The Summer Garden

by Paullina Simons

  Her eyes closed, her arms tightened around his neck. “That stranger is my life,” she whispered. They crawled away from Anthony, from their only bed, onto a blanket on the floor, barricading themselves behind the table and chairs. “You left our boy to go find me, and this is what you found . . .” Alexander whispered, on top of her, pushing inside her, searching for peace.

  Crying out underneath him, Tatiana clutched his shoulders.

  “This is what you brought back from Sachsenhausen.” His movement was tense, deep, needful. Oh God. Now there was comfort. “You thought you were bringing back him, but, Tania, you brought back me.”

  “Shura... you’ll have to do . . .” Her fingers were clamped into his scars.

  “In you,” said Alexander, lowering his lips to her parted mouth and cleaving their flesh, “are the answers to all things.”

  All the rivers flowed into the sea and still the sea was not full.

  Alexander didn’t get in touch with Burck. The next day they met with Tom Richter, who could not hide his astonishment when he shook the delicate hand of Alexander’s ox-pulling wife, his slight, slim, unassuming, soft and smiling wife.

  “I told you,” Sam said quietly to Richter. “Not what you expected.”

  “It’s not possible! She looks like she’d be scared of a mouse! And look at her—she’s the size of a peanut!”

  “Gentlemen,” said Alexander, coming from behind them and putting his hands over their shoulders, “are you whispering about my wife?”

  The size of a peanut she might have been and certainly scared of mice, but the promise Tatiana extracted from Tom Richter was the size of the Giza Pyramid—her husband could join the reserves to go to a quiet army base and translate classified documents in a room; military intelligence behind secure closed doors was fine with her, combat support, if necessary, in the form of intel analysis, perhaps a little training and exercise, but not under any circumstances, for any reason, in any universe could he be pulled up to active duty. She said the wounds he and she received in his ten years at war rendered her incapable of his active combat.

  Richter agreed and Alexander spent a month being interviewed and probed and classified and tested and trained at Fort Meade, Maryland, while waiting for the final reserve paperwork to go through. Finally he got a security clearance card and a commission as a captain in the U.S. Army Officer Reserve Corps. Richter even managed to get a sparkly replica of a Congressional Medal for Anthony to whom he had taken a real shine—and even more of a shine to a fantastically flirty though engaged-to-someone-else Vikki who had come to see her Tania and her boyzie-boy.

  They had long dinners with Sam and Matt Levine and their wives, went sailing on the Chesapeake with Richter and Vikki. Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss was all anyone talked about. And Dennis Burck quietly and without a trace left the federal government.

  After two months with Richter, Tatiana and Alexander went on their way—to Wisconsin, South Dakota, Montana, to the woods in Oregon— through the land of lupine and lotus, to find their way.

  First Interlude

  Saika Kantorova, 1938

  We children live in a frightening time for Russia.

  ALEXANDER BLOK

  Pasha

  Pasha Metanov always cleaned his own fish, even when he was a little boy. He didn’t ask Babushka to clean it, nor even Mama, who would’ve cleaned his fish, his teeth, his feet and his britches for the rest of his life if he let her—because Pasha was Mama’s only son. He didn’t ask Tania to clean it because he knew she wouldn’t—and didn’t know how. When he was five he asked Deda to show him how to clean the fish, and from then on, he took care of his own dirty work.

  The evening after meeting Saika they were having fish soup made out of Pasha’s bass, just the three of them. Pasha caught it and cleaned it and Dasha cooked it. Tania, who neither caught nor cleaned nor cooked, read.

  The three siblings were by themselves. Deda, their grandfather, had gone fishing alone while it was still light, and Babushka, their grandmother, was visiting Berta and her mother, Blanca, down the street. “So what do we think? Do we like our new neighbors?” Dasha asked. “Stefan is such a nice boy.”

  “He could have no teeth, Dasha, and you’d think he was a nice boy,” said Pasha. “Saika, now that’s a nice girl.” He smiled.

  Tatiana said nothing. She was picking the bones out of the fish.

  “Oh, no,” said Pasha. “Oh no, oh no, oh no. Dasha, she’s already quiet. What is wrong with her? What is wrong with you?” he boomed. “You don’t like them?”

