Tatiana crawled away to the wall and put her face into her hands.
“I am not going anywhere,” she said. “There is no point.”
“Tania,” Sayers said, coming after her and putting his hand on her head, “please don’t say that. Honey . . . please . . . let me save you for him.”
“There is no point.”
“No point? What about his baby?” exclaimed the doctor.
She took her hands away from her face and stared dully at Sayers. “He told you we are having a baby?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Flustered, the doctor said, “I don’t know.” His hand was still on Tatiana’s head. “You don’t feel good. You’re all cold. You’re—”
She did not reply. She was convulsing.
“Are you going to be all right?”
She covered her face.
“Will you stay here? Just stay in my office and wait. Don’t get up, all right. Sleep maybe?”
Tatiana made a rasping noise that sounded like an animal pressing its gaping wound into the ground, hoping to die before it bled to death.
“Your patients were asking for you,” Sayers said softly. “Do you think—”
“No.” Through her hands. “Please leave me. I need to be alone.”
Until night fell, she sat on the floor in Dr. Sayers’s office. She put her head into her knees, and sat against the wall. Until she couldn’t sit up anymore, and then she lay down, curled into a ball.
Dimly she heard the doctor return. She heard his gasp and tried to get up but couldn’t. Helping her up, Sayers sucked in his breath when he saw her face. “God, Tania. Please. I need you—”
“Doctor!” Tatiana exclaimed. “All the things you need me to be, I can’t be right now. I’ll be what I can. Is it time?”
“It’s time, Tania. Let’s go.” He lowered his voice. “Look, I went to your bed and got your backpack. It’s yours, right?”
“Yes,” she said, taking it.
“Do you have anything else you need to bring?”
“No,” Tatiana whispered. “The backpack is all I have. Is it just you and me going?”
Dr. Sayers paused before he answered her. “Chernenko came to me earlier today and asked if our plans had changed now that—”
“And you said . . .” Her weak legs weren’t holding her. She sank into the chair and looked up. “I can’t go with him,” she said. “I just can’t.”
“I don’t want to take him either, but what can I do? He told me, not in so many words, that without him we wouldn’t be able to get you through the first checkpoint. I want to get you out, Tania. What else can I do?”
“Nothing,” said Tatiana.
She helped Sayers collect his few things and carried his doctor’s bag and her nurse’s bag outside. The Red Cross vehicle was a big jeep without the enclosed solid steel body customary for ambulances. This one had glass covering the passenger cab but only canvas covering the back, not the safest for the wounded or medical personnel. But it had been the only truck available at the time in Helsinki, and Sayers could not wait for a proper ambulance. The square Red Cross badges were sewn into the tarpaulin.
Dimitri was waiting by the side of the truck. Tatiana did not look or acknowledge him as she opened the tarpaulin and climbed in to load the first aid kit and the box of plasma.
“Tania?” Dimitri said.
Dr. Sayers came up from behind, and said to Dimitri, “All right, let’s hurry along. You get in the back. Once we leave here, you can change into the Finnish pilot’s clothes. I don’t know how you’re going to get your arm through . . . Tania, where are those clothes?” Then to Dimitri, “Do you need morphine? How is your face doing?”
“Terrible. I can barely see. Is my arm going to get infected?”
Tatiana glanced at Dimitri from inside the truck. His right arm was in a cast and sling. His face was swollen black and blue. She wanted to ask what had happened to him, but she didn’t care.
“Tania?” Dimitri called to her. “I heard about this morning. I’m sorry.”
Tatiana retrieved the Finnish pilot’s clothes from their hiding place and threw them on the truck floor in front of Dimitri.
“Tatiana, come,” Dr. Sayers told her. “Let me help you down, we have to get going.”
Taking Sayers’s hand, Tatiana jumped down past Dimitri.
“Tania?” Dimitri repeated.
She lifted her eyes to him filled with such unwavering condemnation that Dimitri could not help but look away. “Just put on the clothes,” Tatiana said through her teeth. “Then get down on the floor and lie very still.”
“Look, I’m sorry. I know how you—”
Clenching her fists, Tatiana lunged furiously at Dimitri, and she would have punched him in his broken nose had Dr. Sayers not restrained her from behind, saying, “Tania, God. Please. No. No.”
