The Summer Garden. Paullina Simons

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 stop it!” she whispered madly, slapping his arm away.

      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.”

      “I can’t make it better,” he said. “I want you 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.

CHAPTER SIX

       Jane Barrington, 1948

       Sam Gulotta

      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.

      “Thank you for looking so lovely for me,” said Alexander.

      She managed a “You’re welcome.” She tried to speak to him, but her voice wouldn’t work. It was unseemly in the zenith of a bright Godlike summer morning to be filled with so much anxiety. He lit a cigarette as they waited. He was wearing his U.S. captain’s Class A dress uniform he had been given by the U.S. consul in Berlin. He had shaved and cropped short his hair.

      Tatiana had at first insisted she was going to be by Alexander’s side through everything. Trouble was, there was no one to leave the boy with. She said she would call Vikki and ask her to come help, but as soon as Anthony, who was milling nearby, obviously listening to adult conversations, had heard the name Vikki in conjunction with his own, he started to cry and clinging to his mother’s leg, said please, please, don’t leave me alone with Vikki.

      And though Tatiana was horrified, she was not so horrified as to not want to call her friend. It was Alexander who put his foot down. They were not going to both leave Ant now when he needed his mother again.

      Standing at the camper, Tatiana said bitterly, to no one in particular, “I can’t believe we’re subjecting ourselves to this. Who would have found us in our vast America? We’d have been lost forever.”

      “How many times do you intend to step out in front of me, Tatiana,” Alexander asked, “to hide me from the Communists?”

      “The rest of my life, if that’s what it takes.”

      He turned to her, and something in his eyes opened and cleared and focused on her. He stared into something he was obviously trying very hard to understand. “What did you just say?”

      She turned her upset face away from his questioning gaze.

      “Oh, I am such a fucking idiot,” said Alexander—as Sam Gulotta drove up in his old Ford sedan.

      Sam