Полина Саймонс – The Summer Garden (страница 37)

“It’s dark, fire’s out, can’t see a thing.”

“Well, I can see you. You’re so bright, you’re burning my eyes. Now look at me. I’m your Tania. Ask me, ask me anything. I don’t lie to you.” She stopped speaking. I don’t lie to my husband. I do keep some things from my husband. Like: there are men coming up the hill again, coming after you, and I have to do everything in my power to protect you, and so I can’t comfort you as well as I would like to because at the moment I’m attacked in more ways than you know. “In Lazarevo,” she said, reaching for that comfort, for that truth he wanted, feeling for his face above her, “you broke my ring and I gave you my hand, and with it my word. It’s the only word that I keep.”

“Yes,” he whispered, his smoky breath beating to the tense drum of his heart. “I did break your ring once upon a time.” His fingers lightly remained on her. “But in New York you thought I was dead.”

“Yes, and I was mourning you. Perhaps in twenty years’ time I may have married the local liege, but I hadn’t. I wasn’t ready and I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t gay. Your son was in the bedroom. Though I may have danced a few times, you know better than anyone I did not forget my sweet love of youth,” she whispered, adding nearly inaudibly, “I left our little boy because I did not forget and could not forget.”

His apologetic palm was warm and comforting on her. Oh, so he was willing to comfort her.

“No apologies necessary,” she said. “You’re anxious, aren’t you? But I told you the truth back in Germany. I don’t lie to you. I won’t lie to you. I wasn’t touched, Shura. Not even in New York as your merry widow.” She moaned for him.

He was staring at her through the black night, tense, tight. Haltingly he whispered, “Kissed, Tatiana?”

“Never, darling Shura,” she replied, lying on her back, her arms around him. “Never by anyone but you. Why do you flagellate yourself over nothing?”

They kissed raptly, tenderly, openly, softly. “Well, look at the idiotic questions you keep asking me,” he said, throwing off his crew and his long johns like a large bristly hedgehog in a small sack. “Worrying about women in Byelorussia, in Bangor. It’s not nothing, is it? It’s everything.” He climbed on top of her in the unzipped sleeping bag. Her hands went above her head. His hands went over her wrists. His lips were on her.

“And finally,” Alexander said, after he was sated, and her palms were on his back, “there is a little blessed relief.”

The cigarette long stubbed out, she lay in his arms and he continued to caress her. Were they close to sleep? She thought he might be, his hands on her back were getting slower. But here at Yavapai, over the silent shrines of God’s fluvial Canyon carved centimeter by centimeter by a persistent and unyielding and course-changing Red River, was as good a time as any for Tatiana’s own slight erosion of the carapace that covered Alexander.

“Shura, why am I tainted with the Gulag?” she whispered. “Please tell me.”

“Oh, Tania. It’s not you. Don’t you understand? I’m soiled by the unsacred things I’ve seen, by the things I’ve lived through.”

She stroked his body, kissed his chest wounds. “You’re not soiled, darling,” she said. “You’re human and suffering and struggling … but your soul is untouched.”

“You think?”

“I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” she whispered, “I see it. From the first moment I touched you on our bus, I saw your soul.” She pressed her lips to his shoulder. “Now tell me.”

“You won’t want to hear it.”

“I will. I do.”

Alexander told her about the gangrapes and the deaths on the trains. Tatiana almost said then that he had been right—she did not want to hear it. The savagery didn’t happen that often, he said; it didn’t need to in the camps. On the transport trains, these assaults and consequent deaths had been a daily occurrence. But at Catowice, Colditz, Sachsenhausen, most of the women either sold it, or bartered it, or gave it away free to strangers—quickly, before the guards came and beat them and then took some for themselves.

He told her about the women at Sachsenhausen. When Tatiana said she didn’t remember any women at Sachsenhausen, Alexander replied that by the time she came they had all gone. But before she came, the guards who hated Alexander put him in charge of building a brick wall to replace the barbed-wire fence that separated the women’s two barracks from the men’s sixteen. The guards knew it would put Alexander’s life in danger to build a wall to replace the existing barbed wire—which was so facilitating in the barter of sexual favors. The women backed up to the barbed wife on their hands and knees as if they were washing the floor, while the men kneeled on the ground, careful not to pierce themselves on the rusty protrusions.

