Tatiana and Alexander

“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.

“Alexander, I want to talk to you.” They walked to a small park and sat under the autumn trees. “Your mother knows, doesn’t she?”

“Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Listen … we needed to stop anyway.”

“Stop?” She said the word as if it had never actually occurred to her.

He looked at her with surprise.

“Not stop!” she exclaimed. “Whatever in the world for?”

“Svetlana …”

“Alexander, can’t you see?” she said, trembling and taking hold of his arm. “This is just a test for us.”

He pulled his arm away. “It’s a test I’m meant to fail. I don’t know what you could possibly be thinking. I’m in school. I’m sixteen. You’re a married thirty-nine-year-old woman. How long did you imagine this would go on?”

“When we first started,” she said hoarsely, “I imagined nothing.”

“All right.”

“But now …”

His gaze dropped. “Oh, Sveta …”

She got up off the bench. The throaty cry she emitted hurt Alexander’s lungs—as if he had breathed inside himself her miserable addiction to him. “Of course. I’m ridiculous.” She struggled with her breath. “You’re right. Of course.” She tried to smile. “Maybe one last time?” she whispered. “For old times’ sake? To say goodbye properly?”

Alexander bowed his head by way of replying.

She stumbled a step back from him, composed herself and said as steadily as she could, “Alexander, remember this as you go through your life—you have amazing gifts. Don’t squander them. Don’t give them out meaninglessly, don’t abuse them, don’t take them for granted. You are the weapon you carry with you till the day you die.”

They did not see each other again. Alexander got himself a card at a different library. Vladimir and Svetlana stopped coming over. At first Harold was curious why they no longer visited and then he forgot about them. Alexander knew his father’s inner life was too unsettled to worry about why he no longer saw people he didn’t like very much to begin with.

Fall turned into winter. 1935 turned into 1936. He and his father celebrated New Year’s by themselves. They went to a local beer bar, where his father bought him a glass of vodka and tried to talk to him. The conversation was brief and strained. Harold Barrington—in his own sober, defiant way—was oblivious to his son and his wife. The world his father lived in Alexander did not know, stopped understanding, didn’t want to understand even if he could have. He knew that his father would have liked Alexander to side with him, to understand him, to believe in him, the way he did when he was younger. But Alexander did not know how to do that anymore. The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

Giving Up One Room, 1936

Could it get less tolerable?

Shortly.

An undergrown man from Upravdom—the housing committee—arrived at their doorstep one dark January Saturday morning, accompanied by two people with suitcases, and waved about a piece of paper, informing the Barringtons that they were going to have to give up one of their rooms to another family. Harold didn’t have the strength to argue. Jane was too drunk to object. It was Alexander who raised his voice but only briefly. There was no point. There was no one to go to, to correct this.

“You can’t tell me this is unjust,” the smirking Upravdom member said to Alexander. “You have two nice rooms for the three of you. There are two of them, and they have no rooms at all. She is pregnant. Where is your socialist spirit, comrade soon-to-be Comsomol?” The Comsomols were young members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Alexander and Harold moved the cot and his small dresser and his few personal belongings and his bookshelf. Alexander put his cot next to the window, and the dresser and bookshelf between himself and his parents as an angry barrier. When his father wanted to know if he was upset, Alexander barked, “It’s been my dream to share a room with you at sixteen. I know you don’t want any privacy either.” They talked in English, which was more natural and more colloquial, and provided an opportunity to say the word privacy, a word that did not exist in Russian.

The next morning when Jane woke up she wanted to know what Alexander was doing in their room. It was a Sunday.

“I’m here for good,” said Alexander, and went out. He took a train to Peterhof and walked the grounds by himself, sullen and confused. The feeling he had had all his young life—that he was brought on this earth for something special—had not left Alexander, not quite; what it did was dissipate inside him, became translucent in his blood vessels. It no longer pulsed through his body. He was no longer filled with a sense of purpose. He was filled with a sense of despair.

I could have lived through it all if only I continued to have the feeling that at the end of childhood, at the end of adolescence, there was something else in this life that would be mine, that I could make with my bare hands, and once I had made it, I could say, I did this to my life. I made my life so.

Hope.

It was gone from Alexander on this sunny crisp Sunday, and the feeling of purpose had vanished, was vanquished in his veins.

The End, 1936

Harold stopped bringing vodka into the house.

“Dad, you don’t think Mom will be able to get vodka any other way?”

“With what? She has no money.”

