“Because,” said Alexander, “my walking by that bench was the most unlikely part of mine.” He nodded. “All this wedged between us—and when we do our best, and grit our teeth, and move away from one another, struggling to reconstruct ourselves, fate intervenes again, and bricks fall from the sky that I remove from your alive and broken body. Was that also not meant to be, perhaps?”
Tatiana inhaled a sob. “That’s right,” she said softly. “We can’t forget that I owe you my life.” She gazed at him. “We can’t forget that I belong to you.”
“I like the sound of that,” Alexander said, hugging her tighter.
“Retreat, Shura,” Tatiana whispered. “Retreat and take your weapons with you. Spare me from him.” She paused. “He just needs to believe you don’t care for me, and then he will lose all interest. You’ll see. He’ll go away, he’ll go to the front. We all have to get through the war before we get to what’s on the other side. So will you do that?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Are you going to stop coming around?” she asked tremulously.
“No,” said Alexander. “I can’t retreat that far. Just stay away from me.”
“All right.” Her heart skipped. She clutched him.
“And forgive me in advance for my cold face. Can I trust you to do that?”
Nodding, Tatiana rubbed her cheek against his arm, pressing her head to him. “Trust me,” she whispered. “Trust in me. Alexander Barrington, I will never betray you.”
“Yes, but will you ever deny me?” he asked tenderly.
“Only in front of my Dasha,” she replied. “And your Dimitri.”
Lifting her face to him, with an ironic smile Alexander said, “Aren’t you glad now that God stopped us at the hospital?”
Tatiana smiled lightly back. “No.” She sat wrapped in his arms. They stared at each other. She put her palm out to him. He put his palm against hers. “Look,” she said quietly. “My fingertips barely come up to your second knuckle.”
“I’m looking,” he whispered, threading his fingers through hers and squeezing her hand so hard that Tatiana groaned and then blushed.
Bringing his face to hers, Alexander kissed the skin near her nose. “Have I ever told you I adore your freckles?” he murmured. “They are very enticing.”
She purred back. Their fingers remained entwined as they kissed.
“Tatiasha . . .” Alexander whispered, “you have amazing lips . . .” He paused and pulled away. “You are”—reluctantly she opened her eyes to meet his gaze—”you are oblivious to yourself. It’s one of your most endearing, most infuriating qualities . . .”
“Don’t know what you mean . . .” She had no brain left. “Shura, how can there be not a single place in this world we can go?” Her voice broke. “What kind of a life is this?”
“The Communist life,” Alexander replied.
They huddled closer.
“You crazy man,” she said fondly. “What were you doing fighting with me at Kirov, knowing all this was stacked against us?”
“Raging against my fate,” said Alexander. “It’s the only fucking thing I ever do. I just refuse to be defeated.”
I love you, Alexander, Tatiana wanted to say to him, but couldn’t. I love you. She bowed her head. “I have too young a heart . . .” she whispered.
Alexander’s arms engulfed her. “Tatia,” he whispered, “you do have a young heart.” He tipped her back a little and kissed her between her breasts. “I wish with all of mine, I wasn’t forced to pass it by.”
Suddenly he moved away and jumped to his feet. Tatiana herself heard a noise behind them in the arcade. Sergeant Petrenko stuck his head out onto the balcony, saying it was time for a shift change.
Alexander carried Tatiana down on his back, and then, with his arm around her, they hobbled through the city streets, back to Fifth Soviet. It was after two in the morning. Tomorrow their day would begin at six, and yet here they both were, clinging to each other in the last remaining hours of night. He carried her in his arms down Nevsky Prospekt. She carried his rifle. He carried her on his back.
They were very alone as they made their way through dark Leningrad.
7
The next evening after work Tatiana found her mother moaning in the room and Dasha sitting in the hallway, crying into her cup of tea. The Metanovs had just received a telegram from the long-defunct Novgorod command, informing them that on 13 July 1941 the train carrying one Pavel Metanov and hundreds of other young volunteers was blown up by the Germans. There were no survivors.
