Alexander sucked in his breath. So did Tatiana. She couldn’t believe herself.
“What?” he said scathingly. “Is that next for you two?”
Shaken, she did not reply.
A nurse came in and left the door open, “for some fresh air.”
When they were alone again, he said, “Tania, I don’t know what you want me to do. I told you from the beginning, let’s not play this game.” He paused. “But now it’s too late. Now Dimitri—” Alexander broke off, shaking his head. “Now it’s become doubly difficult.”
All she wanted was for him to kiss her again. “Which leads me for the third time to my next question,” she said angrily. “What are you doing here?”
“Don’t be upset.”
“I’m not upset!”
Alexander lifted his hand to touch her. She whirled her face away.
“Oh,” he said, getting up. “From me you turn away.” He was at the door when he spun around. “And for your information,” he barked, “it’s impossible for you to be knocking him.”
Tatiana was told by vivacious Vera that she would have to remain in the hospital until the middle of August, until her ribs healed enough for her to walk around on crutches. Her shinbone was fractured in three places and had been set in a cast from her knee to her toes.
Tatiana’s family brought her food, which she ate with relish. Pirozhki with cabbage, chicken cutlets, some hamburger patties, and blueberry pie, which she didn’t enjoy as much as she used to, having practically lived on blueberries during her stint in the volunteer army.
First Mama and Papa visited her every day. Soon it became every other day. Dasha would breeze in, radiant, healthy, cheerful, arm in arm with the uniformed Lieutenant Alexander Belov, kiss Tatiana on the head, and say she really couldn’t stay. Dimitri would come over and, with his arm around her, sit by her side and then leave with them.
One night when to pass the time the four of them were playing cards, Dasha told Tatiana that her dentist had evacuated. He had asked Dasha to come with him to Sverdlovsk on the other side of the Urals, but Dasha had refused, finding work instead with Mama at the uniform factory. “Now I can’t evacuate. I’m indispensable to the war effort, too,” said Dasha, smiling at Alexander and showing Tatiana a handful of gold teeth.
“Where did you get those?” Tatiana asked.
Dasha replied that she got them as payment from the patients who came to the dentist in the last month, asking that the gold be taken out of their mouths.
“You took their gold teeth?” Tatiana asked with surprise.
“The gold teeth were my payment,” Dasha said unapologetically. “We can’t all be so pure as you.”
Tatiana didn’t pursue it. Who was she to pontificate to Dasha?
Tatiana changed the subject to war. War was like weather—always something to talk about. Alexander said the Luga line was about to fall any day, and she again felt the stamp of failure. All that effort on the part of thousands, only to have it crumble in a few days. She stopped asking. Being in the hospital imbued her with a sense of the unreal, even more than being in the deserted Dohotino village. She was stuck between four gray walls with a window, and she saw no one except the people who sporadically came to see her. She knew nothing except what she chose to ask about. Maybe if she didn’t ask about war, by the time she left the hospital, the war would somehow be over.
And then what? Tatiana would ask herself.
Nothing, she would answer in the dark of night. Nothing except the life I had. I’ll go back to work. Maybe next year I’ll go to university, as I planned. Yes, I’ll go to university, I’ll study English, and I’ll meet someone. I’ll meet some nice Russian university student who is studying to be an engineer. We’ll get married and go to live with his mother and grandmother in their communal apartment. And then we’ll have a child.
Tatiana could not imagine that life. She could not imagine any life except this hospital bed, except this hospital window facing the buildings on Grechesky Prospekt, except eating oatmeal for breakfast and soup for lunch and boiled chicken for dinner. All she wanted was for Alexander to come and see her on his own. She wanted to say she was wrong, to say she had no right to behave badly. She wanted to feel him close to her again.
She read Zoshchenko’s funny short stories about the ironic realities of Soviet life but couldn’t find any humor in them all of a sudden.
