The weeks passed.
“Please—let’s just wait and see.” Tatiana kept reciting the hollow words to her increasingly despondent husband. She paced around him every feverish night, never still, not when she cooked, or read to the kids, or lay in bed with him. Some part of her was always moving, always pacing around her pride. “Let’s just...we don’t know anything. Let’s just wait until they find him.”
“Find him where?” Alexander was sitting outside in his chair, smoking. He was not pacing.
“Let’s just see, okay?” she said, back and forth in front of him.
“You’re saying let’s just see if something of him will be found? Let’s see if he stepped on a mine, or if an RPG-7 hit him?” Alexander was loud. “Or if he was in a freak explosion coming back to Kontum? Well, I’m not waiting for that! Are you waiting for that?”
“Stop it,” she whispered. Her voice shook. “I’m just telling you to have a little faith, soldier. A little faith, that’s all.” Tatiana’s hands were twisted in front of her.
Alexander stopped speaking. “How do I regain my faith,” he whispered at last, “when there seems to be so little cause for faith?”
She would have wept if she didn’t see him in such desperate need of her comfort. It was the only thing that stopped her from disintegrating on the travertine tile, from turning to ashes. “Please,” Tatiana whispered in an unconvincing voice. “Maybe they’re right, maybe he’s gone AWOL —”
“Yes, let’s hope for that. Maybe he is AWOL,” Alexander said. “Perhaps he is addicted. Perhaps his own opiate of a girl smoked up his head and then some, and now he is in the Ural Mountains with her.”
“I’d rather he be AWOL than dead!”
“If he is AWOL, he’ll be court-martialed,” said Alexander. “After thirty days, there is little difference between AWOL and desertion. Do you really want Ant to be court-martialed for desertion during wartime? He won’t be alive for long, Tania.”
And then her tears came down. No comfort for Alexander. He jumped up and went inside. Tatiana was left alone on the travertine tile.
Thirty days passed.
Their life stopped.
They sat and watched Pasha, Harry, and Janie make joy because they were children and couldn’t help it. They made joy and their parents sat with frozen smiles upon their faces, while the young ones frolicked in the pool and rough-housed with one another and watched Mission:Impossible. The children did their level best to buck up their mother and father. Pasha never stopped reading and talking to them about the things he’d read. Janie never stopped baking with Tatiana, baking meringue pies and puff pastry that she knew her father loved. Harry always felt he had to try harder because he was the third son. (“Anthony may have been first,” Gordon Pasha—the philosopher king, not warrior king—would explain to his younger brother from whom he was inseparable, “but I was the most wanted. Mom and Dad tried fifteen years for me. You Harry-boy, you were just a seven-month-old afterthought. You were supposed to be Janie.”) So Harry tried harder. He made things that he thought would most please his unsmiling but revered father. Out of wood, out of stone, out of blocks of ice, out of branches and cacti and metal, Harry did nothing but whittle, carve, bend, shape and make weapons. He made pistols from soap, he made knives from sticks, and papier-mâché gray tanks. Dozens of his etched and scored and perfect ice hand grenades were in all three freezers. One evening they found him in front of Alexander’s closet, putting on his father’s grenade bandolier stuffed with ice grenades that were dripping all over their bedroom carpet.
Forty days.
They couldn’t sleep. They tossed and turned, and made fractured love, praying for oblivion that wouldn’t come.
“I have to know what you’re thinking,” Tatiana finally said after sleepless hours one impossible night. “I don’t want to know. But I have to know. Because you can’t carry it alone. Look at you. Harry made you a beautiful replica of a Claymore mine today—at least I hope it was a replica—and you couldn’t even say thank you. Just tell me—be out with it. Don’t tell me what Richter thinks, or what Dan Elkins thinks. Tell me what you think. You are the only one I listen to.” She sat up in bed.
Alexander was lying on his back, his eyes closed. “Stop looking at me,” he said. “I’m exhausted.”
