Read the book: «The Summer Garden»

PAULLINA SIMONS

THE SUMMER

GARDEN

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006

Copyright © Paullina Simons 2005

Besame Mucho Written by Consuelo Velasquez © 1941 & 1943 P.H.A.M., Mexico Latin-American Music Pub. Co. Ltd, London. Used by permission

Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007162499

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2015 ISBN: 9780007390816

Version: 2017-09-25

Dedication

For Kevin, my own mystic guide

Epigraph

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down,Yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst …For there, they that carried us awaycaptive required of us a song,And they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying,Sing us one of the songs of Zion.How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?Psalm 137

The song of songs, which is Solomon’s.The Song of Solomon

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Book One: The Land of Lupine and Lotus

Chapter One: Deer Isle, 1946

Chapter Two: Coconut Grove, 1947

Chapter Three: Paradise Valley, 1947

Chapter Four: Vianza, 1947

Chapter Five: Bethel Island, 1948

Chapter Six: Jane Barrington, 1948

First Interlude: Saika Kantorova, 1938

Pasha

Book Two: Ithaca

Chapter Seven: Conjugal Compromises

Chapter Eight: The House that Balkman Built

Second Interlude: The Queen of Spades

Cousin Marina

Book Three: Dissonance

Chapter Nine: The Five-Year Plan

Chapter Ten: Blockade Girl

Chapter Eleven: Blue Christmas

Chapter Twelve: Gone Astray

Chapter Thirteen: The Summer Garden

Book Four: Moon Lai

Chapter Fourteen: The Man on the Moon

Chapter Fifteen: The Queen of Lake Ilmen

Chapter Sixteen: In the Heart of Vietnam

Chapter Seventeen: Kings and Heroes

Chapter Eighteen: Crossroads

Coda

One

Two

Three

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

BOOK ONE THE LAND OF LUPINE AND LOTUS

The Lotos blooms below the barren peakThe Lotos blows by every winding creek …Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an enqual mind,In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclinedOn the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

CHAPTER ONE
Deer Isle, 1946

The Carapace

Carapace n. a thick hard case or shell made of bone or chitin that covers part of the body of an animal such as a lobster.

Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at the end of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young woman dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling hands, sat on a bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.

By her side was a small boy, also eating ice cream, his a chocolate. They were casually chatting; the ice cream was melting faster than the mother could eat it. The boy was listening as she sang “Shine Shine My Star” to him, a Russian song, trying to teach him the words, and he, teasing her, mangled the verses. They were watching for the lobster boats coming back. She usually heard the seagulls squabbling before she saw the boats themselves.

There was the smallest breeze, and her summer hair moved slightly about her face. Wisps of it had gotten out of her long thick braid, swept over her shoulder. She was blonde and fair, translucent-skinned, translucent-eyed, freckled. The tanned boy had black hair and dark eyes, and chubby toddler legs.

They seemed to sit without purpose, but it was a false ease. The woman was watching the boats in the blue horizon single-mindedly. She would glance at the boy, at the ice cream, but she gawped at the bay as if she were sick with it.

Tatiana wants a drink of herself in the present tense, because she wants to believe there is no yesterday, that there is only the moment here on Deer Isle—one of the long sloping overhanging islands off the coast of central Maine, connected to the continent by a ferry or a thousand-foot suspension bridge, over which they came in their RV camper, their used Schult Nomad Deluxe. They drove across Penobscot Bay, over the Atlantic and south, to the very edge of the world, into Stonington, a small white town nested in the cove of the oak hills at the foot of Deer Isle. Tatiana—trying desperately to live only in the present—thinks there is nothing more beautiful or peaceful than these white wood houses built into the slopes on narrow dirt roads overlooking the expanse of the rippling bay water that she watches day in and day out. That is peace. That is the present. Almost as if there is nothing else.

But every once in a heartbeat while, as the seagulls sweep and weep, something intrudes, even on Deer Isle.

That afternoon, after Tatiana and Anthony had left the house where they were staying to come to the bay, they heard loud voices next door.

Two women lived there, a mother and a daughter. One was forty, the other twenty.

“They’re fighting again,” said Anthony. “You and Dad don’t fight.”

Fight!

Would that they fought.

Alexander didn’t raise a semitone of his voice to her. If he spoke to her at all, it was never above a moderated deep-well timbre, as if he were imitating amiable, genial Dr. Edward Ludlow, who had been in love with her back in New York—dependable, steady, doctorly Edward. Alexander, too, was attempting to acquire a bedside manner.

To fight would have required an active participation in another human being. In the house next door, a mother and daughter raged at each other, especially at this time in the afternoon for some reason, screaming through their open windows. The good news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. The bad news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. They had waited for him since he left for England in 1942, and now he was back.

He wasn’t participating in the fighting either. As Anthony and Tatiana came out to the road, they saw him parked in his wheelchair in the overgrown front yard, sitting in the Maine sun like a bush while his wife and daughter hollered inside. Tatiana and Anthony slowed down as they neared his yard.

“Mama, what’s wrong with him?” whispered Anthony.

“He was hurt in the war.” He had no legs, no arms, he was just a torso with stumps and a head.

“Can he speak?” They were in front of his gate.

Suddenly the man said in a loud clear voice, a voice accustomed to giving orders, “He can speak but he chooses not to.”

Anthony and Tatiana stopped at the gate, watching him for a few moments. She unlatched the gate and they came into the yard. He was tilted to the left like a sack too heavy on one side. His rounded stumps hung halfway down to the non-existent elbow. The legs were gone in toto.

“Here, let me help.” Tatiana straightened him out, propping the pillows that supported him under his ribs. “Is that better?”

“Eh,” the man said. “One way, another.” His small blue eyes stared into her face. “You know what I would like, though?”

“What?”

“A cigarette. I never have one anymore; can’t bring it to my mouth, as you can see. And they”—he flipped his head to the back—“they’d sooner croak than give me one.”

Tatiana nodded. “I’ve got just the thing for you. I’ll be right back.”

The man turned his head from her to the bay. “You won’t be back.”

“I will. Anthony,” she said, “come sit on this nice man’s lap until Mama comes back—in just one minute.”

Anthony was glad to do it. Picking him up, Tatiana placed him on the man’s lap. “You can hold on to his neck.”

After she ran to get the cigarettes, Anthony said, “What’s your name?”

