Paullina Simons: Tatiana and Alexander

Tatiana was silent.

The first time she laid eyes on him she was sitting on a bench, eating ice cream.

“Go forward.”

“I don’t have it in me.”

He nodded. “You have it. It’s just covered up. For you it’s winter.” He smiled. “Don’t worry. Summer’s here. The ice will melt.”

Tatiana struggled up from the bench. Walking away, she said in Russian, “It’s not the ice anymore, my seagoing philosopher. It’s the pyre.”

BOOK ONE

The Second America

… Hold your head up all the more

This tide

And every tide

Because he was the son you bore

And gave to that wind blowing and that tide

Rudyard Kipling

CHAPTER ONE

In Morozovo Hospital, March 13, 1943

IN THE DARK EVENING, in a small fishing village that had been turned into Red Army headquarters for the Neva operation of the Leningrad front, a wounded man lay in a military hospital waiting for death.

For a long time he lay with his arms crossed, not moving until the lights went out and the critical ward grew tired and quiet.

Soon they would be coming for him.

He was a young man just twenty-three, ravaged by war. Months of lying wounded in bed threw a pallor on his face. He was unshaven, and his black hair was cropped close to his scalp. His eyes, the color of toffee, were blanks as he stared into the far distance. Alexander Belov looked grim but he was not a cruel man, and he looked resigned but he was not a cold man.

Months earlier on the ice during the Battle of Leningrad, Alexander had run out for his lieutenant Anatoly Marazov, who lay on the river Neva with a bullet in his throat. Alexander ran out to the hopeless Anatoly, and so did a doctor with no sense—an International Red Cross doctor from Boston named Matthew Sayers, who fell through the ice, and whom Alexander had to pull out and drag across the river to the armored truck for cover. The Germans were trying to blow up the truck from the air, and in their attempts they blew up Alexander instead.

It was Tatiana who had pulled him back from the four horsemen who came for him, counting his good and bad works on their black-gloved fingers. Tatiana, whom he had told, “Leave Leningrad and go back to Lazarevo instantly. ” Lazarevo, deep at the foot of the Ural Mountains, a small fishing village buried in the pine woods, nestled on the shores of the Kama River, Lazarevo, where for an instant in time she could have been safe.

But she was like the doctor: she had no sense. No, she said to him. She was not going. And she said no to the four horsemen, shaking her fist at them. It’s too early for you to claim him. And then defiantly: I won’t let you take him. I will do everything in my power to keep you from taking him.

And she did. With her own blood, she had kept them from Alexander. She poured her blood inside him, she drained her arteries and filled his veins, and he was saved.

Alexander may have owed Tatiana his life but Dr. Sayers owed Alexander his, and he was going to take Alexander and Tatiana to Helsinki, from where they would make their way to the United States. With Tatiana’s help they concocted a plan, and for months Alexander lay in the hospital while his back healed and carved figures and cradles and spears out of wood and imagined driving through America with her, their hurt all vanished, just the two of them, singing to the radio.

He had lived on the fleeting wings of hope. It was such a translucent hope. He knew it even as he drowned in it. It was the hope of a man surrounded by the enemy, who, as he makes his last run to safety, his back turned, prays he will have a chance to dive into a pit of life before the enemy reloads, before they send the heavy artillery out. He hears their guns, he hears their shouts behind him, but still he runs, hoping for a reprieve from the whistle of the shell. Dive into hope, or die in despair. Dive into the River Kama.

Alexander’s fate was sealed. He wondered how long ago it had been sealed, but he did not want an answer to that question.

Since he left his small room in Boston back in December 1930, that’s how long.

Alexander could not leave Russia. But one small thread of hope still dangled in front of him. One small flicker of the waning candle.

To get Tatiana out of the Soviet Union, Alexander Belov grit his teeth and closed his eyes. He clenched his fists and backed away from her; he pushed her away, he let her go.

There was only one thing left for him to do in his old life, and that was to stand up and salute the doctor who could save his wife. For now there was nothing to do but wait.

Deciding he did not wish to be taken out of bed in his hospital clothes, Alexander asked the night shift nurse to bring him his Class A major’s uniform and his officer dress cap. He shaved with his knife and a bit of water by the side of his bed, dressed and then sat in the chair, arms folded. When they came for him, as he knew they would, he wanted to go with as much dignity as the lackeys for the NKVD would allow. He heard loud snoring from the man in the bed next to him, hidden from view by the isolation tent.

Tonight—what was Alexander’s reality? What was it that determined Alexander’s consciousness? And more important, what would happen to him in an hour or two when everything Alexander had ever been would come into question? When the secret police chairman General Mekhlis would lift his beady, lard-encrusted eyes and say to him, “Tell us who you are, Major,” what would be Alexander’s answer?

Was he Tatiana’s husband?

Yes.

“Don’t cry, honey. ”

“Don’t come, yet. Please. Don’t. Not yet. ”

“Tania, I have to go.” He told Colonel Stepanov he was going to be back for Sunday night roll call and he could not be late.

“Please. Not yet. ”

“Tania, I’ll get another weekend leave—” He is panting. “After the Battle of Leningrad. I’ll come back here. But now …”

“Don’t, Shura, please don’t.”

“You’re holding me so tight. Release your legs.”

“No. Stop moving. Please. Just …”

“It’s nearly six, babe. I have to go.”

“Shura, darling, please … don’t go.”

“Don’t come, don’t go. What can I do?”

“Stay right here. Inside me. Forever inside me. Not yet, not yet.”

“Shh, Tania, shh.”

And five minutes later, he is bolting out the door. “I’ve got to run, no, don’t walk me to the barracks. I don’t want you walking by yourself at night. You still have the pistol I gave you? Stay here. Don’t watch me walk down the corridor. Just—come here.” He envelops her in his coat, hugging her into himself, kissing her hair, her lips. “Be a good girl, Tania,” he says. “And don’t say goodbye.”

She salutes him. “I’ll see you, the captain of my heart,” says Tatiana, her tears having fallen down her face from Friday till Sunday.

Was he a soldier in the Red Army?

Yes.

Was he the man who had entrusted his life to Dimitri Chernenko, a worthless demon disguised as a friend?

Yes, again.

But once, Alexander had been an American, a Barrington. He spoke like an American. He laughed like an American. He played summer games like an American, and swam like one and took his life for granted like one. He had friends he thought he was going to have for life, and once there were forests of Massachusetts that Alexander called home, and a child’s bag where he hid his small treasures—the shells and the eroded glass bits he had found on Nantucket Sound, the wrapper from one of the cotton candies, bits of twine and string, a photograph of his friend Teddy.