Did she just say that? He’s commanding his tank, and they’re in the middle of the Prussian fields, they’re almost in Poland. The Germans have mined the meadow in retreat, and one of the S-mines has just gone off, in full view of Alexander. It lifted up to his engineer’s lurching chest, paused as if to say, looky who’s here, and exploded. Ouspensky has dug the hole where the engineer fell, and they buried him in it—him and his backpack. Alexander never looks through the backpacks of the fallen, because the things they contain make it impossible for him either to walk away or to continue forward. As the soldier’s outer wear—his uniform, helmet, boots, weapon— contain the outer him, the backpacks contain the inner him. The backpacks contain the soldier’s soul.
Alexander never looks. Unopened it is buried with the timid engineer who had a large blue tattoo of a cross on his chest that the Nazi mine ripped open because the Nazis don’t believe in Jesus.
“Where’s your backpack?” Alexander said to Tatiana. “What?”
“Your backpack, the one you left the Soviet Union with. Where is it?”
She turned to the passenger window. “Perhaps it’s still with Vikki,” she said. “I don’t know.”
“My mother’s Bronze Horseman book? The photos of your family? Our two wedding pictures? You left them with Vikki?” Alexander was incredulous.
“I don’t know,” she repeated. “Why are you asking?”
He didn’t want to tell her why he was asking. The killed landmine engineer had a sweetheart in Minsk—Nina. Pictures of her, letters from her had filled his pack. Ouspensky told Alexander this, even though Alexander had asked him not to. After he knew, he felt bitterly envious, blackly jealous of the amorous letters the meek engineer was sent by a Nina from Minsk. Alexander never got any letters. Once long ago he received letters from Tatiana, and from her sister, Dasha. But those letters, the cards, the photographs, Tania’s white dress with red roses were all at the bottom of the sea or had turned to ashes. He had no more things.
“The letters I wrote you—after I left you in Lazarevo,” said Alexander, “you don’t—you don’t know where they are? You’ve... left them with Vikki?” Perhaps things remained that stirred some feeling in him.
“Darling . . .” her voice was soothing. “What on heaven’s earth are you thinking about?”
“Can’t you just answer me?” he snapped. “I have them. I have it all, they’re with me, buried deep in my things. The whole backpack. I never look through it, but I’ll get it for you. I’ll get it when we stop for lunch.”
Relief heaved out of his chest. “I don’t want to look through it either,” he said. He simply needed to know that she is not like him—that she has a soul. Because Alexander’s backpack during his penal battalion days was empty. If Alexander had died and Ouspensky, before burying him, looked through it, he would have found cards, smokes, a broken pen, a small Bible—Soviet-issue, distributed to the Red Army late in the war with false piety—and that is all. If Alexander had died, all his men would have seen that their commander, Captain Belov, had no soul.
But had they looked through the backpack a little more carefully, in the cracking parchment of the New Testament, they would have found a soiled small black-and-white picture of a young girl, maybe fourteen, standing toes turned in like a child, in white braids and a sundress, with a broken and casted arm, next to her dark brother. He was pulling her hair. Her good arm was around him. Pasha and Tania, two striplings. They were laughing—in Luga, a long time ago.
Ninety-Seven Acres
New Mexico. Santa Fe Mountains. Arizona. Tonto Mountains.
Seven thousand feet above sea level the air is thinner, drier. In Santa Fe, Anthony had slept almost through the night. Only a whimper from him at dawn. They all felt it was progress and stayed a little longer, hoping to continue the improvement, but it didn’t last.
The Tonto Mountains were breathtaking, the air so transparent Tatiana could see over the vistas and the valleys and the sloping hills clear to the sun, but they’ve left them behind now, and the air has become like the land, bone-dry, overbaked and opaque with stodgy molecules of heat. She has unbuttoned her blouse, but Alexander is focused on the road. Or is he just pretending he is focused on the road? She has noticed a small but palpable change in him recently. He still doesn’t talk much, but his eyes and breath during the day are less impassive.
