“And you didn’t hide it from me,” said Dasha. “Not at all. You put your love for him on a shelf, not in a cupboard. Marina was right. I was just blind.” She closed her own eyes, but her voice carried across the truck, to the woman with her baby and husband, to Tatiana, to the truck driver. “You left it for me to see in a thousand places. I see every bitter one of them now.” She started to cry, breaking into a coughing fit. “But you were a child! How could a child love anyone?” Dasha fell quiet and then groaned.
I grew up, Dasha, thought Tatiana. Somewhere between Lake Ilmen and the start of war, the child had grown.
Outside there was a distant sound of cannons, of mortar fire. Inside the truck was silent.
Tatiana wondered about the baby that was held by the mother, a young woman with sallow skin and sores on her cheeks. Her husband was leaning on her shoulder; in fact, he was more than leaning, he was falling on his wife, and no matter how hard she pulled at him to sit upright, he would not sit up. The woman started to cry. The baby never made a sound.
Tatiana spoke to the woman. “Can I help you?”
“Listen, you’ve got your own problems,” said the woman brusquely. “My husband is very weak.”
Dasha said, “I’m not a problem. Pull me up, Tania, and lean me against the wall. My chest hurts too much to keep lying down. Go, help her.”
Tatiana crawled across the truck to the woman and her husband. The woman was clutching her baby with both arms and not letting go.
Tatiana shook the man a bit, pulled him up briefly, but he fell back down, and this time he fell to the floor of the truck. He was heavily wrapped in a scarf, and his coat was buttoned to his neck. It took Tatiana ten minutes to unbutton him. The woman kept talking to her nonstop.
“He is not doing well, my husband. And my daughter is not much better. I have no milk for her. You know, she was born in October, what luck! Huh, what bad luck for a baby to be born in October. And when I got pregnant last February, we were so happy. We thought it was a sign from God. We just got married the September before. We were so excited. Our first baby! Leonid was working at the city public transportation department; he couldn’t leave and his ration was quite good, but then the trams stopped, and there was nothing for him to do—why are you unbuttoning him?”
Without waiting for an answer, the woman continued. “I’m Nadezhda. My daughter was born, and I had no milk for her. What to give her? I’ve been giving her soy milk, but it gave her terrible diarrhea, so I had to stop. And my husband really needed the food. Thank God, we finally got on the truck. We’ve been waiting to get out for so long. Now it will all be all right. Kobona will have bread and cheese, someone said. What I would do to see a chicken, or something hot. I’ll eat horsemeat, I don’t care. Just something for Leonid.”
Tatiana took her two fingers off the man’s neck and very carefully buttoned him up again and wrapped the scarf around his neck. She moved him slightly so he was not lying on top of his wife’s legs and went back to sit by Dasha. The truck was deathly quiet. All Tatiana could hear was Dasha’s shallow breathing broken by bursts of coughing. That, and Alexander saying he never loved her.
Both sisters closed their eyes so as not to look at the woman and her dead baby and her dead husband. Tatiana put her hand on Dasha’s head. Dasha did not push it away.
They got to Kobona at daybreak—daybreak, a purple haze on the dark horizon. The features on Dasha’s face became dim instead of vague. Why was Tatiana noticing Dasha’s rasping breathing all of a sudden?
“Can you get up, Dasha?” Tatiana asked. “We’re here.”
“I can’t,” she said.
Nadezhda was shouting for someone to help her and her husband. No one came. Rather, a soldier came, lifted the tarpaulin off the back of the truck, and grunted, “Everybody off. We’ve got to load up and drive back.”
Tatiana pulled at Dasha. “Come on, Dasha, get up.”
“Go and get help, Tania,” Dasha said. “I can’t move anymore.”
Yanking at her sister, Tatiana pulled Dasha up on all fours. “You crawl to the edge, and I’ll help you down.”
“Can you help my husband down?” said Nadezhda plaintively. “Help him, please. You’re so strong. You see he is sick.”
Tatiana shook her head. “He’s too big for me.”
“Oh, come on, you’re moving. Help us, will you? Don’t be selfish.”
“Just wait,” said Tatiana. “I’m going to help my sister down, and then I will help you.”
“Leave her alone,” Dasha said to Nadezhda. “Your husband is dead. Leave my poor sister alone.”
