He gave the guard the weapon back. The guard took it, and struck Alexander in the forehead with the
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butt of the rifle. He flinched, saw black for a moment but made no sound. The guard left the classroom and returned shortly with his replacement, Corporal Ivanov, who said, “Go ahead, Major. Close your eyes. When they come I will yell. You will open your eyes then, yes?”
“Instantly,” Alexander said in a grateful voice, closing his eyes in the most uncomfortable of chairs, which had a short back and no arms. He hoped he wouldn’t fall over.
“That’s what they do, you know,” he heard Ivanov say. “They keep you from sleeping day and night, they don’t feed you, they keep you naked, wet, cold, in darkness at day and in light at night until you break down and say white is black and black is white and sign their fucking paper.”
“Black is white,” Alexander said without opening his eyes.
“Corporal Boris Maikov signed their fucking paper,” said Ivanov. “He was shot yesterday.”
“What about the other one? Ouspensky?”
“He’s back in the infirmary. They realized he had only one lung. They’re waiting for him to die. Why waste a bullet on him?”
Alexander was too exhausted to speak. Ivanov lowered his voice another notch, and said, “Major, I heard Slonko arguing with Mitterand a few hours ago. He said to Mitterand, ‘Don’t worry. I will break him or he will die.’”
Alexander made no reply.
He heard Ivanov’s whispering. “Don’t let them break you, Major.”
Alexander didn’t answer. He was sleeping.
Leningrad, 1935
In Leningrad, the Barringtons found two small rooms next to each other in a communal apartment in a ramshackle nineteenth-century building. Alexander found a new school, unpacked his few books, his clothes, and continued being fifteen. Harold found work as a carpenter in a table-making factory. Jane stayed home and drank. Alexander stayed away from the two rooms they called home. He spent much of his time walking around Leningrad, which he liked better than Moscow. The pastel stucco buildings, the white nights, the river Neva; he found Leningrad historic and romantic with its gardens and palaces and wide boulevards and small rivers and canals criss-crossing the never-sleeping city.
At sixteen, as he was obliged to, Alexander registered for the Red Army as Alexander Barrington. That was his rebellion. He was not changing his name.
In their communal apartment they tried to keep to themselves—having so little for each other and nothing for other people—but a married couple on the second floor of their building, Svetlana and Vladimir Visselsky, made friendly approaches. They lived in one room with Vladimir’s mother, and at first were quite taken with the Barringtons and lightly envious of the two rooms they had for themselves. Vladimir was a road engineer, Svetlana worked at a local library and kept telling Jane there was a job for her there, too. Jane got a job there, but was unable to get up in the mornings to go to work.
Alexander liked Svetlana. In her late thirties, she was well-dressed, attractive, witty. Alexander liked the
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way she talked to him, almost as if he were an adult. He was restless during the summer of 1935.
Emotionally and financially broke, his parents did not rent adacha . The summer in the city without a way to make new friends did not appeal much to Alexander, who did nothing but walk around Leningrad by day and read by night. He got a library card where Svetlana worked, and often found himself sitting and talking to her. And, very occasionally, reading. Frequently she walked home with him.
His mother brightened a bit under Svetlana’s casual attention but soon went back to drinking in the afternoons.
Alexander spent more and more of his days at the library. When she walked home with him, Svetlana would offer him a cigarette, which he stopped refusing, or some vodka, which he continued to refuse.
The vodka he could take or leave. The cigarettes he thought he could take or leave too, but he had gradually begun to look forward to their bitter taste in his mouth. The vodka altered him in ways he did not like, but the cigarettes provided a calming crutch to his adolescent frenzy.
One afternoon they had come home earlier than usual to find his mother in a stupor in her bedroom.
They went to his room to sit down for a second, before Svetlana had to go back downstairs. She offered Alexander another cigarette, and as she did so, she moved closer to him on the couch. He studied her for a moment, wondering if he was misreading her intentions, and then she took the cigarette out of her mouth and put it into his, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t bite.”
So he was not misreading her intentions.
He was sixteen and he was ready.
Her lips moved to his mouth. “Are you afraid?” she said.
“I’m not,” he said, throwing the cigarette and the lighter on the floor. “But you should be.”
They spent two hours together on the couch, and afterward Svetlana moved from the room and down the hall with the shaken walk of someone who had come into the battle thinking it was going to be an easy conquest and was now stumbling away having lost all her weapons.
