“You’ve got two weeks. But we have thirteen million troops abroad, and as soon as we win this war, they’re all coming home through the Port of New York.”
“Oh yes? Because United States has no other coastal city?”
“That’s right. Now tell me why you have to go all the way to Washington to find a man when our beautiful New York is going to have thirteen million?”
“Not speaking to you about it.”
After spending five days at the Grand Canyon, Tatiana drove a rented car south through Arizona, headed for Tucson. Vikki, being a city girl, did not know how to drive.
They stopped in Phoenix. “Just a dusty, one-horse village,” Vikki called it. One scorching summer evening they were sitting on a blanket on the hood of their car, looking at the sunset. The Sonoran Desert, covered with white saguaros, stretches for hundreds of miles across southeastern Arizona. Home to 298 varieties of cactus, it is the largest desert in North America, spanning much of Arizona and New Mexico. In the near distance are the foothills of the Maricopa mountains. The indigo blue sky stands in stark contrast to the brick and cream hue of the earth. Except for the flickering of an occasional jackrabbit chasing a previously motionless Gila monster, the desert is silent.
They sat on the hood of the sedan, their backs to the windshield, northwest of the Superstition Mountains. Anthony crawled on the ground, at two years old interested in only two things: getting as mucky as possible and finding a snake, not necessarily in that order.
“Anthony,” called Vikki, wiping the perspiration off her face. “Get off the ground. Do you know that snakes swallow their food whole?”
“All right, Vikki,” said Tatiana. “Enough.”
“Whole, Anthony,” Vikki repeated.
“But I big boy. I want small snake.” Anthony was verbal for a boy of two.
“You’re not a big boy. You’re a small boy.”
“Vikki.”
“What?”
Tatiana said nothing, just stared at Vikki.
“Why do you do that? You call out my name, as if that’s enough for me to know exactly what you want. Vikki what?”
“You know what.”
“No, I’m not going to stop. Aren’t you at all concerned?”
“Not really,” said Tatiana. “Anthony, you find snake, you let me know. We take snake back to New York and cook it.”
“That’ll be a nice change from bacon. For your next birthday,” said Vikki, leaning back and taking a drink, “I’m going to buy you a book on mothering, a book on cooking, and also some ‘a’s and ‘the’s. You don’t seem to have any.”
“Some what?”
“Never mind. But seriously though, Tania, you eat Planter’s peanuts, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Planter’s peanuts.”
“No, I don’t like peanuts.”
“What does the ad for them read in Times Square? We passed it the other day.”
“I don’t know. I think it reads, ‘Planter’s peanuts: a bag a day for more pep.’”
“Exactly. Very good. Now, if you had your way with that line, it would read, ‘bag day for more pep.’ Do you see the difference?”
“No.” With a straight face.
“Oh, God.”
Tatiana turned away and smiled. She got out a bottle of Coke from her bag and passed it to Vikki, saying, “‘Drink Coca Cola. A pause that refreshes.’”
“Very good!” Vikki said, her eyes, her teeth gleaming at Tatiana.
Anthony did not find a snake but did become exhausted by his search efforts. He climbed onto the car, onto Tatiana’s lap, dusty, hands grimy, and nuzzled his head into her chest. She gave him a drink of water.
Sitting close against Vikki with Anthony cradled on her lap, Tatiana said, “Quite beautiful, no?”
“Your son?” Vikki leaned over and kissed him. “Yes. The desert’s barren.” She shrugged. “It’s nice for a change of pace. I wouldn’t want to live here, there’s nothing but cacti.”
“In spring all wildflowers bloom to life. It must be even better here in spring.”
“New York is beautiful in the spring.”
Tatiana didn’t say anything at first. Then she said, “The desert is amazing—”
“Desert is okay. Have you ever seen a steppe?”
