Paullina Simons - The Summer Garden

Tatiana nodded in her approval of Alexander. “Who said that? You know what the Navajos say, who live and walk and die in these parts?” She paused trying to remember. “ With beauty in front of me, I walk ,” she said, stretching out her arms. “ With beauty behind me, I walk. With beauty below me, I walk. ” Not a sound came from the Canyon below. “ With beauty above me, I walk. ” She spoke quietly. “ It is finished in beauty. ” She raised her head. “ It is finished in beauty. ”

“Hmm,” said Alexander, taking one long inhale of his cigarette, eternally in his mouth. “Substitute what you most believe in for the word beauty,” he said, “and then you’ve really got something.”

In the eerily soundless night at the Yavapai campsite, Anthony was restlessly asleep in one of the two tents, while they kept listening to his stirrings and whimperings, waiting for him to quieten down, sitting huddled under one blanket in front of the fire, a mile from the black maw of the Canyon. They were shivering, their icy demons around the worsted wool.

They didn’t speak. Finally they lay down in front of the fire, face to face. Alexander was holding his breath and then breathing out in one hard lump.

He didn’t say anything at first. He didn’t want to talk to her about things that could not be changed. And yet, pain he could not forget kept creeping in and prickling his heart in a thousand different ways. He imagined other men touching her when he was dead. Other men near what he was near, and her looking up at them, taking their hands to lead them into rooms where she was widowed. Alexander didn’t want the truth if it wasn’t what he wanted to hear; he didn’t know how he would bear the unwelcome truth, and he hadn’t asked her in all the time he’d been back, but here they were, lying together at the Grand Canyon, which seemed like a rightful place for mystical confessions.

He took a breath. “Did you love to go dancing?” he asked.

“What?”

So she wasn’t answering. He fell silent. “When I was in Colditz, that impenetrable fortress, whittling away my life, I wanted to know this.”

“Looks like you’re still there, Shura.”

“No,” he said. “I’m in New York, a fly on the wall, trying to see you without me.”

“But I’m here,” she whispered.

“Yes, but what were you like when you were there ? Were you gay?” Alexander’s voice was so sad. “I know you didn’t forget us, but did you want to, so you could be happy again like you once were, dance without pain?” He swallowed. “So you could … love again? Is that what you were thinking sitting on the planks at Mercy Hospital? Wanting to be happy again, wishing you were back there, in New York, reciting Emily Brontë to yourself? Sweet love of youth, forgive if I forget thee …”

He was leading her to temptation of clarity. But he could see she didn’t want clarity. She wanted a jumble that she could deny.

“Okay, Shura, if we’re talking like this, having these things out, then tell me what you meant when you said I was tainted with the Gulag. Tell me what happened to you.”

“No. I—forget it. I was—”

“Tell me what happened to you when you went missing for four days in Deer Isle.”

“It’s getting longer and longer. It was barely three days. First tell me what you were thinking at Mercy Hospital.”

“Okay, fine, let’s not talk about it.”

He pressed his demanding fingers into her back. He put his hands under her cardigan, under her blouse, into her bare shoulders.

He turned her on her back and kneeled astride her, the fire, the maw behind them. No comfort, no peace, he guessed with a sigh, even in the temples of the Grand Canyon.

Anthony’s whimperings turned into full scale miseries. “Mama, Mama!” Tatiana had to rush to him. He calmed down, but she stayed in his tent. Eventually, Alexander crawled in and fit in sideways behind her in the little tent on the hard ground.

“It’s just a stage, Shura,” said Tatiana, as if trying to assuage him. “It too will pass.” She paused. “Like everything.”

Alexander’s impatience and frustration also burned his throat. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he dreams about.”

Tatiana stiffened in his arms.

“Ah!” Alexander raised his head to stare at her in the dark. He could barely see the contours of her face, as the fire diffused muted light through the slightly raised flaps. “You know !”

Tatiana sounded pained when she said yes. Her head remained down. Her eyes were closed.

“All this time you knew?”

She shrugged carefully. “I didn’t want to upset you.”

After a stretch of conflicted silence, Alexander spoke. “I know you think, Tatiana,” he said, “that everything will turn out well, but you’ll see—it won’t. He’s never going to get over the fact that you left him.”

“Don’t say that! He will. He’s just a small boy.”

Alexander nodded, but not in agreement. “Mark my words,” he said. “He won’t.”

“So what are you saying?” she said, upset. “That I shouldn’t have gone? I found you, didn’t I? This conversation is just ridiculous!”

“Yes,” he whispered. “But tell me, if you hadn’t found me, what would you have done? Returned to New York and married Edward Ludlow?” He was indifferent to her stiffness and her tutting. “Anthony for one, rightly or wrongly, thinks that you would have never come back. That you’d still be looking for me in the taiga woods.”

“No, he doesn’t!” Turning sharply to him, Tatiana repeated, “No. He doesn’t.”

“Did you listen to his dream? His mother had a choice. When she left him, she knew there was a very good chance she was leaving him for good. She knew it—and still, she left him. That is his dream. That is what he knows.”

“Alexander! Are you being deliberately cruel? Stop!”

“I’m not being cruel. I just want you to stop pretending that’s not what he’s going through. That it’s just a small thing. You are the big believer in consequences, as you keep telling me. So when I ask you if he’s going to get better, don’t pretend to me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“So why ask me ? Obviously you have all the answers.”

“Stop it with the snide.” Alexander took a breath. “Do you know what’s interesting?”

“No. Shh.”

“I have nightmares that I’m in Kolyma,” Alexander said dully. “I’m sharing a cot, a small dirty cot with Ouspensky. We’re still shackled together, huddling under a blanket. It’s viciously cold. Pasha is long gone.” Alexander swallowed past the stones in his throat. “I open my eyes and realize that all this, Deer Isle, Coconut Grove, America, had been the actual dream, just like I feared. This is just another trick the mind plays in the souls of the insane. I jump out of bed and run out of the barracks, dragging Ouspensky’s rotting corpse behind me into the frozen tundra, and Karolich runs after me, chasing me with his weapon. After he catches me—and he always catches me—he knocks me in the throat with the butt of his rifle. ‘Get back to the barracks, Belov,’ he says. ‘It’s another twenty-five years for you. Chained to a dead man.’ When I get out of bed in the night, I can’t breathe, like I’ve just been jabbed in the throat.”

“Alexander,” Tatiana said inaudibly, pushing him away with shaking hands. “I begged you, begged you! I don’t want to hear this!”

“Anthony dreams of you gone. I dream of you gone. It’s so visceral, every blood vessel in my body feels it. How can I help him when I can’t even help myself?”