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would not reply, Alexander would shrug because he did not know, but in the dark after Harold was asleep, Jane would creep into his room and whisper to him to go the next day and buy himself oranges so the scurvy wouldn’t get him, and ham so dystrophy wouldn’t get him, or some rare and dubiously fresh milk. “Hear me, Alexander? I’m putting American dollars in your school bag, in the inner pocket, all right?”
    “All right, Mom. Where is this American money coming from?”
    “Never mind that, son. I brought a little extra, just in case.” She would creep to him and in the dark her mouth would find his forehead. “Things are not expected to be good overnight. Do you know what’s going on in our America? The Depression. Poverty, unemployment, things are difficult all over; these are difficult times. But we are living according to our principles. We are building a new state not on exploitation but on camaraderie and mutual benefit.”
    “With a few extra American dollars?” Alexander would whisper.
    “With a few extra American dollars,” Jane would agree, gathering his head into her arms. “Don’t tell your father, though. Your father would get very upset. He’d feel as if I’d betrayed him. So don’t tell him.”
    “I won’t.”
    The following winter, Alexander was twelve and there was still no fresh fruit in Moscow. It was still bitterly cold, and the only difference between the winter of 1931 and the winter of 1930 was that the speculators near the railroads had vanished. They had all been given ten years in Siberia for counter-revolutionary anti-proletarian activity.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Living on Ellis Island, 1943
    TATIANA TRIED TO READ to improve her English while she got better. In the small but well-stocked Ellis library, she found many books in English donated by nurses, by doctors, by other benefactors. The library even had some books in Russian: Mayakovsky, Gorky, Tolstoy. Tatiana read in her room, but reading in English could not keep her attention and when her attention wandered, images of rivers and ice and blood mixed with images of bombing, planes, mortars, and ice holes, and knitting, and sewing, and motionless mothers on sofas with their body bags in their hands and famished frozen sisters on piles of dead bodies and brothers who vanished on exploding trains and fathers who burned down to ashes and grandfathers with infected lungs and grandmothers dying of grief. White camouflage, pools of blood, wet matted black hair, an officer’s cap strewn to the side, lying on the ice, images all so visceral she would have to stagger down the hall and throw up in the shared bathroom and afterwards force herself into learning better and better English that sufficiently commanded her attention so that her mind did not wander and go where the heart could not help but wander, meander into the emptiness in the middle of her chest, a black void that felt so much like fear that when she closed her eyes, her whole body choked on it.
    She would lift a sleeping Anthony out of his bassinet and lay him on her chest for comfort, for closeness. But no matter how good Anthony smelled, and how silky his black hair felt against her lips, she could not keep her mind from wandering. If anything…
    But she liked to smell him. She liked to undress him if it was sufficiently warm, and feel his chubby pink soft body. She liked to smell his hair and his neck and his milky baby breath. She liked to turn him over and touch his back and his legs and his long feet, and smell the back of his neck. Contentedly he slept and did not wake up, not even with all the prodding and caressing.
    “Does this child ever wake up?” asked Dr. Edward Ludlow on one of his rounds.
    In slow English Tatiana replied, “Think him as lion. He sleeps twenty hours in day and wakes up in night to hunt.”
    Edward smiled. “You must be getting better. You’re making a joke.”
    She smiled wanly. Dr. Ludlow was a thin, graceful man of fluid motion. He did