Tatiana and Alexander

by Paullina Simons

“Yes, it’s right across the street,” she said.

  “Though I think church is a strong word for that building. It’s a document storage facility.”

  She laughed. “Yes,” she said, bubbling. “It’s a Soviet church.”

  The simple time with her on Sunday was so markedly brief.

  All his time with her was markedly brief, encircled by war wagons, by his mother and father, by his false name, by Dimitri’s perceived power over his humanity, by Dasha, oh that Dasha! Surrounded by Slonko and Nikolai Ouspensky, assailed by the Soviet Union from all sides. He had to learn how to live, not remember, not hear the never-ending echoes that those one hundred minutes alone with her kept thundering into him. One bus ride with her, when he had her all to himself, sitting on the seat next to her, walking across one Field of Mars by her side, one glimpse into what might have been, one flare of an inflamed heart and the consequence? Eternity in Soviet Russia.

  Where could they have gone to hide? Where could they have disappeared?

  Sunday came and went.

  The Field of Mars, June, death, life, white nights, Dasha, Dimitri, they all came…

  And went.

  But there Alexander still was, standing on that street, on that curb, in the sun, looking at her under the elms, looking at provenance across from him, provenance in a white dress with red roses, licking her ice cream with red lips, singing. His and only his for one hundred minutes, blink of an eye and gone. It all was, it was, but now it had passed and the blizzard cloaked it, leaving emptiness and light. Passed forever, and he was here forever, still on the street forming and reforming his screaming heart.

  Losing Pasha, 1941

  Her twin brother Pasha had disappeared. It all seemed innocent enough at first, going to a boy’s summer camp—but then the Luftwaffe flew over the boy’s camp, and the Red Army sent in the boys to stand in front of the Panzer tanks, and Pasha vanished. She refused to accept it and went to find him in Luga with Hitler across the river, because she was crazy, and he went to bring her back because he was crazy for her.

  Another tainted moment of having her this time almost to himself. When they lay in his tent, there was no other place they wanted to be, and they both knew it. Despite Hitler’s forces a hundred meters away, despite Tania’s broken ribs, her broken leg and her broken spirit, despite losing Pasha.

  He felt her short sobs. “Shura, we have to find him.”

  “Oh, Tania.”

  “We have to. I can’t go back home without finding him. I can’t fail like this. Please. You don’t know my family. You don’t know me.”

  “I know Tania. They—and you—will have to learn to live with what you still have.”

  “Don’t say that. I can’t live without him.”

  Alexander could barely get his words out. “I’m sorry, Tania.”

  “I can’t, you don’t know. He is my brother, don’t you understand? And what if he is somewhere waiting for me and I don’t come? Who else should go and rescue you if not your family? Who else? Oh, Alexander, what if he is wondering why it’s taking me so long to come and find him, and I don’t come? Why don’t I come?”

  “Why would he be waiting?”

  “Because he knows what I am. I won’t leave him.”

  Alexander fell quiet. Lucky Pasha having someone like Tatiana on his side. “Tania, there’s no trace of him. Two million German men stand between you and Pasha. You can’t walk, nor bend. You’re broken, and he is lost. Leave him be. Let him go with God.”

  And the next morning alone in the woods under the falling bombs, covering her with his body to shield her from harm, he couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t stop himself. Alexander kissed Tatiana. They could have died there in the woods; he almost wanted to when he recalled dimly what lay ahead of them—desperation, deceit, Dasha, Dimitri, Hitler, Stalin, war all around them.

  Pasha was never found. Weeks later they got word that he had died on a burning train. The father didn’t recover, drinking down, burning down his grief until there was nothing left of him either. Pasha had been his only son. Alexander had one more grateful thought for easing his own father’s heart in prison. He was also his father’s only son. Could he even remember what it was like to have a father, a mother, bending over him at night, kissing him, crying?

  He couldn’t.

  More and more Tatiana seemed to him to be a chance not taken, a moment gone. He could not stop what he felt for her, yet she seemed for another life, for another time, for another man.

  She wanted more from Alexander. Didn’t they all.

