Tatiana and Alexander (59 page)

“Do you think they’ll get into trouble with the Soviet authorities?”

He stood silent for a moment. “I don’t think so,” he said at last. “They don’t like to bring their darkness out into the open. They’ll interrogate them for sure. But they’re not going to trifle with U.S. nationals. Let’s go.”

They dried off as best they could, threw on their clothes, and ran to the woods.

Meandering they walked through the night-time woods for what seemed to Tatiana tens of miles. He was ahead with the knife, clearing the way. She was doggedly behind him. Sometimes they ran if the woods were clear. Most of the time it took a grunting effort to get through the thick underbrush. He would shine the flashlight for three seconds to illuminate the way just ahead of them. He often stopped and listened for sound, and then continued forward. She wished they could stop moving. Her legs weren’t carrying her. He slowed down and said, “Are you tired?”

“A little. Can we stop?”

He stopped to look at the relief map. “I like where we are, we’re much more west than I think they would expect, and not nearly as far south. We’ve moved laterally very well.”

“Yet we’re no closer to Berlin.”

“No, not much closer. But we’re farther away from them, and that’s better for now.” He closed the map. “You don’t have a tent?”

“I have a waterproof trench. We could make a lean-to.” She paused. “I’d rather find a barn, maybe? The ground is so wet.”

“Fine, let’s find a barn. It will be warmer and dryer. There will be farms just the other side of the woods.”

“So we have to walk some more?”

Alexander pulled her up and, for a moment, held her close to him. “Yes,” he said. “We still have a way to go.”

Onward and slowly, they moved through the woods.

“Alexander, it’s
midnight
. How many miles west do you think we’ve gone in total?”

“Three. In another mile there will be fields.”

She didn’t want to tell him she was scared to be in the constantly creaking woods. He probably didn’t remember the story she had once told him about herself, about being lost in the woods when she was
younger. He had been wounded and near death, and probably didn’t remember her telling him that being lost in the woods was the most terrifying experience of her life up to then.

They came out onto a field. The night was clear; Tatiana could just make out the shape of a silo at the other end.

“Let’s walk across,” she said.

Alexander made her walk around. He didn’t trust fields anymore, he told her.

The barn was a hundred yards away from the farmhouse. Popping open the latch, Alexander motioned her inside. A horse whinnied in surprise. Inside was warm and smelled of hay and manure and old cow’s milk. They were familiar smells to Tatiana, as familiar as Luga. Again a pronounced aching hit her. All the things America had nearly made her forget, she was remembering now with him.

Alexander pulled up a ladder next to a hay loft above the cows and prodded her upward.

In the loft, sitting in a heap on the hay, Tatiana found a flask of water, drank some, gave him some. He drank, and then said, “Got anything else in there?”

Smiling, she rummaged and pulled out a pack of Marlboros.

“Ah, American cigarettes,” he said, lighting up. He smoked three cigarettes without saying a word while she sat collapsed on the hay and watched him. Her eyes were closing.

When she opened them, she found Alexander sitting mutely and staring at her with an expression of profound emotion. She crawled on her hands and knees to him and buried herself inside his fierce arms, and somewhere near her head, she heard his whisper,
Shh, shh
.

They could not speak. To be in Alexander’s arms, to smell him, to hear his breathing, his voice again…

Shh, shh,
he was still whispering and holding her, pulling off her hat, her hairnet, her hairpins, letting her black hair fall down.

His hands were in it. His eyes were closed. Perhaps he was imagining her hair was not black but blonde again.

The way Alexander was touching her now, she could tell that he was blind and had not yet learned to see—he was holding her in that impossible choke that had to do not quite with love or passion, but somehow with both and with neither. The embrace wasn’t an alloy, it was a conflagration of anguish and bitter relief and fear.

Tatiana could tell Alexander would like to have spoken more, but
he couldn’t, and so he sat on the hay with his legs open, while she kneeled in front of him, folded into his arms, and every once in a while from his shuddering body would come a
Shh, shh
…

Not for her. Not for Tatiana. For himself.

