He looked down and his stomach twisted. Could he survive? It struck him that he didn’t want to die. He remembered William Miller in Barrington. Nice, blond, popular William Miller. Had been taking swimming lessons since he was five weeks old. He could jump and somersault and hold his breath under water, he could outswim and outjump any other kid in Barrington, including Alexander, who certainly didn’t shy away from trying. And then one summer afternoon when they were eight, they were playing Tarzan in the Olympic-sized pool at William’s house, jumping cannonball into the deep end, into what was supposed to be twelve feet of water. William jumped from a diving board two feet high into twelve feet of water. But what William didn’t consider was large-boned Ben down the street, who, at the moment of William’s ill-timed upside-down cannonball, was treading water too close to the diving board. William saw Ben just a millisecond too late and lurched to the left to avoid Ben’s substantial form. William’s head hit the concrete wall of the pool, snapped and popped, and from then on William Miller was wheeled around by a twenty-four-hour-a-day nurse and was fed through a tube in his stomach. Strange? Could it be any more strange than a seventeen-year-old boy, nearly six foot three and 180 pounds, throwing himself down one hundred feet into what might be eight feet of water with boulders for a bottom? Alexander couldn’t recite the immutable laws of physics on that one, but something was telling him they were not in his favor. There was no time to panic and no time to think. He knew he could be jumping to his death. He knew it. His stomach knew it. His exploding heart knew it. But this death would at least be quick. He crossed himself. In Vladivostok he would be dying for the rest of his life.
He mouthed, help me God, and jumped from the train with only the prison clothes he was wearing.
A hundred feet was a long way to fall, though it took but a few seconds; the train was nearly on the other side of the river by the time he reached the water. He had jumped feet first and hoped the Volga was deep enough to withstand his fall. It was. It was also cold and very fast. The river current grabbed him and carried him half a kilometer, fighting the whole way for a gulp of air, and by the time he turned his head to the bridge, the train was just a speck in the distance. It didn’t look as if it had stopped. He wasn’t sure if anyone even noticed, except for the convict next to him, who had been smirking from Leningrad to the Volga, and muttering, “A strapping young lad, just wait till Vladivostok, wait to see what’ll become of ya.”
He didn’t want to risk getting out of the water until he could no longer see the bridge. He swam with the current, maybe five kilometers, and finally became tired and crawled out. It was summer and drying off was quick. Alexander dug some potatoes out of the ground, ate them raw, took off his clothes, made himself a bed out of leaves, and a lean-to canopy out of twigs (thank God for Cub Scouts) and then slept. When he woke up, his clothes were damp and his legs sore. He didn’t know how to make himself new clothes, so he built a fire, dried the clothes and turned them inside out, so the prison gray wouldn’t be as clearly visible. He smeared green leaves all over himself to further disguise the color, some mud, some strawberry pulp, and when the clothes were unrecognizable as having been issued by the NKVD, he set out again, staying close to the river.
Alexander traveled downstream on the Volga on barges and fishing boats, offering his fishing services until one fisherman asked him for his domestic passport. After that, Alexander veered away, walking deeper inland, hoping to find his way to the mountains between Georgia and Turkey. He stayed away from fisherman and from farmers—he knew sooner or later someone from whom he could not get away would ask for his domestic passport. His had been taken from him, and he had been issued a prison workbook; certainly he could not have shown that. He burned it.
Traveling without accepting help had the great disadvantage of slowness. Walking would only get him thirty or less kilometers a day. Alexander had to risk hitching rides in horse carriages to get south a little faster.
It was the fifteen-year-old girl working in the fields through which he was passing who stopped him. Long enough to ask for a drink, to ask for some bread, to ask if there was any work he could do to make some spare cash. She brought him home by the hand to her open-hearted parents. She of the large warm calloused farmer’s hand, she of the thick long light-brown hair, the round face, the round flesh, the perspiration around the neck and the arms, and a glistening chest on which a small gold cross lay, nearly horizontally, so healthy and young was she.
