Lovers Key
On a moist Sunday—after spring boiled over into summer— Alexander borrowed a one-mast sailboat from Mel and took them out to the bay where they thought the breezes would make them cooler. The humid breezes just made them muggier, but because they were alone out at sea, Alexander undressed to his swimming trunks, and Tatiana wore her bikini swimsuit, and they floated peaceably under the zenith of the Tropic of Cancer sun. Alexander brought two fishing lines and some worms. The wind was good. The head-sail was up. Come with me, she murmured, and I will make you fishers of men. They sailed on the serene waters around Key Biscayne, and down south to Lovers Key, where he dropped anchor so they could have some lunch. Anthony fell asleep after helping his dad loosen the ropes on the jib. He had been leaning on his mother and just keeled over. Smiling, Tatiana adjusted the boy, holding him closer, more comfortably. “I know how he feels. This is quite soothing.” She closed her eyes.
Raising anchor, Alexander let the boat float and flounder as he went to sit by her on the white bench at the rudder. He lit a smoke, gave her a drink; they sat and swayed.
The Russian they spoke reminded them of another time. They spoke softer, often they spoke English, but this Sunday on the boat, they were Russian.
“Shura? We’ve been here six months.”
“Yes. It hasn’t snowed.”
“We’ve had three hurricanes, though.”
“I’m not bothered about the hurricanes.”
“What about the heat, the mugginess?”
“Don’t care.”
She considered him.
“I’d be happy to stay,” Alexander said quietly. “This is fine with me.”
“In a houseboat?”
“We can get a real house.”
“And you’d work the boats and the girls all day?”
“I’ve taken a wife, I don’t know what girls are anymore.” He grinned. “I admit to liking the boats, though.”
“For the rest of your life? Boats, water?”
His smile rather quickly disappearing, he leaned away from her.
“Do you recall yourself in the evenings, at night?” Tatiana asked gently, bringing him back with her free hand. The other held the boy.
“What’s that got to do with the water?”
“I don’t think the water is helping,” Tatiana said. “I really don’t.” She paused. “I think we should go.”
“Well, I don’t.”
They stopped talking. Alexander smoked another cigarette.
They floated in the middle of the tropical green ocean with the islands in view.
The water was doing something to Tatiana. It was dismantling her. With every flutter of the water she saw the Neva, the River Neva under the northern sun on the sub-Arctic white night city they once called home, the water rippled and in it was Leningrad, and in Leningrad was everything she wanted to remember and everything she wanted to forget.
He was gazing at her. His eyes occasionally softened under the sticky Coconut Grove sun.
“You’ve got new freckles, above your eyebrows.” He kissed her eyelids. “Golden, soft hair, ocean eyes.” He stroked her face, her cheeks. “Your scar is almost gone. Just a thin white line now. Can barely see it.” The scar she got escaping from the Soviet Union.
“Hmm.”
“Unlike mine?”
“You have more to heal, husband.” Reaching out, she placed her hand on Alexander’s face and then closed her eyes quickly so he couldn’t pry inside her.
“Tatiasha,” he called in a whisper, and then bent to her and kissed her long and true.
It had been a year since she had found him shackled in Sachsenhausen’s isolation chamber. A year since she dredged him up from the bottomdwellers of Soviet-occupied Germany, from the grasping hands of Stalin’s henchmen. How could it have been a year? How long did it seem?
An eternity in purgatory, a hemidemisemiquaver in heaven.
His boat was full of women, old women, young women, widowed women, newly married women, and now there were pregnant women. “I swear,” said Alexander, “I had very little to do with that.” Also returning war veterans. Some were foreigners. One such man, Frederik, with a limp and a cane and a heavy Dutch accent, liked to sit by Alexander as he looked out on the sea. He came in the mornings, because the afternoon tour was too hot for him, and he and Anthony stayed by Alexander’s steering wheel. Anthony would frequently sit on Frederik’s lap. One day, Anthony was playing a clapping game with Frederik and said, “Oh, look you have blue numbers on your arm, too. Dad, look, he’s got numbers on him, just like you.”
