Part Four
IN LIVE DEFIANCE
WORN OUT WITH TERROR AND MISGIVING
TATIANA wasn’t staying another second in Lazarevo by herself.
She wrote Alexander ten letters, relaxed, upbeat, comfortable letters. She made her news chronological and seasonal. She enlisted Naira Mikhailovna’s help in sending them to Alexander one by one, at an interval of one every week.
She knew that if she just left without a word, the old ladies would write to Alexander or, worse, find a way to telegraph Alexander a frantic missive telling him of her disappearance, and if he were still alive to hear it, his uncontrolled reaction might cost him his life. So Tatiana told the women that to avoid having to get a job at the Lazarevo fish plant, where most of the villagers worked, she was going to Molotov to work in the hospital. Tatiana invited no argument, and after the first few muttered questions from Dusia, got none.
Naira Mikhailovna wanted to know why Tatiana couldn’t send the letters straight from Molotov. Tatiana replied that Alexander didn’t want her to leave Lazarevo, and he would be upset if he found out she was working in town. She didn’t want to upset him while he was fighting. “You know how protective he can be, Naira Mikhailovna.”
“Protective and unreasonable,” Naira said, vigorously nodding. She was more than willing to enlist as a co-conspirator in what she saw as a plot to circumvent Alexander’s impossible character. She agreed to send him the letters.
Having sewn herself all new clothes, and having packed as many bottles of vodka and tushonka as she could carry, Tatiana set out early one morning after saying good-bye to the four old women. Dusia said a prayer over her head. Naira cried. Raisa cried and shook. Axinya leaned in and whispered, “You are crazy.”
Crazy for him, thought Tatiana. She left wearing dark brown trousers, brown stockings, brown boots, and a brown winter coat. Her light hair was tied in a plaid brown kerchief. She wanted to draw as little attention to herself as possible. She had sewn the dollars into an inseam flap on her trousers. Before she left, she took off her wedding ring and threaded it through a braided rope she had made. As she kissed it before tucking it inside her shirt, she whispered, “You’re just closer to my heart this way, Shura.”
As she was walking through the woods out of Lazarevo, Tatiana passed the path that led to their clearing. Stopping briefly, she thought about going down to the river and glancing . . . one last time. The thought alone — the imagining — was too much for her. Shaking her head, she continued onward.
There were some things she could not do.
She had watched Alexander steal one look; she could not. Since Vova had carried her trunk up the path over two months ago, Tatiana had not returned to the place where she had lived with Alexander. Vova boarded up the windows, put the padlock back on, and carried all of Alexander’s cut wood to Naira’s house.
In Molotov, Tatiana first went to the local Soviet to see if there was any money from Alexander for September.
Surprisingly, there was!
She asked if there was any telegram or letter with the money. There wasn’t.
If he was still getting soldier’s pay, it meant that he had neither died nor deserted. Taking the 1,500 rubles, Tatiana wondered what would make Alexander send her ring money but not write? Then she remembered the months it had taken for her grandmother’s letters to reach them in Leningrad. Well, she didn’t care if she got thirty letters from Alexander all at once, one for each day of September.
At the train station in Molotov, Tatiana told the Party domestic passport inspector that Leningrad was experiencing a dire shortage of nurses, what with the war and the hunger, and she was returning to help. She showed him the employment stamp from Grechesky Hospital in her passport. He didn’t have to know she had washed floors and toilets and dishes and sewed body bags. For his help Tatiana offered him a bottle of vodka.
He asked for the letter from the hospital inviting her to return to Leningrad. Tatiana replied that the letter got burned, but here were her credentials from the Kirov factory, from the Grechesky Hospital, and here was a citation for valor in the Fourth People’s Volunteer Army, and here was another bottle of vodka for his trouble.
He stamped her passport, and she bought her ticket.
Before she boarded her train, she went to see Sofia, who was so excruciatingly slow, Tatiana felt herself aging as she waited. Tatiana thought she would miss her train for sure, but Sofia finally managed to procure the two photographs she had taken of Alexander and Tatiana on the steps of St. Seraphim’s church on their wedding day. Tatiana stuffed them in her backpack and ran to catch her train.
