Paullina Simons: The Summer Garden

“Shh … don’t …” She didn’t want Anthony to hear the soldier-speak, kept so carefully under wraps these days.

“Maybe you’re not such a good capitalist after all, Tania.”

“She has no money. She doesn’t make a hundred dollars a day like that Jimmy does off you. But you know what she did offer us? To move in with her. She has two extra bedrooms. We could have them free of charge and just pay her for the water and electric.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch.”

“There’s a catch. I hear it in your voice.”

“Nothing.” She twittered her thumbs. “She just said that when her husband came back, we’d have to go.”

Across the table, Alexander stared at Tatiana inscrutably, then got up and took his own plate to the sink.

Tatiana’s hands trembled as she washed the dishes. She didn’t want to make him upset. No, perhaps that was not quite true. Perhaps she wanted to make him something. He was so exceedingly polite, so exceptionally courteous! When she asked him for help, he was right there. He carried the cursed potatoes, he took the trash to the dump. But his mind was not on the potatoes, on the trash. When he sat and smoked and watched the water, Tatiana didn’t know where he was. When he went outside at three in the morning and convulsed on the bench, Tatiana wished she didn’t know where he was. Where was she within him? She didn’t want to know.

When she was done clearing up, she came outside to sit on the gravel by his feet. She felt him looking at her. She looked up. “Tania …” Alexander whispered. But Anthony saw his mother on the ground and instantly planted himself on her lap, displaying for her the four beetles he had found, two of them fighting stag beetles. When she glanced up at Alexander, he wasn’t looking at her anymore.

After Anthony was asleep and they were in their twin bed, she whispered, “So do you want to—move in with Nellie?” The bed was so narrow, they could sleep only on their sides. On his back Alexander took up the whole mattress.

“Move in until her husband comes back and she kicks us out because she might actually want some privacy with the man who’s back from war?” Alexander said.

“Are you … angry?” she asked, as in, please be angry.

“Of course not.”

“We’ll have more privacy at her house. She’s got two rooms for us. Better than the one here.”

“Really? Better?” Alexander said. “Here we’re by the sea. I get to sit and smoke and look at the bay. Nellie’s on Eastern Road, where we’ll just be smelling the salt and the fish. And Mrs. Brewster is deaf. Do you think Nellie is deaf? Having Nellie at our bedroom door with her young hearing and her five years without a husband, do you think that would spell more privacy for us? Although,” he said, “do you think there could be less privacy?”

Yes, Tatiana wanted to say. Yes. In my communal apartment in Leningrad, where I lived in two rooms with Babushka, Deda, Mama, Papa, my sister, Dasha—remember her?—with my brother, Pasha—remember him? Where the toilet down the hall through the kitchen near the stairs never flushed properly and was never cleaned, and was shared by nine other apartment dwellers. Where there was no hot water for four baths a day, and no gas stove for four lobsters. Where I slept in the same bed with my sister until I was seventeen and she was twenty-four, until the night you took us to the Road of Life. Tatiana barely suppressed her agonized groan.

She could not—would not—she refused to think of Leningrad.

The other way was better. Yes, the other way—without ever speaking.

This bloodletting went on every night. During the day they kept busy, just how they liked it, just how they needed it. Not so long ago Alexander and Tatiana had found each other in another country and then somehow they lived through the war and made it to lupine Deer Isle, neither of them having any idea how, but for three o’clock in the morning, when Anthony woke up and screamed as if he were being cut open, and Alexander convulsed on the bench, and Tatiana thrashed to forget—and then they knew how.

Tainted with the Gulag

He had such an unfailing way with her. “Would you like some more?” he would say, lifting the pitcher of lemonade.

“Yes, please.”

“Would you like to take a walk after dinner? I heard they’re selling something called Italian ices by the bay.”

“Yes, that would be nice.”

“Ant, what do you think?”

“Let’s go. Let’s go now.”

“Well, wait a second, son. Your mother and I have to finish up.” So formal. Mother .

He opened doors for her, he got jars and cans for her off the high shelves in the kitchen. It was so handy him being tall; he was like a step stool.

And she? She did what she always did—for him first. She cooked for him, brought the food to his plate and served him. She poured his drink. She set and cleared his table. She washed his clothes, she folded them. She made their little beds and put clean sheets on them. She made him lunch for the boat, and extra for Jimmy too, because one-handed Jimmy didn’t have a woman to make him a sandwich. She shaved her legs for him, and bathed every day for him, and put satin ribbons in her hair for him.

“Is there anything else you would like?” she asked him. Can I get you something? Would you like another beer? Would you like the first section of the newspaper or the second? Would you like to go swimming? Perhaps raspberry picking? Are you cold? Are you tired? Have you had enough, Alexander? Have—you—had—enough?

“Yes, thank you.”

Or …

“No, I’ll have some more, thanks.”

So courteous. So polite. Straight from the Edith Wharton novels Tania had read during the time of his absence from her life. The Age of Innocence or The House of Mirth (ironic).

There were times when Alexander wasn’t unfailingly polite.

Like one particular afternoon when there was no wind and Jimmy was hung over—or was it when Jimmy was hung over and there was no wind? In any case, Alexander had returned early when she wasn’t expecting him and came looking for her when she was still in Nellie’s potato fields. Anthony was inside the house, having milk with Nellie. Tatiana, her hands grimy from the earth, her face flushed, her hair in tangles, stood up in the field to greet him in her sleeveless chintz summer dress, tight in the torso, slim down the hips, open down the neckline. “Hey,” she said with happy surprise. “What are you doing back so early?”

He didn’t speak. He kissed her, and this time it wasn’t calm and it wasn’t without ardor. Tatiana didn’t even have a chance to raise her hands in surrender. He took her deep in the fields, on the ground, covered in potato leaves, the dress becoming as grimy as her hands. The only foreplay was his yanking the dress off her shoulders to bare her breasts to his massive hands and pulling the dress up over her hips.

“Look what you did,” she whispered afterward.

“You look like a peasant milkmaid in that dress.”

“Dress is ruined now.”

“We’ll wash it.” He was still panting but already distant.

Tatiana leaned to him, murmuring softly, looking into his face, trying to catch his eye, hoping for intimacy. “Does the captain like his wife to look like a peasant milkmaid?”

“Well, obviously.” But the captain was already getting up, straightening himself out, giving her his hand to help her off the ground.

Since Alexander came back, Tatiana had become fixated on his hands, and on her own by contrast. His hands were like the platter on which he carried his life. They were large and broad, dark and square, with heavy palms and heavy thumbs, but with long thick flexible fingers—as if he could play the piano as well as haul lobster trawls. They were knuckled and veined, and the palms were calloused. Everything was calloused, even the fingertips, roughened by carrying heavy weapons over thousands of miles, hardened by fighting, burning, logging, burying men. His hands reflected all manner of eternal struggles. You didn’t need to be a soothsayer, or a psychic or a palmreader, you needed not a single glance at the lines in the palms but just one cursory look at the hands and you knew instantly: the man they belonged to had done everything—and was capable of anything.