Tatiana and Alexander

by Paullina Simons

  “At Christmas!”

  “Oh. Why he coming home so soon?”

  “Can you believe it? He was shot down over the Pacific.”

  Tatiana stared.

  “Oh, he’s fine,” Viktoria said dismissively. “It’s a scrape. A little superficial shoulder wound. He flew the plane ninety miles after he was shot. How bad could it be?”

  Tatiana stood from the table. “I think I go feed my son.”

  “Yes, but Chris is going to be miserable.”

  “Who is Chris?”

  “Dr. Pandolfi. You haven’t met him? He comes here with Dr. Ludlow.”

  Chris Pandolfi. That’s right. “Oh, I met him.” Dr. Pandolfi was the doctor who had come aboard the ship she was on and decided he was not going to help to deliver her baby on U.S.…soil. He wanted to send her back to the Soviet Union, broken amniotic waters, TB and all. It was Edward Ludlow who had said no and made Dr. Pandolfi help get Tatiana to the hospital on Ellis Island. Tatiana patted Vikki on the shoulder. She wasn’t sure Chris Pandolfi was such a great catch. “You be fine, Viktoria. Maybe stay away from Dr. Pandolfi. Your husband is coming home. You are so lucky.”

  Viktoria got up and followed Tatiana down the hall to her room. “Call me Vikki,” she said. “Can I call you Jane?”

  “Who?”

  “Isn’t your name Jane?”

  “You call me Tania.”

  “Why would I call you Tania when your name is Jane?”

  “Tania my name. Jane just on documents.” She saw Vikki’s uninterested and confused face. “Call me what you like.”

  “When are you getting out?”

  “Getting out?”

  “Out of Ellis.”

  Tatiana thought about it. “I do not think I am getting out,” she said. “I have nowhere to go.”

  Vikki followed Tatiana into her room and glanced at her son sleeping in his bassinet. “He’s kind of little,” she said absent-mindedly, touching Tatiana’s blonde hair. “His father was dark-haired?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s it like being a mother?”

  “It’s—”

  “Well, when you’re all better, I want you to come home with me. Meet Grammy and Grampa. They love little babies. They keep wanting me to have one.” Vikki shook her head. “God help me.” She glanced again at Anthony. “He’s sort of cute. Too bad his father has never seen him.”

  “Yes.”

  The boy was so helpless. He couldn’t move, or turn his head, or hold his head. He was so difficult to dress—his floppy arms and head defying Tatiana’s awkward mothering skills—that some days she kept him naked just in a cloth diaper, swaddled underneath the blankets. She had no clothes for him except for the few nightgowns Edward had brought for her. It was summer and warm and he didn’t need much, thank goodness, for the head would not fit in the nightgown hole, the arms refused to go into the long sleeves. Bathing him was even harder, if that were possible. His bellybutton had not healed completely, so she washed his body with a cloth, and that was not too bad, but washing his hair was outside her expertise. He couldn’t do anything, he could not help her in any way, he could not lift his arms or stay still when she needed him still or be propped up. His head bobbed backward, his body slipped out of her grasp, his legs dangled precariously above a sink. She lived in fear that she would drop him, that he would slither out of her arms and onto the black-and-white tile floor. Her feelings about his absolute dependence on her fluctuated from intense anxiety over his future to an almost suffocating tenderness. Somehow, and maybe that was how nature intended it, his need for her made her stronger.

  And she needed to be made stronger. Too often when he was asleep and safe, Tatiana herself felt that her own bobbing head, her own dangling arms and legs, her fragile body would slip on the sill and plummet down to the concrete ground below.

  And so to draw sustenance from him, she would uncover him, unwrap him and touch him. She would lift him from his bed and place him on her chest, where he would sleep, head on her heart. He was long, his limbs were long, and as she caressed him, she imagined looking at another boy through the eyes of his mother, a baby boy, long like Anthony, dark like him, soft like him, touched by his mother, bathed, nursed, caressed by his new mother who had waited her whole life to have this one boy.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Interrogation, 1943

  HE HEARD VOICES OUTSIDE, and the door opened.