The train she was departing on was much better than the one on which she had arrived. It was a semblance of a passenger train, and it was going southwest to Kazan. Southwest was the wrong direction for Tatiana, who needed to be heading north. But Kazan was a big city, and she would be able to catch another train. Her plan was to somehow make her way back to Kobona and to catch a barge across Lake Ladoga to Kokkorevo.
As the train was pulling out, Tatiana looked across the road at the Kama in the far distance, obscured by pines and birches, and thought, will I ever see Lazarevo again?
She did not think so.
In Kazan, Tatiana got on a train headed to Nizhny Novgorod — not the Novgorod of her childhood and of Pasha, another Novgorod. She was now less than 300 kilometers east of Moscow. She caught another train, this one a freight train heading northwest to Yaroslavl, and from there a bus north to Vologda.
In Vologda, Tatiana found that she could take the train to Tikhvin, but that Tikhvin was under constant and oppressive German fire. And from Tikhvin getting to Kobona was apparently impossible. The trains were being knocked out of operation three to four times a day, with heavy loss of life and supplies. Thank God for the train inspector, who sold her the ticket to Tikhvin and who was more than willing to chat with her.
She asked the inspector how the food was getting into the blockaded Leningrad if the Kobona route was blocked by German fire.
After she found out, Tatiana decided to follow the food. From Vologda she took a train headed for Petrozavodsk, far north on the western shores of Lake Onega, and simply got off early, in Podporozhye, and walked fifty kilometers to Lodeinoye Pole, which was ten kilometers from the shores of Lake Ladoga.
In Lodeinoye Pole, Tatiana felt the earth rumbling underneath her feet and knew she was close.
While stopping at a canteen to have some soup and bread, Tatiana overheard four transport drivers talking at the next table. Apparently the Germans had practically stopped bombing Leningrad, diverting all their air power and artillery to the Volkhov front — where Tatiana was headed. The Soviet general Meretskov’s 2nd Army was only four kilometers away from the Neva, and the German field marshal Manstein was determined not to let Meretskov push him from his positions along the river. Tatiana heard one of the men say, “Did you hear about our 861st division? Could not move the Germans at all, spent all day under their fire, and lost 65 percent of its men and 100 percent of its commanding officers!”
“That’s nothing!” another exclaimed. “Did you hear how many men Meretskov lost in August-September in Volkhov? How many dead, wounded, missing in action? One hundred and thirty thousand!”
“Is that a lot?” said another. “In Moscow—”
“Out of one hundred and fifty thousand men!”
Tatiana had had quite enough of listening to other people’s discussions. But she needed just a little bit more information. After striking up a conversation with the truck drivers, she found out that food barges departed on Lake Ladoga just south of a small town called Syastroy, about ten kilometers north of the Volkhov front. Syastroy was about a hundred kilometers south from where Tatiana was at the moment.
Tatiana was going to ask the men for a ride but didn’t like the sound of them. They were staying in Lodeinoye Pole overnight, and the way one of them looked at her, even with her brown plaid kerchief . . .
She wiped her mouth, thanked them, and left. She felt better knowing she was carrying Alexander’s loaded P-38.
It took Tatiana three days to walk the hundred kilometers to Syastroy. It was early October and cold, but the first snow had not fallen yet, and the road was paved. Many other people walked along with her — villagers, evacuees, itinerant farmers, occasionally soldiers returning to the front. She walked for half a day next to one who was returning from furlough. He looked as forlorn as Alexander must have felt. Then he caught a ride from an army truck, and Tatiana kept walking.
The bursting roar of heavy bombs exploding in the near distance never stopped shaking the earth underneath her feet as she walked, her pack on her back, her eyes to the ground. No matter how bad this seemed, it was better than running through the potato field in Luga. It was better than sitting in the train station in Luga, realizing that the Germans weren’t leaving until Tatiana was dead. It was better than that, but not much. She kept walking, her eyes to the ground.
She walked even at night — it was calmer at night, and after eleven there were no bombings. She would walk for another few hours and then find a barn to sleep in. One night she stayed with a family who offered her dinner and their oldest son. She ate the dinner, passed on the son, offering money instead. They took it.
