“Laundry?”
“Still me.”
The girls whistled. There was a silence.
And then Amanda said, “Yes, but who has the children, Tania?”
Tatiana didn’t say anything; she looked at Alexander, who kept his steady gaze on his own steady hands.
It was Anthony who leapt inside the dining room and in a loud upset voice exclaimed, “Leave my mother alone! She works harder than any of you—at everything. While you’re having your little lunches, she heals sick people and dying people. That’s what she does while you’re sipping ice cream sodas, passing judgment on her. That’s what she is—a critical care nurse and a mother.”
Tatiana pointed to Anthony. “Amanda, here is my child. You remember him, don’t you?”
Anthony whirled on his father. “And if she wasn’t a Red Cross nurse, you,” he said, shaking, pointing his finger at Alexander, “you know where you would be.”
“Anthony! That’s enough.” That was Tatiana.
“It’s not enough!”
Alexander stood from the table and fixed Anthony with such a grim and deadly stare that the boy fell mute and ran from the room. Tatiana excused herself. They left soon after.
In the truck, they managed to remain quiet, but at home, Anthony did not remain quiet. They had barely got in the door, still standing in the open space in front of the kitchen where Dudley had been shot when Anthony said, trying to keep his voice low, “Dad, I simply don’t understand how you could’ve sat there and said nothing.”
“Anthony!” Tatiana yelled. “Go to your room!”
“No!” Anthony yelled back.
Alexander slapped Anthony square in the mouth with the flat of his hand. “Do not ever,” he said, “raise your voice to your mother.”
“Why not—you do!”
Coming between them, Tatiana grabbed Alexander by his forearms and said very quietly, “No. Stop right now.”
“You’re telling me to stop right now?” Alexander said. “Are you listening to him?”
And behind her, a suddenly empowered Anthony said, “It’s all your fault, Mom. It’s because everything he does is fine with you—everything! He yells at you, that’s fine. He doesn’t say one syllable when people are attacking you—that’s fine, too!”
“Anthony!” yelled Alexander. Tatiana dug her nails into his arms, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to dislodge her without violently dislodging her, and she was hoping he would stop himself in front of his son.
He did. The tension in his body slightly receding, Alexander lifted his arms up and away from her, took her by the shoulders, looked down into her face and said quietly, “He speaks that way because you let him. You’ve been letting him get away with everything his entire life. I’m not going to let him. Now let go of me.”
Anthony was standing panting.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Alexander said to Anthony. “How many times does your mother tell you, stay out of our business. You want to try your luck with me, fine, be upset with me, but what are you even thinking, talking that way to your mother?”
With tears of pride pinching his face, Anthony said in a much quieter voice, “Oh, I get it now, so against me, my mother needs defending!”
This time, Tatiana wasn’t holding on to Alexander anymore. She whirled on Anthony herself. “Your father is right, you are completely out of line,” she said as she pushed him down the hallway and into his room, mouthing, “Stop it!” before she slammed the door.
Anthony didn’t hear his parents argue. He was sure he would hear loud voices, shouting, but he heard nothing. A half-hour later he walked out of his room into silence. Their bedroom door was open. Quietly opening the back door, he glimpsed his father sitting on the deck bench. His mother was in his lap, her arms around him. Their faces were pressed together. They were rocking. Anthony coughed. His father stopped rocking; his mother with her back to Anthony fixed her blouse. Anthony started to say he needed a permission slip signed for a school trip.
“Your mother will be right there. Go.” Alexander didn’t even turn his head when he spoke. Anthony went inside.
In a little while his door opened. He was expecting—and hoping— for his mother, but it was his father who came in. He signed the note, and then sat on the edge of the bed. Anthony’s mouth was twisted. He couldn’t speak to him. He could barely speak about it to his mother, but at least he could cry with her, yell at her, say cruel things to her. He was free to be anything with her. But with his father, he knew he could not be. Still, Anthony was so upset, so angry.
