“Just long enough to get strong again and rear its head. Wait, hold the flour a little lower.” Her hand with the pen touched his hand holding the bag. She did not look up.

“What’s your Mama going to do, Tania?”

“I don’t know. What’s Babushka going to do? She’s got nothing left to sell.” Taking her hand away, Tatiana went into the kitchen to wash the dishes from dinner.

As she headed back to the room, Alexander entered the kitchen. They were alone. She went to walk past him, and he moved in front of her; she tried to go the other way, and he moved in front of her. Tatiana looked up at him and saw that his eyes were twinkling.

Her own eyes twinkling, she stood still for a moment and then moved right, left, and was around him. Glancing back and smiling, Tatiana said quietly, “Got to be quicker than that, Shura,” and he laughed loudly.



Alexander left after four days and went back to base. Everybody missed him when he went.

The good news was he was staying in Leningrad for another week or so, doing patrol work and base maintenance, building barricades and training new recruits. He couldn’t stay over anymore, but he spent most evenings with them, and in the mornings he came at six-thirty and walked Tatiana to Fontanka to get her rations.

One morning when he came, he said, “I heard Dimitri’s been shot!”

“No!”

“True.” He paused.

“What happened? Did he go down in a blaze of glory?”

“He shot himself in the foot with his Nagant sidearm.”

“Oh, I forget,” Tatiana said. “He is not you.”

Placing a hand on her coat, Alexander told her Dimitri was in a Volkhov hospital, indefinitely out of action. “On top of the foot wound, he’s got dystrophy.”

“What’s that?”

Tatiana felt that Alexander almost did not want to tell her. “Dystrophy,” he said slowly, “is a muscle-mass disease, degenerative. Brought on by acute malnutrition.”

Patting him lightly, Tatiana said in a weak voice, “Don’t worry, Shura. I won’t get it. I have no muscles.”

They waited patiently for her rations.

Alexander kept looking down at her, trying to get her to meet his expectant gaze. Tatiana strongly sensed that he wanted something from her, but what it was she didn’t know and couldn’t guess at.

Couldn’t? Or didn’t want to?

Alexander’s rations helped them stretch their food supplies a little longer. He got a king’s ration — 800 grams of bread per day! — more than half of what they were getting for the five of them. He also received 150 grams of meat and 140 of cereals and half a kilo of vegetables.

Tatiana was elated when he came for dinner, bringing with him his food for the day. Was it because she was happy to see him or was it because she was happy to eat better? Alexander would hand her the food, telling her to divide it into six portions. “And, Tania,” he would tell her every time, “six equal portions.”

The meat in his ration was not beef but some kind of pasty pork or sometimes an aged chicken leg with thick skin. It took all of Tatiana’s mental strength not to give him the largest cut. She did what she could and gave him the best.

There were no more candlesticks to trade and no more dishes, except for the six plates the Metanovs kept for themselves and Alexander. Babushka wanted to trade their old blankets and coats, but Mama put her foot down. “No. Winter is cold here in the city. We will need them.” The temperature had dropped below freezing in the third week of October. Only six sheets remained for three beds, only six towels. Babushka wanted to trade one of the towels, but Tania put her foot down, remembering that Alexander needed a towel, too.

Babushka Maya stopped going across the Neva.


4


Tatiana was in the hallway when she heard Dasha, Alexander, Marina, Mama, and Babushka all arguing heatedly inside the room. She was about to open the door and walk in with the tea when she heard Alexander say, “No, no, you cannot tell her. This is not the time.”

And Dasha’s voice spilled through the crack in the door. “But, Alexander, she is going to have to know eventually—”

“Not now!”

“What’s the point?” said Mama. “What does it matter? Tell her.”

Babushka said, “I agree with Alexander. Why weaken her now when she needs her strength?”

Tatiana opened the door. “Tell me what?”

Everyone fell mute.

“Nothing, Tanechka,” Dasha said quickly, glaring at Alexander, who lowered his gaze and sat down.

Tatiana was holding the tray of teacups, saucers, spoons, and a small teapot. “Tell me what?”

Dasha’s face was streaked with tears. “Oh, Tania,” she said.

“Oh, Tania, what?” said Tatiana.

No one said anything. No one even looked at her.

Tatiana looked from her grandmother to her mother to her cousin to her sister and stopped on Alexander, who was smoking and looking at his cigarette. Someone lift your eyes to me, Tatiana thought.

“Alexander, what don’t you want them to tell me?”

He raised his eyes. “Your grandfather died, Tania,” he said. “In September. Pneumonia.”

The tray with the teacups fell from Tatiana’s hands, and the cups broke on the wood floor, and the hot tea spilled on her stockings. Tatiana knelt on the floor and picked up all the shards without saying a word to anyone, which was just as well, because no one could say a word to her. And then she put all the broken pieces on the tray, picked the tray up and went back out to the kitchen. As she was closing the door, she heard Alexander say, “Happy now?”

Dasha and Alexander came out to the kitchen, where Tatiana was standing next to the window, numbly grasping the sill. Dasha went to Tatiana and said, “Honey, I’m sorry. Come here.” She hugged Tatiana and whispered, “We all adored him. We are all devastated.”

Tatiana hugged her sister back and said, “Dasha, it’s a bad sign.”

“No, Tanechka, it isn’t.”

“It’s a bad sign,” Tatiana repeated. “It’s as if Deda died because he couldn’t bear to see what was about to happen to his family.”

Both girls looked at Alexander, who stood nearby watching them and said nothing.

The next morning Alexander and Tatiana walked in silence to the ration store and waited in silence for their bread. When they were outside by the Fontanka Canal, Alexander stuck his hand into his coat pocket and said, “I have to go back up tomorrow, Tania. But look. Look what I brought you.” He held a small bar of chocolate. She took it from him and managed a weak smile. Her eyes filled up.

