Tatiana sat near the shoreline, watching father and son frolic. Alexander was supposed to be teaching Anthony how to swim, but what he was doing was picking the boy up and flinging him into the shallow waters. The waves were perfect in Miami for a small boy, for the waves were small also. Son jumped to father, only to be thrown up in the air and then caught again, thrown up in the air very high and then caught again. Anthony squealed, shrieked, splashed, full of monumental joy. And there was Tatiana nearby, sitting on the sand, hugging her knees, one of her hands out in invocation, careful, careful, careful. But she wasn’t saying it to Alexander. She was saying it to Anthony. Don’t hurt your father, son. Be gentle with him. Please. Can’t you see what he looks like?
Her breath burned her chest as she furtively glanced at her husband. Now they were racing into the water. The first time Tatiana had seen Alexander run into the Kama River in Lazarevo, naked except for his shorts—like now—his body was holy. It was gleaming and woundless. And he’d been in battles already, in the Russo-Finnish War; he’d been on the northern rivers of the Soviet Union; he had defended the Road of Life on Lake Ladoga. Like her, he had lived through blighted Leningrad. Why then, since she had left him, had this happened to him?
Alexander’s bare body was shocking to see. His back, once smooth and tanned, was mutilated with shrapnel scars, with burn scars, with whip marks, with bayonet gouges all wet in the Miami sun. His nearfatal injury at the breaking of the Leningrad blockade was still a fist-sized patch above his right kidney. His chest and shoulders and ribs were defaced; his upper arms, his forearms, his legs were covered with knife and gunpowder burn wounds, jagged, ragged, raised.
Tatiana wanted to cry, to cry out. It wasn’t fair! It wasn’t right that he should carry Hitler and Stalin on his whole body, even here in Miami where the tropical waters touched the sky. The colonel had been right. It wasn’t fair.
And because all the other iniquities were not enough, the men that guarded Alexander tattooed him against his will, as punishment for escape, as a warning against possible transgressions, and as an ultimate slur against his future—as in, if you have a future at all, you will never have an unblemished one.
Tatiana watched him and her pitying heart rolled around the concrete drum of her insides.
On Alexander’s upper left arm was a black tattoo of a hammer and sickle! It was burned into him by the depraved guards at Catowice—so they would know him by his marks. Above the hammer and sickle, on his shoulder there was a mocking tattoo of a major’s epaulet, taunting that Alexander had spent too much time in solitary confinement. Under the hammer and sickle was a large star with twenty-five points on it—one point for each of the years of his Soviet prison sentence. On the inside of his right forearm, the numbers 19691 were burned in blue—the Soviets learned to use the Nazi torture implements with glee.
On his right upper arm a cross was tattooed—Alexander’s only voluntary mark. And above the cross, he was branded with an incongruous SS Waffen Eagle, complete with a swastika, as a symbol of grudging respect from the ill-fated guard Ivan Karolich for Alexander’s never having confessed to anything despite the severe beatings.
The concentration camp numbers were the hardest to hide, being so low on his arm, which was why he didn’t often roll up his sleeves. Jimmy in Deer Isle had asked about the numbers, but Jimmy hadn’t been to war, and so when Alexander said, “POW camp,” Jimmy didn’t follow up and Alexander didn’t elaborate. The blue numbers now, post Holocaust, screamed of Jewish suffering, not Soviet suffering, of someone else’s life, not Alexander’s. But the hammer and sickle, the SS insignia!—all alarms on his arm, ringing to be explained—were impossible to explain away in any context. Death camp numbers and a swastika? There was nothing to do about any of it, except cover it from everyone, even each other.
Tatiana turned to watch a family strolling by, two small girls with their mother and grandparents. The adults took one glimpse at Alexander and gasped; in their flustered collective horror, they shielded the eyes of the little girls; they muttered, they made the sign of the cross—on themselves, and hurried on. Tatiana judged them harshly. Alexander, lifting and throwing Anthony, never noticed.
Whereas once, certainly in Lazarevo with Tatiana, Alexander looked god-like, it was true now, the strangers were right—Alexander was disfigured. That’s all anyone saw, that’s all anyone could look at.
But he was so beautiful still! Hard still, lean, long-legged, wide-shouldered, strapping, impossibly tall. He’d gained some of his weight back, was muscular again after hauling all those lobster traps. On the rare occasions he laughed, the white of his teeth lit up his tanned face. His sheared head looked like a black hedgehog, his milk chocolate eyes softened every once in a while.
But there was no denying it, he was damaged—and nowhere more noticeably than in this, his American life. For in the Soviet Union, Alexander would have been among millions of men who were maimed like him, and he might have thought no more of it as they sent him out in his sheepskin parka to log in their woods, to mine in their quarries. Here in America, Tatiana sent him out in public, not in a parka but in linen, covering him from his neck to his ankles, to man their boats, to fix their engines.
During lovemaking Tatiana tried to forget. What needed to be whole and perfect on Alexander remained whole and perfect. But his back, his arms, his shoulders, his chest: there was nowhere for her to put her hands. She held onto his head, which was marginally better. There was a long ridge at the back of the occipital lobe, there were knife wounds. Alexander carried war on his body like no one Tatiana had ever known. She cried every time she touched him.
Tatiana couldn’t touch Alexander at night and prayed he didn’t know it.
“Come on, you two,” she called to them weakly, struggling to her feet. “Let’s head home. It’s getting late. Stop your horsing around. Anthony, please. What did I tell you? Be careful, I said!” Can’t you see what your father looks like?
Suddenly her two men, one little, one big, both with the straight posture, the unwavering gazes, came and stood in front of her, their legs in the sand, each in an A, their hands on their hips like kettles.
“Ready to go then?” she said, lowering her gaze.
“Mommy,” said her son firmly, “come and play.”
“Yes, Mommy,” said her husband firmly, “come and play.”
“No, it’s time to go home.” She blinked. A mirage in the setting sun made him disappear for a second.
“That’s it,” said Alexander, lifting her into his arms. “I’ve had just about enough of this.” He carried her and flung her into the water. Tatiana was without breath and when she came up for air, he threw himself on her, shaking her, disturbing her, implacably laying his hands on her. Perhaps he wasn’t a mirage after all, his body immersed in water that was so salty he floated and she floated, too, feeling real herself, remembering cartwheeling at the Palace of the Tsars for him, sitting on the tram with him, walking barefoot through the Field of Mars with him while Hitler’s tanks and Dimitri’s malice beat down the doors of their hearts.
Alexander picked her up and threw her in the air, only pretending to catch her. She fell and splashed and shrieked, and scrambling to her feet, ran from him as he chased her onto the sand. She tripped to let him catch her and he kissed her wet and she held on to his neck and Anthony jumped and scrambled onto his back, break it up, break it up, and Alexander dragged them all deeper in and tossed them into the ocean, where they bobbed and swayed like houseboats.
Alexander’s Favorite Color
“Tania, why haven’t you called Vikki?” Alexander asked her at breakfast.
“I’ll