“We not collecting,” Tatiana said quickly. “We come—I come to speak to Esther Barrington.”
“I’m Esther Barrington,” said Esther. “Who areyou ?”
“I—” Tatiana hesitated. She held out her boy. “This is Anthony Alexander Barrington,” she said.
“Alexander’s son.”
Esther dropped the keys she was holding in her hands. “Whoare you?”
“I am Alexander’s wife,” said Tatiana.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
Esther’s face turned red. “Well, I’m not at all surprised. Tothink you would have the nerve to come here, to my house! Who do you think you are?”
“Alexander’s wife—”
“I don’t care who you are! Don’t you shove your son in my face, as if suddenly I’m supposed to care. I am very sorry for you—” Her stern voice belied Esther’s wretched expression. “Very sorry, but you have nothing to do with my business.”
Tatiana took a step back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. I just wanted you to—”
“I know what you wanted! You’re bringing me your bastard child. What? That’s going to make it all better?”
“Make what better?” said Vikki.
Esther didn’t reply to Vikki as she continued to raise her voice. “Do you know what your father-in-law said to me as he left my house for the last time fourteen years ago? He said,My son is none of your business, cunt . That’s what he said to me! My flesh-and-blood nephew, my Alexander none of my business. I wanted to help them, I said I would keep the boy while he and his wife went to train-wreck their lives in the Soviet Union, but he spat on my offer. He didn’t want any part of me, of our family. He never wrote to me, never telegraphed. I never heard from him.” She paused, panting. “What’s the bastard doing now, anyway?”
“He is dead,” Tatiana said faintly.
Esther couldn’t even mouth an “Oh.” Her hands clutching the door-knob, she staggered back, and said,
“Well, fine. Don’t you, whoever you are, come to me now and tell me your stranger son ismy damned business.” With her trembling hand Esther slammed the door as loudly as she could and the girls were left standing on the porch.
“Hmm,” said Vikki. “How did you expect that to go?”
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Trying hard not to cry, Tatiana turned around and walked back down the steps. “Better than that, I think.”
What had she expected? She didn’t know the relations between Alexander’s father and aunt before the Barringtons left the United States, but she was sure of one thing from Esther’s reaction: Esther knew nothing—not about her brother, not about her sister-in-law and not about Alexander. And really, that was the only thing Tatiana had come to find out—whether Esther had any information that might help Tatiana. She didn’t. Tatiana was done. The promise of distant family, of perhaps a familial bond for her son, was too much of an intellectual intangible for Tatiana at a time when she was single-mindedly set on just one thing—finding out the truth about what happened to Alexander.
She placed Anthony back in the carriage, and they walked down the path to the street. “Fourteen years,” Vikki said. “You’d think she’d get over it. Some people have such long memories.”
Slowly they made their way back to town. “Hey, what was that word?” Tatiana asked. “What did Alexander’s father call her when he left?”
“Never mind. Ladies don’t use that kind of language. Our Esther has a bit of the soldier in her. Someday I’ll teach you the bawdy words in English.”
Tatiana said, “I know bawdy words in English.” Quietly. “Just not that one.”
“How would you know anything? Dictionaries don’t have them. Phrase-books don’t have them.” Vikki prodded her. “Not any phrase-books I’ve ever seen.”
“I once,” said Tatiana, “had very good teacher.”
They were on Main Street when a car pulled up to the sidewalk and Esther jumped out, her makeup long gone, her eyes red, her gray coiffed hair disheveled. She went in front of Tatiana.
“I’m sorry,” Esther said. “It was a shock to see you. And we had never heard a word from my brother since he left America. I didn’t know what happened to them. No one in the State Department would tell us a thing.”
Back at the house, the girls were fed to bursting with ham and bread and ham soup, and were given coffee, and Anthony was put upstairs into a bed, barricaded on all sides, and allowed to nap.
For someone who had harbored a grudge for over a decade, Esther cried like the wife of the hanged when Tatiana told her about her brother and his wife, and Alexander.
She insisted that the girls stay until Sunday, and the girls did. Esther was a decent woman. She herself had no children, was sixty-one, a year younger than Harold, and the only surviving Barrington. Her own husband had died five years earlier, and Esther now lived alone with Rosa, her housekeeper.
“Was this where Alexander lived?” Tatiana kept her eyes on Esther, afraid to look around, afraid she might see a vestige of a child Alexander.
Esther shook her head. “His house is about a mile away from here. I don’t speak to the people who live in it now, they’re right snobs, but if you want I could drive you past there so you can take a look.”
“They had woods behind their house?”
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“Not anymore,” Esther replied. “All houses there now. The woods were nice. Alexander had a friend—”
“Teddy? Or Belinda?”
“Is there any part of his life you don’t know?”
“Yes,” said Tatiana. “The present part.”
“Well, Teddy died in ’42, in the Battle of Midway. And Belinda became a frontline nurse and is now in North Africa. Or Italy. Or wherever those troops are now. Poor Alexander. Poor Teddy. Poor Harold.”
Esther shook her head. “Stupid Harold. His whole family ruined, and that boy—that golden, unbelievable boy—do you have a picture?”
