Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel

by Paullina Simons

  The white jeeps themselves were meant to be self-sufficient, to supply and feed teams of three Red Cross personnel—two nurses and a doctor, or three nurses—for a period of four weeks. The doctor was there to tend to the sick and wounded if need be, and there was certainly a need for tending: the refugees in the Displaced Persons camps they visited suffered from every malady known to man: fungus infections, eye infections, eczemas, tick bites, head lice, crab lice, cuts, burns, abrasion, open sores, hunger, diarrhea, dehydration.

  In one such white jeep, Tatiana, Penny and Martin traveled to refugee camps scattered all over northern Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands. They may have had enough food to feed themselves, but the DPs didn’t, and there were not nearly enough food parcels to distribute. Several times a day, Martin had to stop driving so they could help someone limping or walking, or lying by the side of the road. The whole of western Europe was reeling with the homeless and camps for them were springing up all over the countryside.

  But one thing that was not springing up all over the countryside was Soviet refugees. Those were nowhere to be seen. And although there were plenty of soldiers, French, Italian, Moroccan, Czech, English, there were no Soviet soldiers.

  Through seventeen camps and thousands and thousands of faces, Tatiana did not even come close to finding a Soviet man who had fought near Leningrad, much less to finding anyone who had ever heard of an Alexander Belov.

  Thousands of faces, of pairs of hands reaching up, of foreheads she touched, desperate people infected and unwashed.

  He was not here, she knew it, she felt it. He was not here. She walked each discouraging day from one camp to another, without Penny or Martin. The next camp was close—seven miles—and she did not want company, nor their chatter, she wanted to march herself into a life where she could feel for him and find him. Her heart sinking, fading in her chest, she could not feel for where he was.

  She withdrew from Penny and Martin, wishing instead upon a New York sunset, wishing instead upon the face of her son, now three months going on forever without his mother. Wishing idly for warm bread, for good coffee, for the happiness of sitting on a couch covered up by a cashmere blanket reading a book with Vikki a nudge away, with Anthony a room away. Her blonde roots grew out faster than she could find a private bathroom with a mirror for her touch-ups. She took to wearing her nurse’s kerchief at all times.

  Three months. Since March, she had been driving the truck, handing out parcels, bandaging wounds, administering first aid, driving through destitute Europe, and every day bending to the ground in prayer as she bandaged another refugee. As she buried another refugee. Please let him be here. Another barracks, another infirmary, another military base. Be here, be here.

  And yet…and yet…

  The hope had not died completely.

  The faith had not died completely.

  Every night she went to sleep and every morning she woke up with renewed strength and looked for him.

  She found another P-38 on a Ukrainian man who had died practically in her arms. She took his ruck which contained eight grenades and five eight-round clips. She crawled into the jeep and hid her new-found loot along with her weapons bag inside the hidden compartment underneath the floor, a thin, narrow hutch that held crutches and folding stretchers, or litters, and now held an arsenal of fire.

  But when Tatiana finally realized that Alexander could not be where there was no trace of him, she quickly lost interest in this part of Europe and suggested they go elsewhere.

  “What, you don’t think the DPs need our help, Nurse Barrington?” said Martin. They were in Antwerp, Belgium.

  “No, they do, they do. But there are so many others who need our help. Let’s go to U.S. military base here and talk to base commander, Charles Moss.” They had received from the International Red Cross the names and the maps of all U.S. installations and known DP camps in Europe.

  “Where do you think they need us most, Colonel Moss?” she asked the commander of the base.

  “I’d say Berlin, but I wouldn’t recommend going there.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re not going to Berlin,” confirmed Martin.

  “The Soviets have rounded up the German soldiers and imprisoned them,” said Moss. “I hear the conditions there make the DP camps here seem like resorts on the Riviera. The Soviets have not allowed the Red Cross to distribute parcels in the camps, which is too bad. They could use the aid.”

  “Where are these Germans held?” Tatiana wanted to know.

  “Ah, in a fitting irony, they’re being held in the very concentration camps they themselves built.”

  “Why wouldn’t you recommend going there?”

