The Summer Garden (26 page)

“Conspiracy to what?” Tatiana said in a small voice.

“I can’t believe Alexander is allowing this.”

There was silence from Tatiana.

“Oh, my God,” Vikki said slowly. “He doesn’t
know
?”

Silence from Tatiana. Her choices were narrowing. What if there was a wiretap on Vikki’s phone? They’d know where she was, at which B&B, in which valley. Unable to speak any longer, she just hung up.

She called Jean and said she wasn’t feeling well. Jean complained—money talking—and insisted that Tatiana come in regardless of how she was feeling. They had words. Tatiana said, “I quit,” and hung up on her, too.

She couldn’t believe she just quit. What in the world was she going to tell Alexander?

She and Anthony took a bus to San Francisco, where she thought she would be anonymous, but as soon as she heard the streetcar’s stop bell, she knew the sound would be pretty distinct, even to someone living in Washington DC. She went to a wet cold park on the shores of San Francisco Bay, where there were no rails and no clanging, just screaming seagulls, and from a payphone during the late morning called Sam who was still at home.

“Sam?”

“Who is this?”

“It’s me, Sam.”

“Oh my God. Tania.”

“Sam—”

“OH. MY. GOD.”

“Sam—”

“Oh my God.”

“Sam…”

“Seventeen months, Tania! Do you know what you’ve done? You’re costing me my job! And you’re costing that husband of yours his freedom!”

“SAM—”

“I told you both when he first came back—a debriefing. So simple. Tell us about your life, Captain Barrington. In your own words. A two-hour conversation with minor officials, so easy, so nice; we stamp his file closed, we offer him college tuition, cheap loans, job placement.”

“Sam.”

“And instead? During this unbelievably tense time—have you not been reading the papers?—his file, his
OPEN
file has traveled from my desk, up to the Secretary of State, across to Secretary of Defense, across to the Justice Department. He’s got J. Edgar Hoover himself looking for him! This Alexander Barrington, who was a
major
in the Red Army, whose father was a Communist—who let him in? You can’t be a commissioned officer in the Red Army without being a Soviet citizen and a member of the Communist Party. How did a person like that get a U.S. passport?
Who
approved that? Meanwhile, Interpol is looking for an Alexander Belov…they say he killed sixty-eight of their men while escaping from a military prison. And even HUAC got into this. Now you’ve got them on your back, too! They want to know, is he theirs or ours? Where is his allegiance—now, then, ever? Is he a loyalty risk? Who
is
this man? And no one can find him even to ask him a simple question—why?”

“Sam!”

“Oh, what have you done, Tatiana? What have you—”

She hung up the phone and sank to the ground. She didn’t know what to do. For the rest of the morning, she sat catatonically on the dewy grass in the fog of the San Francisco Bay while Anthony made friends and played on the swings.

What to do?

Alexander was the only one who could lead her out of this morass, but he would not run from anything. He was not on her side.

And yet he was the only one on her side.

Tatiana saw herself opening the windows on Ellis Island, the first morning she arrived on the boat, after the night her son was born. Not since then had she felt so abandoned and alone.

After extracting a solemn oath from Anthony not to tell his father where they had been, she spent two hours after they got back to Napa poring over the map of California, almost as if it were a map of Sweden and Finland that the Soviet soldier Alexander Belov once pored over, dreaming of escape.

She had to steel herself not to shake. That was the hardest thing. She felt so unsound.

The first thing Alexander said when he walked through the door was, “What happened to you? Jean told me you quit.”

She managed a nice pasty smile. “Oh, hi. Hungry? You must be. Change, and let’s go eat.” She grabbed Anthony.

“Tania! Did you quit?”

“I’ll tell you at dinner.” She was putting on her cardigan.

“What? Did someone offend you? Say something to you?” His fists clenched.

“No, no, shh, nothing like that.” She didn’t know how she was going to talk to him. When Anthony was with them, it was impossible to have a serious conversation about serious things. Her work was going to have to be quick and subtle. So it was over dinner and wine in the common dining room, at a withdrawn table in the corner, with Anthony coloring in his book, that she said, “Shura, I did quit. I want you to quit, too.”

