The Summer Garden

“If I don’t read them, how else am I going to know how to please my husband?” she said thickly.

“Tatia, you don’t need to read any magazines for that,” he said.

We’ll have to see about that, she thought, in trepidation at her own anticipated audacity, turning around and stretching out her tremulous hand to him.

His hands behind his head, Alexander lay naked in bed on his back, waiting for her. Tatiana locked the door, took off her silk robe and stood in front of him with her long blonde tresses down over her shoulders. She liked the look in his eyes tonight. It wasn’t neutral. When he reached to switch off the light she said, no, leave the light on.

“Leave the light on?” he said. “This is new.”

“I want you to look at me,” Tatiana said, climbing on top of his stomach, spanning him. Slowly she let her hair fall down onto his chest.

“How does it feel?” she murmured.

“Mmm.” His hands on her hips, Alexander arched his stomach into her open thighs.

“Silky, right?” she purred. “So soft, silky … velvety …”

And Alexander groaned.

He groaned! He opened his mouth and an unsuppressed sound of excitement left his throat.

“Feel me, Shura …” she murmured, continuing to rub herself ever so lightly against his bare stomach, her long loose hair fluttering along with her flutters. But it was stirring her up too much; she had to stop. “I thought maybe if the hair was silky,” she whispered, moving her head from side to side as the cascading mane feathered him in silk strands across his chest, “you’d want to put your hands in it … your lips in it again.”

“My hands are on it,” he let out.

“I didn’t say on it. I said in it.”

Alexander stroked her hair.

She shook her head. “No. That’s how you touch it now. I want you to touch it like you touched it then.”

Alexander closed his eyes, his mouth parting. His gripping hands pulled her hips lower on him, while he pulled himself higher. Tatiana felt him so geared up and searching for her that in one second all her grand efforts with mayonnaise were going to come to the very same end that had already been happening in their bed for months.

Quickly she bent to him, moving herself up and away. “Tell me,” she whispered into his face, “why have you stopped caring how I keep my hair?”

“I haven’t stopped.”

“Yes, you have. Come on. You’re talking to me. Tell me why.”

Falling quiet, Alexander took his hands away from her hips and rested them on her knees.

“Tell me. Why don’t you touch me?”

Alexander paused heavily, looking away from her searching eyes. “The hair is not mine anymore. It belongs to the other you, the you of New York and red nail polish and high-heeled dancing, and Vikki, and building a life without me when you thought I was dead—as you absolutely should have. I’m not against you. But that’s what it reminds me of. I’m just telling you.”

Tatiana put her hand on his cheek. “Do you want me to cut it? I’ll cut it all off right now.”

“No.” Alexander moved his face away. They were quiet. “But nothing is ever enough, have you noticed?” he said. “I can’t touch you enough. I can’t make you happy. I can’t say anything right to you. And you can’t take away from me a single thing I’ve fucked up along the way.”

She became deflated. “You’re here, and you’re forgiven for everything,” she said quietly, sitting up and closing her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at his tattooed arms and his scar-ribbon chest.

“Tell me the truth,” Alexander said. “Don’t you sometimes think it’s harder—this—and other stuff like the magazines quizzes—harder for the two of us? That magazine quiz just points up the absurdity of us pretending we’re like normal people. Don’t you sometimes think it would be easier with your Edward Ludlow in New York? Or a Thelma? No history. No memories. Nothing to get over, nothing to claw back from.”

“Would it be easier for you?”

“Well, I wouldn’t hear you cry every night,” Alexander said. “I wouldn’t feel like such a failure every minute of my life.”

“Oh my God! What are you talking about?” Tatiana yanked to get off him, but now it was Alexander who held her in place.

“You know what I’m talking about,” he said, his eyes blazing. “I want amnesia! I want a fucking lobotomy. Could I please never think again? Look what’s happened to us, us, Tania. Don’t you remember how we used to be? Just look what’s happened.”

His long winter’s night bled into Coconut Grove through all the fields and villages in three countries Alexander plundered through to get to the Bridge to Holy Cross, over the River Vistula, to get into the mountains, to escape to Germany, to save Pasha, to make his way to Tatiana. And he failed. Twenty escape attempts—two in Catowice, one ill-fated one in Colditz Castle, and seventeen desperate ones in Sachsenhausen, and he never got to her. He had somehow made all the wrong choices. Alexander knew it. Anthony knew it. With the son asleep, the parents had hours to mindlessly meander through the fields and rivers of Europe, through the streets of Leningrad. That was not to be wished upon.

