Полина Саймонс – The Summer Garden (страница 45)
“Are you joking?” he whispered into her back. “Ten
“Well, if you go back, they’re going to cuff you and put you away for obstructing justice, for running from the law, or even for treason. You’ll be in prison though you did nothing wrong. Or worse—they’ll …” She was speaking into the pillow, Alexander could barely hear her.
“So what do you propose?” he said. “Living your life hoping you’re going to stay one step ahead of the United States government?”
“I can’t have this argument with you, Shura,” said Tatiana. “I just can’t.”
Alexander turned her to face him, she turned back. He moved her to him, she moved away, pulling the blankets over her head. He removed all the pillows, all the blankets and threw them on the floor, leaving her naked on the empty sheet. She covered her body from him. He pulled her hands away; she struggled against him. He bent to her bare stomach, to the soft gold space below her navel, pressed his mouth to it, whispering to her,
Her back was to him. His back was to her. “I won’t live like this,” said Alexander. “This was my life in the Soviet Union, trapped, running, lying, afraid. This can’t be my life in America. This can’t be what you want for us.”
“I just want you,” she said. “I’ll take you in the Ural Mountains, I don’t care how many men you kill with your desertion. I know, it’s unforgivable, but I don’t care. I will take you running and trapped and lying. I will take you any way. I don’t care how difficult it will be. Everything has been difficult.”
“Tania, please. You don’t mean it.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “How little you know me. Better take that magazine quiz again, Shura.”
“That’s right,” he said, “I obviously don’t know you at all. How could you have kept this from me?”
Tatiana didn’t reply; a gasp was all that came from her.
Alexander unrolled her out of her fetal ball, holding her wrists away from her face. “All this time you deceived me, and now you say you won’t come with me?”
“Please,” she whispered. “Please, you are so blind! I’m begging you, begging you, please see reason. Listen to me. We can’t go to them.”
“I lived in a prison already,” said Alexander, squeezing her wrists, bearing down on her. “Don’t you understand? I want a different life with you.”
“See, that’s the difference between us. I just want a life with you,” said Tatiana, not struggling against him at all, lying fragile and open under his hands. “I told you this back in Russia. I didn’t care if we lived in my cold Fifth Soviet room with Stan and Inga at our door. All I wanted was to live there with you. I don’t care if we live here on Bethel Island, or in one small room on Deer Isle. Soviet Union, Germany, here—it doesn’t matter. I just want it with you.”
“On the run, hiding out, forever scared?” he said. “That’s how you want it?”
“Any which way,” she said, crying. “Just with you.”
“Oh, Tania,” he said, letting go of her.
She crawled to him, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. “Not now, not in Russia, not
“Shh,” he said, opening his arms. “Come here. Shh.”
But she wouldn’t come, her hands clenched in supplication. “Please, let’s not go,” she said. “For Anthony. He needs a father.”
“Tania …”
“For me,” she whispered.
Frozen in time they remained on the bed in a November Leningrad embrace.
“I swore to myself in Berlin,” she said into his chest, “that they would never have you again.”
“I know,” Alexander said. “So what are you going to do? Inject me full of morphine like you planned to, kill me like you wouldn’t kill Colonel Moore?” He extended his upturned forearm to her, tapping on his tattooed blue numbers. “Go ahead. Right here, Tatiana.”
“Oh, stop it, just
They didn’t speak the rest of the night.
In the morning, without saying a word to each other and barely one to Anthony they packed their things and left Bethel Island. Mr. Shpeckel waved goodbye to them from his boat, a regretful look about him in the pale sunrise. “What did I tell you, Captain?” he called after Alexander. “I always knew you were runners.”
After a traveling day of stunning silence, somewhere in the drifting sands of Nevada, Alexander whispered, cradling her in the sleeping bag, “They won’t have me again. I promise you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Not them, not me.”
“Come on, I’ll take care of it. Trust me.”
“Trust you?” Tatiana said. “I trusted you so much I believed your lying face and left the Soviet Union, pregnant, thinking you were dead.”
“You weren’t alone. You were supposed to be with the doctor,” he whispered. “Matthew Sayers was getting you out.”
“Yes. You didn’t count on him getting suddenly dead.” She took a breath. “Don’t speak to me. You want me to do what you want, I’ll do what you want, but don’t speak to me, don’t try to make it better.”
“
He knew that beyond Sam Gulotta and the irate Americans, she was afraid of the Soviets most of all. He was not blameless, he was not innocent. She had reason to be afraid.
He couldn’t see her face. “Tania,” said Alexander, quietly, non-challengingly, caressing her, “you want to fix us? Help me set this right. I know you don’t want to live with this debilitating fear. You’ve been unable to think straight. Help us. Please. Make yourself free. Make me free.”
On another black night near Hell’s Canyon in Idaho, Alexander said to her, “How could you have kept something like this from me? Something this big, this grave? We are meant to go through this together, hand in hand. Like lovers.” He was in the sleeping bag, lying on top of her back, tethered to her, their hands threaded.
“Go through what together?” she said, her voice muffled by the pillow. “Your surrender to the authorities? Which is what you’re doing after the first second you heard they were looking for you? Gee, I wonder why I didn’t tell you. It’s a mystery.”
“Had you told me, we would have fixed it back then, instead of trying to plug up the hole in the Titanic now.”
“The Titanic was doomed as soon as it hit that iceberg,” said Tatiana. “Nothing could’ve saved it. So you’ll excuse me if I tell you that I hate your metaphors.”
Finally Tatiana gave Alexander Sam Gulotta’s number. Alexander called from a public phone booth, Sam called back and they spent a tense hour on the phone, Tatiana listening to Alexander’s end of the conversation and biting her nails. When he hung up, he said Sam agreed to meet them in ten days in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Anthony, sensing that something was remiss, made barely any demands on his washed-out parents. He read, he played his guitar, he drew pictures and played with his soldiers. But in the middle of the night, he started to wake up again and crawl into the tent with his mother. She had to start putting her nightgown on again.
Without stories, or laughing, or joking, they meandered through their America, north through the rivers of Montana, south through the Black Hills of Wyoming and the Badlands of South Dakota. Grimly through the days they drove across the country, they lived in the tents, they cooked over fires, ate out of one bowl. They fastened together and then slept fitted together, one metal bowl inside the other, she buried in his chest, pressed into his heart, swallowed by his ruined body. He didn’t know what was happening. He felt all his instincts were abandoning him, he couldn’t find his way out of the blind mire of her terror. They were exhausted by their demons, by the worry in the day, by the fears in the night. They prayed for sleep, but when it came it was broken and black. They prayed for sun, but each sun just got them closer to the Washington DC of their nightmares.
Silver Spring, Maryland, just north of DC, Tatiana said, “Stop the camper.” He did stop—at the designated meeting point, at a gas station. They got out; he filled the tank, went to go get them Cokes, cigarettes, candy for Anthony, who was running around raising dust. They were meeting Sam at eight in the morning; it was seven-thirty.
Tatiana had put on the sheer ivory muslin and tulle dress Alexander had bought for her in New Orleans; she had taken it in herself on Bethel Island; after all, her mother had been a seamstress. She had brushed out her hair and left it down. In the summer morning breeze, the diaphanous dress floated up slightly and the wisps of her sundried hair blew around her face.