Paullina Simons - The Summer Garden

“Sam.”

“And instead? During this unbelievably tense time—have you not been reading the papers?—his file, his OPEN file has traveled from my desk, up to the Secretary of State, across to Secretary of Defense, across to the Justice Department. He’s got J. Edgar Hoover himself looking for him! This Alexander Barrington, who was a major in the Red Army, whose father was a Communist—who let him in? You can’t be a commissioned officer in the Red Army without being a Soviet citizen and a member of the Communist Party. How did a person like that get a U.S. passport? Who approved that? Meanwhile, Interpol is looking for an Alexander Belov … they say he killed sixty-eight of their men while escaping from a military prison. And even HUAC got into this. Now you’ve got them on your back, too! They want to know, is he theirs or ours? Where is his allegiance—now, then, ever? Is he a loyalty risk? Who is this man? And no one can find him even to ask him a simple question—why?”

“Sam!”

“Oh, what have you done, Tatiana? What have you—”

She hung up the phone and sank to the ground. She didn’t know what to do. For the rest of the morning, she sat catatonically on the dewy grass in the fog of the San Francisco Bay while Anthony made friends and played on the swings.

What to do?

Alexander was the only one who could lead her out of this morass, but he would not run from anything. He was not on her side.

And yet he was the only one on her side.

Tatiana saw herself opening the windows on Ellis Island, the first morning she arrived on the boat, after the night her son was born. Not since then had she felt so abandoned and alone.

After extracting a solemn oath from Anthony not to tell his father where they had been, she spent two hours after they got back to Napa poring over the map of California, almost as if it were a map of Sweden and Finland that the Soviet soldier Alexander Belov once pored over, dreaming of escape.

She had to steel herself not to shake. That was the hardest thing. She felt so unsound.

The first thing Alexander said when he walked through the door was, “What happened to you? Jean told me you quit.”

She managed a nice pasty smile. “Oh, hi. Hungry? You must be. Change, and let’s go eat.” She grabbed Anthony.

“Tania! Did you quit?”

“I’ll tell you at dinner.” She was putting on her cardigan.

“What? Did someone offend you? Say something to you?” His fists clenched.

“No, no, shh, nothing like that.” She didn’t know how she was going to talk to him. When Anthony was with them, it was impossible to have a serious conversation about serious things. Her work was going to have to be quick and subtle. So it was over dinner and wine in the common dining room, at a withdrawn table in the corner, with Anthony coloring in his book, that she said, “Shura, I did quit. I want you to quit, too.”

He sat and considered her. His brow was furled.

“You’re working too hard,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Look at you. All day in the dank basement, working in cellars … what for?”

“I don’t understand the question. I have to work somewhere. We have to eat.”

Chewing her lip, Tatiana shook her head. “We still have money—some of it left over from your mother, some of it from nursing, and in Coconut Grove you made us thousands carousing with your boat women.”

“Mommy, what’s carousing?” said Anthony, looking up from his coloring.

“Yes, Mommy, what’s carousing?” said Alexander, smiling.

“My point is,” Tatiana went on, poker-faced, “that we don’t need you to break your back as if you’re in a Soviet labor camp.”

“Yes, and what about your dream of a winery in the valley? You don’t think that’s back-breaking work?”

“Yes …” she trailed off. What to say? It was just last week in Carmel that they’d had that wistful conversation. “Perhaps it’s too soon for that dream.” She looked deeply down into her plate.

“I thought you wanted to settle here?” Alexander said in confusion.

“As it turns out, less than I thought.” She coughed, stretching out her hand. He took it. “You’re away from us for twelve hours a day and when you come back you’re exhausted. I want you to play with Anthony.”

“I do play with him.”

She lowered her voice. “I want you to play with me, too.”

“Babe, if I play with you any more, my sword will fall off.”

“What sword, Dad?”

“Anthony, shh. Alexander, shh. Look, I don’t want you to fall asleep at nine in the evening. I want you to smoke and drink. I want you to read all the books and magazines you haven’t read, and listen to the radio, and play baseball and basketball and football. I want you to teach Anthony how to fish as you tell him your war stories.”

“Won’t be telling those any time soon.”

“I’ll cook for you. I’ll play dominoes with you.”

“Definitely no dominoes.”

“I’ll let you figure out how I always win.” A Sarah Bernhardt-worthy performance.

Shaking his head, he said slowly, “Maybe poker.”

“Absolutely. Cheating poker then.”

Rueful Russian Lazarevo smiles passed their faces.

“I’ll take care of you,” she whispered, the hand he wasn’t holding shaking under the table.

“For God’s sake, Tania … I’m a man. I can’t not work.”

“You’ve never stopped your whole life. Come on. Stop running with me.” The irony in that made her tremble and she hoped he wouldn’t notice. “Let me take care of you,” Tatiana said hoarsely, “like you know I ache to. Let me do for you. Like I’m your nurse at the Morozovo critical care ward. Please.” Tears came to her eyes. She said quickly, “When there’s no more money, you can work again. But for now … let’s leave here. I know just the place.” Her smile was so pathetic. “ Out of my stony griefs, Bethel I’ll raise,” she whispered.

Alexander was silently contemplating her, puzzled again, troubled again.

“I honestly don’t understand,” he said. “I thought you liked it here.”

“I like you more.”

Tilting at Windmills

They said farewell to the bittersweet sickly heady scentof ripened effervescent grapes, got into their Nomad and left. Tatiana navigated them south and east of Vianza to lose themselves in the flatness of a thousand square miles of the California Delta, amid the islands that were so close to sea level, some would get flooded every time it rained. A hundred miles from the valley of the wine, at the mouth of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, they found tiny Bethel Island and that’s where they stopped.

Bethel Island. Surrounded by river channels, levees, and antediluvian marsh. Nothing moved in any direction except the herons. The canals were made of glass. The cold November air was still as if it were about to storm.

It didn’t even seem like part of the same country, yet unmistakably was America. On Dutch Slough they rented a wood shack with a long L-shaped dock that jutted out onto the canal. The house had what they needed. A room of their own, and a bathroom. Across the canal was nothing but plains of fields and the horizon.

“Looks like Holland,” Alexander said as they unpacked.

“Would you like to go to Holland someday?” she asked, busy nesting.

“I’m never under any circumstances leaving America. How did you find this place?”

“Looked at a map.”

“So now you’re a cartographer, too?” Alexander grinned. “Would you like a glass of wine, my little geologist, capitalist, cartographer?” He had brought a case of bubbly with them.