Tatiana and Alexander. Paullina Simons

room around the small table.

      “You come and visit me?” asked Jane of Svetlana. No one at the table responded for a moment. Then Jane nodded. “Of course you do. Every day. I see you in the afternoon.”

      “You girls must have a great time around here,” said Vladimir. “She always comes home full of such good spirits. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was having a raucous affair.” He laughed in the tone of a man who thought the very idea of his wife’s having an affair was so absurd as to be almost delicious.

      Svetlana herself threw her head back and laughed. Even Harold chuckled. Only Jane and Alexander sat stonily. For the rest of the dinner Jane said nothing to anyone but got drunker and drunker. Soon she was passed out on the couch while the rest of them cleaned up. The next day, when Alexander came home, he found his mother waiting for him in his room, somber and sober.

      “I sent her away,” she said to him as he came in and threw down his bag of library books and jacket on the floor and stood in front of his mother with his arms folded.

      “Okay,” he said.

      “What are you doing, Alexander?” she asked quietly. He could tell she had been crying.

      “I don’t know, Mom. What are you doing?”

      “Alexander …”

      “What are you concerned about?”

      “That I’m not looking after my son,” she replied.

      “You’re concerned about that?”

      “I don’t want it to be too late,” she said in a small, remorseful voice. “It’s my fault, I know. Lately I haven’t been much of …” She broke off. “But whatever is happening in our family, she can’t come here anymore, not if she wants to keep this from her husband.”

      “Like you’re keeping what you do in the afternoons from yours?”

      “Like he cares,” retorted Jane.

      “Like Vladimir cares,” retorted Alexander.

      “Stop it!” she yelled. “What’s the point of this? To wake me up?”

      “Mom, I know you will find this hard to believe, but it has nothing to do with you.”

      “Alexander,” Jane said bitterly, “indeed I find that very hard to believe. You, the most beautiful boy in all of Russia, you’re telling me you could not have found a young school girl to parry with instead of a woman nearly my age who just happens to be my friend?”

      “Who says I haven’t? And would a school girl have gotten you sober?”

      “Oh, I see, so this does have something to do with me after all!” She didn’t get up off the couch while Alexander, with his arms crossed, stood in front of her. “Is this what you want to do with your life? Become a toy for bored older women?”

      Alexander felt his temper rising. He grit his teeth. His mother was too upsetting for him.

      “Answer me!” she said loudly. “Is this what you want?”

      “What?” he said, just as loudly. “Does it seem to you as if I’ve got so many more attractive options? Which part do you find so repellent?”

      Jane jumped up. “Don’t go forgetting yourself,” she said. “I am still your mother.”

      “Then act like my mother!” he yelled.

      “I’ve looked after you!”

      “And look where it’s gotten all of us—all of us Barringtons making a life for ourselves in Leningrad while you spend half of Dad’s wages on vodka, and still that’s not enough. You’ve sold your jewelry, you’ve sold your books, your silks and your linens for vodka. What’s left, Mom? What else have you got left to sell?”

      For the first time in her life, Jane raised her hand and slapped Alexander. He deserved it and knew it, but couldn’t keep himself from saying it.

      “Mom, you want to offer me a solution, offer me a solution. You want to tell me what to do—after months of not speaking to me—forget it. I will not listen. You’re going to have to do better.” He paused. “Stop drinking.”

      “I’m sober now.”

      “Then let’s talk again tomorrow.”

      But tomorrow she was drunk.

      School started. Alexander busied himself with getting to know a girl named Nadia. One afternoon, Svetlana met him at the school doors. He was laughing with Nadia. Excusing himself, Alexander walked down the block with Svetlana.

      “Alexander, I want to talk to you.” They walked to a small park and sat under the autumn trees. “Your mother knows, doesn’t she?”

      “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “Listen … we needed to stop anyway.”

      “Stop?” She said the word as if it had never actually occurred to her.

      He looked at her with surprise.

      “Not stop!” she exclaimed. “Whatever in the world for?”

      “Svetlana …”

      “Alexander, can’t you see?” she said, trembling and taking hold of his arm. “This is just a test for us.”

      He pulled his arm away. “It’s a test I’m meant to fail. I don’t know what you could possibly be thinking. I’m in school. I’m sixteen. You’re a married thirty-nine-year-old woman. How long did you imagine this would go on?”

      “When we first started,” she said hoarsely, “I imagined nothing.”

      “All right.”

      “But now …”

      His gaze dropped. “Oh, Sveta …”

      She got up off the bench. The throaty cry she emitted hurt Alexander’s lungs—as if he had breathed inside himself her miserable addiction to him. “Of course. I’m ridiculous.” She struggled with her breath. “You’re right. Of course.” She tried to smile. “Maybe one last time?” she whispered. “For old times’ sake? To say goodbye properly?”

      Alexander bowed his head by way of replying.

      She stumbled a step back from him, composed herself and said as steadily as she could, “Alexander, remember this as you go through your life—you have amazing gifts. Don’t squander them. Don’t give them out meaninglessly, don’t abuse them, don’t take them for granted. You are the weapon you carry with you till the day you die.”

      They did not see each other again. Alexander got himself a card at a different library. Vladimir and Svetlana stopped coming over. At first Harold was curious why they no longer visited and then he forgot about them. Alexander knew his father’s inner life was too unsettled to worry about why he no longer saw people he didn’t like very much to begin with.

      Fall turned into winter. 1935 turned into 1936. He and his father celebrated New Year’s by themselves. They went to a local beer bar, where his father bought him a glass of vodka and tried to talk to him. The conversation was brief and strained. Harold Barrington—in his own sober, defiant way—was oblivious to his son and his wife. The world his father lived in Alexander did not know, stopped understanding, didn’t want to understand even if he could have. He knew that his father would have liked Alexander to side with him, to understand him, to believe in him, the way he did when he was younger. But Alexander did not know how to do that anymore. The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

      Giving Up One Room, 1936

      Could it get less tolerable?

      Shortly.

      An undergrown man from Upravdom—the housing committee—arrived at their doorstep one dark January Saturday morning, accompanied by two people with suitcases,