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.
In Vologda, Tatiana found that she could take the train to Tikhvin, but that Tikhvin was under constant and oppressive German fire. And from Tikhvin getting to Kobona was apparently impossible. The trains were being knocked out of operation three to four times a day, with heavy loss of life and supplies. Thank God for the train inspector, who sold her the ticket to Tikhvin and who was more than willing to chat with her.
She asked the inspector how the food was getting into the blockaded Leningrad if the Kobona route was blocked by German fire.
After she found out, Tatiana decided to follow the food. From Vologda she took a train headed for Petrozavodsk, far north on the western shores of Lake Onega, and simply got off early, in Podporozhye, and walked fifty kilometers to Lodeinoye Pole, which was ten kilometers from the shores of Lake Ladoga.
In Lodeinoye Pole, Tatiana felt the earth rumbling underneath her feet and knew she was close.
While stopping at a canteen to have some soup and bread, Tatiana overheard four transport drivers talking at the next table. Apparently the Germans had practically stopped bombing Leningrad, diverting all their air power and artillery to the Volkhov front—where Tatiana was headed. The Soviet general Meretskov’s 2nd Army was only four kilometers away from the Neva, and the German field marshal Manstein was determined not to let Meretskov push him from his positions
along the river. Tatiana heard one of the men say, “Did you hear about our 861st division? Could not move the Germans at all, spent all day under their fire, and lost 65 percent of its men and 100 percent of its commanding officers!”
“That’s nothing!” another exclaimed. “Did you hear how many men Meretskov lost in August-September in Volkhov? How many dead, wounded, missing in action? One hundred and thirty thousand!”
“Is that a lot?” said another. “In Moscow—”
“Out of one hundred and fifty thousand men!”
Tatiana had had quite enough of listening to other people’s discussions. But she needed just a little bit more information. After striking up a conversation with the truck drivers, she found out that food barges departed on Lake Ladoga just south of a small town called Syastroy, about ten kilometers north of the Volkhov front. Syastroy was about a hundred kilometers south from where Tatiana was at the moment.
Tatiana was going to ask the men for a ride but didn’t like the sound of them. They were staying in Lodeinoye Pole overnight, and the way one of them looked at her, even with her brown plaid kerchief . . .
She wiped her mouth, thanked them, and left. She felt better knowing she was carrying Alexander’s loaded P-38.
It took Tatiana three days to walk the hundred kilometers to Syastroy. It was early October and cold, but the first snow had not fallen yet, and the road was paved. Many other people walked along with her—villagers, evacuees, itinerant farmers, occasionally soldiers returning to the front. She walked for half a day next to one who was returning from furlough. He looked as forlorn as Alexander must have felt. Then he caught a ride from an army truck, and Tatiana kept walking.
The bursting roar of heavy bombs exploding in the near distance never stopped shaking the earth underneath her feet as she walked, her pack on her back, her eyes to the ground. No matter how bad this seemed, it was better than running through the potato field in Luga. It was better than sitting in the train station in Luga, realizing that the Germans weren’t leaving until Tatiana was dead. It was better than that, but not much. She kept walking, her eyes to the ground.
She walked even at night—it was calmer at night, and after eleven there were no bombings. She would walk for another few hours and then find a barn to sleep in. One night she stayed with a family who offered her dinner and their oldest son. She ate the dinner, passed on the son, offering money instead. They took it.
Ten kilometers west of Syastroy, right on the Volkhov River, Tatiana found a small barge about to take off across the lake around the horn of Novaya Ladoga. The longshoreman was untying the rope. She waited as the plank was just about to go up and then ran up to the man and told him she had food for the war effort, for the blockade, taking out five cans of ham and a bottle of vodka. The longshoreman stared longingly at the vodka. Tatiana asked him to keep the vodka for himself and let her go to see her dying mother in Leningrad. Tatiana knew this was a dire time for local people. Most of their relatives who had lived in Leningrad were either dead or dying. The dockhand gratefully kept the vodka and waved her on. “Warning you, though—it’s a bad passage. Too long in the water, and the Germans bomb the barges all day long.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m ready.” She crossed without incident.
The barge came to Osinovets, north of Kokkorevo, where Tatiana offered the rest of her tushonka—four cans—and another bottle of vodka to the truck driver who was taking food to Leningrad. He let her sit in the front with him and even shared some bread with her as they drove.
Tatiana stared out the window. Was she really going to be able to go back to her Fifth Soviet apartment? As if she had much choice.
But to go back to Leningrad?
She shivered. She didn’t want to think about it. The driver dropped her off at Finland Station in the north of the city. She took a tram back to Nevsky Prospekt and walked home from Insurrection Square.
Leningrad was sad and empty. It was nighttime, and the streets were poorly lit, but at least there was electricity. Tatiana must have come at a good time, because it was quiet; there was no shelling. But as she walked, she saw three smoldering fires and many broken shambling gaps where windows and doors had once been.
She hoped her building on Fifth Soviet was still standing.
