes,” said Anthony. “He is a soldier. He was in a war and in prison.”

“Yeah,” said Mrs. Brewster, looking away. “Prison’s hard.” Then she narrowed her eyes at Tatiana. “So where’s your accent from? Doesn’t sound American to me.”

Anthony began to say, “Russ—” but Alexander pulled his son behind him, pulled Tatiana behind him. “Are you going to rent us the room or not?”

She rented them the room.

But now Alexander asked Tatiana, “Why did we buy the Nomad if we’re not going to stay in it? We might as well sell it. What a waste of money.”

What would they do when they got to the deserts of the west? she wanted to know. To the wine hills of California? To Hell’s Canyon in Idaho? Despite his sudden frugality, Alexander didn’t sell the camper, the dream of it still so fresh. But this was the thing about him: though Tatiana knew he liked the idea of the camper—he was the one who wanted to buy it—he didn’t particularly like the reality of it.

Tatiana got the impression he felt that way about a number of things in his new civilian life.

The camper had no running water. And Alexander never stopped washing one part or another of his body. Living too close for too many years to men at war had done this to him. He washed his hands obsessively; true, much of the time they had fish on them, but there wasn’t enough soap or lemons and vinegar in all of Maine to get Alexander’s hands clean enough for his liking. They had to pay Mrs. Brewster an extra five dollars a week for all the water they were using.

He may have liked the idea of a son, but the reality of a three-year-old boy being with them every waking moment, never leaving his mother’s side, sleeping in the same room with them! coming into bed with them at night! was too much for a soldier who had never been around children.

“Nightmares are hard for a little boy,” Tatiana explained.

“I understand,” he said, so polite.

Alexander may have once liked the idea of a wife, but the reality of one, Tatiana wasn’t so sure about either. Maybe he was looking for Lazarevo in every day that they lived, though from the way he acted, she fully expected him to say, “What’s Lazarevo?”

His eyes, once like caramel, were now hard copper, nothing liquid or flowing in them. He turned his polite face to her, and she turned her polite face back. He wanted quiet, she was quiet. He wanted funny, she tried funny. He wanted food, she gave him plenty. He wanted to go for a walk, she was ready. He wanted newspapers, magazines, cigarettes, she brought them all. He wanted to sit mutely in his chair; she sat mutely on the ground by his side. Anything he wanted, she was ready at any moment to give him.

Now, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, Tatiana stood barefoot in front of the mirror in a yellow, slightly sheer muslin dress, a peasant-girl dress, appraising, assessing, obsessing.

She stood with her hair down. Her face was scrubbed, her teeth were clean and white. The summer freckles on her nose and cheeks were the color of malt sugar, her green eyes sparkled. She rubbed cocoa butter into her hands to make them softer in case he wanted to take her hand as they walked down to Main Street after dinner. She rubbed a bit of musk oil behind her ears, in case he bent to her. She put some gloss on her sulky lips and pressed them together to make them softer, pinker. She stood, looked, thought. Smiled a nice fake smile to make the lips less sulky, and sighed. A little bit of this, a little bit of that.

Her hands went inside her dress and cupped her breasts. Her nipples hardened. Ever since Anthony was born, her body had changed. That, and the American food—all those nutrients. The post-nursing, American-fed breasts hadn’t lost their weightiness, their full-bodied heartiness. The few bras Tatiana owned were all too loose around and made her jiggle. Instead of a bra, Tatiana sometimes wore tight white vests, tight enough to restrain her breasts, which tended to sway when she walked, attracting the eyes of men. Not her husband, necessarily, but other men, like the milk boy.

She slowly lifted up her dress to see her slim rounded hips in the mirror, her smooth belly. She was slight, but everything on her seemed to have been curved by Anthony’s birth—as if she stopped being a girl at the point of his entry into the world.

But it was the girl-child with breasts that the soldier man with the rifle on his back had once crossed the street for.

She pulled down her sheer panties to see her patch of blonde hair. She touched herself, trying to imagine what he might have felt once when touching her. Seeing something in the mirror, she looked closer, then bent her head to look at her legs. On the insides of her thighs were small fresh bruises—thumbprints from his hands.

Seeing them gave Tatiana a liquid throb in her loins, and she straightened out, adjusted herself and, with a flushed face, started brushing out her hair, debating what to do with it. Alexander had never seen her hair this length before, down to the small of her back. She thought he would like it, but distressingly he seemed indifferent to it. She knew the color and texture of the hair weren’t quite normal. She had colored it black eight months ago, before she went to Europe, then painstakingly leached the black out of it last month in Hamburg, and now the hair was dry and limp. It wasn’t silk anymore. Is that why he wasn’t touching it? She didn’t know what to do about it.

She put it into its usual braid, leaving the fronts out and the tuft long in the back, threading the braid with a yellow satin ribbon, in case he touched the hair. Then she called for Anthony, who was outside playing with dirt, and cleaned him, making sure his shorts and shirt weren’t stained, pulling up his socks. “Why do you play with dirt, Anthony, right before we go see Daddy? You know you have to be tidy for him.” Alexander liked order in his wife and son when they came to meet him at the docks. She knew he liked how neat they looked, how put-together, how summery. The flowers in Stonington were breathtaking, the tall shimmering lupines purple and blue; she and Anthony had picked some earlier and now Tatiana put some in her hair, the purple, like lilac, to contrast with the hair, like gold, because once he had liked that, too.

She studied her fingernails to make sure there was nothing underneath them. They both hated dirty fingernails. Now that Tatiana stopped working—and Alexander was with her—she kept her nails a little longer, because, though he never said anything, he wordlessly responded to the light back and forth of her nails on him. Today she had a few minutes and painted them red.

He said nothing that day about the nails. (Or the lilac lupines, the satin in the hair, the lips, the hips, the dress, the breasts, the sheer white panties.) The next day he said, “They sell such dazzling nail polish at the Stonington store?”

“I don’t know. I brought this one with me.”

He was quiet so long, she thought he hadn’t heard her. And then: “Well, that must’ve been nice for all the invalids at NYU.”

Ah, some participation. Not great—but a start. What to say to that, though? Oh, it wasn’t for the invalids. She knew it was a trap, a code for, since nurses aren’t allowed to wear nail polish, what’d you have nail polish for, Tania?

Later that evening at the kitchen table, she took the polish off with acetone. When he saw it was gone, he said, “Hmm. So other invalids rate the red nails but not me?”

She lifted her eyes at him standing over her. “Are you joking?” she said, the tips of her fingers beginning to tremble.

“Of course,” he said, without a glimmer of a smile.

Tatiana threw away her red New York nail polish, her flirty post-war ruched and pleated New York dresses, her high-heeled New York greenbelt brilliant Ferragamo shoes. Something happened to him when he saw her in New York things. What’s the matter, she would ask, and he would reply that nothing was the matter, and that would be all he’d reply. So she threw them all out and bought herself a yellow muslin dress, a floral chintz dress, a white cotton sheath, a blue wrap dress—from Maine. Alexander still said nothing, but was less quiet. Now he talked to her of other things, like Ho Chi Minh and his band of warriors.

She tried, tried to be funny with him like before. “Hey, do you want to hear a joke?”

“Sure, tell me a joke.” They were walking up a Stonington hill behind a huffing Anthony.

“A man prayed for years to go to paradise. Once, going up a narrow path in the mountains he stumbled and fell into the precipice. By a miracle he grasped some sickly bush and started crying: ‘Anybody here? Please, help! Anybody here?’

“After some minutes of silence the voice answered: ‘I am here.’

“‘Who are you?’

“‘I am God.’

“‘If you are God, then do something!’

“‘Look, you asked me for so long to be brought to paradise. Just unclench your hands—and immediately you will find yourself in paradise.’

“After a small silence the man cried: ‘Anybody ELSE here? Please—help!’”

To say that Alexander didn’t laugh at that joke would have been to understate matters.

Tatiana’s hands trembled whenever she thought of him. She trembled all day long. She walked through Stonington as if she were sleepwalking, stiff, unnatural. She bent to her son, she straightened up, she adjusted her dress, she fixed her hair. The churning inside her stomach did not abate.

Tatiana tried to be bolder with him, less afraid of him.

He wouldn’t kiss her in front of Jimmy, or the other fishermen, or anybody. Sometimes in the evenings, as they walked down Main Street and looked inside the shops, he would buy her some chocolate, and she would turn up her face to thank him, and he would kiss her on the forehead. The forehead!

One evening Tatiana got tired of it and, jumping up on the bench, flung her arms around him. “Enough with the head,” she said, and kissed him full on his lips.

His one hand on the cigarette, the other on Anthony’s ice cream, he couldn’t do more than press against her. “Get down,” he said quietly, kissing her back without ardor. “What’s gotten into you?”

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I give you man o’ war!

Alone with Anthony, in their daily wanderings up and down the hills of Stonington, Tatiana made friends with the women who ran the stores and the boys who brought the milk. She befriended a farm woman in her thirties up on Eastern Road, whose husband, a naval officer, was still in Japan. Every day Nellie cleaned the house, weeded the front garden and waited for him on the bench outside, which is how Tatiana met her, just skipping by with her son. After talking to her for two minutes, Tatiana felt so sad for the woman, viscerally remembering grieving for Alexander, that she asked Nellie if she needed help with the farm. Nellie had an acre of potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers. Tatiana knew something about these things.

Nellie gladly agreed, saying she could pay Tatiana two dollars a day from her husband’s army check. “It’s all I can afford,” she said. “When my husband comes back I’ll be able to pay you more.”

But the war ended a year ago, and there was still no news of him. Tatiana said not to worry.

Over coffee, Nellie opened up a little. “What if he comes back and I won’t know how to talk to him? We were married such a short time before he went to fight. What if we find out we’re complete strangers?”

Tatiana shook her lowered head. She knew something about these things, too.

“So when did your husband come back?” Nellie asked with envy.

“A month ago.”

“So lucky.”

Anthony said, “Dad didn’t come back. Dad was never coming back. Mama left me to go find him.”

Nellie stared dully at Anthony.

“Anthony, go play outside for a minute. Let Nellie and me finish up.” Tatiana ruffled Anthony’s hair and ushered him outside. “Kids these days. You teach them to speak and look what they do. I don’t even know what he’s talking about.”

That evening Anthony told Alexander that Mama got a job. Alexander asked Anthony questions, and Anthony, happy to be asked, told his father about Nellie and her potatoes and tomatoes and cucumbers, and her husband who wasn’t there, and how Nellie ought to go and find him, “just like Mama went and found you.”

Alexander stopped asking questions. All he said after dinner was, “I thought you said we were going to be all right on ten dollars a day.”

“It’s just for Anthony. For his candy, his ice cream.”

“No. I’ll work at night. If I help sell the lobsters, it’s another two dollars.”

“No!” Tatiana quickly lowered her voice. “You work plenty. You do plenty. No. Anthony and I play all day anyway.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Play.”

“We’ll have time for everything. He and I will be happy to help her. And besides,” said Tatiana, “she is so lonely.”

Alexander turned away. Tatiana turned away.

The next day Alexander came back from the boat and said, “Tell Nellie to stuff her two dollars. Jimmy and I worked out a deal. If I catch him over a hundred and fifty legal lobsters, he’ll pay me an extra five dollars. And then five more for every fifty legals above one fifty. What do you think?”

Tatiana thought about it. “How many traps on your trawl?”

“Ten.”

“At two legal lobsters per trap … twenty at most per trawl … one trawl an hour, hauling them up, throwing most of them back … it’s not enough.”

“When it comes to me,” he said, “aren’t you turning into a nice little capitalist.”

“You’ve sold yourself short, Alexander,” Tatiana said to him. “Like a lobster.”

Jimmy must have known it, too—the market price for lobsters increasing, and Alexander receiving many job offers from other boats—because he changed the terms without even being asked, giving Alexander five dollars extra for every fifty legals above the first fifty. At night Alexander was too tired to hold a glass of beer in his hands.