Backing away, Dimitri opened his mouth and stammered, “I said I was very s—”
“I don’t want to hear your fucking lies!” she yelled, her arms still being held by Dr. Sayers. “I don’t want you to speak to me ever again. Do you understand?”
Dimitri, mumbling nervously that he didn’t understand why she should be upset with him, got into the back of the truck.
Dr. Sayers got behind the wheel and stared wide-eyed at Tatiana.
“Ready, Doctor. Let’s go.” Tatiana buttoned up her nurse’s white coat with the Red Cross badge on the sleeve, and she tied her little white hat over her hair. She had all of Alexander’s money, she had his Pushkin book, she had his letters and their photographs. She had his cap, and she had his ring.
They drove into the night.
Tatiana held Sayers’s open map but could not have helped him get to Lisiy Nos. Through the northern Russian woods Dr. Sayers drove his small truck, as they made their way on unpaved, muddy, snowy, liquid roads. Tatiana saw nothing at all, staring out the side window into the darkness, counting inside her head, trying to keep herself upright.
Sayers kept talking to her nonstop in English. “Tania, dear, it will be all right—”
“Will it, Doctor?” she asked, also in English. “And what are we going to do with him?”
“Who cares? He can do what he likes once we get to Helsinki. I’m not thinking about him at all. All I’m thinking about is you. We will get to Helsinki, drop off some supplies, and then you and I will take a Red Cross plane to Stockholm. Then from Stockholm we’ll ride the train to Göteborg on the North Sea, and we’ll take a protected vessel across the North Sea to England. Tania, can you hear me? Do you understand?”
“I can hear you,” she said faintly. “I understand.”
“In England I’ve got a couple of stops to make, but then we’ll either fly to the U.S. or take one of the passenger liners from Liverpool. And once you’re in New York—”
“Matthew, please,” whispered Tatiana.
“I’m just trying to make you feel better, Tania. It’s going to be all right.”
From the back Dimitri said, “Tania, I didn’t know you could speak En-glish.”
Tatiana did not reply at first. Then she picked up a metal pipe from under Dr. Sayers’s feet that she knew he kept in case of trouble. Swinging her arm, she smashed the pipe hard against the metal divider separating her from Dimitri, startling Dr. Sayers nearly off the side of the road. “Dimitri,” she said loudly, “you have to stay quiet and stop talking. You are a Finn. Not another Russian syllable out of you.”
Dropping the pipe onto the floor, she folded her arms around her stomach.
“Tania . . .”
“Don’t, Doctor.”
“You haven’t eaten, have you?” the doctor asked gently.
Tatiana shook her head. “I’m not thinking about food at all,” she replied.
In the middle of the night they stopped by the side of the road. Dimitri had already slipped on the Finnish uniform. “It’s very big,” Tatiana heard him say to Dr. Sayers. “I hope I don’t have to stand u
p in it. Anyone will see it doesn’t fit me. Do you have any more morphine? I’m—”
Dr. Sayers came back a few minutes later. “If I give him any more morphine, he’ll be dead. That arm is going to give him trouble.”
“What happened to him?” Tatiana asked in English.
Dr. Sayers was quiet. “He was nearly killed,” he said at last. “He has a very nasty open fracture.” He paused. “He may lose that arm. I don’t know how he is conscious, upright. I thought he’d be in a coma after yesterday, yet today he is walking.” Sayers shook his head.
Tatiana didn’t speak. How could he still be standing? she thought. How could the rest of us—strong, resolute, spirited, young—be falling on our knees, be demolished by our life, while he remains standing?
“Someday, Tania,” Sayers said in English, “you will have to explain to me the—” He broke off, pointing to the back of the truck. “Because I swear to Christ, I don’t understand at all.”
“I do not think I could explain,” whispered Tatiana.
On the way to Lisiy Nos they were stopped half a dozen times at checkpoints for papers. Sayers presented papers on himself and papers on his nurse, Jane Barrington. Dimitri, who was a Finn named Tove Hanssen, had no papers, just a metal dogtag with the dead man’s name on it. He was a wounded pilot being taken back to Helsinki for a prisoner exchange. All six times the guards opened the tarpaulin, shined a flashlight in Dimitri’s battered face, and then waved Sayers on.
