Paullina Simons - Tatiana and Alexander

His mother brightened a bit under Svetlana’s casual attention but soon went back to drinking in the afternoons.

Alexander spent more and more of his days at the library. When she walked home with him, Svetlana would offer him a cigarette, which he stopped refusing, or some vodka, which he continued to refuse. The vodka he could take or leave. The cigarettes he thought he could take or leave too, but he had gradually begun to look forward to their bitter taste in his mouth. The vodka altered him in ways he did not like, but the cigarettes provided a calming crutch to his adolescent frenzy.

One afternoon they had come home earlier than usual to find his mother in a stupor in her bedroom. They went to his room to sit down for a second, before Svetlana had to go back downstairs. She offered Alexander another cigarette, and as she did so, she moved closer to him on the couch. He studied her for a moment, wondering if he was misreading her intentions, and then she took the cigarette out of her mouth and put it into his, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t bite.”

So he was not misreading her intentions.

He was sixteen and he was ready.

Her lips moved to his mouth. “Are you afraid?” she said.

“I’m not,” he said, throwing the cigarette and the lighter on the floor. “But you should be.”

They spent two hours together on the couch, and afterward Svetlana moved from the room and down the hall with the shaken walk of someone who had come into the battle thinking it was going to be an easy conquest and was now stumbling away having lost all her weapons.

Stumbling away past Harold , who was coming home from work, and who passed Svetlana in the hall with a nod and a “You don’t want to stay for dinner?”

“There is no dinner,” Svetlana replied weakly. “Your wife is still asleep.”

Alexander closed his own door and smiled.

Harold cooked dinner for himself and Alexander, who spent the rest of the evening holed up in his room pretending to read, but really just waiting for tomorrow.

Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.

Another afternoon of Svetlana, and another, and another.

For a month in the summer she and Alexander met in the late afternoons.

He enjoyed Svetlana. She never failed to tell him exactly what he needed to do to bring her pleasure, and he never failed to do exactly as he was told. Everything he learned about patience and perseverance, he learned from her. Combined with his own natural tendency to stay until the job was done, the result was that Svetlana left work earlier and earlier. He was flattered. His summer flew by.

On the weekends when Svetlana came over with her husband to visit the Barringtons, and she and Alexander barely acknowledged their intimacy, he found the sexual tension to be almost an end in itself.

Then Svetlana began to question the evenings he spent out.

Trouble was, now that Alexander had seen what was on the other side of the wall, all he wanted was to be on the other side of the wall, but not just with Svetlana.

He would have gladly continued with her and made time with girls his own age, but one Sunday evening as the five of them were sitting down to a dinner of potatoes and a little herring, Vladimir, Svetlana’s husband said to no one in particular, “My Svetochka, I think, needs to get a second job. The library has apparently reduced her hours to part-time.”

“But then when would she come and visit my wife?” said Harold, spooning another helping of potatoes onto his plate. They were all crowded in Alexander’s parents’ room around the small table.

“You come and visit me?” asked Jane of Svetlana. No one at the table responded for a moment. Then Jane nodded. “Of course you do. Every day. I see you in the afternoon.”

“You girls must have a great time around here,” said Vladimir. “She always comes home full of such good spirits. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was having a raucous affair.” He laughed in the tone of a man who thought the very idea of his wife’s having an affair was so absurd as to be almost delicious.

Svetlana herself threw her head back and laughed. Even Harold chuckled. Only Jane and Alexander sat stonily. For the rest of the dinner Jane said nothing to anyone but got drunker and drunker. Soon she was passed out on the couch while the rest of them cleaned up. The next day, when Alexander came home, he found his mother waiting for him in his room, somber and sober.

“I sent her away,” she said to him as he came in and threw down his bag of library books and jacket on the floor and stood in front of his mother with his arms folded.

“Okay,” he said.

“What are you doing, Alexander?” she asked quietly. He could tell she had been crying.

“I don’t know, Mom. What are you doing?”

“Alexander …”

“What are you concerned about?”

“That I’m not looking after my son,” she replied.

“You’re concerned about that?”

“I don’t want it to be too late,” she said in a small, remorseful voice. “It’s my fault, I know. Lately I haven’t been much of …” She broke off. “But whatever is happening in our family, she can’t come here anymore, not if she wants to keep this from her husband.”

“Like you’re keeping what you do in the afternoons from yours?”

“Like he cares,” retorted Jane.

“Like Vladimir cares,” retorted Alexander.

“Stop it!” she yelled. “What’s the point of this? To wake me up?”

“Mom, I know you will find this hard to believe, but it has nothing to do with you.”

“Alexander,” Jane said bitterly, “indeed I find that very hard to believe. You, the most beautiful boy in all of Russia, you’re telling me you could not have found a young school girl to parry with instead of a woman nearly my age who just happens to be my friend?”

“Who says I haven’t? And would a school girl have gotten you sober?”

“Oh, I see, so this does have something to do with me after all!” She didn’t get up off the couch while Alexander, with his arms crossed, stood in front of her. “Is this what you want to do with your life? Become a toy for bored older women?”

Alexander felt his temper rising. He grit his teeth. His mother was too upsetting for him.

“Answer me!” she said loudly. “Is this what you want?”

“What?” he said, just as loudly. “Does it seem to you as if I’ve got so many more attractive options? Which part do you find so repellent?”

Jane jumped up. “Don’t go forgetting yourself,” she said. “I am still your mother.”

“Then act like my mother!” he yelled.

“I’ve looked after you!”

“And look where it’s gotten all of us—all of us Barringtons making a life for ourselves in Leningrad while you spend half of Dad’s wages on vodka, and still that’s not enough. You’ve sold your jewelry, you’ve sold your books, your silks and your linens for vodka. What’s left, Mom? What else have you got left to sell?”

For the first time in her life, Jane raised her hand and slapped Alexander. He deserved it and knew it, but couldn’t keep himself from saying it.

“Mom, you want to offer me a solution, offer me a solution. You want to tell me what to do—after months of not speaking to me—forget it. I will not listen. You’re going to have to do better.” He paused. “Stop drinking.”

“I’m sober now.”

“Then let’s talk again tomorrow.”

But tomorrow she was drunk.

School started. Alexander busied himself with getting to know a girl named Nadia. One afternoon, Svetlana met him at the school doors. He was laughing with Nadia. Excusing himself, Alexander walked down the block with Svetlana.