Tatiana and Alexander (27 page)

“A little trip to your cathouse, maybe,” said Alexander, his lips devouring her laughing face.

Stop, stop, stop.

He was teaching her how to fire a pistol. She was a reluctant—“and poor”—student. “Attention! You are completely not paying attention.”

“I am.”

He nudged her with his hand. “You would make a terrible soldier. You don’t listen, you don’t obey. They’d throw you out of boot camp. Let’s try it again. Where’s the safety?”

She showed him.

“Where’s the magazine catch?”

She showed him.

“Where’s the hammer? Where do the bullets go? Do you remember how to put a new magazine in?”

She popped the magazine catch, pulled the old clip out, snapped the new clip in place, cocked the hammer and with both hands aimed the pistol at a tree. From behind her he reached over and took the gun away. “If you fire it, we’ll lose dinner for a week. All the fish will leave.”

“I see.” She jumped up and down. “So how did I do?”

“You get good marks for memory but you completely fail on attitude.”

Saluting him, she stood to attention. “Yes, sir. What’s the punishment for poor attitude?” She grinned and then burst out laughing and ran away.

Tania is across from him on the wood floor in front of the fire in their cabin. It has rained all morning and afternoon, it is nearing dinner time,
which she is supposed to be preparing, but Alexander isn’t letting her go—until he wins one, just
one
idiotic game of dominoes. She asks him, “You have one-ones,” almost like it’s not a question. And he says yes! because one-ones start the game and give you an advantage. But he has said that before. They’ve been playing since one. They must have played 40 times. Maybe 50. He’s had one-ones and two-twos, he’s had, in a seeming impossibility, all seven double tiles at once. He’s had every combination of tiles imaginable. He has not won. Alexander
cannot
believe it. “Wouldn’t the law of averages swing my way just
once
?” he demands of Tatiana who smiles sweetly across the floor.

“Husband, I think your luck is changing.”

“You think?”

“I’m almost positive.”

She is wearing a knee-length skirt and a blue cardigan over a yellow shirt. Her hair is swept up on top of her head, falling into her face. She looks warm and small. Alexander feels the aching in the pit of his stomach. Not even bothering to study her tiles, she is merrily humming, sitting with her legs drawn up. If he weren’t so intent on winning, he would ask her to pull up her skirt a little to let him peek.

“But I just want to say, Shura,” says Tatiana philosophically, “that you can’t win everything.”

“Watch me.”

“Do I complain when you always beat me across the river?” she asks. “When you catch the perch with your bare hands and I can’t? When you unfairly beat me at arm wrestling just because you’re bigger? And what about poker? Do I complain when you always beat me at strip poker?” She grins, and Alexander wants to fall on top of her that instant.

“Actually, yes, you do complain,” he says, his voice deepening an octave. “And I don’t want to win everything. I want to win one lousy game out of fifty, is that too much to ask?”

Her eyes twinkling, she gets all demure. “Would you like me to
let
you win, darling?”

“That’s it,” he exclaims. She laughs. “I’m winning this game, Tania, I don’t care what kind of black magic you weave over my tiles.”

Alexander comes close. Very close. He has one tile left when she lays down her last and claps joyously, falling back on the floor. Her hitched-up skirt lifts, exposing the flushed backs of her bare thighs, her sheer underwear. He watches her a moment and then falls on top of her.

“Shura, dinner!” She is laughing, feral, trying to get away, and does,
and bolts out the door into the clearing and he chases her down to the river in the gloomy dusk, in the miserable rain. He catches her as she is about to dive in, clothes on, into the Kama.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he says, lifting her into his arms. “Not this time.”

Squealing, she struggles against him, cheerfully and symbolically. He carries her wet inside the house, kicks the door shut behind him and, setting her down, pulls all the blankets and pillows down on the floor in front of the fire.

“Shura, dinner!” she repeats mock-plaintively.

“No, Tania,
me.
”

It is very warm in the cabin.

Undressing her, he lays her naked on the blanket and, undressing himself, lies down next to her.

“One of two things is going to happen after I’m done with you,” he says in his most soothing erotic voice. Tatiana can’t take it; she moans.