A week before I went to find him, thought Tatiana, pacing dully through the rooms. What did I do on the day that my brother’s train blew up? Did I work, did I ride the tram? Did I even think once of my brother? I’ve thought of him since. I’ve felt him not being here since. Dear Pasha, she thought, we lost you and we didn’t even know it. That’s the saddest loss of all, to go on for a few weeks, a few days, a night, a minute, and think everything is still all right when the structure you’ve built your life on has crumbled. We should have been mourning you, but instead we made plans, went to work, dreamed, loved, not knowing you were already behind us.
How could we not have known?
Wasn’t there a sign? Your reluctance to go? The packed suitcase? The not hearing from you?
Something we could point to so that next time we can say, wait, here is the sign. Next time we will know. And we will mourn right from the start.
Could we have kept you with us longer? Could we have all hung on to you, held you closer, played in the park once more with you to stave off the unforgiving fate for a few more days, a few more Sundays, a few more afternoons? Would that have been worth it, to have you for one more month before you were claimed, before you were lost to us? Knowing your inevitable future, would it have been worth it to see your face for another day, another hour, another minute before you were blink and gone?
Yes.
Yes, it would have been worth it. For you. And for us.
Papa was drunk, spread out on the couch, and Mama was wiping the couch, crying into the bucket of water. Tatiana offered to clean up. Mama pushed her away. Dasha was in the kitchen, crying while she was cooking dinner. Tatiana was filled with an acute sense of finality, a sharp anxiety for the days ahead. Anything could happen in a future forged by the incomprehensible present in which her twin brother was no longer alive.
As they prepared dinner, Tatiana said to Dasha, “Dash, a month ago you asked me if I thought Pasha was still alive, and I said—”
“Like I pay any attention to you, Tania,” snapped Dasha.
“Why did you ask me?” questioned a surprised Tatiana.
“I thought you were going to give me some comforting pat answer. Listen, I don’t want to talk about it. You might not be shocked, but we all are.”
When he came for dinner, Alexander raised his questioning eyebrows to Tatiana, who told him about the telegram.
No one ate the cabbage with a little canned ham that Dasha had made, except Alexander and Tatiana, who, despite a small hope, had been living with a lost Pasha since Luga.
Papa remained on the couch, and Mama sat by his side listening to the tick-tock, tick-tock of the radio’s metronome.
Dasha went to put the samovar on, and Alexander and Tatiana were left alone. He didn’t say anything, just bent his head slightly and peered into her face. For a moment they held each other’s eyes.
“Courage, Alexander,” she whispered.
“Courage, Tatiana.”
She left and went out onto the roof, looking for bombs in the chilly Leningrad night. Summer was over. Winter wasn’t far off.
Part Two
WINTER’S FIERCE EMBRACE
BESET AND BESIEGED
WHAT did it cost the soul to lie? At every step, with every breath, with every Soviet Information Bureau report, with every casualty list and every monthly ration card?
From the moment Tatiana woke up until she fell into a bleary sl
eep, she lied.
She wished Alexander would stop coming around. Lies.
She wished he would end it with Dasha. Alas. More lies.
No more trips to St. Isaac’s. That was good news. Lies.
No more tram rides, no more canals, no more Summer Garden, no more Luga, no more lips or eyes or palpitating breath. Good. Good. Good. More lies.
He was cold. He had an uncanny ability to act as if there were nothing behind his smiling face, or his steady hands, or his burned-down cigarette. Not a twitch showed on his face for Tatiana. That was good. Lies.
Curfew was imposed on Leningrad at the beginning of September. Rations were reduced again. Alexander stopped coming every day. That was good. More lies.
When Alexander came, he was extremely affectionate with Dasha, in front of Tatiana and in front of Dimitri. That was good. Lies.
Tatiana put on her own brave face and turned it away and smiled at Di-mitri and clenched her heart in a tight fist. She could do it, too. More lies.
Pouring tea. Such a simple matter, yet fraught with deceit. Pouring tea, for someone else before him. Her hands trembled with the effort.
