She couldn’t hear her sister’s painful labored breathing, only her own.

Tatiana felt a warm hand on her back, and a voice behind her said, “Come. You won’t believe what I have for you. It’s breakfast time. I have buckwheat kasha and bread and a teaspoon of butter. You will have tea with some sugar, and I will even find you some real milk. Come. What’s your name?”

“I can’t leave my sister,” said Tatiana.

The nurse said in a sympathetic voice, “Come, my dear. My name is Olga. Come, breakfast won’t last forever.”

Tatiana felt arms lifting her. She stood up, but one look at Dasha and she sank back down on the floor.

Dasha’s mouth remained open as Tatiana had left it open. Her eyes were open, too, staring upward to the violet sky beyond the cloth of the tent, beyond Tatiana.

Bending and broken, Tatiana kissed Dasha’s eyes closed and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. She struggled up, took Olga’s hand, and left.

In the adjoining mess she sat down at a table and looked into an empty plate. Olga brought her some buckwheat. Tatiana ate half the small bowl. When Olga asked her to eat more, Tatiana said she couldn’t because she was saving the rest for Dasha, and fainted.

Tatiana awoke in a bed.

Olga came, offering her a piece of bread and some tea. Tatiana refused.

“If you don’t eat, you will die,” said Olga.

“I’m not going to die,” said Tatiana weakly. “Give it to Dasha, my sister.”

“Your sister is dead,” said Olga.

“No.”

“Come with me. Let me take you to her.”

Tatiana walked to a back room with Olga, where she saw Dasha lying on the floor next to three other bodies.

Tatiana asked who was going to bury them. Olga said with a laugh, “Oh, girl, what are you thinking? Nobody, of course. Did you take the drugs the doctor gave you?”

Shaking her head, Tatiana said, “Olga, can you bring me a sheet? For my sister.”

Olga brought Tatiana a sheet, some more medicine, a cup of black tea with sugar, and bread with a chunk of butter. This time Tatiana took the drugs and ate, sitting in a low metal chair in a room full of corpses. After she finished, she laid the sheet on the ground and rolled Dasha into it.

Tatiana held her sister’s head in her hands for a long time.

After wrapping Dasha tightly with the sheet, ripping the tattered ends and tying them together, Tatiana left the tent and went to find Dimitri. In Kobona, the small seaside town in the dark of January, Tatiana found many soldiers, but not him. She needed to find him. She needed his help. She went back to the Kobona River. Stopping an officer, she asked him where Dimitri Chernenko might be. He did not know. She asked ten soldiers, but none of them knew. The eleventh one looked at her and said, “Tania? What the hell is the matter with you? I am Dimitri.”

She did not recognize him. Without emotion she said, “Oh. I need your help.”

“Don’t you recognize me, Tania?”

“Yes, of course,” she said flatly. “Come with me.”

He limped with her, his arm lightly around her shoulder. “Aren’t you going to ask me about my leg?”

“In a bit, all right,” Tatiana said, leading him to the partitioned room and showing him Dasha’s body wrapped in a sheet surrounded by uncovered corpses. “Will you help me bury Dasha?” she asked, the strands of her voice barely holding together.

Dimitri sucked in his breath. “Oh, Tania,” he said, shaking his head.

She continued. “I can’t take her with me. But I can’t leave her here either. Please help me.”

“Tania,” he said, opening his arms. She backed away from him. “Where are we going to bury her? The ground is frozen solid. An earthmoving machine couldn’t dig this dirt.”

Tatiana stood and waited. For sunshine, for a solution.

“The Nazis are bombing the Road of Life, yes?”

“Yes.”

“The ice on the lake gets broken, yes?”

“Yes.” His face registered gradual understanding.

“Then, let’s go.”

“Tania, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. If I can, you can.”

“You don’t understand—”

“Dima, you don’t understand. I can’t let her lie in the back room, now, can I? I won’t be able to leave her, and I won’t be able to save my own life.” Tatiana came up to stand in front of him. “Tell me, Dimitri, when I’m dead, will you even know how to sew a sack for me? When I’m dead, will you put me in the back room on top of the other bodies? What will you do with me?”

Banging his rifle on the ground, he said, “Oh, Tania.”

“Please. Help me.”

Sighing, he barely shook his head. “I can’t. Look at me. I’ve been in the hospital for nearly three months. They just let me out, put me on the Kobona detail, and now I have to walk around for hours. It hurts my foot, and the Germans bomb the lake all the time. I’m not going out there. I can’t run if the shelling starts.”

“Get me a sled, will you? Can you do that for me?” she said coldly, going to sit by Dasha.

“Tania—”

“Dimitri, just a sled. Surely you can do that?”

He came back after some time with a sled. Tatiana got up off the ground. “Thank you. You can go,” she said.

“Why are you doing this?” Dimitri exclaimed. “She is dead. Who cares now? Don’t worry about her anymore. This fucking war can’t hurt her.”

Raising her eyes at him, Tatiana said, “Who cares? I care. My sister did not die alone. I’m still here. And I will not turn from her until I bury her.”

“And then what are you going to do? You don’t sound too good yourself. Are you going to go ahead to your grandparents? Where were they again? Kazan? Molotov? You probably shouldn’t go, you know. I keep hearing horror stories about the evacuees.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She added, “Don’t worry about me.”

As he was leaving, she called after him. “Dimitri?”

He turned around.

“When you see Alexander, tell him about my sister.”

He nodded. “Of course, I will, Tanechka. I’m going to see him next week. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”

Tatiana turned sharply away.