Nadezhda shrieked.
Dasha crawled, pulling herself like a soldier across the truck floor. At the edge Tatiana swung Dasha around, lowering her off the truck, legs first. Dasha’s legs hit the ground, and the rest of her body followed and fell. She remained in the snow.
“Dasha, come on, please. I can’t pull you up by myself,” said Tatiana.
The driver of the truck came around and in one motion lifted Dasha to her feet. “Stand up, comrade. Stand up and walk to the field tent. They’re giving you food and hot tea. Now, go.”
From inside the truck Nadezhda shouted, “Don’t you forget me in here!”
Tatiana didn’t want to stay to hear Nadezhda discover the truth about her husband and baby. Turning to Dasha, she said, “Use me as a crutch. Put me under your arm and walk with me.” She pointed up a shallow slope. “Look, we’re at the river Kobona.”
“I can’t. I couldn’t walk with you and Alexander downhill on the other side, I can’t walk uphill with just you.”
“It’s not a hill. It’s a slope. Use that anger you feel at me. Use it, and walk up the damn slope, Dasha.”
“So easy for you, isn’t it?” said Dasha.
“Is that what it is?” Tatiana shook her head.
“So easy. You just want to live, and that’s all.”
I do want to live. But that’s not all. They stumbled through the snow, Dasha holding on to Tatiana.
“And you? Don’t you want to live?”
Dasha made no reply.
“Come on,” said Tatiana. “You’re doing so well. There is nobody to help us.” She squeezed her sister and whispered intensely, “It’s just you and me, Dasha! The soldiers are busy, the other people are all helping their own. Like I am. And you do so want to live. In the summer Alexander will come to Molotov, and you will get married.”
Dasha summoned enough strength to laugh softly. “Tania, you never stop, do you?”
“Never,” said Tatiana.
Dasha fell in the snow and would not get up.
Swirling around in despair, Tatiana spotted Nadezhda walking up the hill alone, no baby, no husband. She went up to her. “Nadezhda, please help me. Help me with Dasha. She’s fallen in the snow.”
Nadezhda ripped her arm away from Tatiana’s hold. “Get away from me. Can’t you see, I’ve got no one with me now.”
Tatiana saw. “Please help me.”
“You didn’t help me. And now they’re all dead. Leave me alone, will you?” Nadezhda walked away.
Suddenly Tatiana heard a familiar voice. “Tatiana? Tatiana Metanova?”
Turning in the direction of the voice, she saw Dimitri hobbling to her, supported by his rifle.
“Dimitri!” She walked up to him. He hugged her. “Help me, Dima, please. My sister! Look, she has fallen.”
Dimitri quickly got to Dasha. “Come on,” he said. “I’m still wounded. I can’t carry her myself. I’ll get you another soldier.” He turned to Tatiana and gave her another long hug. “I can’t believe we ran into each other like this.” Smiling. “It must be destiny,” he said.
Dimitri got someone else to lift Dasha and carry her to the hospital field tent as Tatiana trudged after them in the mauve light of the sky.
In the hospital tent near the Kobona River, a doctor came to see Dasha. He listened to her heart, to her lungs, felt her pulse, opened her mouth, shook his head,
stood, and said, “Galloping consumption. Forget about her.”
Tatiana took a step toward the doctor. “Forget about her? What are you talking about? Give her something, some sulfa—”
The doctor laughed. “You’re all the same, all of you. You think I’m going to be giving away my precious sulfa on a terminal case? What are you, crazy? Look at her. She doesn’t have an hour to live. I wouldn’t waste a piece of bread on her. Have you seen how much mucus she’s bringing up? Have you listened to her breathing? I’m sure the TB bacteria has traveled to her liver. Go and get some soup and porridge for yourself in the next tent. You might actually make it, if you eat.”
Tatiana studied the doctor for a few moments. “Am I all right?” she asked. “Can you listen to my lungs? I don’t feel all right.”
The doctor opened Tatiana’s coat and pressed the stethoscope to her chest. Then he turned her around and listened through her back. “You need some sulfanilamide yourself, girl. You’ve got pneumonia. Let me have the nurse take care of you. Olga!” Before he left, he turned to Tatiana and said, “Don’t go near your sister anymore. TB is contagious.”