Ten kilometers west of Syastroy, right on the Volkhov River, Tatiana found a small barge about to take off across the lake around the horn of Novaya Ladoga. The longshoreman was untying the rope. She waited as the plank was just about to go up and then ran up to the man and told him she had food for the war effort, for the blockade, taking out five cans of ham and a bottle of vodka. The longshoreman stared longingly at the vodka. Tatiana asked him to keep the vodka for himself and let her go to see her dying mother in Leningrad. Tatiana knew this was a dire time for local people. Most of their relatives who had lived in Leningrad were either dead or dying. The dockhand gratefully kept the vodka and waved her on. “Warning you, though — it’s a bad passage. Too long in the water, and the Germans bomb the barges all day long.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m ready.” She crossed without incident.
The barge came to Osinovets, north of Kokkorevo, where Tatiana offered the rest of her tushonka — four cans — and another bottle of vodka to the truck driver who was taking food to Leningrad. He let her sit in the front with him and even shared some bread with her as they drove.
Tatiana stared out the window. Was she really going to be able to go back to her Fifth Soviet apartment? As if she had much choice.
But to go back to Leningrad?
She shivered. She didn’t want to think about it. The driver dropped her off at Finland Station in the north of the city. She took a tram back to Nevsky Prospekt and walked home from Insurrection Square.
Leningrad was sad and empty. It was nighttime, and the streets were poorly lit, but at least there was electricity. Tatiana must have come at a good time, because it was quiet; there was no shelling. But as she walked, she saw three smoldering fires and many broken shambling gaps where windows and doors had once been.
She hoped her building on Fifth Soviet was still standing.
It was. Still green, still drab, still filthy.
Tatiana stood for a few minutes at the double front doors. She was searching for the thing Alexander called courage.
The courage to go back up the stairs that led to the two empty rooms where six other hearts had once lived. Rooms filled with jokes and vodka and dinners and small dreams and small desires and life.
She looked up and down the street. Across Grechesky the church still stood, untouched and unbombed. Turning her head to Suvorovsky, she saw a few people going into their buildings, coming home from work. Just a few people, maybe three. The pavement was clear and dry. The cold air was hurting her nose.
It was for him.
His heart was still beating, and it called to her.
He was going to be her courage.
She nodded to herself and turned the handle. The dark green hallway smelled of urine. Holding on to the railing, Tatiana slowly walked up three flights of stairs to her communal apartment.
Her key worked in the glossy brown door.
The apartment was quiet. There was no one in the front kitchen, and the doors to the other rooms were closed. All closed, except for Slavin’s, whose door was slightly ajar. Tatiana knocked, looked in.
Slavin was on his floor, listening to the radio.
“Who are you?” he said in a shrill voice.
“Tania Metanova, remember? How are you?” She smiled. Some things never changed.
“Were you here during the War of 1905? Oh, did we give those Japs hell.” He pointed his finger to the radio. “Listen, listen carefully.”
Just the sound of the metronome, beat beat beat.
Quietly she backed away. The Russians lost that war. Slavin looked up from the floor at her and said, “You should have come last month, Tanechka — only seven bombs fell on Leningrad last month. You would have been safer.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “If you need anything, I’m right down the hall.”
There was no one in her kitchen either. To her surprise, the door to her hallway and her two rooms was unlocked. In the hallway on her sofa she found two strangers, a man and a woman drinking tea.
Tatiana stood for a moment staring at them. “Who are you?” she asked at last.
They said they were Inga and Stanislav Krakov. They were both in their forties; he was paunchy and spottily balding, she was small and wizened.
“But who are you?” she asked again.
“Who are you?” demanded Stanislav, not even looking at her.
Tatiana put down her backpack. “These are my rooms,” she said. “You’re sitting on my sofa.”
Inga quickly explained that they had lived on Seventh Soviet and Suvorovsky. “We had a nice apartment, our own apartment,” she said. “Our own bathroom, and kitchen, and a bedroom.” Apparently their building was bombed to the ground in August. With the shortage of housing in Leningrad because of so many demolished buildings, the Soviet council placed Inga and Stanislav in the Metanov rooms, which were unoccupied. “Don’t worry,” said Inga. “They’ll find us our own apartment soon; they said, maybe even a two-bedroom. Right, Stan?”
“Well, I’m back now,” said Tatiana. “The rooms are no longer unoccupied.” She looked around the hallway. Alexander had cleaned the place so well, she thought with sadness.
“Yes? And where are we supposed to go?” asked Stan. “We are registered with the council to stay here.”