She offers him a drink, a cigarette. He takes it all but is not distracted by her this time. She wonders when they can stop, break camp, maybe find a river, swim. The memories of swimming in the Kama prickle her skin with pain, and she stiffens, trying not to flinch and, pulling down her skirt, forces her hands to lie still on her lap. She doesn’t want to think of then. It’s bad enough she has to think of now, when she keeps expecting the police to stop them at every intersection and say, Are you Alexander Barrington, son of Harold Barrington? What, your wife didn’t tell you that at your last campsite when you dared to leave her alone for just a moment, she called her old roommate in New York? Your wife, Mr. Barrington, seems not to tell you many things.
That’s right. Tatiana called long distance through an operator, but Sam Gulotta picked up the phone. She got so frightened, she hung up and she didn’t have enough time to call Aunt Esther, too, but now she is terrified that the operator told Sam where in New Mexico she had called from. People with nothing to hide don’t run, Alexander Barrington, the police will say when they stop the Nomad. Why don’t you come with us, and your wife and son can stay here at the intersection of souls and wait for you to come back as they have been doing, as they’re doing still, waiting for you to return to them. Tell them you won’t be long.
It’s a lie. They will take the casement that is his body, they will take his physical self, for that’s almost all that remains of him anyway, and Tatiana and Anthony will be at that intersection forever. No. It’s better to have him here, even like this—withdrawn, into himself, silent, occasionally fevered, fired up, occasionally laughing, always smoking, always deeply human—than to have just a memory. For the things he does to her at night, they’re not memories anymore. And his sleeping with her. She fights her own sleep every night, tries to stay awake long after he has gone to sleep just so she can feel his arms around her, so she can lie completely entombed and surrounded by the ravaged body he barely saved that now comforts her as nothing else can.
He measures her to order her. He gets upset when she won’t respond in kind, but she wants to tell him that he cannot be ordered by Aristotelian methods or by Pythagorean theorems. He is what he is. All his parts are in absolute proportion to his sum, but even more important, all are in relative proportion to her sum. Cardinal or counting numbers don’t help. Ordinals or ranking numbers help so long as she stops at 1. Archimedes’s principle won’t help. Certainly she can’t and won’t measure what is measureless, what neither terminates nor repeats, what is beyond even the transcendental of π—though he doesn’t think so—what is beyond polynomials and quadratic formulas, beyond the rational and irrational, the humanist and the logical, beyond the minds of the Cantors and the Dedekinds, the Renaissance philosophers and the Indian Tantrists, what falls instead into the realm of gods and kings, of myth, of dawn of man, of the mystery of mankind—that there is a space inside her designed solely for him and despite clear Euclidian impossibilities not only does everything, in plenary excess, cleave like it’s meant to, but it makes her feel what math cannot explain, what science cannot explain. What nothing can explain.
And yet, inexplicably, he continues to measure her, tracing out fluents of curves and slopes of tangents. His two hands are always on her—on top of her head, against her palms, her feet, her upper arms, ringing her waist, clasping her hips. He is so desperately endearing. She doesn’t know what he thinks π will give him.
Playing with Anthony. Is that not real? Anthony having his father? The dark boy sitting on his lap trying to find the ticklish spot and Alexander laughing, is that not real, not math nor a memory?
Alexander ha
s nearly completely forgotten what it’s like to play, except when he’s in the water, but there had been no water in Texas, barely any in New Mexico, and now they’re in Arid Zona.
Anthony tries land games with his father. He perches on Alexander’s lap, holds the tips of his index fingers together, and says, “Daddy, want to see how strong I am? Hold my fingers in your fist, and I’ll get free.”
Alexander stubs out his cigarette. He holds Anthony’s fingers lightly, and the boy wriggles free. The delight of freeing himself from his daunting father is so great that he wants to play the game again and again. They play it two hundred times. And then the reverse. Alexander holds his index fingers together while Anthony clenches his tiny four-year-old fist over them. When Alexander is unable to get free, Anthony’s joy is something to behold. They play that two hundred times while Tatiana either prepares lunch or dinner, or washes or tidies, or just sits and watches them with a gladdening heart.
