Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(53)

Stepanov patted Alexander on the back. "Sleep now. You need your strength. Are you hungry? I have some smoked sausage and some bread."

"Leave it for me, but right now I sleep."

Stepanov disappeared into his quarters and Alexander, the heaviness from his soul having lifted like morning fog, thought before he fell asleep that indeed Tania had listened to his every word and did not remain in Helsinki. She must have gone on to Stockholm. Perhaps she was in Stockholm now. He also thought that Sayers must have done right by her to the end, because had he broken and told Tatiana the truth about Alexander's "death," then Tatiana would have already been back in the Soviet Union right in the clutches of the man who--Oh, Tatiana, my--

But that was all he had.

At least f*cking Dimitri was dead.

Fitfully, he slept.

The Bridge over the Volga, 1936

Alexander was asked who he was at seventeen, at the Kresty prison after he was arrested. They were indifferent about it then--they knew. They asked, they went away--for days at a time--they came back, and then they said, "Are you Alexander Barrington?"

"I am, yes," said Alexander, because then he did not have another answer and he thought the truth would protect him.

And then they read him his sentence. There was no courtroom for Alexander in those days, no tribunal presided over by generals. There was an empty windowless concrete cell with bars for doors and a toilet bucket on the concrete floor and no privacy, and there was a naked bulb up high. They made him stand as they read to him from a piece of paper in sonorous voices. There were two men, and as if Alexander didn't understand the first one, the second one took the paper and read it to him again.

Alexander heard his name, loud and clear, "Alexander Barrington," and he heard the sentence, louder and clearer: "Ten years in forced labor camp in Vladivostok for anti-Soviet agitation in Moscow in 1935 and for efforts to undermine Soviet authority and the Soviet state by calling into scurrilous and spurious question the economics lessons of the Father and Teacher." He heard ten years; he thought he hadmis heard. It was a good thing they read it to him again. He almost said, where is my father, he will solve this, he will tell me what to do.

But he didn't say that. He knew that whatever befell him, befell his mother and father as it had befallen the seventy-eight people who had once lived at the hotel with them in Moscow, the piano group Alexander sometimes went to, the group of communists he and his father belonged to, his friend Slavan, the old Tamara.

They asked him if he understood the charges against him; did he understand the punishment meted out to him?

He didn't understand. He nodded anyway. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

He was busy trying to envision the life he was meant to live. The life his father had wanted him to live. He wanted to ask his father if spending his youth fulfilling two of Stalin's Five Year Plans for the industrialization of Soviet Russia--part of the fixed capital that Alexander understood so well because he knew precisely what was not working in the socialist state--was what Harold had wanted for Alexander. But his father wasn't around to ask.

Was Alexander's destiny to mine for gold in the tundra of Siberia because the utopian state couldn't afford to pay him?

"Do you have any questions?"

"Where is my mother?" asked Alexander. "I want to say goodbye to her."

The guards laughed. "Your mother? How the f*ck should we know where your mother is? You're leaving tomorrow morning. See if you can find her by then."

Laughing, they left. Standing, Alexander remained.

And the next day he was put on a train to Vladivostok. The scarred, knotted man next to him said, "We're lucky they're taking us to Vladivostok. I just came back from Perm-35. Nowthat is hell on earth."

"Oh, where is that?"

"Near the city of Molotov. Have you heard of it? Near the Ural Mountains on the Kama River. It's not as far as Vladivostok, but it's much worse. No one who goes there survives."

"You survived."

"Because I served only two years, and they let me out. I exceeded my production quota for five quarters in a row. They were pleased with my capitalist productivity. They thought the proletariat in me had worked hard enough for the common man."

Once Alexander placed Vladivostok on a map of the Soviet Union, he knew that, though he had no money and no home, he had to escape if he were to have any chance of living. The city was in the bowels of the world, and if there was a Hades on earth, then to him Vladivostok seemed it. To travel by cattle train through the Ural Mountains, through the west Siberian plain, through the central Siberian plateau, past all of Mongolia, and around all of China to rot in an industrial cement city on a thin strip of land on the shores of the Sea of Japan. Alexander was sure there was no return from the catacomb that was Vladivostok.

For a thousand kilometers Alexander looked out of the small porthole in the train, or out of the doors the guards sometimes left open to give the prisoners some air. He saw his chance when they were coming up to cross the River Volga. I will jump, he thought. The Volga was far down below, the wobbly rail bridge high over a precipice, maybe thirty meters high, a hundred feet by American standards. Alexander didn't know much about the Volga; was it rocky? Was it deep? Was it fast? But he saw it was wide, and he knew it emptied a thousand kilometers south in Astrakhan into the Caspian Sea. He didn't know if he would get another--better--chance. But he knew that if he managed to survive the Volga, he could make his way into one of the southern republics, Georgia, maybe, or Armenia, and then cross the border into Turkey. He wished he had his mother's American dollars. After they returned from the failed trip to Moscow he had put the book back in the library and then was arrested so quickly he never had a chance Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html