He sat and considered her. His brow was furled.

“You’re working too hard,” she said.

“Since when?”

“Look at you. All day in the dank basement, working in cellars…what for?”

“I don’t understand the question. I have to work somewhere. We have to eat.”

Chewing her lip, Tatiana shook her head. “We still have money—some of it left over from your mother, some of it from nursing, and in Coconut Grove you made us thousands carousing with your boat women.”

“Mommy, what’s carousing?” said Anthony, looking up from his coloring.

“Yes, Mommy, what’s carousing?” said Alexander, smiling.

“My point is,” Tatiana went on, poker-faced, “that we don’t need you to break your back as if you’re in a Soviet labor camp.”

“Yes, and what about your dream of a winery in the valley? You don’t think that’s back-breaking work?”

“Yes…” she trailed off. What to say? It was just last week in Carmel that they’d had that wistful conversation. “Perhaps it’s too soon for that dream.” She looked deeply down into her plate.

“I thought you wanted to settle here?” Alexander said in confusion.

“As it turns out, less than I thought.” She coughed, stretching out her hand. He took it. “You’re away from us for twelve hours a day and when you come back you’re exhausted. I want you to play with Anthony.”

“I do play with him.”

She lowered her voice. “I want you to play with me, too.”

“Babe, if I play with you any more, my sword will fall off.”

“What sword, Dad?”

“Anthony, shh. Alexander, shh. Look, I don’t want you to fall asleep at nine in the evening. I want you to smoke and drink. I want you to read all the books and magazines you haven’t read, and listen to the radio, and play baseball and basketball and football. I want you to teach Anthony how to fish as you tell him your war stories.”

“Won’t be telling those any time soon.”

“I’ll cook for you. I’ll play dominoes with you.”

“Definitely no dominoes.”

“I’ll let you figure out how I always win.” A Sarah Bernhardt-worthy performance.

Shaking his head, he said slowly, “Maybe poker.”

“Absolutely. Cheating poker then.”

Rueful Russian Lazarevo smiles passed their faces.

“I’ll take care of you,” she whispered, the hand he wasn’t holding shaking under the table.

“For God’s sake, Tania…I’m a man. I can’t not work.”

“You’ve never stopped your whole life. Come on. Stop running with me.” The irony in that made her tremble and she hoped he wouldn’t notice. “Let me take care of you,” Tatiana said hoarsely, “like you know I ache to. Let me do for you. Like I’m your nurse at the Morozovo critical care ward. Please.” Tears came to her eyes. She said quickly, “When there’s no more money, you can work again. But for now…let’s leave here. I know just the place.” Her smile was so pathetic. “
Out of my stony griefs, Bethel I’ll raise,”
she whispered.

Alexander was silently contemplating her, puzzled again, troubled again.

“I honestly don’t understand,” he said. “I thought you liked it here.”

“I like you more.”

CHAPTER FIVE
Bethel Island, 1948

Tilting at Windmills

They said farewell to the bittersweet sickly heady scent
of ripened effervescent grapes, got into their Nomad and left. Tatiana navigated them south and east of Vianza to lose themselves in the flatness of a thousand square miles of the California Delta, amid the islands that were so close to sea level, some would get flooded every time it rained. A hundred miles from the valley of the wine, at the mouth of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers, they found tiny Bethel Island and that’s where they stopped.

Bethel Island. Surrounded by river channels, levees, and antediluvian marsh. Nothing moved in any direction except the herons. The canals were made of glass. The cold November air was still as if it were about to storm.

It didn’t even seem like part of the same country, yet unmistakably was America. On Dutch Slough they rented a wood shack with a long L-shaped dock that jutted out onto the canal. The house had what they needed. A room of their own, and a bathroom. Across the canal was nothing but plains of fields and the horizon.

“Looks like Holland,” Alexander said as they unpacked.

“Would you like to go to Holland someday?” she asked, busy nesting.

“I’m never under
any
circumstances leaving America. How did you find this place?”

“Looked at a map.”

“So now you’re a cartographer, too?” Alexander grinned. “Would you like a glass of wine, my little geologist, capitalist, cartographer?” He had brought a case of bubbly with them.

