The Bronze Horseman

  The first thing she saw was the lit-up Church of St. Nicholas, up on a hill overlooking the harbor. She stopped to ask directions to “Helsingin Yliopistollinen Keskussairaala,” the Helsinki University Hospital. She knew how to say it in Finnish, she just couldn’t understand the directions in Finnish. After she’d made five stops for directions, finally someone spoke enough English to tell her the hospital was behind the lit-up church. She could find that.

  Dr. Sayers was well known and loved at the hospital where he had worked since the war of 1940. The nurses brought a stretcher for him and asked Tatiana all sorts of questions she did not understand: most of them in English, some in Finnish, none in Russian.

  At the hospital she met another American Red Cross doctor, Sam Leavitt, who took one look at the gash in her face and said she needed stitches. He offered her a local anesthetic. Tatiana refused. “Suture away, Doctor,” she said.

  “You’ll need about ten stitches,” the doctor said.

  “Only ten?”

  He stitched her cheek as she sat mutely and motionlessly on a hospital bed. Afterward he offered her some antibiotic, some painkiller, and some food. She took the antibiotic. She did not eat the food, showing Leavitt her swollen and bloody tongue. “Tomorrow,” she whispered. “Tomorrow it will be better. Tomorrow I will eat.”

  The nurses brought her not only a new, clean, oversize uniform that hid her stomach but also warm stockings and a flannel undershirt, and they even offered to launder her old, soiled clothes. Tatiana gave them the uniform and her woolen coat but kept her Red Cross armband.

  Later Tatiana lay on the floor by Dr. Sayers’s bed. The night nurse finally came in and asked her to go and sleep in another room, lifting her and leading her out. Tatiana allowed herself to be led out, but as soon as the nurse went down the hall to her station, Tatiana returned to Dr. Sayers.

  In the morning he was worse and she was better. She got her old uniform back, starched and white, and managed to eat a bit of food. She remained all day with Dr. Sayers, staring out the window to the patch of the iced-over Gulf of Finland she could see past the stone buildings and the bare trees. Dr. Leavitt came in the late afternoon to check on her face and to ask her if she wanted to go and lie down. She refused. “Why are you sitting here? Why don’t you go get some rest yourself?”

  Turning her head to Matthew Sayers, Tatiana didn’t reply, thinking, because that’s what I do—then, now. I sit by the dying.

  At night Sayers was worse still. He had a high fever of nearly 42°C, and was parched and sweaty. The antibiotics weren’t helping him. Tatiana didn’t understand what was happening to him. All she wanted was for him to regain consciousness. She fell asleep in the chair next to his bed, her head near him.

  In the middle of the night she woke up, feeling suddenly that Dr. Sayers wasn’t going to make it. His breathing—it was too familiar to her by now, the last gasping rattles of a dying man. Tatiana took his hand and held it. She placed her hand on his head, and with her broken tongue whispered to him in Russian, in English, about America and about all the things he would see when he got better. He opened his eyes and said in a weak voice that he was cold. She went and got him another blanket. He squeezed her hand. “I’m so sorry, Tania,” he whispered, rapidly breathing through his mouth.

  “No, I’m so sorry,” she said inaudibly. Then louder, “Dr. Sayers,” she said. “Matthew . . .” She tried to keep her voice from cracking. “I beg you—please tell me what happened to my husband. Did Dimitri betray him? Was he arrested? We’re in Helsinki. We’re out of the Soviet Union. I’m not going back. I want so little for myself.” She bent her head into his arm. “I just want a little comfort,” she whispered.

  “Go to . . . America, Tania.” His voice was fading. “That will be his comfort.”

  “Comfort me with the truth. Did you really see him in the lake?”

  The doctor stared at her for a long moment with an expression that looked to Tatiana to be one of understanding and disbelief, and then he closed his eyes. Tatiana felt his hand trembling in hers, heard his breath sputtering in his chest. Soon it stopped.

  Tatiana didn’t let go of his hand until morning.

