Trying to be serious, Alexander said, “I’ll see your two. Come on, Tatia.” He smiled. “Show me what you’ve got.”

“Aha!” She threw down a full house, beaming at him.

“Aha nothing,” Alexander said, putting down his cards. He had four kings.

“What?” She frowned.

“I win. Four kings.” He pointed to her underwear. “Go on — off.”

“What do you mean?”

“Four of a kind beats full house.”

“Oh, you’re such a liar,” she fumed, throwing her cards at him and covering her breasts with her hands.

He pulled her hands away. “This isn’t Luga, I’ve seen them.” He grinned. “I’ve—”

She covered herself again. “I finally understand how you win all the time. You cheat.”

Alexander could not stop laughing. He couldn’t shuffle anymore. “How many times do I have to explain it, Comrade I-remember-everything-you-ever-tell-me? Huh?” He reached over and pulled at her panties. “Rules are rules. Off.”

Tatiana scooted away from him on the blanket. “Yes, cheating rules,” she declared defiantly. “Let’s play again.”

“We’ll play again, but you’ll be playing buck naked. Because you lost this game.”

“Shura! Just the other day you told Naira Mikhailovna that your full house beat her four of a kind. You are just the biggest cheater. I’m not going to play with you if you cheat.”

“Tania, the other day Naira Mikhailovna had three of a kind, not four of a kind, and I had a straight, and a straight does beat three of a kind.” Alexander stared at her, grinning broadly. “I don’t need to cheat to beat you in poker. Dominoes, yes. But not poker.”

“If you don’t need to cheat, then why do you?” Tatiana demanded.

“That’s it,” Alexander said, putting down the cards. “Your panties are coming off, Tania, one way or another. I won fair and square.”

“Cheated fair and square,” she said.

Alexander was wearing his army trousers. He was naked to the waist. Tatiana’s hands were still up at her breasts, but her lips were moist and slightly parted, and her eyes were roaming over his exposed body. “Tania,” he said, staring at her intently, “do you want me to enforce the rules?”

“Yes,” she said, jumping up. “I want to see you try.”

Alexander liked her fighting spirit. He was only seconds behind her when he jumped up off the blanket, but Tania was going to stop at nothing to get away. By the time he was up and running, she was already in the Kama.

Alexander stopped at the waterline. “You’re out of your mind!” he yelled to her.

“Yes, and you cheat at poker just to get me to take my clothes off!” she yelled back from the river.

Crossing his arms on his chest, Alexander said, “Do I really need to cheat at poker to get you to take your clothes off? I can’t keep them on you.”

“Oh, you . . .” he heard from the river.

He laughed. “Come out.” But he couldn’t see her. She was a dark space in the river. “Come on, come out.”

“Come in and get me if you’re so clever.”

“I’m clever but not crazy. I’m not going into the river at night. Come.”

He heard her cluck like a chicken.

“Fine,” Alexander said and turning around walked away from the shoreline. He went back to the fire, collected their cards, his cigarettes, their teacups. He brought everything, including the blanket, into the house and then came back out. The clearing was quiet. The river was quiet, too. It was cooler at night now.

“Tania!” Alexander called.

Nothing.

“Tania!” he called, louder.

Nothing.

Alexander walked quickly to the river. He could see nothing, not even a dark space. The moon was pale; the stars did not reflect in the water.

“Tatiana!” he shouted loudly.

Silence.

Suddenly Alexander remembered the swift midriver current of the Kama, the rocks they sometimes stumbled on, the drifts of wood that floated by. Panic like adrenaline shot through him.

“Tania!” he yelled. “This is not funny at all!” He listened for a splash, a breath, a stirring.

Nothing.

He ran into the water in his trousers. “You won’t want to get near me if this is another one of your jokes!”

Nothing.

Alexander swam against the current, yelling for her. “Tania!”

He turned his gaze back to the shore.

And there she was—

Standing, already dry, wearing a long shirt, wiping her hair, watching him. He couldn’t see her expression because the fire was behind her, but when she spoke, he could tell she was wearing a big smug smile on her face. “I thought you didn’t want to go into the Kama with your trousers on, you big cheater?”

He was speechless. Relieved but speechless.

Running out of the water, Alexander came at her so quickly that she backed away and stumbled to the ground, looking up at him, the smile on her face evaporating.

He stood over her for a few moments, breathing hard and shaking his head. “Tatiana, you are impossible.” He gave her his hand to pull her up but didn’t look at her again as he let go and, dripping wet, walked to the cabin.

He heard her say behind him, “It was just a joke . . .”

“Not fucking funny!”

“Someone doesn’t know how to take a little joke,” she muttered.

“What do you think would be so funny to me about you drowning?” he shouted, whirling around to face her. “What part of that do you think I would find particularly funny?” Alexander grabbed her, let go, and went inside. He heard her behind him, and then she was in front of him. Longingly looking up at him, she whispered, “Shura . . .” She took his hand and placed it under her shirt. She had taken off her underwear. Alexander held his breath. She was impossible. His hand remained between her thighs.

“You were supposed to come into the water and rescue me,” Tatiana said contritely, feeling for him, unbuttoning his trousers. “You forgot the part where the knight rescues the frail maiden.”

His fingers caressed her. “Frail?” Alexander said, bringing her closer. “You must be thinking of someone else. And you forget that your sole job as a maiden is to make love to, not terrorize the knight.”