“Shura, what are you so afraid of? Tell me. Look at me.” She knew he wouldn’t look at her because he didn’t want her to see inside him. And Tatiana had let him turn away because she didn’t want to see inside him either.
Tonight he turned from her, but she climbed over him to face him; she sat on him and poked and prodded him and breathed on him and kept on at him until his choice was to get out of bed or tell her. Alexander did what he always did when he couldn’t talk to her about impossible things. He made love to her.
He had barely dismounted when Tatiana said, “You’ve called every MI man you know. What are you searching for?”
“Holy God! Stop!” Throwing on his BVDs, he went outside into their garden. She threw on her robe and followed him. It was the end of August.
“It’s not obvious?” he said, smoking, pacing around the narrow paths, through the desert flowers.
“No!”
“I’m looking for Ant, Tania.”
“In MI?” She stood in front of him.
He lifted his eyes to her. “Now that so much time has passed,” said a worn-out Alexander, “and there has been no sign of him, and they haven’t found a trace of him, I think” —he paused— “that Anthony might have been taken prisoner.”
Prisoner! Tatiana scrutinized him. Why did he say that so wretchedly? Wasn’t that better than the alternative?
“That’s what I’ve been looking for all along,” he admitted. “Any classfied intel of him in a POW camp.”
They stared at each other, Tatiana becoming grimmer with each breath she took as she tried to absorb the gravity of what he was telling her. She couldn’t touch him, she felt him from across the path so afraid.
“Why are you trying to invent more trouble?” she said, trying to sound casual. “Don’t we have enough? I keep telling you, let’s just wait and see.” She reached for his hand. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”
“After hammering at me for half the night you now don’t want to hear it?” Alexander said with disbelief.
Letting go of him, Tatiana said nothing.
“Tell me,” Alexander said, “if Ant is taken prisoner by the NVA, do you think the KGB might be interested in the fate of an American soldier whose name is Anthony Alexander Barrington?”
“Shura, what did I say? Don’t tell me anymore.” Her hands were at her heart.
“If he was captured—”
“Please don’t speak! I’m begging you.”
She backed away but he came after her, taking her by her arms, his eyes in a blaze. “In Romania,” Alexander said, “they just picked up a 68-year-old man and brought him to Kolyma. Gave him ten years. The man had escaped from a Kazakhstan collective in 1934. In 1934, Tania, and they just picked him up. He was a nobody—a nobody who hopped on a train and kept going.”
“Please stop speaking!”
But Alexander wouldn’t stop. “What do you think—is my meter-thick file open or closed with the KGB?”
“This is absurd, what you’re thinking,” Tatiana said breathlessly. “They’re not—”
“Anthony had three tours in Vietnam without incident and disappeared a month before his fourth was over. You don’t think his luck has run out? You don’t think Pushkin’s Queen of Spades is bearing ill will?”
“No,” she whispered, her body shaking.
“Really? Do you remember Dennis Burck at State? He knew of me, of you, of my parents; he knew everything! If the NVA captured Ant, how many weeks would it be before a lackey behind a desk connected my KGB file with his name? Our old friend the French national Germanovsky managed to get through eleven checkpoints in Belgium before he was finally stopped. That’s how long it took th
em to find his name in their books. How many checkpoints do you think it will take them to find an Anthony Alexander Barrington?” Alexander let go of her, and stepped away, peering into his hands as if hoping to find different answers to his questions.
Tatiana stepped away too, hurriedly. “You’re worrying yourself unnecessarily.” Her voice was very small. “There are millions of troops and there is so much chaos.”
“Not like in Belgium after a world war, no,” he said.
“Millions of Vietnamese troops. They’re not looking for American troops who were once Red Army soldiers. Besides, Anthony is twenty-six and obviously not you. It’s 1969. Even if he were . . . captured, no one would piece anything together. Better for him to be taken prisoner but be alive, Shura. Believe me,” said Tatiana, taking another step away from him, and another, “I know something about this.”