“What’s the matter with you?” Alexander said. “Go ahead. Speak your mind.”
Trying to keep his voice straight, Anthony said, “I don’t understand how you could have not defended her, Dad. They were being so mean to her. Isn’t Amanda supposed to be Mommy’s friend?”
“She’s a foul-weather friend,” said Alexander. “Mommy doesn’t expect much from Amanda, who never disappoints her.” He fell silent for a moment. “But Ant,” he said, “you know that our life is not a parade for acquaintances at the dessert table. You know that. You are my son, but you’re fourteen. Mommy and I are not fourteen. And we are going through adult things that we are not going to explain, either to our casual friends or to you.” Alexander leaned to his son and said quietly, “But you know that when your mother needs real defending, I’m her man.”
Anthony looked up at his father. “I thought tonight was such a time.”
Alexander brushed the hair from Anthony’s forehead. “No,” he said. “Tonight, the mother lion managed fine by herself. Now stop being so overwrought. You’re a boy, and the son of a soldier. Emotions in check, buddy.”
But then his mother came to see him. And he closed his eyes, turning in to her, while she kneeled by his bed and held his head and whispered words to him he barely heard and did not need to. You are a good boy, Antman. You have always been a lovely, protective, open, beautiful boy. And he cried in her arms, and she was all right with it.
Outside Tatiana climbed into Alexander’s lap once more, kissing away the evening from his heart.
Alexander sat cradled in her, smoking, breathing in the night air. “Let me ask you . . .” he finally said, trying to keep his voice even, keep it from cracking. “Can you explain to me, in a way I can understand, why you and I, of all the people in this world, after all the love that we have made, can’t make one little baby?”
Tatiana groaned, her eyes deeply averted from him, her body shrinking down, curling around herself. “Shura, darling . . .” Her voice was defeated. “I’m very sorry. Something must be wrong.”
“That much is clear,” said Alexander, his eyes deeply averted from her.
Tatiana stared at Alexander after he said that. And then she got off his lap.
The Soviet Union Baby Boom
It was another Friday night.
Tonight was not a poker night, or a drink with the buddies night, or a downtown with Tyrone and Johnny night. Alexander kept Anthony home with him. They played basketball, had pot roast Tatiana left for them, went to the pictures, had ice cream, came home, played dominoes to hone their skills against her. Anthony was long asleep.
It was three in the morning.
In his black BVDs Alexander was sitting on the couch in the dark living room, his long legs stretched out nearly to the TV, his head thrown back, arms dangling by his sides, a burned down cigarette between his fingers, eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
They weren’t having another baby because they both weren’t here. Alexander Belov wasn’t in America, he was decaying where they didn’t have children after the war that killed fifty million people.
In the United States, two million babies were born in 1946. Three million in 1947 and in 1948, and four million every single year from 1948 to 1956. Women were being sneezed at and they were getting pregnant. Not Alexander’s Soviet woman. Because her husband was a Soviet man, and he was logging in Siberia where he and two million other repatriates were se
nt after being handed over by the Allies. The soldiers who weren’t killed in the war were sent to Kolyma, to Perm-35, to Aykhal, to Archangelsk. Who else was going to rebuild the Soviet Union?
So while in the decade after the war, England, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Austria and, most of all, the United States enjoyed a population explosion unheard of in history, the Soviet Union had a population decrease. How could that be? Where were the men?
Well, the young, the old, the healthy, the sick were in Magadan. Twenty-five percent of all able-bodied Soviet men were in the camps. The maimed were dead. Unlike the United States, where veterans without arms could come home and still sire children, most of the Soviet one-armed veterans were in the earth, because there had not been enough penicillin to save them.
To increase the birth rate, the Soviet government gave periodic amnesty to the Gulag male prisoners. When that was not enough, it abolished abortion. There never had been another form of contraception for women in Soviet Russia, and without abortion available every afternoon from three to five at every hospital clinic in every city, surely there would be a baby boom.