“Stop it,” Tatiana whispered. “Just stop it! You didn’t fail. You’re looking at it all twisted. You stayed alive, that was all, that was everything, and you know that. Why are you doing this?”

“Why?” he said. “You want it out while sitting naked on top of my stomach with your hair down? Well, here it is. You don’t want it out? Then don’t ask me. Turn the light off, keep the braid in, get your”—Alexander stopped himself—“get off me, and say nothing.”

Tatiana did none of those things. She didn’t want it out, what she wanted, desperately, was him to touch her. Though the aching in her heart from his words was unabated, the aching in her loins from her desire for him was also unabated. She remained on him, watching his face watching her. Gently she stroked his chest, his arms, his shoulders. Bending to him, she flickered her moist soft lips over his face, over his neck, and in a little while, when she felt him calm down, she whispered to him. Shura … it’s me, your Tania, your wife …

“What do you want, Tania, my wife?” His hands grazed up her thighs, up her waist, to her hair.

She was so ashamed of her craving. But the shame didn’t make her crave it any less.

His hands traveled down to her hips, holding her, pulling her open. “What are you clamoring for?” Alexander whispered, his fingers clamoring at her. “Tell me. Speak to me.”

She moved a little higher, rubbing her breasts over his mouth.

Cupping them into his face, Alexander groaned again, his mouth opening underneath them.

Moaning, Tatiana whispered, “I want you to stroke my hair … rub it between your fingers, knead it like you used to. I used to love that, you touching me.” Her body was quivering. “Hold it tight, so tight … yes! like that … touch my blonde hair that you used to love … do you remember? Don’t you remember?”

Very slowly Tatiana moved up on his chest, and up and up and up, until she was kneeling over Alexander’s panting parted mouth. Please, please, darling, Shura, whispered Tatiana, touch me … grasping on to the headboard and lowering herself slightly. Please … touch me like you used to …

This time, Alexander, with no breath left in his lungs, did not have to be asked again. When she felt his hands spreading her open and his warm soft mouth on her for the first time since their return to America, Tatiana nearly fainted. She began to cry. She couldn’t even hold herself up; if it weren’t for the headboard and the wall, she would have surely pitched forward.

“Shh … Tatiasha … shh … I’m looking at you … and what do you know, it turns out that blonde … is my favorite color.”

She couldn’t last three gasping breaths, milling into his mouth, trying to remain upright. Crying, crying, from happiness, from arousal, Please don’t stop, darling, Shura, don’t stop … pulsing into his lips, moaning so loudly the heavens were about to open up … Oh God, oh, yes …Oh Shura … Shura … Shura …

The next morning before work, when he came to the kitchen to get his coffee, Tatiana said to him, deeply blushing, “Alexander, what would you like for breakfast?”

And he, taking her into his arms, lifting her, setting her down on the kitchen counter in front of him, embracing her, madness in his eyes, said, “Oh, now that it’s morning, I’m Alexander again?” His open lips were over her open lips.

Lovers Key

On a moist Sunday—after spring boiled over into summer—Alexander borrowed a one-mast sailboat from Mel and took them out to the bay where they thought the breezes would make them cooler. The humid breezes just made them muggier, but because they were alone out at sea, Alexander undressed to his swimming trunks, and Tatiana wore her bikini swimsuit, and they floated peaceably under the zenith of the Tropic of Cancer sun. Alexander brought two fishing lines and some worms. The wind was good. The headsail was up. Come with me, she murmured, and I will make you fishers of men. They sailed on the serene waters around Key Biscayne, and down south to Lovers Key, where he dropped anchor so they could have some lunch. Anthony fell asleep after helping his dad loosen the ropes on the jib. He had been leaning on his mother and just keeled over. Smiling, Tatiana adjusted the boy, holding him closer, more comfortably. “I know how he feels. This is quite soothing.” She closed her eyes.

Raising anchor, Alexander let the boat float and flounder as he went to sit by her on the white bench at the rudder. He lit a smoke, gave her a drink; they sat and swayed.

The Russian they spoke reminded them of another time. They spoke softer, often they spoke English, but this Sunday on the boat, they were Russian.