  “Alexander Belov?”

  Alexander was going to say yes but for some reason thought of the Romanovs shot in a small basement room in the middle of the night. Was it the middle of the night? The same night? The next night? He decided to say nothing.

  “Come. Now.”

  He followed the guard to a small room upstairs, this one not a classroom. It was an old storage area, maybe a nurses’ station.

  He was told to sit in the chair. Then he was told to stand up. Then to sit back down again. It was still dark outside. He couldn’t figure out what the time was. When he asked, he was met with a “Shut up!” He decided not to ask again. After a few moments, two men entered the room. One of them was the fat Mitterand, one of them was a man he did not know.

  The man shined a bright light into Alexander’s face. He closed his eyes.

  “Open your eyes, Major!”

  Fat Mitterand said softly, “Vladimir, now now. We can do this another way.”

  He liked that they were calling him major. So they still couldn’t get a colonel to interrogate him. As he had suspected, they didn’t have anyone to deal with him here in Morozovo. What they needed to do was get him to Volkhov where things would be different for him, but they didn’t want to risk any more of their men for a drive across the river. They had already failed once. Eventually he would go in a barge, but the ice would have to melt first. He could spend another month in the Morozovo cell. Could he take another minute in it?

  Mitterand said, “Major Belov, I am here to inform you that you are under arrest for high treason. We have irrefutable documents accusing you of espionage and treason to your mother country. What say you to these charges?”

  “They’re baseless and unfounded,” said Alexander. “Anything else?”

  “You are accused of being a foreign spy!”

  “Not true.”

  “We are told you have been living under a false identity,” said Mitterand.

  “Not true, the identity is my own,” said Alexander.

  “In front of us we have a few words we would like you to sign, to the effect that we have informed you of your rights under the Criminal Code of 1928, Article 58.”

  “I am not signing a single thing,” said Alexander.

  “The man next to you in the hospital told us that he thought he heard you speaking English to the Red Cross doctor who came to visit you every day. Is that true?”

  “It is not.”

  “Why did the doctor come to visit you?”

  “I don’t know if you are aware of why soldiers go to the critical ward of a hospital, but I was wounded in action. Maybe you should talk to my superiors. Major Orlov—”

  “Orlov is dead!” snapped Mitterand.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Alexander, momentarily flinching. Orlov was a good commanding officer. He was no Mikhail Stepanov, but then who was?

  “Major, you stand accused of joining the army under an assumed name. You stand accused of being an American named Alexander Barrington. You stand accused of escaping while en route to a corrective camp in Vladivostok after having been convicted of anti-Soviet agitation and espionage.”

  “All bald-faced lies,” said Alexander. “Where is my accuser? I’d like to meet him.” What night was it? Was it at least the next night? Had Tania and Sayers gotten out? He knew that if they had, they would have taken Dimitri with them, and then it would be very difficult for the NKVD to maintain that there was an accuser when the accuser himself disappeared like one of Stalin’s Politburo cabinet ministers. “I want to get to the
bottom of this as much as you do,” said Alexander with a helpful smile. “Probably more so. Where is he?”

  “You are not to ask questions of us!” Mitterand yelled. “We will ask the questions.” Trouble was, they had no more questions. Rather, they had the same question over and over again: “Are you an American named Alexander Barrington?”

  “No,” would reply the American named Alexander Barrington. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Alexander could not tell how long this continued. They shined a flashlight into his face; he closed his eyes. They ordered him to stand up, which Alexander took as an opportunity to stretch his legs. He stood gleefully for what seemed like an hour, and regretted being told to sit back down. He didn’t know it was precisely an hour but to keep himself occupied during the repetitive questioning, he started counting the seconds it took for each round to be completed from “Are you an American named Alexander Barrington?” to “No. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It took seven seconds. Twelve if he drew out his response, if he tapped his feet together, if he rolled his eyes, or if he sighed heavily. Once he started to yawn and could not stop for thirty seconds. That made the time go faster.

