Read The Bridge to Holy Cross Page 41


  “All the way to Harlem?”

  “It’s the best for a bit of jitterbug.”

  “Isthat what you call it?”

  “Are you being saucy?” Vikki studied her with a grin. “Will you come?”

  “Maybe other time, okay?”

  “Tania,” Vikki said one evening as the girls curled up on the couch, “I’ve finally decided what’s wrong with you. Besides you making bread and eating bacon all the time.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You’re a moper. You need to learn how to curse like a sailor, you need to learn how to walk with bravado as if the entire world belonged to you, you need to come to Lady Be Beautiful and get a beauty treatment, but mostly you need a man.”

  “All right,” said Tatiana. “Where do we find this man?”

  “I’m not talking aboutlove ,” Vikki said, as if explaining was what Tatiana needed.

  “Of course not.”

  “No. I’m talking about a hair-raising good time. You’re too uptight. You worry too much. You’re always fretting, always working, being a mother. Ellis, Red Cross, Anthony, it’s too much.”

  “I not always fretting,” Tatiana defended herself.

  “Tania, you’re in America! I know it’s war, but the war is not here.You’re here. Didn’t you always want to come to the United States?”

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  “Yes,” Tatiana said. But I didn’t want to come alone.

  “Isn’t it better here than your Soviet Union?”

  They’re in two rowboats and they’re racing across Lake Ilmen, seeing who gets to the middle of the lake first—a kilometer of flat-out rowing. Tatiana, barely smiling, is methodical and unflappable. Pasha is crazed by his inability to beat his sister. And back on shore, their sister Dasha and their cousin Marina are jumping up and down rooting for Tania, and the grown-ups behind them are waving left and right and rooting for Pasha. It’s summer and the air smells of fresh water.

  But they’re not there anymore. Not on Lake Ilmen, not in Luga, not in Leningrad, not in Lazarevo. Yet they never leave her.

  Andhe doesn’t leave her.

  Tatiana blinked away her life as she drank her tea. “Tell me about your first love,” she said.

  “His name was Tommy. He was a lead singer in a band. God, he was cute. Blond and small and—”

  “But you tall.”

  “I know. I smothered him as if he were my son. It was perfect. He was seventeen and so talented. I used to sneak down the fire escape to go watch him perform at Sid’s at the Bowery. I was awed by him.”

  “What happened to you two?” Tatiana asked, looking into her cup.

  “Oh, I found out what musician boys did after they finished playing their sets.”

  “I thought you went to watch him.”

  “I had to be back home. He would tell me he’d be by to see melater . And then I found out that between the end of set andlater , he would have a number of girls in the back room of the bar. He would have them, and then come up the fire escape into my bedroom at five in the morning, and be with me.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I cried for three weeks straight. And then I met Jude.”

  “Who’s Jude?”

  “The second boy.”

  Tatiana laughed.

  Vikki placed her hand on Tatiana’s back and caressed her hair softly. “Tania.” Her voice was soothing.

  “Thereis a second love. And a third love. And if you’re lucky, a fourth and a fifth, too.”

  “That feels nice,” Tatiana said, holding her cup tighter and closing her eyes.

  “I think you’re only supposed to wear black for a year, mourn for a year. And I’ll tell you—Jude was

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  better than Tommy. I felt more for him. He was a better—” Vikki paused. “He was a better person.

  Better at everything.”

  Tatiana nodded.

  “Tania, you’ve forgotten what a great man feels like.”

  “If only I forgotten.”

  Vikki pressed Tatiana to her. “Ah, Tania,” she said. “We’ll get you there. I promise. We’ll get you forgetting yet.”

  Once upon a time, young girls met young boys when the moon was full and the nights were dark, when there was a fire and singing and joking, when there was wine and taffeta and dancing, when the music was loud and the laughing, too, when one pair of eyes stared at another, and the girl’s chest swelled and the boy came up close, and suddenly she looked up, he looked down and…

  Once there was first love.

  Vikki had one. Edward had one. Isabella and Travis had one.

  First love, first kiss, first everything.

  Once when they were so young.

  And then they got older.

  Time passed with the cycles of the moon, and the music stopped, and the girl took off her dress, and the fire went out, and they stopped laughing. But eventually, as surely as the sunrise, another man stood in front of the girl in the taffeta dress and smiled, and she looked up at him, and he gazed down at her.

  It wasn’t first love.

  It wasn’t a first kiss.

  But it was love nonetheless.

  And the kiss was sweet.

  And the heart still pounded.

  And the girl went on. She went on because she wanted to live, and she wanted to be happy. She wanted to love again. She didn’t want to sit by the window looking out onto the sea. She didn’t want to remember. She wanted to forget the first man. All she wanted was to remember the first feeling.

  She wanted to take that feeling and place it on another man, and smile again, because the heart was too full and too bright not to love again. Because the heart needed to feel and needed to soar.

  And because life was long.