There wasn’t. So condoms were removed from the command production line. Black market condoms became exorbitantly priced. You went to prison for buying them and for selling them. When that was not enough, the government practically abolished marriage. The one woman, one man union clearly wasn’t working in the Soviet Union. There weren’t enough men left for Christian marriage.
Married women, whose husbands’ whereabouts were— ahem— unknown, were given instant, no questions asked, no reasons needed divorce dispensation so they wouldn’t waste valuable time waiting around for their missing spouses. The women became divorced with flourishing ease and then were given bonuses, raises, prizes, medals, time off work, cash in hand for having children by absolutely anyone. Proof of paternity was not necessary. Marriage was not essential—and not encouraged. Cohabitation was not essential—and not encouraged. Not only not encouraged, it was not even possible. There was nowhere for married couples to live. The women lived banded together in communal apartments where the men had once been. One amnestied Gulag man among thirteen desperate women, and suddenly there was a chance at repopulation. Once his business was done, the man could move on to the next communal apartment. It seemed so foolproof: both sexes got exactly what they most wanted. Men got absolute sexual freedom and women got financial security.
Yet even with these enticing procreation stimulus packages, ten years after the war, the population growth was zero! Worse than zero—there were fewer people in Russia in 1955 than there had been in 1945. More people were dying than were being born. Why? Sex wasn’t abolished; where were the children?
It was the women’s fault. They were having sex, all right, but they weren’t idiots. They worked all day, they lived in tight quarters with other women, and those unfortunate enough to become pregnant went to doctors and paid vast sums to get under-the-table abortions. When this was discovered, both the doctors and the women got ten years’ hard labor. To save their skins, the doctors refused to perform abortions. In their unrepentant desperation, the women started performing their own. The women’s mortality rates soared. At the later stages of pregnancy, at five, six, seven months, the babies were delivered by midwives and then aborted right in the communal apartments and thrown out with the communal trash.
The Soviet Government solemnly proclaimed the population was stagnating because of a soaring infant mortality rate.
The women were dying, the babies were dying, and meanwhile the dying men were where Nikolai Ouspensky now was, where Alexander should have been, five thousand kilometers across the tundra, out in the forests from dawn to dusk, building forts and fences, cutting down the pines. That’s where his spirit was, but his strong, healthy body was in Arizona, building a house for every house he had destroyed when he was a tank commander, a penal battalion commander, a leader of wretched men who burned down the towns they vanquished, burned the bridges and the huts and the marketplaces. No more apples or cabbages, no more watches or whorehouses. Alexander had a lifetime of villages to rebuild before he was done. And alongside Ouspensky, he had a lifetime of fences to put up before he was done, fences so the men couldn’t get to the imprisoned women (who got ten years for illegal abortions), who were on their hands and knees lifting up their skirts, presenting themselves through the rusty barbed wire.
In America, Alexander worked for himself building houses so that American men could live in them with their American women and have the children he couldn’t with his Soviet factory-girl wisp of a wife who still got up every morning when it was dark in the winter to go get her family their daily bread, their cardboard bread so that they might live. Dasha, Papa, Mama, Marina, Babushka slept while the bombs fell on the emaciated girl in a white dress as she made her way down the empty snowdrift streets where the dead lay wrapped in sheets. Alexander warned Tatiana to walk only on the left side of the avenues and to wait out the bombing, and Tatiana listened to him, waiting impatiently in doorways in her overcoat and hat, and then, her face to the howling wind, making her way in the blizzard to the store—that was all out.
She was still waiting out the bombing, tubercular, starving, twisting her exhausted body like a vine on which nothing could grow. Alexander could build a lifetime of adobe houses, but no matter how many hours Tatiana put in at Phoenix Memorial, she would never be able to save her grandfather, her mother, her father, her sister, her brother. Who could make babies in this barren landscape of her Soviet womb when sired by the sterile landscape of his Soviet seed?
