The Summer Garden
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Author | Paullina Simons |
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Country | America |
Language | English |
Series | Tatiana and Alexander |
Genre(s) | History-fiction novel |
Publisher | HarperCollins |
Released | 2005 |
Media Type | Print Paperback |
Pages | 839 pg |
ISBN | ISBN 0007193688 |
Preceded by | Bridge To Holy Cross |
Followed by | None |
The Summer Garden is the third and final book in the Tatiana and Alexander trilogy by Paullina Simons.
Tagline - The Summer Garden, for what once was...
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- Their odyssey is just beginning...
[edit] Plot Summary
Four years have gone by since World War II has ended; and Tatiana and her lover, her husband, her Shura, her Alexander - are married and living a life together with their son, Anthony. Yet they are strangers to each other. Having been separated from each other for years, they do not know each other anymore.
They live a satisfactory life, with Alexander working as a lobster-man - coming home each day smelling of fish. Tatiana is now known to outsiders as 'Tania'. They move from place to place.
After Alexander confesses to why he was so cold to her, they reconcile and move houses. Finally living in a place that they've dreamed of, Tatiana's friend Vikki phones her to say that the USA government is looking for Alexander. Fearing for her husband's safety, she does not tell him. Finding out himself somehow, he goes to Washington to make everything right - also finding out that his supposedly executed mother "is still alive" in a concentration camp. Realising though, that he has been tricked by an enemy, he does not go to search for her. He meets Tom Richter - a lieutenat colonel - and earns himself a job in Yuma as a captain of the Military Intelligence arm of the the U.S. Army.
Time passes by, and the family moves to Phoenix. Alexander gets a job as a builder/architect in Balkman's company and Tatiana (after persuading Alexander) gets a job as a nurse in the ER terminal care ward in the Phoenix Memorial Hospital.
Making friends with Balkman's son, Steve, Alexander has finally found the piece that he has always wanted. Here Phoenix, they can forget who they once were, and nobody would know about them.
Steve, when they first meet, talks about a girl that he has met at the hospital when he broke his hand; saying that he's "never met anyone like her". Tatiana when she comes home, is tight-lipped when she hear's about Steve. She is initially cold to Steve and never warms up to him. Alexander later figures that his wife was the "not like anyone else" girl that Steve was talking about.
After a time, Steve introduces a man named Dudley to Alexander. But Dudley sees the tattoos - the SchutzStaffel Eagle, the blue numbers, the hammmer and sickel, the swastika. To make matters worse, he storms into Alexander's house: threatening to rape Tatiana and then kill both of them. With no choice, Alexander shoots Dudley in the head.
After revealing what had happened to the police, the doctor, the coroner and the media; Alexander starts his own company and Balkman and Steve were ruined (Dudley had turned out to be an escaped murderer - it was illegal to hire escaped convicts).
After years of trying for a second baby (with Anthony once accidentally seeing them trying without knowing about sex - he thinks his mother is getting hurt in the process: "Dad, I don't think Mom wants to have anymore children. Didn't you hear her?"), things have cooled off. Caught cheating on his wife, it is then revealed that Tatiana is pregnant. Tearfully forgiving him, they have a son - Charles Gordon Pasha Barrington.
Almost eight years have past and Anthony has made his job choice: he is going to Vietnam to fight. With his parents initially protesting, he goes.
Sunday evening, July 20th, 1969 - while the family (Tatiana, Alexander, their children - Pasha, Harry and Janie) are watching the man on the moon, a call comes from Richter. Anthony has been reported missing for three days.
Weeks go by, and Vikki visits. Tatiana and Alexander find out that Vikki and Anthony have had a romantic relationship since he was eighteen. She shows them a letter Anthony sent her - he is married to a Vietnamese girl called Moon Lai and she is pregnant.
Alexander travels all the way to Vietnam to find his son. Using their heads, Anthony's comrades, his father and Richter realise that Moon Lai is a North Vietnam communist who is just a bait for Anthony. Alexander and a group of six (twelve?) people go to rescue him. They first capture Moon Lai who tells them everything. Despite being a trap, she actually loves Anthony. She then tries and sort of fails to stab Alexander and Ha Si (a member of the group), aiming for Alexander's thigh and Ha Si's face. In self defense, they slit her throat.
Alexander rescues Anthony (who's right arm is now chopped off) losing Richter, Ha Si and others on the way.
Time flies by, and the children have grown into adults - married and with their own children.
The Summer Garden, where we are forever young.
[edit] Extract
Tatiana didn’t know how long she had been out. When she awoke, the first sound out of her was a prolonged wail. The agony in her arm was not going away. She couldn’t hear the bear’s breathing for her intense, unending crying. Her arm must have been snapped in two by the closing bear trap. Fortunately for her, the trap was big enough for a paw, big enough to incapacitate and hold a large animal two to three metres long with paws alone probably forty centimetres. It was not meant to incapacitate a human female small elbow. Disorientated, swooning, dizzy, moaning from pain, Tatiana pulled her limp swollen forearm out of the trap, and fainted.
When she came to, it was black inside the hole and out. She wasn’t even sure she awoke. She was under a nightmarish haze of pain and had been dreaming of dull knives slicing into her arms, slowly carving her body to pieces. And she felt every nerve being severed, every blood vessel, every bone. Who was wielding that dull knife?
Awake, Tatiana realized the dream wasn’t a dream at all. She had been and still was in the black with the knives. Her eyes were open - rather, she thought her eyes were open - pain shredded her from her fingertips to her shoulder blades, shot into the jaw, into the throbbing eye, into her skill, and the blood pulsed under the cutting blade. She couldn’t even touch the sleeve over her forearm. She could not make a fist with her hand, could not lift her arm, could not bend it, could not move it. Tatiana had not had anything broken before, but she was certain nothing could hurt this much and not be badly broken. In the dark, she felt for blood, for bones. Tatiana licked her lips. She was thirsty. She wished she could see something, a moon, a star, the tips of the trees, even the bears gleaming eyes would have been better than the void of nothing.
Slowly she opened her parched mouth as she sat pressed against the earth, and her dry throat moved to mutely form the words she once could speak so well, words that Osip Mandelstam, the man who no longer existed, wrote. ‘You took away all the oceans and all the room. You gave me my shoe size in earth with bars around it. Where did it get you? Nowhere. You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.’
Here are my words in silence. Dear God. I don’t want to die alone in the woods, in the earth like I’m already in the grave. Soon the leaves and the twigs and autumn will fall over me, soon the hunter will come and move his trap elsewhere, and throw fresh dirt on me, and I will be covered, I won’t even have to move.
I don’t want to die, cried Tatiana.
I don’t want to draw my last breath in a hole.
I haven’t lived, she whispered.
I barely even know who I am.
I have been much too young to see La Môle pass my way.
Please… don’t let me die before once letting me feel what it’s like to love.
Tatiana in her desperation clawed at the ditch, in the dark.
Oh God. I’ll do anything. I’ll bear anything. Just let me live.
Help me… Dash, Pasha, Deda, Babushka, please, somebody, somebody help me… Lord of the earth, have mercy on me.
She fell into a stuporous semi-consciousness, sitting up, her arm propped on her stomach, her head tilted to the side, the prayer of the heart at her lips, desperately in the deadfall.