  “Because Berlin is a ticking war bomb. There are three million people in the city that cannot be fed.”

  Tatiana knew something about that.

  Moss continued. “The city needs three and a half million kilos of food—a day—and Berlin produces two per cent of that.”

  Tatiana knew even more about that.

  “You figure it out. The sewers are out, the drinking pumps are out, there are no hospitals beds and almost no doctors. Dysentery, typhus, not our little eye infections. They need water, medical attention, grain, meat, fat, sugar, potatoes.”

  “Even in western zones?” asked Tatiana.

  “A little better there. But you have to go to the Soviet zone to get to the concentration camps in eastern Germany. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “Are the Soviets amenable?” she asked Moss.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Like the Huns.”

  After they left Antwerp, Tatiana said, “Dr. Flanagan, what you think? Should we head for Berlin?” The Soviets were in Berlin.

  He shook his head. “Absolutely not. That wasn’t on our agenda. Our mission is clear: the Low Countries and northern Germany.”

  “Yes, but Berlin needs us most. You heard the colonel. There is plenty for these parts.”

  “Not plenty. Not nearly enough,” said Martin.

  “Yes, but in eastern Germany, there isn’t any.”

  Penny stepped in. “Tania is right, Martin. Let’s go to Berlin.”

  Martin sniffed.

  “Hey, how come you allow her to call you Martin?” asked Tatiana.

  “I don’t allow her,” he said. “She just does it.”

  “Martin and I have traveled together through Europe since 1943,” said Penny. “He was just an intern then. If he’s going to make me call him Dr. Flanagan, I’m going to make him call me Miss Davenport.”

  Tatiana laughed. “But Penny, Davenport isn’t your last name. It’s Woester.”

  “I always liked Davenport.”

  All three of them were sitting in the front, squished together in the cabin of the jeep. Tatiana was squeezed between the stiff Martin, who was driving, and the soft Penny.

  “Come on, let’s see these work camps, Dr. Flanagan,” said Tatiana. “Don’t you feel needed? Berlin doesn’t have enough doctors. You’re a doctor. Go where you are needed.”

  “Doctor are needed everywhere,” said Martin. “Why should we go into the quicksand that is Berlin? We’re going to be sunk there.”

  But they went, first stopping off at Hamburg to replenish the supplies. Martin balked at filling the jeep with too many kits and food parcels, pointing out that regulations clearly stated that the trucks were not to be filled more than four feet high, but both Tatiana and Penny insisted, and their jeep was packed from floor to ceiling. Tatiana couldn’t get to her stash under the floor. She figured if and when she needed it, the jeep would be less fully packed.

  Tatiana could have firebombed the city of Berlin herself, so well armed and well stocked was she. She even brought a case of twenty liter-and-a-half bottles of vodka from Hamburg, buying it with her own money.

  “Why do we need that? We don’t need vodka!”

  “You will see, Martin, without it, we will get nowhere.”

  “I don’t want to allow that in my jeep.” />
  “Believe me, you won’t regret it.”

  “Well, I think drinking is a filthy habit. As a doctor I don’t want to condone that sort of behavior.”

  “You’re so right. Please don’t condone.” Tatiana slammed the doors of the jeep as if the matter had been closed.

  Penny stifled a laugh.

  “Nurse Woester, you are not helping. Nurse Barrington, did you not hear me? I don’t think we should bring that alcohol.”

  “Dr. Flanagan, have you ever been in Soviet territory before?”

  “Well, no.”

  “I didn’t think so. Which is why you should trust me on this one. Just this one, all right? We will need the vodka.”

  Martin turned to Penny. “What do you think?”

  “Tatiana here is the chief nursing practitioner at Ellis Island for New York’s Department of Public Heath,” said Penny. “If she says we should bring vodka, we should bring vodka.”

  Tatiana didn’t want to correct her, she didn’t want to say was the chief nursing practitioner.