Tatiana paused before replying. “Yes,” she said slowly. “It’s not this. The steppe is cold and bleak. Here, yes, it’s over ninety degrees now, but in December, near Christmas, it will be seventy. The sun will be high in sky. It won’t be dark. In December, all I will wear for cover is long-sleeve shirt.”
“What do they wear in this Arizona in the winter?” Dasha asks Alexander.
“A long-sleeve shirt.”
“Now I know you’re telling me fairy tales. Tell them to Tania. I’m too old for fairy tales.”
“Tania, you believe me, don’t you?”
“Yes, Alexander.”
“Would you like to live in Arizona, the land of the small spring?”
“Yes, Alexander.”
“So?” said Vikki. “It’s broiling here right now. We’re going to become scrambled eggs if we don’t start driving.”
Tatiana shuddered briefly, to shake off the memories. “I’m just saying. It’s nothing like steppe. I like it here.”
Shrugging, Vikki said, “But Tania, it’s the middle of nowhere.”
“I know. Fantastic, isn’t it? No people anywhere.”
“That’s fantastic?”
“A little…yes.”
“Well, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to buy this land or live here.”
Tatiana cleared her throat. “What about your friend?” she said.
“Which one?”
“Me.”
“You want to live here?” Vikki paused and turned her head. “Or do you want to buy this land?” she said incredulously.
Quietly, Tatiana said, “Imagine I purchased some saguaro cactus and sagebrush land in Sonoran Desert.”
“Not for a second.”
Tatiana was silent.
“Did you buy this land?”
Tatiana nodded.
“This very land?”
She nodded.
“When?”
“Last year. When I come here with Anthony.”
“I knew I should have come with you! Why? And with what?”
“I liked it.” She looked at the expanse of earth stretching out to the mountains. “I never own anything in my life. I bought it with money I brought with me from Soviet Union.” With Alexander’s money.
“But God, why this land?” Vikki looked at her. “I bet it was cheap.”
“It was cheap.” It cost only four lives. Harold’s. Jane’s. Alexander’s. And Tatiana’s. Tatiana pressed Anthony closer to her chest.
“Hmm,” Vikki said, studying Tatiana. “Are you going to be full of these kinds of surprises? Or is this it?”
“This is it.” Tatiana smiled and didn’t say anything after that but stared west into the valley, into the sunset, into the mighty saguaro cactus, into the desert, into four thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars that had bought ninety-seven acres of the United States of America.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Out of Colditz, April 1945
THE AMERICANS LIBERATED COLDITZ in April after three days of fighting, or so it was rumored, for though Alexander heard the gunfire, he saw only a handful of Americans out in the courtyard. He managed to approach a group of them, asking for a cigarette, and, while bending over the lighter flame, he said to one private in English that he was an American named Alexander Barrington and maybe if his story checked out, he could be helped?
And the U.S. soldier laughed and said, “Yeah, and I’m the King of England.”
Alexander opened his mouth and Ouspensky came up to ask for a cigarette himself.
Alexander thought he would have another chance, but there was to be no other chance, because very early the next morning after the American liberation, Sov
iet officials, a general, two colonels, a deputy associate foreign minister or something, along with a hundred troops, came into Colditz to take the seven Soviet men “to join up with their brothers in the victorious march on defeated Germany.”
They were put on a train. A whole train for only seven of them? thought Alexander, but it turned out the train was full of Soviet men. Not all of them were soldiers, some were workers, some were residents of Poland. Thousands of such men were on that train. One, a concrete mixer, said he was living with his family in Bavaria, a wife and three children, when he was apprehended. Others echoed that. “I had a family, too. A mother, two sisters, three nieces after my brother died.” Where were the family members? Alexander wondered. “We left them, left them where they were,” said the man.
“But why didn’t you take your family with you?” inquired Ouspensky, who was shackled to Alexander.
The concrete man didn’t reply.
The train continued slowly west through central Germany. Most of the road signs had been destroyed, it was impossible to tell where they were. They seemed to have traveled hundreds of kilometers. Alexander saw a small sign that said, Gottinger, 9. Where was Gottinger?