  Except he didn’t have more. He didn’t have anything.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Christmas in New York, 1943

  TATIANA AND ANTHONY WERE invited to spend Christmas Eve with Vikki and her grandparents.

  When she arrived she found Edward there.

  “Why did you invite him?” she whispered to Vikki in the kitchen.

  “He celebrates Christmas, too, Tania.”

  Tatiana sat next to Edward on the couch, sipping something called eggnog and holding on her lap six-month-old Anthony, who wanted some eggnog too. Edward told Tatiana that four days earlier he had been kicked out of his home. His wife apparently had had enough of him working such crazy hours and spending so little time with her.

  “Let me understand,” said Tatiana. “You weren’t spending time with her so she throw you out?”

  “That’s correct.”

  Tatiana asked slowly, “But won’t this mean you be spending even less time with her?”

  Edward laughed. “I don’t think she liked me very much, Tania,” he said.

  “That’s unfortunate in wife,” she commented.

  Vikki, who had brought them some biscuits covered with honey, had a self-satisfied look about herself, a look that later prompted Tatiana to quietly call Vikki a trouble maker.

  There was soothing caroling Christmas music on, there was the smell of ginger, of apple pie, of spaghetti sauce filled with garlic, the burgundy colors in the apartment became somehow appropriate, and Vikki was wearing a brown velvet dress that went well with her brown velvet hair and her brown velvet eyes. Isabella and Travis fed everybody as though there were no war. The conversation was as light as the wine.

  Later, she sat in the quiet bedroom and nursed her son while the happy noises full of Christmas graces filled the apartment. Inside the room was quiet and warm and dark. She closed her eyes and rocked.

  There was no comfort for a young woman named Tatiana this Christmas Eve, not at the candlelight mass, not at the celebration dinner, not during prayer, not in sleep, not with Vikki, not in Ellis. As she nursed her boy, Tatiana’s salty tears fell on his face that she didn’t bother to wipe, and in her tears and in her milk and in her heart only one word struck the clock of her soul on the stroke of every minute: Alexander.

  Ellis at Christmas was a grim place. Why was that so soothing to her? Because the wounded needed her. Because someone besides her son needed her. She fed the soldiers lying in their white beds, and she whispered to them to think of their brothers in arms, who had neither bed nor solace. “Well, Nurse Tania, that’s because they don’t have you looking after them,” said a wounded German pilot named Paul Schmidt in accented English. He had been flying over the North Channel, bombing the tankers bringing food and arms into the North Sea. He had been brought down into the water. En route to the U.S. he had both his legs amputated and was now convalescing long enough to be sent back home. He told Tatiana that he didn’t really want to be sent home. “If I still had my legs, the Americans would send me to work for their war effort, wouldn’t they? Like they do the rest of our boys?”

  “They just might send you anyway. You could sit and milk cows.”

  “What I’d like,” he said with a smile, “is to have a nice American girl marry me and keep me from going back.”

  Tatiana smiled back. “You might ask one of other nurses,” she said. “I not American.”

  “I don’t care,”
he said, the interest in his eyes not waning.

  “You think your wife back home would like that? You marrying?”

  “We wouldn’t have to tell her.” He grinned.

  She told him a little about herself. Tatiana found it remarkably easy to tell the German and Italian soldiers about her life before America, compared with how remarkably difficult she found it to talk to Vikki or Edward. She could not let her friends know where she lived every day of her life, among the snows of Leningrad and the waters of Lazarevo. Yet these men, homeless and dying strangers, understood her well, knew her well.

  “I’m glad I’m not on the Eastern Front anymore,” said Paul Schmidt.

  I’m not, Tatiana wanted to say. Because when I was on the Eastern Front, my life meant something. “You weren’t wounded on the Eastern Front,” she said finally. Bending her head, she continued to feed him, looking down into the metal spoon touching the white enamel plate. She concentrated on the chicken broth smell, concentrated on the feel of white crisp starched linen under her arms, on the wool of his blanket, on the slight chill of the ward. She tried to detach herself from visions of the Eastern Front. Feeding her husband…bringing the spoon to his lips…sleeping in the chair next to him…walking away from his bed, and turning around—

  No. NO.

  “You have no idea what the Soviets are doing to us,” he repeated.