The next day at precisely eight in the morning, the mailman on a passing boat barge hooted his horn into their bedroom window. Introducing himself as Mr. Shpeckel, he asked if they would be getting any mail. They said no. But perhaps Aunt Esther wanted to send Anthony a Christmas present? Tatiana said no. They would call Esther at Christmas; that would have to be good enough.

Even though there was going to be no mail, Shpeckel still came by every morning at eight, tooting his horn into their windows just to let them know they had no mail—and to say hello to Alexander, who in his usual military manner was already up, washed and brushed and dressed, and out on the deck with a fishing line. The canals harbored prehistoric sturgeon and Alexander was trying to catch one.

Shpeckel was a 66-year-old man who had lived in Bethel for twenty years. He knew everyone. He knew their business, he knew what they were doing on his island. Some were lifers like him, some vacationers, and some were runners.

“How do you know which are which?” asked Alexander one afternoon when Shpeckel was done with his water route. Alexander had invited him in for a drink.

“Oh, you can always tell,” Shpeckel replied.

“So which ones are we?” Alexander asked, pouring him a glass of vodka, which Shpeckel had admitted to never having before.

They clinked and drank. Alexander knocked his back. Shpeckel carefully sipped his like a mug of tea.

“You are runners,” said Shpeckel, finally downing his and gasping. “Egads, man, I wouldn’t drink this stuff anymore. It’s going to set you on fire. Come to the Boathouse with us on Friday night. We drink good old beer there.”

Alexander politely declined. “But you’re wrong about us. Why do you say we’re runners? We’re not runners.”

Shpeckel shrugged. “Well, I’ve been wrong before. How long are you staying?”

“I have no idea. Not long, I think.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“Hunting and gathering,” he said. Tatiana had gone alone to the store to buy food. She always went alone, dismissing Alexander’s offers of help. “I didn’t catch any sturgeon today.”

There were other fish in the waters. Striped bass, black bass, catfish—and perch. The perch was a Russian fish—here all the way from the Kama River, Alexander thought with amusement as it trembled on his line. Tatiana didn’t mention the existence of Russian perch in American waters as she cleaned it and cooked it and served it. And Alexander didn’t mention that she didn’t mention it.

He did mention, however, what Shpeckel had said to him. “Imagine that, calling us runners. We’re the most rootlessly rooted people I know. We tool around, find a spot, then don’t move from it.”

“He
is
being silly,” she agreed.

“Did you get me a newspaper?”

Tatiana said she had forgotten. “But the Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk was just killed in a ‘fall’ from his office window following the Communist coup in Prague.” She sighed.

“Now my gloomy wife is also a newscaster and a Czechophile. What’s your interest in Masaryk?”

Downtrodden, Tatiana said, “A long time ago, in 1938, Jan Masaryk was the only one who stood up for his country when Czechoslovakia was about to be handed over to Hitler on a plate. He was hated by the Soviets, while Herr Hitler was admired by everyone. Then Hitler took his country, and now the Soviets took his life.” She looked away. “And the world has stood on its head.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Alexander said. “We don’t even have a radio in the house. Did you get a radio as I asked? I can’t keep going outside into the Nomad.”

She forgot that, too.

“Did you get me
Time
magazine?”

“Tomorrow, darling. Today I got you some nice American books from the 19th century.
The Wings of the Dove
from Henry James, ghost stories from Poe and the complete works of Mark Twain. If you like something a little more current, here is the excellent
The Everlasting Man
from 1923.”

The isolation was complete on their last frontier. The house they were living in had a name—on a plaque. It was called
Free
. The dock they fished on was called
My Prerogative
. The skies remained gunmetal gray with no sunshine day after day, and the blue herons hid behind the reeds in the fields across the canal, and the swans flew away in lonely formations. The stillness as far as the eye could see was vertical and horizontal.

Well, perhaps not horizontal, for they had a room of their own and a case of sparkling wine.

They drifted through the winter like river rats in the lost world downstream from Suisun Bay.

One March morning in 1948, Shpeckel, with a salute, said after sounding his bugle, “I guess I was wrong about you and your wife, Captain. I’m surprised. Few women can live this life, day in and day out.”