“What about the other rooms in the communal apartment?” she asked. The other rooms — where other people had died.
“They’re all taken,” said Stan. “Listen, why are we still talking about this? There’s enough space here. You can have a whole room to yourself. What’s to complain about?”
“Both rooms are mine, though,” she said.
“Actually, no,” said Stan, continuing to drink his tea. “Both rooms belong to the state. And the state is at war.” He laughed joylessly. “You are not being a good proletarian, comrade.”
Inga said, “Stan and I are Party members in the Leningrad corps of engineers.”
“That’s great,” said Tatiana, suddenly feeling very tired. “Which room can I take?”
Inga and Stan had taken her old room, where she had slept with Dasha, with Mama, with Papa, with Pasha. It was also the only room with heat. Deda and Babushka’s old room had a broken stove in it.
Even if the stove weren’t broken, Tatiana had no wood to heat it.
“Could I at least have my bourzhuika back?” she asked.
“And what will we use?” said Stan.
“What’s your name anyway?” asked Inga.
“Tania.”
Sheepishly Inga said, “Tania, why don’t you move the little cot to the wall near where the stove is on our side? The wall is warm. Do you want Stan to help you?”
“Inga, stop, you know my back is bad,” snapped Stan. “She can move it herself.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana. She moved Deda’s sofa just far enough to sandwich Pasha’s little cot in between the back of the sofa and the wall.
The wall was warm.
Tatiana slept for seventeen hours covered by her coat and three blankets.
After waking, she went to the Soviet council housing committee to register herself once again as a resident of Leningrad. “What did you come back for?” the woman behind the desk asked her rudely, filling out documents for a new ration card. “We’re still under blockade, you know.”
“I know,” said Tatiana. “But there’s a shortage of nurses. The war is still on.” She paused. “Someone has to take care of the soldiers, right?”
The older woman shrugged, not lifting her eyes. Is anyone in this city going to lift their eyes and look at me? thought Tatiana. Just one person. “Summer was better,” the woman said. “More food. Now you won’t be able to get potatoes.”
“That’s all right,” Tatiana said, twinging with pain, remembering the potato counter Alexander had built in Lazarevo.
With her ration card in hand, she went to the Elisey food store on Nevsky. She couldn’t bear to go back to the store on Fontanka and Nekrasova where she used to get the family rations a year ago. In Elisey it was too late for bread, but she did get some real milk, some beans, an onion, and four tablespoons of oil. For a hundred rubles she bought a can of tushonka. Since she wasn’t working yet, her bread ration was only 350 grams, but for workers it rose to 700. Tatiana planned to get a job.
Tatiana looked for a bourzhuika but had no luck. She even went to Gostiny Dvor shopping center, across from Elisey on Nevsky, but couldn’t find anything there. She had 3,000 rubles left of Alexander’s money, and she would have gladly spent half of it on a bourzhuika to keep her warm, but there was none to be found. With her bag of food Tatiana walked across Nevsky, past the European Hotel, down Mikhailovskaya Ulitsa, crossed the street into the Italian Gardens, and sat on the bench where Alexander had told her about America.
She didn’t move, not even when the bombing started, not even when she saw shelling down Mikhailovskaya and across Nevsky. She watched a bomb fall on the pavement and explode in a black flame. Alexander will be so angry when he finds out I’m here, Tatiana thought, finally getting up and heading home. But she wanted him alive; she didn’t care if he killed her. She had seen Alexander’s temper — he had lost his mind during their last days in Lazarevo. How Alexander got sane — if Alexander got sane — after he left her, Tatiana did not know.
She went back to work at Grechesky Hospital. She had been right. The hospital was in dire need of help. The administration officer saw her former Grechesky employment stamp, asked if she had been a nurse, and Tatiana replied that she had been a nurse’s aide and that it would take her no time at all to brush up on her skills. She asked to be placed in the critical care unit. She was given a white uniform and followed a nurse named Elizaveta for one nine-hour shift and then a nurse named Maria for another nine-hour shift. The nurses did not lift their eyes to Tatiana.
But the patients did.
After two weeks of working eighteen-hour days, Tatiana was finally given her own rounds and a Sunday afternoon off. She got up her courage to go to Pavlov barracks.
2
Tatiana needed just a word that Alexander was all right and where he was stationed.
