Bare Feet and Backpacks
Alexander drove their Nomad through Texas, across Austin, down to San Antonio. The Alamo was a fascinating bit of history—they all died. He couldn’t get around that fact. Despite the heroism, the bravery, they all died! And Texas lost its battle for independence and continued to belong to Santa Ana. Death to all wasn’t enough for victory. What kind of a fucked-up life lesson was that for Anthony? Alexander decided not to tell his son about it. He’d learn in school soon enough.
Western Texas was just flat road amid the dusty plains as far as the eye could see. Alexander was driving and smoking; he had turned off the radio so he could hear Tatiana better—but she had stopped speaking. She was sitting on the passenger side with her eyes closed. She had been telling him and Anthony soothing stories of some of her pranks in Luga. There were few stories Alexander liked better than of her child self in that village by the river.
Is she asleep? He glances at her, squeezed in around herself in a floral pink wrap dress that comes down to a V in her chest. Her glistening, slightly tender, coral nectar mouth reminds him of things, stirs him up a little. He checks to see what Anthony is doing—the boy is lying down facing away, playing with his toy soldiers. Alexander reaches over and cups a palmful of her breast, and she instantly opens her eyes and checks for Anthony. “What?” she whispers, and no sooner does she whisper than Anthony turns around, and Alexander takes his hand away, an aching prickle of desire mixed with frustration all swollen behind his eyes and in his loins.
Their hostilities in Coconut Grove have been yielding some significant crops for him. Just a small measure of his subsequent closed-mouthedness has been making Tatiana trip over herself to show him that his bitter accusations against her were not true. It doesn’t matter. He knows of course they were true, but he doesn’t mind in the least her cartwheels of palpitating remorse.
At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can’t see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn’t you just stay put? Why couldn’t you feel I was coming for you?
You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn’t I dead?
He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arrived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen’s main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him.
As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw after being beaten and dreaming of her kissing him, and these dreams morph with the memories of last night, and suddenly she is kissing not the scars but the raw oozing wounds, and he is in agony for she is crying and the brine of her tears is eating away the meat of his flesh, and he is begging her to stop because he can’t take it anymore. Kiss something else, he pleads. Anything else. He’s had enough of himself. He is sick of himself. She is tainted not just with the Gulag. She is tainted with his whole life.
Does it hurt when I touch them?
He has to lie. Every kiss she plants on his wounds stirs a sense memory of how he got them. He wanted her to touch him, and this is what he gets. But if he tells her the truth, she will stop. So he lies. No, he says.
She kisses him past the small of his back, down to his legs, to his feet, murmuring to him something about his perfect this and that, he doesn’t even know, and then climbs up and prods him to turn over. She lies astride him, holding his head in her arms while he holds her buttocks in his (now they’re perfect), and kisses his face, not inch by inch but centimeter by centimeter. As she kisses him, she murmurs to him. He opens his eyes. Your eyes, do you want to know what color they are? They’re bronze; they’re copper; they’re ocher and amber; they’re cream and coffee; cognac and champagne. They are caramel.
Not crème brûlée? he asks. And she starts to cry. All right, all right, he says. Not crème brûlée.
She kisses his scarred tattooed arms, his ribboned chest. Now he can see her face, her lips, her hair, all glowing in the flickering fire. His hands lie lightly on her silken head.
Mercifully few wounds on your stomach, she whispers, as she kisses the black line of hair that starts at his solar plexus and arrows down.
Yes, he groans back. Do you know what we call men with wounds on their stomachs? Corpses.
She laughs. He doesn’t laugh, his very good Sergeant Telikov dying slowly with the bayonet in his abdomen. There wasn’t enough morphine to let him die free of pain. Ouspensky had to mercy-shoot him—on Alexander’s orders, and this one time Alexander did turn away. The flinching, the stiffness, the dead, the alive, all here, and there is no morphine, and there is no mercy. There is only Tatiana.
She murmurs, she purrs. A corpse, that’s not you.
He agrees. No, not me.
Her breasts press into his rigid with tension—
He is rupturing. What else do you like? Come on, I’m going to implode. What else? She sits between his legs and her small healing hands finally take him. She rubs him between her palms like she’s about to set him on fire. Her warm hands softly milk him, softly climb rope on him. He is stacked in her clasped fingers when she bends her head to him. Shura … look at you … you are so hard, so beautiful. He desperately wants to keep his eyes open. Her long hair feathers his stomach in rhythm to her motion. Her mouth is so soft, so hot, so wet, her fingers are in rotating rings around him, she is naked, she is tense, her eyes are closed and she moans as she sucks him. He is set on fire. He is in bondage through and through. And now, well past it but utterly within it, he keeps quiet during the day while his hands stretch out in a shudder for her yoke of contrition, for her blaze of repentance at night.
But night isn’t nearly enough. As he keeps telling her, nothing is enough. So now he is trying not to crash the camper.
She sits looking ahead at the sprawling fields, and then suddenly straight at him as if she is about to tell him something. Today her eyes are transparent with sunny yellow rays beaming out from the irises. When they’re not misted or jaded by the fathomless waters of rivers and lakes left behind, the eyes are entirely pellucid—and dangerous. They are clear in meaning, yet bottomless. And what’s worse—they allow all light to pass through. There is no hiding from them. Today, after deeming him acceptable, the eyes turn back to the road, her hands relaxing on her lap, her chest swelling against the pink cotton fabric. He wants to fondle her, to feel her breasts in his hands, feel their soft weightiness, to have his face in them—how long till night? She is so sensitive, he can’t breathe on her without her quivering; in her pink nipples seem to center many of the nerve endings in her body.