  Tatiana’s mind on this windy June evening was full of the Catholic Queen Margot sacrificing her life to an arranged marriage to the Protestant Henry Navarre to unite the French Catholics and the French Protestants, believing she would never in her life find true love in the prison in which she lived. But Tatiana knew she would—and how. She wanted to get back to Margot and La Môle.

  Her brother and sister stopped eating and stared at her.

  “Did I say anything? I said nothing.”

  “Your silence is screaming to us,” said Pasha.

  “And now she says nothing,” Dasha said. “Before you couldn’t shut up with your stupid questions.”

  “Oh, leave her alone, Dash. She’s just jealous.” Pasha grinned, banging Tatiana on the head with a wooden spoon.

  The spoon flew out of his hands, hit by Tatiana’s quick, no-nonsense fist. “Pasha, if I was jealous of every girl you said hello to, I’d be green all day long.”

  With a flare to her dancing brown eyes, Dasha said, “So what was with the inquisition earlier?”

  “Just wanted to know where the Pavlovs went, that’s all,” said Tatiana.

  “What do you care?”

  “I wanted to know. What if I end up where they’re at?”

  “I saw a large portrait of a blue peacock in their house!” exclaimed Pasha. “It struck me kind of funny.”

  Tatiana jumped on top of the dining table and sat down on it cross-legged. Dasha yelled at her to get off. Tatiana didn’t move. “Exactly, Pasha!” she said. “They haven’t unpacked, they haven’t taken down the Pavlovs’ things, but they put up a portrait of a peacock. Funny indeed. You think maybe they’re ornithophiles?”

  “Stefan is a little like a peacock.” Dasha smiled. “With that fine tail to draw me in like a peahen.”

  “What about Mark, your boss?” Tatiana said casually. “Does he have a fine tail?”

  Oh how Pasha laughed. Indignantly red, Dasha pushed Tatiana off the table. “What do you know about anything? Stay out of adults’ business. I like it better when you’re buried in your silly books.”

  “I bet you do, Dasha,” said Tatiana, hitting a laughing Pasha with the flat of her hand as she went to fetch Queen Margot. “I just bet you do.”

  Who is Saika?

  Saika was an arresting girl with dramatic overemphasized features, as if her creating artist drew her too fast with a charcoal pencil and then slapped on some undiluted paint. Her hair and eyes were the color of char and coal tar, her lips were ruby red and her teeth polar white. The cheekbones were high, the chin pointed, the forehead broad, the nose sharp. It all was sort of right, well-shaped, slick, but all of it together had the effect of too much on too small a canvas that you were standing too close to. You couldn’t look away, but for some reason you wanted to.

  The next morning, Saika was by Tatiana’s window. “Hello,” she said, sticking her head in with a smile. “I’m unpacked. Want to come out and play?”

  Was she serious? Tatiana never got out of bed in the morning.

  “Can I climb in?” Saika asked. “I’ll help you get dressed.”

  Tatiana, who slept cool and comfortable in just her underwear was ready to tell Saika to come on in, but something in the girl’s glance stopped her. What was it? Saika’s eyes were too black to discern a dilation of the pupil, and her skin was too dark to blush, but there was something in the unblinking of the almond eye and the parting o
f the large mouth that puzzled Tatiana. “Uh... I’ll be out in five minutes.” Tatiana drew the shabby window curtain. She slept by herself in a tiny alcove near an old unused stove. Her family hung a curtain across the opening so she could pretend it was a bedroom and not a boarded-up kitchen. She didn’t care. It was the only time in her life she slept by herself.

  When she was dressed and brushed, Tatiana ambled with Saika down the morning village road in the fragrant air. She took Saika to Berta’s house. Berta had a cow that needed to be milked. Saika immediately asked why Berta couldn’t milk the cow herself.

  “Because she is ancient. She is like fifty! Also she has arthritis. She can’t grasp the udders.”

  “So why does she have a cow if she can’t take care of it? She can sell that cow for fifteen hundred rubles.”

  Tatiana turned her head to Saika. “Because then she’ll have fifteen hundred rubles and no milk. What would the point be?”

