"Never seen him," Harold said in a voice that implied that since he had never seen Nikita, Nikita must not exist. "What does he do when I want to have a bath?"

Jane said, "Oh, he leaves for a half-hour. I give him a shot of vodka. He goes for a walk."

"Mom," said Alexander, eating cheerfully, "his wife is coming to join him in March. He begged me to talk to everybody on the floor to ask if we could have our baths earlier in the evening, to let them have a bit of-"

"All right, you two, you're having me on," said Harold.

Alexander and his mother exchanged a look, and then Alexander said, "Dad, go check it out. And when you come back, you tell me where the van Dorens could have moved to in Moscow."

When Harold came back, he shrugged and said, "That man is a hobo. He is no good."

"That man," said Alexander, looking at his mother's vodka glass, "is the head engineer for the Baltic fleet."

A month later, in February 1935, Alexander came home from school and heard his mother and father fighting-again. He heard his name shouted out once, twice.

His mother was upset for Alexander. But he was fine. He spoke Russian fluently. He sang and drank beer and played hockey on the ice in Gorky Park with his friends. He was all right. Why was she upset? He wanted to go in and tell her he was fine, but he never liked to interrupt his parents' fights.

Suddenly he heard something being thrown, and then someone being hit. He ran into his parents' room and saw his mother on the floor, her cheek red, his father bending over her. Alexander ran to his father and shoved him in the back. "What are you doing, Dad?" he yelled. He kneeled down next to his mother.

She half sat up and glared at Harold. "Fine thing you're showing your son," she said. "You brought him to the Soviet Union for this, to show him how to treat a woman? His wife, perhaps?"

"Shut up," said Harold, clenching his fists.

"Dad!" Alexander jumped to his feet. "Stop!"

"Your father has abandoned us, Alexander."

"I'm not abandoning you!"

Squaring off, Alexander pushed his father in the chest.

Harold shoved Alexander and then hit him open-handed across the face. Jane gasped. Alexander swayed but did not fall. Harold went to strike him again, but this time Alexander moved away. Jane grabbed Harold's legs, yanked, and sent him down on his back. "Don't you dare touch him!" she yelled.

Harold was on the floor, Jane, too; only Alexander was standing. They couldn't look at one another; everyone was panting. Alexander wiped his bleeding lip.

"Harold," Jane said, still on her knees. "Look at us! We're being destroyed by this fucking country." She was crying. "Let's go home, let's start over."

"Are you crazy?" hissed Harold, looking from Alexander to Jane. "Do you even know what you're saying?"

"I do."

"Have you forgotten that we gave up our U.S. citizenship? Have you forgotten that at the moment you and I are citizens of no country; that we're waiting for our Soviet citizenship to come through? You think America is going to want us back? Why, they practically kicked us out. And how do you think the Soviet authorities are going to feel once they find out we're turning our backs on them, too?"

"I don't care what the Soviet authorities think."

"God, you are so naive!"

"Is that what I am? What does that make you? Did you know it was going to be like this and brought us here anyway? Brought your son here?"

He stared at her with disappointment. "We didn't come for the good life. The good life we could have had in America."

"You're right. And we had it. We'll make do with what we have here, but Harold, Alexander is not meant to be here. At least send him back home."

"What?" Harold could not find his voice to say it above a whisper.

"Yes." She was helped off the floor by Alexander as she stood in front of Harold. "He is fifteen. Send him back home!"

"Mom!" said Alexander.

"Don't let him die in this country-can't you see? Alexander sees it. I see it. Why can't you?"

"Alexander doesn't see it. Do you, son?"

Alexander was silent. He did not want to side against his father.

"You see?" Jane exclaimed triumphantly. "Please, Harold. Soon it will be too late."

"You're talking rubbish. Too late for what?"

"Too late for Alexander," Jane said brokenly, pale with despair. "For him, forget your pride for just one second. Before he has to register for the Red Army when he turns sixteen in May, before tragedy befalls us all, while he is still a U.S. citizen, send him back. He has not relinquished his rights to the United States of America. I will stay with you, I will live out my life with you-but-"

"No!" Harold exclaimed in an aghast voice. "Things didn't turn out the way I had hoped, look, I'm sor-"

"Don't be sorry for me, you bastard. Don't be sorry for me-I lay down in this bed with you. I knew what I was doing. Be sorry for your son. What do you think will happen to him?"

Jane turned away from Harold.

Alexander turned away from his parents. He went to the window and looked outside. It was February and night.

Behind him, he heard his mother and father.