“And I too,” said Alexander, stepping away from her with his torture wounds and torture tattoos from the German camps and the Soviet camps, “know something about this.”
The days ticked by.
The ill will penetrated even their white immaculate kitchen, where not a single unkind word had crossed the island in eleven years. Now they stood at opposite ends of the black granite block, not touching, not speaking. It was night; the babies, as they still called their giant children, were asleep. Tatiana had just finished making dough for tomorrow’s breakfast bread. Alexander had just finished closing up for the night. They were pretending to drink tea.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” Alexander said at last. “Tell me where he is, and I will go find him.”
“I don’t know where he is, I’m not a clairvoyant— and what are you talking about? I don’t want you to go anywhere. It was then—then!—I wanted you to tell him not to go.”
“I did tell him not to go.”
“You should’ve stopped him.”
“He is a commissioned lieutenant! Should I have called Richter and told him daddy was forbidding a twenty-two-year-old to go to war?”
“Stop making fun of me.”
“I’m not making fun of you. But honestly, what do you think I should have done?”
“More. Less. Something else.”
“Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”
“I wish we had done something sooner!” Tatiana exclaimed. “We had been so proud, so casual.”
“Who was casual?” said Alexander. “You?” He shook his head. “Not me. I didn’t want this for him, and he knew it. He could have gone anywhere.” His voice cracked. “He could have been anything. He was the one who wanted this for himself.”
“And why do you think that was?” Tatiana said acidly.
Alexander’s hands slammed flat down on the island. “And how would you have liked me to fix that?”
“You should have convinced him not to go,” she said. “Eventually he would’ve listened to you.”
“He would have listened to me least of all! He would have done the opposite of anything I advised him. That’s why I tried to keep my mouth shut—”
“You should’ve tried harder not to. You knew what was at stake.”
“Tania, this country is at war! And not only are we at war, but we’re at war to keep Vietnam from going the way of the Soviet Union, of China, of Korea, of Cuba. Who better than you and me knows what that means? Who better than Ant knows what that means? How could I have kept him from that?”
“Oh, we certainly all know,” said Tatiana. “Aren’t we so smart. Now look at us. We should’ve seen this coming: the future. We should’ve seen the whole thing.”
“And prevented it?”
“Yes!” she cried. “You knew what he was risking! You knew!”
“Come on, now you’re just being...unreasonable,” Alexander said. “And that’s the kindest thing I can think of.”
Tatiana was shaking her head. “I don’t think I’m unreasonable. Not at all. You should have stopped it.”
“How?” he yelled.
“Maybe if you hadn’t come back from Berlin in your military dress greens, he wouldn’t have become so enamored of them. Maybe if you stopped wearing your battle fatigues every chance you got, but no! Maybe if you stopped handing him your officer’s cap in Deer Isle, like I asked!”
“Well, maybe you should have stopped telling him I had been a soldier every chance you got, but no!” said Alexander. “Maybe you should have paraded my wounds to him less. I wasn’t the one flaunting my stupid Hero of the Soviet Union medal in front of him!”
“Oh? And teaching him how to load your weapon when he was five?” Tatiana yelled right back. “Teaching him how to shoot when he was twelve? What, you think I couldn’t smell sulfur, potassium nitrate on your clothes when I’d come back from work? When you teach your twelve-year-old how to fire your weapons, when you take your sixteen-year-old to Yuma to test new missile launchers with you, what do you think he’s going to do with his life?”
“I don’t know, Tania,” Alexander said, rubbing his face, closing his eyes. “You mean, maybe if you and I had been two completely different people, this wouldn’t be happening?”
“Oh, so clever. Well, look at him now, wearing his dress whites, Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, carrying all his Claymore mines and M-16 rifles, and missing. What good are those medals to him, your cap to him, your rifle to him?” Tatiana cried. “He’s missing!”
