“I can tell, Tania,” Dimitri said. “You are not a child anymore.”

She did not move a muscle as he moved closer still.

“Inga and Stan out there told me you are working so much that they are convinced you are seeing a doctor at the hospital. Is that true?”

“If Inga and Stan told you, then it must be,” Tatiana said. “The Communists never lie, Dimitri.”

Nodding, Dimitri moved closer.

“What are you doing?” Tatiana got up off the couch. “Listen, it’s getting late.”

“Tania, come on. You’re lonely. I’m lonely. I hate my life, hate every minute of every day of it. Do you feel like that sometimes?”

Only tonight, Tatiana thought. “No, Dima. I’m fine. I have a good life, all things considered. I’m working, the hospital needs me, my patients need me. I’m alive. I have food.”

“Tania, but you must be so lonely.”

“How can I be lonely?” she said. “I’m constantly surrounded by people. And I thought I was seeing a doctor? Listen, let’s stop this. It’s late.”

He got up and made a move toward her. Tatiana put out her hands. “Dimitri, that’s all over. I’m not the one for you.” She stared at him pointedly. “And you’ve always known that, yet you’ve always been quite persistent. Why?”

With an easy laugh, Dimitri said, “Maybe I had been hoping, dear Tania, that the love of a good young woman like yourself would redeem a rogue like me.”

Tatiana leveled her cold gaze on him. “I’m glad to hear,” she said at last, “that you don’t think you’re beyond redemption.”

He laughed again. “Oh, but I am, Tania,” he said. “I am. Because I didn’t have the love of a good young woman like you.” He stopped laughing and raised his eyes to her. “But who did?” he said quietly.

Tatiana didn’t reply, standing in the place where the dining room table used to be, before Alexander sawed it to pieces for her and Dasha to use as firewood. So many ghosts in one small, dark room. It was almost as if the room were still crowded with feeling, with want, with hunger.

Dimitri’s eyes flashed. “I don’t understand,” he said loudly. “Why did you come to the barracks asking for me? I thought this was what you wanted. Are you just trying to lead me on? To tease me?” He raised his voice, far beyond the levels these walls could contain. He came closer. “Because in the army we have a word for girls who tease us.” He laughed. “We call them mothers.”

“Dima, is that what you think? That I’m a tease? You think that’s me, the girl who wants one thing and pretends she wants another? Is that me?”

He grumbled without replying.

“I thought so,” said Tatiana. “I’ve been very clear with you right from the start. I came to the barracks asking for you, for Marazov. I just wanted to see a familiar face.” Tatiana wasn’t going to back down, though inside she was cold and far away from him.

“Did you ask for Alexander, too, perhaps?” Dimitri asked. “Because if you did, you know, you wouldn’t find him at the garrison. Alexander would be either up in Morozovo, if he was on duty, or in every knocking joint in Leningrad, if he wasn’t.”

Feeling herself pale inside and out, and hoping Dimitri didn’t see and didn’t hear the paling of her voice, Tatiana said, “I asked for everybody I knew.”

“Everybody except Petrenko,” Dimitri said, as if he knew. “Even though you were quite friendly with him, coming around as often as you used to last year. Why didn’t you ask for your friend, Ivan Petrenko? Before he got himself killed, he told me that he sometimes used to walk you to the ration store. On orders of Captain Belov, of course. He was quite helpful to you and your family. Why wouldn’t you ask about him?”

Tatiana was stunned. She felt herself to be so ridiculously in need of Alexander, so ridiculously in need of protection against this specter of a man in her room that she didn’t know what to say.

Tatiana hadn’t asked about Petrenko because she knew that Petrenko was dead. But she only knew he was dead from Alexander’s letters, and Alexander could not be writing to her.

What to do, what to do, to end this revolting lie enveloping her life.

Tatiana was so fed up, so frustrated, so tired, so desperate, that she nearly opened her mouth and told Dimitri about Alexander. Truth was better than this. Tell the truth and live with the consequences.

It was the consequences that stopped her.

Straightening her back and staring coldly at Dimitri, Tatiana said firmly, “Dimitri, what the hell are you trying to get out of me? Stop trying to manipulate me with your questions. Either ask me outright or keep quiet. I’m too tired for your games. What do you want to know? Why I didn’t ask for Petrenko? Because I asked for Marazov first, and once I knew he was at the garrison, I stopped asking. Now, enough!”

Dimitri stared at her with uneasy surprise.

There was a knock on the door. It was Inga. “What’s going on?” she said sleepily, standing in her tattered gray bathrobe. “I heard so much noise. Is everything all right?”

“Yes, thank you, Inga,” Tatiana said, slamming the door. Tatiana would deal with Inga later.

Dimitri came up to her and said, “I’m sorry, Tania. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just misunderstood your intentions.”

“That’s fine, Dimitri. It’s late. Let’s say good night.”

Dimitri tried to come near her, and Tatiana backed away.

Stepping away himself, he shrugged. “I always wished it had worked out for us, Tania.”

“Did you, Dimitri?” said Tatiana.

“Of course.”

“Dimitri! How—” Tatiana exclaimed and broke off.

Dimitri stood in a room in which he had once spent many evenings being fed and watered. He had sat with Tatiana’s family, who had invited him into their home and made him a part of their life. He had been in this room now for an hour. He had talked freely about himself, accused Tatiana of she didn’t know what. He’d told her things that sounded like lies. She didn’t know. What he did not do was ask her what had happened to the six people who had once been in this room with him. He did not ask about her mother, or her father, or her grandparents, or Marina, or her mother’s mother. He did not ask her in Kobona in January, he did not ask her now. If he knew about their fate, he did not utter a single commiserating word, he did not make a single comforting wave of his hand. How did Dimitri think it could have worked out for him and anyone, but especially for him and Tatiana, when he could not look for a second beyond himself into anyone else’s life or heart? Tatiana didn’t care that he didn’t ask after her family. What she wanted was for him not to pretend to her, as if she didn’t know the truth.