Alexander and Frederik exchanged a look. Alexander turned away but not before Frederik’s eyes welled up. Frederik didn’t say anything then, but at noon after they docked, he stayed behind and asked Tatiana if he could talk to Alexander in private. Casting an anxious look at Alexander, she reluctantly left all the sandwiches and took Anthony home for lunch.
“So where were you?” Frederik asked, prematurely old though he was only forty-two. “I was at Treblinka. All the way from Amsterdam to Treblinka. Imagine that.”
Alexander shook his head. He lit a smoke, gave one to Frederik, who shook his head. “You have the wrong impression,” Alexander said.
“Let me see your arm.”
Rolling up his white linen sleeve, Alexander showed him.
“No wrong impression. I’d know these anywhere. Since when are American soldiers branded with German numbers?”
The cigarette wasn’t long enough, the smoke wasn’t long enough. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Alexander said. “I was in a concentration camp in Germany.”
“That’s obvious. Which camp?”
“Sachsenhausen.”
“Oh. It was an SS-training camp.”
“That camp was many things,” said Alexander.
“How did you get there?”
“Long story.”
“We have time. Miami has a large ex-pat Jewish community. You want to come with me tonight to our meeting? We meet on Thursdays. Just a few of us, like me, like you, we get together, talk, drink a little bit. You look like you sorely need to be around other people like yourself.”
“Frederik, I’m not Jewish.”
“I don’t understand,” Frederik said haltingly. “Why would the Germans brand you?”
“The Germans didn’t.”
“Who did then?”
“The Soviets. They ran that camp after the war.”
“Oh, the pigs. I don’t understand anything. Well, come with me anyway. We have three Polish Jews—you didn’t think there were any left, did you?—who were imprisoned by the Soviets after Ukraine went from Soviet to German back to Soviet hands. They’re debating every Thursday which occupation was worse.”
“Well,” said Alexander, “Hitler is dead. Mussolini is dead. Hirohito deposed. Fascism has suddenly gotten a bad name after being all the rage for twenty years. But who’s stronger than ever? The answer should give you a clue.”
“So come, give your two cents. Why would the Sovietskis do that to you if you weren’t Jewish? They didn’t brand American POWs; they were fighting on the same side.”
“If the Soviets knew I was American, they would’ve shot me years ago.”
Frederick looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t understand...”
“Can’t explain.”
“What division did you say you served in?”
Alexander sighed. “I was in Rokossovsky’s Army. His 97th penal battalion.”
“What—that’s not the U.S. Army...”
“I was a captain in the Red Army.”
“Oh, my God.” On Frederik’s face played sharp disbelief. “You’re a Soviet officer?”
“Yes.”
Frederik careened off the plank with his cane so fast, he nearly tipped himself over. “I got the wrong impression about you.” He was wheeling away. “Forget we ever spoke.”
Alexander was visibly upset when he came home. “Anthony!” he s
aid as soon as he walked through the door. “Get over here. I told you this before, I’m going to tell you again, but for absolutely the last time— stop telling strangers about me.”
The boy was perplexed.
“You don’t have to figure it out, you just have to listen. I told you to keep quiet, and you still continue as if I hadn’t made myself clear.”
Tatiana tried to intervene, but Alexander cut her off. “Ant, as punishment tomorrow you’re not going on the boat with me. I’ll take you the next day, but if you ever speak about me to strangers again, you’ll be off the boat for good. You got it?”
The boy cried.
“I didn’t hear you, Anthony.”
“I got it, Dad.”
Straightening up, Alexander saw Tatiana watching them silently from the stove. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put a long-sleeve linen shirt on Anthony’s mouth like you do on my body,” he said, and ate dinner by himself out on the deck.
After Tatiana put Anthony to bed, she went outside.
The first thing Alexander said was, “We haven’t had meat in weeks. I’m as sick of shrimp and flounder as you were of lobsters. Why can’t you buy some meat?”