  “I have some idea, Paul,” Tatiana said. “I was nurse in Leningrad last year. Not long before that, I saw what you German boys did to our Soviet men.”

  He shook his head while swallowing the broth, so vehemently that some of the liquid escaped his mouth and ran down his chin. Tatiana wiped it and brought another spoonful to his mouth.

  “The Soviets are going to win this war,” he said, lowering his voice. “And do you know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t value the lives of their men.”

  And then they were both quiet.

  “Does Hitler value your life?” asked Tatiana.

  “More than Stalin would. Hitler tries to heal us so he can send us back to the front, but Stalin doesn’t even bother. He lets his men die and then sends thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds to the front. And then they die.”

  “Soon,” Tatiana said, “there will be no one left to send.”

  “The war will be Stalin’s before that happens.”

  Tatiana was called away to tend to the other wounded, but returned to Paul with some Christmas cookies, giving him what remained on her tray and pouring him tea with milk.

  “You’re wrong, by the way, about me,” he told her. “I was wounded in Russia. Over the Ukraine. I was flying bombing missions and was knocked down. When I fell, I nearly lost my stomach.” He stopped, remembering. “Literally, lost my stomach.”

  “I understand,” said Tatiana.

  “After I healed, they transferred me to the North Channel—less dangerous. Ironic, isn’t it? My captain thought I’d lost my edge. But do you know, when I fell over the Ukraine, I fell into the hands of the Soviet partisans, who didn’t kill me. They took pity on me, I don’t know, maybe because it was Christmas of last year.”

  “I don’t think they took pity on you because it was Christmas,” Tatiana said gently. “The Soviets don’t celebrate Christmas.”

  He glanced at her. “Is that why you’re here? The holidays don’t mean much to you?”

  She shook her head. She wanted to cross herself to give herself strength, but didn’t. She wanted to cry, but didn’t. She wanted to be strong, to be impenetrable, to be like a rock, to be like Alexander. But she couldn’t be. “I’m here,” she said, “because it makes wounded here happy that they not alone so far from home.” Her voice faltered. “I’m here, because I hope that if I do something nice for you, if I bring you just a bit of comfort, then maybe, somewhere else, someplace else, someone might bring comfort to…” A small tear fell from her eye.

  Paul stared at her with surprise. “You think that’s how it works?”

  “I do not know how it works,” Tatiana said.

  “Is he on the Eastern Front?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” she said. She couldn’t lend voice to the death certificate in the black backpack in her room.

  “Well, you better pray he’s not on the Eastern Front. He won’t last a week there.”

  “No?” Her face must have shown the paling of her already weakened spirit, because Paul patted her hand and said, “Ah, hell, don’t worry about it, Nurse Tania. Wherever he is, here or in the hereafter, you know what he is hoping for?”

  “What?” she whispered.

  “That you’re safe,” Paul replied.

  Christmas in New York.

  Christmas in New York in wartime. The year before, Tatiana had spent New Year’s Eve in Grechesky hospital with Dr. Matthew Sayers, surrounded by Soviet nurses. They had drunk some vodka and passed the glass to a few patients who had been awake enough and strong enough to raise their glasses. Tatiana had thought only about going to the front to meet up with Alexander. They were leaving in five days. Alexander didn’t know it yet, but one way or another she was going to get herself and her husband out of the Soviet Union. Leningrad had no lights. Leningrad was covered in broken ruins. German shells flew from Pulkovo on New Year’s Eve, German planes bombed the city on New Year’s Day. Four days later, Tatiana had left Leningrad in Dr. Sayers’ Red Cross truck and thought to herself, will I see Leningrad again?

  And now it looked as if she never would.

  Instead she was seeing New York at Christmas. She saw Little Italy, covered with green and red flickering lights, and she saw 57th Street, decked out with white lights, and she saw the Empire State Building, with its red and green spire, and she saw the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. The lights in the tall buildings were on for an hour because it was Christmas, and then were dimmed out for war.

