Полина Саймонс – The Summer Garden (страница 19)

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.