Alexander wasn’t sure how it was going to work. Carefully he said that plunging back into the military was not going to be in his best interest. Tatiana would go through the roof.
“Who’s plunging back into the military?” Richter said calmly. “You could be commissioned as a reserve officer. Just two days a month of your time. Earlier this year, the President passed legislation for drill pay for reservists. You’ll have to pass formal clearance,” he went on. “It’s not going to be easy—Red Army are incendiary words these days—as you’ve just witnessed. But I’ll help you. I really think you should do it. Where are you living?”
Alexander said nowhere at the moment, they were still trying— “Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Richter. “Wherever you are in the States, you can get onto an army base, look over the raw data we send and prepare a finished intel report for us. It’ll be sporadic work, but it’ll more than satisfy your annual active duty requirement, and give you other options. You can train, or you can do combat support.”
Sam Gulotta thought it was a great opportunity for Alexander. Richter said the position could be expanded to serve Alexander’s interests. If he wanted to live in Washington, he could work for Army Intelligence right here and be permanently employed by the Department of Defense.
Alexander said, “I’ll let you know. Not likely about living in DC, though.”
“What, Missus Commando doesn’t like Washington?” asked Richter. “She doesn’t like war,” said Alexander. “She’s not going to be happy with any of it.”
“Bring her to the Pentagon tomorrow.” Richter smiled broadly. “I’ll change her mind. I’ll convince her to move here. You’ll see—I’ll convince her to move to Korea with you.”
“Oh, much luck with that.”
“I picture your Russian wife,” Richter said, slapping Alexander on the back, “the woman who single-handedly took on the Red Army in Germany on your behalf as someone who, built like an ox, used to pull her own plow in the Russian collective fields, sowing and reaping for the proletariat.” He laughed.
“Well, that’s about right, isn’t it, Alexander?” said Sam. “Just about.” Alexander smiled back, finishing up his smoke. He needed to get back to the Russian ox-built serf, who was no doubt now summoning a county militia to snatch him from the iron grip of the U.S. State Department.
As they were walking down the corridor, Dennis Burck came out of one of the offices and stopped them in the hall. He wondered if he could have “simply a minute” of Alexander’s time.
Richter said goodbye and left. Sam tried to pull Alexander aside, Matt Levine wanted to come inside the chamber, but Burck said, “No, no, you’ll have him back in thirty seconds, you can speak all night to him.” He cited the smallness of his office and the absence of extra chairs. “Just wait for him outside,” Burck said amiably. “I will leave the door open, and we won’t be but a moment.”
Burck was more senior than Sam Gulotta. Sam had to stay behind. Alexander went into an office that was even smaller than Matt Levine’s. Invited to sit, Alexander opted to stand. Burck began by saying that one of his many responsibilities at the State Department was being a deputy liaison between State and Interpol. Alexander half listened half politely. Burck continued in the same genial tone. “I know you didn’t want to mention it to the committee, but we know, of course, that your wife was also a Soviet subject, who escaped, leaving a dozen Soviet troops dead on the border with Finland.”
Alexander’s mouth was tight. “The dead border troops had nothing to do with her,” he said. “And my wife is now an American citizen. Now, will there be anything else?”
“Oh, that wasn’t what I wanted to talk to you about, Mr. Barrington.” On Burck’s desk lay a thick file that was the Barrington State Department documents since 1917. “Let me get right to my point. I have information about your mother.”
Alexander thought he had misheard. “What did you say?”
Burck buried his gaze and his hands in the file. “You were told your mother was executed in 1938. Who told you this?” He glanced up.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mr. Burck.”
Burck got up. “Would you mind if I closed the door, Mr. Barrington, so we could have a little privacy?”
“Privacy for what?”
Burck went around Alexander and shut the door on Sam and Levine.
When he sat back down at his desk, in a voice so low Alexander had to strain to hear, Burck said, “Now listen carefully. Your father, it is true, was executed, but... your mother is still alive.”
