The children sit. Somewhere soft the music plays. The children’s wives and husband are asleep. The children’s children are asleep—even the teenagers who got tired of air hockey and ping pong and basketball and board games, even the Harvard students; it’s late even for them. The math major is sharing a room with Tommy and Anthony Jr., he and his piercings far down the hall from pristine and protected Becky.
Up on the heights by the mountain, the four of them sit at the island, in the house where they grew up. They’ve brought out the midnight food. Cold leek and bacon stuffing, pieces of turkey straight from the Cling Wrap. They drink old wine, they open new beer.
They sit, winding down. On this Thanksgiving they sit just a while longer, for comfort, for peace, for family, for memory, for the blissful childhood they all shared that flew by and ended much too soon. They sit in the oasis and eat their mother’s bread. During the day in front of their wives, their husbands, their children, they talk about sports and kids, and politics, and weapons, and work, but at night on holidays they never do.
Harry and Pasha talk of going out on the boat with him at sea, possibly the Biscayne Bay, when they were small. They both remember palm trees, green water, hot, remember him massive between them, themselves just fingerlings. No Janie, no Ant. He put the boys on the bench and showed them how to wrap a staysail. He gave them fishing rods and hooks and worms and they sat flanking him, with their lines in the water. Their mother sat at the rudder. Come with me and I will make you fishers of men. He was smoking, yanking on his line once in a while, and they were imitating him and yanking on theirs. The fish ate the worm around the hooks but were never caught. Then Harry got very interested in his hook. What else could it catch? Could it catch a piece of clothing? Wood? A good chunk of Pasha’s thigh?
“Harry, so there was something wrong with you from the very beginning, do you see?” says Janie.
Pasha says, “Yes, but I pulled the hook out of my leg and administered first aid to myself, so there.”
“Well, you are your mother’s son,” says Harry. “And I showed you that—and never a word of thanks. We all should be so lucky as to know who we are from the very beginning.”
“We all knew who we were,” says Jane Barrington. “From the very beginning.” She turns to Anthony. “Did he ever go fishing with you, Ant?”
“Once or twice,” replies Anthony.
And just a few feet away, in the long darkened butler’s pantry between the banquet dining room and the kitchen, there is a small alcove between the wall and the cabinets. In this alcove stands a small stool, and on this stool sits Tatiana, her eyes closed, her head back, pressed into the wall in her little hiding space, shaking a little bit, nodding, listening to his children carrying him on their grown-up voices.
Alexander comes out looking for her, and Tatiana, though herself sleepless, undresses and lies down with him. She wants to talk about the day, but he is tired and tells her they’ll debrief in full tomorrow. She waits until he is asleep, and then disengages and in her robe comes back out to the now solitary kitchen and makes herself a cup of tea. The hums of the house soothe her. She knows what floorboards creak and where the grease stain from a sticky little finger is. She knows the corner of the living room area rug shredded by Janie’s ratel of a Labrador. She knows the drips of the faucet and the smell of garlic each time she walks past the garlic tomb as she calls it—a spherical clay pot with holes on top, a kind of scented candle in reverse.
The house is all.
In solitude she reflects and comforts herself. She doesn’t want the day to end.
She makes bread.
She mixes a little warm milk with sugar and dry active yeast and puts the cup under the hot lamp to bubble up. She sits on her high stool, sipping her tea, and watches the yeast mixture slowly fleck with bubbles, rising in a creamy froth. After swirling it with a spoon and making it all liquid, she sits and watches it bubble up again.
After fifteen minutes she gets out the flour, melts her butter and warms another two cups of milk. She separates her eggs, and beats the whites until they are firm and foamy. When she turns around, a bleary-eyed Anthony is sitting watching her from across the island. “I can’t believe you’re still up.”
“I can’t believe you’re still up.”
She makes him a cup of tea. “So what do you think of your daughter’s new paramour?”
Anthony shrugs. “I don’t have to sleep with him, do I? What do I care? I’d prefer he didn’t parade his tongue jewelry in front of her family, but no one asked me.”
“Rebecca says he’s her first real love,” says Tatiana.
“At eighteen it all seems like real love,” he replies, and breaks off, and then they glance at each other and say no more. Indeed it does, thinks Tatiana. And sometimes it is.
Spread over the island, Anthony watches her. Wherever she goes, his gaze follows, as she combines the flour and sugar and eggs and milk and yeast until it all holds together and then she kneads it, adding melted butter a little at a time until it is all soaked through.
