Paullina Simons - The Summer Garden

In New Orleans, on stinging nostalgic impulse, he had bought her a dress he saw in a shop window, an ivory frothy, thin-netted and muslin dress with a slight swing skirt and layers of stiff silk and lace. It was pretty, but regretfully too big for her: she was swimming in muslin snow. The shop didn’t have a smaller size. “Your wife is very petite, sir,” said the corpulent sales woman with a frowning, disapproving glare—either disapproving of Tania for being petite or disapproving of a man Alexander’s size for marrying someone who was. They bought the dress anyway, judgmental beefy sales lady notwithstanding, and that night in their seedy and stifling hotel room, with Anthony in their bed and the fan whooshing the heat around, Alexander silently measured out her smallness—consoling himself with math instead of love, with circumference instead of circumfusion. Her ankles six inches around. Her calves, eleven . The tops of her very bare thighs below the sulcus, eighteen and a half . The tape measure dropped, his hands ringed her thigh, the entire length of his left index finger burning. Her hips, the tape clasped just above the blonde down, thirty-two . Her waist, twenty-one . The tape measure dropped, his hands ringed her waist. Anthony is in the bed, she whispered, Anthony is unsettled.

Her chest, thirty-six . With the nipples erect, thirty-six and a half . Tape measure dropped for good. Anthony is stirring, Shura, please , and the room is tiny and broiling, and just outside the open windows, the sailors below will hear. But math did not suffice that time. Gasping kneeling piety in the corner of the creaking floor just feet away from sleeping Anthony and the laughing sailors barely sufficed.

Now, on the road, he is thirsty, hungry, profoundly aroused; he glances back to see what Anthony is doing, to see if the boy is busy with his bugs, too busy with his bugs to see his father grope blindly for his mother. But Anthony is on the seat behind her, watching him.

“What’ya thinkin’ about, Dad?”

“Oh, you know your dad. A little of this, a little of that.” His voice creaks, too.

Soon they’ll leave western Texas, be in New Mexico. He casts another long look at her clavicle bones, slim shoulders, straight upper arms, eight , at her graceful neck, eleven , her white throat that needs his lips on it. His eyes drift down to her bare feet under her thin cotton skirt; white and delicate as her hands; her feet six , her hands five, less by three than his own—but it’s her feet he’s stuck on; why?—and suddenly he opens his mouth to let out a shallow anguished breath of a deeply unwanted memory. No, no, not that. Please. His head shudders. No. Feet—dirty, large, blacknailed, bruised, lying motionless underneath a raggy old brown skirt attached to the dead body of a gangraped woman he found in the laundry room. It is Alexander’s job to drag her by the feet to the graves he’s just dug for her and the three others who died that day.

He fumbles around for his cigarettes. Tatiana pulls one out, hands it to him with a lighter. Unsteadily he lights up, pulling up the woman’s skirt to cover her face so that earth doesn’t fall on it when he shovels the dirt over her small part of the mass grave. Under her skirt the woman is so viciously mutilated that Alexander cannot help it, he begins to retch.

Then. Now.

He puts his hand over his mouth as the cigarette burns, and inhales quickly.

“Are you okay, Captain?”

There is nothing he can say. He usually remembers that woman at the worst, most inopportune moments.

Eventually his mouth stops the involuntary reflex. Then. Now. Eventually, he sees so much that he becomes dead to everything. He has inured himself, hardened himself so that there’s nothing that arouses a flicker of feeling inside Alexander. He finally speaks as they cross the state line. “Have a joke for me, Tania?” he says. “I could use a joke.”

“Hmm.” She thinks, looks at him, looks to see where Anthony is. He’s far in the back. “Okay, what about this.” With a short cough, she leans into Alexander and lowers her voice. “A man and his young girlfriend are driving in the car. The man has never seen his girl naked. She thinks he is driving too slow, so they decide to play a game. For every five miles he goes above fifty, she will take off a piece of her clothing. In no time at all, he is flying and she is naked. The man gets so excited that he loses control of the car. It veers off the road and hits a tree. She is unharmed but he is stuck in the car and can’t get out. ‘Go back on the road and get help,’ he tells her. ‘But I’m naked,’ she says. He rummages around and pulls off his shoe. ‘Here, just put this between your legs to cover yourself.’ She does as she is told and runs out to the road. A truck driver, seeing a naked crying woman, stops. ‘Help me, help me,’ she sobs. ‘My boyfriend is stuck and I can’t get him out.’ The truck driver says, ‘Miss, if he’s that far in, I’m afraid he’s a goner.’”

Alexander laughs in spite of himself.

In the afternoon after lunch, Tatiana manages to put Anthony down for an unprecedented godsent nap, and in the canopied seclusion of the trees at the empty rest area grounds, Alexander sets Tatiana down on the picnic bench, pulls high her watercolor skirt, kneels between her legs in the glorious daylight and lowers his head to her fragile and perfect perianth, his palms up, under her. She has given him this, like manna from heaven. O Lord, thank you.

He is driving through the prairies and he is thirsty. Tania and Ant are playing road games, trying to guess the color of the next car that passes them. Alexander declines to participate, saying he doesn’t want to play any game where Tatiana always wins.

It’s very hot in the camper. They’ve opened the top hatch and all the slotted windows, but it’s just dust and wind blowing at them at forty miles an hour. Her hair is getting tangled. She is flushed; a few miles back she had taken off her blouse and now sits in the slightly damp see-through white vest that cannot constrain her. Being around her all day and night like this is getting to be no good for him. He is becoming slightly crazed by her. All he wants is more. But unlike Lazarevo, where his desire like a river flowed into the sea extempore, here the river is dammed by their seedling who sits awake from morning till night and plays road games.

Ant says a word, like “crab,” and she says one that follows into her head, like “grass.” Alexander doesn’t want to play that game either. Should they stop, have lunch? German dead crabgrass in the middle of the camp, in the middle of February. Beaten, lashed, blood oozing down his back, he is made to stand in the cold grass for six hours and what he thinks about for six hours is that he is thirsty.

He glances at her sitting serenely folded over. She catches him looking and says, “Thirsty?”

Does he nod? He doesn’t know. He knows that she gives him a drink.

Tank , says Anthony, continuing the game.

Commander, says his mother.

Alexander blinks. The camper lurches.

Shura, watch the road, or we’ll crash.

Did she just say that? He’s commanding his tank, and they’re in the middle of the Prussian fields, they’re almost in Poland. The Germans have mined the meadow in retreat, and one of the S-mines has just gone off, in full view of Alexander. It lifted up to his engineer’s lurching chest, paused as if to say, looky who’s here, and exploded. Ouspensky has dug the hole where the engineer fell, and they buried him in it—him and his backpack. Alexander never looks through the backpacks of the fallen, because the things they contain make it impossible for him either to walk away or to continue forward. As the soldier’s outer wear—his uniform, helmet, boots, weapon—contain the outer him, the backpacks contain the inner him. The backpacks contain the soldier’s soul.