The Bronze Horseman (99 page)

Kärlek.

Jag älskar dig, Alexander.

As the
tork tumlare
twirled her Red Cross uniform and stockings, Tatiana was so grateful that the last time she and Alexander made love, she saw his face.

The trip across to New York took ten nauseating, spluttering days. When she arrived, it was the end of June. Tatiana had turned nineteen years old on the
White Star
line in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

On the boat Tatiana coughed and thought about
Orbeli
.

“Tatiasha—remember Orbeli—”

Coughing up blood, Tatiana summoned her sinking strength and the foundering energy of her heart to ask herself—if Alexander knew he was going to be arrested and couldn’t tell her because he knew she would never go without him, would he have gritted his teeth and set his jaw and lied?

Yes. Everything she knew about Alexander told her that would be exactly what he would do. If he knew the truth, he would give her one word.

Orbeli.

Her chest hurt so much it felt as if it were about to tear apart her breastbone.

When the
White Star
line docked in the Port of New York, Tatiana could not get up. Not that she wouldn’t. She just couldn’t. Delirious after a passage of violent coughing, she felt as if something inside her were leaking out.

Soon she heard voices, and two men came into the room, both of them dressed in white.

“Oh, no, what do we have here?” said the shorter man. “Not another refugee.”

“Wait, this one is wearing a Red Cross uniform,” said the taller man.

“She obviously stole it somewhere. Look, it barely buttons over her stomach. It’s obviously not hers. Edward, let’s go. We’ll report her to the
INS
later. We’ve got to empty this ship.”

Tatiana moaned. The men came back. The taller man looked her over. “Chris, I think she’s going to have a baby.”

“What—now?”

“I think so.” The doctor felt for something underneath her. “Her water may have broken.”

Chris came up to Tatiana and put his hand on her head. “Feel her. She’s burning up. Listen to her breathing. I don’t even need a stethoscope. She’s got TB. God, how many of these cases can we see? Forget it. We still have all the cabins to go through. She’s our first. I guarantee she won’t be the last.”

Edward kept his hand on Tatiana’s stomach. “She’s very sick,” he said. “Miss,” he said, “do you speak English?”

When Tatiana didn’t answer, Chris exclaimed, “You see?”

“Maybe she has papers? Miss, do you have any papers?”

When Tatiana didn’t answer, Chris said, “I’m done. I’m going.”

Edward said, “Chris, she’s sick, and she’s about to have a baby. What do you want to do, leave her?” He laughed. “What kind of a damn doctor are you?”

“A tired and underpaid one, that’s what kind.
PHD
doesn’t pay me enough to care. Where are we going to take her?”

“Let’s bring her to the quarantine hospital on Ellis Island Three. There’s room. She’ll get better there.”

“With TB?”

“It’s TB, not cancer. Let’s go.”

“Edward, she’s a refugee! Where is she from? Look at her. If she were just sick, I’d say all right, but you know she’s going to have the kid on American soil, and bam! She’s entitled to stay here like the rest of us. Forget it. Deliver her baby on the boat, so that she’s got no claims on U.S. soil, and then put her in Ellis. As soon as she’s better, she’ll be deported. That’s fair. All these folks think they can come into America without permission… well, no more. Look how many we’ve got. Once this damn war is over, it’s going to get even worse. The entire European continent is going to want to—”

“Going to want to what, Chris
Pandolfi
?”

“Oh, easy for
you
to judge, Edward
Ludlow
.”

“I’ve been here since the FrenchIndian wars. I’m not judging.”

Chris waved Edward off and left. Then, sticking his head back into the room, he said, “We’ll come back for her. She’s not ready to have a kid now. Look how still she is. Let’s go.”

Edward was about to walk away when Tatiana groaned slightly. He came back and stood by her face. “Miss?” he said. “Miss?”

Lifting her hand, Tatiana found Edward’s face and placed her palm on his cheek. “Help me,” she said in English. “I’m going to have a baby. Help me, please.”

Edward Ludlow found a stretcher for Tatiana and fetched a reluctant and grumpy Chris Pandolfi to help him carry her down the plank and onto the ferry that took her to Ellis Island in the middle of New York Harbor. Years after the heyday of Ellis, the island’s hospital had been serving as a detention center and quarantine for immigrants and refugees coming to the United States.