“Colonel Nicholas Moore,” the man replied. “But you can call me Nick.”

“You were in the war?”

“Yes. I was in the war.”

“My dad, too,” said Anthony.

“Oh.” The man sighed. “Is he back?”

“He’s back.”

Tatiana returned and, lighting the cigarette, held it to Nick’s mouth while he smoked with intense deep breaths, as if he were inhaling the smoke not just into his lungs but into his very core. Anthony sat on his lap, watching his face inhale with relief and exhale with displeasure as if he didn’t want to let the nicotine go. The colonel smoked two in a row, with Tatiana bent over him, holding the cigarettes one by one to his mouth.

Anthony said, “My dad was a major but now he’s a lobsterman.”

“A captain, son,” corrected Tatiana. “A captain.”

“My dad was a major and a captain,” said Anthony. “We’re gonna get ice cream while we wait for him to come back to us from the sea. You want us to bring you an ice cream?”

“No,” said Nick, leaning his head slightly into Anthony’s black hair. “But this is the happiest fifteen minutes I’ve had in eighteen months.”

At that moment, his wife ran out of the house. “What are you doing to my husband?” she shrieked.

Tatiana scooped Anthony off the man’s lap. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said quickly.

“You won’t be back,” said Nick, gaping after her.

Now they were sitting on the bench eating ice cream.

Soon there was the distant squawk of gulls.

“There’s Daddy,” Tatiana said breathlessly.

The boat was a twenty-foot lobster sloop with a headsail, though most fishing boats were propelled by gas motors. It belonged to Jimmy Schuster, whose father, upon passing on, passed it on to him. Jimmy liked the boat because he could go out in it and trawl for lobsters on his own—a one-man job, he called it. Then his arm got caught in the pot hauler, the rope that pulls the heavy lobster traps out of the water. To free himself, he had to cut off his hand at the wrist, which saved his life—and him from going to war—but now, with no small irony, he needed deckhands to do the grunt work. Trouble was, all the deckhands had been in Hürtgen Forest and Iwo Jima the last four years.

Ten days ago Jimmy had got himself a deckhand. Today, Jimmy was in the cockpit aft, and the tall silent one was standing pin straight, at attention, in orange overalls and high black rubber boots, staring intently at the shore.

Tatiana stood from the bench in her white cotton dress, and when the boat was close enough, still a bay away, she flung her arm in a generous wave, swaying from side to side. Alexander, I’m here, I’m here, the wave said.

When he was close enough to see her, he waved back.

They moored the boat at the buyers’ dock and opened the catches on the live tanks. Jumping off the boat, the tall man said he would be right back to off-load and clean up and, rinsing his hands quickly in the spout on the dock, walked up from the quay, up the slope to the bench where the woman and the boy were sitting.

The boy ran down to him. “Hey,” he said and then stood shyly.

“Hey, bud.” The man couldn’t ruffle Anthony’s hair: his hands were mucky.

Under his orange rubber overalls, he was wearing dark green army fatigues and a green long-sleeved army jersey, covered with sweat and fish and salt water. His black hair was in a military buzzcut, his gaunt perspiring face had black afternoon stubble over the etched bones.

He came up to the woman in pristine white who was sitting on the bench. She raised her eyes to greet him—and raised them and raised them, for he was tall.

“Hey,” she said. It was a breathing out. She had stopped eating her ice cream.

“Hey,” he said. He didn’t touch her. “Your ice cream is melting.”

“Oh, I know.” She licked all around the wafer cone, trying to stem the tide but it was no use, the vanilla had turned to condensed milk and was dripping. He watched her. “I can never seem to finish it before it melts,” she muttered, getting up. “You want the rest?”

“No, thank you.” She took a few more mouthfuls before she threw the cone in the trash. He motioned to her mouth.

She licked her lips to clean away the remaining vanilla milk. “Better?”

He didn’t answer. “We’ll have lobsters again tonight?”

“Of course,” she said. “Whatever you want.”

“I still have to go back and finish.”

“Yes, of course. Should we, um, come down to the dock? Wait with you?”

“I want to help,” said Anthony.

Tatiana vigorously shook her head. She would not be able to get the fish smell off the boy.

“You’re so clean,” said Alexander. “Why don’t you stay here with your mother? I’ll be done soon.”

“But I want to help you.”

“Well, come down then, maybe we’ll find something for you to do.”

“Yes, nothing that involves touching fish,” muttered Tatiana.

She didn’t care much for Alexander’s job as a lobsterman. He reeked of fish when he returned. Everything he touched smelled of it. A few days ago, when she had been very slightly grumbling, almost teasing, he said, “You never complained in Lazarevo when I fished,” not teasing. Her face must have looked pretty crestfallen because he said, “There’s no other work for a man in Stonington. You want me to smell like something else, we’ll have to go somewhere else.”

Tatiana didn’t want to go somewhere else. They just got here.

“About the other thing …” he said. “I won’t bring it up again.”

That’s right, don’t bring up Lazarevo, their other moment by the sea near eternity. But that was then—in the old bloodsoaked country. After all, Stonington—with warm days and cool nights and expanses of still and salty water everywhere they looked, the mackerel sky and the purple lupines reflecting off the glass bay with the white boats—it was more than they ever asked for. It was more than they ever thought they would have.

With his one good arm, Jimmy was motioning for Alexander.

“So how did you do today?” Tatiana asked him, trying to make conversation as they headed down to the dock. Alexander was in his big heavy rubber boots. She felt impossibly small walking by his side, being in his overwhelming presence. “Did you have a good catch?”

“Okay today,” he replied. “Most of the lobsters were shorts, too small; we had to release them. A lot of berried females, they had to go.”

“You don’t like berried females?” She moved closer, looking up at him.

Blinking lightly, he moved away. “They’re good, but they have to be thrown back in the water, so their eggs can hatch. Don’t come too close, I’m messy. Anthony, we haven’t counted the lobsters. Want to help me count them?”

Jimmy liked Anthony. “Buddy! Come here, you want to see how many lobsters your dad caught today? We probably have a hundred lobsters, his best day yet.”

Tatiana leveled her eyes at Alexander. He shrugged. “When we get twelve lobsters in one trap and have to release ten of them, I don’t consider that a good day.”

“Two legals in one trap is great, Alexander,” said Jimmy. “Don’t worry, you’ll get the hang of this. Come here, Anthony, look into the live-well.”