Alexander took hold of Tatiana’s hand and said soothingly, patting his chest, “Come here.”

She stood for a long time — her face pressed into Alexander’s chest, his arms around her — and cried.



Anton’s leg was not getting better. Anton was not getting better.

Tatiana brought him a piece of Alexander’s chocolate. Anton ate it, but listlessly.

She sat by his bed. They didn’t speak for a while.

“Tania,” he said, “remember summer before last?” His voice was weak.

“No,” said Tatiana. She only remembered last summer.

“In August when you came back from Luga, me, you, Volodya, Petka, and Pasha played soccer in Tauride Park? You wanted the ball so much, you kicked my shin to get it? I think it was the same leg.” A faint smile passed over Anton’s face.

“I think you’re right,” Tatiana said quietly. “Shh, Anton.” She took his hand. “Your leg will heal, and maybe next summer we’ll go to Tauride Park and play soccer again.”

“Yes,” he said, squeezing her hand and closing his eyes. “But not with your brother. Or my brothers.”

“Just you and I, Anton,” whispered Tatiana.

“Not even me, Tania,” he whispered back.

They’re waiting for you, Tatiana wanted to say to him. They’re waiting to play soccer with you again.

And with me.


5


Tatiana used to leave at six-thirty to get the rations — herself as punctual as a German — so that even with waiting in line and the ration store being all the way on Fontanka, she could be back by eight when the bombing formations flew overhead and the air-raid sirens sounded. But she had noticed that either the raids were starting earlier or she was getting out later, because three mornings in a row she got caught in the shell fire while still on Nekrasova returning home.

Only because she had promised, sworn to Alexander that she would, Tatiana waited out the bombing in a shelter in someone else’s building, holding her precious bread to her chest and wearing the helmet he had left her and made her promise and swear to wear when she went out.

The bread Tatiana was holding wasn’t delicious bread; it wasn’t white, and it wasn’t soft, and it didn’t have a golden crust, but still a smell emanated from it. For thirty minutes she sat while thirty pairs of eyes glared at her from all directions, and finally an old woman’s voice said, “Come on, girlie, share with us. Don’t just sit there holding the loot. Give us a bite.”

“It’s for my family,” Tatiana said. “There are five of us, all women. They’re waiting for me to bring it to them. If I give it to you, they will have no food today.”

“Not much, girlie,” the old woman persisted. “Just a bite.”

The shelling stopped, and Tatiana was the first one out. After that she made sure she didn’t lag behind anymore.

But despite her best efforts she could not seem to get to the ration store and back before the bombs came.

To go at ten was impossible. Tatiana had to be at work; people depended on her there, too. She wondered if Marina would do better, or maybe Dasha. Maybe they could move faster than Tatiana. Mama was sewing uniforms by hand in the morning and at night. Tatiana couldn’t possibly send her mother, who practically never looked up from her sewing nowadays, trying to finish a few uniforms so she could get some extra oatmeal.

Dasha said she couldn’t go because she had to do laundry in the morning. Marina also refused, which was just as well. She had nearly stopped going to university. Taking her ration card, she picked up her own bread and ate it immediately. At night when she came back to Fifth Soviet, she demanded more food from Tatiana. “Marinka, it’s just not fair,” Tatiana would say to her cousin. “We’re all hungry. I know this is hard, but you have to keep yourself in check—”

“Oh, like you keep yourself in check?”

“Yes,” Tatiana said, sensing that Marina was not talking about the bread.

“You’re doing well,” Marina said. “Very well, Tania. Keep it up.”

But Tatiana didn’t feel she was doing well.

She felt that she was doing worse than ever before, and yet her family was lauding her efforts. Something was not right with the world in which her family thought Tatiana was making a success out of a big botch. It wasn’t that she felt herself to be slow that bothered her, but that she felt herself slowing down. All her efforts at haste, at deliberate speed, were met with an unknown resistance — resistance from her own body.

It wasn’t moving as fast as it used to, and the inarguable proof of that lay with the German bombers, who at precisely eight o’clock flew their planes over the center of the city and for two hours sounded the mortar clarion call, the high-explosive bugle, to disrupt the rush hour of the morning.

Sunrise came at eight also. Tatiana walked to the store and back in near-dark.

One morning Tatiana was walking on Nekrasova and without much thought passed a man walking in the same direction. He was tall, older, thin, wearing a hat.

Only when she passed him did it occur to Tatiana that she hadn’t passed anyone in a long time. People walked at their own pace, but it was never an overtaking pace. Either I’m walking faster, she thought, or he is even slower than me.

She slowed down, then stopped. As she turned around, she saw him drift down like a parachute by the side of the building and keel over to his side. Tatiana walked back to him, to help him sit up. He was still.

Nonetheless, she tried to straighten him up. She lifted his hat. His unblinking eyes stared at Tatiana. They remained open, as they were just minutes ago when he had been walking on the street. Now he was dead.

Horrified, Tatiana let go of the man and his hat and hurried on without turning around. On the way back with her rations, she decided to take Ulitsa Zhukovskogo instead so as not to walk by the corpse. The air raid had started, but she ignored it and walked on. If they wanted to take my bread in the shelter, there would be nothing I could do to stop them, Tatiana thought, pulling Alexander’s helmet down over her head.

That morning she told her family she had seen a dead man on the street. They barely acknowledged it. “Oh?” said Marina. “Well, I saw a dead horse in the middle of the street, cut open, and a crowd of people helping themselves to the horse’s flesh. And that’s not the worst part. I walked up behind someone and asked if there was anything left for me.”