Stumbling away pastHarold , who was coming home from work, and who passed Svetlana in the hall with a nod and a “You don’t want to stay for dinner?”
“There is no dinner,” Svetlana replied weakly. “Your wife is still asleep.”
Alexander closed his own door and smiled.
Harold cooked dinner for himself and Alexander, who spent the rest of the evening holed up in his room pretending to read, but really just waiting for tomorrow.
Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.
Another afternoon of Svetlana, and another, and another.
For a month in the summer she and Alexander met in the late afternoons.
He enjoyed Svetlana. She never failed to tell him exactly what he needed to do to bring her pleasure, and he never failed to do exactly as he was told. Everything he learned about patience and perseverance,
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he learned from her. Combined with his own natural tendency to stay until the job was done, the result was that Svetlana left work earlier and earlier. He was flattered. His summer flew by.
On the weekends when Svetlana came over with her husband to visit the Barringtons, and she and Alexander barely acknowledged their intimacy, he found the sexual tension to be almost an end in itself.
Then Svetlana began to question the evenings he spent out.
Trouble was, now that Alexander had seen what was on the other side of the wall, all he wanted was to be on the other side of the wall, but not just with Svetlana.
He would have gladly continued with her and made time with girls his own age, but one Sunday evening as the five of them were sitting down to a dinner of potatoes and a little herring, Vladimir, Svetlana’s husband said to no one in particular, “My Svetochka, I think, needs to get a second job. The library has apparently reduced her hours to part-time.”
“But then when would she come and visit my wife?” said Harold, spooning another helping of potatoes onto his plate. They were all crowded in Alexander’s parents’ 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 veryidea 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 areyou 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.”
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“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.
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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
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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, and waved about a piece of paper, informing the Barringtons that they were going to have to give up one of their rooms to another family. Harold didn’t have the strength to argue. Jane was too drunk to object. It was Alexander who raised his voice but only briefly. There was no point. There was no one to go to, to correct this.
“You can’t tell me this is unjust,” the smirking Upravdom member said to Alexander. “You have two nice rooms for the three of you. There are two of them, and they have no rooms at all. She is pregnant.
Where is your socialist spirit, comrade soon-to-be Comsomol?” The Comsomols were young members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Alexander and Harold moved the cot and his small dresser and his few personal belongings and his bookshelf. Alexander put his cot next to the window, and the dresser and bookshelf between himself and his parents as an angry barrier. When his father wanted to know if he was upset, Alexander barked, “It’s been my dream to share a room with you at sixteen. I know you don’t want any privacy either.” They talked in English, which was m
ore natural and more colloquial, and provided an opportunity to say the wordprivacy , a word that did not exist in Russian.
The next morning when Jane woke up she wanted to know what Alexander was doing in their room. It was a Sunday.
“I’m here for good,” said Alexander, and went out. He took a train to Peterhof and walked the grounds by himself, sullen and confused.
The feeling he had had all his young life—that he was brought on this earth for something special—had not left Alexander, not quite; what it did was dissipate inside him, became translucent in his blood vessels.
It no longer pulsed through his body. He was no longer filled with a sense of purpose. He was filled with a sense of despair.
I could have lived through it all if only I continued to have the feeling that at the end of childhood, at the end of adolescence, there was something else in this life that would be mine, that I could make with my bare hands, and once I had made it, I could say, I did this to my life. I made my life so.
Hope.
It was gone from Alexander on this sunny crisp Sunday, and the feeling of purpose had vanished, was vanquished in his veins.
The End, 1936
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Harold stopped bringing vodka into the house.
“Dad, you don’t think Mom will be able to get vodka any other way?”
“With what? She has no money.”
Alexander didn’t mention the thousands of American dollars his mother had been hoarding since the day they came to the Soviet Union.
“Stop talking about me as if I’m not here!” Jane shouted.
They looked at her with surprise. Afterward Jane started stealing money from Harold’s pockets and going to buy the vodka herself. Harold started keeping his money out of the house. Jane was then caught in someone else’s apartment, going through their things, already drunk on some French perfume she had found.
Alexander began to be afraid that the next natural step for his mother would be to drink her way through the money she had brought with them from America. It wouldn’t end until all the money was gone. First the Soviet rubles she had saved from her job in Moscow, then the American dollars. It would take his mother a year to buy vodka with all her dollars on the black market, but buy it she would, gone the money would be, and then what?