skates and slips of his fingers became too much for her; clutching him, she whispered inaudibly, wait, wait, but Alexander bent and sucked her nipple into his mouth, slightly increasing his pressure and friction on her, and she had no more inaudible wait, wait, but a very audible yes, yes.
When she could speak again, Tatiana said, “Come on, who are you talking to?” She pulled on his crew. “Look at me, Shura.”
“It’s dark, fire’s out, can’t see a thing.”
“Well, I can see you. You’re so bright, you’re burning my eyes. Now look at me. I’m your Tania. Ask me, ask me anything. I don’t lie to you.” She stopped speaking. I don’t lie to my husband. I do keep some things from my husband. Like: there are men coming up the hill again, coming after you, and I have to do everything in my power to protect you, and so I can’t comfort you as well as I would like to because at the moment I’m attacked in more ways than you know. “In Lazarevo,” she said, reaching for that comfort, for that truth he wanted, feeling for his face above her, “you broke my ring and I gave you my hand, and with it my word. It’s the only word that I keep.”
“Yes,” he whispered, his smoky breath beating to the tense drum of his heart. “I did break your ring once upon a time.” His fingers lightly remained on her. “But in New York you thought I was dead.”
“Yes, and I was mourning you. Perhaps in twenty years’ time I may have married the local liege, but I hadn’t. I wasn’t ready and I wasn’t happy and I wasn’t gay. Your son was in the bedroom. Though I may have danced a few times, you know better than anyone I did not forget my sweet love of youth,” she whispered, adding nearly inaudibly, “I left our little boy because I did not forget and could not forget.”
His apologetic palm was warm and comforting on her. Oh, so he was willing to comfort her.
“No apologies necessary,” she said. “You’re anxious, aren’t you? But I told you the truth back in Germany. I don’t lie to you. I won’t lie to you. I wasn’t touched, Shura. Not even in New York as your merry widow.” She moaned for him.
He was staring at her through the black night, tense, tight. Haltingly he whispered, “Kissed, Tatiana?”
“Never, darling Shura,” she replied, lying on her back, her arms around him. “Never by anyone but you. Why do you flagellate yourself over nothing?”
They kissed raptly, tenderly, openly, softly. “Well, look at the idiotic questions you keep asking me,” he said, throwing off his crew and his long johns like a large bristly hedgehog in a small sack. “Worrying about women in Byelorussia, in Bangor. It’s not nothing, is it? It’s everything.” He climbed on top of her in the unzipped sleeping bag. Her hands went above her head. His hands went over her wrists. His lips were on her.
“And finally,” Alexander said, after he was sated, and her palms were on his back, “there is a little blessed relief.”
The cigarette long stubbed out, she lay in his arms and he continued to caress her. Were they close to sleep? She thought he might be, his hands on her back were getting slower. But here at Yavapai, over the silent shrines of God’s fluvial Canyon carved centimeter by centimeter by a persistent and unyielding and course-changing Red River, was as good a time as any for Tatiana’s own slight erosion of the carapace that covered Alexander.
“Shura, why am I tainted with the Gulag?” she whispered. “Please tell me.”
“Oh, Tania. It’s not you. Don’t you understand? I’m soiled by the unsacred things I’ve seen, by the things I’ve lived through.”
She stroked his body, kissed his chest wounds. “You’re not soiled, darling,” she said. “You’re human and suffering and struggling … but your soul is untouched.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
“How do you know?”
“Because,” she whispered, “I see it. From the first moment I touched you on our bus, I saw your soul.” She pressed her lips to his shoulder. “Now tell me.”
“You won’t want to hear it.”
“I will. I do.”
Alexander told her about the gangrapes and the deaths on the trains. Tatiana almost said then that he had been right—she did not want to hear it. The savagery didn’t happen that often, he said; it didn’t need to in the camps. On the transport trains, these assaults and consequent deaths had been a daily occurrence. But at Catowice, Colditz, Sachsenhausen, most of the women either sold it, or bartered it, or gave it away free to strangers—quickly, before the guards came and beat them and then took some for themselves.
He told her about the women at Sachsenhausen. When Tatiana said she didn’t remember any women at Sachsenhausen, Alexander replied that by the time she came they had all gone. But before she came, the guards who hated Alexander put him in charge of building a brick wall to replace the barbed-wire fence that separated the women’s two barracks from the men’s sixteen. The guards knew it would put Alexander’s life in danger to build a wall to replace the existing barbed wire—which was so facilitating in the barter of sexual favors. The women backed up to the barbed wife on their hands and knees as if they were washing the floor, while the men kneeled on the ground, careful not to pierce themselves on the rusty protrusions.
Tatiana shivered.
So he built the wall. At five feet tall, it was not tall enough. At night the men skipped over the wall, and the women skipped over the wall. A watch tower was put up and a guard remained there round the clock to prevent connubial activity. The skipping over the wall continued. Alexander was told to make the wall seven feet. One afternoon during construction he was cornered in the barracks by eight angry lifers. They came to him with logging saws and axes. Alexander wasted no time talking. He swung the chain he was holding. It hit one of the men across the head, breaking open his skull. The other men fled.
Alexander finished the wall.
At seven feet, the wall was still not tall enough. One man would stand on another man’s shoulders and hop up onto it, then pull the standing man up. The prison guards electrified the top of the wall and put up another watch tower.
The men sustained some electrical shock damage to their bodies—but continued to climb over to get to the women on the other side.
Tatiana asked why the guards didn’t increase the electrical charge at the top of the barrier to instantly kill the man who touched it. Alexander replied they had to preserve their work force. They would have no one left to fill the logging quotas if they made the charge lethal. Also it took too much electricity. The guards had to light their own barracks. “At the commandant’s house, Karolich had to eat and sleep in comfort, didn’t he, Tatia?”
“He did, Shura. Not much comfort for him now.”
“The motherfucking bastard.”
Tatiana’s hand was on his heart. Her face was pressed into the muscles in his chest, into his Berlin shrapnel scar that was always under her mouth when she lay in his arms.
Alexander was told to build the wall to twelve feet.
