They also bought a pot, a pan, a kettle, some plates, utensils and cups, and a soccer ball. Alexander also managed to talk two metal buckets out of Sofia.

“What’s that for?” Tatiana asked, looking at the two metal buckets — one that fit inside the other.

“You’ll see.” He smiled. “A surprise for your birthday.”

“How are we going to carry all this back home?”

Kissing her nose, Alexander said fondly, “When you’re with me, don’t worry — I will take care of everything.”

Sofia sold them two kilos of tobacco but couldn’t help them with produce. She sent them to a stand where they picked up apples, tomatoes, and cucumbers, bread and butter, and with one of the tushonka cans they had a feast for lunch on a blanket in a secluded spot on the outskirts of town down by the Kama.

“What amazes me,” Tatiana said, breaking the bread, “is that you gave me the Pushkin book for my birthday last year.”

“Yes?”

“How did you get the rubles in there?” She poured Alexander a cupful of kvas, a beverage made from bread products.

“I gave you the book with the money already there.”

She looked at Alexander thoughtfully. “Really?” she said.

“Of course.”

“But you barely knew me. Why would you give me a book full of money?” She wanted him to tell her about all the money she had found in that book. But he said nothing. Tatiana knew this about Alexander: unless he wanted to, he didn’t speak about anything. Tatiana stared at him. She wanted him.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she said, glancing away.

Crawling over to her on the blanket, Alexander took the drink and the bread out of her hands and said, smiling, “I’ll teach you this, too: whenever you want something from me and are too shy to ask, blink three times quick.”


10


They had spent the night in his tent by the river. After swimming, they fell into unconscious sleep hours before the sun set at eleven and slept for fifteen hours straight.

In the late morning they left all their new purchases in the woods before going back into town to be married.

Tatiana put on her white dress with red roses. “I told you I was too big for this dress now.” She smiled at Alexander lying on the blanket watching her. She knelt, turning her back to him. “Can you tie my straps, please? Just not tight. Not like before, on the bus.” He wasn’t budging behind her. She glanced at him. “What?”

“God, that dress on you,” Alexander said, his fingers through the crisscross laces pressing on her bare back. He tied the straps for her, kissing her shoulder blades, telling her she looked so good the priest was going to want to marry her himself. She unbraided her hair and left it down, brushed behind her ears. Alexander put on his dress uniform and his cap. Saluting her, he asked, “What do you think?”

Shyly she saluted him back. “I think you’re the most handsome man I ever saw.”

Kissing her, his voice condensed with love, he said, “And in two hours I’m going to be the most handsome husband you ever saw. Happy birthday, my eighteen-year-old child bride.” The joy was plain on his face.

Tatiana hugged him. “I can’t believe we’re getting married on my birthday.”

Alexander hugged her back. “This way you’ll never forget me.”

“Oh, yes, because that’s likely,” Tatiana said, groping for him gently. “Who could ever forget you, Alexander?”



The judge behind the small desk in one of the rooms at the registry office indifferently asked them if they were both of sound mind and were entering into this contract willingly, then shrugged and stamped their passports.

“And you wanted to get married in front of him,” Alexander whispered as they walked out.

Tatiana was quiet. She wasn’t sure about the “sound mind” part.

“Alexander,” she said. “But now our domestic passports are stamped, ‘Married, June 23, 1942.’ Mine states your name. Yours states my name.”

“Yes?”

“Alexander, what about Dimi—”

“Shh,” he said, putting two fingers against her lips. “Is that what we’re going to do? Let that bastard stop us?”

“No,” she agreed.

“I don’t give a shit about him. Don’t mention his name, understand?”

Tatiana understood.

“But we have no witnesses,” she said.

“We’ll get some.”

“We could go back and ask Naira Mikhailovna and the rest to stand as witnesses.”

“Is your intention to ruin this day completely, or is your intention to marry me?”

Tatiana didn’t reply.

Putting his arm around her, Alexander said, “Don’t worry. I’ll get us perfectly good witnesses.”

Alexander offered the jeweler and his wife Sofia a bottle of vodka to come with them to the church for half an hour. The couple readily agreed, and Sofia even brought a camera as an afterthought.

“You two are something,” said Sofia as they walked down the street headed for St. Seraphim’s. “You must really want to be married to go through all this trouble.” She frowned at Tatiana, eyeing her suspiciously. “You’re not in the family way, are you?”

“Yes, she is,” said Alexander unabashedly, pulling Tatiana away. “Is it that obvious?” He patted her stomach. “This will actually be our third child.” He smiled broadly. “But the first one who’s not a bastard.”

They walked more quickly down the street, and Tatiana, red in the face, pulled out one of Alexander’s forearm hairs. “Why do you do that?”

“What?” he said, laughing. “Embarrass you every step of the way?”

“Yes,” she said, trying not to smile.

“Tatia, because I don’t want them to know anything about us. I don’t want to give away a drop of you and me to anyone. Not to strangers, not to the old women you lived with. To nobody. This has nothing to do with them. Just you, me. And God,” he added.



Tatiana stood by Alexander’s side. The priest was not at the church yet. “He’s not coming,” she whispered, looking around. The jeweler and Sofia were standing at the back of the small church, close to the door, holding their bottle of vodka.

“He’ll be here.”

“Doesn’t one of us have to be baptized?” Tatiana wanted to know.

“I am,” he replied. “A Catholic, thanks to my thoughtful, once-Italian mother. And didn’t I baptize you yesterday in the Kama?”