Chapter Eleven
Blue Christmas
Merry Merry Merry
In early November 1957, Alexander was checking out a new marble and granite quarry down on West Yuma and thought he’d stop by to see Tatiana at the hospital. The receptionist told him she was in the cafeteria. Through the glass door he saw her sitting with—who was that? He looked slightly familiar—a doctor. Usually he found her having lunch with one of the other nurses, but here she was sitting with a doctor— ah yes, it was Dr. Bradley. Alexander vaguely remembered him from the Christmas parties. Fair-haired Bradley looked fit for a doctor.
What struck Alexander about Tania having lunch with Bradley was the casual ease of her body while she sat with him. She was relaxed, elbows on the table, legs carelessly crossed. Sucking her drink through a straw like a little girl, she was listening animatedly while he talked animatedly. Alexander was just about to come in when she threw back her head and laughed at something the doctor said.
Perplexed, Alexander watched her, his eyes and solar plexus opening to something he had not expected to see. He was used to seeing the eyes of men on her—though Bradley’s were perhaps a little more keen than most—but this was new. Tatiana laughed long and with joy at this regular Bob Hope of a doctor while she blithely rearranged and tightened her hair bun.
Alexander didn’t go in. He stood a moment by the door and then turned around.
“You didn’t find her?” Cassandra called after him.
“No.” He was walking out.
“Want me to page her?”
“No. Got to get back to work. Thanks, though.”
That night after she came home, Alexander was quiet, observing her. She made him meatball soup and fajitas. Anthony was at basketball practice.
“Shura, Cassandra told me you came by today, is that true?”
“I did, but I didn’t realize what time it was. I had to run.”
“You didn’t even page me to say hello?”
“I was ten minutes late to my one thirty.” Alexander took a spoonful of the soup, weighed his words. “What did you do for lunch?”
“Oh, it was so quick today—we had four code blues,” she said. “I had it with Dr. Bradley. You remember him?”
“I do.” Alexander didn’t say anymore. What was interesting to him was that she didn’t say anymore.
“You like the fajitas, Shura?”
“Yes
. Francesca has taught you well.”
After dinner, Alexander was lying on the couch, not going outside for his smoke, still watching her. He had to go pick up Ant in a little while.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Fine.” But Alexander wasn’t fine.
Was it his imagination? Could he be wrong?
No, he saw her happiness. He wasn’t imagining that.
“Come here,” he said, sitting up.
She was drying the dishes.
“Put the rag down and come here.”
“Shura... you have to go pick up Ant in fifteen minutes.”
“Why so much discussion? Come.”
She came and stood in front of him, her eyes soft, fond.
Taking the rag out of her hands, Alexander drew her close between his legs, his hands going underneath her wool jersey skirt to the bare space above her stockings. The girdle was open and satin, the underwear sheer nylon mesh. Pulling up her sweater, he pressed his mouth into the top of her warm stomach and silently rubbed the backs of her thighs, his fingers circling, circling, becoming more insistent when he felt her skin flush and get warmer.
After her hands went around his head and her breath became shallow, Alexander laid her down on the couch and opening her legs slightly so he could see her, caressed her thighs in steady circles. She was very flushed, very warm. He watched her face, her elongated neck, her white thighs, her barely there underwear. He unhooked the front clasp of her bra and her breasts fell out, the nipples up and coral.
“Shura, please...”
“Okay, babe.” He bent to her breasts, continuing to rub her. A quivering unquiet minute went by. And another. Straightening up, Alexander whispered, “Look at you. Your nipples are so wet, so hard, and you are so warm, and my fingers are so close, rubbing you gently, round and round and round... right on the seam of your underwear...Tania, can you feel me?”
She barely moved, barely breathed.
“I can pull back your underwear, like this, just a little, move it over an inch with my fingers...”
She moaned. His fingers circled.