The Bronze Horseman

by Paullina Simons

  “When did you come?”

  “In 1930, right after the 1929 stock market crash.” Alexander looked at her blank expression and sighed. “Never mind. I was eleven. Never wanted to leave Barrington in the first place.”

  “Oh, no,” Tatiana whispered.

  “Cooking on a little Primus stove with kerosene got us down. Living in the dark. Living with unclean smells, it blackened our spirits in ways we never imagined. My mother took to drink. Well, why not? Everyone drank.”

  “Yes,” said Tatiana. Her father drank.

  “And after she drank, and the toilet was occupied by other foreigners living in our Moscow palace”—he paused—”not like the European—my mother would trot to the local park and relieve herself in the public toilets there—just a hole in the ground for my mother.” He shivered at those words, and Tatiana shivered, too, in the balmy Leningrad evening. Gently she touched Alexander’s shoulder again, and because he didn’t move away, and because they sat canopied under the covering trees, and because there was not another soul around, Tatiana pressed her slender fingers against the fabric of his uniform and did not take them away.

  “On Saturdays,” Alexander continued, “my father and I—like you, your mother, and sister—would go to the public baths and wait two hours in line to get in. My mother went by herself on Fridays, wishing, I think, that she had given birth to a daughter, so she wouldn’t be all alone, so she wouldn’t suffer over me so much.”

  “Did she suffer over you?”

  “Tremendously. At first I was all right, but as the years went by, I started to blame them for my life. We were living in Moscow at the time. Seventy of us, idealists—and not just idealists, but idealists with children—lived as you do, sharing three toilets and three small kitchens on one long floor.”

  “Hmm,” Tatiana said.

  “How do you like it?”

  She thought. “There are only twenty-five of us on our floor. But . . . what can I say? I like our dacha in Luga better.” She glanced at him. “The tomatoes are fresh, and the morning air smells so clean.”

  “Yes!” Alexander exclaimed, as if she had said the magic word: clean.

  “And,” she added, “I like not being on top of other people all the time. Having a little bit of . . .” She trailed off. She couldn’t think of the right word.

  His legs outstretched, Alexander turned a little more to her, looking into her face.

  “You know what I mean?” Tatiana said diffidently.

  He nodded. “I do, Tania.”

  “So should we rejoice that the Germans attacked us?”

  “That’s just trading Satan for the devil.”

  Shaking her head, Tatiana said, “Don’t let them catch you talking like that.” But she was youthfully curious. “Which is Satan?”

  “Stalin. He is marginally more sane.”

  “You and my grandfather,” Tatiana murmured.

  “What, your grandfather agrees with me?” Alexander smiled.

  “No.” She smiled back. “You agree with my grandfather.”

  “Tania, don’t go kidding yourself for a minute. Hitler may be viewed by some people, especially down in the Ukraine, as their deliverer from Stalin, but you’ll see how quickly he will destroy those illusions. The way he destroyed them in Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland. In any case, after the war is over, whatever the outcome for the world, I have a feeling that here in the Soviet Union we will all go back to the same place.” Alexander struggled with his words. “Have you been . . . protected by your family?” he asked with concern. “From the way it has been?”

  Pressing her fingers into his shoulder, Tatiana said, “We really haven’t had much personal experience with it.” She didn’t like to talk about it. It frightened her a little. “I once heard that someone at Papa’s work was arrested. And a man and his daughter at the apartment vanished a few years ago, and the Sarkovs came to live in their place.” She contemplated her words. Her father maintained that the mordant and heavyset Sarkovs were NKVD informers. “I have been somewhat protected, yes.”

  “Well, not me,” said Alexander, taking out a cigarette and his lighter. “Not at all. And so I cannot turn my mind away from my parents, who came here with such hope and were so crushed by the beliefs they supported almost from birth.” He lit up. “You don’t mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all,” Tatiana said, watching him. She liked his face. “What was it?” she asked. “American living must not be that great if an American like your father could forsake his country.”

