Tanner’s Twelve Swingers

I have a touch of the chameleon about me. Had I stayed at the campfire, I would have joined in the fun. Now, in the moonlight with Karlis’s cognac in me, I shared his mood. I became quite maudlin and ultimately I dragged out the charcoal sketch of my son Todor and showed it to Karlis.

“My son,” I a

“He is.”

“And I have never seen him.”

“How can this be?”

“He is in Macedonia,” I said. “In Yugoslavia. And I have never returned since the night of his conception.”

Karlis stared at me and at the picture, then at me again. And then, quite suddenly, he began to cry. He cried with his whole body, of which there was a great deal. His massive chest heaved with great sobs, and I remained respectfully silent until he managed to regain control of himself.

And ultimately, his voice choked with emotion, he said, “Evan, you and I, we are more than fellow soldiers, we are more than comrades fighting together for a great cause. We are brothers.”

“We are, Karlis.”

“To have such a wonderful son and never to have seen him, that is a great tragedy.”

“It is.”

“I too have a tragedy in my life, Evan.” He drank, and I drank. “It is this tragedy that keeps me from dancing with the lovely Lettish girls at the campfire. May I tell you of my tragedy?”

“Are we not brothers?”

“We are.”

“Then, tell me.”

He was silent for a moment or two. Then, his voice pitched low, he said, “Evan, I am in love.”

Perhaps it was the cognac. Whatever the cause, I thought that those were the saddest and most poignant words I had ever heard. I began to weep, and now it was his turn to wait for me to get control of myself. After I had had another drink, he began to tell me about it.

“Her name is Sofija,” he said softly. “And she is the world’s most beautiful woman, Evan, with golden hair and the skin of a fresh peach and eyes as richly blue as the Baltic Sea. I met her at the Tokyo Olympics in nineteen sixty-four. You know that I represented the United States in the shot put.”

“And placed second.”

“Yes. I would have won but for that ox of a Georgian. Well, no matter. Sofija was there as a member of the Soviet Women’s Gymnastic Troupe. No doubt you are aware that the Baltic gymnasts were the finest in the world and that the Letts are superior to those in the other Baltic States.”

I had not been aware of this.

“Sofija’s team was victorious, of course. That such skill should be perverted to enhance the glory and prestige of the Soviet Union! Such grace, such liquid motion.” He closed his eyes and sighed at the memory. “We met, Sofija and I. We met and we fell in love.”

He stopped to light his fourth cigarette of the day. I had a feeling that this might be a night when he exceeded his tobacco ration. He smoked this cigarette all the way down, until he could not hold it without burning his fingers. Then he put it out and field-stripped it and then he had another long belt from the cognac bottle.

“You fell in love,” I prompted.

“We fell in love. Sofija and I, we fell in love. Evan, my brother, it was not the sort of love to spend itself in a night or a week or a month. We truly loved each other. We wanted to have each other forever. We wanted to have children together, to grow old together, to become grandparents together, to remain together for all our lives.” And his ears filled with his own words, and once again he began to weep.

“Did you ask her to defect?”

“Ask her? I begged her, I sank to my knees and pleaded with her. And it would have been so easy then, Evan. An easy ride to the American Embassy in Tokyo, a simple request for political asylum, and in no time at all the two of us would have been together in Providence. We would have been married, we would have had children, we would have grown old together, we would have had grandchildren together, we would have-”

“But she refused?”

“This,” he said, “is the tragedy.”

“Tell me.”

“She did refuse at first. She is only a girl, Evan. She was twenty years old when we met. By the time of her birth Latvia had already been a part of the Soviet Union for three years, and the Russians were our allies in the struggle against German fascism. What did she know of a free and independent Latvia? She was raised in a little town some miles from Riga. She went to Russian schools and learned what Russian teachers taught her. She spoke Russian as well as she spoke Lettish, can you imagine? What could she understand of defecting? She wanted to be a patriot and did not understand what true Lett patriotism means. How could she comprehend the Soviet rape of the Baltic States? How could she know of this?

“So she refused. But love, Evan, love works powerfully upon Letts. When we fall in love, it is not a matter to be shrugged off. The games ended. We separated. I returned to the States, Sofija returned to Riga. And then, when it was too late, when it was no longer a simple matter of a taxi ride to the United States Embassy, then my Sofija attempted to defect. Her troupe was in Budapest for a gymnastic exhibition, and she tried to escape.”

“In Budapest?”

He shrugged. “Of course it was absurd. She was captured immediately and returned to Russia. She was immediately expelled from the all-Soviet team to the team of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, the L.S.S.R. Now, instead of touring the world, she plays matches with the teams of the other Soviet states. She does not leave Russia. She can never leave Russia. It is prohibited. She remains in Riga, and I remain in the States, and we go on loving each other and yet we can never be together.” He took a long pull of cognac. “And that is my tragedy, Evan,” he said. “That is my unhappy little love story, that is my tragedy.”

We drank, we cried, we drank, we sobbed, we drank. We discussed the utter impossibility of his situation, the unlikelihood of his ever finding another woman to replace Sofija, the slim chance that his love for her would ever fade away.

And at last he had an idea. “Evan, my brother,” he said, “you are able to travel, are you not? You are skilled at that sort of thing?”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, that you can slip in and out of this Iron Curtain. You have been to Macedonia, have you not?”

“To all of Yugoslavia,” I said proudly. “And to Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. Never to Rumania or Albania or Poland. Or East Germany or Russia, of course.”

“And never to Latvia?”

“No.”

“But could you get to Latvia? They say that it is very difficult.”

Blame it, if you will, on the cognac. For what I said was, “For the determined man, my brother Karlis, there is no such thing as a frontier. I have had some experience at this sort of thing. What, after all, is a border? An imaginary line that fools have drawn across the face of a map. A strand of barbed wire. A customs checkpoint. An experienced man, a capable man, can slip through any border like water through a sieve.”

“Then, you could enter the Soviet Union.”

“Of course.”

“You could get into Latvia.”

“I don’t see why not.”

He grew very excited. “You could take me with you,” he said hurriedly. “You could show me the way, you could help me, and you could sneak me into Latvia and to Riga and reunite me with Sofija, and we would never have to be separated again.”

“I… wait a minute.”

He looked at me.

“You would return to Latvia?”

“I ca

“But your work with the Army-”

“I could be of even more assistance to the Army if I lived there. I could send bulletins back. I could do organizational work-”

“That’s not what I meant, Karlis. Don’t you understand? They know you there, they know of your work with the exile movement. You’d be arrested at once.”