  She walked in the cold and the snow, pushing Anthony in the carriage, and all around her was noise and bustling people with shopping bags. Tatiana had no bags. Tatiana wasn’t buying presents. She was walking through a snowy, excited New York at war, thinking that Alexander had lived ten Decembers like this, in Boston. Ten Decembers of Christmas carols, and packages under arms, and bells constantly ringing, and trees covered with lights, and a big sign on top of one coffee shop saying “JESUS IS THE REASON.”

  He had lived with it all, and his mother and father gave him gifts and Santa came to him on Christmas. So Tatiana went into a toy store and bought Anthony a train set from Santa. He was too little for a train set, but he would grow into it.

  At Bergdoff’s on 58th and Fifth Avenue, Tatiana saw some beautiful Christmas blankets in the window display, and because she was cold and because she was thinking of Alexander, she walked into Bergdoff and inquired about them. The blankets were one hundred per cent cashmere and one hundred outrageous dollars each. The lady told her that and turned away, as if the conversation were over. Then, remembering, she turned back to Tatiana, took the blanket out of her hands and turned away again.

  “I’ll take it,” Tatiana said, getting out her money. “I will take three. What colors do you have?”

  That night at Ellis, mother and son slept together in her single bed under two cashmere blankets. The third she was saving for Anthony’s father.

  New York at Christmas time. There was ham, and there was cheese, and there was milk and chocolates and a couple of ounces of steak for everyone, and there was the lively spirit of women trying to get the last of the toys for their boys. And there were men who came home from the war for Christmas.

  Not Vikki’s man, because she divorced him.

  And not Tatiana’s man, because she had lost him.

  But other men.

  The trees all glowed with white lights, and even at Ellis, the nurses decorated a tree for the German and Italian soldiers, except that no one wanted to work Christmas Day, not for double pay, not for triple pay, not for a week’s vacation. Tatiana worked for triple
pay and a week’s vacation.

  New York at Christmas.

  As she walked down Mulberry Street in Little Italy on the way to Vikki’s apartment, pushing Anthony in the carriage, Tatiana sang under her breath, “A Long Long Trail,” a song she had heard on the hospital radio.

  “There’s a long long trail unwinding

  Into the land of my dreams,

  Where the nightingales are singing

  And a white moon beams.

  There is a long long night of waiting

  Until my dreams all come true,

  Till the day when I’ll be going

  Down that long long trail with you.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Alexander and the Germans, 1943

  THE SOVIET MEN WERE still dying at Sinyavino, and the Germans remained in the hills.

  Alexander would send more and they would get killed. Lieutenant-colonel Muraviev, in charge of both the penal and the non-penal battalions, had no interest in hearing from Alexander. “It’s a penal battalion,” he said. “Do you know the meaning of that, Captain?”

  “I do. But let me ask you, I haven’t taken math since secondary school, but at the rate of thirty men a day, how long will I keep my two hundred men?”

  “I know the answer to that one,” Muraviev exclaimed. “Six!”

  “Yes. Not even one week. The Germans still have three thousand troops in the hills, while we have virtually none.”

  “Don’t worry. We will get you more men to send to the railroad. We always do.”

  “Is that the goal? To let the Germans use our men for target practice?”

  Muraviev narrowed his eyes. “I’ve been told about you. You’re a troublemaker. You’re forgetting, you’re in charge of a penal battalion. The safety of your men is not my concern. Just fix the railroad and shut up.”

  Alexander left without saluting Muraviev. Clearly he needed to take matters into his own hands. He didn’t wish for another man like Stepanov to guide him. He wished for three men a tenth of Stepanov to let him do as he knew best. Well, why would Alexander’s men mean anything to Muraviev? They were all convicted criminals. Their crimes included having had mothers who had been in musical groups that corresponded with people in France, even though the musical groups had been long defunct and even though the mothers had been long dead. Some of them had been found in churches, before late last year when Stalin had admitted, according to Pravda, that he himself believed in a “kind of God.” Some of them unwittingly shook hands with people who were about to be arrested. Some of them had rooms next to people who had been arrested. Ouspensky said, “I was one of those people. I had the bad luck to be bedded next to you, Captain.” Alexander smiled. They were walking to the armaments tent. He had asked Ouspensky to come with him. Alexander was going to requisition a 160-millimeter mortar.