Tatiana lifted her head from her knees, and Alexander was standing in front of her, eyes full of black vile visions. She hadn’t even heard him come near. Once a soldier, always a soldier, in stealth, even in life.
“Come on,” he said quietly, bending to her and lifting her whole into his arms. He carried her inside. After setting her down next to the sink, he crushed five trays of ice into it and filled it with cold water. Tatiana thought he was going to tell her to put her face into it, and was about to meekly impotently protest—when Alexander submerged his own head into the ice.
After five seconds of watching him, her face ached. “Alexander,” she whispered. “Alexander . . .” Her hand went on his back. He was still under. How long had it been? She got a little worried, and pulled on his soaked shredded T-shirt, tried to pull him up, but he stood like he had turned to stone, his hands gripping the edge of the porcelain sink, his body bent forward, his entire head up to his neck sunk downward into the freezing slush.
“Alexander, please,” she whispered. Oh, he was good. She was now begging him. She yanked on him. “Come on, please.” It must have been well over a minute, possibly two, when he finally lifted his head, gasping for breath.
“I’m burning up,” was all he said, crossing himself.
Panting, not drying off, he put some ice into a dish towel dipped in the freezing water, and took her by the shoulders. Setting her down on the couch, settling her deep into the crook of his arm, he held the towel to her face, his molten eyes blinking at her from inches away, wet, icy, inflamed, in silent remorse. Her head tipping back onto his shoulder, Tatiana closed her eyes. Soon her face was numb. The heart wasn’t numb, though. Maybe he could submerge her heart in ice for two, three years, and when he pulled it out, she’d be as good as new.
“The swelling has gone down a little,” Alexander said. “I know it hurts. Ice, no ice, you’re going to be black and blue tomorrow. I’m sorry.”
“For this you’re sorry?”
In their bed, Tatiana couldn’t stop sobbing, turned away from him, rolled into a fetal ball. But she was naked. He was naked. He had removed the blankets off the bed and left them uncovered. He was on his back, with both arms over his face. She kept wiping her uninjured cheek; the salt was eating her lip. It was dark.
An excruciating sound came from his throat. “You have no right to say such vicious things to me, no right to incite me intentionally and deliberately when you know I’m at the end of my fucking rope. How could you not have had the slightest sense to protect yourself, especially knowing that you’re—” Alexander couldn’t continue.
“What, you of all people can’t understand why I’d be completely crazed? Completely beyond the sanity pale?”
He was breathing heavily. “I honestly don’t understand what’s wrong with you,” he said. “You’re telling me to pack my bags, to leave our house, knowing you’re going to have a baby?”
“And this surprises you why? Have you seen what’s been happening in our house?”
“Stop talking to me like this in our bed, Tatiana. My white flag is up,” said Alexander. “I have no more.”
“My white flag is up, too, Shura,” she said. “You know when mine went up? June 22, 1941.”
They lay. He struggled for his words. “Did you... sleep with that man?”
Tatiana coiled around herself, pressing her face into the pillow. “I can’t talk to you,” she said, her voice muffled. “I had dinner with him in a public place. Unlike you I never forget what I am. I can’t believe you’re shameless enough to ask about him.”
Alexander started to ask something else and broke off. Tatiana knew, there were some things her warrior husband had no strength for, and this was one of them. There were some things Alexander could not ask. But she would be damned before she let him turn it around to her. Damned. This time she wasn’t going to help him with a single word.
Tatiana wanted to ask him about Carmen, but she herself was so afraid. She knew he would lie to save them—especially now. He would look her in the face and with his velvet voice and his velvet eyes lie, and she would never know the truth, and would never understand, and would walk around with lies and betrayal for the rest of her life, and never again know what Alexander’s word was worth.
She couldn’t not ask.
Yet she couldn’t ask.
She felt him creep up behind her. She felt his warm pained breath as he pressed his face into the nape of her neck, into what was left of her hair.
“Tatia, I didn’t sleep with her,” he said. “Please believe me.”
Lies? Truth?
“Turn to me,” he whispered.
“I am your one wife,” she said without turning.