"Janie, come on, it'll be all right. You'll see. Alexander will be better off here eventually. Communism is the future of the world, you know this as well as I do. The wider the chasm between the rich and the poor in the world, the more essential communism is going to become. America is a lost cause. Who else is going to care about the common man, who else will protect his rights but the communist? We're just living through the toughest part. But I have no doubt-communism is the future."

"God!" Jane exclaimed. "When will you ever stop?"

"Can't stop now," he said. "We're going to see this through to the end."

"That's right," Jane said. "Marx himself wrote that capitalism produces above all its own gravediggers. Do you think that perhaps he wasn't talking about capitalism?"

"Absolutely," agreed Harold, while Alexander looked the other way. "The communists hate to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing conditions. The fall of capitalism is inevitable. The fall of selfishness, greed, individuality, personal attainment."

"The fall of prosperity, comfort, humane living conditions, privacy, liberty," said Jane, spitting the words out, as Alexander doggedly stared out the window. "The second America, Harold. The second fucking America."

Without turning back, Alexander saw his father's angry face and his mother's despairing one, and he saw the gray room with the falling plaster, and the broken lock held together by tape, and he smelled the wash-room from ten meters away, and he was silent.

Before the Soviet Union, the only world that had made sense to him was America, where his father could get up on the pulpit and preach the overthrow of the U.S. government, and the police that protected that government would come and remove his father from the pulpit and put him into a Boston cell to sleep off his insurrectionist zeal, and then in the next day or two they would let him out so he could recommence with renewed fervor preaching to the curious the lamentable deficiencies of 1920s America. And according to Harold there were plenty, though he himself admitted to Alexander that he could not for the life of him understand the immigrants who poured into New York and Boston, who lived in deplorable conditions working for pennies and put generations of Americans to shame because they lived in deplorable conditions and worked for pennies with such joy-a joy that was diminished only by the inability to bring more of their family members to the United States to live in deplorable conditions and work for pennies.

Harold Barrington could preach revolution in America and that made perfect sense to Alexander, because he read John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and John Stuart Mill told him that liberty didn't mean doing what you damn well pleased, it meant saying what you damn well pleased. His father was upholding Mill in the greatest tradition of American democracy; what was so wrong with that?

What didn't make sense to him when he had arrived in Moscow was Moscow. As the years passed, Moscow made only less and less sense to him; the privation, the senselessness, the discomfort encroached upon his youthful spirit. He had stopped holding his father's hand on the way to Thursday meetings; what he keenly felt absent from his own hand, however, was an orange in the winter.

Hailing Russia as the "second America," Comrade Stalin proclaimed that in a few years the Soviet Union would have as many railroads, as many paved roads, as many single family houses, as the United States. He said that America had not industrialized as fast as the USSR was industrializing because capitalism made progress chaotic, whereas socialism spearheaded progress on all fronts. The U.S. was suffering thirty-five per cent unemployment, unlike the Soviet Union which had near full employment. The Soviets were all working-proof of their superiority-while the Americans were succumbing to the welfare state because there were no jobs. That was clear, nothing confusing about that. Then why was the sense of malaise so pervasive?

But Alexander's feelings of confusion and malaise were peripheral. What wasn't peripheral was youth. And he was young, even in Moscow.

He turned back to his mother, handing her a napkin to wipe her face while wiping his own with his sleeve. Before walking out and leaving them to their misery, Alexander said to his father, "Don't listen to her. I will not go to America alone. My future is here, for better or worse." He came a little closer. "But don't hit my mother again." Alexander was already several inches taller than Harold. "If you hit her again, you'll have to deal with me."

A week later Harold was removed from his job as a printer because as the new laws would have it, foreigners were no longer allowed to operate printing machinery, no matter how proficient they were and how loyal to the Soviet state. Apparently there was too much opportunity for sabotage, for printing false papers, false affidavits, false documents, false news information, and for disseminating lies to subvert the Soviet cause. Many foreigners had been caught doing just that and then distributing their malicious propaganda to hard-working Soviet citizens. So no more printing for Harold.

He was redeployed to a tool-making factory, melting metal into screw-drivers and ratchets.

That job lasted a few weeks. Apparently it also wasn't safe. Foreigners had been caught making knives and weapons for themselves instead of tools for the Soviet state.

He was then employed as a shoemaker, which amused Alexander ("Dad, what do you know about making shoes?").

That job lasted only a few days. "What? Shoe-making isn't safe either?" Alexander asked.