Tatiana shook her head. “He remained what he was, Esther. You haven’t heard from him, then?”
“Of course not.”
“Or anything about him?”
“Not a word. Why?”
Tatiana struggled up. “We really must be going.”
On the train to New York, Vikki stared out the window.
“What’s wrong, Vik?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking,” said Vikki, “that when I first met you, except for that faded scar on your face, you seemed like the least complicated person I had ever met.”
Staring at her boy, Tatiana put her hand on Vikki’s leg. “I’m not complicated,” she said. “I just need to find out what happened to my husband.”
“You told me and Edward he was dead.”
Tatiana stared out the window as the train whizzed through the wet summer Massachusetts countryside.
Have you been looking for me? she had once asked him, and he replied, All my life.
She said nothing further as she put her head back on the seat and, stroking Anthony’s head, shut her eyes until they were in Grand Central Station.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
In the Mountains of Holy Cross, October 1944
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DEEP IN THE DENSEthick forest of the mountains, a hundred kilometers and six weeks past the bridge to Holy Cross, Alexander and his men were under fire for three hours one cold autumn afternoon.
They lived in the woods and slept in the woods, setting up their canvas tents when the fighting stopped, or wrapping themselves in their trench coats on the ground when it didn’t. They built fires, but food in the forest was more scarce than they would have liked. The rabbits scurried at the sound of a battalion of men. Neither the streams nor the fish were plentiful. But when there were streams, they at least manage
d to wash. The season for blueberries had passed, and they were all sick of mushrooms. Undercooked, the mushrooms gave Alexander’s men terrible stomach upsets and he finally had to forbid their use. The telephone wire frequently broke on the uneven terrain, and the army supplies did not last between reinforcements. Alexander had to make his own soap out of lard and ashes. But his soldiers cared nothing for staying clean, for keeping off lice. They were aware of, but indifferent to, the symbiotic relationship between lice and typhus. The men wanted to eat the lard, and soap be damned. The gunpowder, the mud, the blood remained on their faces and bodies for weeks. Everyone had trench foot: they just could never get dry.
They were a battalion by themselves in the woods, making their way up the mountains to get to the other side, but the Germans took positions atop the mountains, as they had in Sinyavino and Pulkovo and they only needed a few men to ward off Alexander’s many.
But at least before they had been making arduous progress. Suddenly they were stopped by the Germans at the foothills and they had not been able to penetrate the Nazi defense despite twice receiving reinforcements of men and ammunition. There had been no further reinforcements in eight days. In between bursts of fire from morning until night, German voices echoed through the woods. Not just above them, but to the left and right of them. Alexander began to suspect that the Germans had less of a defenseline than an encirclement. Alexander’s troops had not moved a meter in the forest, and once again night was an hour away.
Alexander had to break the impasse or this forest was going to be his death. It had already been Verenkov’s death. The poor bastard couldn’t see the enemy, he fired blindly, but couldn’t move out of the way of anything. Fortune had carried him alive to these woods and stopped here. Alexander and Ouspensky buried him in the hole ripped by the grenade that had taken him and left his helmet hanging on a stick rising out of the ground.
“Who the fuck is that?” Alexander suddenly asked when the gunfire ceased. “I swear to God, I can hear Russian. Am I hallucinating, Ouspensky? Listen.”
“I hear the paper-ripping sound of the Maschinengewehr 43.” That was the German sub-machine-gun.
“Yes, that, but listen. They’re about to load another belt in, and you will hear someone barking commands in Russian. I swear to God it’s Russian.”
Ouspensky looked at Alexander with sympathy. “You miss Russia, Captain?”
“Oh, fuck,” Alexander said. “I’m telling you it’s Russian!”
“You think we’re shooting at Russian men?”
“I don’t know. Is that ridiculous? How would they have gotten here?”
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“Hmm. Sir, have you heard of the Vlasovites?”
“The Vlasovites?”
“The Soviet POWs or partisans who have switched sides.”
“Yes, I’ve heard of the Vlasovites,” Alexander snapped. He did not want to be having this discussion with Ouspensky while he was trying to save his men. Ouspensky had absolutely no sense of urgency about anything. He was sitting behind a tree, reloading his Shpagin, setting up the shells in neat rows to load into Alexander’s mortar, as peaceful as if he were at a Crimean resort.
Of course Alexander had heard about the Vlasovites. In the primordial morass that had become the partisan war on the Germans, the Vlasovites—led by the eponymous Russian general, Andrei Vlasov—were the Russian soldiers who, when taken prisoner by the Germans, switched to the German side and fought their Red Army brothers in arms—ostensibly fighting for a free Russia. Having organized his Anti-Stalinist Russian Liberation Movement and having found no support from Hitler, Vlasov had long been under German house arrest, but many Russians continued to fight under his name in German-led brigades.
“It can’t be the Vlasovites,” Ouspensky said.
“General Vlasov is not here, but his men continue to fight on the German side. He had over a hundred thousand of them. And some of them are in those woods.”
The fire died down for a minute and, as clear as skylight, they heard in Russian,“Zarezhai! Zarezhai!”
