Paullina Simons - The Summer Garden

The men sustained some electrical shock damage to their bodies—but continued to climb over to get to the women on the other side.

Tatiana asked why the guards didn’t increase the electrical charge at the top of the barrier to instantly kill the man who touched it. Alexander replied they had to preserve their work force. They would have no one left to fill the logging quotas if they made the charge lethal. Also it took too much electricity. The guards had to light their own barracks. “At the commandant’s house, Karolich had to eat and sleep in comfort, didn’t he, Tatia?”

“He did, Shura. Not much comfort for him now.”

“The motherfucking bastard.”

Tatiana’s hand was on his heart. Her face was pressed into the muscles in his chest, into his Berlin shrapnel scar that was always under her mouth when she lay in his arms.

Alexander was told to build the wall to twelve feet.

One of his helpers said, “They were ready to maim you for a seven-foot wall. For a twelve-foot wall, they’ll kill you for sure.”

“Let them try,” said Alexander, never walking anywhere without the chain wrapped around his right hand. For extra protection he had attached nails to it in the metal shop. He had to use it again—twice.

The wall grew to twelve feet. And still the men climbed over. The electrical wire ran along the top. And still they climbed over. The barbed wire ran along the electrical wire. And still they climbed over.

Venereal diseases, fatal miscarriages, but worse, continuing pregnancies—the most incongruous thing of all—were making it impossible to run the prison. Finally the women were all put into trucks and carted a hundred kilometers east to the tungsten mines. Alexander found out there was a collapse of the mine during one of the explosions and all the women died.

The men stopped climbing over and began to get sick, to attempt suicidal escapes, to hang themselves with sheets, to fall down mine shafts, to cut each other’s throats in petty arguments. The production quotas were still going unfilled. The guards ordered Alexander to knock down the wall and start digging more mass graves.

He stopped speaking. Tatiana lay heavily by his side. She felt suddenly like she was two hundred pounds, not one hundred.

“During the years I’d been away from you, I used to dream of touching you,” Alexander said to Tatiana. “Your comfort is what I imagined. But during this period, all I saw was women being brutalized, and you, instead of staying sacred, diminished, and my thoughts of you became torture. You know how it goes—I lived oxen, so I dreamed oxen. And then you vanished altogether.” He paused, and nodded in the dark. “And that’s what I mean by tainted. And suddenly—after you fled me even in memories—I saw you in the woods, a vision of a phantom very young you. It wasn’t a dream. I saw you! Real like you are now. You were laughing, skipping, seraphic as always, except you had never sat on our bench in Leningrad, you had never worn your white dress the day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. I had patrolled somewhere else, or you had gone somewhere else, and I had no one to cross the street for. And so in these woods, you were looking at me as if you had never known me, as if you had never loved me.” He broke off. “It was then that I began to attempt my own suicidal escapes, all seventeen of them. It was those eyes of yours that pursued me through Sachsenhausen,” said Alexander in a dead voice. “I may have felt nothing, but I could not live, could not last a minute on this earth believing you had felt nothing, too. Your meaningless eyes were the death of me.”

Tatiana was crying. “Oh, God … Shura, husband …” she whispered, her arms, her legs going around him. She climbed on top of him in the sleeping bag. She couldn’t hold him close enough to herself. “It was just a vile dream. My eyes are never meaningless.”

He stared at her, near her face. “Then why do you keep looking at me as if you’re missing something, Tania?”

She couldn’t return his pained gaze, even in the black of night. Taking a breath, she said, “I’m not missing anything. I’m just looking for you. Looking for you in the taiga woods. Looking for the Alexander I left behind a million miles away on the pine needle banks of Lazarevo, or in the critical care tent in Morozovo. That’s what I was thinking of at Mercy Hospital.”

That wasn’t the only thing she had been thinking at Mercy Hospital. Having called Esther that morning, she had found out just how determined, how grave, and how unrelenting Sam Gulotta remained. Her good sense was devoured by fear and she went missing and forgot to keep time. Tonight she swallowed and went on. “What could I do then that I can’t seem to do now? That’s what I think about. What can I do to bring you back? What can I do to make you happy? What can I do to help you? Where are you?”

Alexander fell quiet. He pulled her off him. She lay behind him, kissing him softly on a ridged scar over his spine, hearing his heart thunder out through his shoulder blades.

After a while he spoke. “You want to know where I was in Maine?”

“No.”

“I was trying to find that man.”

“Did you,” asked Tatiana in a faltering voice, putting her forehead on his back, “find him?”

“Obviously not,” Alexander replied. “I felt I had fucked it up, that it was all a bust. I didn’t know who I was. I too didn’t recognize the man who came back with you from Berlin. You had wanted the boy you met in 1941, the boy you loved, the boy you married. I couldn’t find him—but I couldn’t find you either behind your searching eyes. I saw other things there—worry for me, concern. The eyes of compassion you had for Colonel Moore, it’s true, you had in spades for me. But as you know, I didn’t want your pity eyes, your pity hands. The wall between us seemed a hundred feet, not twelve. I couldn’t take it. You had done so nicely for yourself while I had been gone and now I was damned and ruining it. The colonel and me, we both needed to be in that military hospital. He went, but there was no place for me. No place for me there, and not with you either. There was no place for me anywhere in this world,” said Alexander.

He had taken his weapons with him, and left her his money. Tatiana was breathing hard into her hands, trying to keep from completely breaking down. “I can’t believe you’re telling me this,” she said. “I can’t believe you’re saying these things out loud to me. I don’t deserve them.”

“I know ,” Alexander said. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. Our son needed you. He has his whole life to set right. I thought you could still help him, save him .”

“Oh my God—but what about you?” Tatiana asked. “Shura, you desperately needed my help.” And still do, she wanted to add. She tried to wipe her face, but it was useless.

He turned to her, lay on his side in front of her. “I know.” He touched her eyes, her lips, her heart. “That’s why I came back,” whispered Alexander, his palm fanning her face. “Because I wanted to be saved, Tatiasha.”

Tatiana slept terribly, like she was being repeatedly hit in the throat with the butt of his rifle. They were hoping time would help them. A month here, a month there, a month without mosquitoes and snow, time was like fresh dirt on the shallow graves. Pretty soon the sound of the cannons might mute, the rocket launchers might stop whistling off the ground. Not yet though. On the run for the rest of our short, doomed lives. In other words, prison.

I wanted to be saved, Tatiasha.

“Nearer to thee,” he whispered to her last night before he fell asleep. “Even though it be a cross/that raiseth me.”