“Shura? We’ve been here six months.”

“Yes. It hasn’t snowed.”

“We’ve had three hurricanes, though.”

“I’m not bothered about the hurricanes.”

“What about the heat, the mugginess?”

“Don’t care.”

She considered him.

“I’d be happy to stay,” Alexander said quietly. “This is fine with me.”

“In a houseboat?”

“We can get a real house.”

“And you’d work the boats and the girls all day?”

“I’ve taken a wife, I don’t know what girls are anymore.” He grinned. “I admit to liking the boats, though.”

“For the rest of your life? Boats, water?”

His smile rather quickly disappearing, he leaned away from her.

“Do you recall yourself in the evenings, at night?” Tatiana asked gently, bringing him back with her free hand. The other held the boy.

“What’s that got to do with the water?”

“I don’t think the water is helping,” Tatiana said. “I really don’t.” She paused. “I think we should go.”

“Well, I don’t.”

They stopped talking. Alexander smoked another cigarette.

They floated in the middle of the tropical green ocean with the islands in view.

The water was doing something to Tatiana. It was dismantling her. With every flutter of the water she saw the Neva, the River Neva under the northern sun on the sub-Arctic white night city they once called home, the water rippled and in it was Leningrad, and in Leningrad was everything she wanted to remember and everything she wanted to forget.

He was gazing at her. His eyes occasionally softened under the sticky Coconut Grove sun.

“You’ve got new freckles, above your eyebrows.” He kissed her eyelids. “Golden, soft hair, ocean eyes.” He stroked her face, her cheeks. “Your scar is almost gone. Just a thin white line now. Can barely see it.” The scar she got escaping from the Soviet Union.

“Hmm.”

“Unlike mine?”

“You have more to heal, husband.” Reaching out, she placed her hand on Alexander’s face and then closed her eyes quickly so he couldn’t pry inside her.

“Tatiasha,” he called in a whisper, and then bent to her and kissed her long and true.

It had been a year since she had found him shackled in Sachsenhausen’s isolation chamber. A year since she dredged him up from the bottomdwellers of Soviet-occupied Germany, from the grasping hands of Stalin’s henchmen. How could it have been a year? How long did it seem?

An eternity in purgatory, a hemidemisemiquaver in heaven.

His boat was full of women, old women, young women, widowed women, newly married women, and now there were pregnant women. “I swear,” said Alexander, “I had very little to do with that.” Also returning war veterans. Some were foreigners. One such man, Frederik, with a limp and a cane and a heavy Dutch accent, liked to sit by Alexander as he looked out on the sea. He came in the mornings, because the afternoon tour was too hot for him, and he and Anthony stayed by Alexander’s steering wheel. Anthony would frequently sit on Frederik’s lap. One day, Anthony was playing a clapping game with Frederik and said, “Oh, look you have blue numbers on your arm, too. Dad, look, he’s got numbers on him, just like you.”

Alexander and Frederik exchanged a look. Alexander turned away but not before Frederik’s eyes welled up. Frederik didn’t say anything then, but at noon after they docked, he stayed behind and asked Tatiana if he could talk to Alexander in private. Casting an anxious look at Alexander, she reluctantly left all the sandwiches and took Anthony home for lunch.

“So where were you?” Frederik asked, prematurely old though he was only forty-two. “I was at Treblinka. All the way from Amsterdam to Treblinka. Imagine that.”

Alexander shook his head. He lit a smoke, gave one to Frederik, who shook his head. “You have the wrong impression,” Alexander said.

“Let me see your arm.”

Rolling up his white linen sleeve, Alexander showed him.

“No wrong impression. I’d know these anywhere. Since when are American soldiers branded with German numbers?”

The cigarette wasn’t long enough, the smoke wasn’t long enough. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Alexander said. “I was in a concentration camp in Germany.”

“That’s obvious. Which camp?”

“Sachsenhausen.”

“Oh. It was an SS-training camp.”

“That camp was many things,” said Alexander.

“How did you get there?”

“Long story.”

“We have time. Miami has a large ex-pat Jewish community. You want to come with me tonight to our meeting? We meet on Thursdays. Just a few of us, like me, like you, we get together, talk, drink a little bit. You look like you sorely need to be around other people like yourself.”

“Frederik, I’m not Jewish.”

“I don’t understand,” Frederik said haltingly. “Why would the Germans brand you?”