Alexander stood stonelike, his face a concrete mask.
Burck pressed on. “It’s true. She is still alive! She is in Perm-35. Do you know where that is?”
Alexander spoke with difficulty, but he became more calm, not less, all his senses sharpened as if he were in battle. “I have credible information my mother was killed,” he said in a dull voice. “I heard it four different ways from four different people.”
“You’re hearing it another way from me.”
Alexander’s fists clenched as he tried to keep his composure. “I don’t believe you,” he said.
“It’s my business to know. And it is the truth. This is objectively verifiable information. She has been in the labor camp near the Urals for the last eleven years. She is old and not in the best of health, but she’s still alive. Her name is on the prison rolls.”
Alexander’s fists started to shake.
“Would you like to see?” Burck started to leaf through a long thick sheaf of serrated papers he’d taken from the folders.
Taking a step back, a small stagger back, Alexander stumbled against a chair.
His voice a sibilant excited whisper, Burck exclaimed, “You can help your mother. It’s up to you. You can bring her back home.”
Alexander needed to sit down. He stood. He said nothing. If he asked how he could do that, it would mean he believed Burck, that it was true, she was alive.
“Since the war, many people, especially women, have been released and rehabilitated. You’ll see, the Soviets will help us. And your mother has not been well.”
“Why would they listen to you?”
“My Foreign Office is in constant contact with the Soviet attaché and with Cominform. I am also close to the Commissar of People’s Affairs, who often commutes sentences for prisoners based on recommendations.”
“The Commissar of People’s Affairs? You mean Lavrenti Beria?”
Burck went on without replying. “We can leave for Turkey next week. From Istanbul we will fly across the Black Sea to Yalta, and then—with Soviet permission, of course—drive in a special convoy arranged by them north through the country up the River Volga to the camp. In the meantime, I will begin negotiating for her release.”
Alexander backed away.
“I have incentives to sway them. These are very troubled times. We often exchange influence—”
The chair crashed over and fell against the bookshelves.
“Mr. Barrington, wait!”
Alexander was already in the corridor through the flung-open door. “Let’s go,” he said to Sam and Levine. “Now.”
They walked quickly, almost running, down the corridor and into the stairwell. “What did he say?” Levine kept asking. “What did he say?”
Sam said nothing.
Alexander didn’t reply, but like a grim statue, said good-bye to Levine and then sat mutely in Sam’s car on the way back to Silver Spring, asking for a few moments to himself so he could still the cries of his heart.
They got back to the Nomad well after ten in the evening. Tatiana had been sitting outside on the little steps of the camper, holding a sleeping Anthony on her lap. Alexander couldn’t say a word to her for many minutes while she stood in his arms, sobbing, buried in his chest. In his pajamas, Anthony, having been suddenly awakened, was pulling on her dress.
“Mom, come on, stop it, let go; Mama, let go of him.”
Sam took the boy awa
y to give them a minute. “So how was your mother today?” he said, picking him up.
“Terrible,” said Anthony. “She said herself she was a train wreck of a mother. I’m hoping she’ll be better tomorrow.”
“Indeed, Ant, I think she will be,” said Sam. “Everything is going to be all right. And tomorrow your dad is going to take you to a special place where soldiers work. It’s called the Pentagon.”
Anthony beamed.
Five yards away, near the door of the Nomad, Tatiana was whispering against Alexander’s chest. “Darling, I’m sorry, I can’t stop crying.”
He stood stiffly, his arms around her. “So it’s okay? It went okay?”
“It went okay.”
She immediately heard it, caught it, looked up at him, through her wet eyes. “What?” she said, wiping her face. “What happened?”
“Nothing. I’ll tell you later.”
Finally he let her disengage from him and Anthony jumped to his dad. Sam said he had to be going. His own wife was going to kill him for coming home this late. Despite feeling completely wiped out, a grateful Alexander didn’t want to let Sam go, asking him to stay, perhaps have dinner together.
