“He is right.” Alexander nodded. “But even in Moscow the toilets flushed sporadically at best; the smell accumulated in the bathrooms. My parents and I, we adjusted somehow. We cooked on firewood and thought we were the Ingalls family.”
“The who?”
“The Ingalls family lived in the American West in the late eighteen hundreds. Yet here we were, and this was socialist utopia. I said to my father once, with some irony, that he was right, this was much better than Massachusetts. He replied that you didn’t build ‘socialism in one country’ without a struggle. For a while I think he really believed it.”
“When did you come?”
“In 1930, right after the 1929 stock market crash.” Alexander looked at her blank expression and sighed. “Never mind. I was eleven. Never wanted to leave Barrington in the first place.”
“Oh, no,” Tatiana whispered.
“Cooking on a little Primus stove with kerosene got us down. Living in the dark. Living with unclean smells, it blackened our spirits in ways we never imagined. My mother took to drink. Well, why not? Everyone drank.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana. Her father drank.
“And after she drank, and the toilet was occupied by other foreigners living in our Moscow palace”—he paused—”not like the European—my mother would trot to the local park and relieve herself in the public toilets there—just a hole in the ground for my mother.” He shivered at those words, and Tatiana shivered, too, in the balmy Leningrad evening. Gently she touched Alexander’s shoulder again, and because he didn’t move away, and because they sat canopied under the covering trees, and because there was not another soul around, Tatiana pressed her slender fingers against the fabric of his uniform and did not take them away.
“On Saturdays,” Alexander continued, “my father and I—like you, your mother, and sister—would go to the public baths and wait two hours in line to get in. My mother went by herself on Fridays, wishing, I think, that she had given birth to a daughter, so she wouldn’t be all alone, so she wouldn’t suffer over me so much.”
“Did she suffer over you?”
“Tremendously. At first I was all right, but as the years went by, I started to blame them for my life. We were living in Moscow at the time. Seventy of us, idealists—and not just idealists, but idealists with children—lived as you do, sharing three toilets and three small kitchens on one long floor.”
“Hmm,” Tatiana said.
“How do you like it?”
She thought. “There are only twenty-five of us on our floor. But… what can I say? I like our dacha in Luga better.” She glanced at him. “The tomatoes are fresh, and the morning air smells so clean.”
“Yes!” Alexander exclaimed, as if she had said the magic word: clean.
“And,” she added, “I like not being on top of other people all the time. Having a little bit of…” She trailed off. She couldn’t think of the right word.
His legs outstretched, Alexander turned a little more to her, looking into her face.
“You know what I mean?” Tatiana said diffidently.
He nodded. “I do, Tania.”
“So should we rejoice that the Germans attacked us?”
“That’s just trading Satan for the devil.”
Shaking her head, Tatiana said, “Don’t let them catch you talking like that.” But she was youthfully curious. “Which is Satan?”
“Stalin. He is marginally more sane.”
“You and my grandfather,” Tatiana murmured.
“What, your grandfather agrees with me?” Alexander smiled.
“No.” She smiled back. “You agree with my grandfather.”
“Tania, don’t go kidding yourself for a minute. Hitler may be viewed by some people, especially down in the Ukraine, as their deliverer from Stalin, but you’ll see how quickly he will destroy those illusions. The way he destroyed them in Austria and Czechoslovakia and Poland. In any case, after the war is over, whatever the outcome for the world, I have a feeling that here in the Soviet Union we will all go back to the same place.” Alexander struggled with his words. “Have you been… protected by your family?” he asked with concern. “From the way it has been?”
Pressing her fingers into his shoulder, Tatiana said, “We really haven’t had much personal experience with it.” She didn’t like to talk about it. It frightened her a little. “I once heard that someone at Papa’s work was arrested. And a man and his daughter at the apartment vanished a few years ago, and the Sarkovs came to live in their place.” She contemplated her words. Her father maintained that the mordant and heavyset Sarkovs were NKVD informers. “I have been somewhat protected, yes.”
“Well, not me,” said Alexander, taking out a cigarette and his lighter. “Not at all. And so I cannot turn my mind away from my parents, who came here with such hope and were so crushed by the beliefs they supported almost from birth.” He lit up. “You don’t mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all,” Tatiana said, watching him. She liked his face. “What was it?” she asked. “American living must not be that great if an American like your father could forsake his country.”
Alexander didn’t speak while he smoked the whole cigarette. “Let me tell you exactly what it was: Communism in America in the twenties—the Red Decade—was quite fashionable among the rich.”
Alexander’s father, Harold Barrington, wanted him to become a member of the Communist youth group, the Young Pioneers of America, in their town when Alexander turned ten. The group had a tiny membership, Harold had said, and they needed strength. Alexander refused. He was already in the Cub Scouts, he told his father. Barrington was a small town in eastern Massachusetts, named after the Barringtons, who had lived there since Benjamin Franklin. Alexander’s progenitor had fought in the Revolutionary War. In the nineteenth century the Barringtons produced four mayors, and three of Alexander’s forebears served and died in the Civil War.
Alexander’s father wanted to make his own mark on the Barrington clan. He wanted to go his own way. Alexander’s mother, Gina, came from Italy at the turn of the century when she was eighteen to embrace the American way of life, and when she changed her name to Jane and married Harold Barrington at nineteen, she embraced it with her heart. She had left her family in Italy to go her own way, too.
At first Jane and Harold were radicals, then they were socialist democrats, and then they were Communists. They lived in a country that let them, and they embraced Communism with all their hearts. A modern, progressive woman, Jane Barrington did not want to have children, and Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, said she didn’t have to.
After eleven years of being a radical with Harold, Jane decided she wanted to have children. It took her five years of miscarriages to have one child—Alexander—who was born to her in 1919 when she was thirty-five and Harold thirty-seven.
Alexander lived and breathed the Communist doctrine from the time he was old enough to understand English. In the comfort of his American home, surrounded by a blazing fire and woolen blankets, Alexander spoke words like “proletariat, equality, manifesto, Leninism,” before he was old enough to know what they meant.
When he was eleven, his parents decided to live the words they had been speaking. Harold Barrington was constantly getting himself arrested for less-than-peaceful demonstrations on the streets of Boston, and finally he went to the American Civil Liberties Union and asked for their help in seeking voluntary asylum in the USSR. To do it he was willing and ready to renounce his American citizenship and move to the Soviet Union, where he could be one with the people. No social classes. No unemployment. No prejudice. No religion. The Barringtons did not admire the no-religion part, but they were progressive, intellectual people, who were willing and able to put God aside to help build the great Communist experiment.