Tatiana didn’t say anything.
Dasha continued, “I know I can’t expect too much at once. The fact that he is finally coming around at all is a miracle. I couldn’t get him to come over until last Sunday, when he came with Dima and you.”
Tatiana wanted to point out that it wasn’t Dasha who got Alexander to come over, but of course said nothing.
“I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. I think he likes our family. Did you know he’s from Krasnodar? He hasn’t been back there since he joined the army. Doesn’t have any brothers or sisters. Doesn’t talk about his parents. He is . . . I can’t explain. So closemouthed. Doesn’t like to say too much about his own business.” She paused. “Asks me about mine, though.”
“Oh?” was all Tatiana could manage.
“He tells me he wishes it weren’t war.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana. “We all wish it weren’t war.”
“But that sounds hopeful, doesn’t it? As if a better life with him would be possible once the war was over. Tania,” said Dasha into Tatiana’s hair, “do you like Dimitri?”
Tatiana fought for her voice. “I like him fine,” she whispered.
“He really likes you.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“Yes, he does. You have no idea about these things.”
“I have some idea, and he doesn’t.”
“Is there anything you want to talk to me about, want to ask me?”
“No!”
Dismissively, Dasha said, “Tania, you mustn’t be so shy. You’re seventeen already. Why can’t you just give in a little?”
“Give in to Dimitri?” whispered Tatiana. “Never, Dasha.”
In the minutes before she fell asleep, Tatiana realized she was less afraid of the intangible of war than she was of the tangible of heartbreak.
9
On Saturday, Tatiana went to the Leningrad public library and borrowed a Russian-English phrase book. She was already somewhat familiar with the odd alphabet, having learned it in school. She spent most of the afternoon trying to speak some of the more ridiculous phrases out loud. The Ths, Ws, and the soft Rs were very difficult. “The weather will be thunder and rain tomorrow” was constructed to torment her. She could say “be” pretty well.
On Sunday, when Alexander came by, he single-handedly glued paper strips on their windows to keep the glass from shattering in the explosive waves that might come during shelling, if and when bombs fell on Leningrad. “Everyone must tape their windows,” he said. “Soon the patrols are going to walk around the city to check that all the windows have been taped. We won’t be able to find replacement glass anywhere if the Germans get to Leningrad.”
The Metanovs watched him with great interest, with Mama commenting every few minutes on how tall he was, and on his good work and how steady his hands were, and how solidly he stood on the windowsill. Mama wanted to know where he’d learned how to do that. Dasha replied impatiently, “Well, he is in the Red Army, Mama!”
“Did they teach you to stand on the windowsill in the Red Army, Alexander?” Tatiana asked.
“Oh, shut up, Tania,” Dasha said, laughing, but Alexander laughed, too, and he did not say shut up, Tania.
“What is that design you made on our windows?” Mama said as Alexander jumped down from the sill.
Tatiana, Dasha, Mama, and Babushka looked at the shape of the glued paper on the window. Instead of being the white crisscross that the women had seen on other windows in Leningrad, Alexander’s design looked like a tree. A thick trunk, slightly bent to one side, with elongated leaves growing from it, longer at the bottom, tapering off at the top.
“What is that, young man?” Babushka demanded imperiously.
Alexander said, “That, Anna Lvovna, is a palm tree.”
“A what?” said Dasha, standing close to him. Why always so close?
“A palm tree.”
Tatiana, standing by the door, watched him without blinking.
“A palm tree?” Dasha said quizzically.
“It’s a tropical tree. Grows in the Americas and the South Pacific.”
“Hmm,” said Mama. “Strange choice for our windows, don’t you think?”
“Better than just an old crisscross,” muttered Tatiana.
Alexander smiled at her. And lightly she smiled back.
Gruffly, Babushka said, “Well, young man, when you do my windows, don’t do any fancy things. Just a simple crisscross for me. I don’t need any palm trees.”
