The Bronze Horseman

by Paullina Simons

  Suddenly there was return fire from the woods. This fire was not slow and methodical bolt-action fire—the metronome of battle: five cartridges, flip open bolt, thumb in another five, close bolt. No, this was a bursting machine-gun fire that broke apart the truck’s elongated, flattop front end and the entire windshield. The two NKVD men disappeared.

  The window of the cabin door above her shattered, and Tatiana felt something hard and sharp fall and lodge itself in her cheek. She tasted liquid metal, and her tongue ran over and got caught on something sharp inside her mouth. When she opened her mouth, blood dripped out. She had no time to think about it, crawling under the nose of the truck.

  Tatiana saw Dimitri on the ground. Dr. Sayers was on the ground out in the open. There was an endless barrage of fire, a stifling ringing, a constant popping against the steel hood of the Red Cross truck.

  Tatiana crawled out, grabbed hold of Dr. Sayers, and dragged his motionless body with her. Pulling him close and covering him with herself, she thought she saw Dimitri still moving, or was it the strobe lights of gunfire? No, it was him. He was trying to crawl to the truck. From the Soviet side a mortar shell flew into the air and burst in the woods. Fire, black smoke, screams. From here? From there? She couldn’t tell. There was no here or there. There was just Dimitri making his way toward Tatiana. She saw him in the incongruous headlights, searching for her, finding her, and in the second or two when there was no noise she heard him calling for her: “Tatiana . . . Tatiana . . . please . . .” with his hand outstretched. Tatiana closed her eyes.

  He will not come near me.

  Tatiana heard a whistling noise, a flash, and then a charge that exploded so close that the wave pushed her head into the undercarriage of the truck, and she lost consciousness.

  When she came to, Tatiana decided not to open her eyes. She couldn’t hear very well, having just come out of a dead faint, but she felt warm, as if she were in the hot bathhouse in Lazarevo when she would throw hot water on the rocks and the rocks would sizzle and release steam. Dr. Sayers was still partially underneath her body. There was nowhere for her to go. Her tongue ran over the sharp object in her mouth again. She tasted metallic salt.

  Sayers felt clammy. Blood loss. Tatiana opened her eyes, felt around on him. A small flame behind the truck illuminated the doctor’s pale face. Where was he hit? With her fingers she felt around under his coat and found the bullet hole in his shoulder. She didn’t find the exit hole, but she pressed her gloved hand into his arm to try to clot the wound. Then she closed her eyes again. There was a blaze behind her, but there were no more gunshots.

  How long did that take? Two minutes? Three?

  She felt herself starting to slip down into a black abyss. Not only could she not open her eyes, she did not want to.

  How long for her life to end, to continue? How long for Dr. Sayers to sleep, how long for Dimitri to stand alone in the glare? How long for Tatiana? How much longer for her?

  How long did it take for Alexander to rescue Dr. Sayers and get hit himself? Tatiana had watched it all from the Red Cross truck, positioned behind the trees on the clearing leading to the slope to the river, the slope down which Alexander ran for Anatoly Marazov.

  Tatiana had watched it all.

  Those two minutes of watching Alexander run for Marazov, shout at Dr. Sayers, run to Dr. Sayers, pull him out, and then drag three men to the truck had been the longest two minutes of Tatiana’s life.

  He had been so close to safety. She watched the shell from the German plane fall on the ice and explode. She watched Alexander fly headfirst into the armored truck. When Alexander went down, Tatiana grabbed a box full of cylindrical plasma containers and her nurse’s bag, jumped down from the back of the Red Cross truck, and ran down the embankment, caught near the ice by a corporal who yanked her down and yelled, “What are you, crazy?”

  “I’m a nurse,” she said. “I have to help the doctor.”

  “Yes, you’ll be a dead nurse. Stay down.”

  She stayed down for exactly two seconds. She saw Dr. Sayers hiding behind the armored vehicle that protected him and Alexander from direct fire. She saw him waving for help. She saw Alexander not getting up. Tatiana jumped up and ran out onto the ice before the corporal could utter a sound. She ran at first and then got scared by the crashing artillery shells and dropped onto her stomach, crawling the rest of the way. Alexander was motionless. His shredded white camouflage coat had an enlarging red stain on the right side of his back, surrounded by black ash. Tatiana crawled on her hands and knees to him and pushed the helmet away from his blood-covered head.