Tatiana lay on the ground, while Dasha lay in the clean bed. After a while she became too cold. Tatiana lay down on her side in the narrow cot very close to her sister. “Dasha,” she whispered, “all my life whenever I had nightmares, I would nestle like this with you, in our bed.”
“I know, Tania,” whispered Dasha. “You were the sweetest child.”
Outside wasn’t light so much as blue. Dark blue tints on Dasha’s trembling face. She heard Dasha’s hoarse voice. “I can’t breathe . . .”
Tatiana knelt on the ground in front of the bed, opened Dasha’s mouth, and blew into it, blew into it cold, brusque, stunted, pitiful breath, breath without soil, without roots, without food. She breathed from her own lungs into her sister’s. Tatiana tried to breathe deeply, but she couldn’t. For endless minutes Tatiana breathed into Dasha’s mouth, into Dasha’s lungs, the shallow whisper of life.
A nurse came up to them and pulled Tatiana away. “Stop it,” she said in a kind voice. “Didn’t the doctor tell you to leave her alone? Are you the sick one?”
“Yes,” whispered Tatiana, holding Dasha’s cold hand.
The nurse gave Tatiana three white pills, some water, and a hunk of black bread. “It’s dipped in sugar water,” she said.
“Thank you,” gasped Tatiana between pain-soaked breaths.
The nurse put her arm on Tatiana’s back. “Do you want to come with me? I’ll try to find you a place to lie down before breakfast.”
Tatiana shook her head.
“Don’t give her any of the bread. Eat it yourself.”
“She needs it more than I do,” said Tatiana.
“No, darling,” the nurse replied. “No, she doesn’t.”
As soon as the nurse left, Tatiana crushed the sulfa tablets against the bed frame, crumbling them into her hand and then into the water, and after taking a small gulp, lifted Dasha’s head slightly off the pillow and made her drink the dissolved medicine.
Tatiana broke off a little piece of the bread and fed it to Dasha, who swallowed with obvious pain and choked. Spluttering, she coughed up blood onto the white sheet. Tatiana wiped Dasha’s mouth and chin and then blew her breath into Dasha’s mouth again.
“Tania?”
“Yes?”
“Is this dying? Is this what dying feels like?”
“No, Dasha” was all Tatiana could reply.
She stared into Dasha’s muted, blinking eyes.
“Tania . . . darling, you’re a good sister,” whispered Dasha.
Tatiana continued to breathe into Dasha’s mouth.
She couldn’t hear her sister’s painful labored breathing, only her own.
Tatiana felt a warm hand on her back, and a voice behind her said, “Come. You won’t believe what I have for you. It’s breakfast time. I have buckwheat kasha and bread and a teaspoon of butter. You will have tea with some sugar, and I will even find you some real milk. Come. What’s your name?”
“I can’t leave my sister,” said Tatiana.
The nurse said in a sympathetic voice, “Come, my dear. My name is Olga. Come, breakfast won’t last forever.”
Tatiana felt arms lifting her. She stood up, but one look at Dasha and she sank back down on the floor.
Dasha’s mouth remained open as Tatiana had left it open. Her eyes were open, too, staring upward to the violet sky beyond the cloth of the tent, beyond Tatiana.
Bending and broken, Tatiana kissed Dasha’s eyes closed and made the sign of the cross on her forehead. She struggled up, took Olga’s hand, and left.
In the adjoining mess she sat down at a table and looked into an empty plate. Olga brought her some buckwheat. Tatiana ate half the small bowl. When Olga asked her to eat more, Tatiana said she couldn’t because she was saving the rest for Dasha, and fainted.
Tatiana awoke in a bed.
Olga came, offering her a piece of bread and some tea. Tatiana refused.
“If you don’t eat, you will die,” said Olga.
“I’m not going to die,” said Tatiana weakly. “Give it to Dasha, my sister.”
“Your sister is dead,” said Olga.
“No.”
“Come with me. Let me take you to her.”
Tatiana walked to a back room with Olga, where she saw Dasha lying on the floor next to three other bodies.
Tatiana asked who was going to bury them. Olga said with a laugh, “Oh, girl, what are you thinking? Nobody, of course. Did you take the drugs the doctor gave you?”
