The Summer Garden (105 page)

Alexander was thoughtful, contemplating the desert, the sky, the stars, the story. “If Anthony heard one word from your Lake Ilmen tale he would carry away from it two things. One: do not speak of your mysteries to your enemies. And two: have faith and stay alive long enough for someone to find you.”

Tatiana said quietly, “My own husband learned the latter well.”

“As you know, I need my mystic guide for both,” he said, squeezing her and getting off her lap. He stretched his big long body and pulled out his cigarettes. Getting up and stretching herself, Tatiana picked up his Zippo lighter and flicked it on for him. Bending to inhale, he cupped her hand, as she looked up at him, and he looked down at her.

They came back to bed and took off their clothes. She pleaded with him not to hold himself up, so she could feel his whole body, all his bones, all his wounds and the marks of his life on her, his big arms, his smooth chest, the ravages of war, all of him on top of her.

“Tania,” Alexander said when he was in her arms. This was their unimagined whisper. “I
have
to go to Vietnam to find him. Anthony won’t come out of it by himself. Like I couldn’t. Don’t you feel it?”

She said nothing.

“Something’s happened to him. You know it. I know it.”

She said nothing.

“This is slow death for me.” Glancing down at her, he said with a pained shrug, “Yes. I know.
You
did it. I let you go in Morozovo because I believed that you could bear anything. And I was right. But I can’t bear this. I’m not as strong as you. One way or another”—a strangled breath—“I have to bring him back.”

She said nothing.

“I know it’s Vietnam. I know it’s not a weekend in Yuma. I promised you I’d never go into active combat again. But I’ll come back.”

She said nothing.

“I have three other children. I’ll come back,” Alexander said. He had barely any voice left to speak the rest. “We can’t leave our boy in the woods, Tania,” he said. “Look at what’s been happening to us. We can’t continue living.”

“Shura, I don’t want you to go,” she whispered.

“I know. Not even for our son?”

“I don’t want you to go,” she repeated. “That’s all I feel.” She wanted to say something else—and didn’t. If she told him of her unspeakable fears, it wouldn’t be free will. She pulled him close. But he was already as close as he could be. Two metal bowls fitted into one another.

“
Ordo amoris
, Alexander.”

“
Ordo amoris
, Tatiana.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
In the Heart of Vietnam

Aykhal

He couldn’t give up the ghost. And now he was being sent away, all the way to outlying Aykhal, where she would never find him. He was told that the rules applying to him from hereon in were simple. If he was caught trying to escape, the guards who caught him were under strict orders to shoot to kill. They were done with him. And still he would admit to nothing, and he looked them in the face and denied his name. Past the fields, the Volga, the pines, the Urals. Through Kazan, across the Kama River, and his heart almost stopped beating while crossing it, remembering swimming across it, keeping his gaze back to make sure she didn’t get carried away by the current. She never did. Any current was all right with her. Through the Urals, to Sverdlovsk, and past it through the taiga. They were on the Central Siberian Plain, and the steppe, and past that, too, and now they were on the North Siberian Plateau, in the frozen tundra, and it was there before the mountains, before the Ob and the Amur, before turning south to Vladivostok, to China, to Vietnam, on the edge of nothing, in the middle of one road, one small indentation in the frozen earth known as the Rhone Valley, lay Aykhal. That would have been his ten years in exile after his twenty-five years in the Soviet prisons.

And he was going even farther than that now. Even farther than Aykhal.

Tatiana fretted over him before he left as if he were a five-year-old on his first day of school.

“Shura, don’t forget to wear your helmet wherever you go, even if it’s just down the trail to the river.

“Don’t forget to bring extra magazines. Look at this combat vest. You can fit more than five hundred rounds. It’s unbelievable. Load yourself up with ammo. But bring a few extra cartridges. You don’t want to run out.

“Don’t forget to clean your M-16 every day. You don’t want your rifle to jam.”

“Tatia, this is the third generation of the M-16. It doesn’t jam anymore. The gunpowder doesn’t burn as much. The rifle is self-cleaning.”