  One look at Alexander’s face told Tatiana he was about to die.

  He was gray and flaxen. The ice underneath him was slippery from his blood. She was kneeling in it. Tatiana said, “Hypovolemic shock. Needs plasma.” Dr. Sayers instantly agreed. While he was searching for a surgical instrument to cut open Alexander’s sleeve, Tatiana took off her hat and pressed it hard into Alexander’s side to slow his blood loss. Reaching down into his right boot, she pulled out his army knife and threw it to Dr. Sayers, saying, “Here, use this.” She didn’t think she breathed once.

  Sayers cut open Alexander’s coat and his uniform to expose his left forearm, found a vein, and attached a syringe, a tube, and a plasma drip to him. When he left to get the stretcher and some help, Tatiana, by this time sitting on Alexander’s wound, cut open his other sleeve, got out another bottle of plasma, another syringe, another catheter, and attached it to a vein on his right forearm. She adjusted the syringe so that it dripped the fluid into Alexander’s body at sixty-nine drops a minute, the maximum possible. She sat on his back pressing into him as hard as she could, her white hat and her white coat saturated in his blood, waiting for the stretcher and muttering, “Come on, soldier, come on.”

  By the time the doctor came back, her plasma bottle had emptied and Tatiana had attached another one. Taking off her stained coat, Tatiana laid it on the stretcher sideways, and when they lifted Alexander onto it, she wrapped her coat tightly around his wound. He was excruciatingly heavy to lift, because his clothes were wet. Dr. Sayers asked how they were going to carry him, and she replied that they were just going to pick him up on three and carry him, and he said incredulously, you are going to carry him? and she said without blinking, yes, I will carry him, NOW.

  And afterward Tatiana struggled with the Soviet doctors, with the Soviet nurses, and even with Dr. Sayers, who had taken a look at Alexander’s blood loss and the hole in his side and said, forget it. We can’t do anything for him. Put him in the terminal ward. Give him a gram of morphine, but no more.

  Tatiana hooked an IV to Alexander’s vein herself and fed him morphine and fed him plasma. And when that wasn’t enough, she gave Alexander her blood. And when that wasn’t enough, and it looked as if nothing was going to be enough, she trickled blood from her arteries into his veins.

  Drop by drop.

  And as she sat by him, she whispered. All I want is for my spirit to be heard through your pain. I sit here with you, pouring my love into you, drop by drop, hoping you’ll hear me, hoping you’ll lift your head to me and smile again. Shura, can you hear me? Can you feel me sitting by you letting you know you’re still alive? Can you feel my hand on your beating heart, my hand letting you know I believe in you, I believe in your eternal life, I believe you will live, live through this and grow wings to soar over death, and when you open your eyes again, I will be here. I will always be here, believing in you, hoping for you, loving you. I’m right here. Feel me, Alexander. Feel me and live.

  He lived.

  Now as Tatiana lay under the Red Cross truck in the coming of the cold March dawn, she thought, did I save him so he could die on the ice without my arms to hold him, to hold his young, beautiful, war-ravaged body, the body that loved me with all its great might? Could my Alexander have fallen alone?

  She would rather have buried him as she had buried her sister than live through this. Would rather have known s
he had given him peace than live through another starless second of this.

  Tatiana could not endure another moment of herself. Not another moment. In one more instant there was going to be nothing left of her.

  Dimly she heard Dr. Sayers moan. Tatiana blinked, blinked away Alexander, opened her eyes, and turned to Sayers. “Doctor?” He was semiconscious. The forest was still. The dawn was steel blue. Tatiana disentangled herself from him and crawled out from under the truck. Rubbing her face, she saw it was covered in blood. Her fingers touched a chunk of glass stuck in her cheek. She tried to pull it out, but it hurt too much. Grabbing it by one side, Tatiana wrenched it out, screaming.

  It didn’t hurt enough.

  She continued to scream, her eviscerated cries echoing back to her through the barren woods. Her hands gripping her legs, her stomach, her chest, Tatiana knelt in the snow and screamed as the blood dripped from her face.

