Without that money, Alexander was finished.
Alexander had to get his mother sober for long enough to let him hide the money in a place that was not home. He knew that if she found out he had taken it without her knowledge or permission her hysteria would not cease until Harold knew of her treachery. Once Harold knew his wife had mistrusted him from the moment they left the United States, mistrusted him even in her love and her respect, mistrusted him and his motives and his ideals and all the dreams he thought she shared with him from the very start, once he knew that, Alexander felt his father would not recover. And he didn’t want to be responsible for his father’s future, all he wanted was the money to help him be responsible for his own. That’s what his sober mother wanted, too. He knew that. Sober, she would let him hide the money. The trick was to get her sober.
Over the course of one difficult and contemptible weekend Alexander tried to dry out his mother. She, in her convulsing rage, flooded him with such obscenities and vitriol that finally even Harold said, “Oh, for God’s sake, give her a drink and tell her to shut up.”
But Alexander didn’t give her a drink. He sat by her, and he read aloud from Dickens, in English, and he read Pushkin to her, in Russian, and he read her the funniest of Zoshchenko’s anecdotes, and he fed her some soup and he fed her some bread, and gave her coffee, and put cold wet towels on her head, but still she wouldn’t stop ranting. Harold, in a quiet moment, asked Alexander, “What did she mean about you and Svetlana, what was she talking about?”
“Dad, haven’t you learned by now, you have to shut her off? You can’t listen to a word she is saying.”
“No, no, of course not,” muttered Harold thoughtfully, walking away from Alexander, though not far, because there wasn’t anywhere in the narrow room to go.
On Monday, after his father left for work, Alexander cut school and spent all day convincing his
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morosely, miserably sober mother that her money needed to be put in a safe place. Alexander tried to explain to her, first patiently and quietly, then impatiently and shouting, that if something, God forbid, were to happen to them, and they were arrested—
“You’re talking nonsense, Alexander. Why would they arrest us? We’re their people. We’re not living well, but then we shouldn’t be living any better than the rest of the Russians. We came here to share their fate.”
“We’re doing that gallantly,” said Alexander. “Mom, wise up. What do you think happened to the other foreigners that lived with us in Moscow?” He paused. His mother considered. “Even if I’m wrong, I’m saying it’s not going to hurt us to be a little prudent and hide the money. Now how much money is left?”
After thinking for a few moments, Jane said she did not know. She let Alexander count it. There was ten thousand dollars and four thousand rubles.
“How many dollars did you bring with you from America?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe seventeen thousand. Maybe twenty.”
“Oh, Mom.”
“What? Some of that money went to buy you oranges and milk in Moscow, or did you forget already?”
“I didn’t forget,” Alexander replied in a weary voice. How much for the oranges and milk, he wanted to know. Fifty dollars? A hundred?
Jane, smoking and watching Alexander, narrowed her eyes at him. “If I let you hide the money, will you let me have a drink, as a thank you?”
“Yes. Just one.”
“Of course. One small one is all I want. I feel much better when I’m sober, you know. But just one small drink to get me through the heebie-jeebies would help me stay sober, you know that, don’t you?”
Alexander wanted to ask his mother just how naïve she thought he was. He said nothing.
“All right,” said Jane. “Let’s get it over with. Where are you planning to hide it?”
Alexander suggested gluing the money into the back binding of a book, producing one of his mother’s good, thick-covered hardbacks to show exactly what he meant.
“If your father finds out, he will never forgive you.”
“He can add it to the list of things he won’t forgive me for. Go on, Mom. I have to get to school. After the book is ready, I’m putting it in the library.”
Jane stared at the book Alexander was proposing. It was her ancient copy of Pushkin’sThe Bronze Horseman and Other Poems . “Why don’t we glue it inside the Bible we brought from home?”
“Because finding a Pushkin book in the Pushkin section of the Leningrad library is not going to alert anyone. But finding a Bible in English anywhere in the Russian library just might.” He smiled. “Don’t you
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think?”
Jane almost smiled back. “Alexander, I’m sorry I haven’t been well.”
He lowered his head.
“I don’t want to talk to your father about this anymore because he no longer has any patience for me, but I’m having trouble with our life.”
“We know,” Alexander said. “We’ve noticed.”
She put her arms around him. He patted her on the back. “Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.”
“This money, Alexander,” she said, looking up at him, “you think it will help you somehow?”
“I don’t know. Having it is better than not having it.”
He took the book with him, and after school went to the Leningrad public library and in the back, in the three-aisle-wide Pushkin section, found a place on a bottom shelf for his book. He put it between two scholarly-looking tomes that had not been checked out since 1927. He thought it was a good bet no one would check out his book, either. But still, it didn’t feel completely safe. He wished there were a better hiding place for it.
When Alexander came home later that evening, his mother was drunk again, showing none of the remorseful affection he had seen in her eyes earlier in the day. He ate dinner quietly with his father, while listening to the radio.
“School good?”
