“Yes! I’m still a soldier.”

“What about the doctor? He can’t fight either.”

“He’s a man! And frankly, I’m less worried about him either way—”

“You’re worried about Tatiana? That’s good to hear.”

“I’m worried about what she will do.”

“Ah, that is a fine difference.”

“I’m worried that you will be so busy fretting about her, you will screw up, make stupid mistakes. She will slow you down, make you think twice about taking the kind of chances we might need to take. The Lisiy Nos forest checkpoint is poorly defended, not undefended.”

“You are right. We might have to fight for our freedom.”

“So you agree?”

“No.”

“Alexander, listen to me. This is our last chance. I know it. This is a perfect plan; it could work so well. But she will lead us to ruin. She is not up to it. Don’t be stupid now when we are so close. This is it.” Dimitri smiled. “This is what we’ve been waiting for! There are no more trial runs, there are no more tomorrows, no more next times. This is it.”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “This is it.” Closing his eyes briefly, he fought an impulse to keep them closed.

“So listen to me—”

“I will not listen.”

“You will listen!” exclaimed Dimitri. “You and I have been planning this a long time. Here is our chance! And I’m not saying leave Tania in the Soviet Union for good. Not at all. I’m saying let us, two men, do what we have to do to get out. Get out safely and, most importantly, alive! You’re no good to her dead, and I’m not going to enjoy America if I’m dead myself. Alive, Alexander. Plus, to hide in the swamps—”

“We’re driving to Helsinki in a truck. What swamps?”

“If we need to, I said. Three men and a frail girl, we’re a crowd. We’re not hiding out. We’re asking to be caught. If something were to happen to Sayers, if Sayers were to get killed—”

“Why would Sayers get killed? He’s a Red Cross doctor.” Alexander studied Dimitri intensely.

“I don’t know. But if we had to make it by ourselves across the Baltic — on ice, on foot, hiding out in convoy trucks — well, two men can do it, but three people? We will be too easily noticed. Too easily stopped. And she won’t make it.”

“She made it through the blockade. She made it through the Volga ice. She made it through Dasha. She will make it,” said Alexander, but his heart was burning with uncertainty. The dangers Dimitri was pointing out were so close to Alexander’s own anxieties for Tatiana, it was brutalizing his stomach. “All the things you say may be true,” he continued with great effort, “but you’re forgetting two very important things. What do you think will happen to her here once I’m reported missing?”

“To her? Nothing. Her name is still Tatiana Metanova.” Dimitri nodded slyly. “You have been very careful to keep your marriage hidden. That’ll help you now.”

“It won’t help her.” Alexander stopped.

“No one will know.”

“You’re wrong,” said Alexander. “I will know.” He gritted his teeth to keep the groan of pain from escaping his throat.

“Yes, but you’ll be in America. You’ll be back home.”

Alexander spoke in a flat voice. “She cannot remain behind.”

“She can. She’ll be fine. Alexander, she’s never known anything but this life—”

“Neither have you!”

Dimitri went on. “She’ll continue here as if she’d never met you—”

“How?”

Dimitri laughed. “I know you think a lot of yourself, but she will get over you. Others have. I know she probably cares for you very much — but with time she’ll meet someone else, and she’ll be fine.”

“Stop being an idiot!” Alexander said. “She’ll be arrested in three days. The wife of a deserter. Three days. And you know it. Stop talking horseshit.”

“No one will know who she is.”

“You found out!”

Ignoring Alexander, Dimitri continued calmly, “Tatiana Metanova will go back to Grechesky Hospital and will go on with her life in Leningrad. And if you still want her when you’re settled in America, after the war is over, you can send her a formal letter of invitation, asking her to come to Boston to visit a sick and dying distant aunt. She will come by proper methods, if she can, by train, by ship. Think of this as a temporary separation, until there is a better time for her. For all of us.”

Alexander rubbed the bridge of his nose with his left hand. Somebody come and rescue me from this hell, he thought. The short hairs on his neck stood on end. He breathed more erratically. “Dimitri!” said Alexander, staring straight at him. “You have a chance, for the second time in your life, to do something decent — take it. The first time was when you helped me to see my father. What do you care if she comes with us?”

“I have to think of myself, Alexander. I cannot spend all my time thinking about protecting your wife.”

“How much time have you spent thinking about that?” Alexander exclaimed. “You have always thought only of yourself—”

“Unlike, say, you?” Dimitri laughed.

“Unlike anyone else. Come with us. She extended her hand to you.”

“To protect you.”

“Yes. It doesn’t make her hand any less extended. Take it. She will get us out. We will all be free. You will have the one thing you care about the most — your free life away from war. You do care about that the most, don’t you?” Tania’s St. Isaac’s words swam by Alexander. He covets from you most what you want most. But Alexander would not be defeated. He will never take it all from you, Alexander, his Tatiana had said to him. He will never have that much power. “You will have your free life — because of her. We will not perish — because of her.”

“We’ll all be killed — because of her.”

“I guarantee — you will not perish. Take this chance, have your life. I’m not denying you what is rightfully yours. I said I would get you out, and I will. Tania is very strong, and she will not let us down. You’ll see. She will not falter; she will not fail. You have nothing to do but say yes. She and I will do the rest. You said yourself, this is our last chance. I agree. I feel that more now than ever.”

“I bet you do,” Dimitri said.

Trying to hide his desperate anger, Alexander said, “Let something else guide you! This war has brought you inside yourself, you have forgotten other people. Remember her. Once. You know that if she stays here, she will die. Save her, Dimitri.” Alexander almost said, please.