Keeping a respectful distance, Anthony peered into the tank where the lobsters, already banded and measured, were crawling on top of one another. He told his mother he didn’t care much for their claws, even bound. Especially after what his father told him about lobsters: “They’re cannibals, Ant. Their claws have to be tied up or they would eat each other right in the tank.”

Anthony said to Jimmy, his voice trying not to crack, “You already counted them?”

Alexander shook his head at Jimmy. “Oh, no, no,” Jimmy quickly said. “I was busy hosing down the boat. I just said approximately. Want to count?”

“I can’t count past twenty-seven.”

“I’ll help you,” said Alexander. Taking out the lobsters one by one, he let Anthony count them until he got to ten, and then carefully, so as not to break their claws, placed them in large blue transfer totes.

At last Alexander said to Anthony, “One hundred and two.”

“You see?” said Jimmy. “Four for you, Anthony. That leaves ninety-eight for me. And they’re all perfect, as big as can be, right around a five-inch carapace—which means shell, bud. We’ll get 75 cents a piece for them. Your dad is going to make me almost seventy-five dollars today. Yes,” he said, “because of your dad, I can finally make a living.” He glanced at Tatiana, standing a necessary distance away from the spillage of the boat. She smiled politely; Jimmy nodded curtly and didn’t smile back.

As the buyers started to pour in from the fish market, from the general store, from the seafood restaurants as far away as Bar Harbor, Alexander washed and cleaned the boat, cleaned the traps, rolled up the line, and went down dock to buy three barrels of bait herring for the next day, which he placed into bags and lowered them into the water. The herring catch was good today, he had enough to bait 150 lobster traps for tomorrow.

He got paid ten dollars for the day’s work, and was scrubbing his hands with industrial-strength soap under the water spout when Jimmy came up to him. “Want to wait with me and sell these?” He pointed to the lobsters. “I’ll pay you another two dollars for the evening. After, we can go for a drink.”

“Can’t, Jimmy. But thanks. Maybe another time.”

Jimmy glanced at Tatiana, all sunny and white, and turned away.

They walked up the hill to the house.

Alexander went to take a bath, to shave, to shear his hair, while Tatiana, placing the lobsters in the refrigerator to numb them, boiled the water. Lobsters were the easiest thing to cook, 10–15 minutes in salted boiling water. They were delicious to eat, breaking the claws, taking the meat out, dipping them in melted butter. But sometimes she did think that she would rather spend two dollars on a lobster in a store once a month than have Alexander spend thirteen hours on a boat every day and get four lobsters for free. Didn’t seem so free. Before he was out of the bathroom, she stood outside the door, knocked carefully and said, “You need anything?”

There was quiet inside. She knocked louder. The door opened, and he towered in front of her, all fresh and shaved and scrubbed and dressed. He was wearing a clean green jersey and fatigues. She cleared her throat and lowered her gaze. Barefoot she stood with her lips level with his heart. “Need anything?” she repeated in a whisper, feeling so vulnerable she was having trouble breathing.

“I’m fine,” he said, walking sideways past her. “Let’s eat.”

They had the lobsters with melted butter, and carrot, onion and potato stew. Alexander ate three lobsters, most of the stew, bread, butter. Tatiana had found him emaciated in Germany. He ate for two men now, but he was still war thin. She ladled food onto his plate, filled his glass. He drank a beer, water, a Coke. They ate quietly in the little kitchen, which the landlady allowed them to use as long as they were either done by seven or made dinner for her, too. They were done by seven, and Tatiana left some stew for her.

“Alexander, does your … chest hurt?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“It felt a little pulpy last night …” She looked away, remembering touching it. “It’s not healed yet, and you’re doing all that trap hauling. I don’t want it to get reinfected. Perhaps I should put some carbolic acid on it.”

“I’m fine.”

“Maybe a new dressing?”

He didn’t say anything, just raised his eyes to her, and for a moment between them, from his bronze-colored eyes to her sea-green passed Berlin, and the room at the U.S. Embassy where they had spent what they both were certain was their last night on earth, when she stitched together his shredded pectoral and wept, and he sat like a stone and looked through her— much like now. He said to her then, “We never had a future.”

Tatiana looked away first—she always looked away first—and got up.

Alexander went outside to sit in the chair in front of the house on the hill overlooking the bay. Anthony tagged along behind him. Alexander sat mutely and motionlessly, while Anthony milled about the overgrown yard, picking up rocks, pine cones, looking for worms, for beetles, for ladybugs.

“You won’t find any ladybugs, son. Season for them’s in June,” said Alexander.

“Ah,” said Anthony. “Then what’s this?”

Tilting over to one side, Alexander looked. “I can’t see it.”

Anthony came closer.

“Still can’t see it.”

Anthony came closer, his hand out, the index finger with the ladybug extended.

Alexander’s face was inches away from the ladybug. “Hmm. Still can’t see it.”

Anthony looked at the ladybug, looked at his father and then slowly, shyly climbed into his lap and showed him again.

“Well, well,” said Alexander, both hands going around the boy. “Now I see it. I sit corrected. You were right. Ladybugs in August. Who knew?”

“Did you ever see ladybugs, Dad?”

Alexander was quiet. “A long time ago, near a city called Moscow.”

“In the … Soviet Union?”

“Yes.”

“They have ladybugs there?”

“They had ladybugs—until we ate them all.”

Anthony was wide-eyed.

“There was nothing else to eat,” said Alexander.

“Anthony, your father is just joking with you,” said Tatiana, walking out, wiping her wet hands on a tea towel. “He is trying to be funny.”

Anthony peered into Alexander’s face. “That was funny?”

“Tania,” Alexander said in a far away voice. “I can’t get up. Can you get my cigarettes for me?”

She left quickly and came out with them. Since there was only one chair and nowhere for her to sit, she placed the cigarette in Alexander’s mouth and, bending over him, her hand on his shoulder, lit it for him while Anthony placed the bug into Alexander’s palm.

“Dad, don’t eat this ladybug.” One of his little arms went around Alexander’s neck.

“I won’t, son. I’m full.”

“That’s funny,” said Anthony. “Mama and I met a man today. A colonel. Nick Moore.”

“Oh, yeah?” Alexander looked off into the distance, taking another deep drag of the cigarette from Tatiana’s hands as she was bent to him. “What was he like?”

