She knew what it was.
Perhaps she would have flared up at the medal had she been given it, thought about it too much, wondered about it. Become too suspicious of one thing or another.
But Dr. Sayers wouldn’t have known that.
Only one person would have known that.
Alexander wanted her to have his highest medal of honor, but knew she couldn’t see it right away, that it would raise too many questions for her. So he told Dr. Sayers to hide it. On the ice, in the hospital, somewhere, he asked Dr. Sayers to hide it.
Which meant there had been a deception and Dr. Sayers was in on it.
Was Alexander’s death in the plan, too?
Was Dimitri’s?
“Tatiasha—remember Orbeli.”
That was the last thing he had said to her. Remember Orbeli. Was he asking her if she remembered, as in “Remember Orbeli?”
Or was he telling her to remember? “Remember Orbeli.”
Tatiana did not sleep for the rest of the night.
Byelorussia, June 1944
Alexander called Nikolai Ouspensky into his tent. They had set up camp in western Lithuania for two days of rest and further instructions. “Lieutenant, what’s wrong with Sergeant Verenkov?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Captain.”
“Well, just this morning, he cheerfully informed me that the tank had been fixed.”
Ouspensky beamed. “It has been, Captain.”
“This surprises me, Lieutenant.”
“Why, sir?”
“Well, for one,” Alexander said patiently, “I didn’t know the tank needed fixing.”
“Badly, sir. The diesel pistons were misfiring. They needed to be aligned.”
Nodding, Alexander said, “That’s very good, Lieutenant, but it does bring me to my second point of surprise.”
“And that is, sir?”
“We don’t have a fucking tank!”
Ouspensky smiled. “Oh, yes, we do, sir. We do. Come with me.”
Outside near the woods, Alexander saw a green light battle tank with the Red Star and the emblem “For Stalin!” emblazoned on the side. Like the ones Tania used to make at Kirov. Only this one was smaller. A T-34. Alexander walked around the tank. It was battle-weary but generally in good condition. The treads were intact. He liked the number on the tank: 623. The turret was large. The cannon was larger. “A 100-millimeter!” said Ouspensky.
Alexander glanced at him. “What the fuck are you so proud of? You built this yourself?”
“No. I stole it myself.”
Alexander could not help laughing. “Where from?”
“Fished it out of the pond over there.”
“Was it completely covered with water? Is all the ammo soggy?”
“No, no, just the wheels and the tread were in the water. It had stalled; they couldn’t get it started.”
“How did you get it started?”
“I didn’t. I had thirty men help me push it out. That’s when Verenkov fixed it. Now it works like a music box.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Who the fuck cares? From the battalion before us?”
“There is no battalion before us. You haven’t figured out yet that we’re the first in the line of fire?”
“Well, maybe they were retreating from the woods. I don’t know. I saw a corpse floating in the pond. Maybe it was the gunner.”
“Not a very good one,” commented Alexander.
“Isn’t it fantastic?”
“Yes, it’s great. They’re going to take it away from us. Does it have much ammo?”
“It’s loaded. I think that’s why it sank. It’s supposed to store only three thousand 7.62-millimeter rounds, and it’s got six thousand!”
“Any 100-millimeter?”
“Yes.” Ouspensky grinned. “Thirty. Five hundred of the 11.63-millimeter rounds—for the mortars. It’s got fifteen rockets, and look, a fixed heavy-machine-gun. We’re set, Captain.”
“It’ll all be taken away from us.”
“They’ll have to get past you first.” Ouspensky saluted him. “You’ll be our tank commander.”
“It’s always a pleasure when a lieutenant assigns duties to the captain, you bastard,” said Alexander.
With Ouspensky as his driver, and Telikov as his gunner, and Verenkov as his loader, he was able to protect his men with the tank in skirmishes from spring to summer 1944 for three hundred kilometers from Byelorussia to eastern Poland. The fighting in Byelorussia was the worst. The Germans did not want to leave. Alexander did not blame them. With his helmet on, he plowed through the Byelorussian countryside, not stopping at ponds, or woods, or loss of men, or villages, or women, or even sleep. The tread wearing out on his tank, Alexander forged ahead, keeping only one thought in front—Germany.