“Please turn to me, my one wife.”
“Except for this—anything you do is fine with me,” Tatiana said, and started to cry. “Our son is right. Anything you do is fine with me. Every day I love the ground on which you walk, Alexander,” she whispered. “From the beginning, this was so. So if you raise your voice or your hand to me, I bow my head and take it. And if you need me, any way you need me, any time you need me, I give you my body and take it. You have ruled over me with your scepter. And if you’re shut away and can’t find your heart, I walk beside you up and down the Stonington hills, walk beside you through our entire America, waiting until you love me again. And when you raise your weapon, your .45 caliber cannon and fire into my face, and I am now served that up too without fail as I close my eyes each night—that and Leningrad and Stockholm and Berlin—I say, this is the hand that I have been dealt. I say as I say to everything, this is my cross.” Tatiana’s already cracked voice broke, and broke again. “And for that—I have you.”
Alexander brought himself closer to her, to fit behind her in a spoon, in a crescent moon. His face remained in her hair. His hand slipped around her hip and over her stomach. His body was shaking. “Please . . . turn to me.”
“No,” Tatiana said. “Can’t you see how afraid I am to face you? I made you a promise in that Lazarevo church. I gave you my hand, I promised you, no matter how you treat me, what you do to me, I am steadfast by you, I am resolute, I am always with you.”
He turned her around himself.
Tatiana closed her crying eyes so she wouldn’t see his lying eyes.
“I followed you a thousand miles to the front,” she said brokenly. “I would’ve followed you to hell. And did.”
“I know,” he said.
“I would have lived out the rest of my days with you in one room on Fifth Soviet, making you kasha and stepping over crazy Slavin as I ran to get you your daily bread.” Her shoulders rose and fell. “My whole life, I have been nothing but good to you, why are you hurting me like this?”
His trembling arms went around her. “Please . . .” Alexander whispered, his voice, his body breaking down. “I can’t take it. I’m running on empty seeing you like this—please—” He exhaled in raw shallow breaths.
They lay not speaking until he was a little calmer, and she was a little calmer, smelling his familiar scent, being held by him. “Shh,” Alexander whispered soothingly. “Shh. Come on. Please don’t cry. Please.” He moved to lie on her pillow, his lips touching where he had hit her, his hands stroking her hair. “Tania, my wife, I didn’t sleep with her,” he said. “Open your eyes and look at what I am. Look inside me. I didn’t sleep with her.”
She stared at him in the dark, intensely mining his face. “You’re doing this deliberately,” she said after a minute. “You’ll tell me anything I want to hear, because you know how desperately I want to believe you. You’ll make your eyes anything, because you know how desperately I want them to be true.”
“They are true.” His hand glided over her, from the crown of her hair, down her back, slow and soft and soothing to her calves ...and up again. Her eyes involuntarily closed. His velvet hands, too, would lie, to save them.
“I’m working late, Tania, you said. I have a meeting, Tania. I spilled beer on my j
eans. You laid out your lies for me like a buffet at Christmas. What were you covering up for if not . . .” She squeezed her eyes to stop the tears from springing to them again. “I don’t want to know.”
“I don’t want to tell you.”
“What am I going to do? I can’t have her name mentioned in our bed. But I don’t know what to do with the black hole where my faith in you has been.”
His arms stretched unyielding around her. “Have faith,” he said. “I will fix it.”
She took a frail breath. “Did you... touch her?”
He stopped caressing her. “Tatiana, please forgive me.” Alexander breathed out, crestfallen. “I did.” He wouldn’t let her gasping body turn away. “Look at me, here I am,” he whispered, his face weak from shame. “Don’t turn away. I’m yours. I am only yours. I belong to you. I just fucked up, babe.”
Hours passed in darkness.
Over it, under it, across it, through it, passed torrents of grisly words and storms of shattered confessions. Everything was out, everything was in their bed, everything was said, and felt.
Tatiana watched Alexander’s face when he spoke to her, watched it for truth, for meaning. She listened to him, her hands on him when she asked him things over and over, her hands on him when he answered her over and over. She placed her cheek on his chest when he spoke to her, to hear his voice through his heart. Her mouth was over his mouth, inhaling for the truth on his breath that came from inside him. Lies? Truth?