  She lay down on the ground and pressed her bleeding cheek into the snow. It wasn’t cold enough. It couldn’t numb her enough.

  There was nothing sharp in her mouth anymore, but her tongue was torn and swollen. Getting up, Tatiana sat in the snow, looking around. It was eerily quiet; the bleak, bare birches contrasted somberly with the white earth. No sound anymore, not an echo, not even of her, not a gray branch out of place. Deep in the marsh, close to the Gulf of Finland.

  But things were out of place. The Red Cross truck was ruined. One NKVD man in his dark blue uniform lay to the right of her. Dimitri was on the ground within a meter of the truck. His eyes were still open, and his hand remained extended to Tatiana, as if by some providential miracle he expected to be delivered from his own eternity.

  Tatiana stared for a moment into Dimitri’s frozen face. How Alexander would enjoy the story of Dimitri’s getting recognized by the NKVD. She looked away.

  Alexander had been right—this was a good spot to get through the border. It was poorly manned and poorly defended. The NKVD troops were lightly armed; they had their rifles, and from what she could see they had one mortar, but one wasn’t enough to keep them alive—the Finns had bigger shells. On the Finnish side of the border things were quiet, too. Despite the size of their shells, were they also all dead? Looking through the trees, Tatiana could see no movement. She was still on the Russian side. What to do? New NKVD reinforcements would no doubt be here soon, and she would quickly be whisked away for questioning, and then?

  Tatiana felt her stomach through her coat. Her hands were freezing.

  She crawled back under the Red Cross truck. “Dr. Sayers,” she whispered, putting her hands on his neck. “Matthew, can you hear me?” He was not answering. He was in bad shape; his pulse was around forty, and his blood pressure felt weak through his carotid. Tatiana lay down by the doctor, and from his coat pocket she pulled out his U.S. passport and both their Red Cross travel documents. They plainly stated in English that one Matthew Sayers and one Jane Barrington were headed for Helsinki.

  What should she do now? Should she go? Go where? And go how?

  Climbing inside the cabin, she turned the ignition. Nothing. It was hopeless. Tatiana could see what extensive damage had been done by the gunfire to the front end. She peered through the woods across the Finnish side. Was anyone moving? No. She saw human forms on the snow and behind them a Finnish army truck, a little bigger than their Red Cross one. That wasn’t the only difference between them: the Finnish truck didn’t look ruined.

  Tatiana hopped out and said to Dr. Sayers, “I’ll be right back.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “All right, then,” she said, and walked across the Soviet-Finnish border. It felt about the same, she thought, being in Finland as being in the Soviet Union. Tatiana walked carefully among the half dozen dead Finns. In the truck sat another man, dead behind the wheel, his body keeled forward. To get inside she would have to pull him out.

  To get inside she heaved him out, and he fell with a thud onto the trampled snow. Climbing in, Tatiana tried the key, still in the ignition. The truck had stalled. She put it in neutral and tried to start it again. It was dead. She tried again. Nothing. She looked at the gauge on the gas tank. It said full. Jumping down, she went to the back of the truck and climbed under to see if the gas tank was punctured. No, it was intact. Tatiana went around the nose of the truck and opened the hood. For a minute she stared, unfocused, but then something came to her. It was a diesel engine. How would she know that?

  Kirov.

  The word Kirov sent a long shudder through her body, and she fought off the impulse to lie down in the snow again. This was a diesel engine, and she used to make diesel engines for tanks in the Kirov factory. “I made you a whole tank today, Alexander!” What did she remember about them?

  Nothing. Between the diesel engines and the woods in Finland so much had happened that she could barely remember the number of the tram she took to get home.

  One.

  It was tram Number 1. They would take it part of the way home so they could walk the rest down the Obvodnoy Canal. Walk, talking about war and America, their arms bumping into one another.

  Diesel engine.

  She was cold. She pulled the hat down over her ears.

  Cold. Diesel engines had trouble starting in the cold. She checked to see how many cylinders it had. This one had six. Six pistons, six combustion chambers. The combustion chambers were too cold; the air just couldn’t get hot enough to cause the fuel to ignite. Where was that little glowworm Tatiana used to screw in on the side of the combustion chamber?