Alexander didn’t get as far as Georgia. He ended up staying in Belyi Gor, a village near Krasnodar by the Black Sea, still in the republic of Russia where—because he had noticed Larissa and it was August and harvesting season—he offered his fieldhand services to the farmer’s family, the Belovs. Yefim and Maritza Belov had four sons, Grisha, Valery, Sasha, Anton, and a daughter.
The Belovs had no room for him in their small farmhouse, but he stayed gladly in the barn, slept on hay, worked from sunup to sundown and at night thought about Larissa. She smiled at him with her parted mouth, pretending to be constantly out of breath. Alexander knew it was a ruse, but it worked, for he had been starved and needed feeding. His body had been too tense for too long, on the run and on guard. Larissa was the promise of relief.
But Alexander stayed away. Her brothers were not the trifling types. Working in the fields digging potatoes, carrots, onions, threshing wheat for the collective farm or kolkhoz without the help of animals had made them like oxen, and living around their adolescent, tumescent, eager sister had made them more than a little wary of migrant workers like Alexander, who took off their shirts and worked in their trousers, getting slicker and more tanned by each sun-drenched day. Alexander was seventeen, but he looked like a man and ate like a man, and worked like a man. In all ways, he had the appetites of a man and the heart of one. Larissa saw it. The brothers saw it. He stayed away. He offered to make hay bales. He offered to chop winter wood for the family. He offered to build them a new—bigger—table, hoping he would remember from the childhood days with his father what it was like to use the saw, a plane, hammer and nails. He offered all this, hoping his work would keep him out of the fields and in the barn.
Of course the more Alexander remained aloof, the more Larissa pushed forward, becoming as brazen as a fifteen-year-old girl could get living in a small farmhouse with her parents and four brothers.
It was late August in scorching Krasnodar by the Black Sea. And one afternoon when he was in the barn tying up the hay into neat stacks, he saw the light stream on the ground and when he turned around, the light stream was gone, blacked out by Larissa who stood in front of him.
In his hands he held a pitchfork, a ball of twine, and a knife. She asked him in a low voice what he was doing. Making hay bales, he was going to reply, but realized she knew and he didn’t have to say a word. Under different circumstances, he would have not stopped himself. He could barely stop himself now. But the girl was trouble; he felt it.
“Larissa, this is going to end in no good,” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, sauntering closer. She was barefoot and was wearing what was barely a dress. “It’s godlessly hot out there. I came in for a little shade in the middle of the day. You don’t mind, do you?”
He turned his back to her, bending to the hay. “Your brothers will kill me.”
“Why would they do that? You’re working so hard. They’ll applaud you.” She came closer. He could smell the summer sweat on her body. She inhaled. She could smell his.
“Stop.”
She took another step toward him and stopped. His back was still to her but with his peripheral vision he saw her jump on top of a wooden stable gate. “I’ll just sit here and watch you,” he heard her say.
He watched her for a moment, and then went back to his work. His body was nearly giving out. In one moment, he thought, in one moment, I could have such sweet relief, and it would take but a moment. No harm done. She was close enough to him that he could smell her
farm fresh body, her washed hair, her breath. He closed his eyes momentarily.
“Alexander,” she said huskily. “Look. I want to show you something.”
Aching, reluctant, desperate, he looked. She slowly pulled up her skirt and slightly opened her legs. Her hips were just below Alexander’s eye level. His gaze stopped between her bare thighs. A groan escaped him.
“Come here, Alexander.”
He came. Pushing her hands away, he stood between her legs, and pulled down her dress to expose her body. Panting, perspiring, ravenous, he raised his head to her lips and then feverishly bent to her breasts, while his fingers caressed her, the softness, the warmth…she was moaning as she clutched the bar—and then laughter sounded right outside the barn, and Larissa tried to push Alexander away. He wasn’t moving from her.