Tatiana lay in her room day in and day out, and the days were long, and at night she couldn’t sleep. The tears she saw in her mother’s eyes ate at her heart, and the silence of her father ate at her even more. The feeling of failure over Pasha sickened her. But the absence of Alexander ate at Tatiana most of all.
At first she was sorry, then she was angry, then she was angry at herself for being angry. Then she felt hurt. Finally she felt resigned.
And it was on the day she felt resigned that Alexander came in the middle of the afternoon when she wasn’t expecting him at all—right after lunch—and brought her an ice cream.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
“You’re welcome,” he replied just as quietly, and then sat in the chair by her bed and watched her eat it. “I’m on city patrol,” he said. “I’m walking around the streets, making sure the windows are all taped, checking to see if there are any strange disturbances.”
“By yourself?”
“No,” he said, rolling his eyes. “With a group of seven forty-year-old men who have never carried a rifle.”
“Teach them how, Alexander. You must be a good teacher.”
Glancing at her, he said, “We’ve just spent the whole morning putting up tank barricades on Moscow Prospekt leading south. No trams are running there now.” He paused. “But Kirov is still open and pushing out those tanks. They’re just now deciding to move the production east. Little by little, other industries are leaving in trucks and the last of the trains.” He paused again. “Tania? Are you listening to me?”
“What?” She broke free of the deafening noise in her head.
“How is the ice cream?”
“Very good. An unexpected treat.”
“I think that’s a good way to think about many things in life,” Alexander said, getting up. “I have to be going.”
“No!” Tatiana said quickly, and then more quietly, “Wait.”
Alexander sat back down.
“About the other night . . .” she said. “I’m sorry. I—”
Alexander shook his head. “Forget it.”
Tatiana couldn’t think of anything to say besides low-spirited words. “Why did you take so long to come by?”
“What do you mean? I come by and see you every day.”
Tatiana didn’t say anything, and neither did he.
They looked at each other.
“I would have come alone,” he said. “I just thought there was little point. It wasn’t going to make you or me feel better.”
An image sprang up, an image of him bending over her, washing blood from her naked body. She breathed with difficulty. Another image . . . sleeping next to him, in his arms, her lips pressed to his chest, her hands touching him. Feeling closer to him than to anyone on earth. Standing with her arms around him on the train. And worse—the visceral sensation of his lips parting her lips. She turned her face from him. “You’re right, I know,” she whispered.
Alexander got up, and this time Tatiana didn’t stop him. “I’ll see you,” he said, bending over her and pressing his lips to her head.
Well, my head, that’s something, thought Tatiana. When he was by the door, she asked, “Will you come again? If you can. For just a few minutes.”
With his cap in his hands, he said, “Tania . . .”
“I know. You’re right. Don’t.”
“Tania, all the nurses here . . . someone will mention my visit in front of your family. It’ll just end badly.”
But it will end. “You’re right,” she said. “Don’t.”
After he left, Tatiana tho
ught in loathing self-flagellation, I’m a very bad sister. I’ve always thought of myself as a good sister, but I realize that I have never been tested before. The first time I have been—look how I’m behaving.
2
One night a week later, Tatiana woke up feeling her face being stroked. She wanted to open her eyes, but it felt so much like a dream, and she felt so drugged and tired that she let her eyes stay closed. A man with big hands and vodka on his breath was stroking her face. She knew only one man with big hands. She kept her eyes shut, but she knew that her breathing pattern had changed from sleepy breaths to shallow rasps. He stopped touching her. “Tatia?”
She so wanted the illusion to continue. The illusion of being touched by Alexander in the middle of an August night. Tatiana opened her eyes.
It was Alexander. He wasn’t wearing his hat. There was that look in his molasses eyes again; even in the dark she could make it out.
“Did I wake you?” He smiled.
She sat up. “Yes. I think.” She reached out and touched his arm. “It seems like the middle of the night.”
“It is,” he said. He stared at her blanket, and she looked at the top of his black head. “It’s around three.”
They were speaking in just above a whisper.
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just wanted to see if you were all right. I keep . . . thinking of you here by yourself. Are you sad? Lonely?”