The sentry at the gate was no one she knew; his name was Viktor Burenich. The young soldier was friendly and eager to help. She liked that. He checked the roster of all the soldiers currently at the barracks and told her that Alexander Belov was not there. She asked if he knew where the captain was. The guard replied with a smile that he did not. “But he’s all right as far as you know?” she asked.
The guard shrugged. “I think so, but they don’t tell me these things.”
Holding her breath, Tatiana asked if Dimitri Chernenko was still alive.
He was. Tatiana exhaled. Burenich said Chernenko wasn’t at the garrison at present, but that he constantly came and went with supplies.
Tatiana tried to think of who else she knew. “Is Anatoly Marazov here?” she asked.
He was, what luck.
In a few minutes Tatiana saw Marazov through the gate.
“Tatiana!” He seemed glad to see her. “What a surprise to see you here. Alexander had told me you evacuated with your sister.” He paused. “I’m sorry about your sister.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” she said, her eyes welling up involuntarily. She was extremely relieved. If Marazov mentioned Alexander so offhandedly, it meant that everything was all right.
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Tania,” Marazov said.
“No, no, you haven’t upset me.” They stood in the passageway.
“You want to walk around the block?” Marazov asked her. “I have a few minutes.”
They strolled with their coats buttoned to Palace Square.
“Are you here to see Dimitri? He’s not in my unit anymore.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, and stammered. Could she keep all the lies in her head? How would she have known about Dimitri? “I know he was injured. I saw him at Kobona a few months back.” And if she wasn’t here to see Dimitri, who was she here to see?
“Yes, he’s now on this side. Running. Unhappy about that, too. I just don’t know what he wants the war to give him.”
“Are you still in . . . Alexander’s destroyer company?”
“No, Alexander doesn’t have a company anymore. He was wounded—” Marazov broke off as Tatiana stumbled. “Are you all right?”
“I’m sorry. Yes, of course. I tripped,” she said, crossing her arms around her stomach. She thought that any minute she was going to faint. She had to keep herself together at all costs. She had to. “What happened to him?”
“His hands were burned in an attack in September.”
“His hands?” His hands.
“Yes. Second-degree burns. Couldn’t hold a cup of water for weeks. He’s better now.”
“Where is he?”
“Back at the front.”
Tatiana couldn’t continue anymore. “Lieutenant, maybe we should go back. I really must get back.”
“All right,” Marazov said, puzzled, as they turned around. “Why did you come back to Leningrad anyway?”
“There’s a shortage of nurses. I came back to be a nurse.” She quickened her step. “Are you posted to Shlisselburg?”
“Eventually, yes. We have a new base of operations for the Leningrad front, up in Morozovo—”
“Morozovo? Listen — I’m glad you’re all right. What’s next for you?”
He shook his head. “We’ve lost so many men trying to break the blockade, we’re constantly regrouping. But next time out I think I’m with Alexander again.”
“Oh, yes?” she said, her legs weakening. “Well, I hope so. Listen, it was good to see you.”
“Tania, are you all right?” Marazov stared at her, that look of sad familiarity creeping into his eyes again. Tatiana remembered his face when he met her for the first time, last September. He had looked at her as if he already knew her.
She managed a small smile. “Of course. I’m fine.” Stiffly she came up to him and laid her hand on his sleeve. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”
“Should I tell Dimitri you stopped by?”
“No! Please don’t.”
He nodded. Tatiana was nearly down the street when he yelled, “Should I tell Alexander?”
She turned around. “Please don’t,” she called back faintly.
The following night when Tatiana came home from the hospital, she found Dimitri waiting for her in the hallway with Stan and Inga.
“Dimitri?” said a shocked Tatiana. “What — how — what are you doing here?” She glared at Stan and Inga.
“We let him in, Tanechka,” said Inga. “He said you used to see each other last year?”
Dimitri came up to Tatiana and put his arms around her. She stood with her own arms at her side. “I heard you came asking for me,” he said. “I was so touched. You want to go inside your room?”
“Who told you I stopped by?”
“Burenich, the sentry guard. He said a young girl stopped by asking for me. You didn’t leave your name, but he described you. I’m very touched, Tania. These have been very hard months for me.”
He was lopsided and hollow-eyed.
