Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(164)

"They don't have droughts in wintertime, Vikki," said Tatiana, buttoning her coat. "Come on, we'll takea taxi."

"You and your taxis. Is this person expecting us?"

"I wrote her."

"Did she write you back?"

"Not really."

"Not really? Is there a middle ground with something like that? Did she or did she not write you?"

"I know she was going to, but we are coming to see her so soon, she didn't get chance to."

"I see. So we're barging in uninvited on a farm widow who has just lost her son?"

The small Markey farmhouse was on the outskirts of Des Moines. Their silo nearby was obscured by snow drifts and trees, giving the impression that it had not been used for some time. The door to the house was opened by a frail, pale woman who nonetheless smiled and said, "Tatiana? Come in. I been expecting you. I'm Mary Markey. This your son? Anthony, come with me." Stretched out her hand. "I just made corn muffins, you can help me serve them. Do you like corn muffins?"

Vikki and Tatiana followed them into the kitchen with Vikki whispering, "How do you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Show up in strangers' homes and have them invite you in as if they've known you all their lives?"

The kitchen was neat and plain and old. They sat behind the wooden kitchen table and drank coffee and had corn muffins. Then Vikki took Anthony out in the snow. Mary cupped her mug of coffee and said, "Tatiana, I want to help you. Since you wrote, I been trying to remember what my boy said to me. You Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

understand, I didn't see him in three years, and when he came back he was all closed up. Closed up to me, to his old friends, to the world. The girl he used to see in high school married someone else. Who'd wait that long when you're so young? So Paul would sit around here, or he'd go in the truck down to the local bar. He talked a little about opening the farm again, but with his dad gone that seemed so unlikely." She paused. Tatiana waited. "And he seemed so detached. And then he just gone and killed hisself, too many guns around here, so I been kind of reeling from it and much of what he said to me flew my mind."

"I understand. I'm sorry. Anything you can recall would be helpful."

"I know Paul got that phone call a few days before he died. He didn't tell me nothing, just sat here at this table for the rest of the afternoon. Refused dinner. Went out for a drink, came back, and late at night was sitting here again, or out in the back on the porch. I asked, believe me, I asked several times what the matter was. Finally he said, `Mom, we liberated that castle and there was a man there who said he was an American, and I didn't believe him. I said...something smart in return. And I didn't see him after that...and the next day, the Red Army came to get their POWs. Except that this man's perfect English stuck in my memory. So when I came back stateside, I called Washington, just to put my mind at ease.' He sort of made a choking sound then. He said, `The phone call I got this afternoon? Someone from the State Department. That manwas an American once upon a time. He was an American, trapped there somehow.' And I tried to say something comforting like, well, he was just sent back to his own country. Just like you was sent back to your own country. And Paul waved me off and said, `Mom, you don't understand. Our orders--my orders--were to keep all the Soviet officers under surveillance until their army came to reclaim them.'

"`So?' I said.

"`Why does an army need to reclaim them? Why don't they just go back in mobs and crowds, of their own accord, like we did, like the English did? Our armies didn't come to reclaimus . But the point is, that man wasn't a Soviet.' I didn't understand, you know? I told him that there was nothing he could have done, and he said, `I don't feel better because I'm helpless, Mother.' And he wring his hands so, and I said, `Son, but what does the Soviet Union have to do with you?You're not sending those people back.' And he put his head down on the table and said, `Maybe I could have done something for just that one.'"

Tatiana got up and came round Mary's side of the table. She put her arms around the woman. "And he did, Mary. He did."

Mary nodded.

"I'm very sorry."

"I'll be all right. My other daughter lives nearby. I been alone since my husband died in '38. I'll be all right." She looked up. "Do you think that man was your husband?"

"Without a doubt," replied Tatiana.

On the train back, Tatiana was engrossed in the way the snow lay on the fields outside her window. Anthony was asleep. So was Vikki, Tatiana thought, but then Vikki opened one eye, then the other, and said, "So what now?"

Tatiana didn't answer. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"So what now?" Vikki repeated.

"I don't have all answers, Vik," replied Tatiana. "I don't know what now."

But suddenly the world made a bit of sense again. Alexander was not in the lake.

Somewhere in the world Alexander was still living. In the largest country in the world, sprawled over one sixth of the earth's land mass, one half tundra and permafrost, one quarter steppe, one eighth coniferous forest, part desert, part arable land, with the largest lake in the world, the largest sea in the world, the largest protected border in the world, the largest socialist experiment in the world, was Alexander.