  “She can buy the milk.”

  “The money will be gone in three months. The cow will produce milk for another seven years.”

  “I’m just saying. Why have a cow if you can’t take care of it?”

  Berta was very surprised to see Tatiana so early in the morning, throwing up her arthritic hands and exclaiming, “Bozhe moi! Who died? Even my mother is still sleeping.” She was a small, round, dark-haired woman, with sharp button eyes, “Not fifty, you impossible child,” she said, “but sixty-six.” Her hands may have been crippled, but she still made Tatiana and Saika tea and eggs, and while the girls ate, her gravel hands sifted through the grains of Tatiana’s soft hair. Saika watched it all.

  They brought the fresh milk back to Dasha and then went out into the fields, on the outskirts of Luga, across the long grasses. Tatiana said to Saika that she imagined that’s what the prairies in America must look like—long grasses on rolling fields out to the horizons.

  “Are you dreaming of America, Tania?” Saika said, and Tatiana, flustered, said no, no, not dreaming, just imagining prairies.

  Saika told Tatiana she didn’t know where she was born (how could she not?) but she spent her last few years in a small town called Saki in northern Azerbaijan in the Caucasus Mountains. Azerbaijan was a tiny republic nestled under Georgia and above Iran. Iran! It might as well have been a prehistoric universe full of ferns and mastodons, that’s how remote it was from Tatiana’s understanding. “And from there, we came by train to here. After the summer my father’s new post will be north in Kolpino.”

  “New post? What does he do?”

  Saika shrugged. “What do adults do? He leaves in the morning. He comes home in the evening. My mother asks how his day was. He says it was fine. The next day it starts again. Sometimes he travels.” She paused. “Does your father travel?”

  “Yes,” Tatiana said proudly, as if her father’s traveling was a reflection of her personal glory, as if she was just fantastic for raising a father who traveled. “He has gone to Poland for a month. He is going to bring me back a dress!”

  “Oh, a dress,” said Saika, as if she couldn’t care less. “We haven’t been to Poland, but we’ve been to a few other places. Georgia. Armenia. Kazakhstan. To Baku on the Caspian Sea.”

  “My, you’ve been all over,” Tatiana said with a touch of white envy. She didn’t want Saika not to have traveled. She just wished she had traveled a bit herself. All she’d ever seen was Leningrad and Luga.

  They sat on a rock in the field, and Tatiana showed Saika how to eat the sweet meat out of a clover flower. Saika said she had never eaten it before.

  “They don’t have clover in the Caucasus Mountains?” asked Tatiana, surprised that Saika could have lived without once touching the ubiquitous three-lobed weed.

  “We lived on a farm in the mountains, herded sheep. I don’t know, maybe there was clover.”

  “You were shepherds?”

  “Of sorts.”

  There was that vague qualification again. “What does that mean?” Saika smiled. “I don’t think we were very good shepherds. We kept herding the sheep into the wolf’s mouth.” Tatiana turned to get a better look at Saika, who was smiling as she said it. “Just joking. It wasn’t sheep, Tania. We actually herded goats.” She made a derisive sound. “I don’t want to talk about it. I hate goats. Disgusting filthy animals.”

  Tatiana didn’t reply. She never thought much about goats—but she smelled something suddenly that made her slide away from Saika. Embarrassed at her reaction—but there was that odor again!—Tatiana forced herself to sit still as she looked down at Saika’s hands, which were oddly unwashed for so early in the morning. Tatiana wanted to ask about the dirt under the nails, and the darkened tint to some of the pores of the skin, the rough brown texture of the ridges and grooves of Saika’s fingers, but then glanced further down and noticed too the unwashed feet in the sandals and wondered what Saika could have been doing at seven in the morning to have gotten herself into such a filthy state. Then Saika spoke, and the breath left Saika’s mouth and traveled across the summer meadow air to Tatiana’s nose and Tatiana realized that the smell that made her move away was Saika’s sour breath.