“That’s right, one of two,” he says, caressing her trembling body. “I am going to make love to you until you either beg me to stop, or promise me that you will
never
and I mean, never, play dominoes with me again.”

She closes her eyes as her hands reach for him, grasp for him. “I’ll tell you right now,” she whispers. “I will not be begging you to stop.”

“We’ll just see about that,” says Alexander.

Stop time, stop time, stop time.

One less day. In the late evening, Tatiana climbed into his lap. “No, no, don’t stop reading,” she purred, snuggling up to him. “I’m cold.” She curled into his chest. Enfolding her in his arms, Alexander resumed reading, but only every tenth word was getting through because she was nestled against him, and her silky hair was rubbing against his neck, his throat, his jawbone. Alexander listened to her breath. It was rhythmic. He put the book down and peeked at her. Her eyes were closed.

An aching tenderness filled him. He sat, not moving, inhaling her sleeping soapy feminine smell. She fit into him like a cat under his chin,
on his collarbone, her legs tucked in over him, she was warming him as he warmed her. He wanted to squeeze her closer to him but didn’t want to do anything to wake her up. Unlike him, she was a light sleeper, and he knew when she got up, she would get off his lap.

Minutes, crystalline, wet, chilly, breathless minutes, and the time tick tock, tick tock, it moved, without a watch, without a clock, without the chime of the hour, the bell of the church, but with every sunrise, every sunset, with the waning cycle of the moon it steamrolled ahead without a backward glance.

How many days left? He didn’t want to think about it. When they got married they had twenty-six days in front of them and they said, oh, we’ve been married three days, five days, ten days. But now Tatiana had stopped talking about it, and Alexander was thinking, how many days
left
?

Dear Tania. I am so happy, yet I’ve never been more miserable in my whole life. Can you possibly understand? You with your wings of joy, can you understand what you carry on your shoulders, and how heavy I am? No, you are made of gossamer, nothing can weigh you down, not even me. You float, while I founder—in my fear, in my folly, in my fierce weakness.

A short quake went through her, and she opened her eyes. “Oh,” she murmured. “Did I fall asleep?”

“Shh,” he said. “Don’t get up.”

“How long have I been on you?”

“Not long enough. Stay here,” he said quietly. “Stay. I’ll sit up and you bend your head and sleep on me. I’ll hold you all night.”

“And tomorrow you won’t be able to walk, your back will be so bad,” she replied. She tickled his neck. They sat. “Well? Are we just going to sit here, or do you plan to do your husbandly duty?”

“We’re just going to sit here.”

Her fingers caressed his neck, her lips kissed his throat, her hips nested into his lap. “What’s the matter?” she asked, nuzzling him. “Come on. Let me make you happy.”

“I
am
happy.”

“Happier. Lie down,” she whispered.

When they roughhoused, Tatiana was as assertive as a cougar, but during lovemaking, Alexander couldn’t get her to be anything but intemperately tender with him. “Harder,” he would tell her. “Touch me harder, Tatia. Don’t be so gentle with me.”

“Shura…” The fire flickered its harvest moonlight around the cabin. She stroked his face with her gentle fingers, her tongue ran in smooth circles around his lips, her fingers sloped down to his neck and throat and caressed his chest, lightly circled his upper arms where she rested before continuing. “I love your arms,” she whispered. “I keep imagining you holding me with them.”

“You don’t have to imagine,” Alexander whispered back. “I’ll hold you with them right now.”

“You lie still.” She continued to caress his chest and his stomach; her fingers were silky and fragile, like small nightingales with webbed feet.

“Tatia,” he whispered. “I’m dying.”

“No,” she said, moving lower. “Not yet.”

“Yes, yet,” he replied. “Come on, don’t make a grown man beg.”

Adoring and worshipful, groaning from pleasure, she was bent over him, breathing over him, murmuring. “God, Shura, you are—I love you, I can’t take it.”

She
couldn’t take it? His eyes shut, he clasped her head between his hands.

A few days. A few nights. Later, later. Tomorrow. The next day, the next evening, another breakfast, a waning quarter-moon night.

