Paullina Simons: Tatiana and Alexander

Harold said, “No, Alexander. We are not coming back. We are going to make the Soviet Union our permanent home. There is no place for us in America.”

Alexander wanted to say that there had been a place for him. Alexander had a place in America. Teddy and Belinda had been his friends since they were all three. Barrington was a tiny, white-shingled, black-shuttered town with three steepled churches and a short main street that ran four blocks from one end of town to the other. In the woods near Barrington, Alexander had had a happy childhood. But he knew his father didn’t want to hear it, so he said nothing.

“Alexander, your mother and I, we are absolutely sure this is the right thing for our family. For the first time in our lives, we are finally able to do what we believe in. We are no longer paying lip service to the communist ideals. It’s easy to propound change while living in absolute comfort, isn’t it? Well, now we are going to live what we believe. You know it’s what I fought for my whole adult life. You’ve seen me. And your mother, too.”

Alexander nodded. He had seen them. His father and mother arrested for their principles. Visiting his father in jail. Being unwelcome around Barrington. Being laughed at in school. Constantly getting into fights for his father’s principles. He had seen his mother stand by his father’s side, picketing and protesting with him. The three of them had gone to Washington D.C. together to parade communist pride in front of the White House. They were arrested there, too. Alexander had spent a night in a juvenile detention center when he was seven. But on the plus side, he was the only boy in Barrington who had been to the White House.

He had thought all that was sacrifice enough. And then he had thought that breaking with their family and giving up the house that had been the Barrington homestead for eight generations was sacrifice enough. He thought that living in small rented rooms in busy and dusty Boston while disseminating the socialist word was sacrifice enough.

Apparently not.

Frankly, Alexander was surprised by the move to the Soviet Union, and not happily surprised. But his father believed. His father thought the Soviet Union was the place where they would finally belong, where Alexander would not be laughed at, where they would be welcomed and admired instead of shunned and ridiculed. The place where they could build their life up from “meaningless” and make it “meaningful.” Power was to the toiling man in the new Russia, and soon the toiling man would be king. His father’s belief was enough for Alexander.

His mother pressed her painted red mouth on Alexander’s forehead, leaving a bright greasy pucker, which she then rubbed off—not well. “You know, don’t you, darling, that your father wants you to learn the right way, to grow up the right way?”

A little petulantly, Alexander said, “This is really not about me , Mom—”

“No.” Harold’s voice was adamant. His hand never left Alexander’s shoulder. “This is all about you, Alexander. You’re only eleven now, but soon you will become a man. And since you have only one life, you can be only one man. I’m going to the Soviet Union to make you into the man you need to be. You , son, are my only legacy to this world.”

“There are plenty of men in America, too, Dad,” Alexander pointed out. “Herbert Hoover. Woodrow Wilson. Calvin Coolidge.”

“Yes, but not good men. America can produce greedy and selfish men, prideful and vengeful men. That’s not the man I want you to be.”

“Alexander,” said his mother. “We want you to have advantages of character that people in America just don’t have.”

“That’s right,” said Harold. “America makes men soft.”

Alexander stepped back from his parents, never taking his eyes off his solemn reflection. That’s what he had been looking at before they came in. Himself. He was looking at his face and wondering, when I grow up, what kind of a man am I going to be ? Saluting his father, he said, “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll make you proud. I’ll be ungreedy and unselfish, unprideful and unvengeful. I’ll be as hard a man as they come. Let’s go. I’m ready.”

“I don’t want you to be a hard man, Alexander. I want you to be a good man.” Harold paused. “A better man than me.”

As they were walking out, Alexander turned around and caught himself in the mirror one last time. I don’t want to forget this boy, he thought, in case I ever need to come back to him.

Stockholm, May 1943

I am on a stake, thought eighteen-year-old Tatiana, waking up one cold summer morning. I cannot live like this anymore. She got up from the bed, washed, brushed her hair, collected her books and her few clothes, and then left the hotel room as clean as if she had not been in it for over two months. The white curtains blowing a breeze into the room were unrelenting.

Inside herself was unrelenting.

Over the desk there was an oval mirror. Before Tatiana tied up her hair she stared at her face. What stared back at her was a face she no longer recognized. Gone was the round baby shape; a gaunt oval remained over her drawn cheekbones and her high forehead and her squared jaw and her clenched lips. If she had dimples still, they did not show; it had been a long time since her mouth bared teeth or dimples. The scar on her cheek from the piece of the broken windshield had healed and was fading into a thin pink line. The freckles were fading too, but it was the eyes Tatiana recognized least of all. Her once twinkling green eyes set deep into the pale features looked as if they were the only ghastly crystal barriers between strangers and her soul. She couldn’t lift them to anyone. She could not lift them to herself. One look into the green sea, and it was clear what raged on behind the frail façade.

Tatiana brushed her shoulder blade-length platinum hair. She didn’t hate her hair anymore.

How could she, for Alexander had loved it so much.

She would not think of it. She wanted to cut it all off, shear herself like a lamb before the slaughter, she wanted to cut her hair and take the whites out of her eyes and the teeth out of her mouth and tear the arteries out of her throat.

Tying the hair up in a bun on top of her head, Tatiana put a kerchief over it, to attract as little attention as possible, though in Sweden—a country full of blonde girls—it was easy to become lost in the crowd.

Certainly she had become that.

Tatiana knew it was time to go. But she could find nothing inside to propel her forward. She had the baby inside her, but it was as easy to have a baby in Sweden as it was in America. Easier. She could stay. She wouldn’t have to make her way across an unfamiliar country, get a passage on a freighter headed for Britain and then travel across the ocean to the United States in the middle of a world war. The Germans were blowing up the northern waters on a daily basis, their torpedoes detonating the Allied submarines and the blockade ships into high flame balls encircled by black smoke, incongruous against the serene seas of Bothnia and the Baltic, of the Arctic and the Atlantic. Staying safe in Stockholm required nothing more of her than what she had been doing.

What had she been doing?

She’d been seeing Alexander everywhere.

Everywhere she walked, everywhere she sat, she would turn her head to the right, and there he would be, tall in his officer’s uniform, rifle slung on his shoulder, looking at her and smiling. She would reach out and touch thin air, touch the white pillow on which she saw his face. She would turn to him and break the bread for him and sit on the bench and watch him making his slow sure way to her, crossing the street for her. She would walk after Swedish men during the day, men whose backs were broad, whose stride was long, she would stare impolitely into the faces of strangers because it was Alexander’s face she saw etched there. And then she would blink, blink again and he would be gone. And she would be gone, too. She would lower her gaze, and walk on.