“Yes. It’s fine, Dad.”
“You have good friends?”
“Sure.”
“Any good friends who are girls?” His father was trying to make conversation.
“Some friends who are girls, yes.”
His father cleared his throat. “Nice Russian girls?”
Smiling, Alexander asked, “Compared with what?”
Harold smiled. “Do the nice Russian girls,” he asked carefully, “like my boy?”
Alexander shrugged. “They like me all right.”
Harold said, “I remember you and Teddy hung out with that girl, what was her name again?”
“Belinda.”
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“Yes! Belinda. She was nice.”
“Dad.” Alexander laughed. “We wereeight . Yes, she was nice for an eight-year-old.”
“Oh, but what a crush on you she had!”
“And what a crush on her Teddy had.”
“That about sums up all the relationships on God’s earth.”
They went out for a drink. “I miss our home in Barrington a little,” Harold admitted to Alexander. “But it’s only because I have not lived a different way long enough. Long enough to change my consciousness and make me into the person I’m supposed to be.”
“You have lived this way long enough. That’swhy you miss Barrington.”
“No. You know what I think, son? I think it’s not working so well here, because it’s Russia. I think communism would work much better in America.” He smiled beseechingly at Alexander. “Don’t you agree?”
“Oh, Dad, for God’s sake.”
Harold didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Never mind. I’m going over to Leo’s for a little while. You want to come?”
The choice was, either go back home to the room with his unconscious mother or sit in a s
moked-out room with his father’s communist cronies regurgitating obscure parts ofDas Kapital and talking about bringing the war back home.
Alexander wanted to be with his father but alone. He went home to his mother. He wanted to be alone with somebody.
The next morning, as Harold and Alexander were getting ready for their day, Jane, still inebriated from the night before, held on to Alexander’s hand for a moment and said, “Stay behind, son, I have to talk to you.”
After Harold left, Jane said in a hurried voice, “Collect your things. Where is that book? You have to run and get it.”
“What for?”
“You and I are going to Moscow.”
“Moscow?”
“Yes. We’ll get there by nightfall. Tomorrow first thing in the morning I’ll take you to the consulate.”
They’ll keep you there until they contact the State Department in Washington. And then they’ll send you home.”
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“What?”
“Alexander, yes. I’ll take care of your father.”
“You can’t take care of yourself.”
“Don’t worry about me,” said Jane. “My fate is sealed. But yours is wide open. Concern yourself only with you. Your father goes to his meetings. He thinks by playing with the grown-ups he won’t be punished. But they have his number. They have mine. But you, Alexander, you have no number. I have to get you out.”
“I’m not going without you or Dad.”
“Of course you are. Your father and I will never be allowed to return. But you will do very well back home. I know it’s hard in America these days, there aren’t many jobs, but you’ll be free, you’ll have your life, so come and stop arguing. I’m your mother. I know what I’m doing.”
“Mom, you’re taking me to Moscow to surrender me to the Americans?”
“Yes. Your Aunt Esther will look after you until you graduate secondary school. The State Department will arrange for her to meet your ship in Boston. You’re still only sixteen, Alexander, the consulate won’t turn you away.”
Alexander had been very close to his father’s sister once. She adored him, but she had an ugly fight with Harold over Alexander’s dubious future in the Soviet Union, and they had not spoken or written since.
“Mom, two things,” he said. When I turned sixteen, I registered for the Red Army. Remember?
Mandatory conscription. I became a Soviet citizen when I joined. I have a passport to prove that.”
“The consulate doesn’t have to know that.”
“It’s their business to know it. But the second thing is…” Alexander broke off. “I can’t go without saying goodbye to my father.”
“Write him a letter.”
The train ride was long. He had twelve hours to sit and think. How his mother managed those hours without a drink, he didn’t know. Her hands were shaking badly by the time they arrived at the Leningrad Station in Moscow. It was night; they were tired and hungry. They had no place to sleep. They had no food. It was a fairly mild late April, and they slept on a bench in Gorky Park. Alexander had strong bittersweet memories of himself and his friends playing ice hockey in Gorky Park.
“I need a drink, Alexander,” Jane whispered. “I need a drink to take an edge off my life. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”
“Mother,” said Alexander, putting his steady hand on her to keep her from getting up. “If you leave, I will go straight to the station and take the next train back to Leningrad.”
Deeply sighing, Jane moved closer to Alexander and motioned to her lap. “Lie down, son. Get some sleep. We have a long day tomorrow.”
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Alexander put his head on his mother’s shoulder and eventually slept.
The next morning they had to wait an hour at the consulate gate until someone came to see them—only to tell them they could not come in. Jane gave her name and a letter explaining about her son. They waited restlessly for another two hours until the sentry called them over and said the consul was unable to help them. Jane pleaded to be let in for just five minutes. The sentry shook his head and said there was nothing he could do. Alexander had to restrain his mother. Eventually he led her away and returned by himself to speak to the guard. The man apologized. “I’m sorry,” he said in English. “They did look into it, if you want to know. But the file on your mother and father has been sent back to the State Department in Washington.” The man paused. “Yours, too. Since you’re Soviet citizens, you’re not under our jurisdiction anymore. There is nothing they can do.”
