The Summer Garden (34 page)

After she put Ant in his bed, Tatiana went outside and stood in front of Alexander. He couldn’t look at her. “Tania, I simply can’t speak anymore. I’ll tell you everything tomorrow.”

“No, darling, tell me tonight.”

There was a long nicotine-stained silence. Then Alexander told Tatiana about Dennis Burck.

Tatiana, sitting on his lap, held him to her, tried to calm his frantic heart, but now she was the one who was shaking, having taken some of the frenzy he had been feeling onto herself. “Husband,” she said, “it’s not true.”

He instantly became defensive. He pushed her away and raised his voice. “How do
you
know?”

“Alexander, you don’t want to believe your mother survived eleven years in the worst prison the Soviets have built.”

“It’s not the worst prison,” he said by way of expiation. “It’s not bitterly cold there. Don’t you remember? It’s near Lazarevo.” His voice broke.

“Shura!” She grabbed him, brought him to her off the chair, her arms went around his shaking back. “It’s not true! She’s not there. She is not in their prison.” Her eyes were blazing. “Don’t you see why Burck is telling you this? So you will go back with him. As soon as you enter their territory, with their Soviet-permitted convoy,
you
’ll be taken to Perm-35. The convoy is for you. It’s a ruse, it’s fraud, it’s lies. It’s
meant
to enslave you.”

“Yes,” he said, feeling enslaved. “I know it doesn’t
seem
like it’s true. But, Tania…what if it is?”

“Darling,” she whispered, her begging eyes on him, “it’s not true.”

“It’s my mother!”

“It’s not true!”

In the camper next to a sleeping Anthony in their only bed, lying on his back, Alexander said quietly to her, “Maybe you’re right—Burck is not to be trusted. But don’t you think there is a
chance
that he could be telling the truth?”

“No.”

She was so sure. How could she be so sure?

“Four people told you she had died. One of them was Slonko. Don’t you think when monstrous Slonko was alone with you in your jail cell that he, to get you to admit you were Alexander Barrington, would have told you your mother was alive? ‘Tell me you’re the American we’ve been looking for, and I will personally let you see your mother’? Wouldn’t he have said that?”

“It could’ve been bluster.” Alexander put his arm over his face.

Tatiana took it away, putting her face over his, climbing on top of him.

“A man is talking to another man about his mother! Tell us who you are, Major Belov, and we will let your mother live. That’s bluster?”

“Yes.” He couldn’t help himself; he pushed her off him. She climbed right back.

“Burck wants you to acknowledge that what he’s saying
might
be true. He wants you to say it’s possible, and then he will immediately know you by your words. That for the silence of your own heart you will sell out everything you believe. And return to the Soviet Union with them. Don’t you remember Germanovsky in Sachsenhausen? Please. You don’t want to give them this, we’re done with them.”

“Are we?”

“Aren’t we?” she said ever so faintly.

He wanted to turn his face from her, but she wouldn’t let him.

They stared at each other in the dark.

Alexander spoke in a depleted voice. “If I went back, how could I help her?”

“You couldn’t. You would be dead. But you should comfort yourself with knowing he told you lies.”

“I have
no
fucking comfort. And you don’t know everything. You don’t. You wouldn’t be so cavalier if it were your mother.”

“I’m not cavalier,” Tatiana said. “Don’t hurt me. I’m never cavalier.”

His eyes stinging, Alexander wanted to apologize but couldn’t.

Tatiana whispered, “In my family I was closest to Pasha, not my mother. And I’ll tell you this—if Burck told me Pasha was still alive and was with the enemy in the Polish woods, I would have left him to God. I would not have sent
you
to go find him.”

“That’s a good thing, because as you know, I fucked it up.”

“You didn’t, darling,” Tatiana whispered. “You did all you could to rage against fate. Like I did to try to save Matthew Sayers. But every once in a blue while,” she continued, her voice barely an aching breath, “what we do, unfortunately, is just not enough.”

They fell quiet; struggling, stuporous but not quite asleep.