Alexander didn’t mention the thousands of American dollars his mother had been hoarding since the day they came to the Soviet Union.

“Stop talking about me as if I’m not here!” Jane shouted.

They looked at her with surprise. Afterward Jane started stealing money from Harold’s pockets and going to buy the vodka herself. Harold started keeping his money out of the house. Jane was then caught in someone else’s apartment, going through their things, already drunk on some French perfume she had found.

Alexander began to be afraid that the next natural step for his mother would be to drink her way through the money she had brought with them from America. It wouldn’t end until all the money was gone. First the Soviet rubles she had saved from her job in Moscow, then the American dollars. It would take his mother a year to buy vodka with all her dollars on the black market, but buy it she would, gone the money would be, and then what?

Without that money, Alexander was finished.

Alexander had to get his mother sober for long enough to let him hide the money in a place that was not home. He knew that if she found out he had taken it without her knowledge or permission her hysteria would not cease until Harold knew of her treachery. Once Harold knew his wife had mistrusted him from the moment they left the United States, mistrusted him even in her love and her respect, mistrusted him and his motives and his ideals and all the dreams he thought she shared with him from the very start, once he knew that, Alexander felt his father would not recover. And he didn’t want to be responsible for his father’s future, all he wanted was the money to help him be responsible for his own. That’s what his sober mother wanted, too. He knew that. Sober, she would let him hide the money. The trick was to get her sober.

Over the course of one difficult and contemptible weekend Alexander tried to dry out his mother. She, in her convulsing rage, flooded him with such obscenities and vitriol that finally even Harold said, “Oh, for God’s sake, give her a drink and tell her to shut up.”

But Alexander didn’t give her a drink. He sat by her, and he read aloud from Dickens, in English, and he read Pushkin to her, in Russian, and he read her the funniest of Zoshchenko’s anecdotes, and he fed her some soup and he fed her some bread, and gave her coffee, and put cold wet towels on her head, but still she wouldn’t stop ranting. Harold, in a quiet moment, asked Alexander, “What did she mean about you and Svetlana, what was she talking about?”

“Dad, haven’t you learned by now, you have to shut her off? You can’t listen to a word she is saying.”

“No, no, of course not,” muttered Harold thoughtfully, walking away from Alexander, though not far, because there wasn’t anywhere in the narrow room to go.

On Monday, after his father left for work, Alexander cut school and spent all day convincing his morosely, miserably sober mother that her money needed to be put in a safe place. Alexander tried to explain to her, first patiently and quietly, then impatiently and shouting, that if something, God forbid, were to happen to them, and they were arrested—

“You’re talking nonsense, Alexander. Why would they arrest us? We’re their people. We’re not living well, but then we shouldn’t be living any better than the rest of the Russians. We came here to share their fate.”

“We’re doing that gallantly,” said Alexander. “Mom, wise up. What do you think happened to the other foreigners that lived with us in Moscow?” He paused. His mother considered. “Even if I’m wrong, I’m saying it’s not going to hurt us to be a little prudent and hide the money. Now how much money is left?”

After thinking for a few moments, Jane said she did not know. She let Alexander count it. There was ten thousand dollars and four thousand rubles.

“How many dollars did you bring with you from America?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe seventeen thousand. Maybe twenty.”

“Oh, Mom.”

“What? Some of that money went to buy you oranges and milk in Moscow, or did you forget already?”

“I didn’t forget,” Alexander replied in a weary voice. How much for the oranges and milk, he wanted to know. Fifty dollars? A hundred?

Jane, smoking and watching Alexander, narrowed her eyes at him. “If I let you hide the money, will you let me have a drink, as a thank you?”

“Yes. Just one.”

“Of course. One small one is all I want. I feel much better when I’m sober, you know. But just one small drink to get me through the heebie-jeebies would help me stay sober, you know that, don’t you?”

Alexander wanted to ask his mother just how naïve she thought he was. He said nothing.

“All right,” said Jane. “Let’s get it over with. Where are you planning to hide it?”

Alexander suggested gluing the money into the back binding of a book, producing one of his mother’s good, thick-covered hardbacks to show exactly what he meant.

“If your father finds out, he will never forgive you.”

“He can add it to the list of things he won’t forgive me for. Go on, Mom. I have to get to school. After the book is ready, I’m putting it in the library.”

Jane stared at the book Alexander was proposing. It was her ancient copy of Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems. “Why don’t we glue it inside the Bible we brought from home?”