The train was stopped and they were all told to get off. After walking for two hours, they found themselves at what looked like an abandoned POW camp. The NKGB troops—by now Alexander realized they couldn’t be Red Army men, since the Red Army men were all roped to each other—requisitioned the grounds and called it a transit camp.
“A transit camp to where?” ask Ouspensky. No one answered him.
Then they changed the camp’s name to a screening and identification camp.
In this camp they lived for the last two weeks of April 1945, surrounded by barbed wire, watching perimeter lights being put up and watchtowers being hastily built. Then they heard that the war was over, that Hitler was dead.
The day after Germany’s surrender, the fields beyond the electrified barbed wire were mined. Alexander and Ouspensky knew this because they watched at least a half-dozen Soviet men—including the concrete mixer—go to war with those mines and lose.
“What do they know that we don’t know?” Ouspensky asked with suspicion, as they watched with a group of others as the bodies of the escapees were dumped into mass graves.
“Not just that,” said Alexander, “but what do they know that makes them run across a mined field rather than remain in a fairly innocuous transit camp?”
“They don’t want to go home,” said another man.
“Yes, but why?” said Ouspensky.
Alexander lit a cigarette and said nothing.
He wondered why the camp was being run under military discipline, despite having so many civilians in it. There was reveille and taps, there was curfew and military inspection of the barracks and clear assignation of duties. It was all peculiar and puzzling.
A few days later, Ivan Skotonov, deputy associate foreign minister, sent straight from Moscow, came to speak to the men. They were not allowed to stand as a crowd; they were made to stand in rows. It was a windy May day; Skotonov, greasy-haired and in a suit, could barely be heard. Finally he took a loudspeaker. “Citizens! Comrades!” he said. “Proud sons of Russia! You have helped to defeat an enemy such as our great nation has never known! Your country is proud of you! Your country loves you! Your country needs you again to rebuild, to reconstruct, to help make once again great the land that our Splendid Leader and Teacher Comrade Stalin saved for us. Your country calls for you. You will come back with us, and your country will greet you as heroes and shower you with applause!”
Alexander thought back to the concrete mixer from Bavaria who had left his wife and children behind and then run across a mined field to get back to them.
“What if we don’t want to come back?” someone shouted.
“Yes, we had a life in Innsbruck, why should we have to leave it?”
“Because you are Soviet nationals,” Skotonov shouted back amiably. “You don’t belong in Innsbruck. You belong back home!”
“I’m from Poland,” the man shouted back. “From Krakow. Why do I have to go back?”
“That part of Poland has been disputed for centuries, and the Soviet Union has decreed that it is part of our Motherland!”
That evening after the speech, twenty-four men attempted to escape. One even unprimed a clean swathe through the mined field before he was stopped by a bullet from the sentry’s rifle. “He was wounded, not killed,” Skotonov assured the skittish mob the following morning. But the man was not seen again.
There seemed to be three types of people in the camp: refugees from the German occupation of places like Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the Ukraine; forced labor workers who were taken in by the Germans for their own war machine; and Red Army soldiers like Alexander and Ouspensky.
These three groups were separated at the end of May, and quartered and fed separately. Little by little the refugees started filtering out of the camp, and then the forced labor workers.
“Always at night, have you noticed?” said Alexander. “We wake up, they’re not here. I wish I could keep my eyes open at three in the morning, I have a feeling we’d see quite a bit going on.”
In the yard while on his daily walk, he met a forced labor man who asked for a cigarette and said to him, “Have you heard? Five of the guys I been with the last four years have disappeared last night. Did you hear them? They were taken out and sentenced, right in the common area.”
“Sentenced for what?” said Ouspensky.
“For treason against the Motherland. For working for the enemy.”
“Maybe they should have explained that they were forced to work.”
“They tried. But if they really didn’t want to work for the Germans, why didn’t they try to escape?”