  Alexander didn’t speak while he smoked the whole cigarette. “Let me tell you exactly what it was: Communism in America in the twenties—the Red Decade—was quite fashionable among the rich.”

  Alexander’s father, Harold Barrington, wanted him to become a member of the Communist youth group, the Young Pioneers of America, in their town when Alexander turned ten. The group had a tiny membership, Harold had said, and they needed strength. Alexander refused. He was already in the Cub Scouts, he told his father. Barrington was a small town in eastern Massachusetts, named after the Barringtons, who had lived there since Benjamin Franklin. Alexander’s progenitor had fought in the Revolutionary War. In the nineteenth century the Barringtons produced four mayors, and three of Alexander’s forebears served and died in the Civil War.

  Alexander’s father wanted to make his own mark on the Barrington clan. He wanted to go his own way. Alexander’s mother, Gina, came from Italy at the turn of the century when she was eighteen to embrace the American way of life, and when she changed her name to Jane and married Harold Barrington at nineteen, she embraced it with her heart. She had left her family in Italy to go her own way, too.

  At first Jane and Harold were radicals, then they were socialist democrats, and then they were Communists. They lived in a country that let them, and they embraced Communism with all their hearts. A modern, progressive woman, Jane Barrington did not want to have children, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, said she didn’t have to.

  After eleven years of being a radical with Harold, Jane decided she wanted to have children. It took her five years of miscarriages to have one child—Alexander—who was born to her in 1919 when she was thirty-five and Harold thirty-seven.

  Alexander lived and breathed the Communist doctrine from the time he was old enough to understand English. In the comfort of his American home, surrounded by a blazing fire and woolen blankets, Alexander spoke words like “proletariat, equality, manifesto, Leninism,” before he was old enough to know what they meant.

  When he was eleven, his parents decided to live the words they had been speaking. Harold Barrington was constantly getting himself arrested for less-than-peaceful demonstrations on the streets of Boston, and finally he went to the American Civil Liberties Union and asked for their help in seeking voluntary asylum in the USSR. To do it he was willing and ready to renounce his American citizenship and move to the Soviet Union, where he could be one with the people. No social classes. No unemployment. No prejudice. No religion. The Barringtons did not admire the no-religion part, but they were progressive, intellectual people, who were willing and able to put God aside to help build the great Communist experiment.

  Harold and Jane Barrington surrendered their passports, and when they first arrived in Moscow, they were feted and fed as royalty. Only Alexander seemed to notice the smell in the bathrooms, the lack of soap, and the brazenly destitute with rags on their feet who collected outside their restaurant windows, waiting for the dirty dishes to be brought into the kitchen so they could eat the scraps. The drunken squalor in the beer bars to which Harold Barrington took Alexander was so depressing that Alexander finally stopped going. He didn’t care how much he wanted to be with his father.

  At the residential hotel where they were staying, they received special treatment, along with other expatriates from England, Italy, and Belgium.

  Harold and Jane got their new Soviet passports, thereby permanently severing their
ties with the United States. As a minor, Alexander would not be getting his Soviet passport until he was sixteen and had to register for the compulsory military service.

  Alexander went to school, learned Russian, made many friends. He was slowly adjusting to his new life when in 1935 the Barringtons were told that they would have to leave their rent-free accommodation and fend for themselves. The Soviet government could no longer keep them. The trouble was, the Barringtons could not find a room for themselves in Moscow. Not a single room in any communal apartment anywhere. They moved to Leningrad and, after weeks of going from one housing committee to another, finally found two rooms in a squalid building on the south side of the Neva. Harold found work at Izhorsk factory. Jane’s drinking increased. Alexander kept his head down and concentrated on school.

  It all ended in May 1936, the month Alexander turned seventeen years old.

  Jane and Harold Barrington were arrested in the least expected way—but also the most ordinary. One day she did not come home from the market.