“Yes and yes,” Tatiana said. She smelled vodka on him. “Have you been drinking?”
“Hmm.” His wandering eyes were slightly unfocused. “For the first time in a while. I had a night off tonight. Marazov and I went out, had a few drinks.” He stopped. “Tatia . . .”
Her heart pounding, she waited breathlessly. His hands were on her blanket. Her legs were underneath the blanket. “Shura,” she said, and suddenly, for an instant, felt happy. The way she felt coming out of Kirov and turning her head and seeing his smile. Happier.
Alexander said, “I can’t find the right words. I thought maybe after I’d had enough to drink . . .”
“Every word you’re saying is the right word,” Tatiana told him. “What?”
Alexander took her hands and pressed them to his chest. His head remained bent. He said nothing.
What to do? Tatiana was a child. Any other girl would know what to do. She didn’t even know what the right thing might be. I’m like a newborn. How I wish I knew what to do now in this moment with him. In my hospital bed, with my ribs taped up, with my leg in a cast, yes, but alone with him.
Dasha’s face appeared between them, as if Tatiana’s conscience could not let her heart have even a moment of stolen joy. That is how it should be, she said to herself, wanting desperately to lift his head and kiss him. Suddenly Dasha’s face evaporated. Tatiana leaned toward him and kissed his hair. It smelled of soap and smoke. Alexander looked up. They were centimeters away from each other; she smelled his delicious, vodka-laden, Alexander-laden breath. “I’m so happy you came to see me, Shura,” she whispered, feeling an aching pull in her lower body.
Alexander tilted his head and kissed her deeply on the lips. He let go of her hands, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing herself against him. They kissed as if in a fever . . . they kissed as if the breath were leaving their bodies.
The aching in her stomach got to be too much to bear; Tatiana opened her mouth and moaned. Alexander took her face into his hands. “You sweet thing,” he murmured. “You’re the sweetest thing. I don’t know what to do, what to do, Tania.” He kissed her lips and licked them with his tongue and kissed her eyes and her cheeks and her neck. Tatiana moaned again, still holding on to him; she felt herself incinerating from within. His lips were so insistent and hungry that Tatiana, suddenly unable to breathe or sit, started to float down onto the bed.
Alexander held her up. Tatiana felt his hands gently moving up and down on her partially exposed back where her nightgown opened. Slowly he untied the strings of her gown. Alexander was completely clothed, sitting on her bed and kissing her as he pulled the nightgown down. Tatiana breathed out, shuddering.
He pulled back from her face, still holding her, still whispering. His eyes were blazing. “Tania, you are too much for me . . . I can’t take you, not in small doses, not in large ones, not here, not on the street, nowhere.” His hands moved around to hold her just above her bandaged ribs.
“Shura,” she whispered, her whole aching weakness in her voice. “What’s happening to me? What is this?”
Alexander cupped her breasts and fondled them. Flattening out his palms, he rubbed her nipples in circles. Tatiana moaned. He rubbed them harder. Pulling away and staring at her breasts, he muttered, “Oh, God . . . look at you . . .” Tatiana watched him as he bent down to her breast, put her nipple in his mouth, and sucked it, while rubbing her other nipple with his fingers. Then he sucked the other nipple. Watching and feeling Alexander’s lips on her nipples utterly overwhelmed Tatiana. Her hands clutching his head, she moaned so loudly that he pulled away and lightly put his hand over her mouth. “Shh,” he whispered. “They’ll hear you outside.” His right hand never stopped. Spanning her, his thumb and his little finger kneaded her nipples. Tatiana moaned just as loudly. His left hand went around her mouth a little firmer. “Shh,” he said, smiling, short of breath.
“Shura, I’m going to die.”
“No, Tatia.”
“Breathe on me . . .”
He breathed on her. She kissed him hotly, her hands not leaving his hair. The friction and pressure on her breasts from his fingers was making her delirious; she moaned with such abandon that Alexander moved away. Tatiana sat in the blue light, topless, naked to the hips, gazing at him and panting. Her hands were gripping the hospital sheet.