His mother, Gina Borghese, was seventeen when she left Italy to come to America to find a life fit for a modern, progressive young woman. She met Harold Barrington, as American as the Pilgrims; they fell in love—that fine-looking Italian and that fast-talking radical—fell in love, so unprogressive; they married, even worse. She changed her name, became Jane Barrington. They changed. She put away her abiding Catholicism. They became Communists. It felt so right. She was thirty-five when she finally had Alexander, her desperately wanted baby; it seemed less right to want something personal so badly. She was forty-six when they left for the Soviet Union. She was fifty-two when she was arrested. Now she would have been sixty-four. Could she live out twelve years in Perm-35, a feminist, a Communist, an alcoholic, a wife, Alexander’s mother? He had seen his father in his dreams. He had seen Tatiana. He had never seen his mother, not even as a ghostly breath on someone else’s voice to whisper to him,
She is gone your mother. She is never coming back.
He thought she was buried so deep in the recesses of his heart, and yet it took a shabby little man like Burck one word to uncover Alexander’s mother from her shallow grave.

Deep in the night Tatiana suddenly said, “You’re breathing so raw, Alexander. Don’t torture yourself. Can’t you see past the lies?”

“I can’t,” Alexander whispered, nearly breaking down. “Because I want it desperately to be true.”

“No, you don’t. Oh, Shura…”

“You should understand that better than anyone,” he said. “You who left our only child to go and find
me
when you thought I might be alive, because you wanted it desperately to be true. You didn’t leave
me
in the German woods.”

Her eyes were glistening. “It actually
was
true. You sent me word.”

“Oh, come on. Orbeli? You told me what you thought of my Orbeli.”

Her hands gripped his shoulders. “You said Orbeli, but the word was
faith
. I went because I believed. But this isn’t even your mother’s
one
vague word. This is the lying word of a lackey who’s betraying his country.”

He held her in desperation. “I just can’t see the truth of anything anymore.”

“Sometimes I can’t either.” She looked into his face in the blue of night. “You and your lying face and your damn Orbeli,” she whispered.

Alexander moved her off him, laid her down, was over her, was pressed into her, crushing her. Anthony was right there, he didn’t care, he was trying to inhale her, trying to absorb her into himself. “All this time you were stepping out in front of me, Tatiana,” he said. “Now I finally understand. You hid me on Bethel Island for eight months. For two years you hid me and deceived me—to
save
me. I’m
such
an idiot,” he whispered. “Wretch or not, ravaged or not, in a carapace or not, there you still were, stepping out for me, showing the mute mangled stranger
your
brave and indifferent face.”

Her eyes closed, her arms tightened around his neck. “That stranger is my life,” she whispered. They crawled away from Anthony, from their only bed, onto a blanket on the floor, barricading themselves behind the table and chairs. “You left our boy to go find me, and this is what you found…” Alexander whispered, on top of her, pushing inside her, searching for peace.

Crying out underneath him, Tatiana clutched his shoulders.

“This is what you brought back from Sachsenhausen.” His movement was tense, deep, needful.
Oh God. Now there was comfort.
“You thought you were bringing back
him
, but, Tania, you brought back
me
.”

“Shura…you’ll have to do…” Her fingers were clamped into his scars.

“In you,” said Alexander, lowering his lips to her parted mouth and cleaving their flesh, “are the answers to all things.”

All the rivers flowed into the sea and still the sea was not full.

Alexander didn’t get in touch with Burck. The next day they met with Tom Richter, who could not hide his astonishment when he shook the delicate hand of Alexander’s ox-pulling wife, his slight, slim, unassuming, soft and smiling wife.

“I told you,” Sam said quietly to Richter. “Not what you expected.”

“It’s not possible! She looks like she’d be scared of a mouse! And look at her—she’s the size of a peanut!”

“Gentlemen,” said Alexander, coming from behind them and putting his hands over their shoulders, “are you
whispering
about my wife?”

The size of a peanut she might have been and certainly scared of mice, but the promise Tatiana extracted from Tom Richter was the size of the Giza Pyramid—her husband could join the reserves to go to a quiet army base and translate classified documents in a room; military intelligence behind secure closed doors was fine with her, combat support, if necessary, in the form of intel analysis, perhaps a little training and exercise, but not under any circumstances, for any reason, in any universe could he be pulled up to active duty. She said the wounds he and she received in his ten years at war rendered
her
incapable of
his
active combat.