Tatiana wished she could get out from the spell that was Leningrad at the beginning of September, get out from the circle of misery and love that besieged her.
She loved Alexander. Ah, finally. Something true to hold on to.
After news of Pasha, Papa worked sporadically, being frequently too intoxicated. His being home made it difficult for Tatiana to cook, to clean, to be in the rooms, to read. More lies. That’s not what made it difficult. It’s what made it unpleasant. Sitting on the roof was the only peace left to Tatiana, and even then peace was relative. There was no peace inside her.
While she was on the roof, she closed her eyes and imagined walking, without a cast, without a limp, with Alexander. They walked down Nevsky, to Palace Square, down the embankment, all around the Field of Mars. They meandered across the Fontanka Bridge, through the Summer Garden, and back out onto the embankment, and then to Smolny and then past Tauride Park, to Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin, past their bench, and on to Suvorovsky, and home. And as she walked with him, it felt as if she were walking into the rest of her life.
In her mind they had walked along the streets of their summer while she sat on the roof and heard the echo of gunfire and explosions. It was a small solace to think the gunfire wasn’t as close as it had been at Luga. Alexander wasn’t as close as he had been at Luga either.
Alexander’s own visits became as truncated as Tatiana’s rations. He was rationing himself the way the Leningrad Council was rationing food. Tatiana missed him, wishing for a second, a moment alone with him again, just to remind herself that the summer of 1941 had not been an illusion, that there had indeed been a time when she had walked along a canal wall, holding his rifle, while he was looking at her and laughing.
There was little laughing nowadays.
“The Germans aren’t here yet, right, Alexander?” asked Dasha over tea—the damned tea. “When they come, will we repel von Leeb?”
“Yes,” Alexander replied. Tatiana knew. More lies.
Tatiana would grimly watch Dasha nuzzling Alexander. She would avert her eyes and say to Dimitri, “Hey, want to hear a joke?”
“What, Tania? No, not really. Sorry, I’m a little preoccupied.”
“That’s fine,” she would say, watching Alexander smile at Dasha. Lies, lies, and lies.
All that Alexander was doing wasn’t enough. Dimitri wasn’t leaving Tatiana alone.
Meanwhile, Tatiana hadn’t heard from Marina about coming to live with them, and in the hospital Vera, along with the other nurses, was anxious about the war. Tatiana felt it herself—war was no longer something on the Luga River, something that had swallowed Pasha, something that was fought by the Ukrainians far away in their smoldering villages or by the British in their distant and proper London. It was coming here.
Well, something better come here, Tatiana thought, because I can’t imagine continuing this way.
The city seemed to hold its collective breath. Tatiana certainly held hers.
For four nights in a row Tatiana cooked fried cabbage for dinner, with less and less oil each day.
“What the hell are you cooking for us, Tania?” asked Mama.
“You call this cooking?” Papa remarked.
“I can’t even dip my bread in the oil. Where is the oil?”
“Couldn’t find any,” said Tatiana.
The radio offered only the most depressing news. Tatiana thought the announcers must deliberately wait until Soviet performance at the front was particularly awful and then begin broadcasting. After Mga fell at the end of August, Tatiana had heard that Dubrovka was under attack—her mother’s mother, Babushka Maya, lived in Dubrovka, a rural town just across the river, right outside city limits.
And then Dubrovka fell on September 6.
Suddenly Tatiana got unexpectedly good news, and good news was becoming as hard to come by as oil. Babushka Maya was coming to live with them on Fifth Soviet! Sadly, Mikhail, Mama’s stepfather, had died of TB a few days earlier, and when the Germans burned Dubrovka, Babushka Maya escaped to the city.
When Babushka came, she took one room, and Mama and Papa moved back in with Dasha and Tatiana. No more please, Tania, go away.
Babushka Maya had lived all her long life in Leningrad and said that it had never even occurred to her to evacuate. “My life, my death, all right here,” she told Tatiana as she unpacked.
