Having slowly eaten his food in the warm room and drunk his tea, Alexander felt full and sleepy. Not just sleepy, close to unconsciousness. The black spots on his feet became fainter and grayer. He closed his eyes for a moment and when he opened them again, Slonko sat in front of him. “Your life has been saved by General Mekhlis himself,” Slonko said. “He wanted to show we are not unreasonable and that we believe in mercy.”
Alexander made no move even to nod. It required all he had to stay awake.
“How do you feel, Major Belov?” asked Slonko, getting out a bottle of vodka and two glasses. “Come, we’re both reasonable men. Let’s have a drink. We have no differences.”
Alexander acknowledged Slonko by shaking his head. “I ate, and I had my tea,” he said. “I feel as good as I possibly can.” He couldn’t keep himself upright.
“I want to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“You seem to want a lie from me, and I cannot give it to you. No matter how cold you make me.” He pretended to blink. Really he was just closing his eyes.
“Major, we spared your life.”
With great effort, Alexander opened them again. “Yes, but why? Did you spare it because you believed in my innocence?”
Slonko shrugged. “Look, it’s so simple.” He pushed a piece of paper in front of Alexander. “All you need to do is sign this document in front of you that says you understand your life has been spared. You will be sent to exile in Siberia, and you will live out your days in peace and away from the war. Would you like that?”
“I don’t know,” said Alexander. “But I’m not signing anything.”
“You have to sign, Major. You are our prisoner. You have to do as you’re told.”
“I have nothing to add to what I already told you.”
“Don’t add, just sign.”
“I’m not putting my name on anything.”
“And exactly what would your name be?” Slonko said suddenly. “Do you even know?”
“Very well,” said Alexander, his head bobbing forward.
“I can’t believe you’re making me drink by myself, Major. I find it almost rude.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink, Comrade Slonko. It’s so easy to fall into the abyss.”
Slonko lifted his eyes from the vodka and stared at Alexander for what seemed to be minutes. Finally he said slowly, “You know, a long time ago, I knew a woman, a very beautiful woman who used to drink.”
No reply was required of Alexander, so he made none.
“Yes. She was something. She was very brave and suffered terribly not to have a drink in prison. When we picked her up for questioning, she was drunk. It took her several days to get sober. When she became sober, we talked for a long time. I offered her a drink, and she took it, and I offered her a piece of paper to sign and she signed it gratefully. She wanted only one thing from me—do you know what it was?”
Alexander managed to shake his head. That’s where he heard the name Slonko!
“To spare her son. That was the only thing she asked. To spare her only son—Alexander Barrington.”
“That was good of her,” said Alexander. He clenched his hands together to still them. He willed his body to remain still. He wanted to be like the chair, like the desk, like the blackboard. He didn’t want to be like the glass rattling in the March wind. Any minute now the glass was going to pop out of the frame. Like the stained glass in a church in Lazarevo.
“Let me ask you, Major,” Slonko said amiably, downing his drink and tapping the empty glass on the wooden table. “If you yourself were going to ask for one thing before you were put to death, what would it be?”
“To have a cigarette,” Alexander replied.
“Not for mercy?”
“No.”
“Do you know your father also begged me to show you mercy?”
Alexander paled.
Slonko said in English, “Your mother begged me to fuck her but I refused.” He paused, and then smiled. “At first.”
Alexander ground his teeth together. Nothing else on him moved. In Russian he said, “Are you speaking to me, comrade? Because I speak only Russian. They tried to get me to learn French in school, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very good at languages.” After that he said nothing. His mouth was dry.
“I’m going to ask you again,” said Slonko. “I’m going to ask you patiently and politely. Are you Alexander Barrington, son of Jane and Harold Barrington?”
“I will answer you patiently and politely,” said Alexander patiently and politely. “Though I have been asked this a hundred and fifty times already. I am not.”
“But Major, why would the person who told us this lie? Where would he get this information from? He couldn’t have made it up. He knew details about your life no one could have had any idea about.”
“Where is this person?” Alexander said. “I’d like to see him, I’d like to ask him if he is sure it’s me he is talking about. I for one am certain he made a mistake.”
“No, he is sure you’re Alexander Barrington.”
Alexander raised his voice. “If he is so sure, let him identify me. He is an upstanding comrade, this man you talk about? He is a proper Soviet citizen? He is not a traitor, he has not spat on his country? He served it proudly as I have? He’s been decorated, he never shied away from battle, no matter how one-sided, no matter how hard-won? This man you speak of, he is an example to us all, correct? Let me meet the paragon of new Soviet consciousness. Let him look at me, point his finger and say, “This is Alexander Barrington.” Alexander smiled. “And then we will see.”
Now it was Slonko’s turn to pale. “I came from Leningrad to talk to you like a reasonable man,” he hissed, losing some of that effacing false humility, baring his teeth, narrowing his eyes.
