The Summer Garden

by Paullina Simons

  Every stone tile in the deck flooring was being examined by Alexander.

  “I thought for sure he’d be finished with me after a month, after six months, a year. But, no, he kept coming back,” Vikki said, wiping her face. “Until he graduated—and then without a backward glance left for Vietnam. I said to him, it’s a good thing we were just having fun, Antman. Makes it easier for you to go. Thank you for having a good time with me. Thank you for the moonlight waltzes you and I have never had, thank you for the promises we never made, for the sun that didn’t shine above our heads. Aren’t you glad you’re not breaking my heart? Aren’t you glad now, when you are leaving, that you’re not in love with me?” Vikki’s face was in her hands.

  Alexander sat with her a while. But there was really nothing more to say.

  When he got up, he said, “Vikki, you might think this one over a little more carefully. The parents may be forgiven for being blind fools, but I’m telling you, this kind of thing is very difficult to hide from a husband.”

  Vikki waved him off. “Alexander, you know better than anyone that, unlike you, Tom has been a terrible husband. A good man, a bad husband.”

  “Even terrible husbands see things like this.”

  “Yes, well, when the husband is in Vietnam since 1959, coming back stateside only twice a year, and bleeding U.S. Army since 1941, I know he can’t see anything. I haven’t seen Tom in two years. I hadn’t spoken to him in six months. Had it not been his birthday, I never would’ve called. Certainly he didn’t call me to tell me about Ant; and why would he? I wouldn’t worry about it. He knows nothing.” She paused. “Are you going to tell Tania?”

  “I don’t know,” Alexander replied. “I don’t want to tell her. But for twenty-eight years I’ve had a hard time keeping anything from my wife.” Vikki looked away and Alexander looked away, collecting the glasses, throwing out their butts. “You think now is the time to improve my game?”

  He said good night to her.

  In stealth, with calm breath, he came back to bed, listening for Tatiana’s breathing.

  “I’m awake,” she said.

  He sighed. “Of course you are.”

  She turned to him and they lay silently, their arms intermingling.

  “You went to talk to her?”

  He nodded, searching her face for a frame of mind. “Does she know where Ant is?”

  “No.” Alexander brought her closer. “I didn’t ask.”

  Tatiana lay her ear on his chest, listening minutely to his heart. “Did you ask her... did she tell you things you didn’t want to hear?”

  “She told me things I didn’t want to hear.”

  Alexander told Tatiana about Vikki and Anthony.

  After he was done, Tatiana was silent and when she spoke, she spoke very slowly. “Suddenly, Dasha not seeing what was right in front of her nose is easier to understand, isn’t it? And they didn’t hide it—like we didn’t. They left it everywhere for us to see—and I see it everywhere now.” She put her hands over her face for a moment. “My friend Vikki has always been a spirited gal,” she said then. “When I first met her she was crying because her first husband was coming back from war and she didn’t know how to tell her lover, whom she had not even told she had a husband. She was unfaithful to her first, she was unfaithful to her last, and to all the boyfriends in between. She fell for Richter—she always wanted to fall for a war hero—and married him despite all sense and reason. Certainly he has not done right by her in return, and I won’t speculate on the chicken or the egg question. My opinion is,” said Tatiana, “that she chose him to marry exactly because she knew she was always going to be the mistress and not the wife with him. The role suits her.” Tatiana paused. “And here’s my small solace to us: Vikki has had beaus in Africa, in Europe, in Asia, in Australia. She has traveled far and wide, having fun with the boys.” Tatiana blinked unhappily. “It wasn’t until she cried at my table today that I knew—of all the parasailing, passing fancies that have come and gone, Anthony is the one boy she cannot forget.”

  Facing each other, they lay in their bed. Quietly nodding, Tatiana cupped her hand over Alexander’s face. “I know well the spell of those songs of love,” she whispered.

  He moved closer to her, spooling his arm under her neck, so he could feel her large warm breasts press soft against his bare chest, for comfort, for compassion.

  The next morning over breakfast, the first thing an ashen-faced, tear-streaked Vikki said to them, after the children had gone to school, was, “Alexander, did you tell her?”

