The Summer Garden

by Paullina Simons

  As if Marina could move a meter from Tatiana. “Why do you think she won’t be coming here?” she said, panting.

  “Spinal cord paralysis,” said Tatiana. “She might want to. She just won’t be able to.”

  “Is it...” Marina paused, “ever curable?”

  “No.”

  “So what’s going to happen to her now?”

  “Saika,” said Tatiana, “is going to die in the woods. She’s probably dead already. Like we still might be.”

  Marina lay down in front of Tatiana, in front of the fire. “I’m not alone anymore,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “I don’t care what happens now. I’m not alone.”

  They remained close together. Tatiana did not touch her.

  “You’re very upset with me?” Marina whispered.

  “More than I have the ability to discuss with you.”

  “I’m sorry.” But Marina’s eyes were closing. “What time is it?”

  Tatiana looked up at the sky. “One maybe. One thirty.” Oh, that pale yellow sun. She wanted a life where the sun beat down on her three hundred days a year, not the miserly sixty-five in this northern neck of the woods. When she looked back down at her cousin, Marina was asleep.

  She slept for forty-five minutes, while Tatiana sat awake under the sunshine and fed the fire and watched Marina slumber as if she were home in a comfortable bed.

  Just as early evening was covering the land, she heard voices from the woods calling her name. “Tatiana...Tatiana...!” Not one voice, but a chorus of voices. Male, female, young, old.

  She struggled to her feet. Marina woke up, jumped up. “Taaaaaania...Taaaaaania...”

  “Oh my God!” Marina cried. “You were right! They found you!”

  Tatiana didn’t have the strength to run, to shout, and Marina—who had the strength—didn’t. She took Tatiana’s good hand, ignoring Tatiana’s flinching.

  “Tanechka, I beg you,” she whispered in a panic. “Please don’t tell them. Please. It was just a joke gone horribly wrong. I learned my lesson. I almost died, too. I’ll never do it again. But please don’t tell them.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s just between you and me, Cousin Marina,” Tatiana said without emotion, pulling her hand away. “It’ll be our little secret.”

  Marina ran then, yelling. “Help! Here! Here! Help!”

  Dasha came running through the clearing, crying, yelling Tatiana’s name. Pasha was next to her, Babushka behind her, then Deda, and then Mama! That was surprising. Mama! Wailing, Oh, Tania, Tania.

  Uncle Boris came too, for Marina, his only child. He looked very upset. “Who do we yell at around here?” he said, holding Marina to him. “Who is responsible for this?”

  But Tatiana’s family was so shocked at the state of their baby that they were not in the mood to be yelling at anyone. The broken arm horrified them. When Tatiana told them she had jumped into a bear trap, by the emotional reaction of her family, you’d think they had all jumped in with her.

  “You did what?” said Marina with surprise.

  Pasha looked away from Tatiana and toward Marina. “What do you mean, you did what?” he said suspiciously. “Where the hell were you that you don’t know this?”

  Dasha, too, stared unhappily at Marina, almost if they could tell something unholy went down that Tatiana wasn’t sharing.

  “Why would you do such a stupid thing as jump into a bear trap?” asked Mama.

  “To save myself from the bear,” quietly replied Tatiana.

  Mama almost fainted.

  Deda said, enough talking, all of you; she is in no state to be talking. He tried to pry Tatiana from their clutching arms. But they wouldn’t let go of her. He gave her a flask filled with water. She drank, she swooned. Dasha held the flask to her mouth, and Tatiana drank in large gulps with the water running down her chin and onto her shirt. Deda asked if she wanted some bread; he’d brought bread. She took a grateful bite. Did she want some tea? He’d brought a Thermos of hot tea. Did she want some canned ham? He took out a small can and a can opener. “Canned ham?” Her entire family groaned with distaste, even Tatiana, who shook her head. The very idea of canned ham! Deda put the canned ham away. She didn’t want anything. She had everything.

  The lake was two kilometers due north. Deda had a good compass and they had cleared a trail on which Uncle Boris carried Tatiana. As they walked, Uncle Boris told the girls what had happened.

