The Bronze Horseman (37 page)

Alexander rubbed her thighs. “I can feel you’re afraid.” Quietly, he added, “Tania, I beg you—don’t let stupidity come between us.”

“All right,” she said with remorse.

“Don’t let bullshit that has nothing to do with us keep you away from me. We already have so much keeping you away from me.” He paused. “Everything.”

“All right, Alexander.”

“Let it all fall away, Tatiana. What are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of being wrong about you,” she whispered.

“Tania, how could
you
of all people be wrong about me?” Alexander clenched his fists in frustration. “Can’t you see,” he said, “it’s exactly because of who I had been that I came to you? What’s the matter?” he asked. “You couldn’t see my loneliness?”

“Barely,” Tatiana replied, clutching her hands to her chest, “through my own.” Falling back against the railing, Tatiana said, “Shura, I’m surrounded by half-truth and innuendo. You and I don’t have a moment to talk anymore, like we used to, a moment to be alone—”

“A moment of
privacy
,” said Alexander, speaking the last word in English.

“Of what?” She didn’t know that word. She would have to look it up when she got home. “What about now? Besides Dasha, are you still—”

“Tatiana,” said Alexander, “all the things you’re worried about—they’re gone from my life. Do you know why? Because when I met you, I knew that if I continued and a good girl like you ever asked me about them, I wouldn’t be able to look you in the face and tell you the truth. I would have to look you in the face and lie.” He was looking into her face. The wordless truth was in his eyes.

Tatiana smiled at him and breathed out, the tight, sick feeling in her stomach dissolving with her exhaled breath. She wanted him to come and hug her. “I’m sorry, Alexander,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for my doubt. I’m just too young.”

“You’re too much of everything,” he said. “God!” he exclaimed. “How insane this is—never to have the time to explain, to talk anything out, never to have a minute—”

We’ve had a minute, Tatiana thought. We had our minutes on the bus. And at Kirov. We had our minutes in Luga. And in the Summer Garden. Breathless minutes, we had. What we want, she thought, keeping herself from welling up, is eternity.

“I’m sorry, Shura,” Tatiana said, grasping his hands. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Tania, if only we could have a moment of
privacy
,” Alexander said, again speaking the last word in English, “you would never doubt me again.”

“What is this
privacy
?” she repeated.

Alexander smiled sadly. “Being secluded from the view or from the presence of other human beings. When we need to be alone together to have intimacy, that’s impossible in two rooms with six other people,” he explained in Russian. “We say, we want some
privacy
.”

“Oh.” Tatiana blushed. So
that
was the word she had been searching for, ever since she met him! “There is no word for anything like that in Russian.”

“I know,” he said.

“And there is a word for this in
America
?”

“Yes,” said Alexander.
“Privacy.”

Tatiana remained silent.

Alexander slid closer, putting both his legs around her. “Tania, when will we next have a moment alone?” he asked, peering into her eyes.

“We’re alone now,” she said.

“When will I next be able to kiss you?”

“Kiss me now,” she whispered.

But Alexander didn’t. He said grimly, “Do you know that it might be never? The Germans are here. Do you know what that means? Life, as you knew it, is over.”

“What about this summer?” she asked. “Nothing’s been quite the same since June 22.”

“No, it hasn’t,” he agreed. “But before today we were simply arming ourselves. Now it’s war. Leningrad will be the battleground for your freedom. And at the end, how many of us will be left standing? How many of us will be free?”

Oh, God. “Is that why you come every chance you get, even if it means dragging Dimitri with you?” Tatiana asked.

With a small nod and a large sigh, Alexander said, “I’m always afraid it’ll be the last time I’m going to see your face.”

Tatiana swallowed, curled into her knees. “Why…
do
you always drag him with you?” she asked. “Can’t you ask him to leave me alone? He doesn’t listen to me. What am I going to do with him?”

Alexander made no reply, and Tatiana anxiously tried to catch his eye. “Tell me about Dimitri, Shura,” she said quietly. “What do you owe him?”

Alexander looked at his cigarettes.

Faintly Tatiana said, “Do you owe him… me?”

“Tatiana,” Alexander said, “Dimitri knows who I am.”

“Stop,” she uttered almost inaudibly.

“If I tell you, you won’t believe it,” Alexander said. “Once I tell you, there will be no going back for us.”