She took a piece of black cobble-hard bread and cut it into four pieces the size of a deck of cards each. Then she cut the deck of cards into half again. One half she wrapped for morning. One half she put on four plates. She put one plate in front of her sister, one plate in front of herself, one plate in front of Alexander, and one plate in front of their mother’s chair. She took a knife and fork, and cut a small piece from her share. A drop of blood from her mouth fell on the table. She ignored it. Putting the bread into her mouth, she chewed it for minutes before finally swallowing it. It tasted moldy, and faintly of hay.
Alexander was long done with his piece. Dasha was long done with her piece. The sisters would not look at their mother’s bread or at their mother’s empty chair. All the chairs were empty now except for hers and Dasha’s. And Alexander’s. Another drop of blood fell onto the table. What did her sister teach her to say a few days ago, kneeling in front of their mother who had died? Give us this day our daily bread, Dasha said.
“Give us this day our daily bread,” said 75-year-old Tatiana in her home in Scottsdale, Arizona.
“Amen,” said Anthony. “I have memories of you making bread that go back over fifty years. You don’t realize what a complete food bread is until you see all the ingredients that go into it.”
Tatiana nodded, lightly smiling. “Yes,” she said, opening her palms and bowing her head before the kneaded dough. “Cottonseed, or hay. Cardboard. Sawdust. Linseed. Glue. A complete food, bread.”
After she buttered a large ovenproof dish she placed the kneaded dough into it, covered it with a white towel and put it into the dark oven. Now the bread had to rise. She sat by her son; they sipped their tea. It was so quiet in the house, just the faucet dripped.
“Mom,” he said, “you do know that we know you sit there and listen to us, don’t you?”
She laughed. “Yes, son,” she said fondly. “I do.” She caressed his face, she kissed his cheek. “Tell me about Ingrid. She’s no better?”
Anthony shook his head. He stopped looking at his mother. “She’s worse than ever. She told the doctor it’s all my fault. I drove her to it. I’m gone all the time. I’m never home.” He pressed his lips together in sharp disappointment. “For fifteen years, she’s been saying this. You’re always on the road, Anthony. Like I’m a truck driver.” He tutted. “I made her check into Betty Ford in Minnesota two days ago.”
“Well, that’s good. That will help.”
He seemed unconvinced. “She’s staying for at least eight months. I told her I don’t want her back unless she is better.”
Tatiana considered him. “What about your sons? Who’s going to take care of them?”
“She doesn’t take care of them now, Mom! That’s the whole f—problem. Tommy’s a good boy, but Anthony Jr. is always in trouble.” Anthony sighed. “And I mean trouble. In school, with his friends. With the law.” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to say anything during the day, no reason to make everyone upset over this. But I’ve given the President my resignation. I have no choice. I can’t continue. I mean, honestly, what am I supposed to do? The boys…I can’t leave them, and now she’s gone.” He paused. “We’re leaving Washington.”
This was monumental. Anthony had lived in DC for over twenty years.
“I accepted a new position—as commander of Yuma.”
Yuma! Tatiana nodded, trying not to show her excitement.
“It’s a three-year post,” Anthony continued. “Intelligence, weapons, some travel. The boys will come with me, and I’ll be mostly in one place. I haven’t asked, but I’m sure Harry will help me out when I’m away; my kids won’t know what hit them after a week with him.”
“I’m sure Harry will help you out,” Tatiana said carefully. She knew her son wasn’t happy, and her own satisfaction was intrusive. This wasn’t about her. “I know you don’t think it’s wonderful, son,” she said. “But it is wonderful. Your sons will be better for having their dad. And Harry is going to go through the roof. Just imagine, both of you at Yuma. I want to wake him up and tell him.” Her hand remained on Anthony’s unhappy face. “You’re doing the right thing. And you’ve done well. Buck up,” she said softly. “Be strong. You have a lot to do. Perseus is only one man.” She smiled. “He can’t be everywhere at once.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, kissing her hand, leaning into it, and then said with deep regret, “Besides, how many Andromedas can a man have in his life?”
Their heads were together. Tatiana was hoping at least one more. “Have faith, bud,” she whispered to her son.
Suddenly there was noise of familiar footsteps. Alexander appeared in the archway. His face was not amused. “What do I have to do around here,” he said loudly to a sheepish Tatiana, “to get my wife to stay in bed with me? You have been up since sunrise, and it’s three in the morning. What’s next? Are you going to start bringing your chair to his front yard, too?” He turned and motioned for her. “Come,” he said, inviting no argument. “Now. Come.”