“I know he’s missing!”
“Where is he? You’ve been in MI for twenty years—has that been good for nothing?”
“I know very well what weapons the Soviets are developing. But no, they don’t seem to be sending me dossiers with Anthony’s location on them.”
“That’s great, Alexander, charming,” Tatiana said, crossing her arms. “Despite your sarcasm, you still don’t know anything. We should have known better and been smarter. Made better decisions.”
“Holy Mother of God!” Alexander ran his hands through his hair. “Are we analyzing all our decisions? How far back are we going? Every minuscule decision we had made over the years that might have led to Anthony’s frame of mind at the moment of his choosing West Point among six universities, at the moment of his choosing to extend his tour for the fourth time? Do you really want to do this?”
“He did not become what he became in a vacuum,” Tatiana said. “And, as you well know, those decisions were not so minuscule.” She stared at him pointedly. “And yes, they all affected him.”
“Yes!” Alexander yelled. “Starting with the very first one.”
They fell silent. Tatiana held her breath. Alexander held his breath.
“I’m not talking about the decision to have him,” he said, not even trying to keep his voice down. “He didn’t begin with himself. He began with us. And believe it or not, we began before the moment you went crawling in the snow and bleeding in a truck across Finland and Sweden with him in your womb.”
“Yes,” she snapped. “We certainly did begin before that, didn’t we? But how far back do you want to go, to change your fate, Alexander Belov?”
“All the way, Tatiana Metanova,” Alexander said, his fists on the granite, swiping their china cups of tea across the island onto the limestone floor and storming out of the kitchen. “All the way to crossing that fucking street.”
There was nothing to say after that. There was just nothing to say. Anthony was gone. Alexander had crossed the street, and now his son was lost, and there was nothing to do but run to the ringing phone, play with three babies, work, go to Yuma. Look at each other. Go to sleep with each other, back against back staring into walls, trying to find the answers there, or belly to belly, trying to find the answers there, too.
They walked around with gritted teeth, they slammed doors against their life.
The weeks became months, and like days they passed, the long gray line becoming longer and grayer with each passing day.
Add another lash onto Alexander’s back. Add another lowering of Tatiana’s head as she took care of
her children and her house and ran the Phoenix Red Cross Chapter, barely raising her eyes to Alexander. The Sonoran Desert with lowered eyes, with fears so deep, each thought just another hammer upon the heart, each memory another sickle on the back, until there was almost nothing left under the scar tissue, neither Alexander nor Tatiana.
Just the boy climbing into the bed with them at three in the morning, crushed by his nightmares, in which his mother left him to go find his father, knowing she might never come back, and in his dreams never did.
Just the boy’s mother, sixteen years old with her family in the small Fifth Soviet room, her feet up on the wall, on the morning war started for Soviet Russia, on June 22, 1941, hearing the voice of her beloved Deda saying to her, “What are you thinking Tania? The life you know is over. From this day forward nothing will be as you imagined.”
How right he was. Not two hours later, Tatiana was sitting eating ice cream in her white dress and red sandals, her hair blowing all around her face.
Leningrad is still with them, everywhere they turn. Anthony missing is their continuing eternal struggle against their fate.
Their sweet boy, his brown body in Coconut Grove, walking the line, behind his mother, his hands apart, laughing, trying to keep his balance, imitating her. Swinging upside down like a monkey on the bars, like her. Sitting on top of his father’s shoulders, tapping him on his scarred and sheared head, saying, faster, faster, and Alexander, not knowing babies, or children, or boys, running faster, faster, trying to forget he was Harold Barrington’s son as he tried to become Anthony Barrington’s father.
And Harold Barrington saying to a young Alexander, “We’re going to the Soviet Union because I want it to make you into the man you are meant to be.”
And it did.
And Alexander Barrington saying to a young Anthony, “You decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be.”
The Summer Garden Page 74