Tatiana marinated Nellie’s tomatoes, made Nellie potato soup, tried to make tomato sauce. Tatiana had learned to make very good tomato sauce from her friends in Little Italy, almost as if she were Italian herself. She wanted to make Alexander tomato sauce, just like his Italian mother used to make, but needed garlic, and no one had garlic on Deer Isle.

Tatiana missed New York, the boisterous teeming marketplace of the Saturday morning Lower East Side, her joyous best friend Vikki, her work at Ellis Island, the hospital. The guilt of it stung her in the chest—longing for the old life she could not live without Alexander.

Tatiana worked in the fields by herself while Nellie minded Anthony. It took her a week to dig up Nellie’s entire field—one hundred and fifty bushels of potatoes. Nellie could not believe there was so much. Tatiana negotiated a deal with the general store for 50 cents a bushel, and made Nellie seventy-five dollars. Nellie was thrilled. After twelve hours on the boat, Alexander helped Tatiana carry all hundred and fifty bushels to the store. At the end of the week, Nellie still paid Tatiana only two dollars a day.

When Alexander heard this, his voice lost its even keel for a moment. “You made her seventy-five dollars, we carried all the fucking bushels down the hill for her, and your so called friend still only paid you your daily wage?”

“Shh … don’t …” She didn’t want Anthony to hear the soldier-speak, kept so carefully under wraps these days.

“Maybe you’re not such a good capitalist after all, Tania.”

“She has no money. She doesn’t make a hundred dollars a day like that Jimmy does off you. But you know what she did offer us? To move in with her. She has two extra bedrooms. We could have them free of charge and just pay her for the water and electric.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch.”

“There’s a catch. I hear it in your voice.”

“Nothing.” She twittered her thumbs. “She just said that when her husband came back, we’d have to go.”

Across the table, Alexander stared at Tatiana inscrutably, then got up and took his own plate to the sink.

Tatiana’s hands trembled as she washed the dishes. She didn’t want to make him upset. No, perhaps that was not quite true. Perhaps she wanted to make him something. He was so exceedingly polite, so exceptionally courteous! When she asked him for help, he was right there. He carried the cursed potatoes, he took the trash to the dump. But his mind was not on the potatoes, on the trash. When he sat and smoked and watched the water, Tatiana didn’t know where he was. When he went outside at three in the morning and convulsed on the bench, Tatiana wished she didn’t know where he was. Where was she within him? She didn’t want to know.

When she was done clearing up, she came outside to sit on the gravel by his feet. She felt him looking at her. She looked up. “Tania …” Alexander whispered. But Anthony saw his mother on the ground and instantly planted himself on her lap, displaying for her the four beetles he had found, two of them fighting stag beetles. When she glanced up at Alexander, he wasn’t looking at her anymore.

After Anthony was asleep and they were in their twin bed, she whispered, “So do you want to—move in with Nellie?” The bed was so narrow, they could sleep only on their sides. On his back Alexander took up the whole mattress.

“Move in until her husband comes back and she kicks us out because she might actually want some privacy with the man who’s back from war?” Alexander said.

“Are you … angry?” she asked, as in, please be angry.

“Of course not.”

“We’ll have more privacy at her house. She’s got two rooms for us. Better than the one here.”

“Really? Better?” Alexander said. “Here we’re by the sea. I get to sit and smoke and look at the bay. Nellie’s on Eastern Road, where we’ll just be smelling the salt and the fish. And Mrs. Brewster is deaf. Do you think Nellie is deaf? Having Nellie at our bedroom door with her young hearing and her five years without a husband, do you think that would spell more privacy for us? Although,” he said, “do you think there could be less privacy?”

Yes, Tatiana wanted to say. Yes. In my communal apartment in Leningrad, where I lived in two rooms with Babushka, Deda, Mama, Papa, my sister, Dasha—remember her?—with my brother, Pasha—remember him? Where the toilet down the hall through the kitchen near the stairs never flushed properly and was never cleaned, and was shared by nine other apartment dwellers. Where there was no hot water for four baths a day, and no gas stove for four lobsters. Where I slept in the same bed with my sister until I was seventeen and she was twenty-four, until the night you took us to the Road of Life. Tatiana barely suppressed her agonized groan.

She could not—would not—she refused to think of Leningrad.

The other way was better. Yes, the other way—without ever speaking.

This bloodletting went on every night. During the day they kept busy, just how they liked it, just how they needed it. Not so long ago Alexander and Tatiana had found each other in another country and then somehow they lived through the war and made it to lupine Deer Isle, neither of them having any idea how, but for three o’clock in the morning, when Anthony woke up and screamed as if he were being cut open, and Alexander convulsed on the bench, and Tatiana thrashed to forget—and then they knew how.

Tainted with the Gulag

He had such an unfailing way with her. “Would you like some more?” he would say, lifting the pitcher of lemonade.

“Yes, please.”

“Would you like to take a walk after dinner? I heard they’re selling something called Italian ices by the bay.”

“Yes, that would be nice.”

“Ant, what do you think?”

“Let’s go. Let’s go now.”

“Well, wait a second, son. Your mother and I have to finish up.” So formal. Mother.

He opened doors for her, he got jars and cans for her off the high shelves in the kitchen. It was so handy him being tall; he was like a step stool.

And she? She did what she always did—for him first. She cooked for him, brought the food to his plate and served him. She poured his drink. She set and cleared his table. She washed his clothes, she folded them. She made their little beds and put clean sheets on them. She made him lunch for the boat, and extra for Jimmy too, because one-handed Jimmy didn’t have a woman to make him a sandwich. She shaved her legs for him, and bathed every day for him, and put satin ribbons in her hair for him.

“Is there anything else you would like?” she asked him. Can I get you something? Would you like another beer? Would you like the first section of the newspaper or the second? Would you like to go swimming? Perhaps raspberry picking? Are you cold? Are you tired? Have you had enough, Alexander? Have—you—had—enough?

“Yes, thank you.”

Or …

“No, I’ll have some more, thanks.”

So courteous. So polite. Straight from the Edith Wharton novels Tania had read during the time of his absence from her life. The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth (ironic).

There were times when Alexander wasn’t unfailingly polite.

Like one particular afternoon when there was no wind and Jimmy was hung over—or was it when Jimmy was hung over and there was no wind? In any case, Alexander had returned early when she wasn’t expecting him and came looking for her when she was still in Nellie’s potato fields. Anthony was inside the house, having milk with Nellie. Tatiana, her hands grimy from the earth, her face flushed, her hair in tangles, stood up in the field to greet him in her sleeveless chintz summer dress, tight in the torso, slim down the hips, open down the neckline. “Hey,” she said with happy surprise. “What are you doing back so early?”

He didn’t speak. He kissed her, and this time it wasn’t calm and it wasn’t without ardor. Tatiana didn’t even have a chance to raise her hands in surrender. He took her deep in the fields, on the ground, covered in potato leaves, the dress becoming as grimy as her hands. The only foreplay was his yanking the dress off her shoulders to bare her breasts to his massive hands and pulling the dress up over her hips.

“Look what you did,” she whispered afterward.

“You look like a peasant milkmaid in that dress.”

“Dress is ruined now.”

“We’ll wash it.” He was still panting but already distant.

Tatiana leaned to him, murmuring softly, looking into his face, trying to catch his eye, hoping for intimacy. “Does the captain like his wife to look like a peasant milkmaid?”

“Well, obviously.” But the captain was already getting up, straightening himself out, giving her his hand to help her off the ground.

Since Alexander came back, Tatiana had become fixated on his hands, and on her own by contrast. His hands were like the platter on which he carried his life. They were large and broad, dark and square, with heavy palms and heavy thumbs, but with long thick flexible fingers—as if he could play the piano as well as haul lobster trawls. They were knuckled and veined, and the palms were calloused. Everything was calloused, even the fingertips, roughened by carrying heavy weapons over thousands of miles, hardened by fighting, burning, logging, burying men. His hands reflected all manner of eternal struggles. You didn’t need to be a soothsayer, or a psychic or a palmreader, you needed not a single glance at the lines in the palms but just one cursory look at the hands and you knew instantly: the man they belonged to had done everything—and was capable of anything.

And then take Tatiana and her own square hands. Among other things, her hands had worked in a weapons factory, they had made bombs and tanks and flamethrowers, worked the fields, mopped floors, dug holes in snow and in the ground. They had pulled sleds along the ice. They had taken care of dead men, of wounded men, of dying men; her hands had known life, and strife—yet they looked like they soaked in milk all day. They were tiny, unblemished, uncalloused, unknuckled, unveined, palms light, fingers slender. She was embarrassed by them—they were soft and delicate like a child’s hands. One would conclude that her hands had never done a day’s work in their life—and couldn’t!

And now, in the middle of the afternoon, after touching her in places unsuitable to the genteel propriety of Nellie’s cultivated potato fields, Alexander gave her his enormous dark hand to help her off the ground, and her white one disappeared into his warm fist as he pulled her to her feet.

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

When they first got to Deer Isle, in the evenings, after Anthony was finally asleep, they climbed up the steep hill to where their Nomad was parked off road near the woods. Once inside, Alexander took the clothes off her—he insisted she be bare for him—though most of the time he did not undress himself, leaving on his T-shirt or his sleeveless tank. Tatiana asked once. Don’t you want to undress, too? He said no. She didn’t ask again. He kissed her; with his hands he touched her to soften her; but never said a word. He never called her name. He would kiss her, clasp her body to him, present himself to her eager mouth—sometimes too forcefully, though she didn’t mind—and then he would deliver himself unto her. She moaned, she couldn’t help herself, and there had once been a time when he lived for her moaning. He himself never made a sound anymore, not before, not during, and not even at the end. He aspirated at the end; made an H. Sometimes not even a capital H.

Many things were gone from them. Alexander didn’t use his mouth on her anymore, or whisper all manner of remarkable things to her anymore, or caress her from top to bottom, or turn the kerosene light on—or even open his eyes.

Shura. Naked in the Nomad was the only time in their new life Tatiana called him by that beloved diminutive now. Sometimes she felt as if he wanted to put his hands to his ears so he wouldn’t hear her. It was dark in the camper, so dark; there was never light to see anything. And he wore his clothes. Shura. I can’t believe I’m touching you again.

There were no Edith Wharton novels in the camper, no Age of Innocence. He took her until she had nothing more to give, but still he took her until there was nothing.

“Soldier, darling, I’m here,” Tatiana would whisper, her arms opened, stretched out to him in helplessness, in surrender.

“I’m here, too,” Alexander would say, not whispering, getting up, getting dressed. “Let’s go back downhill. I hope Anthony is still sleeping.” That was the afterglow. Him giving her his hand to help her up.

She was defenseless, she was starved herself, she was open. She would give it to him any way he needed it, but still …

Oh, it didn’t matter. Just that there was something so soldierly and unhusbandly about how silently and rapaciously Alexander needed to still the cries of war.

Near tears one night, she asked him what was the matter with him—with them—and he replied, “You have become tainted with the Gulag.” And then they were interrupted by a child’s maniacal screams from down below. Already dressed, Alexander ran.

“Mama! Mama!”

Old Mrs. Brewster had trotted into his room, but she only terrified Anthony more.

“MAMA! MAMA!”

Alexander held him, but Anthony didn’t want anyone but his mother.

And when she ran in, he didn’t want her either. He hit her, he turned away from her. He was hysterical. It took her over an hour to calm him down. At four Alexander got up to go to work, and after that night Tatiana and Alexander stopped going to the camper. It stood abandoned in the clearing up the hill between the trees as they, both clothed, and in silence, with a pillow or his lips or his hand over her mouth to stifle her moaning, danced the tango of life, the tango of death, the tango of the Gulag, creaking every desperate bedspring in the twin bed across from Anthony’s restless sleeping.

They tried to come together during the day when the boy wasn’t looking. Trouble was, he was always looking. By the end of long napless Sundays, Alexander was mute with impatience and discontent.

One late Sunday afternoon Anthony was supposed to be in the front yard playing with bugs. Tatiana was supposed to be cooking dinner, Alexander was supposed to be reading the newspaper, but what he was actually doing was sitting beneath her billowing skirts on the narrow wooden chair that leaned against the wall of the kitchen, and she was standing astride him. They were panting, her legs were shaking; he was supporting her shifting weight with his hands on her hips, moving her in spasms. Near the moment of Tatiana’s greatest distress, Anthony walked into the kitchen.

