Alexander stopped walking, too, but didn’t reply.

“Are you thinking it over?” she exclaimed, pulling on his arm, trying to look deeper — behind his constricted face. Letting go of him, her voice unable to hide her anguish, she said, “I know, Alexander, that when you’re wearing these clothes, your army clothes, you wear them as armor against me, so you don’t have to tell me anything. Because I also know that when you’re naked and making love to me, you’re completely defenseless, and if only I were stronger, I could ask anything then, and you would tell me. Trouble is . . .” Her voice broke. “I’m not stronger. I’m just as defenseless against you. So you, afraid I’m going to see the truth and your agony, afraid I’ll see that you’re saying good-bye to me, you turn me over because you think if I don’t see it, I can’t feel it.” She started to cry. I’m not doing so well, she thought. Where is my strength?

“Please, stop,” Alexander whispered, not looking at her.

“Well, I can feel it, Shura,” Tatiana said, wiping her face and grabbing his hand. He pulled it from her. “You came here, angry, yes, upset, yes, because you thought you had said good-bye to me for good in Lazarevo—”

“That’s not why I was angry and upset.”

“As it turns out,” Tatiana continued, “you’re going to have to say good-bye to me in Leningrad. But you’ll have to do it to my face, all right?”

Tatiana saw Alexander’s tormented eyes.

She stepped up. He backed away. What a waltz they danced in the stark morning. But Tatiana’s heart was strong; she could take it. “Alexander. I know — you think I don’t know? I’ve got nothing to do but think about the things you tell me. You have wanted to escape to America all your Soviet life. It was the only thing that had kept you going the years before me, those years in the army. That someday you might return home.” She stretched out her hand to him. He took it. “Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Alexander said. “But then I met you.”

Then I met you. Stop, stop. Oh, the summer last year, the white nights by the Neva, the Summer Garden, the northern sun, his smiling face. Tatiana looked at his heartbreaking face. She wanted to speak. Where were all those words she once knew? Where were they now when she needed them most?

Alexander shook his head. “Tania, it’s too late for me. From the moment my father decided to abandon the life we had in America, he doomed us all. I knew it first — even then. My mother second. My father third, last, but most heartfelt. My mother could ease her pain by blaming him. I thought I could ease mine by joining the army and by being young, but who did my father have to point a finger to?”

Tatiana came up to him and held on to his coat. Alexander put his arms around her. “Tania, when I found you, I felt for that hour or two we were together — before Dimitri, before Dasha — that somehow I was going to right my life.” Alexander smiled bitterly. “I had a sense of hope and destiny that I can neither explain nor understand.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Then our Soviet life interfered. You saw, I tried to stay away. I thought, I must stay away. I must keep away. Before Luga. After Luga. Look how I tried after I came to see you at the hospital. I tried to put distance between us after St. Isaac’s, after the Germans closed the ring around Leningrad.” He paused. He shook his head. “I should have, somehow . . .”

“I didn’t want you to,” Tatiana said faintly.

“Oh, Tania,” Alexander said. “If only I hadn’t come to Lazarevo!”

“What are you talking about?” she gasped. “What are you saying? How can you regret—” She didn’t finish. How could he be regretting them? She stared at him, perplexed and ashen.

Alexander didn’t respond. “Some destiny. I’ve done nothing since the day I met you but hurt your heart and — worse — drag you into my own destruction.” He shook his head so hard his cap fell off.

Tatiana picked up his cap, brushed off the slush, and gave it back to him.

“What are you talking about? Hurt my heart? Forget all that, it’s done with. Alexander . . . and I came willingly.” She paused, frowning. “What destruction? I’m not doomed,” said Tatiana slowly, not understanding. “I’m lucky.”

“You’re blind.”

“Then open my eyes.” Like you did once before. She pulled the scarf tighter around her neck, wanting to bundle up, wanting to be near a fire, wanting to be in Lazarevo.

Tatiana watched Alexander gulp down his fear. He turned his face away and started to walk along the canal pavement. Not looking at her, Alexander said, “I took the five thousand dollars because I was going to give it to Dimitri. I’ve been trying to convince him to run by himself—”

Tatiana laughed without feeling. “Stop it.” She shook her head. “I suspected that was why you took half the money. The man who wouldn’t go half a kilometer out onto the ice with me? Is that the man you think is going to America by himself? Honestly.” They stopped for a red light just past Engineers Castle, last winter used as a hospital and now nearly unrecognizable after repeated bombings. “Dimitri would never go by himself,” Tatiana went on. “I already told you. He is a coward and a parasite. You are his courage and his host. What are you even thinking? As soon as Dimitri realizes you’re not going, he won’t go either, and if he remains in the Soviet Union and sees suddenly that he’s got no hope of escape, then he’s going straight to his new friend Mekhlis of the NKVD, and you will be instantly—”

Tatiana broke off, staring at Alexander. Something dawned on her. His face was too miserable. “You know all this. You know he’ll never go without you. You know this already.”

Alexander didn’t reply.

They began walking again, over the crippled-by-shelling Fontanka Bridge, stepping over the granite pieces. “So what are you even talking about, then?” Tatiana said, nudging him slightly and looking up into his face, full of incomprehensible fear. She could not imagine that Alexander was afraid for himself. Whom was he afraid for?

“You’re not thinking of me—” Tatiana wanted to continue, but the words got stuck in her throat.

Her eyes opened; her heart opened.

