“Why does he walk as if he’s got the weight of the whole world on his shoulders?” Alexander asked while walking home. The green and stunning ocean was to their right, through the bending palms. “Where does he get that from?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Hey,” he said, knocking into her with his body. Now that he wasn’t covered with lobster he could do that, knock into her. Tatiana took his arm. Alexander was watching Anthony. “You know what? Let me... I’ll take him to the park for a few minutes while you fix dinner.” He prodded her forward. “Go on now, what are you worried about? I just want to talk to him, man to man.”
Tatiana reluctantly went, and Alexander took Anthony on the swings. They got ice cream, both promising conspiratorially not to tell Mommy, and while they were in the playground, Alexander said, “Ant, tell me what you dream about. What’s bothering you? Maybe I can help.”
Anthony shook his head.
Alexander picked him up and carried him under the trees, setting him down on top of a picnic table while he sat on the bench in front of him so that their eyes were level. “Come on, bud, tell me.” He rubbed Anthony’s little chubby legs. “Tell me so I can help you.”
Anthony shook his head.
“Why do you wake up? What wakes you?”
“Bad dreams,” said Anthony. “What wakes you?”
His father had no answer for that. He still woke up every night. He had started taking ice cold baths to cool himself down, to calm himself down at three in the morning. “What kind of bad dreams?”
Anthony was all clammed up.
“Come on, bud, tell me. Does Mommy know?”
Anthony shrugged. “I think Mommy knows everything.”
“You’re too wise for your own good,” said Alexander. “But I don’t think she knows this. Tell me. I don’t know.”
He cajoled and prodded. Anthony’s ice cream was melting; they kept wiping up the drips. Finally Anthony, looking not at his father’s prying face but at his shirt buttons, said, “I wake up in a cave.”
“Ant, you’ve never been in a cave. What cave?”
Anthony shrugged. “Like a hole in the ground. I call for Mom. She’s not there. Mommy, Mommy. She doesn’t come. The cave starts to burn. I climb outside, I’m near woods. Mommy, Mommy. I call and call. It gets dark. I’m alone.” Anthony looked down at his hands. “A man whispers, Run, Anthony, she is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back. I turn around, but there is no one there. I run into the woods to get away from the fire. It’s very dark, and I’m crying. Mommy, Mommy. The woods go on fire too. I feel like somebody’s chasing me. Chasing and chasing me. But when I turn around, I’m all alone. I keep hearing feet running after me. I’m running too. And the man’s voice is in my ear. She is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back.”
The ice cream dripped through Alexander’s fingers, through Anthony’s fingers. “That’s what you dream about?” Alexander said tone-lessly.
“Uh-huh.”
Alexander stared grimly at Anthony, who stared grimly back. “Can you help me, Dad?”
“It’s just a bad dream, bud,” Alexander said. “Come here.” He picked up the boy. Anthony put his head on Alexander’s shoulder. “Don’t tell your mom what you just told me, all right?” he said in a hollow voice, patting the boy’s back, holding him close. “It’ll make her very sad you dream this.” He started walking home, his gaze fixed blinklessly on the road.
After a minute, he said, “Antman, did your mother ever tell you about her dreams when she was a little girl in Luga? No? Because she used to have bad dreams, too. You know what she used to dream about? Cows chasing her.”
Anthony laughed.
“Exactly,” Alexander said. “Big cows with bells and milk udders would go running down the village road after your young mother, and no matter how hard she ran, she couldn’t get away.”
“Did they go moo?” said Anthony. “Here moo, there moo, everywhere moo-moo.”
“Oh, yes.”
In the night Anthony crawled to his mother’s side, and Alexander and Tatiana, both awake, said nothing. Alexander had just come back to bed himself, barely dry. Her arm went around Anthony, and Alexander’s damp icy arm went around Tatiana.
The Body of War
As it began to stay lighter later, they would go swimming when the park beaches emptied. Tatiana hung upside down on the monkey bars, they played ball, they built things in the sand; the beach, the bars, the breaking Atlantic were good and right as rain. Alexander sometimes even took off his T-shirt while he swam in the languid evenings—slowly, obsessively trying to wash away in the briny ocean typhus and starvation and war and other things that could not be washed away.
