After he was taken back to his cell, two guards came in and, with their two rifles pointed at him, ordered Alexander to undress. “So we can launder your uniform,” they said. He undressed down to his BVDs.
They asked him to remove his watch and boots and socks. Alexander was unhappy about the socks, for the floor in his cell was numbingly cold. “You need my boots?”
“We will polish them.”
Alexander was grateful for the foresight that had made him move Dr. Sayers’ drugs from his boots to his BVDs.
Reluctantly he handed over the boots, which they snatched from him and left without a word.
After the door had closed and he was left alone, Alexander picked up the kerosene lamp and held it close to his body to warm himself up. He didn’t care about losing oxygen any longer.
The guard saw and yelled not to touch the lamp. Alexander did not put the lamp down. The guard came in and took the lamp out, leaving Alexander cold and in darkness again.
His back wound, though having been bandaged thoroughly by Tatiana, was throbbing. The dressing was wrapped around his stomach. He wished he could wrap his whole body in the white bandage.
He needed as little of his body touching the cold as possible. Alexander stood in the middle of his cell, so that only his feet were on the icy floor. He stood and imagined warmth.
His hands were behind his head, they were behind his back, they were in front of his chest.
He imagined…
Tania standing in front of him, her head on his bare chest, listening for his heart, and then lifting her gaze at him and smiling. She was standing tiptoed on his feet holding on to his arms, as she reached up with her neck extended and lifted her head to him.
Warmth.
There was no morning and no night. There was no brightness and no light. He had nothing to measure time with. The images of her were constant, he could not measure how long he had been thinking of her.
He tried counting and found himself swaying from exhaustion. He needed to sleep.
Sleep or cold? Sleep or cold?
Sleep.
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He huddled in the corner and shook uncontrollably, trying to stave off misery. Was it the following day, the following night?
The following day from what? The following night from what?
They’re going to starve me to death. They’re going to thirst me to death. Then they will beat me to death. But first my feet will freeze and then my legs and then my insides, they will all turn to ice. And my blood, too, and my heart, and I will forget.
Tamara and Her Stories, 1935
There was an old babushka named Tamara who had lived for twenty years on their floor. Her door was always open and sometimes after school Alexander would stop in and talk to her. He noticed that old people loved the company of young people. It gave them an opportunity to impart their life experience to the young. Tamara, sitting in her uncomfortable wooden chair near the window one afternoon, was telling Alexander that her husband was arrested for religious reasons in 1928 and given ten years—
“Wait, Tamara, Mikhailovna, ten years where?”
“Forced labor camp, of course. Siberia. Where else?”
“They convicted him and sent him there to work?”
“To prison…”
“To work forfree ?”
“Oh, Alexander, you’re interrupting, and I need to tell you something.”
He fell quiet.
“The prostitutes near Arbat were arrested in 1930 and not only were they back on the street months later but had also been reunited with their families in the old cities they used to frequent. But my husband, and the band of religious men, will not be allowed to return, certainly not to Moscow.”
“Only three more years,” Alexander said slowly. “Three more years of forced labor.”
Tamara shook her head and lowered her voice. “I received a telegram from the Kolyma authorities in 1932—without right of correspondence, it said. You know what that means, don’t you?”
Alexander didn’t want even to hazard a guess.
“It means he is no longer alive to correspond with,” said Tamara, her voice shaking and her head lowering.
She told him how, from the church down the block, three priests were arrested and given seven years for not putting away the tools of capitalism, which in their case was the organized and personal and unrepentant belief in Jesus Christ.
“Also forced labor camp?”
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“Oh, Alexander!”
He stopped. She continued. “But the funny thing is—have you noticed the hotel down the street that had the harlots right outside a few months ago?”
“Hmm.” Alexander noticed.
“Well, have you noticed how they all disappeared?”
“Hmm.” Alexander noticed that too.
“They were taken away. For disturbing the peace, for disrupting the public good—”
“And for not putting away the tools of capitalism,” Alexander said dryly, and Tamara laughed and touched his head.
“That’s right, my boy. That’s right. And do you know how long they had been given in that forced labor camp that you care so much about? Three years. So just remember—Jesus Christ, seven, prostitutes, three.”
“All right,” said Jane, coming into the room, taking her son by the hand and leading him out. Before she left, she turned around and said in an accusatory tone to Tamara, but addressed to Alexander, “Can we not be learning about prostitutes from toothless old women?”
“Who would you like me to learn about prostitutes from, Mom?” he asked.
“Son, your mother wanted me to talk to you about something.” Harold cleared his throat. Alexander crimped his lips together and sat quietly. His father looked so uncomfortable that Alexander had to sit on his hands to keep himself from laughing. His mother was pretending to clean something in another part of the room. Harold glared in Jane’s direction.