After he left, she got Olga to help her lift Dasha’s body onto the sled and then pushed the sled down the slope and walked after it. On the Kobona River she took the reins, and under the seeping silent gray sky, Tatiana pulled Dasha, wrapped in a white hospital sheet, on Lake Ladoga. It was early afternoon and nearly dark. There were no German planes overhead. About a quarter of a kilometer out, Tatiana found a water hole. She kept tugging at Dasha’s body until it slid down onto the ice.

Tatiana knelt next to it and put her hand on the white sheet.

Dasha, do you remember when I was five and you were twelve, teaching me how to dive into Lake Ilmen? You showed me how to swim underwater, saying you loved the feeling of water all around you because it was so peaceful. And then you taught me to stay under longer than Pasha, because you said that girls always had to beat boys. Well, you go and swim underwater now, Dasha Metanova.

Tatiana’s wet face was turning to ice in the Arctic wind. She whispered, “I wish I knew a prayer. I need a prayer right now, but I don’t know one. Dear God, please let my only sister Dasha swim in peace and not ever be cold again, and please . . . can you let her have all the daily bread she can eat, up in Heaven . . . ?”

On her knees Tatiana pushed Dasha’s body into the ice hole. In the waning light the white sack looked blue. Dasha went in reluctantly, as if unwilling to part with life, and then disappeared. Tatiana continued to kneel on the ice. Eventually she got up and, coughing into her mittens, slowly pulled the empty sled back to shore.


Book Two

THE GOLDEN DOOR

Part Three

LAZAREVO


SCENTING SPRING

ALEXANDER went to Lazarevo on faith.

He had nothing else. Literally nothing else, not a letter, not a single piece of correspondence from either Dasha or Tatiana to let him know they had arrived in Molotov. He had grave doubts about Dasha, but he had seen Slavin survive the winter, so anything was possible. It was the absence of letters from Dasha that worried Alexander. While she was in Leningrad, she wrote to him constantly. Here the rest of January and February sped on, and not a word.

A week after the girls had left, Alexander had driven a truck across the ice to Kobona and searched for them among the sick and dispossessed on the Kobona shores. He found nothing.

In March, anxious and depressed, Alexander wrote a letter to Dasha in Molotov. He also had telegraphed the Soviet office in Molotov asking them for information on a Daria or a Tatiana Metanova but did not hear back until May and by regular post. A one-sentence letter from the Molotov Soviet informed Alexander that there was no information on a Daria or a Tatiana Metanova. He telegraphed again, asking if the Lazarevo village Soviet could receive telegraphs. Here the two-word telegram came the next day: no. stop.

Every off-duty hour he got, Alexander went back to Fifth Soviet, letting himself in with the key Dasha had left him. He cleaned the rooms, swept and washed the floors, and washed the linen when the city council repaired the pipes in March. He installed new glass panes in the second bedroom. He found an old photo album of the Metanovs and started looking through it, then suddenly closed it and put it away. What was he thinking? It was like seeing ghosts.

That’s how Alexander felt. He saw their ghosts everywhere.

Each time he was back in Leningrad, Alexander went to the post office on Old Nevsky to see if there were any letters to the Metanovs. The old postmaster was sick of the sight of him.

At the garrison, Alexander constantly asked the sergeant in charge of the army mail if there was anything for him from the Metanovs. The sergeant in charge of the army mail was sick of the sight of him.

But there was nothing for Alexander, no letters, no telegrams, and no news. In April the Old Nevsky postmaster died. No one had been notified of his death, and, in fact, he remained in his chair behind the desk, with mail on the floor, and on the counter, and in boxes, and in unopened mail sacks.

Alexander smoked thirty cigarettes as he searched through all the mail. He found nothing.

He went back to Lake Ladoga, continued protecting the Road of Life — now a water road — and waited for furlough, seeing Tatiana’s ghost everywhere.

Leningrad slowly came out of the grip of death, and the city council became afraid — with good reason — that the proliferation of dead bodies, of clogged sewers, of raw sewage on the streets would result in a mass epidemic once the weather warmed up. The council initiated a full frontal assault on the city. Every living and able person cleared the debris from the bombing and the bodies from the streets. The burst pipes were fixed, the electricity restored. Trams and then trolleybuses began running. With new tulips and cabbage seedlings growing in front of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, Leningrad seemed to be temporarily reborn. Tania would have liked to see the tulips in front of St. Isaac’s, Alexander thought. The civilian ration was increased to three hundred grams of bread for dependents. Not because there was more flour. Because there were fewer people.

At the start of war, on June 22, 1941, the day Alexander met Tatiana, there were three million civilians in Leningrad. When the Germans blockaded the city on September 8, 1941, there were two and a half million civilians in Leningrad.

In the spring of 1942 a million people remained.

The ice road over Ladoga had so far evacuated half a million people from the city, leaving them in Kobona to their dubious fate.

And the siege was not over.

After the snow melted, Alexander was put in charge of dynamiting a dozen mass graves in Piskarev Cemetery, to which nearly half a million corpses were transported on Funeral Trust trucks and eventually buried. Piskarev was just one of seven cemeteries in Leningrad to which the bodies were carried like cordwood.

And the siege was not over.

American foodstuffs — courtesy of Lend-Lease — were slowly making their twisted way into Leningrad. A few times during spring, Leningraders received dehydrated milk, dehydrated soup, dehydrated eggs. Alexander picked up some items himself, including an English-Russian phrase book he bought from a Lend-Lease truck driver in Kobona. Tania might like a new phrase book, he thought. She had been doing so well with her English.

The city rebuilt Nevsky Prospekt with false fronts to cover up the gaping holes left by German shells, and Leningrad went on slowly, neatly, and mostly quietly, into the summer of 1942.