The Summer Garden

by Paullina Simons

“I’m not having this conversation.”

  In two strides he was near her, pulling her up from the table. “Okay, okay,” she whispered, before he even opened his mouth. “Okay.”

  Outside on the deck Alexander stood before her in the growing darkness, silent but for the hushed rippling off the water, the distant rustle of trees from a small cool wind.

  “Oh, Tatiana,” said Alexander. “What have you done?”

  She said nothing.

  “I called Aunt Esther,” he said. “She wasn’t an easy egg to crack. Then I called Vikki. I know everything.”

  “You know everything,” she said without inflection, stepping away from him and shaking her head. “No. You know nothing.”

  “I’ve been wondering why in two years you haven’t called your friend. Why you’re poring over maps. Why you’re shielding me from officers of law. Why you’re practicing with my weapon.” Alexander spoke low and pained. “Now I know.”

  Abruptly she turned away, and he grabbed her and spun her back to him. “Two years ago—two years!—we could’ve stopped in DC on the way to Florida. What are you proposing we do now?”

  “Nothing,” Tatiana said, pulling away from his hands. “We do nothing now. That’s what we do.”

  “You do see how from their point of view it looks as if we’ve been on the run?”

  “I don’t care how it looks.”

  “We’re not fugitives. We have nothing to hide.”

  “No?”

  “No! One conversation with the generals at Defense and the diplomats at State would’ve put this whole thing behind us.”

  “Oh, Alexander,” said Tatiana with a shake of her head, “you once saw through so much. Since when did you become so naïve?”

  “I’m not naïve! I know what’s going on, but since when did you become so cynical?”

  “They already talked to you in Berlin. Why do you think they want to talk to you again?”

  “It’s procedure!” he yelled. “It’s not procedure!” she yelled back. Their voices carried down the black canals, echoing down the water tunnels. She lowered her voice. “Don’t you understand anything? Interpol is looking for you, too.”

  “You know this how?”

  “Because Sam told me, that’s how.”

  Alexander fell back in his chair. “You talked to Sam?” he said aghast. “You knew this, and you didn’t tell me?”

  “I didn’t tell you a lot of things.”

  “Obviously. When did you talk to him?”

  She wouldn’t say.

  “When?” He raised his voice. “Tania! When? Hard way or easy way, you’re going to tell me. You might as well tell it to me easy.”

  “Eight months ago,” she whispered.

  “Eight months ago!” he yelled. “Oh, why did you have to call Esther? Why?” Tatiana threw her arms down in defeat.

  “Is this why we left Napa? Oh my God.” He glared at her with sharp reproach. “All this time, moving from place to place, wringing your hands, falling silent on me, asking me about desertion to the Urals. What games you played, knowing this.” Alexander was so disappointed, he was forced to look away from her. How could the Tatiana he thought he knew keep secrets from him so well? And what was so wrong with him that he never prodded, never pursued, never pushed, even though he sensed and suspected that something was wrong? Alexander couldn’t look at her.

  Tatiana continued to stand in front of him and not speak. “We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” he said finally. “We’re leaving and going to Washington.”

  “No!”

  “No?”

  “That’s right, no. Absolutely under no circumstances. We stay put. We go nowhere. Unless it’s to the woods in Oregon.”

  “I’m not going to the woods in Oregon,” said Alexander. “I’m not hiding out in the Urals. Or Bethel Island.”

  Tatiana bent to him, raising her voice, carrying it far. “We’re not going, and that’s it,” she said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  He frowned at her angry face. “Well, I’m going.”

  Her mouth trembled as she straightened up. “Oh, that’s just perfect, you’re going, you, like you’re all by yourself, only you. Returning to the front, are you? Well, then, you’re going to have to go without me, Alexander. This time if you go, you go alone. Anthony and I aren’t coming with you.”

  He got up so furiously he knocked the chair down behind him and the plates and the glasses and his cigarettes. Tatiana backed away, her hands up; he took one lunging step toward her. “Oh, that’s just fucking priceless!”

  “Shura, stop!”