“He was like you, Dad,” Anthony replied. “He was just like you.”

Red Nail Polish

In the middle of the night, the boy woke up and screamed. Tatiana went to comfort him. He calmed down, but would not let her leave him alone in his bed, even though it was just across the nightstand. “Alexander,” she whispered, “are you awake?”

“I am now,” he said, getting up. Moving the nightstand out of the way, he pushed the two twin beds together so Anthony could lie next to his mother. They tried to get comfortable, Alexander against the wall spooning Tatiana spooning Anthony, who instantly fell asleep in his mother’s arms. Tatiana only pretended to fall back to sleep. She knew that in a moment Alexander would get up and leave the bed.

And in a moment, he was gone. She whispered after him. Shura, darling. After a few minutes, she got up, put on a robe and walked outside. He wasn’t in the kitchen or the yard. She looked for him all the way down to the dock. Alexander was sitting on the bench where Tatiana usually sat waiting for him to come back from the sea. She saw the flare of the cigarette in his mouth. He was naked except for his skivvies, and he was shivering. His arms were crossed over himself, and his body was rocking back and forth.

She stopped walking.

She didn’t know what to do.

She never did know what to do.

Turning around, she stumbled back to their room and lay in bed blinkless, staring beyond Anthony’s sleeping head until Alexander came back, icy and shaking, and fitted in behind her. She didn’t move and he said nothing, made no noise. Just his cold arm went around her. They lay there until four when he got up to go to work. As he ground the coffee beans in the pestle, she buttered a fresh roll for him, filled his water containers and made a sandwich for him to take on the boat. He ate, drank his coffee, and then left, his free hand traveling under her chemise for a moment to rest on her bare buttocks and then between her legs.

They had been on Deer Isle exactly five minutes, breathing in the salt water of the afternoon and seeing the lobster boats returning to shore, and already Tatiana said that a month would not be long enough to spend here. Their agreement was just a month in every state and then onward. Forty-eight states, forty-eight months, beginning with Deer Isle. “A month won’t be enough here,” she repeated when Alexander said nothing.

“Really?” And nothing more.

“You don’t think it’s great here?”

A small ironic something crossed his silent mouth in reply.

On the surface, Stonington had everything they needed: a general store, a variety store, a hardware store. The general store sold newspapers, magazines and, most important, cigarettes. It also sold coffee beans and chocolate. On North and South Deer Isle, there were cows—thus milk, cheese and butter—and chickens that laid eggs. Grain was shipped in by the shipload. There was plenty of bread. Plenty of apples, peaches, pears, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, carrots, turnips, radishes, eggplant, zucchini. There was cheap and plentiful lobster, trout, sea bass, pike. There even was beef and chicken, not that they ever ate it. Who’d ever believe the country had been through a Depression and a world war?

Alexander said ten dollars a day wouldn’t be enough to live on.

Tatiana said it would be plenty.

“What about high-heeled shoes? Dresses for you? Coffee? My cigarettes?”

“Definitely not enough for cigarettes.” She forced a smile, seeing his face. “I’m joking. It’s enough for everything.”

She didn’t want to mention that the amount he was spending on cigarettes was nearly what they were spending on food for the week for all three of them. But Alexander was the only one working. He could spend his money on whatever he liked.

She had been talking English to him as she drank her Sunday coffee. He was responding in Russian to her as he smoked his Sunday cigarettes and read his Sunday paper.

“There’s trouble brewing in Indochina,” he said in Russian. “The French owned it, and lost it to the Japanese during the war. The Japanese lost the war, but they don’t want to leave. The French, rescued by the victors and thus on the side of victory, want their colony back. The Japanese are protesting. While staying neutral, the U.S. are helping their ally France, but they’re really between a rock and a hard place since they’re also helping Japan.”

“I thought Japan is no longer allowed to have an army?” Tatiana asked in English.

And he replied in Russian, “They’re not. But they had a standing army in Indochina, and short of the U.S. forcing them out, the Japanese refuse to lay down their arms.”

She asked in English, “What’s your interest in all this?”

He replied in Russian, “Ah. In all this—because there just isn’t enough trouble—Stalin for decades has been courting a peasant farmer named Ho Chi Minh, paying for his little educational trips to Moscow, feeding him vodka and caviar, teaching him the Marxist dialectic by the warm fire and giving him some old Shpagins and mortars, and some nice American Lend-Lease Studebakers while training and educating his little band of Vietminh right on Soviet soil.”

“Training the Vietminh to fight the Japanese whom the Soviets fought and hate?”

“Believe it or not, no. To fight the former Soviet allies, the colonial French. Ironic?” Alexander stubbed out his cigarette, put down his paper. “Where’s Anthony?” he said in a low voice in English, but before he could even reach for her wrist, Anthony walked into the kitchen.

“I’m here, Dad,” he said. “What?”

They needed a room for just themselves, but Anthony didn’t think so, and besides, the old landlady didn’t have one. The choice was one tiny room next to the kitchen in a vertical house overlooking the bay—with two twin beds, and a bath and toilet down the hall—or their camper with one full bed, and no bath and no toilet.

CHAPTER TWO
Coconut Grove, 1947

The Vanishing

Miami in January! Tropics by the sea. It was eighty degrees and the water was seventy-five. “Better,” said Alexander, smiling. “Much better. Now we stay.”

Sprawled near the calm aqua waves of the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay, Miami Beach and South Beach were a little too … grown up for them with a small boy, with the rampant gambling casinos, the made-up, dressed-up women walking the streets, and the fanned, darkened 1930s Art Deco hotels on the ocean that looked as if men with mortal secrets lived there. Perhaps such hotels were rightful places for the Tatianas and Alexanders of this world—but she couldn’t tell him that. She used Anthony’s moral well-being as her excuse to leave. From South Beach, they drove twelve miles south to Coconut Grove, where it was calmer and neater. Cocoanut Grove, as it was called before the roads and the trains and the tourist trade came in 1896, was just a little town on Biscayne Bay with twenty-eight smart elegant buildings, two large stores doing whopping business, and a luxury hotel. That was then. Now the prosperity was like the sunshine—abundant and unabated. Now there were parks and beaches, marinas, restaurants and stores galore, all etched on the water under the fanning palms.

They stayed at a motel court inland but every day kept drifting out to the bay. Tatiana was worried about the money running through their fingers. She suggested selling the camper. “We can’t stay in it anyway. You need to wash—”

“I’ll wash in the ocean.”

