Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel

by Paullina Simons

  The day after Christmas, the sentry was sick and they didn’t have to kill him. He was sick and he fell asleep on the job. So they ran again, but it was winter and hard to get anywhere. The only trains were military trains. They caught one such train and were apprehended by a policeman at the very next stop, who thought their stolen uniforms were too ill-fitting. By the time they were returned to Catowice, the sentry was dead of pleurisy before he could be shot for dereliction. The three of them were called to Commandant Kiplinger again.

  “Captain Belov, you see I run my camp very lax. I don’t care what you do. You want work, I give you work. You want more food, if there is some, I give it to you. I let you run around the whole camp, I don’t watch you as long as you stay within the boundaries. I think that’s fair, you obviously don’t think so, and under your command these two fools follow like sheep. Well, now you’re done, you’re leaving. I told you last time, you try it once more and you’re finished here. Didn’t you believe me? I don’t want any problems with you. Don’t you know they shoot us for losing prisoners under our command?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To a place from which there is no escape,” Kiplinger said with satisfaction. “Colditz Castle.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  New York, January 1945

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, Tatiana went across the bay with Anthony for a solitary walk, and then met up with Vikki to go skating in Central Park. They took a bus uptown and finally stopped at the corner of 59th Street and Sixth Avenue. Tatiana sent Anthony and Vikki into the park, saying she had to run a quick errand.

  She went to a phone booth near the Plaza Hotel. She waited a few moments, fingering the dimes in her pocket. She took the dimes out and counted them, though she knew how many she had. Finally she dialed a number.

  “Happy New Year, Sam,” she said into the phone. “Is this bad time?”

  “Happy New Year, Tatiana. This is fine, I was catching up on some urgent work at the office today.”

  She waited. She held her breath.

  “I have nothing for you,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  “No.”

  “They did not contact you—”

  “No.”

  “Not even about me?”

  “No. They’re probably busy with other things, like how best to carve up Europe.”

  She breathed out. “Silly of me to keep calling, making it uncomfortable for you.”

  “I don’t mind. Really. Call again in a month.”

  “I will. You are really too kind to me. Thank you.” Tatiana hung up and waited a few seconds, her head pressed into the cold metal frame of the phone.

  Finally Tatiana agreed to find an apartment to share with Vikki. The girls moved in together in January of 1945. Tatiana had found a three-bedroom, two-bathroom, rent-controlled place on Church Street on the sixth floor. It was very close to Bowling Green and Battery Park. From her living room window she could see New York Harbor and Lady Liberty, and Ellis Island if she went out onto the fire escape.

  The apartment cost the girls fifty dollars a month, and though Vikki said in the beginning that she was not used to working to pay the rent instead of buying new clothes, they were both quite happy in the new place. Tatiana because there was a place finally to put all the books she was buying, and because her son finally had his own room, and because she herself had her own room. Mostly that was just brave talk. Tatiana slept with her son, her blankets and pillows on the floor next to Anthony. She said when he stopped nursing, she would go to her own bedroom. At eighteen months, he stopped nursing. She remained on the floor.

  Bread. Flour, milk, butter, salt, eggs, yeast. A complete food. Bread.

  Vikki tried to figure out why every other night at eleven they had to make yeast dough by hand, and Tatiana finally said to her, “So that in morning, I don’t have to leave my house to go get warm bread for my family.” Vikki did not ask again, but every morning before she had Tania’s fresh croissants or fresh rolls or fresh crusty loaf with some black coffee and a cigarette, she smacked her lips and said, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

  “Amen,” said Tatiana.

  “Hey Men!” repeated Anthony.

  “Who taught you to make such delicious bread, Tania?”

  “My sister. She taught me how to cook.”

  “She must have been a very good cook.”

  “She was good teacher.” She taught me how to tie my shoes and how to swim and how to tell time.

  “How did she die?”