Larissa shoved him hard, jumping down from the beam, and the light was on the grass, and Grisha, her oldest brother, came in and said, “Larisska, there you are, I’ve been looking all over for you. Get out of here. Stop trying to corrupt our Alexander. Can’t you see he’s got real work to do? Go to Mama. She wants to know why you haven’t gotten the cows from the pasture yet. The kolkhoznik will be here for the milk soon.”
“I’m going,” said Larissa, walking past Alexander. Grisha left first, and before Larissa disappeared she turned around and with a delicious smile on her face whispered, “Alexander, next time we won’t be interrupted and my mouth will be all over you, I promise. And afterward I will call you Shura, instead of Sasha like my brother. Just you wait.”
Alexander could think about nothing else for the rest of the day, or the evening, or certainly the night alone in his barn. But the next day something happened that stopped him from self-immolation. It was Larissa’s pale face in the morning. When he approached her, she put her hands up and without looking at him said, “I’m not feeling well.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ll make you feel better.”
She pushed him weakly away and, without glancing at him, said, “Stay away, Alexander. Do yourself a favor. Stay away from me.”
Perplexed he went to do his work. He didn’t see her for the rest of the day, but in the evening during dinner, Larissa’s now extremely pale face was accompanied by fever. The fever was higher the following evening and was miserably followed by a red raised rash on her face a day later.
Oh no, the grown-ups said in a panic. She is sick.
And then came Alexander’s fever and his rash, but by the time he was sick, no one said oh no in a panic. Because the horseman of the apocalypse sat atop a pale horse that they all knew was typhus, the incurable, contagious, deadly pestilence. The headache that preceded the onset of the disease was so severe, so throbbing, so eye-poppingly wretched that by the time the 105°F fever and the scabby, scratchy, inflamed rash came, Alexander welcomed the distracting delirium that accompanied it. The brothers were feverish and Larissa was hemorrhaging, and then the parents were delirious, and Larissa was dead. One minute pressed against Alexander’s burning hands, the next dead and unburied as they were all too weak to dig a hole for her, and so she lay in the izba, and they all panted feebly and waited for the horseman to come for them. And it did.
In the end, only Larissa’s father, Yefim, and Alexander remained. They had not been outside in many days, weeks maybe? They held on to each other and drank water, and prayed, and Alexander started praying in English, mixing it with Russian, pleading for peace, for his mother and father, pleading for their lives, praying for America, for health, for his life, for his mother, for Teddy, Belinda, Boston, Barrington, for the woods, for death finally because he couldn’t take it anymore, and then he saw Yefim’s tormented eyes watching him, felt Yefim’s hand on him, heard Yefim’s bleeding mouth whispering to him, “Son, don’t die, don’t die here like this. Go back to your father and mother. Find your way back home. Where is your home, son?”
Yefim died. Alexander did not. After spending six weeks in quarantine, he got better. The Soviet authorities, to prevent the outbreak of disease in the fall heat over the Caucasus region, burned the village of Belyi Gor and all the bodies and huts and barns and fields contained therein. Alexander, who remained alive but had no identity, got himself a new identity as Yefim’s third son Alexander Belov. When the Soviet council workers came with masks on their faces and clipboards to their chests and in muffled voices asked, “Your name?” Alexander without hesitation said, “Alexander Belov.” They checked against the birth records for Belyi Gor, against the available records for the Belov family and issued Alexander a new domestic passport that allowed him to travel in the Soviet Union without getting stopped and arrested for lack of documents. Alexander was put on a train and with written permission from the regional Soviet made his way back to Leningrad and went to live with Mira Belov, Yefim’s sister. Mira was taken aback to see him. Fortunately for Alexander, she had not seen the family and the real Alexander Belov in twelve years and though she pointed out with surprise Alexander’s black hair and dark eyes, the leanness and the height (“Sasha, I can’t get over it. You were so short and blond and chubby when you were five!”), she couldn’t remember well enough to become suspicious. Alexander stayed, sleeping on a cot in the hall, a cot that was half a meter too short for him. He ate dinner with Mira and her husband and her husband’s parents and tried to be in their apartment as little as possible. He had a plan. He needed to finish school and then he would join the army.