“The Germans didn’t.”

“Who did then?”

“The Soviets. They ran that camp after the war.”

“Oh, the pigs. I don’t understand anything. Well, come with me anyway. We have three Polish Jews—you didn’t think there were any left, did you?—who were imprisoned by the Soviets after Ukraine went from Soviet to German back to Soviet hands. They’re debating every Thursday which occupation was worse.”

“Well,” said Alexander, “Hitler is dead. Mussolini is dead. Hirohito deposed. Fascism has suddenly gotten a bad name after being all the rage for twenty years. But who’s stronger than ever? The answer should give you a clue.”

“So come, give your two cents. Why would the Sovietskis do that to you if you weren’t Jewish? They didn’t brand American POWs; they were fighting on the same side.”

“If the Soviets knew I was American, they would’ve shot me years ago.”

Frederick looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t understand …”

“Can’t explain.”

“What division did you say you served in?”

Alexander sighed. “I was in Rokossovsky’s Army. His 97th penal battalion.”

“What—that’s not the U.S. Army …”

“I was a captain in the Red Army.”

“Oh, my God.” On Frederik’s face played sharp disbelief. “You’re a Soviet officer?”

“Yes.”

Frederik careened off the plank with his cane so fast, he nearly tipped himself over. “I got the wrong impression about you.” He was wheeling away. “Forget we ever spoke.”

Alexander was visibly upset when he came home. “Anthony!” he said as soon as he walked through the door. “Get over here. I told you this before, I’m going to tell you again, but for absolutely the last time—stop telling strangers about me.”

The boy was perplexed.

“You don’t have to figure it out, you just have to listen. I told you to keep quiet, and you still continue as if I hadn’t made myself clear.”

Tatiana tried to intervene, but Alexander cut her off. “Ant, as punishment tomorrow you’re not going on the boat with me. I’ll take you the next day, but if you ever speak about me to strangers again, you’ll be off the boat for good. You got it?”

The boy cried.

“I didn’t hear you, Anthony.”

“I got it, Dad.”

Straightening up, Alexander saw Tatiana watching them silently from the stove. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put a long-sleeve linen shirt on Anthony’s mouth like you do on my body,” he said, and ate dinner by himself out on the deck.

After Tatiana put Anthony to bed, she went outside.

The first thing Alexander said was, “We haven’t had meat in weeks. I’m as sick of shrimp and flounder as you were of lobsters. Why can’t you buy some meat?”

After hemming and hawing, Tatiana said, “I can’t go to the Center Meat Market. They’ve put a sign in the window—a little war souvenir.”

“So?”

“Sign says, ‘Horse meats not rationed—no points necessary.’”

They both fell mute.

Tatiana is walking down Ulitsa Lomonosova in Leningrad in October 1941, trying to find a store with bread to redeem her ration coupons. She passes a crowd of people. She is small, she can’t see what they’re circling. Suddenly the crowd opens up and out comes a young man holding a bloodied knife in one hand and a hunk of raw meat in the other, and Tatiana can see the opened flesh of a newly killed mare behind him. Dropping his knife on the ground, the man rips into the meat. One of his teeth falls out and he spits it out as he continues to chew frantically. Meat!

“You better hurry,” he says to her with his mouth full, “or there won’t be any left. Want to borrow my knife?”

And Alexander was remembering being in a transit camp after Colditz. There was no food for the two hundred men, who were contained within a barbed wire rectangular perimeter with guards on high posts in the four corners. No food except the horse that every day at noon the guards killed and left in the middle of the starving mess of men with knives. They would give the men sixty seconds with the horse, and then they would open fire. Alexander only survived because he would head immediately for the horse’s mouth and cut out the tongue, hide it in his tunic and then crawl away. It would take him forty seconds. He did it six times, shared the tongue with Ouspensky. Pasha was gone.

Tatiana stood in front of Alexander, leaning against the rail of the deck and listening to the water. He smoked. She drank her tea.

“So what’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Why did you eat by yourself?”

“I didn’t want to be eating dinner with you looking at me with your judging eyes. Don’t want to be judged, Tania”—he pointed at her—“most of all by you. And today, thanks to Ant, I had an unpleasant and unwanted conversation with a crippled Jewish man from Holland who mistook me for a brother in arms only to learn I fought for a country that handed over half of the Polish Jews and all of the Ukrainian Jews to Hitler.”