  They asked the question 147 times. Mitterand had to take a drink six times to continue. Finally he passed the reins to Vladimir, who needed less to drink and fared much better, even asking Alexander if he wanted a drink. Alexander politely declined, grateful for the diversion. He knew he must never accept anything they offered him. That was their invitation into his graces.

  Still not diverting enough. One hundred and forty-seven times later Vladimir said, with naked frustration in his voice and on his face, “Guard, take him back to his cell.” And then he added, “We will make you confess, Major. We know the accusations against you are true and we will do all it takes to make you confess.”

  Usually, when the Party apparatchiks interrogated prisoners with the intention of convicting them as soon as possible and sending them to a forced labor camp, everyone knew the charade being played. The interrogators knew the charges were bogus, and the stunned and dazed prisoners knew the charges were bogus, but in the end, the alternatives presented to them were too stark for them to continue to deny the obvious fallacies. Tell us, you-who-have-lived-next-door-to-an-anti-proletarian-revolutionary, that you are in collusion with him, or it will be twenty-five years in Magadan for you. If you confess you will get only ten. That was the choice and the prisoners confessed—to save themselves, or to save their families, or because they were beaten, degraded, broken-down, paralyzed from thought by the barrage of lies. But Alexander wondered if this was the first time since these sham interrogations began decades ago that the prisoner was accused of the actual truth—that he indeed was Alexander Barrington—and the interrogators for the first time were armed with truth, and truth stood in front of them, truth that Alexander had to deny, truth that Alexander had to bury under a barrage of lies if he were to live. He thought about pointing this out to Mitterand and Vladimir but he didn’t think they would either understand or appreciate the grim irony.

  After he was taken back to his cell, two guards came in and, with their two rifles pointed at him, ordered Alexander to undress. “So we can launder your uniform,” they said. He undressed down to his BVDs. They asked him to remove his watch and boots and socks. Alexander was unhappy about the socks, for the floor in his cell was numbingly cold. “You need my boots?”

  “We will polish them.”

  Alexander was grateful for the foresight that had made him move Dr. Sayers’ drugs from his boots to his BVDs.

  Reluctantly he handed over the boots, which they snatched from him and left without a word.

  After the door had closed and he was left alone, Alexander picked up the kerosene lamp and held it close to his body to warm himself up. He didn’t care about losing oxygen any longer.

  The guard saw and yelled not to touch the lamp. Alexander did not put the lamp down. The guard came in and took the lamp out, leaving Alexander cold and in darkness again.

  His back wound, though having been bandaged thoroughly by Tatiana, was throbbing. The dressing was wrapped around his stomach. He wished he could wrap his whole body in the white bandage.

  He needed as little of his body touching the cold as possible. Alexander stood in the middle of his cell, so that only his feet were on the icy floor. He stood and imagined warmth.

  His hands were behind his head, they were behind his back, they were in front of his chest.

  He imagined…

  Tania standing in front of him, her head on his bare chest, listening for his heart, and then lifting her gaze at him and smiling. She was standing tiptoed on his feet holding on to his arms, as she reached up with her neck extended and lifted her head to him.

  Warmth.

  There was no morning and no night. There was no brightness and no light. He had nothing to measure time with. The images of her were constant, he could not measure how long he had been thinking of her. He tried counting and found himself swaying from exhaustion. He needed to sleep.

  Sleep or cold? Sleep or cold?

  Sleep.

  He huddled in the corner and shook uncontrollably, trying to stave off misery. Was it the following day, the following night?

  The following day from what? The following night from what?

  They’re going to starve me to death. They’re going to thirst me to death. Then they will beat me to death. But first my feet will freeze and then my legs and then my insides, they will all turn to ice. And my blood, too, and my heart, and I will forget.