“Because finding a Pushkin book in the Pushkin section of the Leningrad library is not going to alert anyone. But finding a Bible in English anywhere in the Russian library just might.” He smiled. “Don’t you think?”

Jane almost smiled back. “Alexander, I’m sorry I haven’t been well.”

He lowered his head.

“I don’t want to talk to your father about this anymore because he no longer has any patience for me, but I’m having trouble with our life.”

“We know,” Alexander said. “We’ve noticed.”

She put her arms around him. He patted her on the back. “Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.”

“This money, Alexander,” she said, looking up at him, “you think it will help you somehow?”

“I don’t know. Having it is better than not having it.”

He took the book with him, and after school went to the Leningrad public library and in the back, in the three-aisle-wide Pushkin section, found a place on a bottom shelf for his book. He put it between two scholarly-looking tomes that had not been checked out since 1927. He thought it was a good bet no one would check out his book, either. But still, it didn’t feel completely safe. He wished there were a better hiding place for it.

When Alexander came home later that evening, his mother was drunk again, showing none of the remorseful affection he had seen in her eyes earlier in the day. He ate dinner quietly with his father, while listening to the radio.

“School good?”

“Yes. It’s fine, Dad.”

“You have good friends?”

“Sure.”

“Any good friends who are girls?” His father was trying to make conversation.

“Some friends who are girls, yes.”

His father cleared his throat. “Nice Russian girls?”

Smiling, Alexander asked, “Compared with what?”

Harold smiled. “Do the nice Russian girls,” he asked carefully, “like my boy?”

Alexander shrugged. “They like me all right.”

Harold said, “I remember you and Teddy hung out with that girl, what was her name again?”

“Belinda.”

“Yes! Belinda. She was nice.”

“Dad.” Alexander laughed. “We were eight. Yes, she was nice for an eight-year-old.”

“Oh, but what a crush on you she had!”

“And what a crush on her Teddy had.”

“That about sums up all the relationships on God’s earth.”

They went out for a drink. “I miss our home in Barrington a little,” Harold admitted to Alexander. “But it’s only because I have not lived a different way long enough. Long enough to change my consciousness and make me into the person I’m supposed to be.”

“You have lived this way long enough. That’s why you miss Barrington.”

“No. You know what I think, son? I think it’s not working so well here, because it’s Russia. I think communism would work much better in America.” He smiled beseechingly at Alexander. “Don’t you agree?”

“Oh, Dad, for God’s sake.”

Harold didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Never mind. I’m going over to Leo’s for a little while. You want to come?”

The choice was, either go back home to the room with his unconscious mother or sit in a smoked-out room with his father’s communist cronies regurgitating obscure parts of Das Kapital and talking about bringing the war back home.

Alexander wanted to be with his father but alone. He went home to his mother. He wanted to be alone with somebody.

The next morning, as Harold and Alexander were getting ready for their day, Jane, still inebriated from the night before, held on to Alexander’s hand for a moment and said, “Stay behind, son, I have to talk to you.”

After Harold left, Jane said in a hurried voice, “Collect your things. Where is that book? You have to run and get it.”

“What for?”

“You and I are going to Moscow.”

“Moscow?”

“Yes. We’ll get there by nightfall. Tomorrow first thing in the morning I’ll take you to the consulate.” They’ll keep you there until they contact the State Department in Washington. And then they’ll send you home.”

“What?”

“Alexander, yes. I’ll take care of your father.”

“You can’t take care of yourself.”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Jane. “My fate is sealed. But yours is wide open. Concern yourself only with you. Your father goes to his meetings. He thinks by playing with the grown-ups he won’t be punished. But they have his number. They have mine. But you, Alexander, you have no number. I have to get you out.”

“I’m not going without you or Dad.”

“Of course you are. Your father and I will never be allowed to return. But you will do very well back home. I know it’s hard in America these days, there aren’t many jobs, but you’ll be free, you’ll have your life, so come and stop arguing. I’m your mother. I know what I’m doing.”

“Mom, you’re taking me to Moscow to surrender me to the Americans?”

“Yes. Your Aunt Esther will look after you until you graduate secondary school. The State Department will arrange for her to meet your ship in Boston. You’re still only sixteen, Alexander, the consulate won’t turn you away.”

Alexander had been very close to his father’s sister once. She adored him, but she had an ugly fight with Harold over Alexander’s dubious future in the Soviet Union, and they had not spoken or written since.