  A nurse came in and gently led Tatiana away, and in the hall she put her arms around Tatiana and said, in English, “Honey, you can do your very best for people, and they still die. We’re at war. You can’t save everybody, you know.”

  Sam Leavitt approached her in the hall on the way to his rounds, asking her what she intended to do. Tatiana said she needed to get back to America. Leavitt stared at her and said, “Back to America?” Leaning toward her, he said, “Listen, I don’t know where Matthew found you, your English is pretty good, but it’s not that good. Are you really an American?”

  Paling, Tatiana nodded.

  “Where is your passport? Can’t get back without a passport.”

  She stared at him mutely.

  “Besides, it’s too dangerous now. The Germans bomb the Baltic mercilessly.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ships go down all the time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you stay here till April, work until the ice melts? Your face has to heal. The stitches need to come out. And we could use another pair of hands. Stay in Helsinki.”

  Tatiana shook her head.

  “You’ll have to stay here anyway until we get you a new passport. Do you want me to take you to Senate Square later? I’ll take you to the U.S. consulate. It’ll take them at least a month to issue you new documents. By that time the ice will have melted. Getting to America is hard these days.”

  Tatiana knew that the U.S. State Department, digging around to find a Jane Barrington, would discover only that she was not Jane Barrington. Alexander told her they could not stay a second in Helsinki—the NKVD had a long arm. Alexander said that they had to get to Stockholm. Shaking her head, Tatiana backed away from the doctor.

  She left the hospital, carrying her backpack, her nurse’s bag, her Jane Barrington travel documents. She walked to the semicircular south harbor in Helsinki and sat on the bench, watching the vendors at Market Square pack up their carts and their tables and sweep the square clean.

  Calm descended again.

  The seagulls screeched overhead.

  Tatiana sat on the bench and waited interminable hours until night fell, and then she got up and walked past a narrow street leading up to the gleaming Church of St. Nicholas. She barely glanced at it.

  In the dark she meandered up and down the harbor until she spotted trucks with the blue-and-white Swedish flag, loading small amounts of lumber lying in piles on the ground. There was quite a bit of activity in the harbor. Tatiana could see that night was the time for the supplies to get across the Baltic. She knew that the trucks did not travel by day, when it was easy to spot them. Though the Germans generally did not bomb neutral trade vessels, sometimes they did. Sweden had finally started sending all its shipping and trucking trade with protective convoys. Alexander told her that.

  Tatiana knew that the trucks were headed for Stockholm because one of the men said the word “Stokgolm,” which sounded like “Stockholm” in Russian.

  She stood at the edge of the harbor watching the lumber being loaded onto the back of an open truck. Was she scared? No. Not anymore. She approached the truck driver, showing him her Red Cross badge, and said in English that she was a nurse trying to get to Stockholm and could he please take her across the Gulf of Bothnia with him for a hundred American dollars. He didn’t understand a word of what she had said. She showed him a hundred-dollar bill and said, “Stokgolm?” Gladly taking the money from her hands, he let her ride with him.

  He didn’t speak any English or Russian, so they barely talked, which was fine with Tatiana. On the way through the white-out darkness, illuminated by the convoy’s headlights and by the gleaming northern lights above her head, she remembered that the first time she kissed Alexander when they were in the woods in Luga, she was really afraid that he was
going to know immediately that she had never been kissed before, and she thought, if he asks me, I’m going to lie, because I don’t want him to think less of me. She thought that for the first second or two, and then she couldn’t think about anything, because his lips were so abundantly passionate for her, because in her hunger to kiss him back she had forgotten her inexperience.

  Thinking about the first time they kissed took up much of the trip. Then Tatiana slept.

  She didn’t know how long the journey took. The last few hours, they meandered on the ice through the small islands preceding Stockholm.