But the truth was merciless. Completely uncircumspect, weighing no consequence, he planned, talked, sat, bought drinks, flirted with another woman, fully aware, fully receptive, week in, week out, as if he were not married. He lay in wait and went into a car with another woman, remembering to take off his jacket, but leaving his wedding ring on. What odd lines of right and wrong he marked inside his head. And if that grave matter weren’t enough, four days later, amid blatant lies, with full knowledge of his actions and deliberate consent of his mind, he bought condoms to take another woman to bed while his wife sat at home waiting to tell him they were going to have a desperately wanted baby. Alexander kissed another woman. He touched another woman. And she touched him. Tatiana simply didn’t have the necessary armor around her untainted, unprotected heart to bear this.
She lay stunned and numb, lay quietly and stared at him in the dark, wondering if this was indeed unfixable and if it wasn’t, why did it feel so unfixable, while Alexander kneeled at the bottom of the bed and kissed her feet, and whispered, Please Tania, please forgive me.
She knocked, yes, but how could you let her in, Shura? How could you let her in?
He faced away from her, his scarred back to her.
She crept to him and touched his wounds, his tattoos, his hammer and sickles, his SS Eagles, she put her face lower on his back where his kidney had been ruptured, vividly seeing him lying gray on the crimson ice, knowing that if she didn’t do something instantly, he was going to die. Tonight she wanted all his scars, his tattoos, his body, his soul to tell her what to do, how to set it right.
She tried to set it right by touching him. She stroked the knotted muscles in his arms, in his shoulders, she kissed his stomach, though kissing was difficult with her swollen lip, but to touch him she did it. She tried to move lower, down the line of his black hair, but couldn’t after what he had told her.
Please, Tania, please forgive me. And touch me.
In a little while, she tried again. With her unsteady hands, she took hold of him. He was so familiar, so true. She knew him so well, what he liked, what he loved, what he needed. She was like his own hands: anytime anywhere she knew how to give it to him in a dozen different ways. And tonight when he responded to her sad and milking hands, she put her swelling mouth on swelling him. But it hurt too much. She pressed her wet face against him, rubbing salt into him, her hands falling away, her body falling away. How could you let her touch you?
I’m sorry, Tania, I’m so sorry.
I guess even we can be broken.
“We cannot be broken,” he said. “We cannot be broken by fucking Carmen. She was nothing. She meant nothing. It meant nothing.”
“Alexander, you and I have been through too much to have this kind of compound fraud in our bed. You’re right in this sense—it’s not any of the other things we have borne. It’s not death. It’s not our lost families or your butchered body. It’s not starvation, or Leningrad. It’s not war, or life in the Soviet Union.” She paused. “You know what it is though, Shura?”
His head was hung. He didn’t look at her. “I’m sorry, Tania. Please.”
“I’m your only family. The only allegiance you have in this world is to me. You selling me out for meaningless milt-market—not even for love—that’s not nothing, is it? Meanwhile I’m shackled to you.” She started to cry again. “I’m holding all your open wounds together. I’m on the train to Kolyma with you, I’m in the filth of the Gulag with you. I’m lashed with you and burned with you, I eat out of the same bowl with you, and when you die I’ll be the one to stick the helmet over your rifle into that shallow ground.”
“Oh dear God, Tania, please.” He was astride her, threading his arms around her. His shoulders were shaking. “Please. I’m sorry.”
She turned her head and closed her eyes and tried to fly away from bitter life.
He held her hands apart and put his face between her breasts. He was kissing her chest and he was whispering, but what she couldn’t hear. Because she was crying. He whispered inaudible unheard truths into her mouth, kissed her bruised lips, kissed her breasts, cupping them, caressing them, whispering again, kissed her achingly sensitive nipples until she pleaded no more no more, and he whispered, just a little more, his wet contrite lips kissing her wet vulnerable nipples.
Oh, Shura . . .