  Alexander and Tatiana exchanged a look. “I told her,” he said.

  Vikki nodded. “Well, now, there is something I have to tell the two of you that I don’t know how to tell Tom. As you can imagine, there are a couple of reasons why he might not be as understanding as you, Alexander.”

  “I’m not as understanding as Alexander,” Tatiana said grimly.

  “I know you are not,” said Vikki. “Because you’re not a sinner. I’m sorry. It’s inexcusable and I don’t know what to say to you. We will spend the next decade fixing this and figuring it out, and I know we’ll be all right—because you have forgiven worse than this.” All three of them lowered their heads into their coffees. “But right now,” Vikki said, “we have to find our boy.”

  They agreed. They had to find their boy.

  From her pocket Vikki pulled out a letter. “I got this four months ago from Anthony. This is partly why I’ve been hiding out in Europe. I wasn’t about to share it with anyone, and I don’t want to share it with you now. This is going to be hard for you to hear, this is going to be hard for me to read. If Anthony is ever found, this is going to be hard for him to know you’ve heard. And it is absolutely impossible for my husband—who loves Ant—to ever see, to ever know about. Unfortunately, now that Anthony is missing, there are some things in this letter you must know.” With her shaking hands she unfolded it. “I’m going to cry. Can you take it?”

  “We can’t take it,” said Tatiana, grasping Alexander’s forearm. “Read your letter, Vikki.”

  Vikki flinched as she started to read, flinched as if she were being slapped—with the very first word.

  Gelsomina!

  In the hope of quieting your worries about me, worries I know you’ve carried for years, I’m writing you now. Vietnam is not the place to do much soul-searching (is Italy?), which is perfect for me since as you know I don’t like to trouble myself with that, and here, who’s got the time? I like to drink and smoke and party with the girls, as you say. No one was more surprised than me when north in Hué, near the Perfume River, I had unexpectedly found what I had been searching for. And now you’re the first and the only to know—I got married. My Vietnamese bride speaks a little English, which is good because I do not speak Vietnamese. She is young, she is a white swan on her bike and we are expecting a baby.

  Vikki had to stop reading. Tatiana and Alexander had to stop listening. While Vikki tried to calm herself, Alexander scrutinized an intense and intently concentrating Tatiana. He saw by her motionless face, by her slightly parted, barely breathing mouth and her unblinking, completely transparent stare that she was not listening for heartbreak, or Grand Guignol, but for some other vapors to pass through.

  Barely composed, her voice already breaking ahead of the remains of the letter she obviously knew by heart, Vikki resumed:

  I thought you might like to know this—you were always so anxious about my life and my choices, where I was and wasn’t going, what I was and wasn’t doing. I kept telling you I already had a mother, but you just weren’t satisfied in the role you had. You wanted expanded duties. So in the interest of full disclosure, that’s why I’m telling you what’s happened to me here, so far away from you.

  It’s been four years since I last played guitar for you, sang “Malaguena Salerosa” for you—“Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” you sometimes think of me when the radio plays “The Rain, The Park & Other Things.”

  “Traces.
”

  “Grazing in the Grass.”

  And “Jean.”

  We had our blissful years, you and I, but it’s all over now, Baby Blue. You were a “Spooky Wild Thing” and I’d been a fool—and so young—intoxicated with the Central Park troika rides under the big yellow moon and the palo verdes outside our fogged-up Biltmore windows. You kept telling me we never had a future—and you were right. I had been dreaming about “la luna ché non c’e.” Remember we talked about St. Augustine? About something he called “Ordo Amoris.” The “order of love,” or “just sentiment.” He said true virtue and true love for human beings were defined as every object being accorded the precise degree of love that was appropriate to it, that it deserved.

  You and I were always out of balance on that one. I’m lucky to have found it with Moon Lai. I now have what you always wanted for me—what you kept saying I wanted for myself: to be married, to have a child, to have real love.