Tatiana’s eyes were so clouded she felt half blind, but even through her haze and the ferry’s unwashed windows she could see the valiant hand offering a flame up to the sunlit heaven,
lifting her lamp beside the golden door.

Tatiana closed her eyes.

At Ellis she was carried to a small, spartan room, where Edward laid her on a bed with starched white sheets and got a nurse to undress her. After examining her, he looked at Tatiana with surprise, and said, “Your baby has crowned. Do you not feel that?”

Tatiana barely moved, barely breathed. Once the baby’s head came out, she convulsed, gritting her teeth through palpitations that felt like distant pain.

Edward delivered her baby for her.

“Miss, can you hear me? Please, look. Look what you have. A beautiful boy!” The doctor smiled, bringing the baby close.

“Look. He’s a big one, too—I’m surprised you could get a baby this size out of little you. Brenda, look at this. Don’t you agree?” Brenda wrapped the baby in a small white blanket and laid him next to Tatiana.

“He’s early,” mouthed Tatiana, staring at her baby. She placed her hand on him.

“Early?” Edward laughed. “No, I’d say he was right on time. If he were any later, you’d be having him back in—where are you from?”

“The Soviet Union,” Tatiana said indistinctly.

“Oh, dear. The Soviet Union. How did you
ever
get here?”

“You would not believe it if I told you,” said Tatiana, lying on her side, shutting her eyes.

“Well, forget all that now,” Edward said brightly. “As it is, your boy is a U.S. citizen.” He sat by the chair near her bed. “That’s a good thing, right? It’s what you wanted?”

Tatiana suppressed a groan. “Yes,” she said, pressing her swaddled son to her feverish face. “It is what I wanted.” It was hurting her to breathe.

“You’ve got TB. It hurts right now, but you’ll be all right,” he said gently. “Everything you’ve been through, it’s all behind you.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” whispered Tatiana.

“No, it’s good!” the doctor exclaimed. “You’ll stay here at Ellis, get better—Where did you get a Red Cross uniform? Were you a nurse?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s great,” he said cheerfully. “You see? You have a valuable skill. You’ll be able to get a job. You speak a little English, which is more than I can say for most people who come through here. It’ll separate you from the chaff. Trust me.” He smiled. “You’re going to do very well. Now, can I get you something to eat? We have sandwiches with turkey—”

“With what?”

“Oh, I think you’ll like turkey. And cheese. I’ll bring it for you.”

“You are a good doctor,” Tatiana said. “Edward Ludlow, right?”

“Right.”

“Edward—”

“It’s Dr. Ludlow to you!” Brenda, the nurse, exclaimed loudly.

“Nurse! Let her call me Edward if she wants. What do you care?”

Huffing, Brenda left, and Edward took a small towel and wiped Tatiana’s tears. “I know you must be sad. It
is
frightening. But I have a good feeling about you. Everything is going to be just fine.” He smiled. “I promise.”

Through her grieving green eyes, Tatiana looked at the doctor and said, “You Americans do like to promise.”

Nodding, Edward said, “Yes, and we
always
keep our word. Now, let me get our Public Heath Department administrative nurse for you. If Vikki is a little grouchy, don’t worry. She’s having a bad day, but she’s got a good heart. She’ll bring you the birth certificate papers.” Edward stared at the boy warmly. “He’s a cute one. Look, he’s got a full head of hair. A miracle, isn’t it? Have you thought about a name for him?”

“Yes,” said Tatiana, weeping into her baby’s black hair. “He is going to have his father’s name. Anthony Alexander Barrington.”

Soldier! Let me cradle your head and caress your face, let me kiss your dear sweet lips and cry across the seas and whisper through the icy Russian grass how I feel for you…
Luga, Ladoga, Leningrad, Lazarevo
. . . Alexander, once you carried me, and now I carry you. Into my eternity, now I carry you.

Through Finland, through Sweden, to America, hand outstretched, I stand and limp forward, the galloping steed black and riderless in my wake. Your heart, your rifle, they will comfort me, they’ll be my cradle and my grave.

Lazarevo
drips you into my soul, dawn drop by moonlight drop from the river Kama. When you look for me, look for me there, because that’s where I will be all the days of my life.