  Tamara and Her Stories, 1935

  There was an old babushka named Tamara who had lived for twenty years on their floor. Her door was always open and sometimes after school Alexander would stop in and talk to her. He noticed that old people loved the company of young people. It gave them an opportunity to impart their life experience to the young. Tamara, sitting in her uncomfortable wooden chair near the window one afternoon, was telling Alexander that her husband was arrested for religious reasons in 1928 and given ten years—

  “Wait, Tamara, Mikhailovna, ten years where?”

  “Forced labor camp, of course. Siberia. Where else?”

  “They convicted him and sent him there to work?”

  “To prison…”

  “To work for free?”

  “Oh, Alexander, you’re interrupting, and I need to tell you something.”

  He fell quiet.

  “The prostitutes near Arbat were arrested in 1930 and not only were they back on the street months later but had also been reunited with their families in the old cities they used to frequent. But my husband, and the band of religious men, will not be allowed to return, certainly not to Moscow.”

  “Only three more years,” Alexander said slowly. “Three more years of forced labor.”

  Tamara shook her head and lowered her voice. “I received a telegram from the Kolyma authorities in 1932—without right of correspondence, it said. You know what that means, don’t you?”

  Alexander didn’t want even to hazard a guess.

  “It means he is no longer alive to correspond with,” said Tamara, her voice shaking and her head lowering.

  She told him how, from the church down the block, three priests were arrested and given seven years for not putting away the tools of capitalism, which in their case was the organized and personal and unrepentant belief in Jesus Christ.

  “Also forced labor camp?”

  “Oh, Alexander!”

  He stopped. She continued. “But the funny thing is—have you noticed the hotel down the street that had the harlots right outside a few months ago?”

  “Hmm.” Alexander noticed.

  “Well, have you noticed how they all disappeared?”

  “Hmm.” Alexander noticed that too.

  “They were taken away. For disturbing the peace, for disrupting the public good—”

  “And for not putting away the tools of capita
lism,” Alexander said dryly, and Tamara laughed and touched his head.

  “That’s right, my boy. That’s right. And do you know how long they had been given in that forced labor camp that you care so much about? Three years. So just remember—Jesus Christ, seven, prostitutes, three.”

  “All right,” said Jane, coming into the room, taking her son by the hand and leading him out. Before she left, she turned around and said in an accusatory tone to Tamara, but addressed to Alexander, “Can we not be learning about prostitutes from toothless old women?”

  “Who would you like me to learn about prostitutes from, Mom?” he asked.

  “Son, your mother wanted me to talk to you about something.” Harold cleared his throat. Alexander crimped his lips together and sat quietly. His father looked so uncomfortable that Alexander had to sit on his hands to keep himself from laughing. His mother was pretending to clean something in another part of the room. Harold glared in Jane’s direction.

  “Dad?” said Alexander in his deepest voice. His voice had broken a few months ago, and he really liked the way his new self sounded. Very grown-up. He also had shot up, growing more than eight inches in the course of the last six months, but he couldn’t seem to put any flesh on his bones. There just wasn’t enough of…anything. “Dad, do you want to go for a walk and talk about it?”

  “No!” said Jane. “I can’t hear a thing. Talk here.”

  Nodding, Alexander said, “All right, Dad, talk here.” He scrunched up his face and tried to look serious. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were sitting cross-eyed and sticking his tongue out. Harold was not looking at Alexander.

  “Son,” said Harold. “You’re getting to be at that age where you’re, well, I’m sure, you’re—and also you’re—you’re a fine boy, and good-looking, I want to help, and soon, or maybe already—and I’m sure that you’re—”

  Jane tutted in the background. Harold fell quiet.

  Alexander sat for a few seconds, then got up, slapped his father on the back and said, “Thanks, Dad. That was helpful.”

  He went into his room, and Harold didn’t follow him. Alexander heard his parents bickering next door, and in a minute there was a knock. It was his mother. “Can I talk to you?”