But now I wake up and think, how am I going to go through the rest of my day until sleep?

To ease myself back into life, I’ve surrounded myself with the villagers. You think it was bad before. I’m from morning till night helping Irina Persikova, who had to have her leg cut off in Molotov, infection or something. I think I like her because she carries my mother’s name.

I think of Dasha. I grieve for my sister.

But her face is not the last face I see before I sleep. Yours is.

You are my hand grenade, my artillery fire. You have replaced my heart with yourself.

Are you thinking of me with your rifle in your hands?

What do we do? How do we keep you from dying? These thoughts consume my waking minutes. What can I do from here to keep you alive?

Dead or wounded, those Soviets will leave you in the field.

Who is going to heal you if you fall?

Who is going to bury you if you die? Bury you like you deserve — with kings and heroes.

Yours,

Tatiana


Tatia,

You ask how I keep myself from dying. Poorly, I say. Though still better than Ivan Petrenko.

My commander tells me — choose the best men you have, and I salute him, and do. And then they die. What does that make me?

We came under the worst unprotected fire today. I can’t believe I’m alive to write you these words. We were supplying the men across the river at the Nevsky Patch. We row the boats with food and arms and munitions and new men to the other side. But the Germans are relentless from Sinyavino Heights, we can’t get past them or to them; they sit on their hills like vultures and hurl their metal at us. Usually I don’t go — there’s not enough of me to go on these suicide missions, and the commander knows it, but today we just didn’t have enough soldiers to man the boats.

Petrenko died. We were in the boat coming back to our side, and a piece of artillery shell hit him. Took his arm off. I threw him on my back, and, you know, in my insanity I bent down to pick up his arm. I picked it up and he fell off my back, and as I looked at him lying in the boat I thought, what am I doing? Who is going to sew that arm back on?

I didn’t want him and his arm reunited, I realized. I just wanted them to be buried together. There is no dignity in the man being ripped apart. The body has to be together so the soul can find it. I buried him and his arm by the woods, near a small birch. He had once said he liked birches. Had to take his rifle — we barely have enough weapons as it is — but I left him his helmet.

I liked him. Where is the justice that a good man like Petrenko dies and yet Dimitri, infirm and hobbled, still lives?

You want to know what I thought of in that boat?

I thought, I have to stay alive. Tatiasha will never forgive me.

But this war is unjust, as you’ve seen. A good man has as much chance of dying as a bad one. Maybe more so.

I want you to know that should something happen to me, don’t worry about my body. My soul isn’t going to return to it, nor to God. It’s flying straight to you, where it knows it can find you, in Lazarevo. I want to be neither with kings nor heroes, but with the queen of Lake Ilmen.

Alexander


3


There were no more letters from Alexander.

August passed quietly into September, and still no letters. Tatiana did the best she could, drowning herself with the old women, with her village, with her books, with her English, with John Stuart Mill, whom she read out loud to herself in the woods, almost understanding everything.

Still nothing from him, and her soul wasn’t quiet anymore, and it wasn’t comforted.

One Friday at the knitting circle, Tatiana, her head buried in the sweater she was making for Alexander, heard Irina Persikova ask if she had received any letters from him.

“Not for a month now,” said Naira quietly. “Shh. We don’t talk about it. The Molotov Soviet has no news. She goes every week to check. Shh.”

Dusia said, “Either way, God is with him.”

Axinya jovially said, “Don’t worry, Tanechka. The post is terrible. You know that. Letters take a long time to come.”

“I know, Axinya,” said Tatiana, looking at her knitting needles. “I’m not worried.”

“I’ll tell you a story that’ll make you feel better. A woman named Olga lived in the village here a few months before you came, and her husband was at the front, too. She waited and waited for letters from him. Nothing. Like you she fretted and waited, and then she got ten letters all at once!”

Tatiana smiled. “Wouldn’t that be great?” she said. “To get ten letters from Alexander all at once.”

“Absolutely, darling.” Axinya smiled. “So don’t worry.”

Dusia said, “Oh, that’s right. Olga put the letters in chronological order and started reading them. She read nine of them, and the tenth letter was from the commandant, saying her husband had been killed at the front.”

Tatiana paled. “Oh” was all she could get out.

“Dusia!” Axinya exclaimed. “For God’s sake, have you no sense? Next you’re going to tell her how Olga drowned herself in the Kama.”

Tatiana put down her knitting needles. “You ladies finish up here without me, all right? I’m going to go and start on our dinner. I’m making cabbage pie.”

She stumbled home and immediately got the Pushkin book out of the trunk. Alexander had told her he put the money back. Looking at the cover, looking and looking, Tatiana took a deep breath and carefully cut off the paper with a razor blade. The money was there. Breathing out a small sigh, she took it into her hands.

Then she counted it.

Five thousand dollars.

Without alarm she counted the crisp new bills again, taking care to separate each one. Ten one-hundred-dollar bills. Four one-thousand-dollar bills.

Five thousand dollars.

She counted it again.

Five thousand dollars.

Tatiana started doubting herself; for a moment she thought maybe it had always been five thousand dollars, that she had just mistaken the amount.

If only Alexander’s voice in the kerosene-lamp-filled night didn’t carry from her brain to her heart: This was the last thing my mother left me, a few weeks before she was arrested. . . . We hid the money together. Ten thousand American dollars . . . four thousand rubles.

Tatiana climbed on top of her bed and lay on her back, facing the beamed ceiling.

He had told her he was leaving her all the money.