“Maybe we could try to escape,” said Ouspensky. “Huh, Captain?”
A Polish man came up behind them, laughed and said, “There is no escape. Escape to where?” Alexander and Ouspensky turned around. There was now a small crowd standing in the yard. The Polish man shook their hands and said, “Lech Markiewicz. Pleased to make your acquaintance. No escape, citizens. Do you know who delivered me into Soviet hands, all the way from Cherbourg, France?”
They waited.
“The English.”
“And do you know who delivered my friend, Vasia over here, into Soviet hands, all the way from Brussels? The French.”
Vasia nodded.
“And do you know who delivered Stepan into Soviet hands, all the way from Ravensburg, Bavaria, just ten kilometers from Lake Constance and Switzerland? The Americans. That’s right. The Allies are helpfully returning us, millions of us, to the Soviets. In the transit camp I was in before this one, in Lübeck, north of Hamburg, there were refugees from Denmark and Norway. Not soldiers like you, and not forced labor workers like me, but refugees, made homeless by war, trying to find a place to hang their hat in Copenhagen. All returned to the Soviets. So don’t talk to me about escape. Time for escape has long passed. There is nowhere to go anymore. All of Europe used to belong to Hitler. Half of Europe now belongs to the Soviet Union.”
And he laughed and walked away, linking his arms with Vasia and Stepan.
But that night, Lech Markiewicz, an electrician by trade, shorted out the electrified fence and ran. He was not in camp the following morning. No one knew what became of him.
The convoys came each night to take the men away, hundreds by hundreds, and during the day, the camp was maintained as a waystation to somewhere else. They were fed badly, they were allowed a bath once a week, they were regularly shaved and deloused. Yet, little by little new Russians kept coming in, old Russians kept shipping out.
One late July night, Alexander and Ouspensky were woken with all their quartermates, told to pack what was theirs, and taken out to the back of the camp. Three trucks were waiting for them. They were all paired up and tied to their partners. Alexander was chained to Ouspensky. They were driven so
me distance in the night, Alexander guessed to a train station, and he was right.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
New York, August 1945
ON THE LOWER EAST Side, Tatiana, Vikki, and Anthony were strolling one summer Saturday, late morning, through the outdoor market under the El on Second Avenue. They were talking, like every person on the street, about the Japanese surrender a week ago following the atomic devastation of Nagasaki. Vikki thought the second bomb was unnecessary. Tatiana pointed out that the Japanese had not surrendered after Hiroshima. “We didn’t give them enough time. Three days, what’s that? We should have given them extra days for their imperial pride. Why else do you think they kept killing us these last three months even though they knew they would never win?”
“I don’t know. Why did Germans? They knew their war was lost in 1943.”
“That’s because Hitler was a madman.”
“And Hirohito, what was he?” Suddenly, Tatiana was stopped—no, besieged—by a family of what seemed like sixty. Actually it was six people, a husband, a wife, and their four teenaged children. First, they grabbed Tatiana’s hands, then her arms, then enveloped her entire body.
“Tania? Tania? Are you there?” Vikki said.
Stroking Tatiana’s hair, the woman murmured in Ukrainian. The man wiped his eyes and handed Anthony an ice cream and a lollipop, which Anthony took with a two-year-old smile and promptly dropped on the sidewalk.
“Who are these people?” Vikki asked.
“Mama knows a wot of people,” said Anthony, tugging at Tatiana’s skirt.
Straightening up, Vikki muttered, “That’s certainly true. Just no men.”
“Ice kweem, Mama. I want ice kweem.”
The family talked to Tatiana in Ukrainian and she spoke Russian back to them. They kissed her hands and at last moved on. With Anthony, Tatiana and Vikki moved on, too.
“Tatiana!”
“What?”
“Are you going to explain to us the scene we just witnessed?”
“Anthony needs no explanation, do you, honey?”
“No, Mama. Need ice kweem.”
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