Afterward Alexander and Dasha went out by themselves, leaving Tatiana with her moody and exhausted family. Tatiana went to the Leningrad library, where she spent hours mouthing alien English sounds to herself. It seemed extremely difficult: to read in this language, to speak it, to write it. Next time she saw Alexander, she would ask him to say a few things to her in English. Just to hear how they sounded. She was already thinking about the next time she saw Alexander, as if it were a certainty. She vowed to tell him that maybe, perhaps, he shouldn’t come to Kirov anymore. She made the promise to herself that night as she lay in bed and faced the wall, she made the promise to the wall, touching the old wallpaper with her fingers, stroking it up and down and saying, I promise, I promise, I promise. Then she reached down to the floor between the bed and the wall and touched the Bronze Horseman book Alexander had given her. Maybe she would tell him that another day. After she heard some English from him, and after he talked to her about the war, and after—
There was another air-raid siren. Dasha returned home well after it, waking Tatiana, whose fingers remained on the listening wall.
10
On Monday at work, Krasenko called her to his office and told her that although she was doing a good job on the flamethrowers, he had to transfer her to one of the tank-production facilities immediately, because the order had come through from Moscow that Kirov had to make 180 tanks a month regardless of capability or manpower.
“Who’s going to make the flamethrowers?”
“They’ll make themselves,” said Krasenko, lighting a cigarette. “You’re a nice girl, Tania. Go. Have some soup at the canteen.”
“Do you think the People’s Volunteers would take me?” she asked him.
“No!”
“I heard that 15,000 people have already joined from Kirov to entrench the Luga line. Is that true?”
“What’s true is that you can’t go. Now, get out of here.”
“Is Luga in danger?” Pasha was near Luga.
“No,” Krasenko replied. “The Germans are far away. It’s just a precaution. Now, go.”
In tank production there were many more people and the assembly line was much more intricate, but because of that, Tatiana had less to do. She placed the pistons in the cylinders that went below the combustion chambers on the tank’s V-12 diesel engine.
The facility was the size of an airplane hangar, gray and dark inside.
By the end of the day the diesel engine was in place, thanks to Tatiana, and the tread was on the tires, and the frame was tightly bolted, but there was no inside, no instruments, no panels, no weapons, no missile boxes, no ammunition launchers, and no hull roof—basically nothing that would make the machine anything other than a heavily armored car. But unlike the crating of the small-arms ammunition, or the making of flamethrowers, or the greasing of high-explosive GP bombs, making half a tank gave Tatiana a sense of accomplishment that she had not had in her entire first month of full-time work. She felt as if she had made the KV-1 herself. Another note of pride: in the afternoon Krasenko had told her the Germans could not even conceive of a tank this well built, well armed, this facile, this agile, this simple, yet armored with 45 mm of steel all around, supplied with an 85-mm gun. They thought their Panzer IV was the best tank there was. “Tania,” he told her, “you did an excellent job on the diesel engine. Maybe you should be a mechanic when you grow up.”
At eight in the evening Tatiana ran outside with her clean hands and her straightened-out collar and h
er brushed-out hair, not believing she could be running at the end of an eleven-hour day, yet running nonetheless, so afraid that Alexander wouldn’t be waiting for her.
But he was.
He was waiting for her but not smiling.
Out of breath, Tatiana tried to regain her composure. She was alone with him for the first time since last Friday, alone in a sea of strangers. She wanted to say, I’m so happy you came to see me. What had happened to don’t come and see me anymore?
Someone yelled out her name; Tatiana reluctantly turned around. It was Ilya, a boy of sixteen, who worked alongside her on the tank tracks. “You catching the bus?” Ilya asked, glancing at Alexander, who said nothing.
“No, Ilya, but I’ll see you tomorrow.” Tatiana motioned for Alexander to cross the street.
“Who was that?” Alexander asked.
Puzzled, Tatiana glanced at him. “Who? Oh, just some boy I work with.”
“Is he bothering you?”
“What? No, no.” Ilya actually was bothering her a little bit. “I started in a new department. We’re building tanks to send to the Luga line,” she said proudly.