  “Tack,” she said to the driver when they stopped at the harbor. “Tack sa mycket.” Alexander taught her that, how to say thank you in Swedish. Tatiana walked across the ice, careful not to slip, walked up granite steps and was out on the cobbled seaside promenade. I’m in Stockholm, she thought. I’m nearly free. Slowly she meandered through the half-empty streets. It was morning—too early for the stores to be open. What day was it? She did not know. Near the industrial docks Tatiana found a small open bakery, and on its shelves there was white bread. She showed the woman her American money. The shop owner shook her head and said something in Swedish. “Bank,” she said. “Pengar, dollars.”

  Tatiana turned to go. The woman called after her, but in a strident voice, and Tatiana, afraid the woman suspected she didn’t belong in Sweden, did not turn around. She was already on the street when the woman ran around to stop her, giving her a loaf of warm crusty white bread, the likes of which Tatiana had never smelled, and a paper cup of black coffee. “Tack,” Tatiana said. “Tack sa mycket.”

  “Varsagod,” said the woman, shaking her head at the money Tatiana was offering her.

  Tatiana sat on the bench at the docks overlooking the crescent of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia and ate the whole loaf of bread and had her coffee. She stared unblinkingly into the blue dawn in front of her. Somewhere east of the ice lay besieged Leningrad. And somewhere east of that was Lazarevo. And in between was the Second World War and Comrade Stalin.

  After eating, she walked around the streets long enough to find an open bank, where she exchanged some of her American money. Armed with a few kronor, Tatiana bought some more white bread and then found a place that sold cheese—in fact, all different kinds of cheeses—but even better, she found a café near the harbor that served her breakfast, and not just oatmeal, and not just eggs, and not just bread, but bacon! She bought three helpings of bacon and decided that from now on that was all she was going to have for breakfast.

  The day was still long. Tatiana didn’t know where to go to sleep. Alexander told her that in Stockholm there would be hotels that would rent them a room without asking for their passports. Just like in Poland. She found that beyond belief then. But Alexander, of course, was right.

  Not only did Tatiana rent a hotel room, not only did she get a key to a room that was warm, that had a bed and a view of the harbor, but it had its own bathroom and in the bathroom was the thing that Alexander had told her about, the shower thing that poured water on her from above. She must have stayed under the hot stream for an hour.

  And then she slept for twenty-four.

  It took Tatiana over two months to leave Stockholm.

  Seventy-six days of sitting on the pier bench looking east past the gulf, past Finland, to the Soviet Union, while the seagulls cried overhead.

  Seventy-six days of—

  She and Alexander had planned to stay in Stockholm in the spring while waiting for his documents to come through from the U.S. State Department. They would have celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday in Stockholm on May 29.

  Austere Stockholm was softened by spring. Tatiana bought yellow tulips and ate fresh fruit right from the market vendors, and she had meat—smoked hams and pork and sausages. She had ice cream. Her face healed. Her stomach grew. She thought of remaining in Stockholm, of finding a hospital to work in, of having her baby in Sweden. She liked the tulips and the hot shower.

  But the seagulls wept overhead.

  Tatiana never did go to Riddarholm Church, Sweden’s Temple of Fame.

  Finally she took a train across the country to Göteborg, where she easily slipped into one of the holds on a Swedish trade cargo vessel bound for Harwich, England, carrying paper products. As during her passage from Finland to Sweden, she and her vessel were surrounded by a heavily armed convoy. Since Norway was German-occupied, there were quite a few incidents of bombings and sinkings in the North Sea. Noncombatant Sweden wasn’t having any of it, and neither was Tatiana.

  All was quiet as she crossed the North Sea and docked in Harwich. To get to Liverpool, Tatiana took a train, which had the most comfortable seats. Out of curiosity she bought herself a first-class ticket. The pillows were white. This would have been a good train to take to Lazarevo after burying Dasha, thought Tatiana.

  She spent two weeks in dank and industrial Liverpool, until she found out that a shipping company called the White Star sailed once a month to New York, but she needed a visa to get on board. She bought a second-class ticket and appeared on the gangplank. When a young midshipman asked for her papers, Tatiana showed him her Red Cross travel document from the Soviet Union. He said it was no good; she needed a visa. Tatiana said she didn’t have one. He said she needed a passport. She said she didn’t have one. He laughed and said, “Well then, dearie, you’re not getting on this boat.”