Alexander didn’t have time to remember, to think, to ache. He had only one mission—to see his parents again—and he had only one goal and one imperative—one way or another to leave the Soviet Union.
A New Best Friend, 1937
In the last six months of secondary school, Alexander met Dimitri Chernenko. Dimitri, nondescript and diminutive, kept sidling up to Alexander and asking questions, his curiosity pervasive, invasive and sometimes irritating. Dimitri was like the puppy Alexander never had. He seemed lonely and in need of friendship—and harmless. He was a scrawny kid with shaggy hair and eyes that constantly darted from one face to the next, never staying for more than a few seconds on anyone or anything. Yet the way he looked up to Alexander, literally looked up to him, the way his mouth opened in fawning awe when Alexander spoke, amused Alexander. Dimitri was easy to tease; he laughed at himself for always coming last in a race, for always missing the goal at football, for falling out of trees.
Once or twice, however, Alexander saw Dimitri bullying the younger boys in the school yard, and the second time when Dimitri tried to get Alexander to join in on the taunting of a petrified kid, Alexander pulled Dimitri aside and said, “What are you doing?” And Dimitri apologized and didn’t do it again. Alexander attributed this lack of propriety ton ever being the popular one and over looked it, just as he overlooked his off-color remarks about girls (“Doesn’t she have a hot ass? Hey, you, hotass!”). Alexander would patiently point out the errors in tact and judgment and Dimitri was a willing student, reforming himself to the best of his abilities, though nothing Alexander could teach would make Dimitri kick the ball into the goal or finish first in a race, or listen to a girl talk about her hair with out a bored sneer around his mouth. But in other ways, Dimitri became better behaved. And he laughed at all of Alexander’s jokes, and that went a long way in friendship.
Dimitri was very interested in Alexander’s tinge of an accent, but Alexander brushed off the questions. He didn’t trust Dimitri, which said less about Dimitri than it said about Alexander who didn’t trust anybody. Other than talking to Dimitri about his American past, Alexander and Dimitri managed to cover many other topics: communist politics (in hushed, mocking terms), girls (Dimitri had less experience than Alexander, i.e. none), and parents.
And that’s when one afternoon while walking home, Dimitri let slip that his father was a guard at one of the city prisons, and not just any prison, but (in a glorious stage whisper) in the House of Detention, the most feared and hated of the Leningrad prisons. He said it, Alexander knew
, because his father’s position of power made Dimitri seem more powerful in Alexander’s eyes. But it was at that moment that Alexander looked differently at Dimitri.
Suddenly he saw an opening in the porthole of destiny, a possibility of discovering what happened to his family, and that opportunity was enough for Alexander to swallow his hard-earned mistrust and confide in Dimitri. Alexander told Dimitri the truth about his past and asked for Dimitri’s help in locating Harold and Jane Barrington. Dimitri, his eyes shining, said he would be glad to help Alexander, who in his gratefulness gave Dimitri a hug and said, “Dima, if you help me, God help me, I swear, I’ll be your friend for life. I’ll do anything for you.”
Patting Alexander on the back, Dimitri replied that no thanks were necessary, he would help Alexander gladly because they were best friends, weren’t they?
Alexander agreed that they were.
A few days later, Dimitri brought him the news about his mother. She had been “imprisoned without a right of correspondence.”
Alexander remembered the old babushka Tamara and her husband. He knew what that meant. He remained composed in front of Dimitri, but that night he cried for his mother.
With Dimitri’s father’s help, they managed to get into the House of Detention for five minutes under the auspices of visiting Dimitri’s father and doing a school report on the progress of the Soviet state against agitators and foreign traitors to the socialist cause.
Alexander saw his father for a few minutes one incongruously sunny and warm June afternoon. He had hoped for ten; maybe one or two alone. He got one or two, with Dimitri, Dimitri’s father, and another guard. No privacy for Harold and Alexander Barrington.
Alexander had gone over what he wanted to say to his father until the few words were cut into his memory that neither anxiety nor fear could obliterate.