It was. Still green, still drab, still filthy.
Tatiana stood for a few minutes at the double front doors. She was searching for the thing Alexander called courage.
The courage to go back up the stairs that led to the two empty rooms where six other hearts had once lived. Rooms filled with jokes and vodka and dinners and small dreams and small desires and life.
She looked up and down the street. Across Grechesky the church still stood, untouched and unbombed. Turning her head to Suvorovsky, she saw a few people going into their buildings, coming home from work. Just a few people, maybe three. The pavement was clear and dry. The cold air was hurting her nose.
It was for him.
His heart was still beating, and it called to her.
He was going to be her courage.
She nodded to herself and turned the handle. The dark green hallway smelled of urine. Holding on to the railing, Tatiana slowly walked up three flights of stairs to her communal apartment.
Her key worked in the glossy brown door.
The apartment was quiet. There was no one in the front kitchen, and the doors to the other rooms were closed. All closed, except for Slavin’s, whose door was slightly ajar. Tatiana knocked, looked in.
Slavin was on his floor, listening to the radio.
“Who are you?” he said in a shrill voice.
“Tania Metanova, remember? How are you?” She smiled. Some things never changed.
“Were you here during the War of 1905? Oh, did we give those Japs hell.” He pointed his finger to the radio. “Listen, listen carefully.”
Just the sound of the metronome, beat beat beat.
Quietly she backed away. The Russians lost that war. Slavin looked up from the floor at her and said, “You should have come last month, Tanechka—only seven bombs fell on Leningrad last month. You would have been safer.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “If you need anything, I’m right down the hall.”
There was no one in her kitchen either. To her surprise, the door to her hallway and her two rooms was unlocked. In the hallway on her sofa she found two strangers, a man and a woman drinking tea.
Tatiana stood for a moment staring at them. “Who are you?” she asked at last.
They said they were Inga and Stanislav Krakov. They were both in their forties; he was paunchy and spottily balding, she was small and wizened.
“But who are you?” she asked again.
“Who are you?” demanded Stanislav, not even looking at her.
Tatiana put down her backpack. “These are my rooms,” she said. “You’re sitting on my sofa.”
Inga quickly explained that they had lived on Seventh Soviet and Suvorovsky. “We had a nice apartment, our own apartment,” she said. “Our own bathroom, and kitchen, and a bedroom.” Apparently their building was bombed to the ground in August. With the shortage of housing in Leningrad because of so many demolished buildings, the Soviet council placed Inga and Stanislav in the Metanov rooms, which were unoccupied. “Don’t worry,” said Inga. “They’ll find us our own apartment soon; they said, maybe even a two-bedroom. Right, Stan?”
“Well, I’m back now,” said Tatiana. “The rooms are no longer unoccupied.” She looked around the hallway. Alexander had cleaned the place so well, she thought with sadness.
“Yes? And where are we supposed to go?” asked Stan. “We are registered with the council to stay here.”
“What about the other rooms in the communal apartment?” she asked. The other rooms—where other people had died.
“They’re all taken,” said Stan. “Listen, why are we still talking about this? There’s enough space here. You can have a whole room to yourself. What’s to complain
about?”
“Both rooms are mine, though,” she said.
“Actually, no,” said Stan, continuing to drink his tea. “Both rooms belong to the state. And the state is at war.” He laughed joylessly. “You are not being a good proletarian, comrade.”
Inga said, “Stan and I are Party members in the Leningrad corps of engineers.”
“That’s great,” said Tatiana, suddenly feeling very tired. “Which room can I take?”
Inga and Stan had taken her old room, where she had slept with Dasha, with Mama, with Papa, with Pasha. It was also the only room with heat. Deda and Babushka’s old room had a broken stove in it.
Even if the stove weren’t broken, Tatiana had no wood to heat it.
“Could I at least have my bourzhuika back?” she asked.
“And what will we use?” said Stan.
“What’s your name anyway?” asked Inga.
“Tania.”
Sheepishly Inga said, “Tania, why don’t you move the little cot to the wall near where the stove is on our side? The wall is warm. Do you want Stan to help you?”
“Inga, stop, you know my back is bad,” snapped Stan. “She can move it herself.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana. She moved Deda’s sofa just far enough to sandwich Pasha’s little cot in between the back of the sofa and the wall.
The wall was warm.
Tatiana slept for seventeen hours covered by her coat and three blankets.
After waking, she went to the Soviet council housing committee to register herself once again as a resident of Leningrad. “What did you come back for?” the woman behind the desk asked her rudely, filling out documents for a new ration card. “We’re still under blockade, you know.”
“I know,” said Tatiana. “But there’s a shortage of nurses. The war is still on.” She paused. “Someone has to take care of the soldiers, right?”
The older woman shrugged, not lifting her eyes. Is anyone in this city going to lift their eyes and look at me? thought Tatiana. Just one person. “Summer was better,” the woman said. “More food. Now you won’t be able to get potatoes.”