“I need somewhere to cook your food.”

“We’ll eat out.”

“We’re going to go broke.”

“I’ll get work.”

She cleared her throat. “We need a little privacy …”

“Ah, now you’re talking. But forget it, I won’t sell it.”

They were strolling along Bayshore Avenue, past moorings that fingered out into the water. He pointed to a houseboat.

“You want to rent a boat?”

“A houseboat.”

“A what?”

“A boat that is also a house.”

“You want us to live on a boat?” Tatiana said slowly.

Alexander called to his son. “Anthony, how would you like to live in a house that is also a boat?”

The child jumped up and down.

“Anthony,” said his mother, “how would you like to live in a snowy mountain retreat in the north of Canada?”

Anthony jumped up and down.

“Alexander, see? I really don’t think you should be making all your life decisions based on the joy of one small boy.”

Alexander lifted Anthony into his arms. “Bud,” he said, “a house that is moored like a boat and sways like a boat, but never moves from the dock, right on the ocean, doesn’t that sound great?”

Anthony put his arms around his father’s neck. “I said yes, Dad. What more do you want?”

For thirty dollars a week—the same money they didn’t want to pay Mrs. Brewster—they rented a fully furnished houseboat on Fair Isle Street, jutting out into the bay right between Memorial Park and the newly broken construction site for Mercy Hospital. The houseboat had a little kitchen with a small stove, a living room, a bathroom with a toilet—And two bedrooms!

Anthony, of course, just like at Nellie’s, refused to sleep by himself. But this time Tatiana was adamant right back. She stayed with her son for an hour, until he was asleep in his own bed. The mother wanted a room of her own.

When an utterly bare Tatiana, without even a silk nightgown, lay down in a double-size bed in front of Alexander, she thought she was a different woman making love to a different man. It was dark in the bedroom, but he was also naked, no tank tops, no shirts, no battle gear. He was naked and on top of her, and he actually murmured a bit to her, things she hadn’t heard in a very long while, he took it a little slower, slower than he had in a very long while, and for that Tatiana rewarded him with a breathless climax, and a shy plea for a little more, and he obliged, but in a way that was too much for her, holding up her legs against his upright arms and moving so intensely that small thrilling cries of pain and pleasure drowned her parchment throat, followed by a less shy plea for some more … and he even opened his eyes briefly, watching her mouth moaning for him, Oh my God, Shura. She saw his searching face; he whispered, You like that, do you? He kissed her, but Tatiana unclasped from him and began to cry. Alexander sighed and closed his eyes again, and there was no more.

Alexander got ready to go look for work, Tatiana got ready to take their clothes to the Laundromat. There was no Laundromat nearby. “Maybe we should have rented a house closer to the Laundromat.”

He stopped getting his cigarettes and his money and stared at her. “Just so we’re clear,” he said, “a houseboat on the Atlantic, dawn over the water like you saw this morning, or living by the Laundromat? Are you opting for the latter?”

“I’m not opting,” she said, chastised and blushing. “But I can’t wash your clothes in the Atlantic, can I?”

“Wait for me to come back and we’ll decide what to do.”

When he returned in the late afternoon he said, “I found work—Mel’s Marina.”

Tatiana’s face was so crestfallen, Alexander laughed. “Tania, Mel owns a marina right on the other side of Memorial Park, a ten minute walk from here down the ocean promenade.”

“Does Mel have one hand like Jimmy?” asked Anthony.

“No, bud.”

“Does Mel smell like fish like Jimmy?” asked Tatiana.

“Nope. Mel rents boats. He’s looking for someone to maintain them, and also do a tour-ride twice a day around Key Biscayne and South Miami Beach. We go around, look at the sights and then we come back. I get to drive a motor boat.”

“But Alexander,” said Tatiana, “did you tell Mel you don’t know how to drive a motor boat?”

“Of course not. I didn’t tell you I didn’t know how to drive a camper either.”

She shook her head. He was something else.

“Seven thirty to six,” he said. “And he’s paying me twenty dollars. A day.”

“Twenty dollars a day!” Tatiana exclaimed. “Double the money in Deer Isle, and you don’t have to smell like fish. How can he afford to pay you so much?”

“Apparently rich lonely ladies love to take boat rides to far away beaches while waiting for their husbands to return from the war.”

Tatiana turned away from him so he wouldn’t see her face.

From behind, his arms went around her. “And if I’m very good to the ladies,” continued Alexander, moving her braid away to kiss her neck and brushing his groin against her, “sometimes they tip the captain.”

Tatiana knew he was trying to amuse her, to be light with her, and even as a tear ran down her cheek, she said, patting his hand, “Well, if there’s one thing you know how to do, Alexander, it’s be good to the ladies.”

In the morning, at seven, as Alexander was about to leave for the marina, he said to Tatiana, “Come by to see me just before ten. That’s when we go out for our morning tour.” He picked up Anthony, who was still in his pajamas. “Bud, I’m going to take you on the boat with me. You’ll be my co-captain.”

Anthony’s face shined. “Really?” Then his face fell. “I can’t go, Dad.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know how to steer a boat.”

“Neither do I, so we’re even.”

Anthony kissed his father on the mouth.

“Am I coming, too?” Tatiana asked.

“No. You are going to walk a mile to the store and buy food, and do laundry. Or suntan.” He smiled. “Do whatever you like. But come at twelve thirty to pick him up. We can have lunch together before I have to go out again at two.”

Tatiana kissed her husband on the mouth.

He took his boy with him! What happiness, what joy for Anthony. Tatiana did laundry, bought food and a Cuban cookbook, and sandwich meat, and potato salad and rolled everything back home in a newly purchased wooden cart. She opened all the windows to smell the ocean breeze while she made lunch as strings playing the Poco Allegretto from Brahms’s Third Symphony filled her houseboat from the kitchen radio. She loved that piece. She’d heard it played on Deer Isle, too.

Then she ran through Memorial Park to bring her two men food.

Anthony was apparently a hit on the boat. “He was so busy making friends, he forgot to help his dad steer,” said Alexander. “And believe me when I tell you, I needed his help. Never mind, bud. Maybe tomorrow?”

“I can come again with you tomorrow?”

“If you’re a good boy for your mother, how about every day?”

Anthony leaped and hopped all the way home.