  In the DP camps as they traveled hundreds of kilometers through Allied-occupied western Germany, Tatiana found something else besides money, jewelry, pens and paper: the many hands of the desperately lonely-for-home soldiers. Nearly each one, as she bent over him, touched her and whispered something, in French, or Italian, or German, or in familiar warming English, about what a nice girl she was and what a dark girl and what a pretty girl, and was she lonely too, was she married, was she willing, was she, was she, was she, and to every one of them, Tatiana—who did not stop touching their heads to bring them comfort—would quietly say, “I’m here to look for my husband, I’m here to find my husband, I’m not one for you, I’m not the one.”

  Penny, however, was not attached and was not looking for her husband. What was she looking for? Tatiana was glad Vikki had not come to this cauldron of reckless male want. Vikki would have thought the gods were finally answering her prayers. Penny, less attractive than Vikki—and maybe therein lay the problem—could not stop herself from feeling flattered and from succumbing to their pleas, and every week or so, needed to take injections of penicillin to ward off sicknesses the thoughts of which made Tatiana a little bit sick herself.

  There were some wards and some camps, in Bremen for instance, where things were so heated that the Red Cross nurses were not allowed to go into the wards by themselves, either without an armed convoy or without a male Red Cross representative. Trouble was, the convoy sometimes was paid to look the other way, and the Red Cross male reps were unreliable. In all honesty, who could Martin have stopped?

  Tatiana took to carrying the P-38 on her at all times, tucked into her belt at her back. Often she did not feel safe.

  To get to Berlin, they had to pass through a number of Soviet checkpoints. Every five miles or so, they were stopped by another military post on the road. Tatiana thought of them not as checkpoints but as ambushes. Every time they looked at her American passport, her heart thumped extra loud in her chest. What if one of them was alerted to the name Jane Barrington?

  As they pulled away after one checkpoint, Martin said, “Why do you call yourself Tania if your name is Jane Barrington?” He paused. “Rather, why did you name yourself Jane Barrington if your name is Tania?”

  “Martin! Don’t be such a clod,” exclaimed Penny. “Don’t you know anything? Tania escaped from the Soviet Union. She wanted to give herself an American name. Right, Tania?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So why would you be going back into Soviet-occupied territory if you escaped from the Soviet Union?”

  “Oh, that is a good question, Martin,” said Penny. “Why, Tania?”

  “I go where I’m needed most,” said Tatiana slowly. “Not where it’s most convenient.”

  Every other checkpoint, the Soviet soldiers asked to inspect the jeep. Since the truck of the jeep was packed to the gills, all the soldiers did was open the doors and close them again. They did not know about the hidden compartment so they never requested to look in there, nor did they look through the personal belongings. Martin would have had a conniption if he saw how much morphine Tatiana was carrying in her nurse’s bag.

  “Where is this Berlin already?” said Tatiana.

  Penny replied, “You’re in it.”

  Tatiana looked around at the long rows of houses. “This is not Berlin.”

  “Yes, it is. What were you expecting?”

  “Big buildings. The Reichstag. The Brandenburg game.”

  “What do you think firebombing means?” Martin said loftily. “There is no more Reichstag. There are no more big buildings.” They drove on to the center of town.

  Tatiana pointed. “I see the Brandenburg gate is still standing.”

  Martin fell quiet.

  Berlin.

  Post-war Berlin.

  Tatiana didn’t know what she was expecting, but having lived through a bombed Leningrad, she had braced herself for the worst, and was still surprised by the destruction she found. Berlin wasn’t a city, it was a ruin of biblical devastation. Most buildings in inner Berlin were lying in rubble, and the residents lived in the shadow of those ruins, as their children played amid the broken concrete, as they hung their washing out to dry from one mangled steel post to another. They built tents around the places where they used to live, and made fires in pits in the ground, and ate what they could and lived how they could. That was the American sector.

  The Tiergarten Park that had made Berlin famous was now the stomping ground for thousands of displaced Berliners, the River Spree was polluted with cement ash, glass, sulfur, sodium nitrate—the debris of firebombing that left nearly three quarters of the central city razed to the pavement.

  Penny was right. Berlin was not cramped like New York into a cigarette pack of an island, was not even like Leningrad, a neat ink blot stopped by the gulf. Berlin sprawled in all directions, broken buildings jutting out for miles.