Alexander takes Anthony off his knee and says in a throaty, nicotine-stained voice, “Tatia, want to play? Put your fingers into my fist and see if you can wriggle free. Come.” Not a muscle moves on his face, but her heart is no longer just gladdening. It’s quickening, it’s maddening. She knows she shouldn’t, Anthony is right there, but when Alexander calls, she comes. That’s just how it is. She perches on his lap and touches together the tips of her slightly trembling index fingers. She tries not to look into his face, just at her fingers, over which he now places his enormous fist, squeezes lightly, and says, “Go ahead, wriggle free.” Her whole body weakens. She tries, of course, to get free, but she knows this: while as a father Alexander plays one way with Anthony, as a husband, he plays the opposite way with her. She bites her lip to keep from making a single sound.
“Come on, Mommy,” says the uncomprehending child by her side. “You can do it. I did it! Wriggle free.”
“Yes, Tatiasha,” whispers Alexander, squeezing her fingers tighter, looking deep into her face as she sits on his lap. “Come on, wriggle free.”
And she glimpses the smiling soul peeking out.
But when he drives, he is often silent and sullen. She hates it when he reduces himself like this to the worst of his life—it’s hard to draw him away, and sometimes even when he wants to be drawn, he can’t be. And sometimes Tatiana is so full of fears herself of the imminent danger to Alexander at every stop sign that she loses the weapons she needs to draw him away, herself reduced to the worst of her life.
She wishes for something else to swallow them, where the road wouldn’t apprehend her, where his soul wouldn’t apprehend him. Perhaps if they were less human.
She was leading him to Phoenix, but Alexander was too hot; he almost wanted to drive straight on to California. “I thought you wanted to see the ninety-seven acres I bought with your mother’s money,” she said to him.
He shrugged, drank some water. “What I want,” he said, “is to feel water on my body. That’s what I want. Will we get that in Phoenix?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Exactly. I am thus reluctant.”
It took them a day to get from Arizona’s eastern border to Phoenix. They had stopped at a camping site that evening near the Superstition Mountains. Alexander lay down on the wooden deck under the water spout with the cold water pouring down onto his chest and face. Anthony and Tatiana stood at a polite distance and watched him. Anthony asked if his dad was all right.
“I’m not sure,” said Tatiana. “I’d say the odds are fifty-fifty.” Had Alexander insisted a little harder, she would’ve been easily persuaded to keep moving until they reached the Pacific. Not because she didn’t want to show him their desert property, but because she thought there was a possibility that Federal agents would be waiting for them in the only place that belonged to them. Vikki might have mentioned the land to Sam Gulotta. Tatiana suspected she might have mentioned it to Sam herself. She and Sam had developed a friendship over the years. What if they were waiting? The thought was sickening her. But unfortunately Alexander didn’t protest hard enough. Tatiana already knew what she wanted to do—unthinkable though it was: to sell the land! Just sell it at whatever price, take the money, go far into another state, maybe into the vastness of Montana, and never be seen again. She had no illusions: Sam’s allegiance was hardly going to be to her and Alexander. Sam wasn’t Aunt Esther. Tatiana was mute as she thought of these things while her husband lay on the deck drowning himself with running water.
The following morning, they took the Superstition Freeway. “It’s very flat here,” Alexander said.
“Well, it is called Mesa,” said Tatiana. “It means flat.”
“Please tell me the land is not here.”
“Okay, the land is not here.” There were stone mountains in the far distance across the flatlands. “This is too developed.”
“This is too developed?” he said. There were no stores, no gas stations, just farmland on one side, untouched flat desert on the other.
“Yes, this is Tempe,” Tatiana said. “Quite built up. Scottsdale, where we’re headed, is a little Western town. It’s got a few things—a store, a market. You want to see it first? Or...”
“Let’s see this mythical promised land first,” he said.
They continued to drive north through the desert. He was thirsty. She was frightened. The paved road ended, and a gravelly Pima Road began that separated the Phoenix valley from the Salt River Indian Reservation that stretched for miles to the McDowell Mountains. It wasn’t as flat anymore, the blue dusty mountains rising up on all sides far and near, low and wide, in the apocalyptic heat.