For dinner she made plantains and beef brisket from a recipe in her new cookbook.

Alexander liked it.

Tatiana set about cooking in every conceivable way what she called “the greatest New World creation since corn”—plantain. Not soft, not sweet, but otherwise banana-like, it went with everything. She bought flounder and fixed it with Mexican salsa and tomatoes and pineapples. But the plantains were the centerpiece of the plate. Tatiana had never had corn or bananas or plantains until she came to America.

“Heavenly plantains with rum,” she said, theatrically lighting a match and setting the plantains and frying pan on fire. Alexander was worried and skeptical until she spooned them over vanilla ice cream; the plantains were mixed with butter, dark brown caramelized sugar, heavy cream—and rum.

“Okay, I’m sold. Heavenly,” he said. “Please. Just a little more.”

The oven didn’t work properly; it was hard to make real bread in it. It wasn’t like the great big oven she had in her apartment in New York. Tatiana managed small challah rolls, from a recipe she had got from the Ukrainian Jews on the Lower East Side. It had been four months since her last conversation with Vikki. Her stomach went cold every time she thought of her and of Sam. She didn’t want to think about them. She forced herself not think of them.

Tatiana was good at forcing herself not to think of things.

Alexander liked the puffy and slightly sweet rolls. “But what, no plantain salad?” he teased when the three of them were eating their lunch on one of the picnic tables under the moss oaks and pines in Memorial Park.

She bought Alexander white cotton and linen shirts with white cotton slacks. She knew he was most comfortable in khaki or green fatigues and long sleeve crews—but he had to look like a boat captain.

Maintaining the boat took most of his time between tours—he learned to make repairs to the hull, the engine, the bearings, the fittings, the bilge pumps, the plumbing, the safety gear, the rails. He repainted the deck, replaced broken or cracked glass, changed the oil. Whatever it was, if it needed fixing, Alexander fixed it, all in his captain’s whites and shirtsleeves down to his wrists in the sweltering sun.

Mel, terrified of losing Alexander, gave him a raise to twenty-five dollars a day. Tatiana, too, wished she could give Alexander a raise, for the same reason.

In Miami there was a large Spanish population, and no one heard Tatiana’s Russian accent, no one knew her name was Russian. In Miami, Tatiana fit right in. Though she missed the smallness and the tightness and the smells of Deer Isle, though she missed the largesse, the expanse, the blaze of New York, she liked the Miami vanishing.

She made stuffed cabbage, which she knew Anthony liked from their time in New York. Alexander ate it, but after dinner said, “Please don’t cook cabbage again.”

Anthony got upset. He loved cabbage. And there was even a time when his father enjoyed cabbage pie.

But Alexander said no cabbage.

“Why?” she asked him when they were outside on their boat deck, bobbing above the water. “You used to like it.”

“I used to like a lot of things,” he replied.

You certainly did, Tatiana thought.

“I saw cabbage that grew as big as three basketballs on the mountain heaps of human ashes and remnants of bones in a death camp called Majdanek in Poland,” said Alexander. “It was freak cabbage like nothing you’ve ever seen, grown out of the ashes of dead Jews. You’d never eat cabbage again either.”

“Not even cabbage pie?” she said softly, trying to lure him away from Majdanek and into Lazarevo.

“Not even cabbage pie, Tania,” replied a not-to-be-lured Alexander. “No more cabbage pie for us.”

Tatiana didn’t cook cabbage anymore.

Anthony was told he was not allowed to leave the table unless his plate was empty.

“I’ll leave when I want,” said Anthony.

Alexander put down his fork. “What did you say?”

“You can’t tell me what to do,” said Anthony, and his father got up from the table so swiftly that Anthony knocked over his chair to run to his mother.

Taking him out of Tatiana’s arms, Alexander set him firmly down. “I can and I will tell you what to do.” His hands were on his son’s shoulders. “Now we’re going to try it again. You will not leave when you want. You will sit, you will finish your food, and when you’re done, you will ask to leave the table. Understand?”

“I’m full!” Anthony said. “Why do I have to finish?”

“Because you have to. Next time, Tania, don’t give him so much.”

“He said he was hungry.”

“Give him seconds. But today he will finish his food.”

“Mommy!”

“No, not Mommy—me! Now finish your food.”

“Mom—”

Alexander’s hands squeezed around Anthony. Anthony finished his food and asked to leave the table. After dinner, Tatiana went outside on the narrow deck where Alexander was sitting and smoking. She crouched carefully, uncertainly, by his side.

“You’ve been too soft on him,” he said. “He has to learn. He will learn.”

“I know. He’s so little, though.”

“Yes, when he is my size, it’ll be too late.”

She sat on the floor of the deck.

After a while Alexander spoke. “He can’t leave food on his plate.”

“I know.”

“Do you want me to tell you about your brother starving in Catowice?”

She barely suppressed her sigh. “Only if you want to, darling.” Only if you need to. Because, like you, there are many things I would rather never talk about.

In the POW camp in Catowice, Poland, where the Germans threw Alexander, his lieutenant, Ouspensky, and Pasha into the Soviet half—which meant the death half—Alexander saw that Pasha was weakening. He had no fuel to feed the shell that carried his life. It was worse for Pasha because he had been wounded in the throat. He couldn’t work. What they gave the Soviet men was just enough to kill them slowly. Alexander made a wood spear, and when he was in the forest cutting down trees for firewood, he caught three rabbits, hid them in his coat and, back at camp, cooked them in the kitchen, giving one to the cook, one to Pasha, and splitting one between himself and Ouspensky.

He felt better, but he was still starving. From Tatiana, during Leningrad’s blockade, he learned that as long as he constantly thought about food—about getting it, cooking it, eating it, wanting it, he was not a goner. He’d seen the goners—then in Leningrad, now in Catowice—the last-leggers, as they were called, the men unable to work, who shuffled through the camp’s trash eating what scraps they could find. When one of the goners had died, Alexander, about to dig a grave, found Pasha and three others eating the remains of the dead man’s slops by the fire at the outskirts of the barracks.

Alexander was made a supervisor, which did not endear him to his peers, but it did allow him to get a larger food ration, which he shared with Pasha. He kept Pasha and Ouspensky with him, and they moved into a room that housed only eight people instead of sixty. It was warmer. Alexander worked harder. He killed the rabbits and the badgers, and occasionally he didn’t wait to bring them back to camp. He built a fire and ate them on the spot, half cooked, tearing at them with his teeth. It wasn’t making much of a difference even to him.