After hemming and hawing, Tatiana said, “I can’t go to the Center Meat Market. They’ve put a sign in the window—a little war souvenir.”
“So?”
“Sign says, ‘Horse meats not rationed—no points necessary.’”
They both fell mute.
Tatiana is walking down Ulitsa Lomonosova in Leningrad in October 1941, trying to find a store with bread to redeem her ration coupons. She passes a crowd of people. She is small, she can’t see what they’re circling. Suddenly the crowd opens up and out comes a young man holding a bloodied knife in one hand and a hunk of raw meat in the other, and Tatiana can see the opened flesh of a newly killed mare behind him. Dropping his knife on the ground, the man rips into the meat. One of his teeth falls out and he spits it out as he continues to chew frantically. Meat!
“You better hurry,” he says to her with his mouth full, “or there won’t be any left. Want to borrow my knife?”
And Alexander was remembering being in a transit camp after Colditz. There was no food for the two hundred men, who were contained within a barbed wire rectangular perimeter with guards on high posts in the four corners. No food except the horse that every day at noon the guards killed and left in the middle of the starving mess of men with knives. They would give the men sixty seconds with the horse, and then they would open fire. Alexander only survived because he would head immediately for the horse’s mouth and cut out the tongue, hide it in his tunic and then crawl away. It would take him forty seconds. He did it six times, shared the tongue with Ouspensky. Pasha was gone.
Tatiana stood in front of Alexander, leaning against the rail of the deck and listening to the water. He smoked. She drank her tea.
“So what’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Why did you eat by yourself?”
“I didn’t want to be eating dinner with you looking at me with your judging eyes. Don’t want to be judged, Tania”—he pointed at her— “most of all by you. And today, thanks to Ant, I had an unpleasant and unwanted conversation with a crippled Jewish man from Holland who mistook me for a brother in arms only to learn I fought for a country that handed over half of the Polish Jews and all of the Ukrainian Jews to Hitler.”
“I’m not judging you, darling.”
“I’m good for nothing,” Alexander said. “Not even polite conversation. You may be right about me not being able to rebuild my life working off Mel’s boats, but I’m not good for anything else. I don’t know how to be anything. In my life I’ve had only one job—I was an officer in the Red Army. I know how to carry weapons, set mines in the ground, drive tanks, kill men. I know how to fight. Oh, and I know how to burn down villages wholesale. That’s what I know. And I did this all for the Soviet Union!” he exclaimed, staring into the water, not looking at Tatiana, who stood on the deck, staring at him. “It’s completely fucked up,” he went on. “I’m yelling at Anthony because we have to pretend I’m not what I am. I have to lie to deny what I am. Just like in the Soviet Union. Ironic, no? There I denied my American self, and here I deny my Soviet self.” He flicked his ash into the water.
“But, Shura, you’ve been other things besides a soldier,” Tatiana said, unable to address the truth of the other things he was saying to her.
“Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about,” he snapped. “I’m talking about living a life.”
“Well, I know, but you’ve managed before,” she whispered, turning her body away from him to herself look out onto the dark bay. Where was Anthony to interrupt the conversation she realized belatedly she didn’t want to have? Alexander was right: there were many things she would rather not have out. He couldn’t talk about anything, and she didn’t want to. But now she was in the thick of it. She had to. “We lived a life in Lazarevo,” she said.
“It was a fake life,” said Alexander. “There was nothing real about it.”
“It was the realest life we knew.” Stung at his bitter words, she sank down to the deck.
“Oh, look,” he said dismissively, “it was what it was, but it was a month! I was going back to the front. We pretended we were living while war raged. You kept house, I fished. You peeled potatoes, made bread. We hung sheets on the line to dry, almost as if we were living. And now we’re trying it in America.” Alexander shook his head. “I work, you clean, we dig potatoes, we shop for food. We break our bread. We smoke. We talk sometimes. We make love.” He paused as he glanced at her, remorsefully and yet—accusingly? “Not Lazarevo love.”