Richter agreed and Alexander spent a month being interviewed and probed and classified and tested and trained at Fort Meade, Maryland, while waiting for the final reserve paperwork to go through. Finally he got a security clearance card and a commission as a captain in the U.S. Army Officer Reserve Corps. Richter even managed to get a sparkly replica of a Congressional Medal for Anthony to whom he had taken a real shine—and even more of a shine to a fantastically flirty though engaged-to-someone-else Vikki who had come to see her Tania and her boyzie-boy.

They had long dinners with Sam and Matt Levine and their wives, went sailing on the Chesapeake with Richter and Vikki. Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss was all anyone talked about. And Dennis Burck quietly and without a trace left the federal government.

After two months with Richter, Tatiana and Alexander went on their way—to Wisconsin, South Dakota, Montana, to the woods in Oregon—through the land of lupine and lotus, to find their way.

FIRST INTERLUDE: SAIKA KANTOROVA, 1938

We children live in a frightening time for Russia.

A
LEXANDER
B
LOK

Pasha

Pasha Metanov always cleaned his own fish
, even when he was a little boy. He didn’t ask Babushka to clean it, nor even Mama, who would’ve cleaned his fish, his teeth, his feet and his britches for the rest of his life if he let her—because Pasha was Mama’s only son. He didn’t ask Tania to clean it because he knew she wouldn’t—and didn’t know how. When he was five he asked Deda to show him how to clean the fish, and from then on, he took care of his own dirty work.

The evening after meeting Saika they were having fish soup made out of Pasha’s bass, just the three of them. Pasha caught it and cleaned it and Dasha cooked it. Tania, who neither caught nor cleaned nor cooked, read.

The three siblings were by themselves. Deda, their grandfather, had gone fishing alone while it was still light, and Babushka, their grandmother, was visiting Berta and her mother, Blanca, down the street. “So what do we think? Do we like our new neighbors?” Dasha asked. “Stefan is such a nice boy.”

“He could have no teeth, Dasha, and you’d think he was a nice boy,” said Pasha. “Saika, now
that’s
a nice girl.” He smiled.

Tatiana said nothing. She was picking the bones out of the fish.

“Oh, no,” said Pasha. “Oh no, oh no, oh no. Dasha, she’s already quiet. What is
wrong
with her? What is wrong with you?” he boomed. “You don’t like them?”

Tatiana’s mind on this windy June evening was full of the Catholic Queen Margot sacrificing her life to an arranged marriage to the Protestant Henry Navarre to unite the French Catholics and the French Protestants, believing she would never in her life find true love in the prison in which she lived. But Tatiana knew she would—and how. She wanted to get back to Margot and La Môle.

Her brother and sister stopped eating and stared at her.

“Did I say anything? I said nothing.”

“Your silence is screaming to us,” said Pasha.

“And
now
she says nothing,” Dasha said. “Before you couldn’t shut up with your stupid questions.”

“Oh, leave her alone, Dash. She’s just jealous.” Pasha grinned, banging Tatiana on the head with a wooden spoon.

The spoon flew out of his hands, hit by Tatiana’s quick, no-nonsense fist. “Pasha, if I was jealous of every girl you said hello to, I’d be green all day long.”

With a flare to her dancing brown eyes, Dasha said, “So what was with the inquisition earlier?”

“Just wanted to know where the Pavlovs went, that’s all,” said Tatiana.

“What do
you
care?”

“I wanted to know. What if I end up where they’re at?”

“I saw a large portrait of a blue peacock in their house!” exclaimed Pasha. “It struck me kind of funny.”

Tatiana jumped on top of the dining table and sat down on it cross-legged. Dasha yelled at her to get off. Tatiana didn’t move. “Exactly, Pasha!” she said. “They haven’t unpacked, they haven’t taken down the Pavlovs’ things, but they put up a portrait of a
peacock
. Funny indeed. You think maybe they’re ornithophiles?”

“Stefan is a little like a peacock.” Dasha smiled. “With that
fine
tail to draw me in like a peahen.”

“What about Mark, your boss?” Tatiana said casually. “Does he have a fine tail?”