When she could heave her body up from the bed, she tried again. Sitting next to him, she took hold of him, caressing him, and when her soft hands made him hard, she put her bloodied lips on him and kissed all of him, from his groin up to his head that was cupped into her kneading palm, kissed him and lightly rubbed him, smooth and straight, into her lips and into her tears. You are so beautiful, she whispered, crying. Without knowing anything but you, I always thought so.
“And I have known,” he said. “I have come to you knowing. No one is like you. You are more than I have ever deserved. I was so afraid you didn’t love me like you used to. I was terrified you felt for someone else. You were always working, and I was felled by our other struggle”—he choked—“and I wasn’t thinking. But those are just words, nothing more. I’m sorry.” Pledging, repenting, promising, pleading.
She listened to him, she nodded. They were all just words. What good were his promises to her? He couldn’t explain, she didn’t understand. She tried to fix it by letting him touch her.
With her tiny hand, she took his big hands, all ripped up and raw from the cholla, and placed them on her breasts. You have the strongest hands, she whispered. He pulled away. With her slender hand she took his long, thick fingers, tense and trembling, and put them between her thighs. He pulled away. Look at me, she whispered, crying, lying on her back, opening her legs. I’m defenseless before you. Please touch me. I’m like you love, Shura. Like you love.
Kissing her mound, pressing his palm over her, covering her, he shook his head and crawled away.
“Please touch me,” she said. “Why won’t you touch me?”
“Don’t you understand what I come to you for?” said Alexander. “I can’t have communion with you until you forgive me.”
He was right.
He pressed his forehead to her forehead, his damp stubbled face to her face. He pressed his lips into her heart, his wet black hair tickling her clavicles. Please forgive me. White gold is the color of my true love’s hair.
All that love, and it still was not enough. She was weeping in her despair.
“How can I forgive you?” she said. “This is the one thing I don’t know how to forg
ive.”
“I’m damned,” Alexander said, falling on his back. “I was blinded by stupidity for a brief moment in our life, for a flicker in the eternity in which you and I live, and I stumbled. I fucked up. I am sick and completely wrong. I am low and revolted. I promise I will do everything I can to fix it, to make it better.” He took a breath. “But—what do you mean, you don’t know how to forgive me?”
In her weakest whisper, Tatiana spoke. “Alexander Barrington,” she said, “tell me, would you know how to forgive me?”
They both knew the inconceivable answer to that inconceivable question.
The answer was no.
He stared at her mutely and then covered his face with his arm. “Well, what are you and I going to do, Tatiana?” he said in a desperate voice. “We can’t live like we’ve been living.”
She started to speak, to present him with a number of choices, and that’s when he opened her legs and climbed on her to comfort her shaking body from its monumental distress of the unbearable endless night.
“Listen to me,” Alexander said, holding her head between his forearms. His hands were clamped on top of her head. “Understand this one thing and then everything else will become easier. You and I have only one life. There is no other choice. A long time ago we went to war together, went into one trench together, lived through Leningrad together. Remind yourself of all we have been through. Did we think we would get even a Lazarevo? And after Lazarevo that we would have Napa, or Bethel Island—or here? I know that sometimes the things we carry become too much for us. We are burned down, but somehow we have to pick ourselves up and keep going. Sometimes I come back from war, and I’m dead, and sometimes I hear your voice and ignore it, and sometimes the impossible happens, I don’t know how, and I don’t know why. I have no defense for myself,” he said. “I know you want one, but I have no excuse. I don’t have a single justification. This one time in my life when I need more than just I’m sorry, I have nothing but my profound regret. I don’t want justice from you,” said Alexander. “I want mercy.” He groaned. “I made a terrible mistake, and I’m begging you to forgive me. Tatiana, I’m begging you,” he said in a collapsing breath, “to forgive me. But there is no separate life for you and me. There is no other bunker, no packed bags, there is no leaving, there are no other wives. There is nothing else ever, but you and me.” He held down her hands, his body was over her, covering her, his face was above hers and she was tiny underneath him, looking up at him, under the black moon. “Do you really think I would let you leave me?” he whispered. “Don’t you remember what I said to you in Berlin? When we were lost in the woods, raging against our fate?”
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