She had married her first husband back at the turn of the century and had Tatiana’s mother. After her husband disappeared in the war of 1905, she never remarried, though she lived with poor tubercular Uncle Mikhail for thirty years. Tatiana had once asked Babushka why she never married Uncle Mikhail, and Babushka had replied, “What if my Fedor comes back, Tanechka? I’d be in quite a pickle then.” Babushka painted and studied art; her paintings had hung in galleries before the revolution, but after 1917 she made her living by illustrating propaganda materials for the Bolsheviks. Everywhere in her house in Dubrovka, Tatiana would find sketchbooks filled with pictures of chairs and food and flowers.
After she arrived, Babushka told Tatiana that she didn’t have time to get anything out of her house before it burned. “Don’t worry, Tanechka. I’ll draw you a nice new picture of a chair.”
Tatiana said, “Maybe you can draw me a nice apple pie instead? It’s the season for them.”
The following evening, on September 7, Marina finally arrived—just before dinner. Marina’s father had died in the fighting around Izhorsk, died as an untrained assistant gunner in a tank he had made himself. Uncle Boris was beloved by the Metanovs, and his death would have been a terrible blow, had the family not been reeling from their own nightmare of losing Pasha.
Marina’s mother remained hospitalized; unrelated to the war, she was slowly dying of renal failure. Tatiana’s naïveté surprised even herself. How could anything that happened nowadays be unrelated to the war? First Uncle Misha, now Aunt Rita. There was something universally unfair about that—for people to be dying of causes unrelated to the trenches Alexander had been digging.
Papa looked at Marina’s suitcase. Mama looked at Marina’s suitcase. Dasha looked at Marina’s suitcase. Tatiana said, “Marinka, let me help you unpack.”
Papa asked if she was staying for a while, and Tatiana said, “I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Papa, her father is dead and your sister is dying. She can stay with us for a while, no?”
“Tania,” Marina said, “have you not told Uncle Georg that you invited me? Don’t worry, I brought my ration card, Uncle Georg.”
Papa glared at Tatiana. Mama glared at Tatiana. Dasha glared at Tatiana.
Tatiana said, “Let’s unpack you, Marina.”
That night there was a small problem with dinner. The girls had left the food on the stove for a moment, and when they came back to the kitchen, they found that the fried potatoes, on
ions, and one small fresh tomato had disappeared. The frying pan had been left empty and dirty. A few of the potatoes had stuck to the bottom, and there they remained, encrusted and covered with a bit of oil. Dasha and Tatiana looked around the kitchen incredulously and vacuously, even coming back inside, thinking maybe they had already brought the dinner in and simply forgotten.
The potatoes were gone.
Dasha, because that was her way, dragged Tatiana with her, knocking on every door of the apartment, asking about the potatoes. Zhanna Sarkova opened the door, looking unkempt and haggard, almost as if she were related to crazy Slavin.
“Is everything all right?” Tatiana asked.
“Fine!” barked Zhanna. “Potatoes—my husband’s disappeared! You haven’t seen him in Grechesky, have you?”
Tatiana shook her head.
“I thought maybe he was wounded somewhere.”
“Wounded where?” Tatiana gently wanted to know.
“How should I know? And no, I haven’t seen your stupid potatoes.” She slammed the door.
Slavin was lying on the floor, muttering. His small room reeked of everything but fried potatoes.
“How is he going to feed himself?” asked Tatiana as they walked by.
“That’s not our problem,” said Dasha.
The Iglenkos were not even home. After the loss of Volodya alongside Pasha, Petr Iglenko spent all his days and nights at the factory that melted down old scrap metal for ammunition. They had just got more bad news. Petka, their eldest son, had been killed in Pulkovo. Only their two youngest, Anton and Kirill, remained.
“Poor Nina,” said Tatiana as they headed back down the corridor to their rooms.
“Poor Nina!” exclaimed Dasha. “What the hell are you talking about, Tania? She still has two sons. Lucky Nina.”
When they returned to the door that led to their own hallway, Dasha said, “They’re all lying.”
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