Tatiana and Alexander. Paullina Simons

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СКАЧАТЬ stop!” she exclaimed. “Whatever in the world for?”

      “Svetlana …”

      “Alexander, can’t you see?” she said, trembling and taking hold of his arm. “This is just a test for us.”

      He pulled his arm away. “It’s a test I’m meant to fail. I don’t know what you could possibly be thinking. I’m in school. I’m sixteen. You’re a married thirty-nine-year-old woman. How long did you imagine this would go on?”

      “When we first started,” she said hoarsely, “I imagined nothing.”

      “All right.”

      “But now …”

      His gaze dropped. “Oh, Sveta …”

      She got up off the bench. The throaty cry she emitted hurt Alexander’s lungs—as if he had breathed inside himself her miserable addiction to him. “Of course. I’m ridiculous.” She struggled with her breath. “You’re right. Of course.” She tried to smile. “Maybe one last time?” she whispered. “For old times’ sake? To say goodbye properly?”

      Alexander bowed his head by way of replying.

      She stumbled a step back from him, composed herself and said as steadily as she could, “Alexander, remember this as you go through your life—you have amazing gifts. Don’t squander them. Don’t give them out meaninglessly, don’t abuse them, don’t take them for granted. You are the weapon you carry with you till the day you die.”

      They did not see each other again. Alexander got himself a card at a different library. Vladimir and Svetlana stopped coming over. At first Harold was curious why they no longer visited and then he forgot about them. Alexander knew his father’s inner life was too unsettled to worry about why he no longer saw people he didn’t like very much to begin with.

      Fall turned into winter. 1935 turned into 1936. He and his father celebrated New Year’s by themselves. They went to a local beer bar, where his father bought him a glass of vodka and tried to talk to him. The conversation was brief and strained. Harold Barrington—in his own sober, defiant way—was oblivious to his son and his wife. The world his father lived in Alexander did not know, stopped understanding, didn’t want to understand even if he could have. He knew that his father would have liked Alexander to side with him, to understand him, to believe in him, the way he did when he was younger. But Alexander did not know how to do that anymore. The days of idealism had gone. Only life was left.

      Giving Up One Room, 1936

      Could it get less tolerable?

      Shortly.

      An undergrown man from Upravdom—the housing committee—arrived at their doorstep one dark January Saturday morning, accompanied by two people with suitcases, and waved about a piece of paper, informing the Barringtons that they were going to have to give up one of their rooms to another family. Harold didn’t have the strength to argue. Jane was too drunk to object. It was Alexander who raised his voice but only briefly. There was no point. There was no one to go to, to correct this.

      “You can’t tell me this is unjust,” the smirking Upravdom member said to Alexander. “You have two nice rooms for the three of you. There are two of them, and they have no rooms at all. She is pregnant. Where is your socialist spirit, comrade soon-to-be Comsomol?” The Comsomols were young members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

      Alexander and Harold moved the cot and his small dresser and his few personal belongings and his bookshelf. Alexander put his cot next to the window, and the dresser and bookshelf between himself and his parents as an angry barrier. When his father wanted to know if he was upset, Alexander barked, “It’s been my dream to share a room with you at sixteen. I know you don’t want any privacy either.” They talked in English, which was more natural and more colloquial, and provided an opportunity to say the word privacy, a word that did not exist in Russian.

      The next morning when Jane woke up she wanted to know what Alexander was doing in their room. It was a Sunday.

      “I’m here for good,” said Alexander, and went out. He took a train to Peterhof and walked the grounds by himself, sullen and confused. The feeling he had had all his young life—that he was brought on this earth for something special—had not left Alexander, not quite; what it did was dissipate inside him, became translucent in his blood vessels. It no longer pulsed through his body. He was no longer filled with a sense of purpose. He was filled with a sense of despair.

      I could have lived through it all if only I continued to have the feeling that at the end of childhood, at the end of adolescence, there was something else in this life that would be mine, that I could make with my bare hands, and once I had made it, I could say, I did this to my life. I made my life so.

      Hope.

      It was gone from Alexander on this sunny crisp Sunday, and the feeling of purpose had vanished, was vanquished in his veins.

      The End, 1936

      Harold stopped bringing vodka into the house.

      “Dad, you don’t think Mom will be able to get vodka any other way?”

      “With what? She has no money.”

      Alexander didn’t mention the thousands of American dollars his mother had been hoarding since the day they came to the Soviet Union.

      “Stop talking about me as if I’m not here!” Jane shouted.

      They looked at her with surprise. Afterward Jane started stealing money from Harold’s pockets and going to buy the vodka herself. Harold started keeping his money out of the house. Jane was then caught in someone else’s apartment, going through their things, already drunk on some French perfume she had found.

      Alexander began to be afraid that the next natural step for his mother would be to drink her way through the money she had brought with them from America. It wouldn’t end until all the money was gone. First the Soviet rubles she had saved from her job in Moscow, then the American dollars. It would take his mother a year to buy vodka with all her dollars on the black market, but buy it she would, gone the money would be, and then what?

      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, СКАЧАТЬ