  He loomed too close to her on the dock. “You’re threatening me with leaving?”

  “I’m not threatening you with leaving!” she yelled. “You’re the one who’s telling me you’re going by yourself. I’m telling you we’re not going!”

  “We are!”

  “No!”

  Anthony came out, having been awakened by their raised voices, and stood warily on the edge of the dock. Raggedly panting, they stared at each other. Then Tatiana took the boy inside and didn’t come back out.

  After a long while Alexander returned to the house to find her under the covers. He sat on the bed, and she turned away in a coil.

  “What, that’s it?” he said. “You walked away, in the middle, got into bed, and that’s it?”

  “What more is there?” she said tonelessly. “My own government is looking for me,” he said. “I won’t have it.” Tatiana shuddered. “Don’t you understand—they’re going to come for me, Tania,” said Alexander. “One day, they’ll find me, working on a farm somewhere, picking grapes, making wine, driving a boat, catching lobster, and the statute of limitations won’t run out on me.”

  “Yes, it will,” she said. “After ten years it will.”

  “Are you joking?” he whispered into her back. “Ten years? What are you talking about? What am I, in espionage? I’ve done nothing wrong!”

  “Well, if you go back, they’re going to cuff you and put you away for obstructing justice, for running from the law, or even for treason. You’ll be in prison though you did nothing wrong. Or worse—they’ll . . .” She was speaking into the pillow, Alexander could barely hear her.

  “So what do you propose?” he said. “Living your life hoping you’re going to stay one step ahead of the United States government?”

  “I can’t have this argument with you, Shura,” said Tatiana. “I just can’t.”

  Alexander turned her to face him, she turned back. He moved her to him, she moved away, pulling the blankets over her head. He removed all the pillows, all the blankets and threw them on the floor, leaving her naked on the empty sheet. She covered her body from him. He pulled her hands away; she struggled against him. He bent to her bare stomach, to the soft gold space below her navel, pressed his mouth to it, whispering to her, touch me, touch my head. She was shaking and didn’t. He lay on top of her naked body in all his clothes, flat on her, but since there was no peace inside her, there was no peace for him. Piercing her sadness with his sadness, barely undressing, he made deaf mute love to her and then they lay deaf mute, unable to utter the things that were piercing them—he thought he had made himself so clear, and she thought she hadn’t made herself clear enough.

  Her back was to him. His back was to her. “I won’t live like this,” said Alexander. “This was my life in the Soviet Union, trapped, running, lying, afraid. This can’t be my life in America. This can’t be what you want for us.”

  “I just want you,” she said. “I’ll take you in the Ural Mountains, I don’t care how many men you kill with your desertion. I know, it’s unforgivable, but I don’t care. I will take you running and trapped and lying. I will take you any way. I don’t care how difficult it will be. Everything has been difficult.”

  “Tania, please. You don’t mean it.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “How little you know me. Better take that magazine quiz again, Shura.”

  “
That’s right,” he said, “I obviously don’t know you at all. How could you have kept this from me?”

  Tatiana didn’t reply; a gasp was all that came from her. Alexander unrolled her out of her fetal ball, holding her wrists away from her face. “All this time you deceived me, and now you say you won’t come with me?”

  “Please,” she whispered. “Please, you are so blind! I’m begging you, begging you, please see reason. Listen to me. We can’t go to them.”

  “I lived in a prison already,” said Alexander, squeezing her wrists, bearing down on her. “Don’t you understand? I want a different life with you.”

  “See, that’s the difference between us. I just want a life with you,” said Tatiana, not struggling against him at all, lying fragile and open under his hands. “I told you this back in Russia. I didn’t care if we lived in my cold Fifth Soviet room with Stan and Inga at our door. All I wanted was to live there with you. I don’t care if we live here on Bethel Island, or in one small room on Deer Isle. Soviet Union, Germany, here—it doesn’t matter. I just want it with you.”

  “On the run, hiding out, forever scared?” he said. “That’s how you want it?”

  “Any which way,” she said, crying. “Just with you.”