Field after field, forest after forest, marsh, mud, mines, rains. They would set up their tents and catch fish in rivers, cook it in steel bowls over fires, eat two to a bowl—Ouspensky always ate with Alexander—and then restless sleep, and then onward again into German bullets and German arms. There were three Soviet armies pushing the Germans out of Russia, Army Group Ukraine, the most southern, Army Group Center and Army Group North, of which Alexander was part, under General Rokossovsky. The Soviets were not content to merely push the Germans out of Russia. There was going to be retribution on German soil for the evil inflicted on Russia the past two and a half years and for that, millions of men had to plow through Lithuania, Latvia, Byelorussia, and Poland. Stalin wanted to be in Berlin by fall. Alexander did not think that was possible but even so, it was not because of a lack of effort on his part. Onward field after mined field, and the men lay afterward dead and unburied in the fields that once grew potatoes. The remaining men took their rifles and went on. There were a dozen engineers in Alexander’s battalion who could find and de-prime mines. They kept getting killed, and Alexander kept getting new engineers. Finally he trained everyone in his battalion how to find a mine and how to pull out the fuse. After crossing the un-primed field, they would come to a wood, and in the wood the Germans awaited them. Five penal battalions would push their way through the wood first, through the rivers first, through the marsh first, to clear the way for the regular divisions. And then more woods, more fields.
It was good that it wasn’t winter, but it was still cold and wet at night. The rivers weren’t frozen, and the men could clean themselves, thus avoiding typhus—just barely. Alexander knew: typhus meant death by firing squad—the army could not afford an epidemic. The penal battalions were the first to be killed, but also the first to be replenished: there seemed to be no shortage of political convicts sent to die for Mother Russia. To boost sagging morale, Stalin decided to put honor and dignity back into the Red Army by introducing new uniforms—new after a fashion. Following Stalin’s directive in 1943, even the officers in penal battalions wore the uniforms of the old Tsar’s Imperial Army, with red emblazoned shoulder boards, gray felt fabric and gilded epaulets. It made dying in the mud so much more dignified and stepping on mines a matter of great honor. Even Ouspensky seemed to breathe easier with his one lung while wearing the uniform he would have died protecting the emperor in.
The men had no hair anywhere on their bodies. Under Alexander’s directive, they shaved themselves daily to prevent the spread of lice. After heavy fighting, they would spend a day in the river shaving.
Alexander was often unable to tell his men apart from one another. Some were slightly taller than average, some were slightly smaller, some had birthmarks, others were clean, some were dark-skinned, most were white and sunburned. Only a few were freckled. Some had green eyes, some brown, and one Corporal Yermenko had one green eye, one brown.
In civil life, hair defined men. Head hair, body hair, but now the men were defined by war and their scars. The scars were the most distinguishing features. Scars from battle, from knife wounds, from bullets, from compound fractures, from shell grazings, from gunpowder burns. On th
e arms, maybe on the upper shoulders, perhaps on the lower legs. There were not too many living with scars on their chests, abdomens, or scalps.
Alexander knew his Lieutenant Ouspensky by the wheezing noise he made when he breathed, and by the scar over his right lung, and he knew his Sergeant Telikov by his white, wiry, long body, and Sergeant Verenkov by his squat body that must have been once nearly completely covered with black hair and was now nearly completely covered with black stubble.
Alexander preferred them to have fewer distinguishing features. It made losing the men easier. One loss, one replacement with another shaved, bald, smooth, scarred man.