“Dimitri, this is not a good time for me,” she said, casting an angry glance toward Inga and Stan. She turned her face away from him. “I’m very tired.”
“You must be hungry. You want to have dinner?”
“I ate at the hospital,” Tatiana lied. “And I have almost nothing here.” How to get him to go, just go? “I have to wake up tomorrow at five. I have two nine-hour shifts back to back. I’m on my feet all day. Another time, perhaps?”
“No, Tania. I don’t know if there will be another time,” Dimitri said. “Come on. Maybe you can make me some tea. A little something to eat? For old times?”
Tatiana could not even imagine Alexander’s reaction when he found out that Dimitri was in the room with her. This was not in her plans — to deal with him. She didn’t know what to do about him. But then she thought, Alexander still has to deal with him. So I have to deal with him. He is not just Alexander’s. He is ours.
Tatiana fried Dimitri some soybeans on a Primus stove that she had borrowed from Slavin in return for occasionally cooking for him. She threw in a few small carrots with the beans and a piece of old onion. She gave him some black bread with a spoonful of butter. When Dimitri asked for vodka, Tatiana told him she was all out, not wanting him to get drunk while she was alone with him. The room was poorly illuminated by a kerosene lamp; there was electricity, but Tatiana couldn’t find any lightbulbs in the stores.
He ate with the plate on his lap. She sat on the far end of the couch and realized she had not taken off her coat yet. She took off her coat, and while he ate, she went and made herself a cup of tea.
“Why is it so cold in this room?” Dimitri asked.
“No heat,” replied Tatiana. She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform, and her hair was tied back in a nurse’s white head kerchief.
“So, Tania, tell me — how have you been? You look good,” Dimitri said. “You don’t look like a girl anymore.” He smiled. “You look like a young woman. You look older.”
“Enough things happen to you,” said Tatiana, “and you almost can’t help it.”
“You look very good. This war agrees with you.” Dimitri smiled. “You’ve gained weight since I saw you last—”
Tatiana leveled a look at him that stopped him. “Dimitri,” she said quietly, “last time you saw me, I was in Kobona, asking for your help to bury my sister. Maybe you’ve forgotten. But I haven’t.”
“Tania, oh, I know,” he said, with a casual drift of his hand. “We just completely lost touch. But I never stopped thinking about you. I’m glad you made it out of Kobona. Many people didn’t.”
“My sister, for one.” Tatiana wanted to ask how in the world could he have looked Alexander in the face and lied about Dasha, but Tatiana could not bear to say her husband’s name in front of Dimitri.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” Dimitri said. “My parents died, too. So I know how you feel.” Dimitri paused. Tatiana waited. Waited for him to finish eating and leave.
“How did you get back to Leningrad?” Dimitri asked her.
Tatiana told him.
But she didn’t want to talk about herself. She didn’t want to talk about anything. Where was Dasha, where was Alexander, where were Mama and Papa, surrounding Tatiana so she wouldn’t have to sit in the room alone with Dimitri?
Taking a deep breath, Tatiana asked him what he was doing with himself, now that he looked to be permanently injured.
“I’m a runner. Do you know what that is?”
Tatiana knew what a runner was. But she shook her head. If he was talking about himself, he was not asking her questions.
“I get supplies for the front lines and for the rear units from trucks, from planes, from ships, and I distribute them around—”
“Where do you distribute them? Here in Leningrad?” she asked.
“Here, yes. Also to various delivery points on this side of the Neva. And to the Karelian side near Finland.” Glancing at her sideways, Dimitri said, “Do you see why I’m so unhappy?”
“Of course I do,” Tatiana said. “The war is dangerous. You don’t want to be in this war.”
“I don’t want to be in this country,” Dimitri mumbled, barely heard.
But heard.
“Did you say you deliver to the Finnish line?” she asked, her voice fading with her strength.
“Yes, to the border troops on the Karelian Isthmus. I also deliver to our new headquarters for the Neva operations in Morozovo. The command post was built there, while we plan our next move—”
“Where on the Karelian Isthmus?”
“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a place called Lisiy Nos . . .”
“I’ve heard of it,” Tatiana said, holding on to the arm of the couch.
“There.” Dimitri smiled. “I also bring supplies on foot from quarters to quarters. Do you know, Tania, I even bring in supplies for the generals!” he said, raising his eyebrows.