She sat on the blanket every night before the fire he built outside in the clearing, and called him to her. And he would come, like a lamb to the slaughter, and lie down and put his head into the lion’s lap and she would sit over him and stroke his face, and murmur. Every night she murmured to him, soothing him with her lilting stories or her questions, or her jokes, and sometimes she sang to him. Lately all she sang to him was “Moscow Nights”:

“Shura, are you hungry?”

“No.” They were sitting side by side. He wasn’t looking at her.

“You sure? We haven’t eaten since six, and it’s—”

“I said no.”

Silence. “Are you thirsty? Want another cup of tea?”

“No, thank you,” he said a little gentler.

“What about a little vodka?” She nudged him. “I’ll drink with you.”

“No, Tania. I don’t want anything.”

“Can I get you a cigarette?”

“Tania!” he exclaimed. “I’m fine. Believe me, if there is something I want, I’ll let you know, all right?”

He felt her body tense. She took her hands away. He put them back. “I want you to continue to touch me, I don’t want to move, or have you move. I’m fine, right here.” He didn’t look at her.

“Come here, darling,” she said. “Come. Put your head on me.”

The lion spoke. The lamb obeyed.

His head was in her lap and she was lightly tickling his neck and murmuring.

“Tania, can you just stop?” he whispered. “Can you just quit for a second? Please. I can’t take you.”

She cradled him, bending over him, kissing his hair. He felt her breasts soft against his head. “Shura…Shura…” she purred in her sing-song voice. “Husband man, lovely man, big man, soldier man, beautiful man, Tania’s man…Shura, beloved man, adored man, worshipped man, alive man, Shura…”

Alexander couldn’t speak.

“Shura, listen. Look at me, and listen. Are you listening?”

“Yes,” he said, opening his eyes and looking up.

Her eyes were twinkling. She cleared her throat. “In the year 2000, three crocodiles lie on a river bank. One says, ‘We were green once.’ The other one says, ‘Yes, and we could swim.’ The third one says indignantly, ‘Enough of this. Stop wasting your time. Let’s fly around and gather some honey!’”

Laughing, Alexander put his hands to his face. The crocodiles might not have known what they were, but he knew very well what he was.

“Shura, stop, come on now. Don’t laugh yet. My mission is to make you laugh until you cry.” Tatiana peeled his hands away from his face and said, “A husband says to his wife—”

“Please, no more.”

“A husband says to his wife, ‘Dear, did you hear the rumor that the postman has had all the women in the village except one?’ And his wife exclaims, ‘Oh, I bet it’s that stuck-up Mira in hut number thirty!’”

Alexander laughed. “Okay, here is mine: ‘A pest is a man you’d rather make love to than explain why you’d rather not.’”

Tatiana hugged him and said, “And here’s mine: ‘Honey, what do you prefer—my beautiful body or my beautiful face?’”

“Your sense of humor,” returned Alexander, holding her to him until she couldn’t breathe. Nine days left, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Couldn’t.

She was struggling with a large basket of wet clothes near the water while he sat on the bench smoking. He had been hacking away at the forest all morning, swinging the axe at the branches as if it were some kind of absolution from his sins. He spent three hours making kindling bundles for her, because he knew it would get cold at night after he had left. But he was upset with her—again. She had been gone all morning, helping the old women clean their house, or plant, or fuck knows what else.

Alexander watched her resentfully as she struggled with their wet sheets. Tatiana couldn’t lift the heavy basket to bring it to the line. He watched her and smoked. Finally she turned around, saw him sitting on the bench and looked surprised and then disheartened.

“Shura,” she called to him reproachfully, motioning him to her. “What are you doing? Come and help me.”

He didn’t move.

“Shura!”

Alexander got up and walked over. Without looking at her, he swung the basket up with one hand and carried it to the line, where he dropped it on the ground and went back to the bench. As he turned to sit down, Tatiana was standing in front of him.

“What?” she said. “What
now
?”

“Don’t give me the ‘what now,’ all right?”

“What?” she said. “What did I do too much of, or not enough of?”

He opened his mouth, but her hand went over it as she brought her face to his and said quietly, “Stop it. Stop yourself before you say something you will have to apologize for in ten seconds.” She held her hand over his mouth and then kissed his forehead. Patting him lightly on the cheek, she went to hang the laundry, leaving him dumbfounded and stung by conscience.