Paullina Simons: Tatiana and Alexander

They fell silent.

“Do you have your grenades?”

Alexander nodded. “One in my bag, one in my boot.”

“Weapon?”

He patted his holster.

“They’ll take it from you.”

“They’ll have to. I’m not surrendering it.”

Dr. Sayers shook Alexander’s hand.

“You remember what I told you?” Alexander asked. “Whatever happens to me, you’ll take this”—he took off his officer cap, handing it to the doctor—“and you will write me a death certificate and you will tell her that you saw me dead on the lake and then pushed me into an ice hole, and that’s why there is no body. Clear?”

Sayers nodded. “I’ll do what I have to,” he said. “I don’t want to do it.”

“I know.”

They were grim.

“Major … what if I do find you dead on the ice?”

“You will write me a death certificate and you will bury me in Lake Ladoga. Make a sign of the cross on me before you push me in.” He shuddered slightly. “Don’t forget to give her my cap.”

“That guy, Dimitri Chernenko, is always around my truck,” Sayers said.

“Yes. He won’t let you leave without him. Guaranteed. You must take him.”

“I don’t want to take him.”

“You want to save her, don’t you? If he doesn’t come, she has no chance. So stop thinking about the things you can’t change. Just watch out for him. Trust him with nothing.”

“What do I do with him in Helsinki?”

Here Alexander allowed himself a small smile. “I’m not the one to be advising you on that one. Just—don’t do anything to endanger you or Tania.”

“Of course not.”

Alexander spoke. “You must be very careful, nonchalant, casual, brave. Leave with her as soon as you can. You’ve already told Stepanov you’re headed back?” Colonel Mikhail Stepanov was Alexander’s commander.

“I told him I’m headed back to Finland. He asked me to bring … your wife back to Leningrad. He said it would be easier for her if she left Morozovo.”

Alexander nodded. “I already spoke to him. I asked him to let her leave with you. You’ll be taking her with his approval. Good. It’ll be easier for you to leave the base.”

“Stepanov told me it’s policy for soldiers to get transported to the Volkhov side for promotions. Was that duplicity? I can’t understand anymore what’s truth and what’s a lie.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“Does he know what’s happening with you?”

“He is the one who told me what’s about to happen to me. They have to take me across the lake. They don’t have a stockade here,” Alexander explained. “But he will tell my wife what I have told her—I’m getting promoted. When the truck blows up, it will be even easier for the NKVD to go along with the official story—they don’t like to explain arrests of their commanding officers. It’s so much easier to say I’ve died.”

“But they do have a stockade here in Morozovo.” Sayers lowered his voice. “I didn’t know it was the stockade. I was asked to go check on two soldiers who were dying of dysentery. They were in a tiny room in the basement of the abandoned school. It was a bomb shelter, divided into tiny cells. I thought they had been quarantined.” Sayers glanced at Alexander. “I couldn’t even help them. I don’t know why they didn’t just let them die, they asked for me so late.”

“They asked for you just in time. This way they died under doctor’s care. An International Red Cross doctor’s care. It’s so legitimate.”

Breathing hard, Dr. Sayers asked, “Are you afraid?”

“For her,” said Alexander, glancing at the doctor. “You?”

“Ridiculously.”

Alexander nodded and leaned back against the chair. “Just tell me one thing, Doctor. Is my wound healed enough for me to go and fight?”

“No.”

“Is it going to open again?”

“No, but it might get infected. Don’t forget to take the sulfa drugs.”

“I won’t.”

Before Dr. Sayers walked away, he said quietly to Alexander, “Don’t worry about Tania. She’ll be all right. She’ll be with me. I won’t let her out of my sight until New York. And she’ll be all right then.”

Faintly nodding, Alexander said, “She’ll be as good as she can be. Offer her some chocolate.”

“You think that’ll do it?”

“Offer it to her,” Alexander repeated. “She won’t want it the first five times you ask. But she will take it the sixth.”

Before Dr. Sayers disappeared through the doors of the ward, he turned around. The two men stared at each other for a short moment, and then Alexander saluted him.

Living in Moscow, 1930

When they were first met at the train station, even before heading to their hotel they were escorted to a restaurant where they ate and drank all evening. Alexander delighted in the fact that his father was right—life seemed to be turning out just fine. The food was passable and there was plenty of it. The bread was not fresh, however, and, oddly, neither was the chicken. The butter was kept at room temperature, so was the water, but the black tea was sweet and hot, and his father even let Alexander have a sip of vodka as they all raised their crystal shot glasses, their boisterous voices yelling, “Na zdorovye!” or “Cheers!” His mother said, “Harold! Don’t give the child vodka, are you out of your mind?” She herself was not a drinker, and so she barely pressed the glass to her lips. Alexander drank his vodka out of curiosity, hated it instantly, his throat burning for what seemed like hours. His mother teased him. When it stopped burning, he fell asleep at the table.

Then came the hotel.

Then came the toilets.

The hotel was fetid and dark. Dark wallpaper, dark floors, floors that in places—including Alexander’s room—were not exactly at right angles with the walls. Alexander always thought they needed to be, but what did he know? Maybe the feats of Soviet revolutionary engineering and building construction had not made their mark on America yet. The way his father talked about the Soviet hope, Alexander would not have been surprised to learn that the wheel had not been invented before the Glorious October Revolution of 1917.

The bedspreads on their beds were dark, the upholstery on their couches was dark, the curtains were dark brown, in the kitchen the wood-burning stove was black, and the three cabinets were dark wood. In the adjacent rooms down the dark, badly lit hall lived three brothers from Georgia by the Black Sea, all curly dark-haired, dark-skinned and dark-eyed. They immediately embraced Alexander as one of their own, even though his skin was fair and his hair was straight. They called him Sasha, their little Georgian boy, and made him eat liquid yogurt called kefir , which Alexander did not just hate but loathe.

There were many Russian foods that—much to his misfortune—he discovered he loathed. Anything bathed in onions and vinegar he could not share the same table with.

Most of the Russian food placed before them by the other well-meaning compatriots of the hotel was bathed in onions and vinegar.

Except for the Russian-speaking Georgian brothers, the rest of the people on their floor did not speak much Russian at all. There were thirty other people living on the second floor of Hotel Derzhava, which meant “fortress” in Russian; thirty other people who came to the Soviet Union largely for the same reasons the Barringtons did. There was a communist family from Italy, who had been thrown out of Rome in the late twenties, and the Soviet Union took them in as their own. Harold and Alexander thought that was an honorable deed.

There was a family from Belgium, and two from England. The British families Alexander liked most because they spoke something resembling the English he knew. But Harold didn’t like Alexander continuing to speak English, nor did he like the British families very much, nor the Italians, nor really anyone on that floor. Every chance he got, Harold tried to dissuade Alexander from associating with the Tarantella sisters, or with Simon Lowell, the chap from Liverpool, England. Harold Barrington wanted his son to make friends with Soviet girls and boys. He wanted Alexander to be immersed in the Moscow culture and to learn Russian, and Alexander, wanting to please his father, did.