Shaking her head, Tatiana said, “Olga, can you bring me a sheet? For my sister.”
Olga brought Tatiana a sheet, some more medicine, a cup of black tea with sugar, and bread with a chunk of butter. This time Tatiana took the drugs and ate, sitting in a low metal chair in a room full of corpses. After she finished, she laid the sheet on the ground and rolled Dasha into it.
Tatiana held her sister’s head in her hands for a long time.
After wrapping Dasha tightly with the sheet, ripping the tattered ends and tying them together, Tatiana left the tent and went to find Dimitri. In Kobona, the small seaside town in the dark of January, Tatiana found many soldiers, but not him. She needed to find him. She needed his help. She went back to the Kobona River. Stopping an officer, she asked him where Dimitri Chernenko might be. He did not know. She asked ten soldiers, but none of them knew. The eleventh one looked at her and said, “Tania? What the hell is the matter with you? I am Dimitri.”
She did not recognize him. Without emotion she said, “Oh. I need your help.”
“Don’t you recognize me, Tania?”
“Yes, of course,” she said flatly. “Come with me.”
He limped with her, his arm lightly around her shoulder. “Aren’t you going to ask me about my leg?”
“In a bit, all right,” Tatiana said, leading him to the partitioned room and showing him Dasha’s body wrapped in a sheet surrounded by uncovered corpses. “Will you help me bury Dasha?” she asked, the strands of her voice barely holding together.
Dimitri sucked in his breath. “Oh, Tania,” he said, shaking his head.
She continued. “I can’t take her with me. But I can’t leave her here either. Please help me.”
“Tania,” he said, opening his arms. She backed away from him. “Where are we going to bury her? The ground is frozen solid. An earthmoving machine couldn’t dig this dirt.”
Tatiana stood and waited. For sunshine, for a solution.
“The Nazis are bombing the Road of Life, yes?”
“Yes.”
“The ice on the lake gets broken, yes?”
“Yes.” His face registered gradual understanding.
“Then, let’s go.”
“Tania, I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. If I can, you can.”
“You don’t understand—”
“Dima, you don’t understand. I can’t
let her lie in the back room, now, can I? I won’t be able to leave her, and I won’t be able to save my own life.” Tatiana came up to stand in front of him. “Tell me, Dimitri, when I’m dead, will you even know how to sew a sack for me? When I’m dead, will you put me in the back room on top of the other bodies? What will you do with me?”
Banging his rifle on the ground, he said, “Oh, Tania.”
“Please. Help me.”
Sighing, he barely shook his head. “I can’t. Look at me. I’ve been in the hospital for nearly three months. They just let me out, put me on the Kobona detail, and now I have to walk around for hours. It hurts my foot, and the Germans bomb the lake all the time. I’m not going out there. I can’t run if the shelling starts.”
“Get me a sled, will you? Can you do that for me?” she said coldly, going to sit by Dasha.
“Tania—”
“Dimitri, just a sled. Surely you can do that?”
He came back after some time with a sled. Tatiana got up off the ground. “Thank you. You can go,” she said.
“Why are you doing this?” Dimitri exclaimed. “She is dead. Who cares now? Don’t worry about her anymore. This fucking war can’t hurt her.”
Raising her eyes at him, Tatiana said, “Who cares? I care. My sister did not die alone. I’m still here. And I will not turn from her until I bury her.”
“And then what are you going to do? You don’t sound too good yourself. Are you going to go ahead to your grandparents? Where were they again? Kazan? Molotov? You probably shouldn’t go, you know. I keep hearing horror stories about the evacuees.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She added, “Don’t worry about me.”
As he was leaving, she called after him. “Dimitri?”
He turned around.
“When you see Alexander, tell him about my sister.”
He nodded. “Of course, I will, Tanechka. I’m going to see him next week. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.”
Tatiana turned sharply away.
After he left, she got Olga to help her lift Dasha’s body onto the sled and then pushed the sled down the slope and walked after it. On the Kobona River she took the reins, and under the seeping silent gray sky, Tatiana pulled Dasha, wrapped in a white hospital sheet, on Lake Ladoga. It was early afternoon and nearly dark. There were no German planes overhead. About a quarter of a kilometer out, Tatiana found a water hole. She kept tugging at Dasha’s body until it slid down onto the ice.