Nodding, he said, “How fast can you make them?”
“My department is making one every two days,” she replied. “That’s good, right?”
“To help at the Luga line,” Alexander said, “you’re going to need ten a day.”
Detecting something . . . she looked up at him, tried to figure it out but couldn’t. “Are you all right?”
“Yes.”
She thought. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
The people near the tram stop were standing silently, smoking. No one was talking to anyone else. “You want to walk back home?” Tatiana asked shyly.
Alexander shook his head. “I’ve been in military training all day.”
Nudging him with her fingers, Tatiana said teasingly, “I thought you already were in the military.”
“Yes. Not for me, for them. Maneuvers, gun training, more air-raid shelters.” He sounded depleted for some reason. Was she that close to the nuances of his voice? Of his face?
“What’s the matter?” she asked again.
“Nothing,” he repeated. But then he took her arm, pulling up her sleeve a little to reveal the dark bruises on the underside. “Tania, what’s this?”
Ah. “Nothing.” She tried to pull her arm away. He would not let go as he stood very close to her.
“Really nothing,” she said, unable to look up at him. “Come on. I’m fine.”
“I don’t believe you,” Alexander said. “I told you, don’t take up with Di-mitri.”
“I’m not taking up with him,” Tatiana said.
They glanced at each other, and then Tatiana stared at his uniform buttons.
“Alexander, it’s nothing,” she said. “He was just trying to get me to sit with him.”
“I want you to tell me if he grabs you this hard again, do you hear?” Alexander said, letting go of her.
She didn’t want his tender, firm fingers to let go of her. “Dima is a nice enough man. He is just used to a different kind of girl, I think.” She coughed. “Who isn’t? Well, listen, I took care of it. I’m sure it won’t happen again.”
“Oh?” Alexander said. “Like you took care of talking about Pasha to your family?”
Tatiana didn’t speak at first but then said, “Alexander, I told you it was going to be hard for me. You can’t even get my twenty-four-year-old sister to do it. Why don’t you try? Come over for dinner one night, have some vodka with Papa, and bring it up. See how they take it. Show me how it’s done. Because I can’t do it.”
“You can’t talk to your own family about your brother, but you can stand up to Dimitri?”
“That’s right,” Tatiana replied, raising her voice a little, and thought unhappily, are we fighting? Why are we fighting?
There was a seat for them on the tram. Tatiana held on to the bench in front of her. Alexander’s hands were folded in his lap. He was quiet and didn’t look at her. Something continued to upset him. Was it Dimitri? Still they sat close, his arm pressed into her arm and his leg pressed into her leg. His leg felt made of marble. Tatiana didn’t move her body away from him; as if she could, as if that were even an option. She was magnetized to him.
Trying to alleviate the tension between them, Tatiana brought up the war. “Where is the front now, Alexander?”
“Moving north.”
“But it’s far still. Right? Far from . . . ?”
He didn’t look at her. “For all our military bravado, we are a civilian country.” He snorted. “Our silly maneuvers, our exercises, our grounded planes, our pathetic tanks. We didn’t know who we were dealing with.”
She pressed lightly into his side, assimilating him through her skin. “Alexander, why does Dimitri seem so reluctant to go and fight? I mean, it is to get the Germans out of our country.”
“He doesn’t care about the Germans. He cares about only one thing—” He broke off.
Tatiana waited.
“You will learn something about Dimitri, Tania. He treats self-preservation as his inalienable right.”
She gazed at him. “Alexander, what is . . . inalienable?”
He smiled. “A right that no one can assail.”
Tatiana thought. “Who says that? Do we even have those kinds of rights? Aren’t they usually reserved for the state?”
“We? Where?”
“Here.” She lowered her voice. “In the Soviet Union.”
“No, Tania. Here we do not. Here those rights are reserved for the state.” Alexander paused. “And Dimitri. Especially self-preservation.”
“Inalienable. I’ve never heard anyone say that word before,” Tatiana said thoughtfully.