  “Oh, Tania,” he said, letting go of her.

  She crawled to him, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Not now, not in Russia, not ever,” she said with sobbing anger, “did you ever protect yourself for my sake, for Anthony’s sake!”

  “Shh,” he said, opening his arms. “Come here. Shh.”

  But she wouldn’t come, her hands clenched in supplication. “Please, let’s not go,” she said. “For Anthony. He needs a father.”

  “Tania...”

  “For me,” she whispered.

  Frozen in time they remained on the bed in a November Leningrad embrace.

  “I swore to myself in Berlin,” she said into his chest, “that they would never have you again.”

  “I know,” Alexander said. “So what are you going to do? Inject me full of morphine like you planned to, kill me like you wouldn’t kill Colonel Moore?” He extended his upturned forearm to her, tapping on his tattooed blue numbers. “Go ahead. Right here, Tatiana.”

  “Oh, stop it, just stop it!” she whispered madly, slapping his arm away. They didn’t speak the rest of the night.

  In the morning, without saying a word to each other and barely one to Anthony they packed their things and left Bethel Island. Mr. Shpeckel waved goodbye to them from his boat, a regretful look about him in the pale sunrise. “What did I tell you, Captain?” he called after Alexander. “I always knew you were runners.”

  After a traveling day of stunning silence, somewhere in the drifting sands of Nevada, Alexander whispered, cradling her in the sleeping bag, “They won’t have me again. I promise you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Not them, not me.”

  “Come on, I’ll take care of it. Trust me.”

  “Trust you?” Tatiana said. “I trusted you so much I believed your lying face and left the Soviet Union, pregnant, thinking you were dead.”

  “You weren’t alone. You were supposed to be with the doctor,” he whispered. “Matthew Sayers was getting you out.”

  “Yes. You didn’t count on him getting suddenly dead.” She took a breath. “Don’t speak to me. You want me to do what you want, I’ll do what you want, but don’t speak to me, don’t try to make it better.”

  “I can’t make it better,” he said. “I want you to make it better.”

  He knew that beyond Sam Gulotta and the irate Americans, she was afraid of the Soviets most of all. He was not blameless, he was not innocent. She had reason to be afraid.

  He couldn’t see her face. “Tania,” said Alexander, quietly, nonchallengingly, caressing her, “you want to fix us? Help me set this right. I know you don’t want to live with this debilitating fear. You’ve been unable to think straight. Help us. Please. Make yourself free. Make me free.”

  On another black night near Hell’s Canyon in Idaho, Alexander said to her, “How could you have kept something like this from me? Something this big, this grave? We are meant to go through this together, hand in hand. Like lovers.” He was in the sleeping bag, lying on top of her back, tethered to her, their hands threaded.

  “Go through what together?” she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Your surrender to the authorities? Which is what you’re doing after the first second you heard they were looking for you? Gee, I wonder why I didn’t tell you. It’s a mystery.”

  “Had you told me, we would have fixed it back then, instead of trying to plug up the hole in the Titanic now.”

  “The Titanic was doomed as soon as it hit that iceberg,” said Tatiana. “Nothing could’ve saved it. So you’ll excuse me if I tell you that I hate your metaphors.”

  Finally Tatiana gave Alexander Sam Gulotta’s number. Alexander called from a public phone booth, Sam called back and they spent a tense hour on the phone, Tatiana listening to Alexander’s end of the conversation and biting her nails. When he hung up, he said Sam agreed to meet them in ten days in Silver Spring, Maryland.

  Anthony, sensing that something was remiss, made barely any demands on his washed-out parents. He read, he played his guitar, he drew pictures and played with his soldiers. But in the middle of the night, he started to wake up again and crawl into the tent with his mother. She had to start putting her nightgown on again.