Tatiana sat near the shoreline, watching father and son frolic. Alexander was supposed to be teaching Anthony how to swim, but what he was doing was picking the boy up and flinging him into the shallow waters. The waves were perfect in Miami for a small boy, for the waves were small also. Son jumped to father, only to be thrown up in the air and then caught again, thrown up in the air very high and then caught again. Anthony squealed, shrieked, splashed, full of monumental joy. And there was Tatiana nearby, sitting on the sand, hugging her knees, one of her hands out in invocation, careful, careful, careful. But she wasn’t saying it to Alexander. She was saying it to Anthony. Don’t hurt your father, son. Be gentle with him. Please. Can’t you see what he looks like?
Her breath burned her chest as she furtively glanced at her husband. Now they were racing into the water. The first time Tatiana had seen Alexander run into the Kama River in Lazarevo, naked except for his shorts—like now—his body was holy. It was gleaming and woundless. And he’d been in battles already, in the Russo-Finnish War; he’d been on the northern rivers of the Soviet Union; he had defended the Road of Life on Lake Ladoga. Like her, he had lived through blighted Leningrad. Why then, since she had left him, had this happened to him?
Alexander’s bare body was shocking to see. His back, once smooth and tanned, was mutilated with shrapnel scars, with burn scars, with whip marks, with bayonet gouges all wet in the Miami sun. His near-fatal injury at the breaking of the Leningrad blockade was still a fist-sized patch above his right kidney. His chest and shoulders and ribs were defaced; his upper arms, his forearms, his legs were covered with knife and gunpowder burn wounds, jagged, ragged, raised.
Tatiana wanted to cry, to cry out. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right that he should carry Hitler and Stalin on his whole body, even here in Miami where the tropical waters touched the sky. The colonel had been right. It wasn’t fair.
And because all the other iniquities were not enough, the men that guarded Alexander tattooed him against his will, as punishment for escape, as a warning against possible transgressions, and as an ultimate slur against his future—as in, if you have a future at all, you will never have an unblemished one.
Tatiana watched him and her pitying heart rolled around the concrete drum of her insides.
On Alexander’s upper left arm was a black tattoo of a hammer and sickle! It was burned into him by the depraved guards at Catowice—so they would know him by his marks. Above the hammer and sickle, on his shoulder there was a mocking tattoo of a major’s epaulet, taunting that Alexander had spent too much time in solitary confinement. Under the hammer and sickle was a large star with twenty-five points on it— one point for each of the years of his Soviet prison sentence. On the inside of his right forearm, the numbers 19691 were burned in blue— the Soviets learned to use the Nazi torture implements with glee.
On his right upper arm a cross was tattooed—Alexander’s only voluntary mark. And above the cross, he was branded with an incongruous SS Waffen Eagle, complete with a swastika, as a symbol of grudging respect from the ill-fated guard Ivan Karolich for Alexander’s never having confessed to anything despite the severe beatings.
The concentration camp numbers were the hardest to hide, being so low on his arm, which was why he didn’t often roll up his sleeves.
Jimmy in Deer Isle had asked about the numbers, but Jimmy hadn’t been to war, and so when Alexander said, “POW camp,” Jimmy didn’t follow up and Alexander didn’t elaborate. The blue numbers now, post Holocaust, screamed of Jewish suffering, not Soviet suffering, of someone else’s life, not Alexander’s. But the hammer and sickle, the SS insignia!— all alarms on his arm, ringing to be explained—were impossible to explain away in any context. Death camp numbers and a swastika? There was nothing to do about any of it, except cover it from everyone, even each other.
Tatiana turned to watch a family strolling by, two small girls with their mother and grandparents. The adults took one glimpse at Alexander and gasped; in their flustered collective horror, they shielded the eyes of the little girls; they muttered, they made the sign of the cross—on themselves, and hurried on. Tatiana judged them harshly. Alexander, lifting and throwing Anthony, never noticed.
Whereas once, certainly in Lazarevo with Tatiana, Alexander looked god-like, it was true now, the strangers were right—Alexander was disfigured. That’s all anyone saw, that’s all anyone could look at.