  The morning after they didn’t return, he telegraphed Luga and Leningrad to notify the Metanovs. The family had been looking for the girls for days now, in two boats, rowing across the lake early in the morning and staying till night. They had found Tatiana’s twigs, they had found Tatiana’s etchings in the trees. But they simply could not find the girls. It was the fire that finally did it.

  Deda said, “As soon as we woke up this morning and it was sunny, I told everyone we would find you, because I knew with the sun being out, you would make a fire.” The girls were found almost thirteen kilometers southwest from their boat.

  Finally someone remembered to ask about Saika. Marina said nothing, just shook her head. Tatiana said, “She and Marina became separated from me.” She paused. “We got very lost. Right, Marina?”

  “Yes, Tania.” She lowered her gaze.

  Deda said, “If Saika is still in the woods, we should go look for her.”

  “No!” Marina cried. “She went into a cave at night and got rabies.”

  “She went into a cave at night?” Deda repeated; even he sounded shocked. “Who in their right mind goes into a cave at night?”

  Tatiana spoke slowly, while carried by Uncle Boris. “It was warmer for her, she felt at home there, she didn’t like being out in the open. She went in, scaring the bats, who flew away. She didn’t hear any flapping and thought it was safe. She forgot, or maybe she never knew, maybe she didn’t read quite enough, that the rabies virus, in small confined, heavily infested areas also travels by saliva particles in the air. It obviously found her.”

  “What a nightmare,” Deda said. “What are her parents going to think? Well, none of our business. As I always say: know your business and stick to it. What is your father going to think? That’s our business. He’s coming back next week.” He tutted. “We have to get you both back to Leningrad. Tania, you need to go to the hospital immediately.”

  “I’m fine, Deda.” She smiled. I’m fine now.

  “You didn’t go into a cave, did you, Tania?”

  “I didn’t go into a cave, darling Deda.”

  He kissed her head while Uncle Boris carried her. “I know your papa will bring you something nice back from Poland when he returns,” he whispered. “It’ll make you feel better, Tanechka.”

  “I feel all right already.”

  They got the girls into the boat, and Pasha got behind the oars, and said, with unsuppressed glee, “I am rowing across Lake Ilmen. Hee-hee, Tanechka. So really, I win.”

  Alexander laughed. Reaching up, he stroked Tatiana’s face, then pulled her down to him and kissed her. “You say it like a joke, little Tanechka, but I know it’s what rankles you most about the whole sorry episode.”

  Lightly Tatiana smiled. “Only because he was so annoying. I said to him, that’s the only way you ever beat me, Pasha, when my arm is literally broken.”

  “Of course you did. And the Kantorovs?”

  “When they found out Saika got rabies, they left without a word to anyone, without saying good-bye. They simply packed up and were gone. When I came back to Luga a few weeks later, they had already gone. Perhaps they looked for her. I don’t know.”

  Alexander was thoughtful, contemplating the desert, the sky, the stars, the story. “If Anthony heard one word from your Lake Ilmen tale he would carry away from it two things. One: do not speak of your mysteries to your enemies. And two: have faith and stay alive long enough for someone to find you.”

  Tatiana said quietly, “My own husband learned the latter well.”

  “As you know, I n
eed my mystic guide for both,” he said, squeezing her and getting off her lap. He stretched his big long body and pulled out his cigarettes. Getting up and stretching herself, Tatiana picked up his Zippo lighter and flicked it on for him. Bending to inhale, he cupped her hand, as she looked up at him, and he looked down at her.

  They came back to bed and took off their clothes. She pleaded with him not to hold himself up, so she could feel his whole body, all his bones, all his wounds and the marks of his life on her, his big arms, his smooth chest, the ravages of war, all of him on top of her.

  “Tania,” Alexander said when he was in her arms. This was their unimagined whisper. “I have to go to Vietnam to find him. Anthony won’t come out of it by himself. Like I couldn’t. Don’t you feel it?”

  She said nothing.

  “Something’s happened to him. You know it. I know it.”

  She said nothing.

  “This is slow death for me.” Glancing down at her, he said with a pained shrug, “Yes. I know. You did it. I let you go in Morozovo because I believed that you could bear anything. And I was right. But I can’t bear this. I’m not as strong as you. One way or another”—a strangled breath—“I have to bring him back.”