  But I’m still in the heart of darkness, my time here is not over yet, and just in case this is the last letter I ever write you, know this: There was once a time I believed that what I felt for you was real, no matter how imperfect. There was once a time I believed what I felt for you was Love. “Vy sgubili menya/ochi chernye.” Now I find myself grateful that you always knew the difference, being so much wiser. Thanks for steering me clear of the lie of you and me that had felt so much like truth.

  Ti amavo e tremo.

  Anthony

  Not Vikki, not Tatiana, not Alexander were able to lift their eyes. Vikki cried as she kissed Anthony’s letter and pressed it to her chest. Tatiana was so deeply chin down, she looked as if she could’ve fallen asleep. And Alexander, his eyes blackened with the impossible permutations of what he had just heard, was trying to make sense of the nonsensical. When Tatiana’s eyes looked up at him, they were no longer crystal, but chernye with stradania, occluded with suffering.

  He had a day’s work and an evening full of his children to live through but at night in their garden, in the back, in private, Alexander and Tatiana both paced like caged tigers. Frantically they tried to piece together the fragments of a puzzle they could not understand.

  Anthony had gotten married! Anthony married a Vietnamese girl who was pregnant. And then Anthony disappeared. Could he have gotten his head so crazed that he ran into the Ural Mountains with his pregnant wife and abandoned his men, his commander, his duty, his Military Code of honor, his country?

  Could Anthony have betrayed the United States for a Vietnamese girl named Moon Lai?

  “No,” said Anthony’s adamant feral mother, a vehement Panthera leo. “His whole life that child has had only one example of how to be a man, and that has been yours. He is your son, Alexander,” said Tatiana. “We did not stay in Lazarevo in 1942, we did not stay on Bethel Island in 1948, both times when we had everything to lose. Anthony did not run into the Ural Mountains with her. Something else happened to him.”

  How deeply Alexander and Tatiana bowed their heads. That’s what he had been afraid of. Anthony was a West Point graduate. He was a captain in Special Forces, in MACV-SOG, the elite of the elite. SOG operated separately from regular operations and in secrecy, both commando and long-range recon, reporting straight to the top. SOG was the tip of the sword. There were 500,000 U.S. troops in Southeast Asia, of which 2000 were Special Ops soldiers, of which Ant was one of only 200 strike-force ground troops. This West Point man, this soldier, their son could not have gone AWOL. It was simply impossible.

  “You sometimes call Vikki Gelsomina,” Alexander said, hoping she did not hear the resignation in his voice.

  “Her sainted grandmother Isabella, who raised her, called her that. It means jasmine,” Tatiana said. “Only people who love her call her that. But what’s that in your voice?”

  “Oh God.” Mystified, Alexander raised his eyes to her. “Well, why would Ant marry someone else then?”

  “Because Vikki is married to Tom Richter,” Tatiana said. “And Anthony knows his place. But a long time ago, your one word to me was Orbeli. I had asked you not to leave me without a word, and you didn’t. You gave me Orbeli. Moon Lai is Anthony’s one word to us. Across the miles, to another woman, it’s as inscrutable as Orbeli, as infuriating, as meaningless—and as fraught with meaning as Orbeli. It’s unforgivable—just like what you had done to me, since you knew I didn’t know what Orbeli meant because I did not know the Hermitage director’s name. That cursed curator with his crates of art.”

  “Yes,” said Alexander. “The art was Orbeli’s sole passion. He sent it away to save it.”

  “All very well and good. It wasn’t exactly,” said Tatiana, “coordinates to your location in Special Camp Number 7 in Sachsenhausen.” She smiled lightly. “Well, Moon Lai is Anthony’s voice from the wilderness. Moon Lai is Anthony’s Orbeli.”

  Alexander couldn’t smoke enough cigarettes in their stone garden. “And what are we going to do with this one cryptic word?” he asked. “The only person who can help us is the husband of a woman who got a letter from our son that the husband can never read.” He paused. “If I tell Richter what we know, he’s not going to help us, he’s going to find and kill Anthony himself.”

  “Well, obviously, you don’t tell him everything you know,” said Tatiana. Then: “What are you looking all skeptical and forlorn for— now suddenly you’ve lost your ability to say whatever you have to? This is for your son. Call Richter, put on your brave and indifferent face and lie with all your heart.”