Alexander exchanged a look with Ouspensky, raised his eyebrows and said, “I hate it when I’m fucking right.”
“Now what? We have no ammo.”
“That’s not true,” Alexander said cheerfully. “I’ve got four magazines left and half of one drum. And reinforcements will be here soon.” That was a lie. He suspected the telephone wire had been torn again, and now there was an added problem—the wire stringer was dead.
“There are at least thirty of them in the woods.”
“I better not miss then, had I?”
“You’re lying about the reinforcements. We already had our reinforcements. Konev brought you three hundred men with rifles and ammo two weeks ago. They’re all dead.”
“Stop your yapping, Lieutenant. Order your men to get ready to open fire.”
Ten minutes later, Alexander had nothing left in his drum. The fire from his men subsided.
“How far is the German border?” Ouspensky asked.
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“About a hundred thousand German troops away, Lieutenant.”
Ouspensky sighed. “Now what?”
“Take out your knife. Soon it will be hand to hand in the woods.”
“You’re fucking nuts.” Ouspensky spoke quietly, so no one else could hear him.
“You have other suggestions?”
“If I had other suggestions, I wouldn’t be a lieutenant. I’d be a captain and you’d be taking orders from me.” Ouspensky paused. “Have you ever taken orders from anybody, sir?”
Alexander laughed lightly. “Lieutenant, in case you haven’t noticed, I do have superior officers of my own.”
“Well, where are they now? They need to order you to retreat.”
“We cannot retreat. You know that. There are two dozen NKGB troops behind us to make sure of that.
They’ll shoot us.”
Alexander was very quiet and very thoughtful.
The two men paused, sitting side by side on the mossy ground, their backs against a tree. Ouspensky said, “Did you say the NKGB will shoot us if we retreat?”
“Instantly.” Alexander wasn’t looking at Ouspensky.
“Did you sayshoot us ?”
Now Alexander looked at Ouspensky. “What are you suggesting, Lieutenant?” he said slowly.
“Nothing, sir. But you are implying, aren’t you, that they have something to shoot at us with?”
Alexander was silent for a few minutes and then said, “Bring me Corporal Yermenko.”
A few minutes later, Ouspensky returned with Yermenko, who was wiping blood off his arm.
“Corporal, how is your ammo holding up?”
“I’ve got three eight-round boxes, three grenades and a few mortar shells.”
“Very good. Let me tell you the situation. We’re low on ammo and there are at least a dozen Germans in the woods.”
“I think, sir, more than a dozen. And they are armed.”
“Corporal, how good a marksman are you? Will your two dozen rounds last you against a dozen men?”
“No, sir, they won’t. I don’t have a sniper rifle.”
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“Have you any ideas?”
“Are you asking me, sir?”
“I’m asking you, Corporal.”
Yermenko paused, moving his mouth in a thoughtful manner, while he adjusted his helmet. He was standing at attention and his arm continued to bleed. Alexander motioned for Ouspensky to get the first aid kit. Yermenko was still thinking. Alexander motioned for him to crouch and took a look at the corporal’s wound. It was a superficial grazing of the triceps, but it was bleeding steadily. Alexander applied pressure with a dressing, and while sitting next to Yermenko, said, “Tell me what you think, Corporal.”
Low
ering his voice, Yermenko said, “I think maybe we should ask the…back troops for some of their ammo, sir.” He motioned behind him into the woods.
“I think you’re right. But what if they refuse?”
“I think we should ask them in such a way as to make that impossible.”
Alexander patted Yermenko on the back.
Lowering his voice further, Yermenko said, “I know they have dozens of semi-automatic rifles, at least three or four sub-machine guns, and they have not expended their rounds. They have grenades, they have mortar shells, and they have water and food.”
Alexander and Ouspensky exchanged glances. “You’re right, of course,” Alexander said, wrapping the bandage over Yermenko’s arm and tying the ends in a knot. “But I don’t know if they’re going to part with their ammo. Are you up to this assignment?”
“Yes, sir. I will need one man to distract them.”
Alexander got up. “That will be me.”
“Sir!” Ouspensky exclaimed. “No. You will sendme .”
“You can come with us. But whatever you do, don’t tell them you have only one lung, Lieutenant.”
Alexander handed Yermenko the wooden club he had made. Small pieces of sharp shell fragments were wedged deep into the carved-out wooden head. At the other end, the handle was attached to a rope Alexander had made out of tree bark so it would be easy to swing. Yermenko took it, gave Ouspensky rounds for his Tokarev pistol, they loaded their weapons, Alexander loaded a fresh 35-round magazine into his Shpagin, and the three of them walked silently through the woods to the NKGB encampment.
Alexander could see a dozen men sitting in a social circle around a welcoming fire, chatting, laughing.
“Ouspensky,” he said, “stay here. I’m going to talk to them first. I’m going to ask for their help. You two wait for me here. When I turn around to walk back to you, if I sling my machine gun over my shoulder, it means we have peace. If I take a step with it in my arms, that means we don’t. Understood?”
“Perfectly,” said Yermenko, but Ouspensky, grim in the face, did not reply. Ouspensky took his job of protecting Alexander too seriously.