The Summer Garden

Rolling up his white linen sleeve, Alexander showed him.

“No wrong impression. I’d know these anywhere. Since when are American soldiers branded with German numbers?”

The cigarette wasn’t long enough, the smoke wasn’t long enough. “I don’t know what to tell you,” Alexander said. “I was in a concentration camp in Germany.”

“That’s obvious. Which camp?”

“Sachsenhausen.”

“Oh. It was an SS-training camp.”

“That camp was many things,” said Alexander.

“How did you get there?”

“Long story.”

“We have time. Miami has a large ex-pat Jewish community. You want to come with me tonight to our meeting? We meet on Thursdays. Just a few of us, like me, like you, we get together, talk, drink a little bit. You look like you sorely need to be around other people like yourself.”

“Frederik, I’m not Jewish.”

“I don’t understand,” Frederik said haltingly. “Why would the Germans brand you?”

“The Germans didn’t.”

“Who did then?”

“The Soviets. They ran that camp after the war.”

“Oh, the pigs. I don’t understand anything. Well, come with me anyway. We have three Polish Jews—you didn’t think there were any left, did you?—who were imprisoned by the Soviets after Ukraine went from Soviet to German back to Soviet hands. They’re debating every Thursday which occupation was worse.”

“Well,” said Alexander, “Hitler is dead. Mussolini is dead. Hirohito deposed. Fascism has suddenly gotten a bad name after being all the rage for twenty years. But who’s stronger than ever? The answer should give you a clue.”

“So come, give your two cents. Why would the Sovietskis do that to you if you weren’t Jewish? They didn’t brand American POWs; they were fighting on the same side.”

“If the Soviets knew I was American, they would’ve shot me years ago.”

Frederick looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t understand …”

“Can’t explain.”

“What division did you say you served in?”

Alexander sighed. “I was in Rokossovsky’s Army. His 97th penal battalion.”

“What—that’s not the U.S. Army …”

“I was a captain in the Red Army.”

“Oh, my God.” On Frederik’s face played sharp disbelief. “You’re a Soviet officer?”

“Yes.”

Frederik careened off the plank with his cane so fast, he nearly tipped himself over. “I got the wrong impression about you.” He was wheeling away. “Forget we ever spoke.”

Alexander was visibly upset when he came home. “Anthony!” he said as soon as he walked through the door. “Get over here. I told you this before, I’m going to tell you again, but for absolutely the last time—stop telling strangers about me.”

The boy was perplexed.

“You don’t have to figure it out, you just have to listen. I told you to keep quiet, and you still continue as if I hadn’t made myself clear.”

Tatiana tried to intervene, but Alexander cut her off. “Ant, as punishment tomorrow you’re not going on the boat with me. I’ll take you the next day, but if you ever speak about me to strangers again, you’ll be off the boat for good. You got it?”

The boy cried.

“I didn’t hear you, Anthony.”

“I got it, Dad.”

Straightening up, Alexander saw Tatiana watching them silently from the stove. “Wouldn’t it be nice if you could put a long-sleeve linen shirt on Anthony’s mouth like you do on my body,” he said, and ate dinner by himself out on the deck.

After Tatiana put Anthony to bed, she went outside.

The first thing Alexander said was, “We haven’t had meat in weeks. I’m as sick of shrimp and flounder as you were of lobsters. Why can’t you buy some meat?”

After hemming and hawing, Tatiana said, “I can’t go to the Center Meat Market. They’ve put a sign in the window—a little war souvenir.”

“So?”

“Sign says, ‘Horse meats not rationed—no points necessary.’”

They both fell mute.

Tatiana is walking down Ulitsa Lomonosova in Leningrad in October 1941, trying to find a store with bread to redeem her ration coupons. She passes a crowd of people. She is small, she can’t see what they’re circling. Suddenly the crowd opens up and out comes a young man holding a bloodied knife in one hand and a hunk of raw meat in the other, and Tatiana can see the opened flesh of a newly killed mare behind him. Dropping his knife on the ground, the man rips into the meat. One of his teeth falls out and he spits it out as he continues to chew frantically. Meat!

“You better hurry,” he says to her with his mouth full, “or there won’t be any left. Want to borrow my knife?”

And Alexander was remembering being in a transit camp after Colditz. There was no food for the two hundred men, who were contained within a barbed wire rectangular perimeter with guards on high posts in the four corners. No food except the horse that every day at noon the guards killed and left in the middle of the starving mess of men with knives. They would give the men sixty seconds with the horse, and then they would open fire. Alexander only survived because he would head immediately for the horse’s mouth and cut out the tongue, hide it in his tunic and then crawl away. It would take him forty seconds. He did it six times, shared the tongue with Ouspensky. Pasha was gone.

Tatiana stood in front of Alexander, leaning against the rail of the deck and listening to the water. He smoked. She drank her tea.

“So what’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Why did you eat by yourself?”

“I didn’t want to be eating dinner with you looking at me with your judging eyes. Don’t want to be judged, Tania”—he pointed at her—“most of all by you. And today, thanks to Ant, I had an unpleasant and unwanted conversation with a crippled Jewish man from Holland who mistook me for a brother in arms only to learn I fought for a country that handed over half of the Polish Jews and all of the Ukrainian Jews to Hitler.”

“I’m not judging you, darling.”

“I’m good for nothing,” Alexander said. “Not even polite conversation. You may be right about me not being able to rebuild my life working off Mel’s boats, but I’m not good for anything else. I don’t know how to be anything. In my life I’ve had only one job—I was an officer in the Red Army. I know how to carry weapons, set mines in the ground, drive tanks, kill men. I know how to fight. Oh, and I know how to burn down villages wholesale. That’s what I know. And I did this all for the Soviet Union!” he exclaimed, staring into the water, not looking at Tatiana, who stood on the deck, staring at him. “It’s completely fucked up,” he went on. “I’m yelling at Anthony because we have to pretend I’m not what I am. I have to lie to deny what I am. Just like in the Soviet Union. Ironic, no? There I denied my American self, and here I deny my Soviet self.” He flicked his ash into the water.