“I must be home before it’s dark,” she says. “They are waiting and…” She stops and shudders. “Where am I?” She sits upright and looks around, frightened.
It is nearly dark in the room, but ambient light from the marina seeps through the curtains and tints the darkness green.
“We’re on Drake Island. At the inn. Remember?” he asks, though he knows she will not.
“We’re on an island?”
“Where Andrei has his dacha. We were there this evening.”
“I must go home.” Her voice is as plaintive as a child’s.
“We’ll go home Monday morning. After the wedding. Go back to sleep now.”
But she has swung her legs over the side of the bed and is on her feet, at the window, pulling open the curtain, peering out into the dark. And then she explains again about the chocolate-there isn’t enough for him, she is sorry, but she has to take it home.
“I don’t want any chocolate.”
“Can I go home now?”
“Not tonight.”
“They are waiting for me.”
“They will be okay.”
“Where am I?”
He is so tired. His eyes are leaden, and his mind is swimming in deep, heavy water. He answers her questions, but each one costs him an effort. Sometimes it is more than he can bear, this repetition, over and over, of the same questions, the same answers, as though their lives were a battered phonograph record with a hundred skips and they will never get to the end of it.
“Come back to bed,” he pleads.
“Where am I?”
When he pulls himself up onto his elbows, he feels the exhaustion in his bones.
“ Marina, you have to sleep now.” He feels his eyes stinging with frustration. “I need for you to help me. Do you understand?” In the half-light, their eyes meet. What he finds there is her, but also not her. Her eyes are like the bright surface of shallow water, reflecting back his own gaze. Something flutters and darts under the surface, but it might be his own desire, his own memory. He is, he realizes, probably alone.
“Please, Marina. I miss you.”
Obediently, she crawls back into their bed and pulls the covers up over her chest. She asks him again, but hesitantly this time, if they can go home, she wants to go home.
“Monday morning, we’ll go home. Go to sleep now.” His voice is husky. He is holding her and smoothing her hair, her neck. His fingertips know the shape of her back, each little knob of her spine, the soft folds of her waist. If she were lost, he could find her in the dark by touch alone.
She relaxes a little into the crook of his arm. The smell of her, warm and yeasty and faintly scented with lavender, is familiar and potent. She has been in his life for so long that he can hardly recall a time before her. Over the years, they have grown together, their flesh and their thoughts twining so closely that he cannot imagine the person he might be apart from her.
Even during the war, when they were physically separated, she was there with him in the form of a small studio photograph taken to mark her graduation. When his unit was encircled at Chudovo and he was captured by the Germans, he held on to the photograph and began whispering to it like an icon. For three years, he worked in the German prison camps, first in the Ukraine and later in Bavaria, where starving prisoners logged the forest and cut railroad ties. He kept the photograph in his breast pocket and, while working, he would dredge up and replay every conversation with her that he could remember. Later, he invented new ones, talking with her under his breath. The Germans thought he had gone crazy. She listened as he confessed his cowardice, his fear of the sadistic guards, and his humiliating physical needs. At night, her delicate hands came to him in sleep, stroking his face, his chest, his penis.
He survived the war, but when the American soldiers came to liberate the camp, he was already a dead man. Being captured by the Germans was treason: Stalin had said as much. Dmitri knew what that meant-he had lost his father in prison-he could never go home again. Dazed and without hope, he slipped out of the camp and joined the millions of refugees wandering the roads through the rubble of Germany. He stayed safely inside the American occupation zone and for nearly three months managed to avoid the dragnets rounding up Soviets for forced repatriation. But he had no papers, no money, and eventually he was caught filching eggs from a henhouse, beaten severely by the enraged farmer, and rescued just this side of death by American soldiers. A week later, he was behind barbed wire again, this time in a refugee camp. He had heard rumors of others who had committed suicide rather than return to the Soviet Union, and he noted that the soldiers took his belt.
On his third day in the camp, walking down the main corridor between the barracks, he saw a woman up ahead who looked like Marina. He was not surprised; he had lost his glasses when he was captured, and from a distance, many women appeared to be Marina. But as he drew closer, she did not resolve into a stranger, and when she turned and saw him staring at her, she cried out his name.
Fifty-eight years later, this single moment still astonishes him. It is the one event in his long life that is both wildly illogical and absolutely necessary. Everything else he can consign to the random happenstance of a godless world, but not this moment.
He remembers they stood stock-still before each other, stunned into speechlessness. Tentatively, he reached out and ran his fingers over her face like a blind man, rubbing a tear from her cheek, astonished at its materiality. And then he looked down and saw that she was not alone. There was a child, a solemn toddler that watched him unblinkingly from behind her legs.
“This is our son,” she said, drawing the boy forward. “I named him Andrei,” and nothing more.
What were the odds that a single act of lovemaking might result in a child? Another man might have doubted her, might have questioned whether she had met someone after he left for the front. Or worse. He had witnessed the depravities, the vodka-fueled rapes of old women and children, and the desperate licentiousness of starving women. Later, she told him how she and her infant had evacuated from Leningrad and survived the journey to a small resort town in the Caucasus only to arrive a few short weeks before the Wehrmacht overran and occupied it. She had scratched out an existence doing laundry for the officers there, and a year later, with the Red Army threatening to retake the town, had retreated with those officers all the way back to Munich, where she spent the remainder of the war in a munitions factory. Another man might have wondered if this child was German.
But he had just been handed back his life. It was a miracle-it embarrasses him to think in such terms, but there is no other word for it-and he would not spit on it. Instead, he threw himself into saving what had been given him, forging new identities as Polish Ukrainians for himself and Marina and the boy so that they could emigrate to America. They made a new life, learned a new language, found work, made a home. They even had a second child, a leap of faith in their future. And both of them did their best not to look back, lest they turn into pillars of salt. If they spoke at all of the war, they were as careful as the official censors back in the Soviet Union to mention only the victories and the acts of heroism.
It didn’t matter. The bond that had first brought them together as children existed whether they spoke of it or not, the bond of survivors. Here in America, a relentlessly foolish and optimistic country, what they knew drew them closer together. She was his country and he hers. They were inseparable.
Until now. She is leaving him, not all at once, which would be painful enough, but in a wrenching succession of separations. One moment she is here, and then she is gone again, and each journey takes her a little farther from his reach. He cannot follow her, and he wonders where she goes when she leaves.