The Summer Garden

  “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 al
l 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?”