  “She…she didn’t get enough of her daily bread, Vikki.”

  Can’t do enough, she thought, staring at the ceiling. Too many minutes and seconds to fill the day. Look at me now. I got up at six, and got Anthony up for Isabella, thank God she comes here to take care of him. I was at Ellis from eight until four, and then at Red Cross until six to take blood for an hour and to fill their POW medical kits to be sent overseas. I picked up Anthony from Isabella’s, took him to the park, bought food, cooked dinner, played with him, bathed him, put him to bed, and listened to the radio and listened to Vikki, and made bread dough for tomorrow. Now it’s after one and Vikki and Anthony are asleep, but here I still am, staring up at the ceiling, because there is not enough for me to do.

  I need to do until I’m too tired even for nightmares.

  Until I’m too exhausted by my American life to see his face.

  He holds her waist in his hands, his face wet, his hair wet, his teeth gleaming like the river. He counts one, two, three, and flings her as far as he can into the Kama, and then hurls himself on top of her. She dives under him, wriggles free and swims away. He chases her, threatening her with all kinds of bodily harm when he catches her, and she slows down a bit, so that he can.

  With her heart resolutely turned to the east, Tatiana made bread and bought seven varieties of bacon with her ration cards, she bought pots and pans and kitchen utensils, towels and sheets, she so liked the stores, the fruit stands, the butchers, the supermarkets, the corner delis. With inexorable force, Tatiana’s physical body moved forward while the spirit of Tatiana languished relentlessly in the past. He had found her, a Lazarevo orphan waiting for him, and made her whole.

  But she couldn’t find him. She barely even tried. What a poor effort it had been. Not: I’m not going to stop until I find you, Shura, but I couldn’t find a babysitter, sorry, Shura. She began to hate herself, a first for her. Not even in the days when she played the moral roulette with Dasha and Alexander, did Tatiana feel such a gnawing self-loathing.

  No matter how many times Vikki asked, Tatiana would not go dancing at a club called Ricardo’s up in Greenwich Village on Astor Place on Saturday night. She would not buy a new dress, she would not buy new shoes.

  “You must come with me to Elks Rendezvous in Harlem,” Vikki said. “It’s some place! Great dancing, lots of doctors.”

  “There is no fury like a woman trying to find herself a new lover,” said Tatiana, quoting from a book she just read. “Have you read The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly? I highly recommend it.”

  “Forget this reading business. Do you want to go see Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage at the Apollo?”

  “Maybe other time.”

  “There is no other time! This Friday night, let’s go to Lady Be Beautiful. I’ve been telling them about you, they’re very eager to meet you. We’ll get manicures, and then go out for dim sum on Mott Street, you have to try Chinese food, it’s fantastic, and then we’ll go to Elks Rendezvous.”

  “All the way to Harlem?”

  “It’s the best for a bit of jitterbug.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “Are you being saucy?” Vikki studied her with a grin. “Will you come?”

  “Maybe other time, okay?”

  “Tania,” Vikki said one evening as the girls curled up on the couch, “I’ve finally decided what’s wrong with you. Besides you making bread and eating bacon all the time.”<
br />
  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’re a moper. You need to learn how to curse like a sailor, you need to learn how to walk with bravado as if the entire world belonged to you, you need to come to Lady Be Beautiful and get a beauty treatment, but mostly you need a man.”

  “All right,” said Tatiana. “Where do we find this man?”

  “I’m not talking about love,” Vikki said, as if explaining was what Tatiana needed.

  “Of course not.”

  “No. I’m talking about a hair-raising good time. You’re too uptight. You worry too much. You’re always fretting, always working, being a mother. Ellis, Red Cross, Anthony, it’s too much.”

  “I not always fretting,” Tatiana defended herself.

  “Tania, you’re in America! I know it’s war, but the war is not here. You’re here. Didn’t you always want to come to the United States?”

  “Yes,” Tatiana said. But I didn’t want to come alone.