“Dad?” said Alexander in his deepest voice. His voice had broken a few months ago, and he really liked the way his new self sounded. Very grown-up. He also had shot up, growing more than eight inches in the course of the last six months, but he couldn’t seem to put any flesh on his bones. There just wasn’t enough of…anything. “Dad, do you want to go for a walk and talk about it?”
“No!” said Jane. “I can’t hear a thing. Talk here.”
Nodding, Alexander said, “All right, Dad, talk here.” He scrunched up his face and tried to look serious.
It wouldn’t have mattered if he were sitting cross-eyed and sticking his tongue out. Harold was not looking at Alexander.
“Son,” said Harold. “You’re getting to be at that age where you’re, well, I’m sure, you’re—and also you’re—you’re a fine boy, and good-looking, I want to help, and soon, or maybe already—and I’m sure that you’re—”
Jane tutted in the background. Harold fell quiet.
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Alexander sat for a few seconds, then got up, slapped his father on the back and said, “Thanks, Dad.
Thatwas helpful.”
He went into his room, and Harold didn’t follow him. Alexander heard his parents bickering next door, and in a minute there was a knock. It was his mother. “Can I talk to you?”
Alexander trying to keep a composed face, said, “Mom, really, I think Dad said all there was to say, I don’t know if there’s anything to add—”
She sat down on his bed while he sat in the chair near the window. He was going to be sixteen in May.
He liked summer. Maybe they would get a room at adacha in Krasnaya Polyana again like they did last year.
“Alexander, what your father didn’t mention—”
“Wasthere something Dad didn’t mention?”
“Son…”
&nb
sp; “Please—go ahead.”
“I’m not going to give you a lesson in girls—”
“Thank goodness for that.”
“Listen to me, the only thing I want you to do is remember this—” She paused.
He waited.
“Martha told me one of her derelict sons has had his horn removed!” she whispered. “Removed, Alexander, and do you know why?”
“I’m not sure I want to.”
“Because he gotfrenchified ! Do you know what that is?”
“I think—”
“And her other son’s gotFrench pigs all over his body. It’s the most revolting thing!”
“Yes, it—”
“TheFrench curse ! TheFrench crown ! Syphilis! Lenin died from it eating up his brain,” she whispered.
“No one talks about it, but it’s true all the same. Is that what you want for yourself?”
“Hmm…” said Alexander. “No?”
“Well, it’s all over the place. Your father and I knew a man who lost his whole nose because of it.”
“Personally, I’d rather lose the nose than—”
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“Alexander!”
“Sorry.”
“This is very serious, son. I have done all I can to raise you a good, clean boy, but look where we are living, and soon you’ll be out on your own.”
“How soon you think?”
“What do you think is going to happen when you don’t know where the harlot you’re with has been?”
Jane asked resolutely. “Son, when you grow up, I don’t want you to be a saint or a eunuch. I just want you to be careful. I want you to protect what’s yours at all times. You must be clean, you must be vigilant, and you must also remember that without protection, you will get a girl up the stick, and then what? You’re going to marry someone you don’t love because you weren’t careful?”
Alexander stared at his mother. “Up thestick ?” he said.
“She’ll tell you it’s yours and you’ll never know for sure, all you’ll know is that you’re married, and your horn is falling off!”
“Mother,” said Alexander. “Really, you must stop.”
“Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
“How can I not?”
“Your father was supposed to explain to you.”
“He did. I think he did very well.”
Jane got up. “Will you just once stop with your joking around?”
“Yes, Mom. Thanks for coming in. I’m glad we had this chat.”
“Do you have any questions?”
“Absolutely none.”
The Changing of the Hotel’s Name, 1935
One frostbitten late January Thursday, Alexander asked his father as they headed out to their Party meeting, “Dad, why is our hotel’s name changing again? It’s the third time in six months.”
“Surely not thethird time.”
“Yes, Dad.” They walked side by side down the street. They weren’t touching. “When we first moved in, it was the Derzhava. Then the Kamenev Hotel. Then the Zinoviev Hotel. Now it’s the Kirov Hotel.
Why? And who is this Kirov chap?”
“He was the Leningrad Party Chief,” said Harold.
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At their meeting, the old man Slavan laughed raucously after he heard Alexander’s question repeated.
He beckoned Alexander to him, patted him on the head and said, “Don’t worry, son, now that’s it’s Kirov, Kirov it will stay.”
“All right, enough now,” Harold said, trying to pull his son away. But Alexander wanted to hear. He pulled away from his father.
“Why, Slavan Ivanovich?”
Slavan said, “Because Kirov is dead.” He nodded. “Assassinated in Leningrad last month. Now there’s a manhunt on.”
“Oh, they didn’t catch his killer?”
“They caught him, all right.” The old man smirked. “But what about all the others?”
“What others?” Alexander lowered his voice.
“All the conspirators,” said the old man. “They have to die, too.”
“It was a conspiracy?”
“Well, of course. Otherwise how can we have a manhunt?”