“I’m not judging you, darling.”

“I’m good for nothing,” Alexander said. “Not even polite conversation. You may be right about me not being able to rebuild my life working off Mel’s boats, but I’m not good for anything else. I don’t know how to be anything. In my life I’ve had only one job—I was an officer in the Red Army. I know how to carry weapons, set mines in the ground, drive tanks, kill men. I know how to fight. Oh, and I know how to burn down villages wholesale. That’s what I know. And I did this all for the Soviet Union!” he exclaimed, staring into the water, not looking at Tatiana, who stood on the deck, staring at him. “It’s completely fucked up,” he went on. “I’m yelling at Anthony because we have to pretend I’m not what I am. I have to lie to deny what I am. Just like in the Soviet Union. Ironic, no? There I denied my American self, and here I deny my Soviet self.” He flicked his ash into the water.

“But, Shura, you’ve been other things besides a soldier,” Tatiana said, unable to address the truth of the other things he was saying to her.

“Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he snapped. “I’m talking about living a life.”

“Well, I know, but you’ve managed before,” she whispered, turning her body away from him to herself look out onto the dark bay. Where was Anthony to interrupt the conversation she realized belatedly she didn’t want to have? Alexander was right: there were many things she would rather not have out. He couldn’t talk about anything, and she didn’t want to. But now she was in the thick of it. She had to. “We lived a life in Lazarevo,” she said.

“It was a fake life,” said Alexander. “There was nothing real about it.”

“It was the realest life we knew.” Stung at his bitter words, she sank down to the deck.

“Oh, look,” he said dismissively, “it was what it was, but it was a month! I was going back to the front. We pretended we were living while war raged. You kept house, I fished. You peeled potatoes, made bread. We hung sheets on the line to dry, almost as if we were living. And now we’re trying it in America.” Alexander shook his head. “I work, you clean, we dig potatoes, we shop for food. We break our bread. We smoke. We talk sometimes. We make love.” He paused as he glanced at her, remorsefully and yet—accusingly? “Not Lazarevo love.”

Tatiana lowered her head, their Lazarevo love tainted by the Gulag.

“Is any of it going to give me another chance to save your brother?” he asked.

“Nothing is going to change what cannot be changed,” she replied, her head close to her knees. “All we can do is change what can be.”

“But, Tania, don’t you know that the things that torture you most are the things you cannot fix?”

“That I know,” she whispered.

“And do I judge you? Let’s see,” said Alexander, “what about taking ice away from the borders of your heart? Is that changeable, you think? No, no, don’t shake your head, don’t deny it. I know what used to be there. I know the wide-eyed joyous sixteen-year-old you once were.”

Tatiana hadn’t shaken her head. She bowed her head; how different.

“You once skipped barefoot through the Field of Mars with me. And then,” said Alexander, “you helped me drag your mother’s body on a sled to the frozen cemetery.”

“Shura!” She got up off the deck on her collapsing legs. “Of all the things we could talk about—”

“On the sled dragged,” he whispered, “your entire family! Tell me you’re not still on that ice in Lake—”

“Shura! Stop!” Her hands went over her ears.

Grabbing her, removing her hands from her head, Alexander brought her in front of him. “Still there,” he said almost inaudibly, “still digging new ice holes to bury them in.”

“Well, what about you?” Tatiana said to him in a lifeless voice. “Every single night reburying my brother after he died on your back.”

“Yes,” Alexander said in his own lifeless voice, letting her go. “That is what I do. I dig deeper frozen holes for him. I tried to save him and I killed him. I buried your brother in a shallow grave.”

Tatiana cried. Alexander sat and smoked—his way of crying—poison right in the throat to quell the grief.

“Let’s go live in the woods, Tania,” he said. “Because nothing is going to make you skip next to me again while walking through the Summer Garden. I’m not the only one who’s gone. So let’s go make fish soup over the fire in our steel helmet, let’s both eat and drink from it. Have you noticed? We have one pot. We have one spoon. We live as if we’re still at war, in the trench, without meat, without baking real bread, without collecting things, without nesting. The only way you and I can live is like this: homeless and abandoned. We have it off with the clothes on our back, before they start shooting again, before they bring reinforcements. That’s where we still are. Not on Lovers Key but in a trench, on that hill in Berlin, waiting for them to kill us.”