“I didn’t mean to terrorize the knight,” she murmured as Alexander picked her up and laid her atop their bed. She opened her arms to him.

In the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, Alexander gazed at his Tatiana lying naked, flat on her back, quivering for him, open for him, moaning for him. They had been making love for a long while, and he knew she nearly had no more, having burned and burned through the wave. Tania, was all he could think. Tania. He placed his hand on her toes and ran it up her legs, between her open thighs, gently, so she wouldn’t jump out of her skin, up her stomach to her chest, spanning her from one side to the other, pressing his palm into her breasts, and then slowly moving his hand up to encircle her throat.

“What, Alexander? What, darling?” she whispered.

Alexander made no reply. His hand remained on her throat.

“I’m here, soldier,” said Tatiana, placing her own hand on top of his. “Feel me.”

“I’m feeling, Tania,” Alexander whispered, bending over her. “I’m feeling.”

“Please come to me,” she moaned. “Please . . . come, take me like you want . . . take me like I love . . . go ahead . . . but like I love, Shura . . .”

He took her like she loved, and afterward, when they were warm under the covers, spent, murmuring, clasped and saturated in each other, ready to go to sleep, Alexander opened his mouth to speak, and Tatiana said, “Shura, I know it all. I understand it all. I feel it all. Say nothing.”

They were enveloped in a fierce embrace, their naked bodies not just pressed hard against each other but in a trance, attempting a Bessemer smelt, in which they would be alloyed and conjoined by heat and perhaps in their cooling, grieving bliss eventually be tempered.

Alexander didn’t feel tempered. He felt as if he were being daily blown out of sand into a still-warm glass.


21


So they lived. From morning until night, from the first swell of the river to the last song of the lark, from the smell of the nettles to the scent of the pinecones, from the peaceful morning sun to the pale blue moon in the clearing, Alexander and Tatiana so spent their lilac days.

Alexander cut wood for her and made it into small bundles tied together with twigs. She made him blueberry pie and blueberry compôte and blueberry pancakes. The blueberries were plentiful that summer.

He built things for her, and she made bread for him.

They played dominoes. They sat on Naira’s porch and played dominoes on the days it rained, and Tatiana beat Alexander every time, and no matter how hard he tried, he could not win. Alone they played strip poker. Tatiana always lost.

They played war-hide-and-seek, Alexander’s favorite.

Tatiana sewed him five more tops and two new pairs of army skivvies. “So you feel me under your uniform,” she told him.

They went mushroom picking together.

He taught her English. He taught her poems in English that he still remembered, some by Robert Frost: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, but I have promises to keep . . .

And some by Emma Lazarus: Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman . . .

After building a fire in the cabin, Alexander would read Pushkin to her while she cooked dinner on their hearth, though eventually he stopped reading “The Bronze Horseman.” It was too much for them both.

In the book he had found a picture of himself that he had given to Dasha the year before. The photo was of him getting his medal of valor for Yuri Stepanov. “Is my wife proud of her husband?” he asked, showing Tatiana the picture.

“Hopelessly,” she replied with a grin. “Think about this, Shura,” she said. “When I was still a kid rowing on Lake Ilmen, you had already lost your father and mother, joined the army, and become a hero.”

“Not a kid rowing on Lake Ilmen,” he said, grabbing her. “A queen rowing on Lake Ilmen. Waiting for me.”

“You know we still haven’t gotten those wedding photos,” Tatiana said.

“Who has time to go to Molotov?” remarked Alexander.

They did not speak about his leaving, but just the same the days sped on. By the end they didn’t just speed on, they seemed to race ahead of them in triple time, as if the spring had broken on the hands of the pitiless clock.

Alexander and Tatiana did not speak about the future.

No, not did not.

Could not.

Not after the war, not during the war, not after July 20. Alexander found himself barely able to speak to Tatiana about the next day. They had no past. They had no future. They just were. Young in Lazarevo.

As they ate and played, and talked and told jokes, as they fished and wrestled, as they walked in the woods practicing Tatiana’s English and swam naked across the river and back, as he helped her with their laundry and the laundry of four old women, as he carried the water from the well for her and her milk pails, as he brushed her hair each morning and made love to her many times a day, never tiring, never ceasing to be aroused by her, Alexander knew that he was living the happiest days of his life.

He held no illusions. Lazarevo was not going to come again, neither for him nor for her.

Tatiana held those illusions.

And he thought — it was better to have them.

Look at him.

And look at her.

Tatiana so ceaselessly and happily did for him, so constantly smiled and touched him and laughed — even as their twenty-nine moon-cycle days spun faster around the loop of grief — that Alexander had to wonder if she ever even thought about the future. He knew she sometimes thought about the past. He knew she thought about Leningrad. She had a stony sadness around her edges that she had not had before. But for the future, Tatiana seemed to harbor a rosy hope, or at the very least a sense of humming unconcern.

What are you doing? she would ask him when he was sitting on the bench and smoking. Nothing, Alexander would reply. Nothing but growing my pain.

He smoked and wished for her.

It was like wishing for America when he was a few years younger.

Wishing for a life with her, a life that was full of nothing else but her, a simple, long, married life of being able to smell her and taste her, to hear the lyre of her voice and see the honey of her hair. To feel her staggering comfort. All of it, every day.

Could he find a way to turn his back on Tatiana and have her faithful face free him? Would she forgive him? For leaving her, for dying, for killing her?