In their bedroom, she took off her robe and climbed naked into bed with him, into the old big brass bed they had shared since 1949. He was sulky but only for a moment, since he wanted to go to sleep and needed to touch her. “You couldn’t stay in my bed, could you?” They lay face to face. “We were so nice, so warm. But no.” He was caressing her back, her breasts, her thighs.
“I needed to make bread for tomorrow,” she whispered, her kneading hands on him.
“Now that you’ve been in this country for fifty-six years, one of these days I will have to take you to a supermarket,” said Alexander, “and show you this thing we have in aisle twelve—called bread. All kinds, all the time. No ration cards, no blizzards, and you don’t even have to wait in line for it.” He was relaxed now, warm, enlarged; he rubbed her back, murmuring to her something about Anthony Jr. being angry, and Tommy being sad, and the baby being cute, and the day being good, and not caring much for Washington despite his mathematical sycophancy…he murmured and nuzzled and she caressed him into relief and sleep.
Back over the years she flies, to Anthony’s voice, learning how to accompany himself on the guitar. In their winter jackets, he and his dad sit on the deck called My Prerogative near the house called Free on Bethel Island in December 1948, Alexander holding both fishing lines while Anthony is showing him how to play and sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” as Tatiana at her open kitchen window is cooking a ham with a brown sugar glaze for the holiday dinner, watching them out on the deck, struggling with the chords and the notes and the fishing lines, heads together, four-year-old Anthony holding his guitar in his two little arms, leaning into his smoking, twenty-eight-year-old father, as she listens to their chuckling voices, one deep, one soft, rising above the cold canals, drifting down the canopies…
Here we are as in olden days,
Happy golden days of yore…
Two
Soon the century has come and gone, from one sea to another and back again across the waters. Tatiana and Alexander have walked through the old world, they’ve walked through the new. They’ve lived.
But the mangoes are still ripe and sweet, the avocados are fresh, so are the tomatoes. They still plant flowers in their garden. They love to go to the movies, read the paper, read books. Once a month they drive up to Yuma to visit their sons and grandchildren. (Harry shows Alexander the latest weapons he’s working on; Alexander loves that best.) Once a month they drive up to Sedona and the Canyon. Once a month they drive up to Las Vegas. They love American television, comedies best. And other things that the penthouse suite up on the thirty-sixth floor of the Bellagio over Vegas Strip shows them.
“Tania, quick, come here, see what’s on TV.”
She comes. “Oh my.”
“What a country. Bread—and this.”
At home they sit on the couch late into the evening. The TV is off, and he can tell she is nearly asleep. The blanket is over their laps. She sits with her head pressed against his arm.
“Tatia,” he calls for her. “Tatiana, Tania, Tatiasha…”
“Hmm?” she says sleepily.
“Would you like to live in Arizona, Tatia?” Alexander whispers, looking at the fire, “the land of the small spring?”
“Yes…” she echoes. “Yes, my horse and cart, yes, my soul.”
He has his last cigarette sitting outside their bedroom, smelling the nightshade.
They swim in their pool every morning. Once, after they swam five laps and were resting, panting, holding on to the edge, Alexander said, “Did you know that when King David got old he was advised by his counselors to take in a young virgin to warm himself?”
Tatiana blushed at the unexpectedness of that.
“No, you kill me,” said Alexander, pulling her to him.
“I think,” said Tatiana, closing her eyes in his arms, “King David already availed himself of a young virgin.”
“Yes…” His lips were over her face. “And she’s been warming him for life.”
He keeps telling her, the victorious do not surrender their weapons. They do not put away their swords, they sheathe and clothe them in scarlet and keep them ever at the ready. He keeps telling her, go easy on me, I’m not eighty-one anymore. And sometimes she listens to him.
She makes him Mickey Mouse homemade waffles for breakfast. When he is home for lunch, she makes him tuna with apples; in the afternoons they have a long siesta, and then Tatiana fixes dinner while Alexander watches the news in the kitchen, or reads the paper to her. They dine alone and afterward go for a long walk into the foothills before the sun sets. Sometimes they drive down to have ice cream and walk through the Scottsdale Common, sometimes they drive up a few miles north to Carefree to ride horses through trails in the mountains full of ancient saguaros and Corona de Cristo thorns. Their life is quieter for a brief lull before the next baby boom. The wild grandchildren are growing up, becoming less noisy, flying away.