“If she comes with us, we will all die,” Dimitri said coldly. “I’m convinced of it.”

Alexander turned his body forward and faced the middle distance once again. His eyes glazed over, cleared, glazed over.

Darkness engulfed him.

Dimitri spoke. “Alexander — think of it as dying at the front. If you had died out on the ice, she would have had to find a way to continue living in the Soviet Union, wouldn’t she? Well, it’s the same thing.”

“It’s all the difference in the world.” Alexander looked into his stiffening hands. Because now there is light in front of her.

“It is no difference to her at all. One way or the other she is without you.”

“No.”

“She is a small price to pay for America!” Dimitri exclaimed.

Shuddering, Alexander made no reply, his heart pumping out of his chest. The Fontanka Bridge, the granite parapets, Tatiana on her knees.

“She will doom us all.”

“Dimitri, I already said no,” he said, steel in his voice.

Dimitri narrowed his eyes. “Are you deliberately not understanding me? She can’t come.”

I am just a means to an end, she had said. I am just ammunition.

Alexander laughed. “Finally! I was wondering how long it would take you to issue your useless threats. You say she can’t come?”

“No, she can’t.”

“That’s fine,” said Alexander with a short nod. “I’m not going either. The whole thing is off. It’s over. Dr. Sayers is leaving for Helsinki immediately. In three days I’m going back to the front. Tania will return to Leningrad.” Steadying his loathing stare on Dimitri, he said, “No one is going. You’re dismissed, Private. Our meeting is finished.”

Dimitri looked at Alexander with cold surprise. “Are you telling me you will not go without her?”

“Have you not been listening?”

“I see.” Dimitri paused, rubbing his hands. He leaned over, propping himself on Alexander’s bed as he spoke. “You underestimate me, Alexander. I can see you will not listen to reason. That’s too bad. Perhaps, then, what I should do is go and talk to Tania, explain the situation to her. She is much more reasonable. Once Tania sees that her husband is in grave danger, why, I am certain she herself will offer to stay behind—” Dimitri didn’t finish.

Alexander grabbed Dimitri’s arm. Dimitri yelped and threw his other hand up, but it was too late, Alexander had them both.

“Understand this,” said Alexander as his thumb and forefinger tightened in a twisting vise around Dimitri’s wrist. “I don’t give a fuck if you talk to Tania, to Stepanov, to Mekhlis, or to the whole Soviet Union. Tell them anything! I am not leaving without her. If she stays, I stay.” And with a savage thrust, Alexander ruptured the ulnar bone in Dimitri’s forearm. Even through the red of his fury Alexander heard the snap. It sounded like the ax crashing against the pliant pine in Lazarevo. Dimitri screamed. Alexander did not let go. “You underestimate me, you fucking bastard!” he said, jerking the wrist violently again and again until the broken bone tore out of Dimitri’s skin.

Dimitri continued to scream. Clenching his fist, Alexander punched Dimitri in the face, and the uppercut blow would have driven the fractured nasal bone into Dimitri’s frontal lobe had the impact not been weakened by an orderly who had grabbed Alexander’s arm, who literally threw himself on Alexander and yelled, “Stop it! What are you doing? Let go, let go!”

Panting, Alexander shoved Dimitri away, and Dimitri slumped to the floor. “Get off me,” Alexander said loudly to the stunned and grumbling orderly. As soon as the man got off him, Alexander started wiping his hands. He had yanked the IV right out of the vein, which was now dripping blood between his fingers. So it does bleed, he thought.

“What in the world happened here?” yelled the nurse, running up. “What kind of awful situation is this? The private comes for a visit, and what do you do?”

“Next time don’t let him through,” Alexander said, throwing off his blankets and getting out of bed.

“Get back into bed! My orders are that you don’t get out of bed under any circumstances. Wait till Ina comes back. I never work the critical ward. Why does something always happen on my shift?”

After a commotion that lasted a good half hour, a bleeding and unconscious Dimitri was removed from the floor, and the orderly cleaned up the mess, complaining that he already had plenty to do without the wounded making more wounded out of perfectly healthy men.

“You call him perfectly healthy?” said Alexander. “Did you see his limp? Did you see his pulverized face? Ask around. This isn’t the first time he’s been assaulted. And I guarantee it won’t be the last.”

But Alexander knew: he had not merely assaulted Dimitri. Had he not been stopped, Alexander would have killed Dimitri with his bare hands.



Alexander slept, woke up, looked around the ward.

It was early evening. Ina was at her station by the door, chatting to three civilian men. Alexander stared at the civilian men. That didn’t take long, he thought.

Motionless and alone, he remained with the rucksack on his lap, both of his hands inside, on the white dress with red roses. Alexander finally had the answer to his question.

He knew at what price Tatiana.



It was Colonel Stepanov who came to see him later that evening, eyes sunk deep into his ashen face. Alexander saluted his commander, who sat down heavily in the chair and said quietly, “Alexander, I almost don’t know how to say this to you. I should not be here. I’m here not as your commanding officer, understand, but as someone who—”

Alexander interrupted him gently. “Sir,” he said, “your very presence is a balm to my soul. More than you know. I know why you’re here.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s true? General Govorov came to me tonight and said that Mekhlis” — Stepanov seemed to spit the word out — “approached him with a slew of information that you have previously escaped from prison as a foreign provocateur? As an American?” Stepanov laughed. “How can that be? I said it was ridiculous—”