  Without stories, or laughing, or joking, they meandered through their America, north through the rivers of Montana, south through the Black Hills of Wyoming and the Badlands of South Dakota. Grimly through the days they drove across the country, they lived in the tents, they cooked over fires, ate out of one bowl. They fastened together and then slept fitted together, one metal bowl inside the other, she buried in his chest, pressed into his heart, swallowed by his ruined body. He didn’t know what was happening. He felt all his instincts were abandoning him, he couldn’t find his way out of the blind mire of her terror. They were exhausted by their demons, by the worry in the day, by the fears in the night. They prayed for sleep, but when it came it was broken and black. They prayed for sun, but each sun just got them closer to the Washington DC of their nightmares.

  Chapter Six

  Jane Barrington, 1948

  Sam Gulotta

  Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of DC, Tatiana said, “Stop the camper.” He did stop—at the designated meeting point, at a gas station. They got out; he filled the tank, went to go get them Cokes, cigarettes, candy for Anthony, who was running around raising dust. They were meeting Sam at eight in the morning; it was seven-thirty.

  Tatiana had put on the sheer ivory muslin and tulle dress Alexander had bought for her in New Orleans; she had taken it in herself on Bethel Island; after all, her mother had been a seamstress. She had brushed out her hair and left it down. In the summer morning breeze, the diaphanous dress floated up slightly and the wisps of her sundried hair blew around her face.

  “Thank you for looking so lovely for me,” said Alexander.

  She managed a “You’re welcome.” She tried to speak to him, but her voice wouldn’t work. It was unseemly in the zenith of a bright Godlike summer morning to be filled with so much anxiety. He lit a cigarette as they waited. He was wearing his U.S. captain’s Class A dress uniform he had been given by the U.S. consul in Berlin. He had shaved and cropped short his hair.

  Tatiana had at first insisted she was going to be by Alexander’s side through everything. Trouble was, there was no one to leave the boy with. She said she would call Vikki and ask her to come help, but as soon as Anthony, who was milling nearby, obviously listening to adult conversations, had heard the name Vikki in conjunction with his own, he started to cry and clinging to his mother’s leg, said please, please, don’t leave me alone with Vikki.

  And though Tatiana was horrified, she was not so horrified as to not want to call her friend. It was Alexander who put his foot down. They
were not going to both leave Ant now when he needed his mother again.

  Standing at the camper, Tatiana said bitterly, to no one in particular, “I can’t believe we’re subjecting ourselves to this. Who would have found us in our vast America? We’d have been lost forever.”

  “How many times do you intend to step out in front of me, Tatiana,” Alexander asked, “to hide me from the Communists?”

  “The rest of my life, if that’s what it takes.”

  He turned to her, and something in his eyes opened and cleared and focused on her. He stared into something he was obviously trying very hard to understand. “What did you just say?”

  She turned her upset face away from his questioning gaze. “Oh, I am such a fucking idiot,” said Alexander—as Sam Gulotta drove up in his old Ford sedan.

  Sam shook Alexander’s hand, and then stood in front of Tatiana without speaking. He was wearing an atypically rumpled suit, and his face was weary. His curly hair had started to go gray at the edges and thin on top; he looked less sturdy though he had coached his sons’ baseball games for many years. “You look well, Tatiana. Very well.” He cleared his throat, and looked away. Sam, who never noticed her, looked away! “Marriage obviously agrees with you,” he said. “I got married again myself.” His first wife had died in a plane crash at the start of the war, bringing supplies to the troops. Tatiana wanted to say that the second marriage didn’t seem to agree with him quite so well but of course didn’t. Her arms were crossed on her chest.

  Sam said, “So finally you saw reason.”

  “Not me,” she retorted.

  “Well, since he’s the one who’s going have to pay for your shenanigans, I’m glad one of you had some sense.”

  “I’m not paying for her shenanigans,” said Alexander.

  Tatiana waved them both off. “Sam, don’t pretend you don’t understand why in today’s climate I might not be completely forthcoming with bringing you my husband.”

  “Yes,” said Sam. “But why were you not forthcoming with bringing me your husband back in 1946?”

  “Because we were done with all of you!” Tatiana exclaimed. “And he’s already talked this to death in Berlin. That’s not in his file for all to see?” Alexander put his hand out to quieten her. Anthony was nearby.