And Pasha suddenly stopped being interested in rabbits.

Tatiana’s head was folded over her knees. She needed a better memory of her brother.

In Luga, Pasha is stuffing blueberries into Tatiana’s open mouth. She is begging him to stop, trying to tickle him, trying to throw him off her, but in between mouthfuls of blueberries for himself, he is tickling Tatiana with one hand, stuffing blueberries into her mouth with the other, and pinning her between his legs so she can’t go anywhere. Tatiana finally heaves her small body hard enough to throw Pasha off, onto the pails of blueberries they just brought freshly picked from the woods. The buckets tip over; she screams at him to pick them up and when he doesn’t, she takes handfuls and mashes them into his face, painting his face purple. Saika comes from next door and stares blankly at them from the gate. Dasha comes out from the porch and when sees what they’ve done, she shows them what real screaming is all about.

Alexander smoked, and Tatiana, on weakened legs, struggled up and went back inside, hoping that when Anthony was older they could tell him in a way he would understand, about Leningrad, and Catowice, and Pasha. But she feared he would never understand, living in the land of plantains and plenty.

In the Miami Herald Tatiana found an article about the House of Un-American Activities Committee investigations into communist infiltration of the State Department. The paper was pleased to call it “an ambitious program of investigations to expose and ferret out Communist activities in many enterprises, labor unions, education, motion pictures and most importantly, the federal government.” Truman himself had called for removal of disloyal government employees.

She became so engrossed that Alexander had to raise his voice to get her attention. “What are you reading?”

“Nothing.” She slammed the newspaper shut.

“You’re hiding things in newspapers from me? Show me what you were reading.”

Tatiana shook her head. “Let’s go to the beach.”

“Show me, I said.” He grabbed her, his fingers going into her ribs and his mouth into her neck. “Show me right now, or I’ll …”

“Daddy, stop teasing Mommy,” said Anthony, prying them apart.

“I’m not teasing Mommy. I’m tickling Mommy.”

“Stop tickling Mommy,” said Anthony, prying them apart.

“Antman,” said Alexander, “did you just … call me daddy?”

“Yes. So?”

Bringing Anthony to his lap, Alexander read the HUAC article. “So? They’ve been investigating communists since the 1920s. Why the fascination now?”

“No fascination.” Tatiana started to clear the breakfast plates. “You think there are Soviet spies here?”

“Rampaging through the government. And they won’t rest until Stalin gets his atomic bomb.”

She squinted at him. “You know something about this?”

“I know something about this.” He pointed to his ears. “I listened to quite a bit of chatter and rumor among the rank and file outside my door in solitary confinement.”

“Really?” Tania said that in a mulling tone, but what she was trying to do was to not let Alexander see her eyes. She didn’t want him to see Sam Gulotta’s anxious phone calls in her frightened eyes.

When they didn’t talk about food or HUAC, they spoke about Anthony.

“Can you believe how well he’s talking? He is like a little man.”

“Tania, he comes into bed with us every night. Can we talk about that?”

“He’s just a little boy.”

“He needs to sleep in his own bed.”

“It’s big and he gets scared.”

Alexander bought a smaller bed for Anthony, who didn’t like it and had no interest in sleeping in it. “I thought the bed was for you,” said Anthony to his father.

“Why would I need a bed? I sleep with Mommy,” said Anthony Alexander Barrington.

“So do I,” said Anthony Alexander Barrington.

Finally Alexander said, “Tania, I’m putting my foot down. He can’t come into our bed anymore.”

She tried to dissuade him.

“I know he has nightmares,” Alexander said. “I will take him back to his bed. I will sit with him as long as it takes.”

“He needs his mother in the middle of the night.”

“I need his mother in the middle of the night, his naked mother. He’s going to have to make do with me,” Alexander said. “And she is going to have to make do with me.”

The first night, Anthony screamed for fifty-five minutes while Tatiana remained in the bedroom with a pillow pressed over her head. Alexander spent so long in the boy’s room, he fell asleep on Anthony’s bed.

The following night Anthony screamed for forty-five minutes.

Then thirty.

Then fifteen.

And finally, just whimpers coming from Anthony, as he stood by his mother’s side. “I won’t cry anymore, but please, Mama, can you take me back to my bed?”

“No,” said Alexander, getting up. “I will take you back.”

And the following afternoon as mother and son were walking back home from the boat, Anthony said, “When is Dad going back?”

“Going back where?”

“The place you brought him from.”

“Never, Anthony.” She shivered. “What are you talking about?” The shiver was at the memory of the place she had brought him from, the bloodied, filth-soaked straw on which he lay shackled and tortured, waiting not for her but for the rest of his life in the Siberian resort. Tatiana lowered the boy to the ground. “Don’t ever let me catch you talking like that again.” Or your nightmares now will pale compared to the ones you will have.

“Why does he walk as if he’s got the weight of the whole world on his shoulders?” Alexander asked while walking home. The green and stunning ocean was to their right, through the bending palms. “Where does he get that from?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Hey,” he said, knocking into her with his body. Now that he wasn’t covered with lobster he could do that, knock into her. Tatiana took his arm. Alexander was watching Anthony. “You know what? Let me … I’ll take him to the park for a few minutes while you fix dinner.” He prodded her forward. “Go on now, what are you worried about? I just want to talk to him, man to man.”

Tatiana reluctantly went, and Alexander took Anthony on the swings. They got ice cream, both promising conspiratorially not to tell Mommy, and while they were in the playground, Alexander said, “Ant, tell me what you dream about. What’s bothering you? Maybe I can help.”

Anthony shook his head.

Alexander picked him up and carried him under the trees, setting him down on top of a picnic table while he sat on the bench in front of him so that their eyes were level. “Come on, bud, tell me.” He rubbed Anthony’s little chubby legs. “Tell me so I can help you.”

Anthony shook his head.

“Why do you wake up? What wakes you?”

“Bad dreams,” said Anthony. “What wakes you?”

His father had no answer for that. He still woke up every night. He had started taking ice cold baths to cool himself down, to calm himself down at three in the morning. “What kind of bad dreams?”

Anthony was all clammed up.

“Come on, bud, tell me. Does Mommy know?”

