Tatiana and Alexander. Paullina Simons

smiled.

      They had arrived in Moscow in the winter, and after three months they realized that to get the goods they needed, the white or rye flour, or electric bulbs, they had to go to the private sellers, to the speculators who loitered around railroad stations selling fruit and ham out of their furlined coat pockets. There were few of them and their prices were exorbitant. Harold objected to it all, eating the small rationed black bread portions, and borscht without meat, and potatoes without butter but with plenty of linseed oil—previously thought to be good only for making paint and linoleum and for oiling wood. “We have no money to give away to private traders,” he would say. “We can live one winter without fruit. Next winter there will be fruit. Besides, we don’t have any extra money. Where is this money to buy from speculators coming from?” Jane would not reply, Alexander would shrug because he did not know, but in the dark after Harold was asleep, Jane would creep into his room and whisper to him to go the next day and buy himself oranges so the scurvy wouldn’t get him, and ham so dystrophy wouldn’t get him, or some rare and dubiously fresh milk. “Hear me, Alexander? I’m putting American dollars in your school bag, in the inner pocket, all right?”

      “All right, Mom. Where is this American money coming from?”

      “Never mind that, son. I brought a little extra, just in case.” She would creep to him and in the dark her mouth would find his forehead. “Things are not expected to be good overnight. Do you know what’s going on in our America? The Depression. Poverty, unemployment, things are difficult all over; these are difficult times. But we are living according to our principles. We are building a new state not on exploitation but on camaraderie and mutual benefit.”

      “With a few extra American dollars?” Alexander would whisper.

      “With a few extra American dollars,” Jane would agree, gathering his head into her arms. “Don’t tell your father, though. Your father would get very upset. He’d feel as if I’d betrayed him. So don’t tell him.”

      “I won’t.”

      The following winter, Alexander was twelve and there was still no fresh fruit in Moscow. It was still bitterly cold, and the only difference between the winter of 1931 and the winter of 1930 was that the speculators near the railroads had vanished. They had all been given ten years in Siberia for counter-revolutionary anti-proletarian activity.

CHAPTER FOUR

      Living on Ellis Island, 1943

      TATIANA TRIED TO READ to improve her English while she got better. In the small but well-stocked Ellis library, she found many books in English donated by nurses, by doctors, by other benefactors. The library even had some books in Russian: Mayakovsky, Gorky, Tolstoy. Tatiana read in her room, but reading in English could not keep her attention and when her attention wandered, images of rivers and ice and blood mixed with images of bombing, planes, mortars, and ice holes, and knitting, and sewing, and motionless mothers on sofas with their body bags in their hands and famished frozen sisters on piles of dead bodies and brothers who vanished on exploding trains and fathers who burned down to ashes and grandfathers with infected lungs and grandmothers dying of grief. White camouflage, pools of blood, wet matted black hair, an officer’s cap strewn to the side, lying on the ice, images all so visceral she would have to stagger down the hall and throw up in the shared bathroom and afterwards force herself into learning better and better English that sufficiently commanded her attention so that her mind did not wander and go where the heart could not help but wander, meander into the emptiness in the middle of her chest, a black void that felt so much like fear that when she closed her eyes, her whole body choked on it.

      She would lift a sleeping Anthony out of his bassinet and lay him on her chest for comfort, for closeness. But no matter how good Anthony smelled, and how silky his black hair felt against her lips, she could not keep her mind from wandering. If anything …

      But she liked to smell him. She liked to undress him if it was sufficiently warm, and feel his chubby pink soft body. She liked to smell his hair and his neck and his milky baby breath. She liked to turn him over and touch his back and his legs and his long feet, and smell the back of his neck. Contentedly he slept and did not wake up, not even with all the prodding and caressing.

      “Does this child ever wake up?” asked Dr. Edward Ludlow on one of his rounds.

      In slow English Tatiana replied, “Think him as lion. He sleeps twenty hours in day and wakes up in night to hunt.”

      Edward smiled. “You must be getting better. You’re making a joke.”

      She smiled wanly. Dr. Ludlow was a thin, graceful man of fluid motion. He did not raise his voice, he did not jerk his hands. He was soothing in his eyes, in his speech, in his movements. He had a good bedside manner, a must for a fine doctor. He was in his mid-thirties, Tatiana guessed, and carried himself so upright that she suspected he might have been a military man once. She felt that she could trust him. He had serious eyes.

      Dr. Ludlow had delivered Anthony when she had arrived in the Port of New York and gone into labor, a month early. He now came every day to check on her, even though Brenda said that normally he worked at Ellis only a couple of days a week.

      Glancing at his watch, Edward said, “It’s almost lunchtime. Why don’t we take a walk if you’re up to it, and eat in the cafeteria? Put on your robe and we’ll go.”

      “No, no.” She didn’t like to leave her room. “What about TB?”

      He waved her off. “Put on your face mask and walk down the hall.”

      Reluctantly she went. They had lunch at one of the narrow rectangular tables lining the large open room with high windows.

      “It’s not great,” Edward said, looking at his meal. “I get a little beef. Here, have some of mine.” He cut half of his chipped beef with gravy and put it on her plate.

      “Thank you, but look at all food I have,” said Tatiana. “I have white bread. I have margarine. I have potatoes and rice and corn. There is so much food.”

       In the dark room she sits and in front of her is a plate and on the plate lies a black hunk of bread the size of a deck of cards. The bread has sawdust in it, and cardboard. She takes a knife and a fork, and cuts it slowly into four pieces. She eats one, chews it deliberately, pushes it with difficulty through her dry throat, eats another and another and finally the last one. She lingers especially on the last one. She knows after this piece is gone there will be no more food until tomorrow morning. She wishes she could be strong enough to save half of the bread until dinner, but she isn’t, she can’t. When she looks up from her plate, her sister, Dasha, is staring at her. Her plate is long empty.

       “I wish Alexander was coming back,” says Dasha. “He might have food for us.”

       I wish Alexander was coming back, thinks Tatiana.

      She shuddered; her potato fell to the floor. She bent and picked it up, dusted it off, and ate it without saying a word.

      Edward stared at her, his fork full of beef suspended between the plate and his mouth.

      “There is sugar and tea and coffee and condensed milk,” Tatiana tremulously continued. “There is apples and oranges.”

      “There’s hardly any chicken, there’s practically no beef, there’s only very little milk and there’s no butter,” Edward said. “The wounded need all the butter we have and we don’t have any, you know they’d get better faster if they had some but they don’t.”

      “Maybe they do not want to get better faster. Maybe they like it here,” Tatiana said, and found Edward studying her again. She thought of something. “Edward, you say you have milk?”

      “Not much, but yes, regular milk, not condensed.”

      “Bring me some milk and a large vat, and long wooden spoon. Maybe ten liters of milk, twenty. The more the better.