“Mama?”

Tatiana’s mouth opened in a tortured O. Alexander whispered Shh. She held her breath, unable to turn around, overwhelmed by the stillness, the hardness, the fullness of him so thoroughly inside her. She dug her long nails into Alexander’s shoulders and tried not to scream, and all the while Anthony stood behind his mother.

“Anthony,” said Alexander, his voice almost calm. “Can you give us a minute? Go outside. Mommy will be right there.”

“That man, Nick, is in his yard again. He wants a cigarette.”

“Mom will be right there, bud. Go outside.”

“Mama?”

But Tatiana could not turn around, could not speak.

“Go outside, Anthony!” said Alexander.

In the short term, Anthony left, Tatiana took a breath, Alexander took her to the bedroom, barricaded the door, and resolved them, but in the long term she didn’t know what to do.

One thing they didn’t do is talk about it.

“Would you like some more bread, some more wine, Alexander?” she would ask with open hands.

“Yes, thank you, Tatiana,” he would reply with lowered head.

The Captain, the Colonel, and the Nurse

“Dad, can I come on the boat with you?” Anthony turned his face up to his father, sitting next to him at the breakfast table.

“No, bud. It’s dangerous on a lobster boat for a little boy.”

Tatiana studied them both, listening, absorbing.

“I’m not little. I’m big. And I’ll be good. I promise. I’ll help.”

“No, bud.”

Tatiana cleared her throat. “Alexander, if I come, um, I can look after Ant.”

“Jimmy’s never had a woman on his boat before, Tania. He’ll have a heart attack.”

“No, you’re right, of course. Ant, you want some more oatmeal?”

Anthony’s head remained down as he ate his breakfast.

Sometimes the wind was good, and sometimes it wasn’t. Windward, leeward, when there was no wind, it was difficult to trawl, despite Jimmy’s valiant efforts to set the sail. With just the two of them on the boat, Alexander loosened the staysail and while the sloop floated in the Atlantic, they sat and had a smoke.

Jimmy said, “Good God, man, why do you always wear that shirt down to your wrists? You must be dying of heat. Roll it up. Take it off.”

And Alexander said, “Jimmy, man, forget about my shirt, why don’t you get yourself a new boat? You’d make a heap more money. I know this was your old man’s, but do yourself a favor, invest in a fucking boat.”

“I got no money for a new boat.”

“Borrow it from a bank. They’re bending over backwards to help men get on their feet after the war. Get a fifteen-year boat mortgage. With the money you’ll make, you’ll pay it back in two years.”

Jimmy got excited. Suddenly he said, “Go halves with me.”

“What?”

“It’ll be our boat. And we’ll split the profits.”

“Jimmy, I—”

Jimmy jumped up, spilling his beer. “We’ll get another deckhand, another 12-trap trawl; we’ll get a 1300-gallon live tank. You’re right, we’ll make a heap.”

“Jimmy, wait—you have the wrong idea. We’re not staying here.” Alexander sat with the cigarette dangling from his fingers.

Jimmy became visibly upset. “Why would you be leaving? She likes it here, you keep saying so. You’re working, the boy’s doing all right. Why would you go?”

Alexander put the cigarette back in his mouth.

“You’ll have the winters off to do what you want.”

Alexander shook his head.

Jimmy raised his voice. “So why’d you get a job if you were just going to raise anchor in a month?”

“I got a job because I need work. What are we going to live on, your good graces?”

“I haven’t worked full time like this since before the war.” Jimmy spat. “What am I going to do after you leave?”

“Plenty of men are coming back now,” Alexander said. “You’ll get someone else. I’m sorry, Jim.”

Jimmy turned away and started untying the rope from the staysail. “Just great.” He didn’t look at Alexander. “But tell me, who else is going to work like you?”

That evening, as Alexander was sitting in his chair, showing Anthony how to tie a hitch knot through the marlinspike in his hands while they were waiting for Tatiana to go for their evening walk, there was shouting, and what was unusual this time was that a male voice was participating.

Tatiana came out.

“Mama, do you hear? He’s fighting back!”

“I hear, son.” She exchanged a glance with Alexander. “You two ready?”

They walked out the gate and started slowly down the road—all of them trying to hear the words instead of just the raised voices.

“Odd, no?” Alexander said. “The colonel arguing.”

“Yes,” Tatiana said in the tone of someone who was saying, isn’t it fantastic.

He glanced puzzled at her.

They strained to listen. A minute later, the mother came barreling out of the backyard, pushing the wheelchair with Nick in it through the tall grass. She nearly knocked herself and her husband over.

Thrusting the chair into the front yard, she said, “Here, sit! Happy now? You want to sit here all by yourself in the front so that passersby can gawk at you like you’re an animal in a zoo, go ahead. I don’t care anymore. I don’t care about anything.”

“That much is obvious!” the colonel yelled as she stormed away. He was panting.

Tatiana and Alexander lowered their heads. Anthony said, “Hi, Nick.”

“Anthony! Shh.”

Anthony opened the gate and went in. “Want a cigarette? Mama, come here.”

She looked at Alexander. “Can I have a cigarette for him?” she whispered.

But it was Alexander who went to the colonel—his body and face slightly twisted—took out a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and held it to the colonel’s mouth.

The man inhaled, exhaled, but without his previous fervor with Tatiana. He didn’t speak.

Tatiana put her hand on Nick’s shoulder. Anthony brought him a stag beetle, a dead wasp, a raw old potato. “Look,” he said, “look at the wasp.”

Nick looked, but said nothing. The cigarette calmed him down. He had another one.

“Want a drink, Colonel?” Alexander asked suddenly. “There is a bar down on Main Street.”

Nick nodded in the direction of the house. “They won’t let me go.”

“We won’t ask them,” Alexander said. “Imagine their surprise when they come out and find you gone. They’ll think you wheeled yourself down the hill.”

This made Colonel Nicholas Moore smile. “The image of that is worth all the screeching later. OK, let’s go.”

Swezey’s was the only bar in Stonington. Children weren’t allowed in bars.

“I’m going to take Anthony on the swings,” Tatiana said. “You two have fun.”

Inside Alexander ordered two whiskeys. Holding both glasses, he clinked them, and put the drink to Nick’s mouth. The liquor went in one gulp. “Should we order another one?”

“You know,” said Nick, “why don’t you order me a whole bottle? I haven’t had a drink since I got hit eighteen months ago. I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t worry,” Alexander said, and bought Nick and himself a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They sat in the corner, smoking and drinking.

“So what’s the matter with your wife, Colonel?” Alexander asked. “Why is she always so ticked off?”

They were leaning toward each other, the colonel in a wheelchair, the captain by his side.

Nick shook his head. “Look at me. Can you blame her? But not to worry—the army is going to get me a round-the-clock nurse soon. She’ll take care of me.”

They sat.

“Tell me about your wife,” Nick said. “She’s not afraid of me. Not like others around here. She’s seen this before?”

Alexander nodded. “She’s seen this before.”

Nick’s face brightened. “Does she want a job? The army will pay her ten dollars a day for my care. What do you say? A little more money for your family.”

“No,” Alexander said. “She was a nurse long enough. No more nursing for her.” He added, “We don’t need the money, we’re fine.”

“Come on, everyone needs money. You can get yourself your own house instead of living with crazy Janet.”

“And what’s she going to do with the boy?”

“Bring him, too.”

“No.”

Nick fell quiet, but not before making a desperate noise. “We’re on a waiting list for a nurse, but we can’t get one,” he said. “There aren’t enough of them. They’ve all quit. Their men are coming back, they want to have babies, they don’t want their wives to work.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “I don’t want my wife to work. Especially not as a nurse.”

“If I don’t get a nurse, Bessie says she’s going to send me to the Army Hospital in Bangor. Says I’d be better off there.”

Alexander poured more needed drink down the man’s throat.

“They’ll certainly be happier if I’m there,” Nick said.

“They don’t seem like a happy pair.”

“No, no. Before the war, they were great.”

“Where d’you get hit?”

“In Belgium. Battle of the Bulge. And there I was thinking colonels didn’t get hit. Rank Has Its Privileges and all that. But a shell exploded, my captain and lieutenant both died, and I was burned. I would’ve been fine, but I was on the ground for fourteen hours before I got picked up by another platoon. The limbs got infected, couldn’t be saved.”

More drink, more smoke.

Nick said, “They should’ve just left me in the woods. It would’ve been over for me five hundred and fifty days ago, five hundred and fifty nights ago.”

He calmed down by degrees, helped by whiskey and the smokes. Finally he muttered, “She is so good, your wife.”

“Yes,” said Alexander.

“So fresh and young. So lovely to look at.”

“Yes,” said Alexander, closing his eyes.

“And she doesn’t yell at you.”

“No. Though I reckon she sometimes wants to.”

“Oh, to have such restraint in my Bessie. She used to be a fine woman. And the girl was such a loving girl.”

More drink, more smoke.

“But have you noticed since coming back,” said Nick, “that there are things that women just don’t know? Won’t know. They don’t understand what it was like. They see me like this, they think this is the worst. They don’t know. That’s the chasm. You go through something that changes you. You see things you can’t unsee. Then you are sleepwalking through your actual life, shell-shocked. Do you know, when I think of myself, I have legs? In my dreams I’m always marching. And when I wake up, I’m on the floor, I’ve fallen out of bed. I now sleep on the floor because I kept rolling over and falling while dreaming. When I dream of myself, I’m carrying my weapons, and I’m in the back of a battalion. I’m in a tank, I’m yelling, I’m always screaming in my dreams. This way! That way! Fire! Cease! Forward! March! Fire, fire, fire!”

Alexander lowered his head, his arms drooping on the table.

“I wake up and I don’t know where I am. And Bessie is saying, what’s the matter? You’re not paying attention to me. You haven’t said anything about my new dress. You end up living with someone who cooks your food for you and who used to open her legs for you, but you don’t know them at all. You don’t understand them, nor they you. You’re two strangers thrown together. In my dreams, with legs, after marching, I’m always leaving, wandering off, long gone. I don’t know where I am but I’m never here, never with them. Is it like that with you, too?”

Alexander quietly smoked, downing another glass of whiskey, and another. “No,” he finally said. “My wife and I have the opposite problem. She carried weapons and shot at men who came to kill her. She was in hospitals, on battlefields, on frontlines. She was in DP camps and concentration camps. She starved through a frozen, blockaded city. She lost everyone she ever loved.” Alexander took half a glass of sour mash into his throat and still couldn’t keep himself from groaning. “She knows, sees, and understands everything. Perhaps less now, but that’s my fault. I haven’t been much of a—” he broke off. “Much of anything. Our problem isn’t that we don’t understand each other. Our problem is that we do. We can’t look at each other, can’t speak one innocent word, can’t touch each other without touching the cross on our backs. There is simply never any peace.” Another stiff drink went into Alexander’s throat.

Suddenly Tatiana appeared in the dark corner. “Alexander,” she whispered, “it’s eleven o’clock. You have to be up at four.”

He looked up at her bleakly.

She glanced at Nick, who was staring at her with a knowing, full expression. “What have you been telling him?”

“We’ve just been reminiscing,” said the colonel. “About the good old days that brought us here.”

Slightly slurred, Alexander said he would be right back and stood up, knocking over his chair and swaying away. Tatiana was left alone with Nick.

“He tells me you’re a nurse,” Nick said.

“I was.”

He fell silent.

“What do you need?” She placed her hand on him. “What is it?” His moist eyes were pleading. “Do you have morphine?”

Tatiana straightened up. “What’s hurting?”

“Every single fucking thing that’s left of me,” he said. “Got enough morphine for that?”

“Nick …”

“Please. Please. Enough morphine so that I never feel again.”

“Nick, dear God …”

“When it gets unbearable for your husband, he’s got the weapons he cleans, he can just blow his brains out. But what about me?”

Nick couldn’t grab her, but he threw his body forward to her. “Who is going to blow my brains out, Tania?” he whispered.