“It’s nice to be protected by the Red Cross flag,” said Sayers.
Tatiana nodded.
The doctor pulled over by the side of the road, turning the engine off. “Are you cold?” he asked.
“I’m not cold.” Not cold enough. “Do you want me to drive?”
“You know how to drive?”
In Luga, when she was sixteen, the summer before she met Alexander, Tatiana had befriended an army corporal stationed with the local village Soviet. The corporal let Tatiana and Pasha drive around in his truck for the whole summer. Pasha was annoying because he always wanted to be behind the wheel, but the corporal was kind and let her behind the wheel, too. She drove the truck well, better than Pasha, she thought, and the corporal told her she was a quick learner.
“I know how to drive.”
“No, it’s too dark and icy.” Sayers closed his eyes for an hour.
Tatiana sat quietly, her hands in her coat. She was trying to remember the last time she and Alexander had made love. It was a Sunday in November, but where was it? She couldn’t recall. What did they do? Where were they? Did she look up at him? Was Inga outside their door? Was it in the bath, on the couch, on the floor? She couldn’t remember.
What did Alexander say to her last night? He made a joke, he kissed her, he smiled, he touched her hand, he told her he was going across to Volkhov to get promoted. Were they lying to him? Was he lying to her?
He had been trembling. She had thought he was cold. What else did he say? I’ll see you. So casual. Not even blinking. What else? Remember Orbeli.
What was that?
Alexander often told her fascinating little tidbits he picked up in the army, names of generals, stories about Hitler, or Rommel, about England or Italy, about Stalingrad, about Richthoffen, von Paulus, El Alamein, Montgomery. It wasn’t unusual that he would say a word she didn’t understand. But Orbeli was a word she hadn’t heard before, and yet there was Alexander—asking her to remember it.
Tatiana nudged Dr. Sayers awake. “Dr. Sayers, what is Orbeli?” she asked. “Who is Orbeli?”
“Don’t know,” Sayers replied sleepily. “Never heard of it. Why?”
She said nothing.
Sayers began driving again.
They got to the silent, sleeping border between the Soviet Union and Finland at six in the morning.
Alexander had told Tatiana it wasn’t really a border, it was a line of defense, which meant there was anywhere from thirty to sixty meters between the Soviet and Finnish troops. Each side marked its territory and then sat and waited out the war.
To Tatiana the Finnish conifer and willow woods looked like the Soviet conifer and willow woods they had been driving through for the last long hours of the night. The headlights from their truck illuminated a narrow strip of unpaved road ahead. Sunrise was slow in coming toward the ides of March.
Dr. Sayers suggested that if everyone was sleeping, maybe they could just drive across and present their papers to the Finns instead of to the Soviets. Tatiana thought that was an excellent idea.
Suddenly someone yelled for them to halt. Three sleepy NKVD border troops came up to the doctor’s window. Sayers showed them the papers. After thoroughly looking over the documents, the NKVD soldier said to Tatiana in accented English, “A cold wind, isn’t it?”
And in clear English, she replied, “Very bitter. They say it is going to snow.”
The soldier nodded, and then all three men went around to take a look at Dimitri in the back of the truck. Tatiana waited.
Silence.
The flashlight shined.
Silence.
Then, “Wait,” Tatiana heard. “Let me see his face again.”
The flashlight shined.
Tatiana sat immobile and listened intently.
She heard one of the soldiers laugh and say something to Dimitri in Finnish. Tatiana didn’t speak Finnish, so she couldn’t guarantee that it was Finnish, but the Soviet soldier spoke to Dimitri in a language Tatiana didn’t understand, and obviously Dimitri hadn’t understood either, because he did not reply.
The Soviet officer repeated his question more loudly.
Dimitri remained silent. Then he said something in what sounded to Tatiana like Finnish. After a short snickering silence from the troops, one of them said, in Russian, “Get out of the truck.”
“Oh, no,” whispered Dr. Sayers. “Are we caught?”
“Shh,” said Tatiana.
The soldiers repeated their order to Dimitri to get out of the truck. He didn’t move.
Dr. Sayers turned around and said, in Russian, “He is wounded. He can’t get up.”