“Where are these mountains you told me about?”
“Shura, don’t tell me you don’t see them!” Tatiana pointed straight ahead. The ranges did loom rather large and monolith-like across the saguaros, but Alexander was in a good mood this morning and wanted to tease her.
“What, those? Those aren’t mountains. Those are rocks. I know, because I’ve seen mountains. The Tontos we passed yesterday, those were mountains. The Santa Fe, those were mountains. Also I’ve seen the Urals, I’ve seen the Holy Cross Mountains, completely covered by coniferous forest. Those were mountains.” His mood became less good.
“Now, now . . .” Tatiana said, reaching over and easing him away with her hand on his thigh. “These are Arizona’s McDowell Mountains. Sedimentary rock on top of granite rock formed from lava two billion years ago. Precambrian rocks.”
“Aren’t you a little geologist.” Alexander grinned. “A capitalist and a geologist.” She was in yellow gingham today, white bobby socks and ballet slipper shoes, her hair pulled back in a braided bun. She didn’t have a bead of perspiration on her face, looking almost serene if only Alexander didn’t look down on her lap and notice her fingers pressed so stiffly against each other, they looked as if they were breaking.
“All right, all right,” he said with a slight frown. “They’re mountains.”
They chugged along north, kicking up dirt with their dusty tires. The McDowell Mountains drew closer. The sun was high. Alexander said they were idiots, morons for taking a trip across the hottest part of the country during the hottest part of the year. If they were smart they would have left Coconut Grove early, driven up to Montana to spend the summer, then carried on to California for the grape-picking.
“You didn’t want to leave Florida, remember?”
“Hmm,” he assented. “Coconut Grove was quite nice for a while.”
They fell quiet.
It was another forty-five minutes of unpaved frontier road with not a house, a fruit stand, a gas station, a storefront, or another soul around before Tatiana told him to make a right on a narrow dirt path that sloped upward.
The path was called Jomax.
Jomax ended in a sun-drenched rocky mountain, and that’s where Alexander stopped, a mile above the valley. Tatiana, her fingers relaxed, a toothy, happy smile on her face, exclaimed, “Oh God! There is nobody here!”
“That??
?s right,” Alexander said, turning off the ignition. “Because everyone else is in Coconut Grove in the ocean.”
“There is nobody here,” she repeated, almost to herself, and hopped out of the trailer.
Anthony ran off but not before Tatiana stopped him, saying, “Remember what I told you about the cholla, Ant? Don’t go anywhere near it. The wind blows the puffs of needles right under your skin and I won’t be able to get them out.”
“What wind? Let go of me.”
“Anthony,” said Alexander, looking for his lighter, “your mother tells you something, you don’t tell her to let go. Tania, hold on to him for another two minutes until he understands that.”
Tatiana made a face at Anthony, pinched him, and quietly let him go. Alexander’s lighter was in her hands. She flicked it on for him, and he cupped her hand as he lit his cigarette. “Stop being so soft with him,” he said.
Walking away from her to explore a little, Alexander looked north and south, east and west, to the mountains, to the expanse of the entire Phoenix valley lying vast beneath his gaze, its farms all spread out in the overgrown rolling Sonoran Desert. This desert wasn’t like the Mojave he vaguely remembered from childhood. This wasn’t gray sand with gray mounds of dirt as far as the eye could see. This desert in late July was covered in burned-out, abundant foliage. Thousands of saguaro cacti filled the landscape, their brown-green spiky towering pinnacles and their arms reaching thirty, forty feet up to the sun. The mesquite trees were brown, the palo verdes sepia. The underbrush and the motley over-brush were all in hues of the taupe singed earth. All things grew not out of grass, but out of clay and sand. It looked like a desert jungle. It was not at all what Alexander had expected.
“Tania...”
“I know,” she said, coming up against him. “Isn’t it unbelievable?”
“Hmm. That wasn’t quite what I was thinking.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it in my whole life.” Her voice became tainted with something. “And wait till you see this place in the spring!”