Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(21)

"Explain to them, Edward," said Tatiana, "that if ten thousand people come to see me every day for whole year and I had TB every day for whole year, only ten to sixteen people contract disease from me." She paused. "It's not so contagious as people think. So send in INS man if he thinks he strong enough. But tell him odds. And tell him I don't speak so good English."

Smiling, Edward said her English was just fine and asked if she wanted him to stay.

"No. No, thank you."

The INS man, Tom, talked to her for fifteen minutes to see if she spoke rudimentary English. Tatiana spoke rudimentary English. He asked about her skills. She told him she was a nurse, and that she could also sew and cook. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"Well, there is certainly a shortage of nurses during the war," he said.

"Yes, much of it here at Ellis," said Tatiana. She thought of Brenda being in the wrong profession.

"We don't get many cases like you."

She made no reply.

"You want to stay in the United States?"

"Of course."

"You think you could get a job, to help in the war effort?"

"Of course."

"Not be a public charge? That's very important to us in time of war. You understand? The attorney general comes under scrutiny every time he lets a person like you slip through his fingers. The country is in turmoil. We must make sure you stay productive, and that you have allegiance to this country, not your old country."

"Don't worry about that," she said. "As soon as my TB goes and they let me work, I will get job. I will be nurse, or seamstress, or cook. I will be all three, if need to. I will do what I have to after I am good again."

As if suddenly remembering she had TB, Tom stood up and went to the door, tightening the mask around his mouth. "Where will you live?" he said in a muffled voice.

"I want to stay here."

"After you get better, you'll have to get an apartment."

"Yes. Do not worry."

He nodded, writing something down in his book. "And the name you want to go by? I saw on the documents you brought with you that you got out of the Soviet Union as a Red Cross nurse named Jane Barrington."

"Yes."

"How fake are those documents?"

"I do not understand what you mean."

Tom fell silent. "Who is Jane Barrington?"

Now Tatiana was silent. "My husband's mother," she said at last.

Tom sighed. "Barrington? Not very Russian."

"My husband was American." She lowered her gaze. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Tom opened the door. "Is that the name you want to use to get your permanent residency card?"

"Yes."

"No Russian name for you?"

She thought about it.

Tom came closer to her. "Sometimes refugees who come here like to cling to a little bit of their past. Maybe they leave just the first name the same. Change the last name. Think about it."

"Not me," she replied. "Change all. I don't want to--how you put it? Cling to anything."

He wrote something down in his book. "Jane Barrington it is, then."

When he left, Tatiana opened herBronze Horseman book as she sat once more by the window, looking out onto the New York harbor and the Statue of Liberty. She touched the picture of Alexander she had kept in there; without looking at it she touched his face and his uniformed body, and she whispered small short words in Russian to comfortherself this time, not Alexander, not his child, but herself. Shura, Shura, Shura, whispered Jane Barrington, once known as Tatiana Metanova.

Tatiana's days consisted of feeding Anthony and changing Anthony and washing Anthony's few nightgowns and cloth diapers in the bathroom sink and going on short, fragrant walks outside the hospital and sitting on benches with Anthony wrapped in blankets in her arms. Brenda brought her breakfast to her room. Tatiana ate lunch and dinner in her room. Unless Anthony was sleeping, Tatiana had him in her arms. She looked at only two things: the New York harbor and her son. But whatever comfort she received from holding her baby was dissipated from being alone day in and day out. Brenda and Dr. Ludlow called it convalescing. Tatiana called it solitary confinement.

One morning at the end of July, tired of herself, of sitting in her room, Tatiana decided to take a walk down the corridor while Anthony was sleeping.

She heard groans from the corridor and followed the groans into a ward filled with wounded men. Brenda was on duty--the only one on duty--looking less than pleased with her lot and showing the wounded men exactly how she felt. Grumbling, curt, displeasingly surly, she was washing out a wound on a soldier's leg despite repeated and loud pleas from the soldier to either do it more gently or to shoot him.

Tatiana walked over and asked Brenda if she needed help, to which Brenda replied that she certainly didn't need a sick girl making her prisoners sicker, and could Tatiana immediately go back to her room. Not moving, Tatiana stood, stared at Brenda, stared at the raw hole in the soldier's thigh, at the soldier's eyes, and said, "Let me bandage leg, let me help you. Look, I have mask over my nose and mouth. You got four men screaming for you on other side of hospital. One just lose a tooth in his morning coffee. One have raging fever. One is oozing blood through his ear."