“No, you wouldn’t,” he said, his face softening. “How was the rest of your Sunday? What did you do? How is your mother? Every time I see her, she looks ready to fall down.”
“Yes, too much worry for Mama these days.” Tatiana turned to the window. She didn’t want to speak about Pasha again. “You know what I did yesterday? I learned some English words. Want to hear?”
“Let’s get off, and then yes, very much. Any good words?”
She didn’t know quite what he meant, but she blushed anyway.
They got off the tram, and as they were walking past Warsaw Station, Tatiana saw a crowd of people huddled together: women with their children, old people with luggage, waiting in a focused disorder.
“What are they waiting for?” she asked.
“A train. They are the smart ones. They’re leaving this city,” said Alexander.
“Leaving?”
“Yes.” He paused. “Tania . . . as you should be leaving.”
“Leaving and going where?”
“Anywhere. Away from here.”
Why was it that a week ago the thoup bght of evacuation was so thrilling, yet today it felt like a death sentence? It wasn’t evacuation. It was exile.
“What I hear,” Alexander continued, “is that we’re getting routed by the Germans. Trounced. We’re unprepared, unequipped; we have no tanks and no weapons.”
“Don’t worry,” Tatiana said with false levity. “We’ll have a tank tomorrow.”
“We have nothing except men, Tania. No matter what the cheerful radio reports say.”
“They are quite cheerful,” Tatiana said, trying to sound cheerful herself—and failing.
“Tania?”
“Yes?”
“Are you listening? The Germans are eventually headed for Leningrad. It’s not safe. You really have to leave.”
“But my family is staying put!”
“So? Leave without them.”
“Alexander, what are you talking about?” Tatiana exclaimed and laughed. “I’ve never been anywhere by myself in my whole life! I barely go to the store by myself. I can’t go by myself. Where? By myself to the Urals or to some place where they evacuate people? Is that where you
want me to go? Or maybe to America, where you’re from? Will I be safe there?” Tatiana chuckled. It was just preposterous.
“Certainly if you went where I’m from, you’d be safe there,” Alexander said grimly.
* * *
After she came home that night, Tatiana struck up a conversation with her father about evacuation and about Pasha.
Papa listened to her long enough for him to take three puffs of his cigarette. Tatiana counted. Then he got up and, stubbing out the cigarette to punctuate his words, said, “Tanyusha, where in hell are you getting your ideas from? The Germans are not coming here. I’m not going away from here. And Pasha is safe. I know it. Listen, if it will make you feel better, Mama will call him tomorrow to make sure all is well. All right?”
Deda said, “Tania, I did ask to be evacuated east to the Molotov Oblast near the Urals. I have a cousin in Molotov.”
“He’s been dead for ten years, Vasili,” said Babushka, shaking her large head. “Since the hunger of ’31.”
“His wife still lives there.”
“She died of dysentery in ’28.”
“That was his second wife. His first wife, Naira Mikhailovna, still lives there.”
“Not in Molotov. Remember? She lives where we used to live, in that village called—”
“Woman!” Deda interrupted. “Do you want to come with me or not?”
“I’ll come with you, Deda,” Tatiana said brightly. “Is Molotov nice?”
“I’ll come with you, too, Vasili,” said Babushka, “but don’t pretend we have people in Molotov. We might as well go to Chukhotka.”
Tatiana intervened. “Chukhotka . . . isn’t that near the Arctic circle?”
“Yes,” said Deda.
“Isn’t that near the Bering Strait?”
“Yes,” he said again.
“Well, maybe we should go to Chukhotka,” Tatiana said. “If we have to go somewhere.”
“Chukhotka? Who is going to let me go there?” Deda exclaimed. “Do you think I can teach math there?”
“Tania is a fool,” agreed Mama.
Tatiana fell quiet. She wasn’t thinking about Deda teaching math. She was thinking about something ridiculous. So outlandish that if she weren’t in front of her judgmental family, she would have laughed.