Alexander’s battalion started up in northern Russia and moved down to Lithuania and Latvia. By the time they got to Byelorussia, he had been ordered to switch fronts and go from Rokossovsky’s Army Group North, to Zhukov’s Army Group Center. In flat and largely woodless Byelorussia there was a rousting of the Germans such as Alexander had never seen; to do it the Red Army lost over 125,000 men and twenty-five divisions in Byelorussia alone, while Alexander’s battalion pushed forward and south, forward and south, finally connecting with Konev’s northern divisions of southernmost Army Group Ukraine.
After June 1944, when news came that the American and British forces landed in Normandy, Alexander’s battalion covered a hundred kilometers in ten days, knocking out four German companies of 500 men each. The Soviet trucks rallied behind with supplies and food, and more men to replace the losses. Alexander was unstoppable. Like Comrade Stalin, he needed to get into Germany. Stalin may have wanted retribution, but Alexander felt his deliverance lay there.
The Black Horseman of the Apocalypse, 1941
Fed up and frustrated, Alexander volunteered himself to fight the Finns in Karelia to get as far away from the Metanovs as possible.
He asked Dimitri to come with him, mentioning valor, medals, promotions, but thinking shootings, stabbings, casualties.
True to form, Dimitri refused to go to Karelia to fight, and then was promptly sent to the slaughterhouse of Tikhvin where he was outmanned and outarmed by the Germans.
Alexander was sent with a thousand troops to push the Finns back from the supply line to Leningrad. Weeks went by of savage fighting, of gaining territory meter by hard won bloody meter. Finally, after a day of gunfire that left three hundred Red Army soldiers dead, Alexander, surveying the damage in the near dark, found himself one icy late September evening alone in a field with dead Soviet men around him and with dead Finnish men in front of him. All quiet on the Karelian front and the NKVD were half a kilometer back in the bushes, away from the front line. The fires from the shells still burning, branches broken from trees crackling, snow black from the blood of man, smell acrid of singed human flesh, a few isolated groans, and Alexander alone.
All was quiet, except the roaring in Alexander’s chest. He looked back; there was no movement behind him. The machine gun was in his hands. He took a step, then another, then another. He had his Shpagin, his rifle, his pistol, his uniform. He was now walking amid the dead Finns close to the woods. In one and a half minutes he could be wearing a Finnish uniform, stripped from the body of a dead officer and holding a Finnish machine gun.
Dark. Quiet. He glanced back again. The NKVD weren’t coming any closer.
Mere months with her. Months. In the vast landscape of his life, the weeks, the stolen moments, the Luga night, the hospital minutes, the moment on the bus, the white dress, the green eyes, all of it just a burst of color on the periphery, a red splash in the corner of the canvas of his life. He took another step. He could not help her. Not her, not Dasha, not Dimitri. Leningrad was going to swallow them all and Alexander would be damned if he stayed and watched. Another step. Dead on the icy blown-apart streets of a starved Leningrad.
No one moving on the flat terrain, no trucks, no roads, no men, just trenches, and downed bodies, and Alexander, another step in the right direction and another. And another. He was deep amid the Finns now. Bend down, find a tall body, take its uniform, pick up his machine gun, drop yours, drop the life you hate, one more step and go. Go, Alexander. You cannot save her. Go.
For many minutes he stood on Finnish soil amid the fallen enemy.
The life he hated had in it one thing he could not leave behind.
He turned around and slowly walked back to his platoon, his only light the flares of flashlights and the failing fires…glancing back once at the forest that was Finland.
If only he could have found a way out of Russia that cold dark September night in Finland, he would not be so heavy-hearted now. Empty-hearted, yes, but not fear-hearted, leaden-hearted like now.
Stalin gave up Leningrad to Hitler, fighting for his life in Moscow. Hitler in turn said he wouldn’t waste a bullet on Leningrad preferring instead to starve it out, and in a matter of months the city became lined with unburied corpses. The bodies lying in the white streets covered in white sheets were pristine. The barely living called them “dolls.”