“Nick, please!” Her hands were propping him up, but he’d had too much to drink and was listing.

Alexander came back, unsteady on his feet. Nick stopped speaking.

Tatiana had to wheel Nick up the steep hill herself because Alexander kept releasing the handlebars and Nick kept rolling back down. It took her a long time to get him to his house. Nick’s wife and daughter were purple with ire. The shrieking would have been sweeter for Tatiana had the colonel not spoken to her, but since he had, and since Alexander himself was too drunk to react to the histrionics of the two women, and since Nick Moore was also in a stupor, the punchline of the joke—a quadruple amputee in a wheelchair vanishing from the front lawn—went unappreciated by all parties, except for Anthony the following day.

The next morning Alexander had three cups of black coffee, staggered to work hung over, could put down only three traps at a time instead of the usual twelve, and came back with barely seventy lobsters, all of them chickens or one-pounders. He refused his pay, fell asleep right after dinner and never woke up until Anthony screamed in the middle of the night.

In the evening after supper, Tatiana went outside with a cup of tea, and Alexander wasn’t there. He and Anthony were with Nick in the next yard. Alexander had even taken his chair. Anthony was looking for bugs, and the two men were talking. Tatiana watched them for a few minutes and then went back inside. She sat down at the empty kitchen table and, surprising herself, burst into tears.

And the next night, and the next. Alexander didn’t even say anything to her. He just went, and he and Nick sat together, while Anthony played nearby. He started leaving his chair on Nick’s front lawn.

After a few days of not being able to stand it, Tatiana made a long distance call to Vikki before breakfast.

Vikki screamed into the phone with joy. “I can’t believe I’m finally hearing from you! What’s wrong with you? How are you? How is Anthony, my big boy? But first, what is wrong with you? You are a terrible friend. You said you’d be calling every week. I haven’t heard from you in over a month!”

“It hasn’t really been a month, has it?”

“Tania! What in heaven’s name have you been doing? No, no, don’t answer that.” Vikki giggled. “How has everything been?” she said in a low, insinuating voice.

“Oh, fine, fine, how’s it with you? How have you been keeping?”

“Never mind me, why haven’t you called me?”

“We’ve been—” Tatiana coughed.

“I know what you’ve been doing, you naughty girl. How is my adored child? How is my beloved boy? You don’t know what you’ve done to me. Tania giveth him and Tania taketh him away. I really miss looking after him. So much so that I’m thinking of having my own baby.”

“Unlike mine, Gelsomina,” said Tatiana, “your own child you’re going to have to keep forever. No giving him away like a puppy. And he’s not going to be as nice as Antman.”

“Who ever could be?”

They talked about Vikki’s nursing, about Deer Isle, about the boats, and the swings, and Edward Ludlow, and about a new man in Vikki’s life (“An officer! You’re not the only one who can take up with an officer”), and about New York (“Can’t walk any street without getting your shoes dirty with construction debris”), about her grandparents (“They’re fine, they’re trying to fatten me up, they say I’m too tall and skinny. Like if they feed me, I’ll get shorter”) and about the new short teased haircuts and new stilettos, and new fandango dresses and suddenly—“Tania? Tania, what’s the matter?”

Tatiana was crying into the phone.

“What’s the matter? What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing. Just … nice to hear your voice. I miss you very much.”

“So when are you coming back? I can’t live without you in our empty apartment,” said Vikki. “Absolutely can’t. Can’t do without your bread, without your boyzie-boy, without seeing your face. Tania, you’ve ruined me for other girls.” She laughed. “Now tell Vikki what’s wrong.”

Tatiana wiped her eyes. “Are you thinking of moving out of the apartment?”

“Moving, are you joking? Where am I going to find a three-bedroom in New York? You can’t imagine what’s happened to apartment prices since the war ended. Now stop changing the subject and tell me what’s the matter.”

“Really. I’m fine. I just …” Anthony was by her feet. She blew her nose and tried to calm down. She couldn’t speak aloud about Alexander in front of his son.

“You know who’s been calling for you? Your old friend Sam.”

“What?” Tatiana instantly stopped crying. She became alert. Sam Gulotta was her contact at the State Department for the years she had been trying to find Alexander. Sam knew very well Alexander had been found; why would he be calling for her? Her stomach dropped.

“Yes, calling for you. Looking for Alexander.”

“Oh.” Tatiana tried to keep her voice careless. “Did he say why?”

“He said something about the State Department needing to talk to Alexander. He was adamant that you call him. He’s been adamant every time he called.”

“How many times, um, has he called?”

“Oh, I don’t know, try … every day?”

“Every day?” Tatiana was stunned and frightened.

“That’s right. Every day. Adamant every day. That’s too much adamant for me, Tania. I keep telling him, as soon as I hear from you, I’ll give him a call, but he doesn’t believe me. Do you want his number?”

“I have Sam’s number,” she said slowly. “I’ve called him so many times over the years, I have it committed to memory.”

When Alexander first returned home, they had gone to Washington to thank Sam for helping with Alexander’s return. Sam had mentioned something about a mandatory debriefing by the State Department, but he had said it calmly and without haste, and added that it was summer and vital people were away. When they had left Sam at the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial, he didn’t say another word about it. So why such urgency now? Did this have anything to do with the reversal of friendly relations between two recent war allies, the United States and the Soviet Union?

“Call Sam, please, so he stops calling me. Although …” Vikki’s voice lowered a notch into flirtation territory. “Perhaps we should let him continue calling me? He’s a cutie-pie.”

“He’s a 37-year-old widower with kids, Vikki,” said Tatiana. “You can’t have him without becoming a mother, too.”

“Well, I’ve always wanted a child.”

“He has two children.”

“Oh, just stop it. Promise you’re going to call him?”

“I will.”

“Will you give our boyzie-boy a kiss from me the size of Montana?”

“Yes.” When Tatiana went to Germany to search for Alexander, it was Vikki who took care of Anthony. She had grown very attached to him. “I can’t call Sam right away,” Tatiana said. “I have to talk to Alexander about it first when he comes home tonight, so do me a favor, if Sam calls again, just say you haven’t spoken to me yet, and you don’t know where I am. All right?”

“Why?”

“I just … I need to talk to Alexander, and then sometimes we can’t get the phone to work. I don’t want Sam to panic, so hang tight, okay? Please don’t say anything.”

“Tania, you’re not very trusting, that’s your problem. That’s always been your problem. You’ve always been suspicious of people.”

“I’m not. I’m just … suspicious of their intentions.”

“Well, Sam wouldn’t do anything to …”

“Sam’s not running the State Department, is he?” said Tatiana.

“So?”

“He can’t vouch for everyone. Haven’t you been reading the papers?”

“No!” Vikki said proudly.

“The State Department is afraid of espionage on all fronts. I must talk to Alexander about this, see what he thinks.”

“This is Sam! He didn’t help you get Alexander back home just to accuse him of espionage.”

“I repeat, is Sam running the State Department?” Tatiana felt apprehension she could not explain to Vikki. In the 1920s Alexander’s mother and father belonged to the Communist Party of the United States. Harold Barrington got himself into quite a bit of trouble stateside. Suddenly Harold’s son was back in America just as tension between the two nations was escalating. What if the son had to pay for the sins of the father? As if he hadn’t paid enough—and by the looks of him indeed he had. “I have to run,” Tatiana said, glancing at Anthony and squeezing her hands around the phone. “I’ll talk to Alexander tonight. Promise you won’t say anything to Sam?”

“Only if you promise to come and visit me as soon as you leave Maine.”

“We’ll try, Gelsomina,” said Tatiana, hanging up. I will try someday to make that promise.

Shaking, she called Esther Barrington, Alexander’s aunt, his father’s sister, who lived in Massachusetts. She called ostensibly to say hello, but really to find out if anyone had contacted Esther about Alexander. They hadn’t. Small relief.

That evening over lobsters, Anthony said, “Dad, Mama called Vikki today.”

“She did?” Alexander looked up from his plate. His eyes probed her face. “Well, that’s great. How is Vikki?”

“Vikki is good. Mama cried though. Two times.”

“Anthony!” Tatiana lowered her head.

“What? You did cry.”

“Anthony, please, can you go and ask Mrs. Brewster if she wants some dinner now or if I should keep it in the oven for her?”

Anthony disappeared. Acutely feeling Alexander’s silence, Tatiana got up to go to the sink, but before she could utter a word of defense for her tears, Anthony reappeared.

“Mrs. Brewster is bleeding,” he said.

They rushed upstairs. Mrs. Brewster told them her son, newly returned from prison, beat her to get the rent money Alexander was paying. Tatiana tried to clean up the old lady with rags.

“He’s not staying with me. He’s staying down the road with friends.” Could Alexander help her with her son? Since he’d been in prison too, he should understand how things were. “I don’t see you beatin’ your wife, though.” Could Alexander ask her son not to beat her anymore? She wanted to keep her rent money. “He’s just going to spend it on filthy drink, like always, and then get hisself into trouble. I don’t know what you was in for, but he was in the pen for assault with a deadly weapon. Drunken assault.”

Alexander left to go next door to sit with Nick, but late that night he told Tatiana he was going to talk to Mrs. Brewster’s son.

“No.”

“Tania, I don’t like her either, but what kind of a fucked-up loser beats his own mother? I’m going to talk to him.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. You’re too tightly wound.”

“I’m not tightly wound,” Alexander said slowly, into her back. “I’m just going to talk to him, that’s all, man to man. I’ll tell him beating his mother is not acceptable.” They were whispering in the dark, the beds pushed together, Anthony lightly snoring by Tatiana’s side.

“And he says to you, screw you, mister. Stay out of my business. And then what?”

“Good question. But perhaps he’ll be reasonable.”

“You think so? He beats his mother to take her money!” Sighing, Tatiana twitched in the middle between her two men.

“Well, we can’t just do nothing.”

“Yes, we can. Let’s not ask for someone else’s trouble.” We’ve got plenty. She didn’t know how to bring up Sam Gulotta, cold terror gluing his name to her throat. She tried to keep thinking about someone else’s troubles. She didn’t want Alexander near that woman’s son. But what to do?

“You’re right,” Tatiana finally said with a throat clearing. “We can’t do nothing. You know what? I think I’ll go and speak to him. I’m a woman. I’m little. I’ll talk to him nicely, the way I talk to everybody. He’s not going to get rough with me.”

She felt Alexander stiffen behind her. “Are you joking?” he whispered. “He beats his mother! Don’t even think of coming close to him.”

“Shh. It’ll be okay. Really.”

He turned her around to face him. “I’m serious,” he said, his eyes on her unblinking and intense. “Don’t take one step in his direction. Not one step. Because a syllable out of him against you, and he won’t be speaking to anyone ever again, and I’ll be in an American prison. Is that what you want?”

“No, darling,” she said softly. He was talking! He was animated. He had raised his whispering voice! She kissed his face, kissed him and kissed him, until he kissed her back, his hands pacing over her nightgown.

“Have I mentioned how much I hate you wearing clothes in my bed?”

“I know, but there’s a little boy with us,” she whispered. “I can’t be naked next to him.”

“You don’t fool me,” Alexander said heavily.

“Darling, it’s the boy,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Besides, my slip is made of silk, not burlap. Have you noticed I’m naked underneath?”

Alexander slipped his hands under. “Why were you crying with Vikki?” Something cool and unwelcome got into his voice. “What, you miss your New York?”

Guiltily Tatiana glanced at him. Lonely she glanced at him. “Why do you keep going next door every night?” she whispered, moaning lightly.

Alexander took his hands away. “Come on. You’ve seen Nick’s family. I’m the only one he can talk to. He’s got nobody besides me.”

Me neither, Tatiana thought, the hot hurt of it burning her eyes.

She couldn’t say anything to Alexander about Sam Gulotta and the State Department. There was no more room on his cold plate of anguish.

The next evening Anthony wandered back by himself after only half an hour outside with his father and the colonel. The sun had set and the mosquitoes were out. Tatiana bathed him, and as she was applying Calamine lotion to his bites, she asked, “Ant, what do Daddy and Nick talk about?”

“I don’t know,” Anthony said vaguely. “War. Fighting.”