  Tatiana found all six glowworms. She needed to heat them up a little so the air could get warm enough during compression. Otherwise the engine was drawing below-zero air into the cylinders and expecting it to warm up to 540°C in the one-up-one-down motion of the pistons.

  Tatiana looked about her. Five dead soldiers lay in the vicinity. She stuck her hand into the small pocket of one of their rucksacks and pulled out a lighter. Alexander had always kept his lighter in the small pocket of his rucksack, too. She used to fetch it to light his cigarettes for him. Flicking the lighter on, she held the small flame to the first glow plug for a few seconds. Then to the second one. Then to the third. By the time she got through all six, the first one was as cold as before she had started. Tatiana had had quite enough. Gritting her teeth and groaning, she broke a low branch off a birch and tried to light it. The branch was too wet from the snow. It wouldn’t light.

  She looked around in frantic desperation. She knew exactly what she was searching for. She found it behind the truck in a small case on the body of one of the Finns. He was wearing a flamethrower. Tatiana yanked the flamethrower off the dead Finn, her jaw set and her face dark, and strapped it to her back like Alexander’s rucksack. Holding the propellant hose firmly in her left hand, she pulled out the ignition plug in the tank, flicked the lighter on, and pressed it to the ignition.

  Half a second passed and all was still, and then a white nitrate flame burst out of the hose, the recoil nearly knocking Tatiana backward onto the snow. Nearly. She remained standing.

  She walked up to the open hood of the truck and pointed the flame over the engine for a few moments. Then a few more moments. She could have stood there for thirty seconds, she couldn’t tell. Finally with her right hand she popped the ignition lever down, and the handheld fire shut off. Flinging the flamethrower off her back, Tatiana climbed into the truck, turned the key, and the engine creaked once and revved into life. She started the truck in neutral, depressed the clutch, put the transmission into first gear, and stepped on the accelerator. The truck lurched forward. She drove slowly across the defense line to pick up Dr. Sayers.

  To get Sayers inside the Finnish truck required more out of her than she had.

  But not much more.

  After she got him in, Tatiana’s eyes caught the Red Cross flag on Sayers’s truck.

  She found Dimitri’s army knife in his boot. Walking over to the truck, Tatiana reached up and carefully cut out the Red Cros
s badge. How she was going to attach it to the tarpaulin on the Finnish truck, she had no idea. She heard Dr. Sayers moan in the back and then remembered the first aid kit. With mindless determination she got the kit, along with a plasma bottle. Cutting away the doctor’s coat and shirt, she attached the plasma bottle to his vein, and while the plasma was draining, she looked over his inflamed wound, which was red around the entry hole and unclean. The doctor was hot and delirious. She cleaned the wound with some diluted iodine and covered it with gauze. Then with grim satisfaction she poured iodine onto her cheek and sat pressing a bandage to her face for a few minutes. It felt as if the glass were still inside her skin. She wished she had some undiluted iodine and wondered if the cut would need stitches. She thought it would.

  Stitches.

  Tatiana remembered the suture needle in the first aid kit.

  Her eyes clearing, Tatiana took the suture needle and suture thread, jumped down, and, standing on tiptoe, carefully sewed the large Red Cross symbol into the brown canvas of the Finnish truck. The thin thread broke several times. It didn’t matter. It just had to hold until Helsinki.

  After she was done, Tatiana got behind the wheel, turned to the back, said into the small window, “Ready?” to Dr. Sayers, and then drove the truck out of the Soviet Union, leaving Dimitri dead on the ground.

  Tatiana drove down the marshy wooded path, carefully and uncertainly, with both hands clutching the big wheel and her feet barely reaching the three pedals. Finding the road that stretched along the Gulf of Finland from Lisiy Nos to Vyborg was easy. There was only one road. All she had to do was head west. And west she could find by the location of the gloomy, barely interested March sun.

  In Vyborg she showed her Red Cross credentials to a sentry and asked for fuel and directions to Helsinki. She thought he asked her about her face, pointing to it, but since she didn’t speak Finnish, she didn’t answer and drove on, this time on a wide paved road, stopping at eight sentry points to show her documents and the wounded doctor in the back. She drove for four hours until she reached Helsinki, Finland, in late afternoon.