And the Soviet officer said, “He’ll get up if he wants to live. Talk to your patient in whatever language he speaks and tell him to get up.”
“Doctor,” whispered Tatiana, “be very careful. If he can’t save himself, he will try to kill us all.”
The three NKVD soldiers dragged Dimitri out of the truck and then ordered Sayers and Tatiana out. The doctor came around and stood by Tatiana’s side near her open door. His slender body was slightly in front of her. Tatiana, feeling herself weakening, touched Sayers’s coat, hoping for some strength. She felt ready to faint. Dimitri was out in the open in plain sight a few meters away from them, dwarfed by the Finnish uniform, a uniform that would have been just right on a bigger soldier.
Laughing, their rifles trained on him, one of the NKVD troops said, in Russian, “So, hey, Finn, we ask you how you got your face wound, and you tell us that you are going to Helsinki. You want to explain?”
Dimitri said nothing, but stared pleadingly at Tatiana.
Dr. Sayers said, “Look, we picked him up in Leningrad, he was grievously wounded—”
Imperceptibly, Tatiana nudged Dr. Sayers. “Keep quiet,” she whispered. “It’s trouble.”
“He may be grievously wounded,” said the NKVD man, “he’s just not grievously Finnish.” The three soldiers laughed. One of the NKVD men walked up to Dimitri. “Chernenko, don’t you recognize me?” he said in Russian, cracking up. “It’s me, Rasskovsky.” Dimitri lowered his good arm. “Keep your hand above your head!” the NKVD soldier yelled, laughing. “Keep it up.” Tatiana saw they were not taking Dimitri seriously, his right arm in a sling. Where was Dimitri’s weapon? she wondered. Did he have one on him?
The two other soldiers stood a short distance away from Dimitri. “You know him?” one of them asked, lowering his rifle.
“Know him?” Rasskovsky exclaimed. “Of course I know him! Chernenk
o, have you forgotten how much you were charging me for cigarettes? And how I had to pay because I just couldn’t be without my smokes in the middle of the forest?” He laughed. “Just four weeks ago I saw you. Have you already forgotten?”
Dimitri didn’t say a word.
“Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you just because of the pretty color on your face?” Rasskovsky seemed to be having a very good time. “So, Chernenko, darling, can you explain what you’re doing wearing a Finnish uniform and lying in the back of a Red Cross truck? The arm and the face I understand. Someone didn’t like your extortionate prices?”
One of the other two soldiers said, “Rasskovsky, you don’t think our runner is trying to escape, do you?” Everyone roared with laughter.
Under the glare of the lights Dimitri stared at Tatiana, who held his gaze for only an instant. Then she turned her whole body away and moved closer to Dr. Sayers, her arms tight around herself. “I’m cold,” she said.
“Tatiana!” yelled Dimitri in Russian to her. “You want to tell them? Or should I?”
Rasskovsky turned to look at her, and said, “Tatiana? An American named Tatiana?” He walked over to Sayers. “What’s going on, here? Why is he talking to her in Russian? Let me see her papers again.”
Dr. Sayers showed Tatiana’s papers. They were in order.
Looking right at Rasskovsky, Tatiana said in English, “Tatiana? What is he talking about? Listen, what do we know? He said he was Finnish. Right, Doctor?”
“Absolutely,” Dr. Sayers replied, stepping forward and away from Tatiana and the truck, his friendly hand on Rasskovsky’s back. “Listen, no trouble, I hope. He came to our hospital—”
At that moment Dimitri took out his sidearm and shot at Rasskovsky walking in front of Tatiana.
She wasn’t sure whom Dimitri was aiming for—he was shooting with his left arm—but she wasn’t about to stand there to find out. She dropped down. He could have been aiming at the NKVD man. He could have. But he missed and shot Dr. Sayers instead. Or maybe Dimitri didn’t miss. Or maybe he was shooting at her—standing behind the two men—and missed. Tatiana didn’t want to think about it.
Rasskovsky ran toward Dimitri, who fired again, this time hitting Rasskovsky. Dimitri wasn’t quick enough to turn his fire on the other two NKVD soldiers, who, as if suspended in still life, struggled to remove their rifles from their shoulders. Finally they opened fire on Dimitri, who was thrown several meters by the force of the impact.
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