“What about tonight? Why did you come back so early?”

“Nick keeps asking Dad for something.”

“What does he keep asking Dad for?”

“To kill him.”

A crouching Tatiana staggered backward, nearly falling on the floor. “What?”

“Don’t be upset with Dad. Please.”

She patted him. “Anthony … you’re a good boy.”

Seeing the crashed look on his mother’s face Anthony began to whimper.

She took him in her arms. “Shh. Everything is going to be all right, son.”

“Dad says he doesn’t want to kill him.”

Tatiana quickly dressed the boy for bed. “You wait here, you promise? Don’t go outside in your nightshirt. Stay in your bed and look at your book of boats and fish.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get Daddy.”

“Are you going to … come right back after you get Dad?” he said uncertainly.

“Of course. Anthony, of course. I’ll be right back.”

“Are you going to yell at him?”

“No, son.”

“Mama, please don’t be mad if he killed the colonel.”

“Shh. Look at your book. I’ll be right back.”

Tatiana got her nurse’s bag from the closet. It took her a few minutes to compose herself, but finally she walked determined down the road.

“Uh-oh,” said Nick when he saw her. “I think there’s going to be some hollerin’.”

“There isn’t,” Tatiana said coldly, opening the gate.

“It’s not his fault,” Nick said. “It’s mine. I’ve kept him.”

“My husband is a big boy,” she said. “He knows when enough is enough.” She looked at Alexander accusingly. “But he does forget that his son speaks English and hears every word the adults say.”

Alexander got up. “On that note, good night, Nick.”

“Leave the chair,” said Tatiana. “Go. Ant is by himself.”

“You’re not coming?”

“I’m going to talk to Nick for a minute.” She looked steadily at Alexander. “Go on. I’ll be right along.”

Alexander didn’t move. “What are you doing?” he said quietly.

She could see he wasn’t going to go and she wasn’t going to argue in front of a stranger. Though an argument would’ve been nice. “Nothing. I’m going to talk to Nick.”

“No, Tania. Come.”

“You don’t even know what—”

“I don’t care. Come.”

Ignoring his outstretched hand, she sat down in the chair and turned to the colonel. “I know what you’re talking to my husband about,” Tatiana said. “Stop it.”

Nick shook his head. “You’ve been at war. Don’t you understand anything?”

“Everything,” she said. “You can’t ask this of him. It’s not right.”

“Right?” he cried. “You want to talk about what’s right?”

“I do,” said Tatiana. “I’ve got a few things I’m trying to set right myself. But you went to the front, and you got hurt. That’s the price you paid to keep your wife and daughter from speaking German. When they stop grieving for you, they’ll be better. I know it’s hard now, but it will get better.”

“It’ll never get better. You think I don’t know what I was fighting for? I know. I’m not complaining about it. Not about that. But this isn’t life, not for me, not for my wife. This is just bullshit, pardon my language.” Because he could do nothing else, Nick heaved himself out of his chair onto the grass. Tatiana gasped. Alexander picked him up, put him back into his chair. “All I want is to die,” Nick said, panting. “Can’t you see it?”

“I see it,” she said in a low voice. “But leave my husband alone.”

“No one else will help me!” Nick tried to throw himself on the ground again, but Tatiana kept a firm arm on him.

“He won’t help you either,” she said. “Not with this.”

“Why not? Have you asked him how many of his own men he had shot to spare them agony?” Nick cried. “What, he hasn’t told you? Tell her, Captain. You shot them without thinking twice. Why won’t you do it for me now? Look at me!”

Tatiana stared at a darkly grim Alexander and then at Nick. “I know about my husband at war,” she said, her voice shaking. “But you leave him alone. He needs peace, too.”

“Please, Tania,” Nick whispered, bending his head into her hand. “Look at me. My revels now are ended. Have mercy on me. Just give me the morphine. It’s not violent, I’ll feel no pain. I’ll just drift off. It’s kind. It’s right.”

Tatiana looked questioningly up at Alexander.

“I’m begging you,” said Nick, seeing her vacillation.

Alexander pulled Tatiana up out of the chair. “Stop this, both of you,” he said, in a voice that brooked no argument, not even from the colonel. “You two have lost your minds. Good night.”

Later, in bed, they didn’t speak for a long while. Tatiana was scooped narrowly into him.

“Tania … tell me, were you going to kill Nick so that I wouldn’t spend any more time with him?”

“Don’t be ridi—” she broke off. “The man is dying. The man wants to be dead. Can’t you see that?”

With difficulty came Alexander’s reply. “I see it.”

Oh God.

“Help him, Alexander,” said Tatiana. “Take him to Bangor, to the Army Hospital. I know he doesn’t want to go, but he needs to go. The nurses are trained to take care of people like him. They will put the cigarettes in his mouth, they will read to him. They will care for him. He will live.” That man can’t be around you. You can’t be around him.

Alexander stopped talking. “Should I go to Bangor Hospital, too?” he asked.

“No, darling, no, Shura,” she whispered. “You have your own nurse right here. Round the clock.”

“Tania …”

“Please … shh.” They were whispering desperately, he into her hair, she into the pillow in front of her.

“Tania, would you … do it for me, if I asked? If I was … like him—”

He broke off.

“Faster than you can say Sachsenhausen.”

Click click somewhere, crickets crickets, bats and wings, Anthony snoring in the silence, in the sorrow. There was once so much Tatiana could help Alexander with. Why couldn’t she do it anymore?

Soundlessly she cried, only her shoulders quaking.

The next day Alexander took the colonel to the Bangor Army Hospital, four hours away. They left in the early morning. Tatiana filled their flasks, made them sandwiches, and washed and ironed Alexander’s khaki fatigues and a long-sleeved crew.

Before he left he asked, crouching by Anthony’s small frame, “You want me to bring you something back?”

“Yes, a toy soldier,” replied Anthony.

“You got it.” Alexander ruffled his hair and straightened up. “What about you?” he asked Tatiana, coming close to her.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she said, purposefully casual. “I don’t need anything.” She was trying to look beyond his bronze eyes, into somewhere deeper, somewhere that would tell her what he was thinking, what he was feeling, trying to reach across the ocean waters she could not traverse.

Nick was already in the camper, and his wife and daughter were milling nearby. Too many people around. The backs of Alexander’s fingers stroked her cheek. “Be a good girl,” he said, kissing her hand. She pressed her forehead into his chest for a moment before he stepped away.

When he was near the cab of the Nomad, he turned around. Tatiana, standing still and erect, squeezed hard Anthony’s hand, but that was the only indication of the turmoil within her, for to Alexander she presented herself straight and true. She even managed to smile. She blew him a kiss. Her hand went up to her temple in a trembling salute.

Alexander didn’t come back that night.

Tatiana didn’t sleep.

He didn’t come back the next morning.

Or the next afternoon.

Or the next evening.

She searched through his things and saw that his weapons were gone. Only her pistol remained, the German-issue P-38 he gave her in Leningrad. It was wrapped in a towel near a large wad of bills—extra money he had made from Jimmy and left for her.

She slept in a stupor next to Anthony in his twin bed.

The next morning Tatiana went down to the docks. Jimmy’s sloop was there, and Jimmy was doing his best to repair some damage to the side. “Hey, little guy,” he said to Anthony. “Your dad back yet? I gotta go and get me some lobsters or I’m gonna go broke.”

“He’s not back yet,” said Anthony. “But he’s going to bring me a toy soldier.”

Tatiana wavered on her calf legs. “Jim, he didn’t say anything to you about how many days he was going to take off?”

Jimmy shook his head. “He did say if I wanted to, I could hire one of the other guys coming here looking for work. If he doesn’t come back soon, I’m gonna do it. I gotta get back out there.”

The morning was dazzling.

Tatiana, dragging Anthony by the hand, practically ran uphill to Bessie’s and knocked until Bessie woke up and came miserably to the door. Tatiana, without apologizing for the early call, asked if Bessie had heard from Nick or from the hospital.

“No,” Bessie said gruffly. Tatiana refused to leave until Bessie called the hospital, only to find out that the colonel had been admitted without incident two days ago. The man who brought him stayed for one day and then left. No one knew anything else about Alexander.

Another day passed.

Tatiana sat on the bench by the bay, by the morning water, and watched her son push himself on a tire swing. Her arms were twisted around her stomach. She was trying not to rock like Alexander rocked at three o’clock in the morning.

Has he left me? Did he kiss my hand and go?

No. It wasn’t possible. Something’s happened. He can’t cope, can’t make it, can’t find a way out, a way in. I know it. I feel it. We thought the hard part was over—but we were wrong. Living is the hardest part. Figuring out how to live your life when you’re all busted up inside and out—there is nothing harder. Oh dear God. Where is Alexander?

She had to go to Bangor immediately. But how? She didn’t have a car; would she and Ant go there by bus? Would they leave Stonington for good, leave their things? And go where? But she had to do something, she couldn’t just continue to sit here!

She was clenched inside, outside.

She had to be strong for her son.

She had to be resolute for him.

Everything was going to be all right.

Like a mantra. Over and over.

This is my vicious dream, Tatiana’s entire body shouted. I thought it was like a dream that he was with me again, and I was right, and now I’ve opened my eyes, and he’s gone like before.

Tatiana was watching Anthony swing, looking beyond him, dreaming of one man, imagining only one other heart in the vastness of the universe—then, now, as ever. She still flew to him.

Is he still alive?

Am I still alive?

She thought so. No one could hurt this much and be dead.

“Mama, are you watching me? I’m going to spin and spin and spin until I get dizzy and fall down. Whee! Are you watching? Watch, Mama!”

Her eyes were glazed over. “I’m watching, Antman. I’m watching.”

The air smelled so August, the sun shone so brightly, the pines, the elms, the cones, the sea, the spinning boy, just three, the young mother, not even twenty-three.

Tatiana had imagined her Alexander since she was a child, before she believed that someone like him was even possible. When she was a little girl, she dreamed of a fine world in which a good man walked its winding roads, perhaps somewhere in his wandering soul searching for her.

On the Banks of the Luga River, 1938

Tatiana’s world was perfect.

Life may not have been perfect; far from it. But in the summer, when the day began almost before the last day ended, when the crickets sang all night and cows mooed before dreams fled, when the smells of summer June in the village of Luga were sharp—the cherry and the lilacs and the nettles in the soul from dawn to dusk—when you could lie in the narrow bed by the window and read books about the Grand Adventure of Life and no one disturbed you—the air so still, the branches rustling and, not far, the Luga River rushing—then the world was a perfect place.

And this morning young Tatiana was skipping down the road, carrying two pails of milk from Berta’s cow. She was humming, the milk was spilling, she was hurrying so she could bring the milk back and climb into bed and read her marvelous book, but she couldn’t help skipping, and the milk couldn’t help spilling. She stopped, lowered the rail over her shoulders onto the ground, picked up one pail and drank the warm milk from it, picked up the other and drank some more. Replacing the rail around her shoulders she started skipping again.

Tatiana was one elongated reedy limb from toe to fingers, all one straight line, feet, knees, thighs, hips, ribs, chest, shoulders, a stalk, tapering off in a slender neck and expanding into a round Russian face with a high forehead, a strong jaw, a pink smiling mouth and white teeth. Her eyes glinted green with mischief, her cheeks and small nose were drowned in freckles. The joyous face was framed with white blonde hair, just wispy feathers falling on her shoulders. No one could sit by Tatiana without caressing her silky head.

“TATIANA!” The scream from the porch.

Except maybe Dasha.

Dasha was always shouting. Tatiana, this, Tatiana, that. She is going to have to learn to relax and lower her voice, Tatiana thought. Though why should she? Everyone in Tatiana’s family hollered. How else could one possibly be heard? There were so many of them. Well, her gray quiet grandfather managed somehow. Tatiana managed—somehow. But everyone else, her mother, her father, her sister, even her brother, Pasha—what did he have to shout about?—shouted as if they were just coming into the world.