No, he didn’t say that. He said, I’m leaving you the money. She had watched him glue the cover back together.

Why would he take only five thousand dollars?

To mollify her? To have her not worry, not make another scandalous scene? Not return to Leningrad with him?

She held the money to her chest and tried to fathom Alexander’s heart.

He was the man who, a few meters away from freedom, from America, had chosen to turn his back on his lifelong dream. Feel one way. Behave one way, too. Alexander may have hoped for America, but he believed more in himself. And he loved Tatiana most of all. Alexander knew who he was.

He was a man who kept his word.

And he had given it to Dimitri.


Part Four

IN LIVE DEFIANCE


WORN OUT WITH TERROR AND MISGIVING

TATIANA wasn’t staying another second in Lazarevo by herself.

She wrote Alexander ten letters, relaxed, upbeat, comfortable letters. She made her news chronological and seasonal. She enlisted Naira Mikhailovna’s help in sending them to Alexander one by one, at an interval of one every week.

She knew that if she just left without a word, the old ladies would write to Alexander or, worse, find a way to telegraph Alexander a frantic missive telling him of her disappearance, and if he were still alive to hear it, his uncontrolled reaction might cost him his life. So Tatiana told the women that to avoid having to get a job at the Lazarevo fish plant, where most of the villagers worked, she was going to Molotov to work in the hospital. Tatiana invited no argument, and after the first few muttered questions from Dusia, got none.

Naira Mikhailovna wanted to know why Tatiana couldn’t send the letters straight from Molotov. Tatiana replied that Alexander didn’t want her to leave Lazarevo, and he would be upset if he found out she was working in town. She didn’t want to upset him while he was fighting. “You know how protective he can be, Naira Mikhailovna.”

“Protective and unreasonable,” Naira said, vigorously nodding. She was more than willing to enlist as a co-conspirator in what she saw as a plot to circumvent Alexander’s impossible character. She agreed to send him the letters.

Having sewn herself all new clothes, and having packed as many bottles of vodka and tushonka as she could carry, Tatiana set out early one morning after saying good-bye to the four old women. Dusia said a prayer over her head. Naira cried. Raisa cried and shook. Axinya leaned in and whispered, “You are crazy.”

Crazy for him, thought Tatiana. She left wearing dark brown trousers, brown stockings, brown boots, and a brown winter coat. Her light hair was tied in a plaid brown kerchief. She wanted to draw as little attention to herself as possible. She had sewn the dollars into an inseam flap on her trousers. Before she left, she took off her wedding ring and threaded it through a braided rope she had made. As she kissed it before tucking it inside her shirt, she whispered, “You’re just closer to my heart this way, Shura.”

As she was walking through the woods out of Lazarevo, Tatiana passed the path that led to their clearing. Stopping briefly, she thought about going down to the river and glancing . . . one last time. The thought alone — the imagining — was too much for her. Shaking her head, she continued onward.

There were some things she could not do.

She had watched Alexander steal one look; she could not. Since Vova had carried her trunk up the path over two months ago, Tatiana had not returned to the place where she had lived with Alexander. Vova boarded up the windows, put the padlock back on, and carried all of Alexander’s cut wood to Naira’s house.

In Molotov, Tatiana first went to the local Soviet to see if there was any money from Alexander for September.

Surprisingly, there was!

She asked if there was any telegram or letter with the money. There wasn’t.

If he was still getting soldier’s pay, it meant that he had neither died nor deserted. Taking the 1,500 rubles, Tatiana wondered what would make Alexander send her ring money but not write? Then she remembered the months it had taken for her grandmother’s letters to reach them in Leningrad. Well, she didn’t care if she got thirty letters from Alexander all at once, one for each day of September.

At the train station in Molotov, Tatiana told the Party domestic passport inspector that Leningrad was experiencing a dire shortage of nurses, what with the war and the hunger, and she was returning to help. She showed him the employment stamp from Grechesky Hospital in her passport. He didn’t have to know she had washed floors and toilets and dishes and sewed body bags. For his help Tatiana offered him a bottle of vodka.

He asked for the letter from the hospital inviting her to return to Leningrad. Tatiana replied that the letter got burned, but here were her credentials from the Kirov factory, from the Grechesky Hospital, and here was a citation for valor in the Fourth People’s Volunteer Army, and here was another bottle of vodka for his trouble.

He stamped her passport, and she bought her ticket.

Before she boarded her train, she went to see Sofia, who was so excruciatingly slow, Tatiana felt herself aging as she waited. Tatiana thought she would miss her train for sure, but Sofia finally managed to procure the two photographs she had taken of Alexander and Tatiana on the steps of St. Seraphim’s church on their wedding day. Tatiana stuffed them in her backpack and ran to catch her train.

The train she was departing on was much better than the one on which she had arrived. It was a semblance of a passenger train, and it was going southwest to Kazan. Southwest was the wrong direction for Tatiana, who needed to be heading north. But Kazan was a big city, and she would be able to catch another train. Her plan was to somehow make her way back to Kobona and to catch a barge across Lake Ladoga to Kokkorevo.

As the train was pulling out, Tatiana looked across the road at the Kama in the far distance, obscured by pines and birches, and thought, will I ever see Lazarevo again?

She did not think so.



In Kazan, Tatiana got on a train headed to Nizhny Novgorod — not the Novgorod of her childhood and of Pasha, another Novgorod. She was now less than 300 kilometers east of Moscow. She caught another train, this one a freight train heading northwest to Yaroslavl, and from there a bus north to Vologda.