  All Harold wanted was somehow to get a message to Alexander, but they had had bitter words and he had not seen the boy in two nights.

  Four days after his wife’s disappearance, there was a soft knock on Harold’s door at three in the morning.

  What Harold did not know was that representatives of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs had already come for Alexander.

  * * *

  A man named Leonid Slonko was Jane’s interrogator at the Big House. “What funny things you say, Comrade Barrington,” he said to her. “How did I know you were going to say them?”

  “You’ve never met me before,” she said.

  “I’ve met thousands like you.”

  Really, thousands, she wanted to say. Are there really thousands of us coming from the United States?

  “Yes, thousands,” confirmed Slonko, as if she’d spoken. “They all come. To make us better, to live the capitalist-free life. Communism requires a sacrifice, you know that. You must put away your bourgeois aesthetic and look at us as a new reformed Soviet woman and not as an American.”

  “I have put away my bourgeois aesthetic,” Jane said. “I’ve given away my home, my job, my friends, my entire life. I came here and started a new life because I believed. All you had to do was not betray me.”

  “And how did we do that? Did we do that by feeding you? By clothing you? By giving you a job? A place to live?”

  “Then why am I here?” she asked.

  “Because it is you who have betrayed us,” said Slonko. “We cannot abide your disillusionment when we are trying to rebuild the human race for the benefit of all mankind. When we are trying to eradicate poverty and misery from this earth.”

  Slonko added, “And let me ask you, Comrade Barrington, when you expressed contempt for our country by calling on the U.S. embassy in Moscow a few weeks ago, did you perhaps forget that you have given up your allegiance to the United States by advocating the overthrow of democracy? By being connected with the Popular Front? By giving up your American citizenship? You are not an American citizen. They do not care whether you live or die.” Slonko laughed. “How silly all of you are. You come here from your countries, decrying their governments, their customs, their ways of life that are repulsive to you. Yet at the first sign of trouble, who is it that you contact?” Slonko slapped the table. “Be assured, comrade, that the American government couldn’t care less about you right now. They’ve forgotten who you are. The file on you and your husband and your son has been sealed by the U.S. Department of Justice and put into a vault. You are ours now.”

  It was true. Jane had gone to the U.S. embassy in Moscow two weeks before her arrest. She had taken the train with Alexander. She must have been followed. The reception she got at the embassy was chilly at best: the Americans had no interest in helping either her or her son.

  “Was I followed?” she asked Slonko.

  “What do you think?” he said. “You’ve shown that your fealty is a fickle thing. We were right to follow you. We were right not to trust you. Now you will be tried for treason under Article 58 of the Soviet Constitution. You know that, too. You know what’s ahead of you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I just wish it would come quicker.”

  “What would be the point of that?” Slonko was a big, imposing man of advancing age, but he still looked strong and skilled. “You understand how you look to the Soviet government. You have broken with the country you were born in, then spat on the country that provided for you and your family. You were doing quite well in America, quite well—you, the Barringtons of Massachusetts—until you decided to change your life. You came here. Fine, we said. We were convinced you were all spies. We watched you because we were cautious, not vindictive. We watched you and then we wanted you to stand on your own two feet. We promised you we would take care of you, but for that we needed your undying loyalty. Comrade Stalin expects—no, requires—nothing less.

  “You went to the embassy because you changed your mind about us the way you changed your mind about America. They said, sorry, but we don’t know you. We said, sorry, but we don’t want you. So what’s there for you to do? Where do you go? They won’t have you, we don’t want you. You have shown us you cannot be trusted. Now what?”

  “Now death,” said Jane. “But I beg you, spare my only son.” She lowered her head. “He was just a young boy. He never surrendered his U.S. citizenship.”

  “He surrendered it when he registered for the Red Army and became a Soviet citizen,” said Slonko.

  “But the U.S. State Department doesn’t have a subversive file on him. He never joined the Communists there, he is not part of this. I beg you—”

  “Why, comrade,” Slonko said, “he is the most dangerous of you all.”