The children played noisily and the grown-ups fished and grew vegetables in their yards. Some had cows, some had goats; they bartered cucumbers for milk and milk for grain; they milled their own rye and made their own pumpernickel bread. The chickens laid eggs and the eggs were bartered for tea with people from the cities, and once in a while someone brought sugar and caviar from Leningrad. Chocolate was as rare and expensive as diamonds, which was why when Tatiana’s father—who had left for a business trip to Poland recently— asked his children what they wanted for gifts, Dasha instantly said chocolate. Tatiana wanted to say chocolate, too, but instead said, maybe a nice dress, Papa? All her dresses were hand-me-downs from Dasha and much too big.

“TATIANA!” Dasha’s voice was now coming from the yard.

Turning her reluctant head, Tatiana leveled her bemused gaze at her sister, standing at the gate with her exasperated arms at her large hips. “Yes, Dasha?” she said softly. “What is it?”

“I’ve been calling you for ten minutes! I’m hoarse from shouting! Did you hear me?” Dasha was taller than Tatiana, and full-figured; her unruly curly brown hair was tied up in a ponytail, her brown eyes indignant.

“No, I didn’t hear,” Tatiana said. “Next time, maybe shout louder.”

“Where have you been? You’ve been gone two hours—to get milk from five houses up the road!”

“Where’s the fire?”

“Stop it with your fresh lip this instant! I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Dasha,” said Tatiana philosophically, “Blanca Davidovna says that Christ says that blessed are the patient.”

“Oh, you’re a fine one to talk, you’re the most impatient person I know.”

“Well, tell that to Berta’s cow. I was waiting for it to come back from pasture.”

Dasha took the pails off Tatiana’s shoulders. “Berta and Blanca fed you, didn’t they?”

Tatiana rolled her eyes. “They fed me, they kissed me, they sermonized me. And it’s not even Sunday. I’m fed and cleansed and one with the Lord.” She sighed. “Next time you can go get your own milk, you impatient heathen.”

Tatiana was three weeks from fourteen, while Dasha had turned twenty-one in April. Dasha thought she was Tatiana’s second mother. Their grandmother thought she was Tatiana’s third mother. The old ladies who gave Tatiana milk and talked to her about Jesus thought they were her fourth, fifth and sixth mothers. Tatiana felt that she barely needed the one loud exasperated mother she had—thankfully in Leningrad at the moment. But Tatiana knew that for one reason or another, through no fault of her own, women, sisters, other people felt a need to mother her, smother her more like it, squeeze her in their big arms, braid her wispy hair, kiss her freckles, and pray to their God for her.

“Mama left me in charge of you and Pasha,” Dasha declared autocratically. “And if you’re going to give me your attitude, I won’t tell you the news.”

“What news?” Tatiana jumped up and down. She loved news.

“Not telling.”

Tatiana skipped after Dasha up the porch and into their house. Dasha put the pails down. Tatiana was wearing a little-girl sundress and bouncing up and down. Without warning she flung herself onto her sister, who was nearly knocked to the floor before she caught her footing.

“You shouldn’t do that!” Dasha said but not angry. “You’re getting too big.”

“I’m not too big.”

“Mama is going to kill me,” said Dasha, patting Tatiana’s behind. “All you do is sleep and read and disobey. You don’t eat, you’re not growing. Look how tiny you are.”

“I thought you just said I was too big.” Tatiana’s arms were around Dasha’s neck.

“Where’s your crazy brother?”

“He went fishing at dawn,” Tatiana said. “Wanted me to come too. Me get up at dawn. I told him what I thought of that.”

Dasha squeezed her. “Tania, I have kindling that’s fatter than you. Come and eat an egg.”

“I’ll eat an egg if you tell me your news,” said Tatiana, kissing her sister’s cheek, then the other cheek. Kiss kiss kiss. “You should never keep good news all to yourself, Dasha. That’s the rule: Bad news only to yourself but good news to everybody.”

Dasha set her down. “I don’t know if it’s good news but … We have new neighbors,” she said. “The Kantorovs have moved in next door.”

Tatiana widened her eyes. “You don’t say,” she said in a shocked voice, grabbing her face. “Not the Kantorovs!”

“That’s it, I’m not speaking to you anymore.”

Tatiana laughed. “You say the Kantorovs as if they are the Romanovs.”

In a thrilled tone, Dasha continued. “It’s rumored they’re from Central Asia! Turkmenistan, maybe? Isn’t that exciting? Apparently they have a girl—a girl for you to play with.”

“That’s your news?” said Tatiana. “A Turkmeni girl for me to play with? Dasha, you’ve got to do better than that. I have a village-full of girls and boys to play with—who speak Russian. And cousin Marina is coming in two weeks.”

“They also have a son.”

“So?” Tatiana looked Dasha over. “Oh. I see. Not my age. Your age.”

Dasha smiled. “Yes, unlike you, some of us are interested in boys.”

“So really, it’s not my news. It’s your news.”

“No. The girl is for you.”

Tatiana went with Dasha on the porch to eat a hard-boiled egg. She had to admit she was excited, too. New people didn’t come to the village very often. Never actually. The village was small, the houses were let out for years to the same people, who grew up, had children, grew old.

“Did you say they moved in next door?”

“Yes.”

“Where the Pavlovs lived?”

“Not anymore.”

“What happened to them?”

“I don’t know. They’re not there.”

“Well, obviously. But what happened to them? Last summer they were here.”

“Fifteen summers they were here.”

“Fifteen summers,” Tatiana corrected herself, “and now new people have moved into their house? Next time you’re in town, stop by the local Soviet council and ask the Commissar what happened to the Pavlovs.”

“Are you out of your mind, such as it is? I’m going to the Soviet to ask where the Pavlovs went? Just eat, will you? Have the egg. Stop asking so many questions. I’m tired of you already and it’s only morning.”

Tatiana was sitting, cheeks like a chipmunk, the whole egg uneaten in her mouth, her eyes twinkling. Dasha laughed, pulling Tatiana to herself. Tatiana moved away. “Stay still,” said Dasha. “I have to rebraid your hair, it’s a mess. What are you reading now, Tanechka?” she asked as she started unbraiding it. “Anything good?”

“Queen Margot. It’s the best book.”

“Never read it. What’s it about?”

“Love,” said Tatiana. “Oh, Dasha—you’ve never dreamed of such love! A doomed soldier La Môle falls in love with Henry IV’s unhappy Catholic wife, Queen Margot. Their impossible love will break your heart.”

Dasha laughed. “Tania, you are the funniest girl I know. You know absolutely nothing about anything, yet talk in thrall of words of love on a page.”

“Obviously you’ve never read Queen Margot,” Tatiana said calmly. “It’s not words of love.” She smiled. “It’s a song of love.”

“I don’t have the luxury of reading about love. All I do is take care of you.”

“You leave a little time for some nighttime social interaction.”

Dasha pinched her. “Everything is a joke to you. Well, just you wait, missy. Someday you won’t think that social interaction is so funny.”

“Maybe, but I’ll still think you’re so funny.”

“I’ll show you funny.” Dasha knocked her back on the couch. “You urchin,” she said. “When are you going to grow up? Come, I can’t wait for your impossible brother anymore. Let’s go meet your new best friend, Mademoiselle Kantorova.”

Saika Kantorova.

The summer of 1938, when she turned fourteen, was the summer that Tatiana grew up.

The people who moved in next door were nomads, drifters from parts of the world far removed from Luga. They had odd Central Asian names. The father, Murak Kantorov, too young to be retired, mumbled that he was a retired army man. But his black hair was long and tied in a ponytail. Did soldiers have long hair like that? The mother, Shavtala, said she was a non-retired teacher “of sorts.” The nineteen-year-old son, Stefan, and the fifteen-year-old daughter, Saika, said nothing except to pronounce Saika’s name. “Sah-EE-ka.”

Was it true that they came from Turkmenistan? Sometimes. Georgia? Occasionally. The Kantorovs answered all questions with vagueness.

Usually new people were friendlier, not as watchful or silent. Dasha tried. “I’m a dental assistant. I’m twenty-one. What about you, Stefan?”

Dasha was already flirting! Tatiana coughed loudly. Dasha pinched her. Tatiana wanted to make a joke, but there didn’t seem to be any room for jokes in the crowded dark room where too many people stood awkwardly. The sun was blazing outside, yet inside, the unwashed curtains were drawn over the filthy windows. The Kantorovs had not unpacked their suitcases. The house had been left furnished by the Pavlovs, who seemed not so much to have left as to have stepped out.

There were some new things on the mantel. Photos, pictures, strange sculptures and small gilded paintings, like icons, though not of Jesus or Mary … but of things with wings.

“Did you know the Pavlovs?” asked Tatiana.

“Who?” the father said gruffly.

“The Pavlovs. This was their house.”

“Well, it’s not their house anymore, is it?” said the raven mother.

“They won’t be back,” said Murak. “We have papers from the Soviet. We are registered to stay here. Why so many questions from a child? Who wants to know?” He pretended to smile.

Tatiana pretended to smile back.

When they were outside, Dasha hissed, “Stop it! I can’t believe you’re already starting with your inane questions. Keep quiet, or I swear I’ll tell Mama when she comes.”

Dasha, Stefan, Tatiana and Saika stood in the sunlight.

Tatiana said nothing. She wasn’t allowed to ask questions.

Finally Stefan smiled at Dasha.

Saika watched Tatiana guardedly.

It was at that moment that Pasha, little and fast, ran up the steps of the house, shoved a bucket with three striped bass into Tatiana’s body and said loudly, “Ha, little smart Miss Know-it-nothing, look what I caught today—”

“Pasha, meet our new neighbors,” interrupted Dasha. “Pasha—this is Stefan, and Saika. Saika is your age.”

Now Saika smiled. “Hello, Pasha,” she said.

Pasha smiled broadly back. “Well, hello, Saika.”

“And how old are you?” Saika said, appraising him.

“Well, I’m the same age as this one over here.” Dark-haired Pasha pulled hard on Tatiana’s blonde braid. She shoved him. “We’re fourteen soon.”

“You’re twins!” exclaimed Saika, looking at them intently. “What do you know. Obviously not identical.” She smirked. “Well, well. You seem so much older than your sister.”

“Oh, he is so much older than me,” said Tatiana. “Nine minutes older.”

“You seem older than that, Pasha.”

“How much older do I seem, Saika?” Pasha grinned. She grinned back.

“Like twelve minutes older,” Tatiana grumbled, stifling the desire to roll her eyes, and “accidentally” tripping over the bucket, spilling his precious fish onto the grass. Pasha’s attention was loudly and properly diverted.

To wake up and be still with the morning, to wake up and feel the sun, to not do, to not think, to not fret. Tatiana lived in Luga unbothered by the weather, for when it rained she read, and when it was sunny she swam. She lived in Luga unbothered by life: she never thought about what she wore, for she had nothing, or what she ate, because it was always adequate. She lived in Luga in timeless childhood bliss without a past and without a future. She thought there was nothing in the world that a summer in Luga could not cure.

The Last Snow, 1946

“Mama, Mama!”

Shuddering she came to and swirled around. Anthony was running, pointing to the sloping hill, down which walked Alexander. He was wearing the clothes he left in.

Tatiana got up. She wanted to run to him, too, but her legs wouldn’t carry her. They couldn’t even support her standing. Anthony, the brave boy, jumped straight into his father’s arms.

Carrying his son, Alexander walked to Tatiana on the pebbled beach and set him down.

“Hey, babe,” he said.

“Hey,” she said, barely able to keep her composed face.

Unshaven and unclean, Alexander stood and stared at her with gaunt black rings under his eyes, with a barely composed face of his own. Tatiana forgot about herself and went to him. He bent deeply to her, his face pressed into her neck, into the braids of her hair. Her feet remained on the ground and her arms were around him. Tatiana felt such black despair coming from Alexander that she started to convulse.

Gripping her tighter, his arms surrounding her, he whispered, “Shh, shh, come on, the boy …” When he released her, Tatiana didn’t look up, not wanting him to see the fear for him in her eyes. There was no relief. But he was with her.

Tugging on his father’s arm, Anthony asked, “Dad, why did you take so long to come back? Mama was so worried.”