  Tatiana said, “I do not have visa, I do not have passport, but what I do have is five hundred dollars I would like you to have if you let me pass.” She coughed. She knew that five hundred dollars was a year’s salary for the sailor.

  The midshipman instantly took the money and led her into a small room below sea level, where Tatiana climbed onto the top bunk. Alexander told her he slept on the top bunk at the Leningrad garrison. She wasn’t feeling well. She was wearing the larger of her two white uniforms, the one she had been given in Helsinki. Her original one had long stopped fitting her, and even this one did not button well around her stomach.

  In Stockholm, Tatiana had found a place to wash her uniforms called the tvatteri, where there were things called tvatt maskins and tork tumlares that she put money into, and thirty minutes later the clothes came out clean, and thirty minutes later the clothes came out dry, and there was no standing in cold water, no washboards, no soaping. She didn’t have to do anything but sit and watch the machine.

  As Tatiana sat and watched the machine, she remembered the last time she and Alexander made love. He was leaving at six in the evening, and they finished making love about five fifty-five. He had just enough time to put on his clothes, kiss her, and bolt out the door. When they made love, he had been on top of her. She watched his face the whole time, holding on to his neck and crying and pleading with him not to end, because when he ended he would have to leave. Love. How did they say it in Swedish?

  Kärlek.

  Jag älskar dig, Alexander.

  As the tork tumlare twirled her Red Cross uniform and stockings, Tatiana was so grateful that the last time she and Alexander made love, she saw his face.

  The trip across to New York took ten nauseating, spluttering days. When she arrived, it was the end of June. Tatiana had turned nineteen years old on the White Star line in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  On the boat Tatiana coughed and thought about Orbeli.

  “Tatiasha—remember Orbeli—”

  Coughing up blood, Tatiana summoned her sinking strength and the foundering energy of her heart to ask herself—if Alexander knew he was going to be arrested and couldn’t tell her because he knew she would never go without him, would he have gritted his teeth and set his jaw and lied?

  Yes. Everything she knew about Alexander told her that would be exactly what he would do. If he knew the truth, he would give her one word.

  Orbeli.

  Her chest hurt so much it felt as if it were about to tear apart her breastbone.

  When the White Star line docked in the Port of
New York, Tatiana could not get up. Not that she wouldn’t. She just couldn’t. Delirious after a passage of violent coughing, she felt as if something inside her were leaking out.

  Soon she heard voices, and two men came into the room, both of them dressed in white.

  “Oh, no, what do we have here?” said the shorter man. “Not another refugee.”

  “Wait, this one is wearing a Red Cross uniform,” said the taller man.

  “She obviously stole it somewhere. Look, it barely buttons over her stomach. It’s obviously not hers. Edward, let’s go. We’ll report her to the INS later. We’ve got to empty this ship.”

  Tatiana moaned. The men came back. The taller man looked her over. “Chris, I think she’s going to have a baby.”

  “What—now?”

  “I think so.” The doctor felt for something underneath her. “Her water may have broken.”

  Chris came up to Tatiana and put his hand on her head. “Feel her. She’s burning up. Listen to her breathing. I don’t even need a stethoscope. She’s got TB. God, how many of these cases can we see? Forget it. We still have all the cabins to go through. She’s our first. I guarantee she won’t be the last.”

  Edward kept his hand on Tatiana’s stomach. “She’s very sick,” he said. “Miss,” he said, “do you speak English?”

  When Tatiana didn’t answer, Chris exclaimed, “You see?”

  “Maybe she has papers? Miss, do you have any papers?”

  When Tatiana didn’t answer, Chris said, “I’m done. I’m going.”

  Edward said, “Chris, she’s sick, and she’s about to have a baby. What do you want to do, leave her?” He laughed. “What kind of a damn doctor are you?”

  “A tired and underpaid one, that’s what kind. PHD doesn’t pay me enough to care. Where are we going to take her?”