“Tania,” Alexander said, looking at her with wonder and lust. “How can you be so innocent in this day and age? How can you be so innocent?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I knew more.”
Moving flush with her, he held her to him. “Knew more?”
“Had more experience. I just—”
“You’re joking, right?” Alexander whispered fiercely. “Don’t you understand me at all? It’s your innocence that’s driving me mad. Can’t you see that?”
His hands caressed her. “Don’t moan,” he said. “They’ll have me arrested.”
Tatiana wanted him to—but she wasn’t brave enough to say it. Gently she pushed his head downward. The only thing she could manage in a stilted whisper was, “Please . . .”
Smiling, he went to lock the door. The door wouldn’t lock. He took his rifle and stuck it against the door handle.
Alexander came back to Tatiana, laid her flat on the bed, covered her mouth, bent to her breasts, and sucked her nipples until she nearly fainted, quivering the whole time and groaning into the palm of his hand.
“God, is there more?” she whispered, panting.
“Have you ever had more?” Alexander asked, panting himself.
Tatiana stared into his face. To tell him the truth? He was a man—how could she tell him? She didn’t want to lie to him. She said nothing.
He sat up, pulling her up, too. “Have you? Tell me the truth. Please. I must know. Have you ever had more?”
She didn’t want to lie to him. “No,” she said. “I haven’t had more.”
His eyes glazed with amazement, heartache, and desire, Alexander lowered his head and said, “Oh, Tania, what are we going to do?”
“Shura . . .” Tatiana whispered, having forgotten everything else in the universe. She took his hands and put them on her breasts. “Please, Shura, please.”
Alexander quietly moved his hands away to rest on her legs. “We can’t here.”
“Then where?”
He couldn’t even look up at her.
Tatiana saw he didn’t have an answer. “What about you?” she said, nearly crying. “Don’t you want more? Don’t you need some
thing for yourself?”
“God, yes.” His voice was hoarse.
“What is it? What can I do?”
Smiling lightly, he whispered, “What are you offering?”
“I have no idea.” Tatiana timidly touched his thigh. “But I’ll do anything.” She kissed his neck. “Anything,” she whispered. “You tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” She moved her hand a little higher. Her fingers were trembling.
Now it was Alexander’s turn to groan. He gripped her hand, and said, “Tania, wait—is this how you want it to be for you?”
“I don’t know,” she moaned back, licking his lips. “I want it any—”
Suddenly the door moved and light streaked into the room. A nurse’s voice sounded from the outside. “Tatiana? Are you all right? What’s wrong with the door?”
Quickly Tatiana pulled up her nightgown, and Alexander went to his rifle, picked it up, turned on the light in the room, and opened the door.
“Everything is fine,” he said, an air of formality enveloping him. “Just came to say good night to Tatiana.”
“Good night?” the nurse shrieked. “Are you an idiot or something? It’s four in the morning. There are no visiting hours at four in the morning.”
“Nurse! You’re forgetting yourself,” said Alexander, raising his voice. “I’m a lieutenant in the Red Army.”
Substantially more quietly, the nurse said, “I heard screams, I thought she was hurt.”
“I’m fine,” said Tatiana, and her voice was all croaky. “We were just laughing.”
“And I was just leaving,” Alexander said.
“You’re going to wake up my other patients,” the nurse said.
“Good night, Tatiana,” Alexander said, his eyes boring into her. “I hope your leg feels better.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Tatiana said. “Come again soon.”
“Just not at four in the morning,” the nurse mumbled, coming inside to check on Tatiana. Behind the nurse’s back, Alexander pressed his fingers to his lips and blew Tatiana a kiss. Then he was gone.
There was no more sleep to be had that night, or the following morning. Tatiana had Vera bathe her twice, and kept obsessively brushing her teeth and tongue all day to make sure her breath was clean. She had no food, only water to drink, though by the afternoon, she nibbled on some bread left over from lunch.
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