Anthony has not stopped working. Especially now, with the world going to hell in a handbasket, there is more to do than ever. When it quiets down, he’ll retire. The time has not come. Anthony’s son Anthony Jr. managed to shape up in Yuma, straighten out, and went to OCS right out of high school and then straight to Iraq. Tommy is still with Anthony. Ingrid got better, but belatedly, because in the eight recovering months that she’d been gone, Anthony recovered too, and moved on, and fell in love again. He divorced Ingrid and married Kerri, who accompanied his singing on her guitar for him, and baked every day for him, and adored him without pretensions or conditions, and got pregnant for him, and gave him a blonde Isabella.
Anthony’s daughter Rebecca is having her first child next month. Washington, it turned out, had a permanent soft spot for Becks.
Could Rebecca really be having a baby? Because just a breath ago, an eighteen-year-old nurse was bending over Rebecca’s father’s father, a wounded soldier in a Soviet hospital, saying, yes, Shura, we are going to have a baby.
And now the father’s father, the old warrior, sits on the raised deck in the Sonoran sunset and smokes.
And the nurse sits next to him and sips her cup of tea.
His arms are draped over the white rocking bench. It’s in the 90s still, and the sun blazes orange over the saguaros and sagebrush, reflecting onto the rocky mountains.
Around her is the land that his mother’s money bought for her—the land with such a price and without price. Behind them are Germany and Poland and Russia. Behind them farther down the meadows and the steppes is the great ancient city of Perm, née Molotov, and near it through a muddy track in the woods, a small fishing village called Lazarevo that they left in 1942 knowing they would never see it again, and never did.
Far, far east and steep south through treacherous jungle is the Hué River, is Kum Kau, is Vietnam. They don’t face that way.
They look on the Western Mountains instead, at the McDowell Hills, at the sprawled valley over which the sun sets every night, they look on the uplands where they rode horses and saw their first saguaros bloom white, where Anthony found snakes and jack rabbits and Pasha dissected scorpions, and Harry chased Gila monsters with his punji sticks, and Janie deliberately put her hands on the cholla to show her father she could be as tough as the boys. They did well, their children, growing up in the creosote bushes. They did all right.
“I don’t want this life to end,” said Alexander. “The good, the bad, the everything, the very old, to ever end.” His arm went around her. “It’s fantastic here—the sunset over this great, gold and lilac desert and the million flickering lights in the frontier land of my mother and father.” He kept his voice steady, kept it low. He pointed into the distance. “Do you see our 97-acre backyard?” he said softly. “Our own Summer Garden right past those Russian lilacs, where our Arizona lilac—the sand verbena, the phacelia, the desert lavender, the lantana—blankets the earth. Do you see it?”
“I see it.” And the marigolds, too.
“Do you see the Field of Mars, where I walked next to my bride in her white wedding dress, with red sandals in her hands, when we were kids?”
“I see it well.”
“We spent all our days afraid it was too good to be true, Tatiana,” said Alexander. “We were always afraid all we had was a borrowed five minutes from now.”
Her hands went on his face. “That’s all any of us ever has, my love,” she said. “And it all flies by.”
“Yes,” he said, looking at her, at the desert, covered coral and yellow with golden eye and globe mallow. “But what a five minutes it’s been.”
Rebecca’s book of love for her grandparents is almost finished. But there are things Rebecca will not know and does not know and cannot know.
Tatiana is thinking of Fontanka and Moika canals, of Palace Bridge—and other bridges—oars and sandals, casts and dresses, fathers and brothers, one sister, one mother, on a Sunday long ago.
“Look, Tania. A new dress.” Papa pulled out a package in brown paper. Tatiana perked up a bit despite her cast, which itched and hurt.
A tiny gasp escaped her and she forgot about her arm and her troubles and her lost summer. Oh, the dress! White and flowing with embroidered dancing crimson roses. It had satin straps instead of sleeves, and satin sashes criss-crossing her back, opening in a flowing skirt. The dress was soft and well made. “But, Papa!”
“But Papa!” he said, imitating her.
“Papa, where did you get this?”
Her hands were kneading the dress, turning it over, traveling to the tag sewed into the seam. “Fabriqué en France.”
“You bought this in…France?” Tatiana breathed out. All she could think of was Queen Margot and her doomed beautiful soldier lover La Môle, rent with rapture in Paris.
“No,” Papa replied. “I bought it in Poland. I was in a small town called Swietocryzst and they had a Sunday market there. Remarkable things. I found this and thought, my Tania would like it.”
“Like it? Papa, I adore it! Let me put it on and we’ll go for a walk.”