Apparently it wasn't. Foreigners had been known to make galoshes and mountain boots for good Soviet citizens to escape through marshes and through mountains.

A somber Harold came home one April evening in 1935 and instead of cooking (it was Harold who cooked dinner for his family now), sat down heavily at the table and said that a Party Obkom man had come to see him at the school where he was working as a floor sweeper and asked him to find a new place to live. "They want us to find our own rooms. Be a little more independent." He shrugged. "It's only right. We've had it relatively easy the last four years. We need to give something back to the state." He paused and lit a cigarette.

Alexander saw his father glance at him furtively. He coughed and said, "Well, Nikita has disappeared. Maybe we can take his bathtub."

There was no room for the Barringtons in all of Moscow. After a month of looking, Harold came home from work and said, "Listen, the Obkom man came to see me again. We can't stay here. We have to move."

"By when?" Jane exclaimed.

"Two days from now. They want us out."

"But we have nowhere to go!"

Harold sighed. "They offered me a transfer to Leningrad. There is more work-an industrial plant, a carpentry plant, an electricity plant."

"What, no electricity plants in Moscow, Dad?"

Harold ignored Alexander. "We'll go there. There'll be more rooms available. You'll see. Janie, you'll get a job at the Leningrad public library."

"Leningrad?" Alexander exclaimed. "Dad, I'm not leaving Moscow. I got friends here, school. Please."

"Alexander, you'll start a new school. Make new friends. We have no choice."

"Yes," Alexander said loudly. "But once we had a choice, didn't we?"

"Alexander! You will not raise your voice to me," Harold said. "Do you hear?"

"Loud and clear!" shouted Alexander. "I'm not going. Do you hear?"

Harold jumped up. Jane jumped up. Alexander jumped up.

Jane said, "No, stop it, stop it, you two!"

"You will not speak to me this way," Harold said. "We are moving, and I don't want to talk another minute about it."

He turned to his wife and said, "Oh, and one more thing." Sheepishly, he coughed. "They want us to change our name. To something more Russian."

Alexander scoffed. "Why now? Why after all these years?"

"Because!" Harold shouted, losing control. "They want us to show our allegiance! You're going to be sixteen next month. You're going to register for the Red Army. You need a Russian name. The fewer questions, the better. We need to be Russians now. It will be easier for us." He lowered his gaze.

"God, Dad," Alexander exclaimed. "Will this ever stop? We can't even keep our name anymore? It's not enough to kick us out of our home, to move us to another city? We need to lose our name, too? What else have we got?"

"We are doing the right thing. Our name is an American name. We should have changed it long ago."

"That's right," said Alexander. "The Frascas didn't. The van Dorens didn't. And look what happened to them. They're on vacation. Extended vacation, right, Dad?"

Harold raised his hand to Alexander, who pushed him away. "Don't touch me," he said coldly.

Harold tried again. Alexander pushed him away again, but this time he didn't let go of his father's hands. He did not want his mother to see him lose his temper, his poor mother, who stood shaking and crying, clasping her hands at her two men, pleading, "Darlings, Harold, Alexander, I beg you, stop it, stop it."

"Tell him to stop it!" Harold said. "You've raised him like this. No respect for anybody."

His mother came over to Alexander and grabbed hold of his arms. "Please, son," she said. "Calm down. It'll be all right."

"You think so, Mom? We're moving cities, we're changing our name just like this hotel. You call that all right?"

"Yes," she said. "We still have each other. We still have our lives."

"How the definition of being all right changes," said Alexander, extricating himself from his mother and taking his coat.

"Alexander, don't walk out that door," said Harold. "I forbid you to walk out that door."

Alexander turned to his father, looked him in the eye, and said, "Go ahead and stop me."

He left and did not come back home for two days. And then they packed up and left the Kirov Hotel.

His mother was drunk and unable to help carry the suitcases to the train.

When did Alexander first begin to feel, to know, to sense that something was desperately wrong with his mother? That was the point: something wasn't desperately wrong with her all at once. At first she had been slightly not herself, and it wasn't for Alexander to say what was the matter with his adult parent. His father could have seen, but his father had no eyes. Alexander knew his father was the kind of man who simply could not keep the personal and the global in his head at the same time. But whether Harold was aware and plainly ignored it, or whether he was actually oblivious, didn't matter, and it didn't change the simple fact that Jane Barrington gradually, without fanfare, without much to-do, much introduction and much warning permanently ceased to be the person she once was and became the person she wasn't.

CHAPTER EIGHT.