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  She went on and stopped grieving, and she smiled and put on another dress and stood close to another man. She sang again, and joked again, after all, she did not die, she was still on this earth and she was still the same person, the person who needed to laugh every once in a while, to laugh with the roses, even if she knew that she would never again in all those many days ahead love as she loved when her heart was seventeen.

  To protect herself she walked through life favoring the bleeding half of her body. She was careful not to step too harshly, she was careful to shield it from other eyes, from other cries. Her greatest asset became her greatest liability. And what time allowed her to do was to become an expert at hiding her deformity from the world. What time allowed her to do was say, as she walked hunched uphill carrying the cross on her back, that everyone had one, and this was hers.

  She was so lucky to have her baby boy, to not be alone, to have love, to havelife . And yesterday when she was young, she had been given more than she deserved.

  Someday, she would stand from the couch, step away from the window sill, leave the fire escape, put away the black backpack, take the rings off her neck. Someday when the music played, she would not feel him waltzing with her through the clearing under the crimson moon on their wedding night.

  Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed…

  Someday. But today with every breath of the past she colored her breath of the future, with every blink of her eye, Alexander bore himself deeper and deeper inside her until the whole of what they were together blinded her from seeing what else might be in the world for her.

  All she thought about was what he had loved in her, what he had needed from her, what he had wanted from her.

  Memory—that fiend, that cruel enemy of comfort.

  There was no forgetting; worse, the bloodletting that went on every minute became more intense as time went on. It was as if his lips, his hands, his crown, his heart, the things that seemed almost normal, almost right in Lazarevo acquired a prescient, otherwo
rldly sense; it was as if in their totality they took on a life they had not had before.

  How did they fish, or sleep, or clean? How did she go to her sewing circle? She hated herself now, flagellated herself for doing anything else, how could she have tried to live a normal life in Lazarevo with him, knowing even then that time and they were as fleeting as snowflakes?

  Knowing what was at stake, could he have lowered his head and walked by her, if he had known what he would lose for the hour of rapture, for the minute of bliss?

  How he loved to touch her. And she would sit quietly, with her legs not too close together, so that anytime he wanted to, he could: and he did.Anytime. Yes, he said, it was what a soldier on furlough wanted. Anytime wasn’t often enough. He would touch her with his fingers as she sat quietly on the bench, and then he would touch her with his mouth as she sat less quietly on the bench, there was no other time for him but now, there was no later, there was only insanity now.

  I will make you insane, her memory screamed at her near the winter window sill as Tatiana smelled the brine of eternity. On the outside you will walk and smile as if indeed you are a normal woman, but on the

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  inside you will twist and burn on the stake, I will never free you, you will never be free.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Colditz, January 1945

  PERHAPS THEY WERE RIGHTin what they said about Colditz. There was no escape. And there was no work, either. There was nothing for the men to do except sleep and play cards and go for two walks a day. They got up at seven for roll call, and turned off their lights every evening at ten. In between there were three meals and two walks.

  Colditz was the sprawling fifteenth-century fortress castle in northern Saxony, in the triangle between three great German cities: Leipzig, Dresden, and Chemnitz. Colditz stood on a steep hill above the river Mulde. And it wasn’t just a hill. Colditz was surrounded by moats on the south and vertical drops on the east and leg-buckling precipices on the north and west. Colditz was built out of the rocky hill. When the mountain ended, the castle began.

  The castle was extremely well run by high-minded, well-organized Germans who took their jobs very seriously and would not be corrupted, as Alexander learned from the five Soviet officers already residing in their small, cold, single stone cell with four bunks.

  Colditz had a sick ward and a chapel, it had a delousing shed, two canteens, a movie theater, even a dentist. And that was just for the prisoners. As if it were their permanent residence, the German guards lived and ate very well. The commandant of Colditz had a quarter of the castle all to himself.

  The most notorious escapees in all the other POW camps in Germany were brought to Colditz, where the sentries with machine guns stood every fifteen meters, on level ground, on raised catwalks and in round towers, and watched them twenty-four hours a day. Floodlights covered the castle at night. There was only one way in and one way out, over a moat bridge that led to the German garrison and the commandant’s quarters.

  There must have been two sentries for every one of the 150 prisoners; it certainly felt like it. Alexander spent thirty-one January days watching the sentries as they went out for their walks in the large inner courtyard, cobbled with gray stones that reminded him slightly of Pavlov barracks in Leningrad. He wondered whatever happened to Colonel Stepanov.

  For thirty-one days he watched the guards in the canteen, in the showers, in the courtyard. Twice a week for an hour—with good behavior only—the prisoners were allowed, in small clusters of twelve, to take walks on the outer terrace facing west. It was an enclosed stone space, and below it over a parapet was a grassy, completely enclosed garden, but the prisoners weren’t permitted there. Alexander, always on his best behavior, went out to the terrace for his two walks a week and watched the men who were watching him. He even watched them changing guard out of the window of his room. His bunk was next to the window, on the third floor over the sick ward, facing west. He liked that he was facing west.

  Something hopeful about it. Below him was the long and narrow terrace, and below that the long and narrow garden.