But he was so beautiful still! Hard still, lean, long-legged, wide-shouldered, strapping, impossibly tall. He’d gained some of his weight back, was muscular again after hauling all those lobster traps. On the rare occasions he laughed, the white of his teeth lit up his tanned face. His sheared head looked like a black hedgehog, his milk chocolate eyes softened every once in a while.
But there was no denying it, he was damaged—and nowhere more noticeably than in this, his American life. For in the Soviet Union, Alexander would have been among millions of men who were maimed like him, and he might have thought no more of it as they sent him out in his sheepskin parka to log in their woods, to mine in their quarries. Here in America, Tatiana sent him out in public, not in a parka but in linen, covering him from his neck to his ankles, to man their boats, to fix their engines.
During lovemaking Tatiana tried to forget. What needed to be whole and perfect on Alexander remained whole and perfect. But his back, his arms, his shoulders, his chest: there was nowhere for her to put her hands. She held onto his head, which was marginally better. There was a long ridge at the back of the occipital lobe, there were knife wounds. Alexander carried war on his body like no one Tatiana had ever known. She cried every time she touched him.
Tatiana couldn’t touch Alexander at night and prayed he didn’t know it.
“Come on, you two,” she called to them weakly, struggling to her feet. “Let’s head home. It’s getting late. Stop your horsing around. Anthony, please. What did I tell you? Be careful, I said!” Can’t you see what your father looks like?
Suddenly her two men, one little, one big, both with the straight posture, the unwavering gazes, came and stood in front of her, their legs in the sand, each in an A, their hands on their hips like kettles.
“Ready to go then?” she said, lowering her gaze.
“Mommy,” said her son firmly, “come and play.”
“Yes, Mommy,” said her husband firmly, “come and play.”
“No, it’s time to go home.” She blinked. A mirage in the setting sun made him disappear for a second.
“That’s it,” said Alexander, lifting her into his arms. “I’ve had just about enough of this.” He carried her and flung her into the water. Tatiana was without breath and when she came up for air, he threw himself on her, shaking her, disturbing her, implacably laying his hands on her. Perhaps he wasn’t a mirage after all, his body immersed in water that was so salty he floated and she floated, too, feeling real herself, remembering cartwheeling at the Palace of the Tsars for him, sitting on the tram with him, walking barefoot through the Field of Mars with him while Hitler’s tanks and Dimitri’s malice beat down the doors of their hearts.
Alexander picked her up and threw her in the air, only pretending to catch her. She fell and splashed and shrieked, and scrambling to her feet, ran from him as he chased her onto the sand. She tripped to let him catch her and he kissed her wet and she held on to his neck and Anthony jumped and scrambled onto his back, break it up, break it up, and Alexander dragged them all deeper in and tossed them into the ocean, where they bobbed and swayed like houseboats.
Alexander’s Favorite Color
“Tania, why haven’t you called Vikki?” Alexander asked her at breakfast.
“I’ll call her. We’ve only been here a few weeks,” she said. “Where’s the fire?”
“Try eleven.”
“Eleven weeks? No!”
“I know how much rent I’ve paid. Eleven.”
“I didn’t realize it’s been that long. Why are we still here?” Tatiana muttered, and quickly changed the subject to Thelma, the nice woman she met in the store a few mornings ago. Thelma’s husband had recently come back from Japan. Thelma was looking for something to entertain him with as he seemed a bit down in the dumps. Tatiana had suggested a boat ride, and Thelma had sprung at the idea.
Thelma apparently didn’t make it to the boat that afternoon, nor the next, though all afternoons were equally blue-skied and acceptable. When Tatiana ran into her at the store a few days later, Thelma muttered an excuse but said she and her husband were hoping to get to the boat this afternoon for sure. She asked Tatiana if she came on the boat. Tatiana said no, explaining about her son’s nap and her husband’s dinner and other home things. Thelma nodded in sisterly understanding, doing the home things herself that morning. She was making a hot apple cobbler. Apparently men returning home from the war liked that.