“There is no going back for us now,” Tatiana said, and wanted to mouth a prayer.

“I don’t know what to do about him,” Alexander said.

“I will help you,” said Tatiana, her heart scared and swelling. “Tell me.”

Alexander moved away on the narrow balcony to sit diagonally across from her against the wall, stretching his legs out to her. Tatiana continued to sit against the railing. She sensed he didn’t want her too close. Taking off her one shoe, Tatiana stretched her bare feet out to his boots. Her foot was half the size of his.

Shuddering as if trying to stave off a beast, Alexander began. “When my mother was arrested,” he said, not looking at Tatiana, “the
NKVD
came for me, too. I wasn’t even able to say good-bye to her.” Alexander looked away. “I don’t like to talk about my mother, as you can imagine. I was accused of distributing some capitalist propaganda when I had been fourteen, still in Moscow, and going to Communist Party meetings with my father. So at seventeen, in Leningrad, I was arrested and taken right to Kresty, the inner-city prison for nonpolitical criminals. They didn’t have room for me at Shpalerka, the Big House, the political detention center. I was convicted
in camera
in about three hours,” Alexander said with scorn. “They didn’t even bother with an interrogation. I think all their interrogators were tied up with more important prisoners. I got ten years in Vladivostok. Can you imagine?”

“No,” said Tatiana.

“You know how many of us finally got on that train headed for Vladivostok? A thousand. One man said to me, ‘Oh, I just got out, and now this again.’ He told me the prison camp we were going to had 80,000 people in it. Eighty thousand, Tania! One camp. I told him I didn’t believe it. I had just turned seventeen.” Alexander looked at her. “Like you are now.” He continued, “What could I do? I couldn’t spend
ten
years of my youth in prison, could I?”

“No,” she said.

“I had always believed, you see, that I was meant to live a good life. My mother and father believed in me. I believed in myself—” He broke off. “Prison never entered into it. I never stole, I never broke windows, I didn’t terrorize old ladies. I did nothing wrong. I wasn’t going. So,” he said, “we were crossing the river Volga, near Kazan, thirty meters up over a precipice. I knew it was either now or I was going to Vladivostok for what seemed to me like the rest of my life. I had too much hope for myself. So I jumped right into the river.” Alexander laughed. “They didn’t even stop the train. They thought for sure I had died in the fall.”

“They didn’t know who they were dealing with,” said Tatiana, wanting to put her arms around him, but he was too far away. “When you jumped, was that when you found out you indeed could swim?” She smiled.

Alexander smiled back. The soles of his boots were touching the soles of her feet. “I could swim a little bit.”

“Did you have anything on you?”

“Nothing.”

“Papers? Money?”

“Nothing.” Tatiana thought Alexander wanted to tell her something else, but he continued. “It was the summer of 1936. After I escaped, I made my way south on the Volga, on fishing boats, by foot, in the back of horse carriages. I fished, worked briefly on farms, and moved on south. From Kazan to Ulyanovsk, where Lenin was born—interesting city, like a shrine. Then to Saratov, downstream on the Volga, fishing, harvesting, moving on. Wound up in Krasnodar, near the Black Sea. I was headed down south into Georgia, and then Turkey. I hoped to cross the border somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains.”

“But you had no money.”

“None,” Alexander said. “But I made some along the way, and I did think that my English, once I got into Turkey, would help me. But in Krasnodar, fate intervened.” He glanced at her. “As always. It was a brutal winter, and the family I was staying with, the Belovs—”

“The Belovs?” exclaimed Tatiana.

Alexander nodded. “A nice farming family. Father, mother, four sons, one daughter.” He cleared his throat. “Me. We all got typhus. The entire village of Belyi Yar—360 people—got typhus. Eight-tenths of the village population perished, including the Belovs, the daughter first. The local council from Krasnodar, with the help of the police, came and burned down the village, for fear that the epidemic would spread to the nearby city. All my clothes were burned, and I was quarantined until I either died or got better. I got better. The local
Soviet
councilman came to issue me new papers. Without a moment’s hesitation I said I was Alexander Belov. Since they burned the village in its entire—” Alexander raised his eyebrows. “Only in the Soviet Union. Anyway, since they burned the village, the councilman could not confirm or deny my claim to be Alexander Belov, the youngest Belov boy.”