  Tatiana got up. Saika walked in front of Tatiana, and as she did so, the whiff of her body got into Tatiana’s nose. Saika smelled of mold and ammonia. A baffled Tatiana looked at Saika, whose hands were raised above her head as she stretched. Yet Saika’s hair was shiny as if it had just been washed, and her face was not dirty. She wasn’t actually unwashed, she just smelled and looked unwashed.

  The two girls stood in front of each other. The dark-haired girl wore an indigo dress. The blonde-haired girl wore a pale print dress. Saika was a head taller and her feet were one and a half times larger, and as Tatiana looked closer she noticed that the second and third toes on Saika’s feet grew out in a V. She stared inappropriately long and finally pointed. “Huh. I never saw that before. What is that?”

  Saika glanced down. “Oh, that. Yeah. I have a fused joint.” She shrugged. “My father jokes that I have cloven feet.”

  “Cloven feet?” Tatiana said faintly. “What does he mean by that?”

  “I don’t know. You sure do ask a lot of questions, girl. Let me ask you a question. Can we go play with Pasha?”

  Slowly they started walking back to Luga. “Tell me about him. What do you all do for fun around here?”

  “What do kids do in the summer? Nothing,” Tatiana replied. When Saika laughed, Tatiana said, “No, really. Nothing. Last week, for example, we spent two days seeing how long a blueberry string we could make. Turned out about ten meters. Other times we fish. We swim, we argue.”

  “Argue about what?”

  “Europe, mainly. Hitler. Germany. I don’t know.”

  “Come on,” Saika said. “You must do something else around these parts other than argue about Hitler and swim.” She raised her eye brows.

  Like what? Tatiana wanted to ask. And what did the raising of the eye brows mean? “No, not really,” she said slowly.

  “Well, we’re going to have to change that, won’t we?” said Saika. Tatiana coughed slightly as they walked to the river to the other kids, attempting to steer the conversation back to how the children fished or berry-picked or idly spent their hazy summers.

  How Idle Children Spend their Hazy Summers

  Anton Iglenko was Tatiana’s best friend and he played great football and constantly begged for Tatiana’s small Leningrad-bought supplies of chocolate. Anton had three older brothers, Volodya, Kirill, and Alexei, all of them Pasha’s friends and all under direct nonnegotiable orders from Pasha to stay away from Tatiana, all except for Volodya’s friend Misha, who didn’t leave Tatiana’s side and hated Anton. There was also Oleg, who never played anything.

  The only other girl in their group was Natasha with long brown hair, a bookworm even worse than Tatiana, always trying to engage Tatiana in one conversation or another about who was a better writer, Dumas or Dickens, Gogol or Gorky. Cousin Marina, who was not a reader, was coming in
two weeks and would inflate the girl numbers and equalize the games.

  Tatiana stood politely to the side while the new raven-haired girl held court among the eager-for-a-new-face throng, who had all known each other since birth.

  “Who is the boy sitting under the tree?” Saika whispered, pointing. “He hasn’t come over to say hello to me.”

  Tatiana glanced over. “That’s Oleg,” she said. “I told you about him. He is not in a playing mood.”

  “When will he be in a playing mood?”

  “When Hitler is dead,” Tatiana replied lightly. “He is a bit over-wrought about—well, you want to see? I’ll show you. Oleg!” She called to the skinny brown boy nestled under the birches.

  Reluctantly, as if it were a great effort, Oleg stood up and walked over. He nodded to Saika, he did not shake hands, and when Tatiana, poking him in the ribs, asked if he wanted to play hide and seek, he said, “Oh, great, yes, go ahead, play your little games. Czechoslovakia is about to fall, but you go ahead and play,” and went back under the trees.

  Tatiana stared at Saika with a you see? “Oleg,” she explained, as they followed him to his hiding spot, “is distraught not only at the crisis in international relations, but—”

  “I’m distraught only at your lack of interest in the outside world,” Oleg exclaimed.

  “We’re very interested,” Tatiana said. “We’re interested in the fish in the river, and in the blueberries in the woods, and in the potatoes in the fields and in the amount of milk the cow brings us because that will determine whether we can have sour cream next week.”

  “Go ahead. Make fun. Foreign Minister Masaryk and I only hope that sacrificing his fledgling country will be the only price the world pays for peace.”