  She said nothing.

  “I know it’s Vietnam. I know it’s not a weekend in Yuma. I promised you I’d never go into active combat again. But I’ll come back.”

  She said nothing.

  “I have three other children. I’ll come back,” Alexander said. He had barely any voice left to speak the rest. “We can’t leave our boy in the woods, Tania,” he said. “Look at what’s been happening to us. We can’t continue living.”

  “Shura, I don’t want you to go,” she whispered.

  “I know. Not even for our son?”

  “I don’t want you to go,” she repeated. “That’s all I feel.” She wanted to say something else—and didn’t. If she told him of her unspeakable fears, it wouldn’t be free will. She pulled him close. But he was already as close as he could be. Two metal bowls fitted into one another.

  “Ordo amoris, Alexander.”

  “Ordo amoris, Tatiana.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  In the Heart of Vietnam

  Aykhal

  He couldn’t give up the ghost. And now he was being sent away, all the way to outlying Aykhal, where she would never find him. He was told that the rules applying to him from hereon in were simple. If he was caught trying to escape, the guards who caught him were under strict orders to shoot to kill. They were done with him. And still he would admit to nothing, and he looked them in the face and denied his name. Past the fields, the Volga, the pines, the Urals. Through Kazan, across the Kama River, and his heart almost stopped beating while crossing it, remembering swimming across it, keeping his gaze back to make sure she didn’t get carried away by the current. She never did. Any current was all right with her. Through the Urals, to Sverdlovsk, and past it through the taiga. They were on the Central Siberian Plain, and the steppe, and past that, too, and now they were on the North Siberian Plateau, in the frozen tundra, and it was there before the mountains, before the Ob and the Amur, before turning south to Vladivostok, to China, to Vietnam, on the edge of nothing, in the middle of one road, one small indentation in the frozen earth known as the Rhone Valley, lay Aykhal. That would have been his ten years in exile after his twenty-five years in the Soviet prisons.

  And he was going even farther than that now. Even farther than Aykhal.

  Tatiana fretted over him before he left as if he were a five-year-old on his first day of school.

  “Shura, don’t forget to wear your helmet wherever you go, even if it’s just down the trail to the river.

  “Don’t forget to bring extra magazines. Look at this combat vest. You can fit more than five hundred rounds. It’s unbelievable. Load yourself up with ammo. But bring a few extra cartridges. You don’t want to run out.

  “Don’t forget to clean your M-16 every day. You don’t want your rifle to jam.”

  “Tatia, this is the third generation of the M-16. It doesn’t jam anymore. The gunpowder doesn’t burn as much. The rifle is self-cleaning.”

  “When you attach the rocket bandolier, don’t tighten it too close to your belt, the friction from bending will chafe you, and then irritation follows, and then infection...

  “. . . Bring at least two warning flares for the helicopters. Maybe a smoke bomb, too?”

  “Gee, I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Bring your Colt—that’s your lucky weapon—bring it, as well as the standard-issue Ruger. Oh, and I have personally organized your medical supplies: lots of bandages, four complete emergency kits, two QuikClots— no, I decided three. They’re light. I got Helena at PMH to write a prescription for morphine, for penicillin, for—”

  Alexander put his hand over her mouth. “Tania,” he said, “do you want to just go yourself?”

  When he took the hand away, she said, “Yes.”

  He kissed her.

  She said, “Spam. Three cans. And keep your canteen always filled with water, in case you can’t get to the plasma. It’ll help.”

  “Yes, Tania.”

  “And this cross, right around your neck. Do you remember the prayer of the heart?”

  “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

  “Good. And the wedding band. Right around your finger. Do you remember the wedding prayer?”

  “Gloria in Excelsis, please just a little more.”

  “Very good. Never take off the steel helmet, ever. Promise?”

  “You said that already. But yes, Tania.”

  “Do you remember what the most important thing is?”

  “To always wear a condom?”

  She smacked his chest.

  “To stop the bleeding,” he said, hugging her.

  “Yes. To stop the bleeding. Everything else they can fix.”