Tatiana shivered.

So he built the wall. At five feet tall, it was not tall enough. At night the men skipped over the wall, and the women skipped over the wall. A watch tower was put up and a guard remained there round the clock to prevent connubial activity. The skipping over the wall continued. Alexander was told to make the wall seven feet. One afternoon during construction he was cornered in the barracks by eight angry lifers. They came to him with logging saws and axes. Alexander wasted no time talking. He swung the chain he was holding. It hit one of the men across the head, breaking open his skull. The other men fled.

Alexander finished the wall.

At seven feet, the wall was still not tall enough. One man would stand on another man’s shoulders and hop up onto it, then pull the standing man up. The prison guards electrified the top of the wall and put up another watch tower.

The men sustained some electrical shock damage to their bodies—but continued to climb over to get to the women on the other side.

Tatiana asked why the guards didn’t increase the electrical charge at the top of the barrier to instantly kill the man who touched it. Alexander replied they had to preserve their work force. They would have no one left to fill the logging quotas if they made the charge lethal. Also it took too much electricity. The guards had to light their own barracks. “At the commandant’s house, Karolich had to eat and sleep in comfort, didn’t he, Tatia?”

“He did, Shura. Not much comfort for him now.”

“The motherfucking bastard.”

Tatiana’s hand was on his heart. Her face was pressed into the muscles in his chest, into his Berlin shrapnel scar that was always under her mouth when she lay in his arms.

Alexander was told to build the wall to twelve feet.

One of his helpers said, “They were ready to maim you for a seven-foot wall. For a twelve-foot wall, they’ll kill you for sure.”

“Let them try,” said Alexander, never walking anywhere without the chain wrapped around his right hand. For extra protection he had attached nails to it in the metal shop. He had to use it again—twice.

The wall grew to twelve feet. And still the men climbed over. The electrical wire ran along the top. And still they climbed over. The barbed wire ran along the electrical wire. And still they climbed over.

Venereal diseases, fatal miscarriages, but worse, continuing pregnancies—the most incongruous thing of all—were making it impossible to run the prison. Finally the women were all put into trucks and carted a hundred kilometers east to the tungsten mines. Alexander found out there was a collapse of the mine during one of the explosions and all the women died.

The men stopped climbing over and began to get sick, to attempt suicidal escapes, to hang themselves with sheets, to fall down mine shafts, to cut each other’s throats in petty arguments. The production quotas were still going unfilled. The guards ordered Alexander to knock down the wall and start digging more mass graves.

He stopped speaking. Tatiana lay heavily by his side. She felt suddenly like she was two hundred pounds, not one hundred.

“During the years I’d been away from you, I used to dream of touching you,” Alexander said to Tatiana. “Your comfort is what I imagined. But during this period, all I saw was women being brutalized, and you, instead of staying sacred, diminished, and my thoughts of you became torture. You know how it goes—I lived oxen, so I dreamed oxen. And then you vanished altogether.” He paused, and nodded in the dark. “And that’s what I mean by tainted. And suddenly—after you fled me even in memories—I saw you in the woods, a vision of a phantom very young you. It wasn’t a dream. I saw you! Real like you are now. You were laughing, skipping, seraphic as always, except you had never sat on our bench in Leningrad, you had never worn your white dress the day Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. I had patrolled somewhere else, or you had gone somewhere else, and I had no one to cross the street for. And so in these woods, you were looking at me as if you had never known me, as if you had never loved me.” He broke off. “It was then that I began to attempt my own suicidal escapes, all seventeen of them. It was those eyes of yours that pursued me through Sachsenhausen,” said Alexander in a dead voice. “I may have felt nothing, but I could not live, could not last a minute on this earth believing you had felt nothing, too. Your meaningless eyes were the death of me.”