Harold called sharply for Alexander, and later on, when they were walking home, he said, “Son, why are you so friendly with Slavan? What kinds of things has that man been telling you?”
“He is a fascinating man,” Alexander said. “Did you know he’s been to Akatui? For five years.” Akatui was the Tsarist Siberian hard labor prison. “He said they gave him a white shirt, and in the summer he worked only eight hours and in the winter six, and his shirt never got dirty, and he got a kilo of white bread a day, plus meat. He said they were the best years of his life.”
“Unenviable,” grumbled Harold. “Listen, I don’t want you talking to him so much. Sit by us.”
“Hmm,” said Alexander. “You all smoke too much. It burns my eyes.”
“I’ll blow my smoke the other way. But Slavan is a troublemaker. Stay away from him, do you hear?”
He paused. “He is not going to last long.”
“Last long where?”
Two weeks later, Slavan disappeared from the meetings.
Alexander missed the nice old man and his stories.
“Dad, people keep disappearing from our floor. That lady Tamara is gone.”
“Never liked her,” put in Jane, sipping her vodka. “I think she is sick in the hospital. She was old, Alexander.”
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“Mom, two young men in suits are living in her room. Are they going to share that room with Tamara when she returns from the hospital?”
“I know nothing about that,” said Jane firmly, and just as firmly poured herself another drink.
“The Italians have left. Mom, did you know the Italians have left?”
“Who?” said Harold loudly. “Who is disappearing? The Frascas have not disappeared. They are on vacation.”
“Dad, it’s winter. Vacation where?”
“The Crimea. In some resort near Krasnodar. Dzhugba, I think. They’re coming back in two months.”
“Oh? What about the van Dorens? Where have they gone? Also the Crimea? Someone new is living in their room, too. A Russian family. I thought this was a floor only for foreigners?”
“They moved to a different building in Moscow,” said Harold, picking at his food. “The Obkom is just trying to integrate the foreigners into Soviet society.”
Alexander put down his fork. “Did you say moved? Moved where? Because Nikita is sleeping in our bathroom.”
“Who is Nikita?”
“Dad, you haven’t noticed that there is a man in the bathtub?”
“What man?”
“Nikita.”
“Oh. How long has he been there?”
Alexander exchanged a blank look with his mother. “Three months.”
“He’s been in the bathtub for three months? Why?”
“Because there is not a single room for him to rent in all of Moscow. He came here from Novosibirsk.”
“Never seen him,” Harold said in a voice that implied that since he had never seen Nikita, Nikita must not exist. “What does he do when I want to have a bath?”
Jane said, “Oh, he leaves for a half-hour. I give him a shot of vodka. He goes for a walk.”
“Mom,” said Alexander, eating cheerfully, “his wife is coming to join him in March. He begged me to talk to everybody on the floor to ask if we could have our baths earlier in the evening, to let them have a bit of—”
“All right, you two, you’re having me on,” said Harold.
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Alexander and his mother exchanged a look, and then Alexander said, “Dad, go check it out. And whe
n you come back, you tell me where the van Dorens could have moved to in Moscow.”
When Harold came back, he shrugged and said, “That man is a hobo. He is no good.”
“That man,” said Alexander, looking at his mother’s vodka glass, “is the head engineer for the Baltic fleet.”
A month later, in February 1935, Alexander came home from school and heard his mother and father fighting—again. He heard his name shouted out once, twice.
His mother was upsetfor Alexander. But he was fine. He spoke Russian fluently. He sang and drank beer and played hockey on the ice in Gorky Park with his friends. He was all right. Why was she upset?
He wanted to go in and tell her he was fine, but he never liked to interrupt his parents’ fights.
Suddenly he heard something being thrown, and then someone being hit. He ran into his parents’ room and saw his mother on the floor, her cheek red, his father bending over her. Alexander ran to his father and shoved him in the back. “What are you doing, Dad?” he yelled. He kneeled down next to his mother.
She half sat up and glared at Harold. “Fine thing you’re showing your son,” she said. “You brought him to the Soviet Union for this, to show him how to treat a woman? His wife, perhaps?”
“Shut up,” said Harold, clenching his fists.
“Dad!” Alexander jumped to his feet. “Stop!”
“Your father has abandoned us, Alexander.”
“I’m not abandoning you!”
Squaring off, Alexander pushed his father in the chest.
Harold shoved Alexander and then hit him open-handed across the face. Jane gasped. Alexander swayed but did not fall. Harold went to strike him again, but this time Alexander moved away. Jane grabbed Harold’s legs, yanked, and sent him down on his back. “Don’t you dare touch him!” she yelled.
Harold was on the floor, Jane, too; only Alexander was standing. They couldn’t look at one another; everyone was panting. Alexander wiped his bleeding lip.
“Harold,” Jane said, still on her knees. “Look at us! We’re being destroyed by this fucking country.”
She was crying. “Let’s go home, let’s start over.”