Alexander had been bringing home astonishing amounts of money. One dollar, two dollars, five dollars, twenty dollars.
“Even my math is failing me,” Tatiana said, sitting at the kitchen table with a stash of singles and fives in front of her. “I can’t count this high. Did you make a—hundred dollars today?”
“Hmm.”
“Alexander, I want to know what you’re doing to these women for a hundred dollars a day.”
When he smoked and grinned and didn’t reply, she said, “That was not a rhetorical question. Your wife would like an answer.”
He laughed, and she laughed, ha ha, but the next day when she went to pick up Anthony from the boat, who should she see but Thelma, nattily dressed standing at a distance Tatiana deemed to be too close to her barely salvaged husband. She wasn’t even sure it was Thelma, for in the grocery store Thelma was sans makeup and wore grocery store clothes. Here, her wavy dark hair was curled and teased, she had makeup on...she....Tatiana wasn’t even sure what it was that was provocative— perhaps the tightness of the skirt around the hips, the bareness of leg underneath, perhaps the wine trollop lips in the middle of a torrid noon, perhaps even the smiling tilt of the coquettish, slatternly head.
“Thelma?” Tatiana said, coming up the plank. “Is that you?”
Thelma snapped around as if she’d heard a voice from the grave. “Oh! Hi.”
“Oh, hi,” said Tatiana, stepping between her and Alexander. She turned to face the woman. “I see you’ve met my husband. Where’s your husband?”
High-heeling away, Thelma waved her off. “He couldn’t make it today.”
Tatiana said nothing—then. But she asked Anthony the next morning, in full hearing of a certain husband having breakfast, about the nice woman on the boat, and Anthony told her that she’d been coming every morning for some time.
“Is that so?”
“No, that is not so,” intervened a certain husband.
“And, Anthony, does the nice woman’s husband come with her?”
“Oh no. She doesn’t have a husband. She told Daddy her husband ran away. She said he didn’t want to be married after the war.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, and, Mommy,” said Anthony, licking his lips, “she brought us an apple cobbler to eat. It was so yummy!”
Tatiana said nothing else. She didn’t even look up. Alexander tilted his head across the table to get her attention, saying nothing himself. When he
went to kiss her, he cupped her face and made her look up at him. His eyes were twinkling. He kissed her nice and open, making the lava pit in her stomach nice and open, too, and left for work.
When Tatiana went to pick up Anthony at noon, Thelma wasn’t there.
“Mommy,” Anthony whispered. “I don’t know what Daddy said to her this morning, but she ran from the boat in tears!”
Thelma was never seen again, not even in the grocery store.
At home Alexander said, “You want to come with me tomorrow for the morning ride, for the afternoon ride? You know you can come on the boat with me any time you want.”
“Can I now?”
“Of course. Any time. You haven’t expressed any interest.” He paused. “Until now.”
There was something slightly . . . Tatiana didn’t know . . . pointed in his remark. Something accusing. But accusing her of what? Of cooking and cleaning and washing for him? Of braiding her hair and shaving and scrubbing herself pink, and putting on gauzy dresses and sheer panties and musk oil to come to meet him in the evenings? Of letting him have an hour or two with his boy in the mornings?
She contemplated making an issue of it. But an issue of what? She studied him, but he was already past it, as he was past most things, reading the paper, drinking, smoking, talking to Anthony.
Tatiana did come on the boat ride the next morning.
“Your hair is in a crew cut,” a girl murmured to him after she sauntered to stand by his side while Tatiana sat quietly nearby, Anthony on her lap. “Almost like you’re in the army,” the girl persisted when Alexander didn’t reply.
“I was in the army.”
“Oh that’s great! Where did you serve?”
“On the Eastern Front.”
“Oh, wow. I want to know everything! Where is this Eastern Front, anyway? I’ve never heard of it. My father was in Japan. He’s still there.” The girl, who looked to be in her late teens, continued nonstop. “Captain, you’re driving the boat so fast, and it’s getting so windy, and I’m wearing this flouncy skirt. You don’t think it’ll be a problem, do you? The wind isn’t going to kick the skirt up, in an immodest sort of way?” She giggled.
The Summer Garden Page 10