  Jane saw her husband once before appearing in front of a tribunal presided over by Slonko. After a speedy trial, she was put in front of the firing squad, turned blind to the wall.

  Until his arrest Harold Barrington’s concern for Alexander did not outweigh his despair at being caught with his dreams around his ankles.

  He had been in prison before; incarceration did not bother him. Being in prison for his beliefs was a badge of honor, and he had worn that badge proudly in America. “I have sat in some of the best jails in Massachusetts,” Harold used to say. “In New England no one compares to me in what I endure for my beliefs.”

  The Soviet Union had turned out to be a land of soup kitchens. Communism wasn’t working as well in Russia as everyone hoped because it was Russia. It would work great in America, Harold thought. That was the place for Communism. Harold wanted to bring it back home.

  Home.

  He couldn’t believe he was still calling it home.

  The Soviet Union was well and good, but it wasn’t his home, and the Soviet Communists knew it. They were done protecting him, no matter how much he had refused to believe it. Now he was the enemy of the people. He understood.

  Harold derided America. He despised America with its shallowness and false morality, he hated the individualist ethic, and he thought the idea of democracy was embraced only by a special kind of idiot. But now that he was sitting in a Soviet concrete cell, Harold wanted to get his boy back to this America, at any cost, at any price.

  The Soviet Union couldn’t save Alexander. Only America could do that.

  What have I done to my son? Harold thought. What have I left behind for him? Harold couldn’t remember what Communism was anymore. All he saw was Alexander’s admiring face as Harold stood on a pulpit in Greenwich, Connecticut, screaming invective on a Saturday afternoon in 1927.

  Who is the boy I call Alexander? If I don’t know, how will he? I found my way, but how will he find his in a country that does not want him?

  All Harold wanted during his year of endless interrogations, denials, pleas, and confusion was to see Alexander once before he died. He called on Slonko’s humanity.

  “Don’t call on my humanity,” Slonko said
. “I have none. Also, humanity has nothing to do with Communism, with creating a higher social order. That, comrade, takes discipline, perseverance, and a certain detached attitude.”

  “Not just detached,” said Harold, “but severed.”

  “Your son will not be coming to visit you,” Slonko said. “Your son is dead.”

  Speechless, Tatiana sat next to Alexander as both her hands caressed his arm up and down. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, wanting desperately to touch his face but unable to bring herself to do so. “Alexander, you hear me? I’m so sorry.”

  “I hear you. It’s all right, Tania,” he said, getting up. “My parents are gone, but I’m still here. That’s something.”

  She could not move from the bench. “Alexander, wait, wait. How did you get from ‘Barrington’ to ‘Belov?’ And what happened to your father? Did you ever see your parents again?”

  He looked at his watch. “What happens to time when I’m with you?” he muttered. “I have to run. We’ll save that for another day.” He gave her his hand to help her up. “A later day.”

  Her heart swelled. There would be another day, then? Slowly they walked out of the park. “Have you told Dasha any of this?” Tatiana asked.

  “No, Tatiana,” Alexander replied, not looking at her.

  She was treading softly next to him. “I’m glad you told me,” she said at last.

  “Yes, me, too,” said Alexander.

  “Promise you’ll tell me the rest someday?”

  “Someday I’ll make that promise.” He smiled.

  “I can’t believe you’re from America, Alexander. That’s definitely a first for me.” She blushed when she said it.

  He bent and kissed her gently on the cheek. His lips were warm and his stubble prickly. “Be careful walking home,” Alexander said after her. Her heart aching, Tatiana nodded, watching him walk away with a feeling that resembled despair.

  What if he turned around and saw her? How silly she must look standing there staring at him. Before she could think another thought, Alexander turned around. Caught, she tried to move, her slow legs betraying her confusion. He saluted her. What must he think, seeing me gaping at him as he walks away. She wished she had more guile and made a vow to herself to get some. And then she raised her hand and saluted him back.