The less Tatiana and her family had—as their supplies of flour and oatmeal evaporated—the more their faces crowded around Alexander, longingly asking him if he had more for them, more food, more rations, more, more, the more Tatiana withdrew and stood near the door, away from him, the more feeling he began to have for her. In the middle of war, in the middle of raging fighting, of unburied dead, of being cold and wet, in famine, Alexander’s feelings for Tatiana grew as if they were a well-watered, well-nourished plant.
What Leningrad gave them, 250 grams of cardboard bread, what Alexander stole for them, soy beans and linseed oil, was not enough, but the sawdust and cottonseed black cake he was eating was enough for his heart.
She had to be evacuated. One way or another she simply had to be.
November died into December. The white and bombed out streets of Leningrad remained littered with corpses no one could either move or bury. All the movers and buriers were dead. The electricity wasn’t working. Neither was water. There was no kerosene to fire up the kilns to bake the bread, which was just as well because there was no flour.
“Alexander, tell me, how long have you loved my sister?” asked the dying Dasha.
“Tell me, how long have you loved my sister?”
“How long—have you—loved my sister?”
Alexander should have replied, Dasha, if you had seen me standing mute, hearing the day fly, the May fly, an ephemera on a Sunday street singing, “Someday We’ll Meet in Lvov, My Love and I,” you would have your answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Lazarevo, 1942
LAZAREVO—EVEN THE NAME itself was reminiscent of myth, of legend, of revelation. Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, raised from four days dead by Jesus. A miracle given by God to reaffirm man’s faith that so angered His enemies they started plotting to kill both the mortal and the divine.
Lazarevo—a small fishing village on the needle banks of the mighty Kama, the river that for ten million years flowed a thousand miles south into the world’s largest sea.
Alexander went to Lazarevo on faith.
He had heard nothing from her. Nothing for six months. All he had to say was, I do not believe she could have survived because I have seen with my own eyes thousands stronger than her, healthier than her that had not survived. They got sick, and she was sick. They had no food, they were starved and she was starved. They had no defences and she had none. They were alone, and she was also. She was small and she was weak and she didn’t make it.
That would have required nothing of Alexander. He could have said, it must be so. All he had to do was nothing. How easy!
But Alexander learned by now: there was no easy step in his life, no easy day, no easy choice, no easy way.
He had his one life. In June 1942 he went to Lazarevo holding it in his hands.
By the shores of the Kama, he found her gorgeous and restored, and not just restored to her original shining brilliance but enlarged and clarified. Light reflected off her, no matter which way she turne
d.
They ran down to the almighty river. She never even looked back.
She would never know what it meant to him, an unremitting sinner, after all the unsacred things he had seen and done, to have her innocence. He held her to him. He had dreamed of it too long, touching her. Dreamed of seeing her naked too long, beautiful, bare, ready for him. He was afraid to hurt her. He had never been with an untouched girl before; he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to do something first.
In the end, he did nothing first, but she baptized him with her body. There was no Alexander anymore; the man he knew had died and was reborn inside a perfect heart, given to him straight from God, to him and for him.
He had lived the last five years of his life being with women whose names he could not remember, whose faces he could not recall, women to whom he meant nothing but a well spent moment on a Saturday night. The connections he had made with those women were transient links, gone as soon as the moment was gone. Nothing lasted in the Red Army. Nothing lasted in the Soviet Union. Nothing lasted inside Alexander.
He had lived the last five years of his life amid young men who could die instantly as he was covering them, as he was saving them, as he was carrying them back to base. His connections to them were real but impermanent. He knew better than anyone the fragility of life during Soviet war.
Yet Tatiana had lived through the hunger, made her blind way through the snow on the Volga, made her way inside his tent to show Alexander that in his life there was one permanence. In Alexander’s life there was one thread that could not be broken by death, by distance, by time, by war. Could not be broken. As long as I am in the world, she said with her breath and her body, as long as I am, you are permanent, soldier.
And he believed.
And before God they were married.
Alexander was sitting on a blanket, his back against the tree, and she was on top of him, straddling him, kissing him so deeply he couldn’t get his breath. “Tania…” he whispered. “…Hang on…”