She blushed.

“That’s my good girl,” he whispered. “Hang on. We’re almost there.” Alexander faced the altar, his gaze unwavering, his head strong, his mouth closed. He stood and waited.

Tatiana thought it was all a dream.

A nightmare from which she could not wake up. But not her nightmare. Dasha’s.

How could Tatiana be marrying Dasha’s Alexander? Just last week she could not have imagined a moment in her life when that would have been possible. She couldn’t help it, she felt as if she were living a life that was not meant for her.

“Shura, some integrity I have,” Tatiana said quietly. “Pined after my sister’s lover long enough for her to die and for me to claim him as my own.”

“Tania, what are you thinking? Where are you?” he asked, puzzled, turning to her slightly. “I was never Dasha’s. I was always yours.” He took her hand.

“Even through the blockade?”

“Especially then. What little I had was all for you. It was you who was everybody else’s. But I was only yours.”

Alexander and Tatiana had had an impossible love. Suddenly marriage. A proclamation to the world, a banner. They met, they fell in love, now they were getting married. As if it were always meant to be. As if betrayal, deceit, war, hunger, death — and not just death but the death of everyone else she had ever loved — had been their courtship.

Tatiana’s fragile resolve was weakening by the second.

There had been other lives and other people’s hearts, deep and abiding hearts. There was her Pasha, losing his life before it even began, and Mama, trying so hard to keep going after the death of her favorite child. There was Papa, under a cloud of alcohol-fueled guilt no war could fix, and there was Marina, missing her own mother, missing her home, unable to find a small place for herself in their cramped rooms.

There was Babushka Maya, painting away her life, half hoping her first love would return. There was her Deda, dying away from his family, and Babushka, dying because there was no point in living through war without him.

And then there was Dasha.

If things were as they were supposed to be, why did Dasha’s death feel so unnatural, why did it seem to break the order of things in the universe?

Was Alexander right and Tatiana wrong? Was she to blame, with her misplaced integrity, her inexplicable commitment to her sister? Should Tatiana have let Alexander say to Dasha, I like Tania best.

Should Tatiana have said to Dasha from day one, I want him for myself.

Would that have been the right thing, maybe?

To come out with the truth, instead of hiding behind her fear?

No, Tatiana thought, as they waited for the priest. No. He was too much for me then. I was jaw-droppingly smitten, like I was twelve. It was only right that Dasha should have him. On the surface she seemed right for him, not me.

I was right for kindergarten, for Comrade Perlodskaya, who used to kiss me every day and hold me in her lap. I was right for Deda, because when he said, Tania, you have to be this way, I said, yes, I will be this way.

“Selfish!” she exclaimed in the church. Alexander looked at her. Nodding, she repeated, “Selfish, to the end. Dasha is dead, and I’m stepping in. Gingerly, I step in, careful not to disturb Vova’s crush on me, or Naira’s illusions about me, or Dusia’s and my churchgoing. I step in but say, wait, just make sure my love for you doesn’t interfere with my sewing circle at three.”

“Tatiana, I guarantee,” Alexander said, the light in his eyes flickering off for a moment, “your love for me will interfere with everything.”

She stared up at him standing tall next to her. Tatiana was still jaw-droppingly smitten. Alexander was still too much for her. Now more than ever. “Shura,” she whispered.

“Yes, Tatia?”

“Are you sure about this? Are you sure? You don’t have to do this for me.”

“Oh, but I do.” He smiled, bending to her. “As a husband, I will have certain . . . inalienable rights that no one can assail.”

“I’m serious.”

He kissed her hand. “I’ve never been more sure of anything.”

Tatiana knew: had Alexander told Dasha the truth from the beginning, he would have had to go his own way. He never then could have been part of Tatiana’s life in the drab apartment with all those grand betrayals and hurts.

Tatiana would have lost him, and Dasha, too. She could not have continued to live with her sister, knowing that Dasha — with her breasts, her hair, her lips, and the fullness of her heart — was not enough for the man she loved. The chasm that cheap knowledge would have wreaked in Tatiana’s family no bridge could have spanned, not even the bridge of sisterly affection.

No, Tatiana could not have claimed him for herself. She knew that.

But this was the thing: she didn’t lay claim to Alexander. She was not reclaiming him now. She was not going to a warehouse of love and saying, I think he is mine, I’ll take him. He’ll do. Tatiana did not drive in her stake for the possession of his heart.

It was Alexander who came to her, while she was nothing but absorbed in her own small, lonely life, and showed her that larger than life was possible. Alexander was the one who crossed the street and said, I’m yours.

Alexander was the one.

Glancing at him, Tatiana saw that he was waiting patiently, confident and whole and perfect. The sun filtered in through the church’s stained glass windows. She breathed in the faint smell of long-gone incense. Dusia had introduced her to the church in Lazarevo, and every evening after dinner Tatiana went willingly, ready to pray as Dusia had taught her, ready to part with her crushing sadness and her crushing doubt.

When Tatiana had been a child in Luga, her beloved Deda, seeing her depressed one summer and unable to find her way, said to her, “Ask yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: what do you believe in? What do you hope for? But most important — ask: what do you love?”

She looked up at Alexander. “What did you call it, Shura?” she said quietly. “Our first night, you said you and I had something, you called us . . .”

“The life force,” he replied.

I know who I am, she thought, taking his hand and turning to the altar. I am Tatiana. And I believe in, and hope for, and love Alexander for life.