Truth flowed in, but not the truth she had known with Alexander. No. Truth illuminating terror. Truth lighting up those hideous corners of an ugly room, with the rotting wood and the broken plaster and the ratty furniture. Once Tatiana saw it, once she saw what was left—

She came around and stood in front of Alexander, stopping him from walking. Too many things were making themselves clear on this desolate Leningrad Saturday. Alexander was thinking of her. He was thinking only of her.

“Tell me . . .” Tatiana said faintly, “what do they do to wives of Red Army officers arrested on suspicion of high treason? Arrested for being foreign infiltrators? What do they do to wives of American men who jumped out of trains on the way to prison?’

Alexander said nothing, closing his eyes.

And suddenly — the flip side. His eyes were closed. Hers were open.

“Oh, no, Shura . . .” she said. “What do they do to wives of deserters?”

Alexander did not reply. He tried to go around her, but Tatiana stopped him, putting both her hands on his chest. “Don’t turn your face from me,” she said. “Tell me, what does the Commissariat of Internal Affairs do with wives of soldiers who desert, soldiers who run into the woods in marshy Finland, what do they do with the Soviet wives who remain behind?”

Alexander didn’t answer her.

“Shura!” she cried. “What is the NKVD going to do with me? The same thing they do to wives of MIAs? Or POWs? What did Stalin call it, protective custody? What is that a euphemism for?”

Alexander was silent.

“Shura!” Tatiana wasn’t letting him off the bombed-out bridge. “Is that a euphemism for being shot? Is it?” She was panting.

Tatiana stared at Alexander in disbelief, inhaling the cold wet air, her nose hurting from the frost, and she thought back to the river Kama — the icy water every morning on her naked body as it touched him, thought back to all Alexander had tried to hide from her in the corners of his soul where he hoped she would not peek. But in Lazarevo, Tatiana’s eyes saw only the Kama sunrise. It was only here in dreary Leningrad that all was exposed, the darkness and the light, the day and the night. “Are you telling me,” she breathed out, “that whether you go or stay, I am done for?”

Turning his agonized face away from her, Alexander said nothing.

Tatiana’s scarf fell off her head. Numbly she picked it up and held it in her hands. “No wonder you couldn’t tell me. But how could I not have seen?” she whispered.

“How? Because you never think of yourself,” Alexander said, grabbing his rifle, moving from foot to foot, not looking at her. “And that’s why,” he said, “I wanted you to stay in Lazarevo. I wanted you to stay as far away from here, as far away from me, as possible.”

Tatiana shivered, putting her hands inside the pockets of her coat. “What did you think?” she said. “If you kept me in Lazarevo, you’d keep me safe?” She shook her head. “How long do you think it would take the village Soviet right next to the bathhouse to receive the order by that long Lend-Lease telegraph line to have me come in for a few questions?”

“That’s why I liked Lazarevo so much,” he said, not looking at her. “The village Soviet didn’t have a telegraph line.”

“Is that why you liked Lazarevo so much?”

Alexander lowered his head to his chest, his warm eyes cooling off, his breath a vapor. His back to the stone wall, he said, “Now do you see? Now do you understand? Are your eyes opened?”

“Now I see.” Everything. “Now I understand.” Everything. My eyes are opened.

“Do you see there is only one way out before us?”

Narrowing her eyes at him, Tatiana stopped talking, backing away from Alexander, tripping over her scarf, and falling on the bombed, deserted bridge under the liquid sky. Alexander went to help her up and then let go. He could not continue to touch her, Tatiana saw that. And for a moment she could not touch him. But it was just a moment. At first it was black, but the clearing inside her own head made her breathless. Suddenly, through the darkness, there was light, light! She saw it up ahead and she flew to it, knowing what it was, and before she opened her mouth to speak, she felt such relief as if her weight — and his — had been lifted.

Tatiana looked at Alexander with her clearest eyes.

Perplexed, he stared at her. She stretched out her arms to him and said quietly, “Shura, look, look here.”

He looked at her.

“All around you is darkness,” she said. “But in front of you I stand.”

He looked at her.

“Do you see me?” she said faintly.

“Yes.” Just as faintly.

She came closer to him, stepping over the broken granite. Alexander sank to the ground.

Tatiana studied him for a few moments and then descended to her knees. Alexander put his face into his shaking hands.

Tatiana said, “Darling, soldier, husband. Oh, God, Shura, don’t be afraid. Will you listen to me, please? Look at me.”

Alexander would not.

“Shura,” Tatiana said, clenching her fists to keep her composure. Stop. Breathe. Beg for strength. “You think your death is our only choice? Remember what I told you in Lazarevo? Do you not remember me in Lazarevo? I cannot bear the thought of you dying. And I will do everything in my pathetic, powerless life to keep that from happening. You have no chance here in the Soviet Union. No chance. The Germans or the Communists will kill you. That’s their sole objective. And if you die at war, your death will mean that for the rest of my life I will be eating poisoned mushrooms in the Soviet Union, alone and without you! And you know it. Your greatest sacrifice will be for my life in darkness.” Come on, Tania, be strong. “You wanted me to let you go? You wanted my faithful face to free you?” Her voice could not keep from breaking. “Well, here I am! Here is my face.” She wished he would look at her. “Go, Alexander. Go!” she said. “Run to America, and never look back.” Stop. Breathe. Breathe again. She couldn’t even wipe her eyes. All right, I cried, but I think I did well, Tatiana thought. And besides, he wasn’t looking at me.

Taking his hands away from his face, Alexander glared at her for several moments before he spoke. “Tatiana, are you out of your mind? I need you right now,” he said slowly, “to stop being ridiculous. Can you do that for me?”

“Shura,” Tatiana whispered, “I never imagined that I could love anyone like I love you. Do this for me. Go! Return home, and don’t think about me again.”