“Was she? I’m sorry Mommy was worried,” Alexander said, not looking at her. “But, Ant, toy soldiers aren’t easy to come by.” He took out three from his bag. Anthony squealed.

“Did you bring Mama anything?”

“I didn’t want anything,” said Tatiana.

“Did you want this?” He took out four heads of garlic.

She attempted a smile.

“What about this?” He took out two bars of good chocolate.

She attempted another smile.

As they were walking up the hill, Alexander, carrying Anthony, gave Tatiana his arm. Putting her arm through his, she pressed herself against him for a moment before walking on.

Alexander was cleaned, bathed, shaved, fed. Now in their little narrow bed she was lying on top of him, kissing him, cupping him, caressing him, carrying on, crying over him. He lay motionless, soundless, his eyes closed. The more clutching and desperate her caresses became, the more like a stone he became, until finally, he pushed her off himself. “Come on now,” he said. “Stop it. You’ll wake the boy.”

“Darling, darling …” she was whispering, reaching for him.

“Stop it, I said.” He took her hands off him.

“Take off your vest, darling,” Tatiana whispered, crying. “Look, I’ll take off my nightgown, I’ll be naked, like you like …”

He stopped her. “No, I’m exhausted. You’ll wake the boy. The bed creaks too much. You’re making too much noise. Stop crying, I said; stop carrying on.”

She didn’t know what to do. Caressing him until he was swollen in her hands, she asked if he wanted something from her. He shrugged.

Trembling, she put him in her mouth but couldn’t continue; she was choking, she was so sad. Alexander sighed.

Getting off the bed, he brought her down to the plank wood floor, turned her on her hands and knees, told her to keep quiet, and took her from behind, holding her at the small of her back with one hand and at her hip with the other to keep her steady. When he was done, he got up, got back into bed, and never made a sound.

After that night, Tatiana lost her ability to talk to him. That he wouldn’t just tell her what was going on with him was one thing. But the fact that she couldn’t find the courage to ask was wholly another. The silence between them grew in black chasms.

For three subsequent evenings, Alexander wouldn’t stop cleaning his weapons. That he had the weapons was troubling enough, but he wouldn’t part with any of the ones he brought back from Germany, not the remarkable Colt M1911 .45 caliber pistol she had bought for him, not the Colt Commando, not even the 9mm P-38. The M1911, the king of pistols, was Alexander’s favorite—Tatiana could tell by how long he cleaned it. She would go to put Anthony to bed, and when she returned outside, he would still be sitting in the chair, sliding the magazine in and out, cocking it, putting the safety on it and back again, wiping all the parts with cloth.

For three subsequent evenings Alexander wouldn’t touch her. Tatiana, not knowing, not understanding, but desperately wanting to make him happy, stayed away, hoping that eventually he would explain, or evolve back into what they had. He evolved so slowly. On the fourth night Alexander pulled off all his clothes and stood in front of her naked in the dark, as she sat on the bed, about to get in. She looked up at him. He looked down at her. You want me to touch you? she whispered uncertainly, her hands rising to him. Yes, he said. I want you to touch me, Tatiana.

He evolved a little but never explained anything in the dark, in their little room with Anthony sleeping.

The days became cooler, the mosquitoes left. The leaves started changing. Tatiana didn’t think there was breath left in her body to sit on the bench and watch the hills of cinnabar and wine and gold reflect off the still water.

“Anthony,” she whispered. “Is this so beautiful or what?”

“It’s or what, Mama.” He was wearing his father’s officer’s cap, the one Dr. Matthew Sayers had given her years ago off a supposedly dead Alexander’s head. He has drowned, Tatiana, he is dead in the ice, but I have his cap; would you like it?

The beige cap with a red star, too big for Anthony, made Tatiana think of herself and her life in the past tense instead of in the present. Sharply regretting having given it to the boy, she tried to take it from him, to hide it from him, to put it away, but every morning Anthony said, “Mama, where is my cap?”

“It’s not your cap.”

“It is so. Dad told me it was mine now.”

“Why did you tell him he could have it?” she grumbled to Alexander one evening as they were ambling down to town.

Before he had a chance to reply, a young man, less than twenty, ran by, lightly touching Tatiana on her shoulder, and said with a wide, happy smile, “Hi there, girly-girl!” Saluting Alexander, he continued downhill.

Slowly Alexander turned his head to Tatiana, who was next to him, her arm through his. He tapped her hand. “Do I know him?”

“Yes, and no. You drink the milk he brings every day.”

“He’s the milkman?”

“Yes.”

They continued walking.

“I heard,” Alexander said evenly, “that he’s had it off with every woman in the village but one.”

“Oh,” Tatiana said without missing a beat, “I bet it’s that stuck-up Mira in house number thirty.”

And Alexander laughed.

He laughed!

He laughs!

And then he leaned to her and kissed her face. “Now that’s funny, Tania,” he said.

Tatiana was pleased with him for being pleased. “Will you explain to me why you don’t mind the boy wearing your cap?” she asked, squeezing his arm.

“Oh, it’s harmless.”

“I don’t think it’s so harmless. Sometimes seeing your army cap prevents me from seeing Stonington. That isn’t harmless, is it?”

And what did her inimitable Alexander say to that, strolling down a sublime New England autumn hill overlooking the crystal ocean waters with his wife and son?

He said, “What’s Stonington?”

And a day later Tatiana finally figured out why this place was so close to her heart. With its long grasses and sparkling waters, the field flowers and the pines, the deciduous smells coupled with the thinness in the air—it reminded her of Russia! And when she realized this—the minutes and hours of claret and maroon maples, the gold mountain ash and swaying birches piercing her heart—she stopped smiling.

When Alexander came home from the boat that evening and went up to her, as usual sitting on the bench, and saw what must have been her most unresponsive face, he said with a nod, “Ah. And there it finally is. So … what do you think? Nice to be reminded of Russia, Tatiana Metanova?”

She said nothing, walking down to the dock with him. “Why don’t you take the lobsters, go on up?” he offered. “I’ll keep the boy while I finish.”

Tatiana took the lobsters and flung them in the trash.

Alexander bit his amused lip. “What, no lobsters today?”

She strode past Alexander to the boat. “Jim,” she said, “instead of lobsters, I made spaghetti sauce with meatballs. Would you like to come have dinner with us?”

Jimmy beamed.

“Good.” Tatiana turned to go, and then, almost as an afterthought, said, “Oh, by the way, I invited my friend Nellie from Eastern Road to join us. She’s a little blue. She just found out she lost her husband in the war. I hope you don’t mind.”

Jimmy, as it turned out, didn’t mind. And neither did a slightly less blue Nellie.

Mrs. Brewster was beaten for her rent money again. Tatiana was cleaning the cut on her hand for her, while Anthony’s eyes, as somber as his father’s, stared at his mother from the footstool at her feet.

“Mama was a nurse,” said Anthony reverentially.

Mrs. Brewster watched her. There was something on her mind. “You never told me where you come from, the accent. It sounds—”

“Russian,” said the three-year-old whose father wasn’t there to stop him.

“Ah. Your husband a Russki, too?”

“No, my husband is American.”

“Dad is American,” said Anthony proudly, “but he was a captain in the—”

“Anthony!” Tatiana yanked his arm. “Time to go get Dad.”

The next day Mrs. Brewster expressed the opinion that the Soviets were nasty communists. This was her son’s view. She wanted another seven dollars for the water and electric. “You’re cooking all the time on my stove there.”

Tatiana was rattled at the shakedown. “But I make dinner for you.”

Mrs. Brewster said, patting the bandage Tatiana had wrapped around her hand, “And in the spirit of communism, my son says he wants you to pay thirty dollars a week for the room, not eight. Or you can find another collective to live on, comrade.”

Thirty dollars a week! “All right,” said Tatiana through her teeth. “I’ll pay you another twenty-two a week. But this is just between us. Don’t mention it to my husband.” As Tatiana walked away, she felt the glare of someone who’d been beaten by her son for rent money and yet still trusted him more.

No sooner had they met Alexander on the dock than Anthony said, “Dad, Mrs. Brooster called us nasty communists.”

He glanced at Tatiana. “She did, did she?”

“She did, and Mama got upset.”

“She did, did she?” He sidled up to her.

“No, I didn’t. Anthony walk ahead now, I have to talk to your father.”

“You did, you did,” Anthony said. “You get that tight mouth when you get upset.” He tightened his mouth to show his father.

“Doesn’t she just,” said Alexander.

“All right you two,” Tatiana said quietly. “Will you go on ahead, Anthony?”

But he lifted his arms to her, and she picked him up.

“Dad, she called us communists!”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“What are communists?”

That night before dinner, of lobsters (“Oh, not again!”) and potatoes, Anthony said, “Dad, is twenty-two dollars a lot or a little?”

Alexander glanced at his son. “Well, it depends for what. It’s a little money for a car. But it’s a lot of money for candy. Why?”

“Mrs. Brooster wants us to pay twenty-two more dollars.”

“Anthony!” Tatiana was near the stove; she didn’t turn around. “No, the child is impossible. Go wash your hands. With soap. Thoroughly. And rinse them.”

“They’re clean.”

“Anthony, you heard your mother. Now.” That was Alexander. Anthony went.

He came up to her by the sink. “So what’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

“It’s time to go, don’t you think? We’ve been here two months. And soon it’s going to get much colder.” He paused. “I’m not even going to get started on the communists or the twenty-two dollars.”

“I wouldn’t mind it if we never left here,” she said. “Here on the edge of the world. Nothing intrudes here. Despite …” she waved her hand to Mrs. Brewster upstairs. “I feel safe here. I feel like no one will ever find us.”

Alexander was quiet. “Is someone … looking for us?”

“No, no. Of course not.” She spoke so quickly.

He placed two fingers under her chin and lifted her face to him. “Tania?”

She couldn’t return his serious gaze. “I just don’t want to go yet, okay?” She tried to move away from his hand. He didn’t let her. “That’s all. I like it here.” She raised her hands to hold on to his arms. “Let’s move to Nellie’s. We’ll have two rooms. She has a bigger kitchen. And you can go for a drink with your pal Jimmy. As I understand, he’s been coming around there a little.” She smiled to convince him.

Letting go of her, Alexander put his plate in the sink, clanging it loudly against the cast aluminum sides. “Yes, let’s,” he said. “Nellie, Jimmy, us. What a fine idea, communal living. We should have more of it.” He shrugged. “Oh, well. Guess you can take the girl out of the Soviet Union, but you can’t take the Soviet Union out of the girl.”

At least there was some participation. Though, like Tatiana kept saying, not great.

They moved to Nellie’s. The air turned a little chilly, then a lot chilly, then cold, particularly in the night, and Nellie, as they found out, was Dickensianly cheap with the heat.

They may have paid for two rooms, but it was all never mind to Anthony, who had less than no interest in staying in a room all by himself. Alexander was forced to drag his twin bed into their room, and push the beds together—again. They paid for two rooms and lived in one.

They huddled under thick blankets, and then suddenly, in the middle of October, it snowed! Snow fell in balls out of the sky, and in one night covered the bay and the barely bare trees in white wool. There was no more work for Alexander, and now there was snow. The morning snow fell, they looked out the window and then at each other. Alexander smiled with all his teeth.

Tatiana finally understood. “Oh, you,” she said. “So smug in your little knowledge.”

“So smug,” he agreed, still smiling.

“Well, you’re wrong about me. There is nothing wrong with a little snow.”

He nodded.

“Right, Anthony? Right, darling? You and me are used to snow. New York had snow, too.”

“Not just New York.” The smile in Alexander’s eyes grew dimmer, as if becoming veiled by the very snow he was lauding.

The stairs were slippery, covered with four inches of old ice. The half-filled metal bucket of water was heavy and kept spilling over the stairs as she held on to the banister with one hand, the bucket with the other and pulled herself up one treacherous step at a time. She had to get up two flights. At the seventh step, she fell on her knees, but didn’t let go the banister, or the bucket. Slowly she pulled herself back to her feet. And tried again. If only there were a little light, she could see where she was stepping, avoid the ice maybe. But there wouldn’t be daylight for another two hours, and she had to go out and get the bread. If she waited two hours there would be no bread left in the store. And Dasha was getting worse. She needed bread.