“Oh, yes?” she said, barely listening. “Anyone interesting?”
Lowering his voice, Dimitri said, “I’m getting to be quite friendly with General Mekhlis.” He laughed with satisfaction. “I bring him paper, pens, plus if I get anything extra — if you get my meaning — I bring it to him. Never ask him to pay me. Cigarettes, vodka, all goes to him. He quite looks forward to my visits.”
“Oh?” Tatiana said. She had no idea who Mekhlis was. “Mekhlis . . . what army does he command?”
“Tania, are you joking?”
“No. Why would I joke?” Tatiana was exhausted.
In a gleeful whisper Dimitri said, “Mekhlis commands the NKVD army!” Lowering his voice, he said, “He is Beria’s right-hand man!” Lavrenti Beria was Stalin’s People’s Commissar of the NKVD.
Tatiana had been afraid of bombs once, and of hunger, and of death. She was afraid once of being lost in the woods. And once she was afraid of a human being wanting to do her harm for no reason other than to do her harm.
The harm was the means and the end.
Tonight Tatiana wasn’t afraid for herself.
But studying Dimitri’s depraved, ominously insinuating face, she was afraid for Alexander.
Before tonight she had felt twinges of remorse about leaving Lazarevo and reneging on what had been a heartfelt promise to her husband. But now she became convinced that Alexander didn’t just need her closer to him, he needed her more than even she herself had thought possible.
Someone had to protect Alexander — not just from random death, no, but from deliberate destruction.
Without moving, without blinking, without flinching, Tatiana studied Dimitri.
She watched him put down his cup and move closer on the couch to her. Then she blinked and came out of her thoughts. “What are you doing?”
“I can tell, Tania,” Dimitri said. “You are not a child anymore.”
She did not move a muscle as he moved closer still.
“Inga and Stan out there told me you are working so much that they are convinced you are seeing a doctor at the hospital. Is that true?”
“If Inga and Stan told you, then it must be,” Tatiana said. “The Communists never lie, Dimitri.”
Nodding, Dimitri moved closer.
“What are you doing?” Tatiana got up off the couch. “Listen, it’s getting late.”
“Tania, come on. You’re lonely. I’m lonely. I hate my life, hate every minute of every day of it. Do you feel like that sometimes?”
Only tonight, Tatiana thought. “No, Dima. I’m fine. I have a good life, all things considered. I’m working, the hospital needs me, my patients need me. I’m alive. I have food.”
“Tania, but you must be so lonely.”
“How can I be lonely?” she said. “I’m constantly surrounded by people. And I thought I was seeing a doctor? Listen, let’s stop this. It’s late.”
He got up and made a move toward her. Tatiana put out her hands. “Dimitri, that’s all over. I’m not the one for you.” She stared at him pointedly. “And you’ve always known that, yet you’ve always been quite persistent. Why?”
With an easy laugh, Dimitri said, “Maybe I had been hoping, dear Tania, that the love of a good young woman like yourself would redeem a rogue like me.”
Tatiana leveled her cold gaze on him. “I’m glad to hear,” she said at last, “that you don’t think you’re beyond redemption.”
He laughed again. “Oh, but I am, Tania,” he said. “I am. Because I didn’t have the love of a good young woman like you.” He stopped laughing and raised his eyes to her. “But who did?” he said quietly.
Tatiana didn’t reply, standing in the place where the dining room table used to be, before Alexander sawed it to pieces for her and Dasha to use as firewood. So many ghosts in one small, dark room. It was almost as if the room were still crowded with feeling, with want, with hunger.
Dimitri’s eyes flashed. “I don’t understand,” he said loudly. “Why did you come to the barracks asking for me? I thought this was what you wanted. Are you just trying to lead me on? To tease me?” He raised his voice, far beyond the levels these walls could contain. He came closer. “Because in the army we have a word for girls who tease us.” He laughed. “We call them mothers.”
“Dima, is that what you think? That I’m a tease? You think that’s me, the girl who wants one thing and pretends she wants another? Is that me?”
He grumbled without replying.
“I thought so,” said Tatiana. “I’ve been very clear with you right from the start. I came to the barracks asking for you, for Marazov. I just wanted to see a familiar face.” Tatiana wasn’t going to back down, though inside she was cold and far away from him.