Continuing to hold her, Alexander lowered her onto the straw. His trembling limbs surrounded her. Tatiana was barely breathing, her own body convulsing. To rage, to quell—

They didn’t know what to do—to undress? To stay clothed? She couldn’t move, nor want to. His lips were on her neck, her clavicles, he was clawing at her, ripping open her tunic, baring her breasts to his desperate gasping mouth. She wanted to whisper his name, to moan maybe. Tears kept trickling down her temples.

He removed from himself and her only what was necessary. He didn’t so much enter her as break her open. Her mouth remained in a mute screaming O, her hands clutched him, not close enough, and through the whisper of grief, through the cry of desire, Tatiana felt that Alexander, in his complete abandon, was making love to her as if he were being pulled from the cross to which he was still attached by nails.

His gripping her, his ferocious, unremitting movement was so intense that Tatiana felt consciousness yield to—

Oh my God, Shura, please
…she mouthed inaudibly.

But it could not be any other way.

Violent release came for Alexander at the expense of Tatiana’s momentary lapse of reason, as she cried out, her pleas carrying through the barn, to the basin, to the river, to the sky.

He remained on top of her without moving, without pulling away. His body was shaking. He couldn’t be any closer. She held him closer still…And then…

Shh, shh.

That wasn’t Alexander.

That was Tatiana.

They both fell asleep.

Still they hadn’t spoken.

She woke up to find him inside her again.

And night, though lengthened by gods, wasn’t long enough.

She spread the trench coat on the hay. He took the clothes off her.
In the unmuted darkness, Tatiana cried and cried out, stretched out on the rack of his famine.

Time and again she was imprisoned and released—barely, just for breath; time and again she burned for Alexander, in the
hands
of Alexander, and cried out again,
Oh, Shura
…endlessly, endlessly.

During brief respite, he continued to lie with his limbs over her, and again she was crying.

He whispered, “Tatia, what’s a man to think when every time he makes love to his wife, she cries?”

“That he is his wife’s only family,” said Tatiana, crying. “That he is her whole life.”

“As she is his,” he said. “You don’t see him crying.” Tatiana could not see his face—it was buried in her breasts.

There was no night.

There was only twilight; the sky turned blue then lavender, then pink again within minutes that weren’t long enough.

The night was not long enough.

Not long enough for the floor in Mathew Sayers’s office, for Lisiy Nos, for the swamps of Finland, not long enough for Stockholm.

Not long enough for the punishment cell in Morozovo, for the ten grains of morphine in Slonko, for the drive across Europe with Nikolai Ouspensky.

Not long enough for the river Vistula.

And nothing was long enough for the forests and mountains of Holy Cross.

“Don’t tell me another word.” Tatiana’s voice was defeated. “I don’t have the strength to hear it.”

“I don’t have the strength to tell it.”

After Tatiana heard about Pasha, she could not talk or look at Alexander, as she lay supine, her legs drawn up to her chest, while he lay behind her whispering, “I’m sorry, Tania. I’m sorry.”

Just a gasp from a bereft Tatiana.

“I was dying in 1944 before I found him,” said Alexander. “You can’t imagine what stormed inside me as I pushed my penal battalion across every fucking river in Poland.”

“Alexander, what I would have given for a penal battalion.”

He kissed the soft flesh between her shoulder blades.

She rolled into a tighter coil, seeking to return to the place she had once shared with her brother.

Alexander didn’t even bother uncoiling her to return to the place he shared with her.

Alexander was not so much sleeping as unconscious, while Tatiana was propped up on her elbow, tracing the scars on his body. She didn’t want to wake him but she couldn’t stop touching him. He had marks on his body that defied her understanding. How could a body bear all this yet live, thinner than before, less whole than before, raggedly tearing apart at the seams, yet live?

Her hand cupped him softly, then ran down to his shins, and up again to his arms, where it stayed, caressing him, while Tatiana stared at his sleeping face.