“Yes,” Tatiana said, more composed. “Please stay, Sam. I’ll make something quick.”
“Last thing you need is me around here,” said Sam. “You rest up. Tomorrow, I’ll take the three of you out to lunch. We have to go to the Pentagon anyway. Tania, tomorrow you’re going to meet your husband’s new boss and his new lawyer. I think I’ll call your friend Vikki, see if she wants to take the train and come down and join us.”
“No, no! Not Vikki,” said Anthony, reaching for his mother. “My husband has a boss and a lawyer?” said Tatiana, reaching for Alexander, taking the boy.
They stood in the dusty bowl of a yard by the gas station, and Sam told her about the hearing. Alexander, his powers of speech draining away, said nothing.
“Thank you, Sam,” Tatiana said. “Once again—you have been very good to me.”
Patting her gently, Sam said with affectionate reproach, “Your husband did all the work. Thank him. You nearly lost me my job, missy. All because you wouldn’t trust me. You knew I’d help you if I could.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was so afraid.” She didn’t look at Alexander as she spoke.
She fussed and murmured over him after Sam left. He was shattered and in no condition to drive at night searching for a campsite. They were right by the side of the road and there was nowhere to pitch a tent, to have a little privacy, but they reluctantly stayed. She warmed up some water on their little Primus stove for him to wash with, fed him canned Spam, some bread, cucumbers, a beer. Anthony fell asleep on the floor of the camper.
After she put Ant in his bed, Tatiana went outside and stood in front of Alexander. He couldn’t look at her. “Tania, I simply can’t speak anymore. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.”
“No, darling, tell me tonight.”
There was a long nicotine-stained silence. Then Alexander told Tatiana about Dennis Burck.
Tatiana, sitting on his lap, held him to her, tried to calm his frantic heart, but now she was the one who was shaking, having taken some of the frenzy he had been feeling onto herself. “Husband,” she said, “it’s not true.”
He instantly became defensive. He pushed her away and raised his voice. “How do you know?”
“Alexander, you don’t want to believe your mother survived eleven years in the worst prison the Soviets have built.”
“It’s not the worst prison,” he said by way of expiation. “It’s not bitterly cold there. Don’t you remember? It’s near Lazarevo.” His voice broke.
“Shura!” She grabbed him, brought him to her off the chair, her arms went around his shaking back. “It’s not true! She’s not there. She is not in their prison.” Her eyes were blazing. “Don’t you see why Burck is telling you this? So you will go back with him. As soon as you enter their territory, with their Soviet-permitted convoy, you’ll be taken to Perm-35. The convoy is for you. It’s a ruse, it’s fraud, it’s lies. It’s meant to enslave you.”
“Yes,” he said, feeling enslaved. “I know it doesn’t seem like it’s true. But, Tania... what if it is?”
“Darling,” she whispered, her begging eyes on him, “it’s not true.”
“It’s my mother!”
“It’s not true!”
In the camper next to a sleeping Anthony in their only bed, lying on his back, Alexander said quietly to her, “Maybe you’re right—Burck is not to be trusted. But don’t you think there is a chance that he could be telling the truth?”
“No.”
She was so sure. How could she be so sure?
“Four people told you she had died. One of them was Slonko. Don’t you think when monstrous Slonko was alone with you in your jail cell that he, to get you to admit you were Alexander Barrington, would have told you your mother was alive? ‘Tell me you’re the American we’ve been looking for, and I will personally let you see your mother’? Wouldn’t he have said that?”
“It could’ve been bluster.” Alexander put his arm over his face. Tatiana took it away, putting her face over his, climbing on top of him.
“A man is talking to another man about his mother! Tell us who you are, Major Belov, and we will let your mother live. That’s bluster?”
“Yes.” He couldn’t help himself; he pushed her off him. She climbed right back.