  No wonder the sectors were so hard to contain, Tatiana thought. There isn’t one way in and one way out, there are hundreds of ways in. Tatiana wondered how the Soviets were keeping all the Germans from escaping into the American, French and English sectors.

  Martin explained. “I told you, because all the Germans are in jail.”

  “All the Germans?”

  “The rest are dead.”

  They met with the American military governor in Berlin, an ageing brigadier general by the name of Mark Bishop originally from Washington Heights in Manhattan, who fed them, was very interested in news from back home, and let Tatiana telegraph a wire to Vikki and Anthony (“AM WELL AND SAFE. MISS YOU. LOVE YOU.”) and one to Sam Gulotta (“IN BERLIN. ANY NEWS? ANY HELP?”) and put them up in a hostel for the night. The building was badly damaged but inhabitable. The inside walls had partly collapsed and the windows were all blown out. But many medical and military personnel used the building to sleep in, and so did Tatiana, Penny, and Martin. Tatiana and Penny shared a room. It was June, it was breezy and cool and there was the constant noise of awake men coming from the outside. Tatiana slept lightly with her hand heavily on the pistol.

  Alexander of the broken hearted! Alexander of the innocent, the eloquent, the invincible, the invisible, the inordinate, Alexander of the warrior, the combatant, the commander, Alexander of the water and the fire and the sky, Alexander of my soul—good Lord, deliver me to you, to my soldier man of the tanks and the trenches, of the smoke and the sorrow, to Alexander of all my bliss and my longing, to you wherever you may be—I am searching for you. Please O God be on this earth, Alexander of my heart.

  The next morning, there was a telegram from Sam waiting for her at Bishop’s administrative offices. “YOU ARE MAD. JOHN RAVENSTOCK CONSULATE. HE WILL HELP.”

  Vikki also telegraphed: “COME HOME. WE HAVE NO BREAD.”

  Mark Bishop himself, eager to get the Red Cross inside the Soviet zone of occupation, took the three of them through the Brandenburg gate to meet with the lieutena
nt-general of the Berlin garrison who was also the military commander of Berlin.

  “He doesn’t speak English. Do any of you speak Russian, or do I have to get an interpreter?” asked Bishop.

  Martin volunteered Tatiana. “She speaks Russian.”

  She would have to talk to him about volunteering her for things.

  “Tania, you don’t mind translating, do you?” said Penny.

  “Not at all. I do my best,” Tatiana replied, and then took Penny a side. “Penny,” she whispered, “don’t call me Tania, all right? We’re in Soviet territory. Don’t call me by my Russian name. Call me Nurse Barrington.”

  “I didn’t even think, I’m sorry,” Penny said and smiled. “All that lovin’ must be going to my brain.”

  “Did you take your penicillin shot today? Yesterday you forgot.”

  “I took it. I’m nearly all better. Thank God for penicillin, huh?”

  Tatiana smiled wanly, cringed slightly.

  The buildings on the boulevard Unter den Linden in the district of Mitte that had been commandeered to quarter the Soviet army were as decrepit as the hostel Tatiana had slept in. Tatiana was stunned most of all not by the destruction, but by the absolute and foreboding lack of reconstruction, a year after the war. New York, which was not even bombed, was building feverishly as if it were gearing up for the next century. Yet the eastern section of Berlin was stagnant and ruined and sad.

  “Commander Bishop, why is it so quiet here? Why isn’t Berlin rebuilding?”

  “We are rebuilding. Slowly.”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “Nurse Barrington, the tragedy that is Berlin I cannot explain in the five minutes before we meet the Soviet garrison commander. The Soviets don’t want to pay for the rebuilding. They want the Germans to pay for the rebuilding.”

  “All right,” said Tatiana, “Berlin is a German city. They should.”

  “Ah. But first the Soviets want to rebuild the Soviet Union. It’s only right.”

  “It is.”

  “So there is no money for eastern Berlin. Or brains. They’re sending all the engineers and all the money to the Soviet Union.”