“And I am certainly glad to talk to you,” Alexander said, feeling his own dark eyes darken. “As always I am happy to talk to an earnest Soviet operator, who seeks the truth, who will stop at nothing to find it. And I want to help you. Bring my accuser here. Let’s clear up this matter once and for all.” Alexander stood up and took one half-menacing step in the direction of the desk. “But once we get this cleared up, I want my besmirched name back.”
“Which name would that be, Major?”
“My rightful name. Alexander Belov.”
“Do you know that you look like your mother?” Slonko said suddenly.
“My mother has long died. Of typhus. In Krasnodar. Surely your moles told you that?”
“I’m talking about your real mother. The woman who would suck off any guard to get a shot of vodka.”
Alexander did not flinch. “Interesting. But I don’t think my mother, who was a farmer’s wife, had ever seen a guard.”
Slonko spat and left.
A guard came to stand over Alexander. It was not Corporal Ivanov. All Alexander wanted to do was close his eyes and fall asleep. But every time he closed his eyes, the guard rammed the butt of the rifle under his chin with a call to wake up. Alexander had to learn to sleep with his eyes open.
The bleak sun set and the room became dark. The corporal turned on the bright light, and shined it into Alexander’s face. He became rougher with the rifle. The third time he tried to slam the barrel into Alexander’s throat, Alexander grabbed the barrel, twisted it out of the guard’s hands and turned it on him. Standing over him, he said, “All you have to do is ask me not to fall asleep. No stronger measures are required. Can you do that?”
“Give me my rifle back.”
“Answer me.”
“Yes, I can do that.”
He gave the guard the weapon back. The guard took it, and struck Alexander in the forehead with the butt of the rifle. He flinched, saw black for a moment but made no sound. The guard left the classroom and returned shortly with his replacement, Corporal Ivanov, who said, “Go ahead, Major. Close your eyes. When they come I will yell. You will open your eyes then, yes?”
“Instantly,” Alexander said in a grateful voice,
closing his eyes in the most uncomfortable of chairs, which had a short back and no arms. He hoped he wouldn’t fall over.
“That’s what they do, you know,” he heard Ivanov say. “They keep you from sleeping day and night, they don’t feed you, they keep you naked, wet, cold, in darkness at day and in light at night until you break down and say white is black and black is white and sign their fucking paper.”
“Black is white,” Alexander said without opening his eyes.
“Corporal Boris Maikov signed their fucking paper,” said Ivanov. “He was shot yesterday.”
“What about the other one? Ouspensky?”
“He’s back in the infirmary. They realized he had only one lung. They’re waiting for him to die. Why waste a bullet on him?”
Alexander was too exhausted to speak. Ivanov lowered his voice another notch, and said, “Major, I heard Slonko arguing with Mitterand a few hours ago. He said to Mitterand, ‘Don’t worry. I will break him or he will die.’”
Alexander made no reply.
He heard Ivanov’s whispering. “Don’t let them break you, Major.”
Alexander didn’t answer. He was sleeping.
Leningrad, 1935
In Leningrad, the Barringtons found two small rooms next to each other in a communal apartment in a ramshackle nineteenth-century building. Alexander found a new school, unpacked his few books, his clothes, and continued being fifteen. Harold found work as a carpenter in a table-making factory. Jane stayed home and drank. Alexander stayed away from the two rooms they called home. He spent much of his time walking around Leningrad, which he liked better than Moscow. The pastel stucco buildings, the white nights, the river Neva; he found Leningrad historic and romantic with its gardens and palaces and wide boulevards and small rivers and canals criss-crossing the never-sleeping city.
At sixteen, as he was obliged to, Alexander registered for the Red Army as Alexander Barrington. That was his rebellion. He was not changing his name.
In their communal apartment they tried to keep to themselves—having so little for each other and nothing for other people—but a married couple on the second floor of their building, Svetlana and Vladimir Visselsky, made friendly approaches. They lived in one room with Vladimir’s mother, and at first were quite taken with the Barringtons and lightly envious of the two rooms they had for themselves. Vladimir was a road engineer, Svetlana worked at a local library and kept telling Jane there was a job for her there, too. Jane got a job there, but was unable to get up in the mornings to go to work.
Alexander liked Svetlana. In her late thirties, she was well-dressed, attractive, witty. Alexander liked the way she talked to him, almost as if he were an adult. He was restless during the summer of 1935. Emotionally and financially broke, his parents did not rent a dacha. The summer in the city without a way to make new friends did not appeal much to Alexander, who did nothing but walk around Leningrad by day and read by night. He got a library card where Svetlana worked, and often found himself sitting and talking to her. And, very occasionally, reading. Frequently she walked home with him.
His mother brightened a bit under Svetlana’s casual attention but soon went back to drinking in the afternoons.
Alexander spent more and more of his days at the library. When she walked home with him, Svetlana would offer him a cigarette, which he stopped refusing, or some vodka, which he continued to refuse. The vodka he could take or leave. The cigarettes he thought he could take or leave too, but he had gradually begun to look forward to their bitter taste in his mouth. The vodka altered him in ways he did not like, but the cigarettes provided a calming crutch to his adolescent frenzy.