  “Yes, Tania.”

  When Alexander arrived in Saigon on a military transport jet in November 1969, he thought he was dreaming someone else’s diluvian nightmare. It was raining so biblically hard, the plane couldn’t land. Alexander actually became worried they would run out of fuel, they were circling in the air so long. Finally they landed. So much for the hot and humid jungle. It was windy, cold and pouring.

  Because the helicopter couldn’t land in the wind and rain, they couldn’t fly out to Kontum. Richter called, told him to sit tight. So he sat, smoking by the window of his hotel room, looking out onto Saigon Square, reading American newspapers. Mostly he paced the room—oh, he was good at that, pacing.

  While drinking downstairs at the bar, a frazzled and wet Vietnamese woman approached him, told him she would give him boom boom for two American dollars. He declined. She told him he could sample for free but if he liked, he would pay. He declined. She offered him yum-yum for a dollar. He declined. She came back a few moments later, thrusting a small toddler into his face and saying, “My baby need food. Why you no give me piastres for yum-yum? I have to feed my baby.”

  He gave her twenty American piastres and sent her on her way. Five minutes later she was walking up the stairs with another man, baby in hand. Alexander ordered another drink.

  Wishing for the rain to end.

  The nights were long. But the days when the rain didn’t end were even longer. He paced as if he were in his cell in Volkhov, in hell, pacing away what was left of his life. Despite all his presumptions at the time, a surprising lot had been left, which showed what he knew.

  He wasn’t in charge, he had finally learned that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be drumming out his son’s life and his own life on the window-pane. He had telegraphed Tania, told her he’d arrived safely. He put his hand on the cold glass. Bar lights flickered down below in the wet night.

  Why did you come? the weeping heavens seemed to be saying. It’s bad out here. We won’t let you pass.

  There was too much time to think in his dark hotel room. He wondered if Ta
nia could feel him from three continents away. He had not been in a hotel room alone... well, ever. He had been alone in many places—cold wet cells, on trains, in wet forests—but he had not experienced isolation like this since his solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen. It had been an instrument of torture and punishment. And he had not been alone since the door opened a crack, light streamed in, and a small slim shadow stood trembling in front of him.

  After that, they lived in hotels and motels and rental homes and houseboats, and a mobile home that was preserved complete like a museum on the hilltop, and now they lived in a spotless stucco house that was clean and cool, where his bed was white and made, and she was always next to him. She never left him, except for those one hundred Friday nights—and somehow they managed to survive even that.

  His hand remained fanned out on the damp, cold pane. Even now, in Saigon, he was not alone. Staggering comfort was always close, even in Vietnam, twelve thousand miles away from home.

  He telegraphed her. “DESPERATE RAIN. STILL IN SAIGON.”

  Three more days of rain went by.

  She telegraphed him back. “SUNNY AND HOT IN NOVEMBER. STILL IN PHOENIX.”

  She telegraphed him again. “HAPPY THANKSGIVING.”

  She telegraphed him again. “DECEMBER LADIES HOME JOURNAL. SEEK: 100 REASONS TO REJOICE.”

  He smiled. This is what he meant. She found a way even from twelve thousand miles away. In one of the news kiosks catering to the Americans, he found a December Ladies Home Journal, and the article she was referring to: “100 Places to Make Love,” and spent one happy day remembering some of those places.

  Number 16, in a tent. Number 25, next to a fire; number 33, on top of a hill. At a rest area; on a picnic table; in a hammock; in a corn field; in a sleeping bag under the stars. On a boat on a lake; in a bath; in a barn; in the bed of a truck on a hot summer night. In the woods; in the woodshed; on the wood floor. During sunset and high noon. In the pool. On a beach, almost secluded; on a beach at night. In a car on a deserted road; at a drive-in movie theater. In a room with lit candles; in a big brass bed; in every room in your house; in a room at your friend’s house during a noisy party; and once during a quiet dinner party right before dessert. On a porch swing; on the playground swings; on a bobbing houseboat deck; in the core of the Grand Canyon; in luminescent, lilac-heather, never-forgot Bed and Breakfast. And last but not least, on top of the Maytag washer when it was in spin cycle.