Tatiana closed her mouth.

“So I was issued a brand-new domestic passport and a brand-new identity. I was Alexander Nikolaevich Belov, born in Krasnodar, orphaned at seventeen.” He looked away.

“What was your full American name?” asked Tatiana faintly.

“Anthony Alexander Barrington.”

“Anthony!” she exclaimed.

Alexander shook his head. “Anthony was for my mother’s father. I myself was never anything but Alexander.” He pulled out a cigarette. “You don’t mind?”

Tatiana shook her head.

“Anyway,” he said, “I returned to Leningrad and went to stay with relatives of the Belovs. I needed to be back in Leningrad—” Alexander hesitated. “I’ll tell you why in a minute. I stayed with my ‘aunt,’ Mira Belov, and her family. They lived on the Vyborg side. They hadn’t seen their nephews in a decade; it was ideal. I was like a stranger to them.” He smiled. “But they let me stay. I finished school. And it was in this school that I met Dimitri.”

“Oh, Alexander,” said Tatiana. “I cannot believe what you lived through when you were so young.”

“I’m far from finished. Dimitri was one of the kids I played with at school. He was spindly, unpopular, and never much fun. When we played war at recess, he was always the one taken prisoner. Dimitri
POW
Chernenko we used to call him. We said that for him alone the Soviet Union should have signed the 1929 Geneva Convention, because he was getting himself wounded or taken prisoner or killed every time we played, managing to get himself caught somehow without help from anyone.”

“Please go on.”

“But then I found out that his father was a prison guard at Shpalerka.” Alexander stopped.

Tatiana stopped breathing. “Your parents were still alive?”

“I didn’t know,” Alexander said. “So I
chose
to become close to Dimitri. I hoped that maybe he could help me see my mother and father. I knew that if they were alive, they would be tortured by their worries about me. I wanted to let them know I was all right.” He paused. “My mother particularly,” he said, his voice controlled. “We had been very close once.”

Tatiana’s eyes filled with tears. “What about your father?”

With a shrug, Alexander said, “He was my father. We had some conflict in the last years. What can I say? He thought he knew everything. I thought I knew everything. So it went.”

Tatiana did not blink as she stared at Alexander, transfixed. “Shura, they must have loved you so much.” She swallowed hard.

“Yes,” Alexander said, taking a deep, pained drag of the cigarette. “They did once love me.”

Tatiana’s heart was breaking for Alexander.

“Little by little,” he continued, “I gained Dimitri’s confidence, and we became better and better friends. Dima really liked the fact that I picked him out of many to be my closest friend.”

“Oh, Shura,” said Tatiana. She understood. Crawling to him, Tatiana wrapped her arms around Alexander. “You had to
trust
Dimitri.”

With one arm he hugged her back. The other held his cigarette. “Yes. I had to tell him who I was. I had no choice but to trust him. Leave my parents to die, or trust him.”

“You trusted Dimitri,” Tatiana repeated incredulously, letting go of him and sitting close by his side.

“Yes.” Alexander looked down into his large hands, as if trying to find the answer to his life in them. “I didn’t want to trust him. My father, the good Communist that he was, taught me never to trust anyone, and though it wasn’t easy, I learned that lesson well. But it’s a hard way to live, and I wanted to trust just one person in my life. Just one. I really needed Dimitri’s help. Besides, I was his friend. I said to myself that if he did this for me and I got to see my mother and father, I would be his friend for life. And that’s exactly what I told him. ‘Dima,’ I said, ‘I will be your friend for life. I will help you in any way that I can.’ “ Alexander lit another cigarette. Tatiana waited, the aching in her chest increasing.

“Dimitri’s father found out that I was too late to see my mother.” Alexander’s voice cracked. “He told me what had happened to her. But my father was still alive, though apparently not for long. He’d already been in prison for nearly a year. Chernenko got Dimitri and me inside Shpalerka, and then we had five minutes with the foreign infiltrator, Harold Barrington. Me, my father, Dimitri, his father, and another guard. No
privacy
for me and my father.”

Tatiana took Alexander’s hand. “How was that?”

Alexander stared straight ahead. “Pretty much how you imagine it might be,” he said, keeping his voice even. “And bitterly brief.”