“Shura, I can’t bear the thought of you dying,” Tatiana said to him when they were lying on the blanket, having made love by the fire in the dewy morning. “I can’t bear the thought of you not breathing in this world.”

“I’m not crazy about the thought of that myself.” Alexander grinned. “I’m not going to die. You said so yourself. You said I was meant for great things.”

“You are meant for great things,” she replied. “But you better keep yourself alive for me, soldier, because I can’t continue to live without you.” That’s what she said, looking up into his face, her hands on his beating heart.

He bent down and kissed her freckles. “You can’t continue? My cartwheeling queen of Lake Ilmen?” Smiling, he shook his head. “You will find a way to live without me. You will find a way to live for both of us,” Alexander said to Tatiana as the swelling Kama River flowed from the Ural Mountains through a pine village named Lazarevo, once when they were in love, and young.

Paullina Simons’s Tribute to Her Grandparents, Survivors of Russia’s Terrible Twentieth Century

My grandparents, Lev and Maria Handler, met in a factory in Leningrad when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-one. Maria was an assembly line worker and Lev was an engineer and designer of engines. They went together for two years before they married in 1934. My father, Yuri, was born in 1936, my uncle, Alex, in 1938. They lived in Leningrad on a street called Fifth Soviet, in the two rooms in a communal apartment that I use as a setting for The Bronze Horseman. There were six of them before World War II began: my grandparents, my father and his brother, and my grandfather’s parents.

My grandmother was one of the very few Soviet women at that time who did not work outside the home. My grandfather did not want an exhausted wife coming home late, and so she stayed home and took care of him, his parents, and her children. She was very happy with that arrangement, “Because it pleased your grandfather.”

In August of 1941, my grandmother with her boys, ages five and two, and her in-laws, rode one of the last trains out of Leningrad. They were evacuated to a small village 1500 miles away in Saratov County on the Volga, a hundred miles north of Stalingrad. My grandfather, a skilled and essential worker, remained in Leningrad. His factory was quickly retrofitted to manufacture airplanes, and he was assigned to design and repair their engines.

During the evacuation, my grandmother became separated from her children and her in-laws – she was aboard one boat on the Volga while they traveled on another. She had all the money (though not for long: she would be robbed during the night) and her in-laws had the documents, the luggage, and the kids. It was several days before they were all reunited at their designated evacuation post, but now they were broke and would remain penniless until my grandfather’s paycheck finally reached the village where they would live out the war.

My grandmother’s mother, Dusia, had stayed behind in Leningrad to be with her partner of thirty years, Mikhail; but only a few weeks after the evacuation he would be dead of tuberculosis. Dusia then moved in to the Fifth Soviet apartment with my grandfather. They lived there during that first terrible winter of the German blockade when half a million Soviet civilians perished from famine and pestilence. My grandfather says that he only survived because of Dusia’s daily excursions across the frozen Neva River to barter with her farmer friends, trading personal items for potatoes.

Believing, however, that he would not make it through another winter in a blockaded city, my grandfather joined the Red Army in the summer of 1942. His talent for repairing all types of engines was much in demand and he became a decorated lieutenant. Dusia remained in Leningrad for the remainder of the war, ever the survivor – until cancer of the stomach claimed her in 1977 at the age of eighty-three.

My grandfather’s father, Wolf Lazarevich, was a professor of mathematics. He died of pneumonia in September of 1943 at the age of sixty-one. During his short time in evacuation, Wolf taught mathematics to the villagers and was so beloved that when he died they gave him a funeral procession – carrying his body above their heads through the village – and a Christian burial (although he was a Jew). My grandfather’s lifelong regret is that he never again saw his father after the day he put him on the evacuation train in 1941. Wolf was already dead by the time his son was finally granted a ten-day furlough to visit his family in their village. To this day, my grandfather grieves for his father and loves him deeply.

After the war was over, my grandparents and my father and uncle lived in Moscow with relatives while Leningrad was being rebuilt. They came back to Fifth Soviet in the late 1940s and continued to live there until 1963. Both my widowed great-grandmothers lived in the rooms with them. My grandfather’s mother died in 1953 of heart failure. In 1962, my father, twenty-six, met my mother, twenty-two, and married her two months later (despite the inconvenience of a prior wedding engagement). My parents continued to live separately after their wedding because there was no room for my mother in my grandparents’ rooms.