“Burck wants you to acknowledge that what he’s saying might be true. He wants you to say it’s possible, and then he will immediately know you by your words. That for the silence of your own heart you will sell out everything you believe. And return to the Soviet Union with them. Don’t you remember Germanovsky in Sachsenhausen? Please. You don’t want to give them this, we’re done with them.”
“Are we?”
“Aren’t we?” she said ever so faintly.
He wanted to turn his face from her, but she wouldn’t let him.
They stared at each other in the dark.
Alexander spoke in a depleted voice. “If I went back, how could I help her?”
“You couldn’t. You would be dead. But you should comfort yourself with knowing he told you lies.”
“I have no fucking comfort. And you don’t know everything. You don’t. You wouldn’t be so cavalier if it were your mother.”
“I’m not cavalier,” Tatiana said. “Don’t hurt me. I’m never cavalier.”
His eyes stinging, Alexander wanted to apologize but couldn’t.
Tatiana whispered, “In my family I was closest to Pasha, not my mother. And I’ll tell you this—if Burck told me Pasha was still alive and was with the enemy in the Polish woods, I would have left him to God. I would not have sent you to go find him.”
“That’s a good thing, because as you know, I fucked it up.”
“You didn’t, darling,” Tatiana whispered. “You did all you could to rage against fate. Like I did to try to save Matthew Sayers. But every once in a blue while,” she continued, her voice barely an aching breath, “what we do, unfortunately, is just not enough.”
They fell quiet; struggling, stuporous but not quite asleep.
His mother, Gina Borghese, was seventeen when she left Italy to come to America to find a life fit for a modern, progressive young woman. She met Harold Barrington, as American as the Pilgrims; they fell in love—that fine-looking Italian and that fast-talking radical—fell in love, so unprogressive; they married, even worse. She changed her name, became Jane Barrington. They changed. She put away her abiding Catholicism. They became Communists. It felt so right. She was thirty-five when she finally had Alexander, her desperately wanted baby; it seemed less right to want something personal so badly. She was forty-six when they left for the Soviet Union. She was fifty-two when she was arrested. Now she would have been sixty-four. Could she live out twelve years in Perm-35, a feminist, a Communist, an alcoholic, a wife, Alexander’s mother? He had seen his fath
er in his dreams. He had seen Tatiana. He had never seen his mother, not even as a ghostly breath on someone else’s voice to whisper to him, She is gone your mother. She is never coming back. He thought she was buried so deep in the recesses of his heart, and yet it took a shabby little man like Burck one word to uncover Alexander’s mother from her shallow grave.
Deep in the night Tatiana suddenly said, “You’re breathing so raw, Alexander. Don’t torture yourself. Can’t you see past the lies?”
“I can’t,” Alexander whispered, nearly breaking down. “Because I want it desperately to be true.”
“No, you don’t. Oh, Shura...”
“You should understand that better than anyone,” he said. “You who left our only child to go and find me when you thought I might be alive, because you wanted it desperately to be true. You didn’t leave me in the German woods.”
Her eyes were glistening. “It actually was true. You sent me word.”
“Oh, come on. Orbeli? You told me what you thought of my Orbeli.” Her hands gripped his shoulders. “You said Orbeli, but the word was faith. I went because I believed. But this isn’t even your mother’s one vague word. This is the lying word of a lackey who’s betraying his country.”
He held her in desperation. “I just can’t see the truth of anything anymore.”
“Sometimes I can’t either.” She looked into his face in the blue of night. “You and your lying face and your damn Orbeli,” she whispered.
Alexander moved her off him, laid her down, was over her, was pressed into her, crushing her. Anthony was right there, he didn’t care, he was trying to inhale her, trying to absorb her into himself. “All this time you were stepping out in front of me, Tatiana,” he said. “Now I finally understand. You hid me on Bethel Island for eight months. For two years you hid me and deceived me—to save me. I’m such an idiot,” he whispered. “Wretch or not, ravaged or not, in a carapace or not, there you still were, stepping out for me, showing the mute mangled stranger your brave and indifferent face.”
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