“Mom, two things,” he said. When I turned sixteen, I registered for the Red Army. Remember? Mandatory conscription. I became a Soviet citizen when I joined. I have a passport to prove that.”

“The consulate doesn’t have to know that.”

“It’s their business to know it. But the second thing is …” Alexander broke off. “I can’t go without saying goodbye to my father.”

“Write him a letter.”

The train ride was long. He had twelve hours to sit and think. How his mother managed those hours without a drink, he didn’t know. Her hands were shaking badly by the time they arrived at the Leningrad Station in Moscow. It was night; they were tired and hungry. They had no place to sleep. They had no food. It was a fairly mild late April, and they slept on a bench in Gorky Park. Alexander had strong bittersweet memories of himself and his friends playing ice hockey in Gorky Park.

“I need a drink, Alexander,” Jane whispered. “I need a drink to take an edge off my life. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

“Mother,” said Alexander, putting his steady hand on her to keep her from getting up. “If you leave, I will go straight to the station and take the next train back to Leningrad.”

Deeply sighing, Jane moved closer to Alexander and motioned to her lap. “Lie down, son. Get some sleep. We have a long day tomorrow.”

Alexander put his head on his mother’s shoulder and eventually slept.

The next morning they had to wait an hour at the consulate gate until someone came to see them—only to tell them they could not come in. Jane gave her name and a letter explaining about her son. They waited restlessly for another two hours until the sentry called them over and said the consul was unable to help them. Jane pleaded to be let in for just five minutes. The sentry shook his head and said there was nothing he could do. Alexander had to restrain his mother. Eventually he led her away and returned by himself to speak to the guard. The man apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said in English. “They did look into it, if you want to know. But the file on your mother and father has been sent back to the State Department in Washington.” The man paused. “Yours, too. Since you’re Soviet citizens, you’re not under our jurisdiction anymore. There is nothing they can do.”

“What about political asylum?”

“On what grounds? Besides, you know how many Soviets come this way asking for asylum? Dozens every day. On Mondays, near a hundred. We’re here by invitation from the Soviet government. We want to maintain our ties to the Soviet community. If we started accepting their people, how long do you think they’d allow us to stay here? You’d be the last one. Just last week, we relented and let a widowed Russian father with two small children pass. The father had relatives in the United States and said he would find work. He had a useful skill, he was an electrician. But there was a diplomatic scandal. We had to give him back.” The sentry paused. “You’re not an electrician, are you?”

“No,” replied Alexander. “But I am an American citizen.”

The sentry shook his head. “You know you can’t serve two masters in the military.”

Alexander knew. He tried again. “I have relatives in America. I will live with them. And I can work. I’ll drive a cab. I will sell produce on the street corner. I will farm. I will cut down trees. Whatever I can do, I will do.”

The sentry lowered his voice. “It’s not you. It’s your father and mother. They’re just too high profile for the consulate to get involved. Made too much of a fuss when they came here. Wanted everyone to know them. Well, now everyone knows them. Your parents should have thought twice about relinquishing their U.S. citizenship. What was the hurry? They should have been sure first.”

“My father was sure,” said Alexander.

The trip back from Moscow was only as long as the trip to Moscow; why did it seem decades longer? His mother was mute. The countryside was flat bleak fields; there was still no food.

Jane cleared her throat. “I desperately wanted to have a baby. It took me ten years and four miscarriages to have you. The year you were born the worldwide flu epidemic tore through Boston, killing thousands of people, including my sister, your father’s parents and brother, and many of our close friends. Everybody we knew lost someone. I went to the doctor for a check-up because I was feeling under the weather and was terrified it might be the dreaded flu. He told me I was pregnant. I said, how can it be, we’ll fall sick, we’ve given up our family inheritance, we are broke, where are we going to live, how will we stay healthy, and the doctor looked at me and said, “The baby brings his own food.”

She took Alexander’s hand. He let her.

“You, son—you brought your own food. Harold and I both felt it. When you were born, Alexander—when you were born, it was late at night, and you came so suddenly, I didn’t even have time to go to the hospital. The doctor came, delivered you in our bed, and said that you seemed in a great hurry to get on with living. You were the biggest baby he had ever seen, and I still remember, after we told him we were naming you Anthony Alexander after your great grandfather, he lifted you, all purple and black-haired, and exclaimed, “Alexander the great!” Because you were so big, you see.” She paused. “You were such a beautiful boy,” she whispered.