“When you attach the rocket bandolier, don’t tighten it too close to your belt, the friction from bending will chafe you, and then irritation follows, and then infection…

“…Bring at least two warning flares for the helicopters. Maybe a smoke bomb, too?”

“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Bring your Colt—that’s your lucky weapon—bring it, as well as the standard-issue Ruger. Oh, and I have personally organized your medical supplies: lots of bandages, four complete emergency kits, two QuikClots—no, I decided three. They’re light. I got Helena at PMH to write a prescription for morphine, for penicillin, for—”

Alexander put his hand over her mouth. “Tania,” he said, “do you want to just go yourself?”

When he took the hand away, she said, “Yes.”

He kissed her.

She said, “Spam. Three cans. And keep your canteen always filled with water, in case you can’t get to the plasma. It’ll help.”

“Yes, Tania.”

“And this cross, right around your neck. Do you remember the prayer of the heart?”

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

“Good. And the wedding band. Right around your finger. Do you remember the wedding prayer?”

“Gloria in Excelsis,
please
just a little more.”

“Very good. Never take off the steel helmet, ever. Promise?”

“You said that already. But yes, Tania.”

“Do you remember what the most important thing is?”

“To always wear a condom?”

She smacked his chest.

“To stop the bleeding,” he said, hugging her.

“Yes. To stop the bleeding. Everything else they can fix.”

“Yes, Tania.”

When Alexander arrived in Saigon on a military transport jet in November 1969, he thought he was dreaming someone else’s diluvian nightmare. It was raining so biblically hard, the plane couldn’t land. Alexander actually became worried they would run out of fuel, they were circling in the air so long. Finally they landed. So much for the hot and humid jungle. It was windy, cold and pouring.

Because the helicopter couldn’t land in the wind and rain, they couldn’t fly out to Kontum. Richter called, told him to sit tight. So he sat, smoking by the window of his hotel room, looking out onto Saigon Square, reading American newspapers. Mostly he paced the room—oh, he was good at that, pacing.

While drinking downstairs at the bar, a frazzled and wet Vietnamese woman approached him, told him she would give him boom boom for two American dollars. He declined. She told him he could sample for free but if he liked, he would pay. He declined. She offered him yum-yum for a dollar. He declined. She came back a few moments later, thrusting a small toddler into his face and saying, “My baby need food. Why you no give me piastres for yum-yum? I have to feed my baby.”

He gave her twenty American piastres and sent her on her way. Five minutes later she was walking up the stairs with another man, baby in hand. Alexander ordered another drink.

Wishing for the rain to end.

The nights were long. But the days when the rain didn’t end were even longer. He paced as if he were in his cell in Volkhov, in hell, pacing away what was left of his life. Despite all his presumptions at the time, a surprising lot had been left, which showed what he knew.

He wasn’t in charge, he had finally learned that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be drumming out his son’s life and his own life on the windowpane. He had telegraphed Tania, told her he’d arrived safely. He put his hand on the cold glass. Bar lights flickered down below in the wet night.

Why did you come? the weeping heavens seemed to be saying. It’s bad out here. We won’t let you pass.

There was too much time to think in his dark hotel room. He wondered if Tania could feel him from three continents away. He had not been in a hotel room alone…well, ever. He had been alone in many places—cold wet cells, on trains, in wet forests—but he had not experienced isolation like this since his solitary confinement in Sachsenhausen. It had been an instrument of torture and punishment. And he had not been alone since the door opened a crack, light streamed in, and a small slim shadow stood trembling in front of him.

After that, they lived in hotels and motels and rental homes and houseboats, and a mobile home that was preserved complete like a museum on the hilltop, and now they lived in a spotless stucco house that was clean and cool, where his bed was white and made, and she was always next to him. She never left him, except for those one hundred Friday nights—and somehow they managed to survive even that.

His hand remained fanned out on the damp, cold pane. Even now, in Saigon, he was not alone. Staggering comfort was always close, even in Vietnam, twelve thousand miles away from home.

He telegraphed her. “D
ESPERATE RAIN
. S
TILL IN
S
AIGON
.”

Three more days of rain went by.