  “Isn’t it better here than your Soviet Union?”

  They’re in two rowboats and they’re racing across Lake Ilmen, seeing who gets to the middle of the lake first—a kilometer of flat-out rowing. Tatiana, barely smiling, is methodical and unflappable. Pasha is crazed by his inability to beat his sister. And back on shore, their sister Dasha and their cousin Marina are jumping up and down rooting for Tania, and the grown-ups behind them are waving left and right and rooting for Pasha. It’s summer and the air smells of fresh water.

  But they’re not there anymore. Not on Lake Ilmen, not in Luga, not in Leningrad, not in Lazarevo. Yet they never leave her.

  And he doesn’t leave her.

  Tatiana blinked away her life as she drank her tea. “Tell me about your first love,” she said.

  “His name was Tommy. He was a lead singer in a band. God, he was cute. Blond and small and—”

  “But you tall.”

  “I know. I smothered him as if he were my son. It was perfect. He was seventeen and so talented. I used to sneak down the fire escape to go watch him perform at Sid’s at the Bowery. I was awed by him.”

  “What happened to you two?” Tatiana asked, looking into her cup.

  “Oh, I found out what musician boys did after they finished playing their sets.”

  “I thought you went to watch him.”

  “I had to be back home. He would tell me he’d be by to see me later. And then I found out that between the end of set and later, he would have a number of girls in the back room of the bar. He would have them, and then come up the fire escape into my bedroom at five in the morning, and be with me.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I cried for three weeks straight. And then I met Jude.”

  “Who’s Jude?”

  “The second boy.”

  Tatiana laughed.

  Vikki placed her hand on Tatiana’s back and caressed her hair softly. “Tania.” Her voice was soothing. “There is a second love. And a third love. And if you’re lucky, a fourth and a fifth, too.”

  “That feels nice,” Tatiana said, holding her cup tighter and closing her eyes.

  “I think you’re only supposed to wear black for a year, mourn for a year. And I’ll tell you—Jude was better than Tommy. I felt more for him. He was a better—” Vikki paused. “He was a better person. Better at everything.”

  Tatiana nodded.

  “Tania, you’ve forgotten what a great man feels like.”

  “If only I forgotten.”

  Vikki pressed Tatiana to her. “Ah, Tania,” she said. “We’ll get you there. I promise. We’ll get you forgetting yet.”

  Once upon a time, young girls met young boys when the moon was full and the nights were dark, when there was a fire and singing and joking, when there was wine and taffeta and dancing, when the music was loud and the laughing, too, when one pair of eyes stared at another, and the girl’s chest swelled and the boy came up close, and suddenly she looked up, he looked down and…

  Once there was first love.

  Vikki had one. Edward had one. Isabella and Travis had one.

  First love, first kiss, first everything.

  Once when they were so young.

  And then they got older.

  Time passed with the cycles of the moon, and the music stopped, and the girl took off her dress, and the fire went out, and they stopped laughing. But eventually, as surely as the sunrise, another man stood in front of the girl in the taffeta dress and smiled, and she looked up at him, and he gazed down at her.

  It wasn’t first love.

  It wasn’t a first kiss.

  But it was love nonetheless.

  And the kiss was sweet.

  And the heart still pounded.

  And the girl went on. She went on because she wanted to live, and she wanted to be happy. She wanted to love again. She didn’t want to sit by the window looking out onto the sea. She didn’t want to remember. She wanted to forget the first man. All she wanted was to remember the first feeling.

  She wanted to take that feeling and place it on another man, and smile again, because the heart was too full and too bright not to love again. Because the heart needed to feel and needed to soar.

  And because life was long.

  She went on and stopped grieving, and she smiled and put on another dress and stood close to another man. She sang again, and joked again, after all, she did not die, she was still on this earth and she was still the same person, the person who needed to laugh every once in a while, to laugh with the roses, even if she knew that she would never again in all those many days ahead love as she loved when her heart was seventeen.