“What about political asylum?”
“On what grounds? Besides, you know how many Soviets come this way asking for asylum? Dozens every day. On Mondays, near a hundred. We’re here by invitation from the Soviet government. We want to maintain our ties to the Soviet community. If we started accepting their people, how long do you think they’d allow us to stay here? You’d be the last one. Just last week, we relented and let a widowed Russian father with two small children pass. The father had relatives in the United States and said he would find work. He had a useful skill, he was an electrician. But there was a diplomatic scandal. We had to give him back.” The sentry paused. “You’re not an electrician, are you?”
“No,” replied Alexander. “But I am an American citizen.”
The sentry shook his head. “You know you can’t serve two masters in the military.”
Alexander knew. He tried again. “I have relatives in America. I will live with them. And I can work. I’ll drive a cab. I will sell produce on the street corner. I will farm. I will cut down trees. Whatever I can do, I will do.”
The sentry lowered his voice. “It’s not you. It’s your father and mother. They’re just too high profile for the consulate to get involved. Made too much of a fuss when they came here. Wanted everyone to know them. Well, now everyone knows them. Your parents should have thought twice about relinquishing their U.S. citizenship. What was the hurry? They should have been sure first.”
“My father was sure,” said Alexander.
The trip back from Moscow was only as long as the tripto Moscow; why did it seem decades longer?
His mother was mute. The countryside was flat bleak fields; there was still no food.
Jane cleared her throat. “I desperately wanted to have a baby. It took me ten years and four miscarriages to have you. The year you were born the worldwide flu epidemic tore through Boston, killing thousands of people, including my sister, your father’s parents and brother, and many of our close friends. Everybody we knew lost someone. I went to the doctor for a check-up because I was feeling under the weather and was terrified it might be the dreaded flu. He told me I was pregnant. I said, how can it be, we’ll fall sick, we’ve given up our family inheritance, we are broke, where are we going to live, how will we stay healthy, and the doctor looked at me and said, “The baby brings his own food.”
She took Alexander’s hand. He let her.
“You, son—you brought your own food. Harold and I both felt it. When you were born,
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Alexander—when you were born, it was late at night, and you came so suddenly, I didn’t even have time to go to the hospital. The doctor came, delivered you in our bed, and said that you seemed in a great hurry to get on with living. You were the biggest baby he had ever seen, and I still remember, after we told him we were naming you Anthony Alexander after your great grandfather, he lifted you, all purple and black-haired, and exclaimed, “Alexander the great!” Because you were so big, you see.” She paused. “You were such a beautiful boy,” she whispered.
Alexander took his hand away and turned to the window.
“Our hopes for you were extraordinary. I wish you could imagine the kinds of things we dreamed for you as we strolled down the Boston Pier with you in the carr
iage and all the old ladies stopping to gaze at the baby with hair so black and eyes so shining.”
The flat fields were rushing by.
“Ask your father—ask him—when next you can, if his dreams for you ever includedthis for his only son.”
“I just didn’t bring enough food, did I, Mom?” said Alexander, with hair so black and eyes so shining.
CHAPTER TEN
The Ghosts of Ellis Island, 1943
THERE WAS SOMETHING UNDENIABLYcomforting about living and working at Ellis. Tatiana’s world was so small, so insular, and so full that there was little left of her to imagine a different life, to move forward in her imagination to New York, to the real America, or backward in her memory, to Leningrad, to the real Alexander. So long as she stayed at Ellis with her infant son, lived with him in a small stone room with the large white window, slept in her single bed on her white linen, wore her one set of white clothes and sensible shoes, so long as she lived in that room with Anthony and her black backpack, she didn’t have to imagine an impossible life in America without Alexander.
Desperately trying to get away from that black backpack, she frequently longed for the noise of her family, for the chaos and the arguing, for the music of loud vodka drinkers, for the smell of incessant cigarette smokers. She wished for her impossible brother, for her sister, for her bedraggled mother, her gruff father and for her grandmother and grandfather—revered by her. She ached for them the way she used to ache for bread during the blockade. She wished for them to walk loudly down the Ellis halls with her as they did now every day, silent ghosts by her side, helpless before his screaming ghost also by her side.
During the day she carried her boy and bandaged and fed the wounded, leaving her own festering wounds until night-time when she licked them and nursed them, and rememberedthe pines and the fish and the river and the axe and the woods and the fire and the blueberries and the smell of cigarette smoke and the loud laughter coming from one male throat.
It was impossible to walk the stripped bare corridors of Ellis Island Three without hearing the millions of footsteps that had walked there on the black-and-white checkered floor before Tatiana. When she ventured across the short bridge to the Great Hall on Ellis Island One, the sense grew. Because unlike