Tatiana turned away from him. It was morning! There was no dimming of lights at the beginning of each day; it was simply not allowed.

They went sledding. They rented two Flexible Flyers from the general store, and spent the afternoon with the rest of the villagers sledding on the steep Stonington hill that ran down to the bay. Anthony walked uphill exactly twice. Granted, it was a big hill, and he was brave and good to do it, but the other twenty times, his father carried him.

Finally, Tatiana said, “You two go on without me. I can’t walk anymore.”

“No, no, come with us,” said Anthony. “Dad, I’ll walk up the hill. Can you carry Mama?”

“I think I might be able to carry Mommy,” said Alexander.

Anthony trudged along, while Alexander carried Tatiana uphill on his back. She cried and the tears froze on her face. But then they raced down, Tatiana and Anthony on one sled, trying to beat Alexander, who was heavier than mother and son, and fast and maneuvered well, unhampered by fear for a small boy, unlike her. She flew down anyway, with Anthony shrieking with frightened delight. She almost beat Alexander. At the bottom she collided into him.

“You know if I didn’t have Ant, you’d never win,” she said, lying on top of him.

“Oh, yes, I would,” he said, pushing her off him into the snow. “Give me Ant, and let’s go.”

It was a good day.

They spent three more long days in the whitened mountain ash trees on the whitened bay. Tatiana baked pies in Nellie’s big kitchen. Alexander read all the papers and magazines from stem to stern and talked post-war politics to Tatiana and Jimmy, and even to indifferent Nellie. In Nellie’s potato fields, Alexander built snowmen for Anthony. After the pies were in the oven, Tatiana came out of the house and saw six snowmen arrayed like soldiers from big to little. She tutted, rolled her eyes and dragged Anthony away to fall down and make angels in the snow instead. They made thirty of them, all in a row, arrayed like soldiers.

On the third night of winter, Anthony was in their bed restfully asleep, and they were wide awake. Alexander was rubbing her bare buttocks under her gown. The only window in their room was blizzarded over. She assumed the blue moon was shining beyond. His hands were becoming very insistent. Alexander moved one of the blankets onto the floor, silently; moved her onto the blanket, silently; laid her flat onto her stomach, silently, and made love to her in stealth like they were doughboys on the ground, crawling to the frontline, his belly to her back, keeping her in a straight line, completely covering her tiny frame with his body, clasping her wrists above her head with one hand. As he confined her, he was kissing her shoulders, and the back of her neck, and her jawline, and when she turned her face to him, he kissed her lips, his free hand roaming over her legs and ribs while he moved deep and slow! amazing enough by itself, but even more amazingly he turned her to him to finish, still restraining her arms above her head, and even made a brief noise not just a raw exhale at the feverish end … and then they lay still, under the blankets, and Tatiana started to cry underneath him, and he said shh, shh, come on, but didn’t instantly move off her, like usual.

“I’m so afraid,” she whispered.

“Of what?”

“Of everything. Of you.”

He said nothing.

She said, “So you want to get the heck out of here?”

“Oh, God. I thought you’d never ask.”

“Where do you think you’re going?” Jimmy asked when he saw them packing up the next morning.

“We’re leaving,” Alexander replied.

“Well, you know what they say,” Jim said. “Man proposes and God disposes. The bridge over Deer Isle is iced over. Hasn’t been plowed in weeks and won’t be. Nowhere to go until the snow melts.”

“And when do you think that might be?”

“April,” Jimmy said, and both he and Nellie laughed. Jimmy hugged her with his one good arm and Nellie, gazing brightly at him, didn’t look as if she cared that he had just the one.

Tatiana and Alexander glanced at each other. April! He said to Jim, “You know what, we’ll take our chances.”

Tatiana started to speak up, started to say, “Maybe they’re right—” and Alexander fixed her with such a stare that she instantly shut up, ashamed of questioning him in front of other people, and hurried on with the packing. They said goodbye to a regretful Jimmy and Nellie, said goodbye to Stonington and took their Nomad Deluxe across Deer Isle onto the mainland.

In this one instant, man disposed. The bridge had been kept clear by the snow crews on Deer Isle. Because if the bridge was iced over, no one could get any produce shipments to the people in Stonington. “What a country,” said Alexander, as he drove out onto the mainland and south.

They stopped at Aunt Esther’s for what Alexander promised was going to be a three-day familial visit.

They stayed six weeks until after Thanksgiving.

Esther lived in her big old house in a quaint and white Barrington with Rosa, her housekeeper of forty years. Rosa had known Alexander since birth. The two women clucked over Alexander and his wife and child with such ferocity, it was impossible to leave. They bought Anthony skis! They bought Anthony a sled, and new boots, and warm winter coats! The boy was outside in the snow all day. They bought Anthony bricks and blocks and books! The boy was inside all day.

What else would you like, dear Anthony?

I’d like a weapon like my Dad has, said the boy.

Tatiana vehemently shook her head.

Look at Anthony, what an amazing boy he is and he talks so well for a three-and-a-half-year-old, and doesn’t he look just like his father did? Here’s a picture of a baby Alexander, Tania.

Yes, Tatiana said, he was a beautiful boy.

Once, said Alexander, and Tania nearly cried, and he was never smiling.

Esther, seeing nothing, continued. Oh, was my brother ever besotted with him. They had him so late in life, you know, Tania, and wanted him so desperately, having tried for a baby for years. Never was a man more besotted with his child. His mother too. I want you to know that, Alexander, darling, the sun rose and set on you.

Cluck, cluck, cluck, for six weeks, wanting them to stay for the holidays, through Easter, through the Fourth of July, maybe Labor Day, for all the days, just stay.

And suddenly, late one evening in the kitchen, when Alexander, exhausted from playing in the snow with Anthony, fell asleep in the living room, and Tatiana was clearing up their tea cups before bed, Aunt Esther came into the kitchen to help her, and said, “Don’t drop the cups when you hear this, but a man named Sam Gulotta from the State Department called here in October. Don’t get upset, sit. Don’t worry. He called in October, and he called again this afternoon when you three were out. Please—what did I tell you?—don’t shake, don’t tremble. You should have said something when you called in September, given me a warning about what was going on. It would have helped me. You should have trusted me, so I could help you. No, don’t apologize. I told Sam I don’t know where you are. I don’t know how to reach you, I know nothing. That’s what I told him. And to you I say, I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me. Sam said it was imperative that Alexander get in touch with him. I told him if I heard from you, I’d let him know. But darling, why wouldn’t you tell me? Don’t you know I’m on your side, on Alexander’s side? Does he know that Sam is calling for him? Oh. Well. No, no, you’re right of course. He’s got enough to worry about. Besides, it’s the government; it takes them years just to send out a veteran’s check. They’re hardly going to be on top of this. Soon it will go into the inactive pile and be forgotten. You’ll see. Tell Alexander nothing, it’s for the best. And don’t cry. Shh, now. Shh.”

“Aunt Esther,” said Alexander, walking into the kitchen, “what in the world are you telling Tania now to make her cry?”

“Oh, you know how she is nowadays,” Aunt Esther said, patting Tatiana’s back.

On Thanksgiving, Rosa and Esther talked about having Anthony baptized. “Alexander, talk some sense into your wife. You don’t want your son to be a heathen like Tania.” It was after a magnificent dinner during which Tania gave thanks to Aunt Esther, and they were sitting late in the deep evening, with mulled apple cider in front of a roaring fire. Anthony had been long bathed and fussed over and adored and put to sleep. Tatiana was feeling sleepy and contented, pressed against Alexander’s sweatered arm. It reminded her throbbingly of another time in her life, sitting next to him, like this, in front of a flickering small stove called the bourzhuika, feeling calmed by his presence despite the apocalyptic things going on just steps from her in her own room, in her own apartment, in her own city, in her own country. And yet, she sat like this with him and for a fleeting minute was comforted.

“Tania is not a heathen,” Alexander said to Esther. “She was dunked into the River Luga promptly after birth by Russian women so old they looked as if they lived in the times of Christ. They took her from her mother, babynapped her, you might say, and muttered over her for three hours, summoning the love of Christ and the Holy Spirit onto her. Tania’s mother never spoke to the old women again.”

“Or to me,” said Tatiana.

“Tania, is this true?”

“Alexander is teasing, Esther. Don’t listen to him.”

“That’s not what she asked, Tatia. She asked if it was true.” His eyes were twinkling.

He was teasing! She kissed his arm, putting her face back against his sweater. “Esther, you mustn’t fret about Anthony. He is baptized.”

“He is?” said Esther.

“He is?” said Alexander with surprise.

“He is,” Tatiana said quietly. “They baptized all the children at Ellis Island because so many of them used to get sick and die. They had a chapel, and even found me a Catholic priest.”

“A Catholic priest!” Catholic Rosa and Protestant Esther raised their hands to the heavens in a loud interjection, one happy, one slightly less so. “Why Catholic? Why not even Russian Orthodox, like you?”

“I wanted Anthony,” Tatiana said timidly, looking away from Alexander’s gaze, “to be like his father.”

And that night in their bed, all three of them, Alexander didn’t go to sleep, lightly keeping his hand on her. She felt him awake behind her. “What, darling?” she whispered. “What do you need? Ant’s here.”

“Don’t I know it,” he whispered back. “But no, no. Tell me …” his voice was halting, “was he … very small when he was born?”

“I don’t know …” she replied in a constricted voice. “I had him a month early. He was quite little. Black-haired. I don’t really remember. I was in a fever. I had TB, pneumonia. They gave me extreme unction, I was so sick.” She clenched her fists to her chest, but groaned anyway. And so alone.

Alexander told her he couldn’t stay in wintry Barrington any longer, couldn’t do snow, winters, cold. “Never again—not for one more day.” He wanted to go swimming for Christmas.

Whatever Anthony’s father wanted, Anthony’s father got. The sun still rises and sets on you, husband, she whispered to him.

Sets mainly, he whispered back.

They said a grateful goodbye to Esther and Rosa, and drove down past New York.

“Aren’t we stopping to see Vikki?”

“We’re not,” Tatiana said. “Vikki always goes to visit her mentally ill mother in California during Christmas. It’s her penance. Besides, it’s too cold. You said you wanted to go swimming. We’ll catch her in the summer.”

They drove through New Jersey and Maryland.

They were passing Washington DC when Alexander said, “Want to stop and say hello to your friend Sam?”

Startled she said, “No! Why would you say that?”

He seemed pretty startled by that. “Why are you getting defensive? I asked if you wanted to stop and say hello. Why are you talking to me as if I asked you to wash his car?”

Tatiana tried to relax.

Thank goodness he dropped it. In the past, he never used to drop anything until he got his answer.

Virginia, still in the thirties, too cold.

North Carolina, in the high forties, cold.

South Carolina in the fifties. Better.

They stayed in cheap motels and had hot showers.

Georgia in the sixties. Not good enough.

St. Augustine in Florida was in the seventies! on the warm ocean. St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States, had red Spanish tile roofs and was selling ice cream as if it were summer.

They visited the site of Ponce De Leon’s Fountain of Youth, and bought a little immortal water, conveniently in bottled form.

“You know it’s just tap water, don’t you?” Alexander said to her, as she took a drink from it.

“I know,” Tatiana said, passing him the bottle. “But you have to believe in something.”

“It’s not tap water I believe in,” Alexander said, drinking half of it down.

They celebrated Christmas in St. Augustine. Christmas Day they went to a deserted white beach. “Now this is what I call the dead of winter,” said Alexander, diving into the ocean water in swimming shorts and a T-shirt. There was no one around him but his son and wife.

Anthony, who didn’t know how to swim, waded at the edge of the water, dug holes that looked like craters, collected seashells, got burned, and with his shoulders red and his hair sandy, skipped on the beach, singing, holding a long stick in one hand, and a rock in the other, moving his arms up and down to the rhythmic beat of the tune while his mother and father watched him from the water.

“Mr. Sun/ Sun/ Mr. Golden Sun/ please shine down on/ please shine down on/ please shine down on me …”

After weeks in St. Augustine, they drove south down the coast.