  Colditz certainly looked impenetrable.

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  But how did Tania do it? How did she make it to Finland, with Dimitri dead and Sayers fatally wounded? He wished he knew, but he knew one thing—somehow she ended up in Finland. So there must be a way out of this place, too. He just couldn’t see it.

  Pasha and Ouspensky were a lot less optimistic. They had no interest in watching the guards. Alexander wanted to talk to the British POWs in the courtyard, but he had no interest in explaining his flawless English to Pasha or Ouspensky. There were no Americans in sight, only British and French officers, one Polish officer and the five Soviets with whom they shared their cell.

  The one Polish officer was General Bor-Komarovsky. Alexander and he got talking in the canteen.

  Komarovsky had taken over the Polish Underground Resistance to Hitler and to the Soviets in 1942.

  When he was caught he went straight to Colditz, to ensure his permanent incarceration. And though he was very willing to tell Alexander stories of previous escape attempts out of the castle, and even gave Alexander his old relief maps of the area, in Russian, Komarovsky told Alexander that he could forget about escaping from here. Even those who had gotten outside the fortress walls were all caught within days. “Which goes to show you,” Komarovsky said, “that what I’ve always believed is especially true of a place like Colditz. Despite the most meticulous planning and organization, there is no successful way out of any difficult situation without the hand of God.”

  Tania got out of the Soviet Union, Alexander wanted to say. I rest my case.

  At night on his top bunk, he thought of her arms. He thought of trying to find her…Where would she be?

  If she were still waiting for him, where would she be so he could find her? Helsinki? Stockholm?

  London? America? Where in America, Boston, New York? Somewhere warm, perhaps? San Francisco? The City of Angels? When she left Russia with Dr. Matthew Sayers, he was going to take her to New York. Though the doctor had died, perhaps Tatiana headed there as planned. He would start there.

  He hated these blind alleys of his imagination, but he liked to picture what her face might look like when she saw him, what her body might look like as it trembled, what her tears might taste like, how she would walk to him, maybe run to him.

  What about their child, how old was it now? One and a half. A boy, a girl? If a girl, maybe she was blonde like her mother. If a boy, maybe he was dark-haired like his once dark, now hairless father. My child, what is it like to hold a small child, to lift it up in the air?

  He would get himself into a self-defeating frenzy thinking of her hands on him, and of his own on her.

  When she had first left him, the aching for her in his body was unabated, through windy March and wet April, and dry May and warm June. June was the worst. The aching was so intense that sometimes he thought that he would not be able to continue another day, another minute of such want, of such need.

  Then a year passed and another. And little by little the aching was numbed, but the want, the need—there was no escape from that.

  Sometimes he thought of the girl in Poland, blowzy Faith, who offered him everything and to whom he gave a chocolate. Would he be as strong now if a Faith walked through these parts? He didn’t think so.

  In Colditz, there was no escape, not from the thoughts, not from the fear, not from the throbbing. Not from the realization that it had now been many months, many years, and how long could one faithful wife wait for her dead husband? Even his Tatiana, the brightest star in the sky. How long could she wait

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  before she moved on?

  Please, no more. No more thoughts. No more des
ire. No more love.

  Please. No more anything.

  How long could she wait before she put her blonde hair down, and walked out of work, and saw another face that made her smile?

  He turned his own face to the window. He had to get out of Colditz, at whatever the cost.

  “Comrades, look here,” he said to Pasha and Ouspensky, when they were out on the terrace one freezing February afternoon. “I want you to see something.” Without motioning he pointed to the two sentries one on each side of the rectangular terrace, seven meters wide by twenty meters long.

  Then he walked them casually across the terrace to the stone parapet and casually looked over the ledge while lighting a cigarette. Pasha and Ouspensky also looked over the ledge. “What are we looking at?”

  said Pasha.

  In the walking garden far below, same shape as the terrace but twice as wide, two sentries with machine guns stood at opposite sides, one in an elevated pagoda, one on a raised catwalk.

  “Yes?” said Ouspensky. “Four guards. Day and night. And the garden is over a vertical drop. Let’s go.”

  He turned.

  Alexander grabbed his arm. “Wait, and listen.”

  “Oh no,” said Ouspensky.

  Pasha leaned forward. “Let him go, Captain,” he said. “We don’t need him. Go to hell, Ouspensky, and good riddance.”

  Ouspensky stayed.

  Alexander, without pointing, said, “There are two guards down in the garden during the day, and two up here on the terrace. But at night the two guards here are relieved until morning because there is not much point in looking right at the floodlights. The guards here are replaced by one additional sentry in the garden below for a total of three. The third sentry watches the barbed wire fence over the fifty-foot—”

  Alexander coughed—“sixteen-meter precipice that leads to the bottom of the hill and to freedom.” He paused. “At midnight, two things happen. One is the changing of the guard. The other is the turning of the floodlights to light this terrace and the castle. I’ve been watching it all out of our window at night. The guards walk off their posts, and new ones come to take their place.”