  To protect herself she walked through life favoring the bleeding half of her body. She was careful not to step too harshly, she was careful to shield it from other eyes, from other cries. Her greatest asset became her greatest liability. And what time allowed her to do was to become an expert at hiding her deformity from the world. What time allowed her to do was say, as she walked hunched uphill carrying the cross on her back, that everyone had one, and this was hers.

  She was so lucky to have her baby boy, to not be alone, to have love, to have life. And yesterday when she was young, she had been given more than she deserved.

  Someday, she would stand from the couch, step away from the window sill, leave the fire escape, put away the black backpack, take the rings off her neck. Someday when the music played, she would not feel him waltzing with her through the clearing under the crimson moon on their wedding night.

  Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed…

  Someday. But today with every breath of the past she colored her breath of the future, with every blink of her eye, Alexander bore himself deeper and deeper inside her until the whole of what they were together blinded her from seeing what else might be in the world for her.

  All she thought about was what he had loved in her, what he had needed from her, what he had wanted from her.

  Memory—that fiend, that cruel enemy of comfort.

  There was no forgetting; worse, the bloodletting that went on every minute became more intense as time went on. It was as if his lips, his hands, his crown, his heart, the things that seemed almost normal, almost right in Lazarevo acquired a prescient, otherworldly sense; it was as if in their totality they took on a life they had not had before.

  How did they fish, or sleep, or clean? How did she go to her sewing circle? She hated herself now, flagellated herself for doing anything else, how could she have tried to live a normal life in Lazarevo with him, knowing even then that time and they were as fleeting as snowflakes?

  Knowing what was at stake, could he have lowered his head and walked by her, if he had known what he would lose for the hour of rapture, for the minute of bliss?

  How he loved to touch her. And she would sit quietly, with her legs not too close together, so that anytime he wanted to, he could: and he did. Anytime. Yes, he said, it was what a soldier on furlough wanted. Anytime wasn’t often enough. He would touch her with h
is fingers as she sat quietly on the bench, and then he would touch her with his mouth as she sat less quietly on the bench, there was no other time for him but now, there was no later, there was only insanity now.

  I will make you insane, her memory screamed at her near the winter window sill as Tatiana smelled the brine of eternity. On the outside you will walk and smile as if indeed you are a normal woman, but on the inside you will twist and burn on the stake, I will never free you, you will never be free.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Colditz, January 1945

  PERHAPS THEY WERE RIGHT in what they said about Colditz. There was no escape. And there was no work, either. There was nothing for the men to do except sleep and play cards and go for two walks a day. They got up at seven for roll call, and turned off their lights every evening at ten. In between there were three meals and two walks.

  Colditz was the sprawling fifteenth-century fortress castle in northern Saxony, in the triangle between three great German cities: Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz. Colditz stood on a steep hill above the river Mulde. And it wasn’t just a hill. Colditz was surrounded by moats on the south and vertical drops on the east and leg-buckling precipices on the north and west. Colditz was built out of the rocky hill. When the mountain ended, the castle began.

  The castle was extremely well run by high-minded, well-organized Germans who took their jobs very seriously and would not be corrupted, as Alexander learned from the five Soviet officers already residing in their small, cold, single stone cell with four bunks.

  Colditz had a sick ward and a chapel, it had a delousing shed, two canteens, a movie theater, even a dentist. And that was just for the prisoners. As if it were their permanent residence, the German guards lived and ate very well. The commandant of Colditz had a quarter of the castle all to himself.

  The most notorious escapees in all the other POW camps in Germany were brought to Colditz, where the sentries with machine guns stood every fifteen meters, on level ground, on raised catwalks and in round towers, and watched them twenty-four hours a day. Floodlights covered the castle at night. There was only one way in and one way out, over a moat bridge that led to the German garrison and the commandant’s quarters.