One afternoon they had come home earlier than usual to find his mother in a stupor in her bedroom. They went to his room to sit down for a second, before Svetlana had to go back downstairs. She offered Alexander another cigarette, and as she did so, she moved closer to him on the couch. He studied her for a moment, wondering if he was misreading her intentions, and then she took the cigarette out of her mouth and put it into his, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t bite.”
So he was not misreading her intentions.
He was sixteen and he was ready.
Her lips moved to his mouth. “Are you afraid?” she said.
“I’m not,” he said, throwing the cigarette and the lighter on the floor. “But you should be.”
They spent two hours together on the couch, and afterward Svetlana moved from the room and down the hall with the shaken walk of someone who had come into the battle thinking it was going to be an easy conquest and was now stumbling away having lost all her weapons.
Stumbling away past Harold, who was coming home from work, and who passed Svetlana in the hall with a nod and a “You don’t want to stay for dinner?”
“There is no dinner,” Svetlana replied weakly. “Your wife is still asleep.”
Alexander closed his own door and smiled.
Harold cooked dinner for himself and Alexander, who spent the rest of the evening holed up in his room pretending to read, but really just waiting for tomorrow.
Tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough.
Another afternoon of Svetlana, and another, and another.
For a month in the summer she and Alexander met in the late afternoons.
He enjoyed Svetlana. She never failed to tell him exactly what he needed to do to bring her pleasure, and he never failed to do exactly as he was told. Everything he learned about patience and perseverance, he learned from her. Combined with his own natural tendency to stay until the job was done, the result was that Svetlana left work earlier and earlier. He was flattered. His summer flew by.
On the weekends when Svetlana came over with her husband to visit the Barringtons, and she and Alexander barely acknowledged their intimacy, he found the sexual tension to be almost an end in itself.
Then Svetlana began to question the evenings he spent out.
Trouble was, now that Alexander had seen what was on the other side of the wall, all he wanted was to be on the other side of the wall, but not just with Svetlana.
He would have gladly continued with her and made time with girls his own age, but one Sunday evening as the five of them were sitting down to a dinner of potatoes and a little herring, Vladimir, Svetlana’s husband said to no one in particular, “My Svetochka, I think, needs to get a second job. The library has apparently reduced her hours to part-time.”
“But then when would she come and visit my wife?” said Harold, spooning another helping of potatoes onto his plate. They were all crowded in Alexander’s parents’ room around the small table.
“You come and visit me?” asked Jane of Svetlana. No one at the table responded for a moment. Then Jane nodded. “Of course you do. Every day. I see you in the afternoon.”
“You girls must have a great time around here,” said Vladimir. “She always comes home full of such good spirits. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was having a raucous affair.” He laughed in the tone of a man who thought the very idea of his wife’s having an affair was so absurd as to be almost delicious.
Svetlana herself threw her head back and laughed. Even Harold chuckled. Only Jane and Alexander sat stonily. For the rest of the dinner Jane said nothing to anyone but got drunker and drunker. Soon she was passed out on the couch while the rest of them cleaned up. The next day, when Alexander came home, he found his mother waiting for him in his room, somber and sober.
“I sent her away,” she said to him as he came in and threw down his bag of library books and jacket on the floor and stood in front of his mother with his arms folded.
“Okay,” he said.
“What are you doing, Alexander?” she asked quietly. He could tell she had been crying.
“I don’t know, Mom. What are you doing?”
“Alexander…”
“What are you concerned about?”
“That I’m not looking after my son,” she replied.
&nb
sp; “You’re concerned about that?”
“I don’t want it to be too late,” she said in a small, remorseful voice. “It’s my fault, I know. Lately I haven’t been much of…” She broke off. “But whatever is happening in our family, she can’t come here anymore, not if she wants to keep this from her husband.”
“Like you’re keeping what you do in the afternoons from yours?”
“Like he cares,” retorted Jane.
“Like Vladimir cares,” retorted Alexander.
“Stop it!” she yelled. “What’s the point of this? To wake me up?”
“Mom, I know you will find this hard to believe, but it has nothing to do with you.”
“Alexander,” Jane said bitterly, “indeed I find that very hard to believe. You, the most beautiful boy in all of Russia, you’re telling me you could not have found a young school girl to parry with instead of a woman nearly my age who just happens to be my friend?”
“Who says I haven’t? And would a school girl have gotten you sober?”
“Oh, I see, so this does have something to do with me after all!” She didn’t get up off the couch while Alexander, with his arms crossed, stood in front of her. “Is this what you want to do with your life? Become a toy for bored older women?”
Alexander felt his temper rising. He grit his teeth. His mother was too upsetting for him.
“Answer me!” she said loudly. “Is this what you want?”
“What?” he said, just as loudly. “Does it seem to you as if I’ve got so many more attractive options? Which part do you find so repellent?”
Jane jumped up. “Don’t go forgetting yourself,” she said. “I am still your mother.”
“Then act like my mother!” he yelled.
“I’ve looked after you!”