Dasha said, “You’re not putting on a dress like that with a broken arm.”
Tatiana frowned. “If not with a broken arm, then when?”
“When you don’t have a broken arm,” said Dasha.
“But I need it to make me feel better now. Right, Papa?”
“Right.” Papa smiled and nodded. “Dasha, you’re too pragmatic. You should have seen the town I bought it in. The town, the dress, all for youth, for love. You’d wear the dress if you had no legs.”
“Well, that’s perfect for her because she has no arm,” grumbled Dasha.
“Put it on, sunshine,” Papa said to Tatiana. “Put it on, sweetness. Do you know what they told me in Poland? That your name means fairy princess. I never knew that.”
“Me neither, Papa. How delightful. Fairy princess!” She twirled holding the dress to herself.
And so it was that Tatiana, for the first time, was allowed to borrow her sister’s red, high-heeled strappy sandals that were too large for her. She tied them around her ankles, put on her new dress, and they left their cramped communal apartment on Fifth Soviet and went for a stroll. She did the best she could, every once in a while tripping on the Leningrad cobblestones, her brushed-out golden hair flowing.
That was a good way to describe her. She did the best she could.
They bought a beer, and with their hats on, in their Sunday shoes, smoking cigarettes, chatting idly, breathing in the dusty Leningrad summer air, they walked down to Engineer’s Castle over the granite Fontanka Bridge and through the back gates of the Summer Garden. Down the paths and past the water fountains they strolled, shaded by overflowing elms. Couples were draped over the benches between the marble statues of ancient heroes: near Saturn eating his own children, near the doom of Amour and Psyche, near Alexander the Great, the commander of commanders of the ancient world.
The Metanovs ambled through the gilded iron gates of the Summer Garden onto the Neva embankment, across from St. Peter and Paul’s Fortress and walked the winding way along the parapets along a shimmering river, past the Winter Palace, past the Admiralty’s golden spire to St. Isaac’s Cathedral square, to the statue of the Bronze Horseman.
They had come a long way and they were tired. The evening was nearing, the amber shadows were lengthening. Tatiana’s arm was still broken, but that was the only vestige left of a girl named Saika Kantorova. Everything else had been forgotten. Her name was never mentioned again by anyone in the family, even in passing.
It was as if she had never existed.
Dasha walked with her protective arm through Tatiana’s good one, and Pasha was on the other side, bumping constantly into her cast, and Mama and Papa were arm in arm, talking intimately—such a rarity. Papa bought Tatiana a crème brûlée ice cream. They sat on a bench and gazed at Peter the Great’s granite tribute, the Bronze Horseman, lit by Arctic light, gazed into the northern sun reflected in the halcyon Neva River.
“Papa, you said Holy Cross in Poland is a nice town?” said Tatiana. “But nothing can compare to Leningrad in the summer evening, don’t you think?”
“Nothing,” Papa agreed. “This is where I want to die.”
“Here we are, enjoying our day and you’re talking about dying,” exclaimed Mama. “What’s wrong with you?”
“He is so melancholic and Russian,” whispered Pasha to a laughing Tatiana. “You’re not going to turn out that maudlin, are you?”
“I’ll try not to, Pasha.”
“When I was in Holy Cross,” said Papa, “it was also a Sunday, and toward evening I took a walk to the River Vistula running on the outskirts of the city. It wasn’t the wide Neva, but it was blue and calm, and the bridge leading to the town was painted blue also. Couples and families strolled across the bridge in white hats, eating ice cream and watermelon, and children were laughing, and underneath the bridge, a young man was rowing his young lady.”
“You see, Tania,” said Pasha, “there are some cultures where it’s appropriate, even desirable, for men to row.”
She elbowed him.
Papa continued. “The man had put down his oars and the two of them just sat bobbing on the river. She was wearing a white dress and a wide-brim hat. In her hands she held a bouquet of white lupines. The sun glistened on them. I stood on the bridge and watched them for a long time.” He sighed. “I felt happy just to be alive. I wish you could’ve seen it, milaya Tania.”
“Don’t you want milaya me to have seen it, too, Papa?” asked Dasha.
“And what about me, Georg? Don’t you want your darling wife to have seen it while eating ice cream and wearing a white hat?” said Mama.
Somewhere in the near distance a troubadour was singing, his choral tenor spilling down the sidewalk, echoing off the glass of the iridescent river.