Tatiana lowered her head, their Lazarevo love tainted by the Gulag.
“Is any of it going to give me another chance to save your brother?” he asked.
“Nothing is going to change what cannot be changed,” she replied, her head close to her knees. “All we can do is change what can be.”
“But, Tania, don’t you know that the things that torture you most are the things you cannot fix?”
“That I know,” she whispered.
“And do I judge you? Let’s see,” said Alexander, “what about taking ice away from the borders of your heart? Is that changeable, you think? No, no, don’t shake your head, don’t deny it. I know what used to be there. I know the wide-eyed joyous sixteen-year-old you once were.”
Tatiana hadn’t shaken her head. She bowed her head; how different.
“You once skipped barefoot through the Field of Mars with me. And then,” said Alexander, “you helped me drag your mother’s body on a sled to the frozen cemetery.”
“Shura!” She got up off the deck on her collapsing legs. “Of all the things we could talk about—”
“On the sled dragged,” he whispered, “your entire family! Tell me you’re not still on that ice in Lake—”
“Shura! Stop!” Her hands went over her ears.
Grabbing her, removing her hands from her head, Alexander brought her in front of him. “Still there,” he said almost inaudibly, “still digging new ice holes to bury them in.”
“Well, what about you?” Tatiana said to him in a lifeless voice. “Every single night reburying my brother after he died on your back.”
“Yes,” Alexander said in his own lifeless voice, letting her go. “That is what I do. I dig deeper frozen holes for him. I tried to save him and I killed him. I buried your brother in a shallow grave.”
Tatiana cried. Alexander sat and smoked—his way of crying—poison right in the throat to quell the grief.
“Let’s go live in the woods, Tania,” he said. “Because nothing is going to make you skip next to me again while walking through the Summer Garden. I’m not the only one who’s gone. So let’s go make fish soup over the fire in our steel helmet, let’s both eat and drink from it. Have you noticed? We have one pot. We have one spoon. We live as if we’re still at war, in the trench, without meat, without baking re
al bread, without collecting things, without nesting. The only way you and I can live is like this: homeless and abandoned. We have it off with the clothes on our back, before they start shooting again, before they bring reinforcements. That’s where we still are. Not on Lovers Key but in a trench, on that hill in Berlin, waiting for them to kill us.”
“Darling, but the enemy is gone,” Tatiana said, starting to shake, remembering Sam Gulotta and the State Department.
“I don’t know about you, but I can’t live without the enemy,” said Alexander. “I don’t know how to wear the civilian clothes you bought to cover me. I don’t know how not to clean my weapons every day, how not to keep my hair short, how not to bark at you and Anthony, how not to expect you to listen. And I don’t know how to touch you slow or take you slow as if I’m not in prison and the guards are coming any minute.”
Tatiana wanted to walk away but didn’t want to upset him further. She didn’t lift her head as she spoke. “I think you’re doing better,” she said. “But you do whatever you need to. Wear your army clothes. Clean your guns, cut your hair, bark away, I will listen. Take me how you can.” When Alexander said nothing, nothing at all, to help her, Tatiana continued in a frail voice, “We have to figure out a way that’s best for us.”
His elbows were on his knees. Her shoulders were quaking.
Where was he, her Alexander of once? Was he truly gone? The Alexander of the Summer Garden, of their first Lazarevo days, of the hat in his hands, white-toothed, peaceful, laughing, languid, stunning Alexander, had he been left far behind?
Well, Tatiana supposed that was only right.
For Alexander believed his Tatiana of once was gone, too. The swimming child Tatiana of the Luga, of the Neva, of the River Kama.
Perhaps on the surface they were still in their twenties, but their hearts were old.
Mercy Hospital
The following afternoon at 12:30, she wasn’t at the marina. Alexander could usually spot her from a great distance, waiting for them on the docks, even before he entered the no wake zone. But today, he pulled up, he docked, let the women and the old men off as Anthony stood by the plank and saluted them. He waited and waited.