  Alexander had stopped pacing and from afar was standing and staring at her.

  She shook her head, looked away, fervently shook her head again, and said, “No. Absolutely not. Not under any circumstances. No.” She came to him, he came to her. Their arms wrapped around each other. She was still so small, so slender, pressed into his chest, under his chin, his arms still swallowed her.

  “Oh, Tatia.”

  “No, Shura.”

  They were in their secluded nighttime garden. It was October 1969, it was cool. Alexander made a fire in a stone enclosure, and when it was blazing, they undressed and he laid her down in front of it on a thick quilted blanket. They were barricaded by flowers, the fire, a low adobe wall. This was their private Lazarevo place under the Perseus galaxy stars in Arizona. They made love; in tandem and in unison they used their lips on each other, and then Alexander sat against the low wall, his legs drawn up, and Tatiana poured herself into his lap, her legs drawn up, too, her arms around his neck, her bare navel against his bare navel, her heart against his heart, her mouth on his mouth. He held her flush to him, his hands on her hips, on her back, in her hair.

  Afterward, he put on his army bottoms and she his army crew. She sat in front of the fire, and he lay down, his head in her lap. They sat without moving, without speaking while the fire burned down in the little garden.

  “Babe, please,” Alexander said, “why are your tears falling on me?”

  She stroked his forehead, his eyes, his stubble. “Oh my God,” said Tatiana. “Because I realize what you’ve been thinking. It’s not what I’m thinking. You want to go to Vietnam to find him. Please, no. No. I can’t make it, Shura. I can’t make it without you, too. I can’t.” A hollow cry followed her words. “I wish I had died in the Lake Ilmen woods! I should have died. No one could believe I had made it. Had I died, none of this would be happening!”

  “Tania,” Alexander said, furling with unhappiness, “you’ve been telling your husband, your family, the Lake Ilmen story for thirty years— to give us strength, to give us hope, to give us faith. The two most important life lessons Anthony will ever learn are in that story. And now you’re telling me the life lesson in it was that you should have died?”

  “Do you think Ant remembers the story of me in the Lake Ilmen woods?”

  “How could he forget? He can’t forget.” He reached up to wipe her face. “Help me. Oh, give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish,” he whispered. “Tell me.”

  Tatia
na bent down, pressing her wet face to him, her wet lips to him, she kissed him, holding his head to her breasts. “The song of songs, which is ours,” she whispered. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is better than wine ...” She straightened up. He lit a cigarette, not taking his eyes off her face, watching her lips move, her eyes glisten, inhaling nicotine, and through it her sweet breath, listening to her murmur to him about ravens and brothers.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Queen of Lake Ilmen

  Ravens and Brothers

  Tatiana rowed the boat across the lake. She wasn’t talking much to either Saika or Marina, concentrating on the rowing, listening to them chatting.

  It was overcast. Yesterday’s heavy rain did not clear the sky, the clouds hung close over the lake as if threatening rain again at any capricious minute. It was seasonably cool, perhaps 25˚C. The girls wore long-sleeved shirts and long trousers to protect their arms and legs from burning nettles and biting mosquitoes. Saika had wanted to wear a dress, but one word of advice from Tatiana and she was changing into trousers and thanking her. Saika didn’t want to rub stinky and stinging alcohol all over her body, still covered with swollen red wounds from the leech attack the other day, but again, Tatiana convinced her that the bug bites would be worse than the smell and almost as bad as the leech bites. Saika listened and was grateful. In the boat under Tatiana’s legs were two wicker baskets, one for the blueberries, one for the mushrooms. She brought a small paring knife, so as not to frighten the mushrooms with a big blade.

  Her grandfather—a big believer in the just in case—always counseled her to bring a watch and a compass into the woods. The compass hung around her neck, but truthfully, Tatiana had doubts about it: A fledgling scientist in a Jules Verne mode, she had been experimenting with it a little. The watch, borrowed from Dasha, Tatiana was convinced was running two minutes slow—an hour. Tatiana herself did not own a watch, because she did not keep time.