“Did you ask for Alexander, too, perhaps?” Dimitri asked. “Because if you did, you know, you wouldn’t find him at the garrison. Alexander would be either up in Morozovo, if he was on duty, or in every knocking joint in Leningrad, if he wasn’t.”
Feeling herself pale inside and out, and hoping Dimitri didn’t see and didn’t hear the paling of her voice, Tatiana said, “I asked for everybody I knew.”
“Everybody except Petrenko,” Dimitri said, as if he knew. “Even though you were quite friendly with him, coming around as often as you used to last year. Why didn’t you ask for your friend, Ivan Petrenko? Before he got himself killed, he told me that he sometimes used to walk you to the ration store. On orders of Captain Belov, of course. He was quite helpful to you and your family. Why wouldn’t you ask about him?”
Tatiana was stunned. She felt herself to be so ridiculously in need of Alexander, so ridiculously in need of protection against this specter of a man in her room that she didn’t know what to say.
Tatiana hadn’t asked about Petrenko because she knew that Petrenko was dead. But she only knew he was dead from Alexander’s letters, and Alexander could not be writing to her.
What to do, what to do, to end this revolting lie enveloping her life.
Tatiana was so fed up, so frustrated, so tired, so desperate, that she nearly opened her mouth and told Dimitri about Alexander. Truth was better than this. Tell the truth and live with the consequences.
It was the consequences that stopped her.
Straightening her back and staring coldly at Dimitri, Tatiana said firmly, “Dimitri, what the hell are you trying to get out of me? Stop trying to manipulate me with your questions. Either ask me outright or keep quiet. I’m too tired for your games. What do you want to know? Why I didn’t ask for Petrenko? Because I asked for Marazov first, and once I knew he was at the garrison, I stopped asking. Now, enough!”
Dimitri stared at her with uneasy surprise.
There was a knock on the door. It was Inga. “What’s going on?” she said sleepily, standing in her tattered gray bathrobe. “I heard so much noise. Is everything all right?”
“Yes, thank you, Inga,” Tatiana said, slamming the door. Tatiana would deal with Inga later.
Dimitri came up to her and said, “I’m sorry, Tania. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just misunderstood your intentions.”
“That’s fine, Dimitri. It’s late. Let’s say good night.”
Dimitri tried to come near her, and Tatiana backed away.
Stepping away himself, he shrugged. “I always wished it had worked out for us, Tania.”
“Did you, Dimitri?” said Tatiana.
“Of course.”
“Dimitri! How—” Tatiana exclaimed and broke off.
Dimitri stood in a room in which he had once spent many evenings being fed and watered. He had sat with Tatiana’s family, who had invited him into their home and made him a part of their life. He had been in this room now for an hour. He had talked freely about himself, accused Tatiana of she didn’t know what. He’d told her things that sounded like lies. She didn’t know. What he did not do was ask her what had happened to the six people who had once been in this room with him. He did not ask about her mother, or her father, or her grandparents, or Marina, or her mother’s mother. He did not ask her in Kobona in January, he did not ask her now. If he knew about their fate, he did not utter a single commiserating word, he did not make a single comforting wave of his hand. How did Dimitri think it could have worked out for him and anyone, but especially for him and Tatiana, when he could not look for a second beyond himself into anyone else’s life or heart? Tatiana didn’t care that he didn’t ask after her family. What she wanted was for him not to pretend to her, as if she didn’t know the truth.
Tatiana wanted to say this to Dimitri. But it wasn’t worth it.
Though she suspected that the truth was plain in her eyes, because bowing his head and appearing even more hunched, Dimitri stammered, “I just can’t seem to say the right thing.”
“We’ll say good night,” Tatiana said coldly. That will be the right thing.
He went to the door, and she followed him. “Tania, I think this is good-bye. I don’t think we’re going to see each other again.”
“If we’re meant to, we will.” Tatiana swallowed hard, numb inside, her legs weak.
Dimitri lowered his voice, and whispered, “Where I’m going, Tatiana, you will never see me again.”
“Oh, yes?” she mouthed, her strength gone.
He left at last, leaving black turmoil behind for Tatiana, who lay on her cot between the wall and the back of the couch, lay in all her clothes clutching her wedding ring to her chest, not moving or sleeping until morning.