Anthony shrugged. “I think Mommy knows everything.”

“You’re too wise for your own good,” said Alexander. “But I don’t think she knows this. Tell me. I don’t know.”

He cajoled and prodded. Anthony’s ice cream was melting; they kept wiping up the drips. Finally Anthony, looking not at his father’s prying face but at his shirt buttons, said, “I wake up in a cave.”

“Ant, you’ve never been in a cave. What cave?”

Anthony shrugged. “Like a hole in the ground. I call for Mom. She’s not there. Mommy, Mommy. She doesn’t come. The cave starts to burn. I climb outside, I’m near woods. Mommy, Mommy. I call and call. It gets dark. I’m alone.” Anthony looked down at his hands. “A man whispers, Run, Anthony, she is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back. I turn around, but there is no one there. I run into the woods to get away from the fire. It’s very dark, and I’m crying. Mommy, Mommy. The woods go on fire too. I feel like somebody’s chasing me. Chasing and chasing me. But when I turn around, I’m all alone. I keep hearing feet running after me. I’m running too. And the man’s voice is in my ear. She is gone, your mommy, she is not coming back.”

The ice cream dripped through Alexander’s fingers, through Anthony’s fingers. “That’s what you dream about?” Alexander said tonelessly.

“Uh-huh.”

Alexander stared grimly at Anthony, who stared grimly back. “Can you help me, Dad?”

“It’s just a bad dream, bud,” Alexander said. “Come here.” He picked up the boy. Anthony put his head on Alexander’s shoulder. “Don’t tell your mom what you just told me, all right?” he said in a hollow voice, patting the boy’s back, holding him close. “It’ll make her very sad you dream this.” He started walking home, his gaze fixed blinklessly on the road.

After a minute, he said, “Antman, did your mother ever tell you about her dreams when she was a little girl in Luga? No? Because she used to have bad dreams, too. You know what she used to dream about? Cows chasing her.”

Anthony laughed.

“Exactly,” Alexander said. “Big cows with bells and milk udders would go running down the village road after your young mother, and no matter how hard she ran, she couldn’t get away.”

“Did they go moo?” said Anthony. “Here moo, there moo, everywhere moo-moo.”

“Oh, yes.”

In the night Anthony crawled to his mother’s side, and Alexander and Tatiana, both awake, said nothing. Alexander had just come back to bed himself, barely dry. Her arm went around Anthony, and Alexander’s damp icy arm went around Tatiana.

The Body of War

As it began to stay lighter later, they would go swimming when the park beaches emptied. Tatiana hung upside down on the monkey bars, they played ball, they built things in the sand; the beach, the bars, the breaking Atlantic were good and right as rain. Alexander sometimes even took off his T-shirt while he swam in the languid evenings—slowly, obsessively trying to wash away in the briny ocean typhus and starvation and war and other things that could not be washed away.

Tatiana sat near the shoreline, watching father and son frolic. Alexander was supposed to be teaching Anthony how to swim, but what he was doing was picking the boy up and flinging him into the shallow waters. The waves were perfect in Miami for a small boy, for the waves were small also. Son jumped to father, only to be thrown up in the air and then caught again, thrown up in the air very high and then caught again. Anthony squealed, shrieked, splashed, full of monumental joy. And there was Tatiana nearby, sitting on the sand, hugging her knees, one of her hands out in invocation, careful, careful, careful. But she wasn’t saying it to Alexander. She was saying it to Anthony. Don’t hurt your father, son. Be gentle with him. Please. Can’t you see what he looks like?

Her breath burned her chest as she furtively glanced at her husband. Now they were racing into the water. The first time Tatiana had seen Alexander run into the Kama River in Lazarevo, naked except for his shorts—like now—his body was holy. It was gleaming and woundless. And he’d been in battles already, in the Russo-Finnish War; he’d been on the northern rivers of the Soviet Union; he had defended the Road of Life on Lake Ladoga. Like her, he had lived through blighted Leningrad. Why then, since she had left him, had this happened to him?

Alexander’s bare body was shocking to see. His back, once smooth and tanned, was mutilated with shrapnel scars, with burn scars, with whip marks, with bayonet gouges all wet in the Miami sun. His nearfatal injury at the breaking of the Leningrad blockade was still a fist-sized patch above his right kidney. His chest and shoulders and ribs were defaced; his upper arms, his forearms, his legs were covered with knife and gunpowder burn wounds, jagged, ragged, raised.

Tatiana wanted to cry, to cry out. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right that he should carry Hitler and Stalin on his whole body, even here in Miami where the tropical waters touched the sky. The colonel had been right. It wasn’t fair.

And because all the other iniquities were not enough, the men that guarded Alexander tattooed him against his will, as punishment for escape, as a warning against possible transgressions, and as an ultimate slur against his future—as in, if you have a future at all, you will never have an unblemished one.

Tatiana watched him and her pitying heart rolled around the concrete drum of her insides.

On Alexander’s upper left arm was a black tattoo of a hammer and sickle! It was burned into him by the depraved guards at Catowice—so they would know him by his marks. Above the hammer and sickle, on his shoulder there was a mocking tattoo of a major’s epaulet, taunting that Alexander had spent too much time in solitary confinement. Under the hammer and sickle was a large star with twenty-five points on it—one point for each of the years of his Soviet prison sentence. On the inside of his right forearm, the numbers 19691 were burned in blue—the Soviets learned to use the Nazi torture implements with glee.

On his right upper arm a cross was tattooed—Alexander’s only voluntary mark. And above the cross, he was branded with an incongruous SS Waffen Eagle, complete with a swastika, as a symbol of grudging respect from the ill-fated guard Ivan Karolich for Alexander’s never having confessed to anything despite the severe beatings.

The concentration camp numbers were the hardest to hide, being so low on his arm, which was why he didn’t often roll up his sleeves. Jimmy in Deer Isle had asked about the numbers, but Jimmy hadn’t been to war, and so when Alexander said, “POW camp,” Jimmy didn’t follow up and Alexander didn’t elaborate. The blue numbers now, post Holocaust, screamed of Jewish suffering, not Soviet suffering, of someone else’s life, not Alexander’s. But the hammer and sickle, the SS insignia!—all alarms on his arm, ringing to be explained—were impossible to explain away in any context. Death camp numbers and a swastika? There was nothing to do about any of it, except cover it from everyone, even each other.