Tatiana wanted to say this to Dimitri. But it wasn’t worth it.

Though she suspected that the truth was plain in her eyes, because bowing his head and appearing even more hunched, Dimitri stammered, “I just can’t seem to say the right thing.”

“We’ll say good night,” Tatiana said coldly. That will be the right thing.

He went to the door, and she followed him. “Tania, I think this is good-bye. I don’t think we’re going to see each other again.”

“If we’re meant to, we will.” Tatiana swallowed hard, numb inside, her legs weak.

Dimitri lowered his voice, and whispered, “Where I’m going, Tatiana, you will never see me again.”

“Oh, yes?” she mouthed, her strength gone.

He left at last, leaving black turmoil behind for Tatiana, who lay on her cot between the wall and the back of the couch, lay in all her clothes clutching her wedding ring to her chest, not moving or sleeping until morning.


3


In Morozovo, Alexander was sitting behind a table in his officer’s tent when Dimitri stepped inside with some cigarettes and vodka. Alexander was wearing his coat, and his injured hands were numb from the cold. He was thinking of going to the mess tent to get some warmth and some food, but he couldn’t leave his tent. It was Friday, and he had a meeting with General Govorov in an hour to talk about their preparations for an assault on the Germans across the river.

It was November, and after four failed attempts to cross the Neva, the 67th Army was now impatiently waiting for the river to freeze. Finally the Leningrad command concluded that it would be easier to attack with the foot soldiers in line formations on ice instead of being clustered in easy-to-destroy pontoon boats.

Dimitri placed the bottles of vodka and the tobacco with the rolling papers on the table. Alexander paid him. He wanted Dimitri to leave. He had just been reading a letter from Tatiana that was puzzling him. He hadn’t written to her for the few weeks that he’d been hurt, even though he could have had a nurse write the letter for him. Alexander knew that if Tatiana saw a letter in someone else’s handwriting, she would go insane reading between the lines into how badly he was really injured. Not wanting her to worry, he had sent her his September money and waited until he could hold a pen, writing to her himself toward the end of the month.

He wrote that his burn wounds were just God’s way of protecting him. Unable to function at his weapons, Alexander had missed two disastrous assaults on the Neva in September, which had decimated the first and second line armies so utterly that all reserves had to be brought in from the Leningrad garrison. The Volkhov front would have been glad to supply the Leningrad front with men — if only they had some. But after Hitler’s directive to Manstein to hold the Neva and the blockade around Leningrad at all costs, there were hardly any men left in Meretskov’s 2nd Army in Volkhov.

Elsewhere, Stalingrad was being razed to the ground. The Ukraine was Hitler’s. Leningrad was barely holding. The Red Army was thoroughly debilitated. Govorov was planning another attack on the Germans across the Neva. And Alexander was sitting at his desk, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with his wife.

Here it was November, and none of her letters that came with steady and conversational regularity, though without some of her usual candid fervor, mentioned a word about his injuries. He was driving himself to distraction trying to read between the lines of her letters when Dimitri had come in with the supplies. And now Dimitri wasn’t leaving.

“Alexander, can you pour me a drink? For old times’ sake?”

Reluctantly Alexander poured Dimitri a drink. He poured himself a smaller one. He sat behind his desk, Dimitri in a chair opposite him. They talked about the impending invasion and about the frightful battles with the Germans across the Neva on the Volkhov side.

“Alexander,” Dimitri said quietly, “how can you sit there so calmly knowing what’s ahead of you? Four attempts to cross the Neva, most of our men dead, and I hear that the fifth attack once the ice freezes is going to be our last one, that not a single man will be allowed to return until the blockade is broken; did you hear that, too?”

“I heard something about it, yes.”

“I can’t be here anymore. I can’t. Just yesterday I was delivering supplies to the Neva for the Nevsky Patch troops, and a rocket bomb flew all the way from Sinyavino across the river and blew up yet another fucking squadron getting ready to ferry. I was maybe a hundred meters away from the explosion. But look” — he showed Alexander the cuts on his face — “it doesn’t end.”

“No, Dimitri, it doesn’t.”

Lowering his voice a notch, Dimitri said, “Alexander, you will not believe how unprotected the Lisiy Nos area is right now! I deliver to our border troops there and see the Finns in the woods. There are maybe a dozen men in all. It’s providential. You can come with me in my delivery truck, and before we get to the border, we can dump the truck, and then—”

“Dima!” whispered Alexander. “Dump the truck? Look at you. You can barely walk on straight ground. We talked about this in June—”

“Not just in June. We talked this to death. I’m tired of talking. Tired of waiting. I can’t wait anymore. Let’s just go, we’ll go, and we’ll make it, and if we won’t make it, they’ll shoot us. What’s the difference? At least this way we stand a chance.”

“Listen to me—” Alexander said, getting up from his desk.

“No, you listen to me. This war has changed me—”

“Has it?”

“Yes!” said Dimitri. “It has shown me that I have to fight for my own life to survive. By whatever means necessary. Everything I’ve done so far just hasn’t worked. Not the moving from platoon to platoon, not the foot wound, not the months in the hospital, not the Kobona interlude — nothing! I’ve been trying to save my life until we make our move again. But the Germans are determined to kill me. And I’m determined not to let them.” Dimitri paused and lowered his voice. “Makes your little stunt with the now deceased and forgotten Yuri Stepanov even more infuriating in retrospect.” His voice barely audible, Dimitri said, “He’s dead, and we’re still here. All because you had to bring him back. We’d be in America right now, if it weren’t for you.”