She telegraphed him back. “S
UNNY AND HOT IN
N
OVEMBER
. S
TILL IN
P
HOENIX
.”

She telegraphed him again. “H
APPY
T
HANKSGIVING
.”

She telegraphed him again. “D
ECEMBER
L
ADIES
H
OME
J
OURNAL
. S
EEK
: 100 R
EASONS TO REJOICE
.”

He smiled. This is what he meant. She found a way even from twelve thousand miles away. In one of the news kiosks catering to the Americans, he found a December
Ladies Home Journal
, and the article she was referring to: “100 Places to Make Love,” and spent one happy day remembering some of those places.

Number 16, in a tent. Number 25, next to a fire; number 33, on top of a hill. At a rest area; on a picnic table; in a hammock; in a corn field; in a sleeping bag under the stars. On a boat on a lake; in a bath; in a barn; in the bed of a truck on a hot summer night. In the woods; in the woodshed; on the wood floor. During sunset and high noon. In the pool. On a beach,
almost
secluded; on a beach at night. In a car on a deserted road; at a drive-in movie theater. In a room with lit candles; in a big brass bed; in every room in your house; in a room at your friend’s house during a noisy party; and once during a quiet dinner party right before dessert. On a porch swing; on the playground swings; on a bobbing houseboat deck; in the core of the Grand Canyon; in luminescent, lilac-heather, never-forgot Bed and Breakfast. And last but not least, on top of the Maytag washer when it was in spin cycle.

One happy day. Then he was clawing his hair out again.

Richter called. Alexander said, “I don’t give a fuck if a tsunami comes and washes away the whole of South Vietnam. Tomorrow you’re getting me on that slick.”

Tomorrow it stopped raining. The sun shined as if it had never rained, as if the ground was just soggy with heavy morning dew. It got hot and muggy. Alexander choppered out with two young PFCs fresh from basic at Fort Bragg, plus two suppliers and two sergeants. The doors of the Huey remained open through the three-hour flight north. The young soldiers tried to engage Alexander in conversation, but he was looking down below him to the canopied countryside, trying to do Tatiana’s thing, trying to feel for his son under the blanket of trees and ancient pagodas and broken beaten open churches and French Catholic palace ruins, trying to find that rising smoke signal. The green covering looked too thick to land the helicopter but then the jungle ended, and rice valleys began. A rectangular, orderly swathe of man-made clearing was laid out below surrounded by distant mountains. A large military base etched out in symmetry in the freshly cut elephant grass in the central highlands, that was the MACV-SOG Command Control Central in Kontum, the chopper distressing the grass and dust underneath as it came in to land.

Richter was waiting for him. Alexander hadn’t seen Richter since Anthony’s graduation four and a half years earlier. They were both in green battle fatigues, both with striped and barred officers’ insignia at their shoulders, including sharpshooter badges, and rifle and machine-gun bars. Both had graying hair cut army short, Alexander’s mostly black, Richter’s mostly gone.

“I’m sorry to see you under these circumstances,” Richter said. “But, man, am I happy to see your face.” They shook strong hands, they smiled briefly. Richter’s smile subsided. “Come, let’s go have a drink, some grub,” he said. “You must be exhausted.”

“Exhausted from sitting around.”

“I know. Not very good at that, are you, Major?” Richter shook his head as they started walking. “Look how much gear you brought. You’re a lunatic. You know you can get anything you need here. Look at our supply points. Ground studies teams go out loaded for bear.”

Alexander nodded in acknowledgment of the bear metaphor. “I had no idea you were so well equipped. But I have to talk to you and Ant’s lieutenant ASAP, Tom.”

“Come,” Richter said, with a slightly resigned demeanor. They walked from the landing strip down to the row of well-maintained officers’ barracks. “Lieutenant Elkins and Sergeant Mercer
are
waiting for you. They can’t wait to meet you.”

The base, its perimeter wrapped by a fence and barbed wire, was organized and functional: a landing pad, a landing strip, a hospital, a mail room, officers’ barracks, enlisted barracks, command headquarters, many weapon sites, a training camp, all on flattened ground the size of three football fields.