“Gori, gori, moya zvezda
Zvezda lyubvi privetnaya
Ti u menya odna zavetnaya
Drugoi ne budet nikogda…”
“Shine on, shine on, my only star,
my star of love eternally,
You are my sole and chosen one,
There’ll be no other one for me…”
Snug between Papa and Pasha, fourteen-year-old Tatiana licked her ice cream on the bench with her family across from the Bronze Horseman, and saw with all her soul, felt with all her soul the white day, the stucco houses, the wide-brim hat and the young man with oars in his hands and a smile on his face rowing his white lupine beloved under the blue bridge that led to a small serene town in Poland named Holy Cross, saw with all her soul, felt with all her soul the life divine, the love divine.
Three
In the new millennium, Tatiana sits on a bench on a Sunday in a palm-covered Western-themed, art-gallery-filled, immaculate Scottsdale downtown, ecumenical, multi-cultural and yet deeply American. They have been shopping, they had lunch, they went to a bookstore, an antique store, a curtain store, a hardware store, a DVD store. It’s now afternoon, around three, three thirty. She is wearing a hat and all white to reflect her from the sun, but the truth is, she loves that sun. She is perspiring and panting, and her breath is short; she doesn’t care. She sits on the bench, thinking, if I stay here another minute, I’m going to boil away like burnt sugar. It’s not a good time to be out, it’s so hot, there is no smell except the smell of heat; she doesn’t care. Alexander, who loves the heat slightly less, has gone to get himself a drink.
Tatiana sits under the palms and eats her ice cream. It’s summer, it’s June, her birthday is tomorrow. Under her hat, under her breath, she hums a slow sweet Russian song from long ago.
She blinks and looks up from her ice cream.
On the other side of the pavement, Alexander smiles.
A local bus heading to Phoenix downtown comes, obscuring his view of her. He moves his head, this way, that.
That was his moment in Leningrad, on an empty street, when his life became possible—when Alexander became possible. There he stood as he was—a young Red Army officer in dissolution, all his days stamped with no future and all his appetites unrestrained, on patrol the day war started for Russia. He stood with his rifle slung on his shoulder and cast his wanton eyes on her, eating her ice cream all sunny, singing, blonde, blossoming, breathtaking. He gazed at her with his entire unknowable life in front of him, and this is what he was thinking…
To cross the street or not to cross?
To follow her? To hop on the bus, after her? What absolute madness.
He comes around the bus; he only thinks he is running. He doesn’t run anymore. He walks slowly to the bench where she is sitting. In front of her he stands and she raises her eyes to get a good look at him; she raises and raises them, for he is tall.
Her hair is fading white. Alexander blinks. It’s blonde and long again. The lines are gone from her face. The green eyes sparkle, the freckles multiply, her red sandal toe bounces up and down with her crossed leg, and the strap of her white dress slips off her shoulder. Smiling, he says, “Tatiana, your ice cream is, as always, melting.” He stretches out his hand to her—and wipes her mouth and fixes her shoulder strap.
“I am ridiculously hot,” Alexander says, sitting down on the bench, opening his Coke and lighting a cigarette. “I can’t believe I agreed, no, chose to come here. We could be in Bay Biscayne right now.” He shakes his head and shrugs. Taking a long puff, he glances at her. They’re sitting shoulder to bare shoulder. “Well? Thinking up another witty riposte for me?”
Tatiana turns to him, looks up at him, and smiles. “Do you know what a happy ending is to a Russian?” she says. “When the hero, at the end of his own story, finally learns the reason for his suffering.”
Taking another swig of Coke, Alexander says, “Your jokes are getting so lame.” He knocks into her with his stretched-out leg. She takes hold of his hand. “What?” he asks.
“Nothing, soldier,” says Tatiana.
He is thinking of sailboats in distant oceans, the desert from dimmest childhood, the ghost of fortune, the girl on the bench. When he saw her, he saw something new. He saw it because he wanted to see it, because he wanted to change his life. He stepped off the curb and out of the deadfall.
To cross the street. To follow her. And she will give your life meaning, she will save you. Yes, yes—to cross.
“We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I…” Tatiana hums, eating her ice cream, in our Leningrad, in jasmine June, near Fontanka, the Neva, the Summer Garden, where we are forever young.
THE SUMMER GARDEN
Paullina Simons was born in Leningrad and emigrated to the United States in 1973. The Summer Garden is her seventh novel. She lives close to New York with her husband and four children.
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Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters, and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is coincidental.
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This paperback edition 2007
FIRST EDITION
First published in Australia and New Zealand by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2006
Copyright © Paullina Simons 2005
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