There is one moment, a moment in eternity. Before we find out the truth about one another. That simple moment is the one that propels us through life—what we felt like at the very edge of our future, standing over the abyss, before we knew for sure we loved. Before we knew for sure we loved forever. Before the dying Dasha, the dying Mama, the dying Leningrad. Before Luga. Before the divinity of Lazarevo, when the miracles you heaped upon me with your love and your body alloyed us for life. Before all that, you and I walked through the Summer Garden, and once in a while my bare arm touched your arm, and once in a while you spoke and that gave me an excuse to look up into your face, into your laughing eyes, to catch a glimpse of your mouth and I, who had never been touched, tried to imagine what it might be like to have your mouth touch me. Falling in love with you in the Summer Garden in the white nights of Leningrad is the moment that propels me through life.

He woke up, saw her. “What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Watching over you,” she whispered back.

And he closed his eyes and reached for her, taking her almost without waking, and then slept.

The next morning at dawn, the farmer came in to milk the cows. They lay silently in the loft and listened to him, and after he left, Tatiana dressed, went down the ladder and squeezed some milk for her and Alexander into a cup she carried to dispense medicine. He came with her, holding both pistols in his hands.

They drank to bursting.

“My God, you’re thinner than I’ve ever seen you,” she said. “Have some more milk. Have all of it.”

He drank. “You’re curvier than I’ve ever seen you.” He bent to her on the little stool. “Your breasts are bigger.”

“Motherhood, I guess,” she muttered, kissing him.

“Let’s go up,” he said, his hand on her.

They went up. But before they had a chance to undress, they heard the sound of an engine outside. It was seven in the morning. Alexander looked out the small, four-pane loft window. A military truck was outside and four Red Army officers were talking to the farmer in the clearing.

He glanced back at Tatiana.

“Who’s there?” she whispered.

“Tania, sit back against the wall but not too far. Hold the P-38 and the ammo.”

“Who’s there?”

“They’ve come for us.”

She emitted a cry, creeping to the window. “Oh, my God, there are four of them, what are we going to do, we’re trapped up here!”

“Shh. Maybe they’ll leave.” Alexander readied the machine gun, all three pistols and the Commando. She watched them out of the corner of the window. The farmer was opening his hands, shrugging his shoulders. The soldiers were coming up too close to him, pointing to the house, the fields, and finally the barn. The farmer moved out of their way, motioning with his hand in the direction of the barn.

“The revolver, is it double action, or single action?”

“What?”

“Never mind.”

“Double action, I think. I’m almost sure,” she said, trying to remember. “Does it recock by itself you mean? Yes.”

Alexander lay flat with two bales in front of him, the machine gun and pistols by his right side, the Commando in his hands pointed at the ladder. Tatiana, her shaking hands full of clips, sat against the barn wall behind him.

He turned around. “Not a single sound, Tania. Stop shaking.”

Mutely she nodded. Tried to stop shaking.

The barn door opened and the farmer came in with one of the officers. Tatiana’s heart was beating so loudly that she could barely hear. The officer spoke very poor German intermingled with Russian. The farmer must have told him that no one had been through these parts, because the officer yelled in Russian, “You’re sure of this, you’re sure?”

They went on in circles like this for a few seconds, and suddenly the officer stopped speaking and looked around. “Do you smoke?” he asked in Russian.

“Nein, nein,”
said the farmer.
“Ich rauche nei in der Scheune wegen Brandgefahr.”

“Well, fire or no fire, somebody has been smoking in your fucking barn!”

Tatiana put her hand over her mouth to stop herself from crying out.

The officer ran out of the barn. She looked out the window. He said something to the rest of the men. One of them turned off the engine and they all retrieved their machine guns.

“Shura,” Tatiana whispered.

“Shh. Don’t speak. Don’t even breathe.”

The farmer was still standing in the middle of his barn when the four Soviets walked in with their weapons.

“Get the fuck out of here,” one of them said to the farmer. He ran.

“Who’s here?” they called.

Tatiana held her breath.

“There’s no one here,” said one of them.

“We know you’re here, Belov,” said another. “Just come out and nobody will get hurt.”

Alexander said nothing.