Текст книги "The Bronze Horseman"
Автор книги: Paullina Simons
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 47 страниц)
Alexander mouthed to his father, in English, “I love you, Dad.”
Then they left.
Tatiana was crying. Alexander put his arm around her, and said, “Oh, Tania…” He wiped her face. “From the effort to remain composed,” he told her, “I cracked one of my side teeth. See?” He showed her an upper bicuspid. “Now you can stop asking me about it. So I did get to see my father once before he died, and I never would have been able to do it without Dimitri.” With a heavy breath, he took his arm away.
“Alexander,” said Tatiana, crouching beside him, “you did an unbelievable thing for your father.” Her lips trembled. “You gave him comfort before his death.” Feeling very shy, yet overwhelmed by her emotion, her throbbing heart overfilled with him, she took hold of Alexander’s hand, bent her head to it, and kissed it. Blushing and clearing her throat, she let go of him and raised her eyes.
“Tania,” he said with feeling, “who are you?”
She replied, “I am Tatiana.” And gave him her hand. They sat silently.
“There is more.”
She nodded. “The rest I know.” Tatiana took Alexander’s pack of cigarettes and pulled one out. She had needed just a little truth to see the whole. She knew the rest at the point Alexander told her that he gave Dimitri something Dimitri had never had before. It wasn’t friendship, and it wasn’t companionship, and it wasn’t brotherhood. Tatiana’s hands were shaking as she put the cigarette into Alexander’s mouth, and reached for his lighter. Flicking it on, she brought it to his face, and when he inhaled, she kissed his cheek and extinguished the light.
“Thank you,” Alexander said, smoking down half the cigarette before he continued. He kissed her. “You’re not crazy about smoker’s breath?”
“I’ll take your breath any way you give it to me, Shura,” said Tatiana, blushing again. Then she spoke. “Let me tell you the rest. You and Dimitri enrolled in university. You and Dimitri joined the army. You and Dimitri went to officers’ school together. And then Dimitri didn’t make it.” She lowered her head. “At first he was all right with it. You remained best friends. He knew you would do anything for him.” She paused. “And then,” Tatiana said, raising her eyes, “he started asking.”
“I see,” said Alexander. “So you do know everything.”
“What does he ask you for, Shura?”
“You name it.”
They didn’t look at each other.
“He asks you to transfer him here, to make exceptions for him there, he asks you for special privileges and for special treatment.”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
Alexander was mute for a few minutes. It was such a long time that Tatiana thought he had forgotten her question. She waited patiently. Finally Alexander said, his voice filled with something, “Very occasionally, girls. You’d think there was plenty for everyone, but every once in a while I would be with a girl Dimitri wanted to be with. He’d ask me, and I’d back off. I just went and found myself a new girl, and things went on as before.”
Tatiana stared ahead, her eyes the clearest sea green. “Alexander, tell me something. When Dimitri asked you for a girl, he only asked for one you actually liked, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t want just any of your girls. He asked you for girls that he saw you liked. That’s when he asked. Right?”
Alexander was pensive. “I guess.”
Slowly Tatiana said, “So when he asked you for me, you just backed off.”
“Wrong. What I did was show him my indifferent face, hoping that if he thought you didn’t matter to me, he would leave you alone. Unfortunately, that has backfired.”
Tatiana nodded, then shook her head, then started to cry. “Yes, you’re not doing such a good job with your face, Shura. He won’t leave me alone.”
“Please.” Alexander brought her into his arms. “I told you this was a dire mess. I can back off you now as far as Japan for all he cares. Because now Dimitri has fallen for you and wants you for himself.” He stopped.
Tatiana studied Alexander for a few moments and then pressed herself into him. “Shura,” she said quietly, “I’m going to tell you something right now, all right? Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t hold your breath like that.” She managed a smile. “What do you think I’m about to say?”
“I don’t know. I’m ill equipped to guess at the moment. Maybe you have a small child living with a distant aunt?”
Tatiana laughed lightly. “No.” She paused. “But are you ready?”
“Yes.”
Tatiana said, “Dimitri has not fallen for me.”
Alexander pulled away from her.
She shook her head. “No. Not at all. Not even remotely. Believe me when I tell you.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“So what does he want with you then? Don’t even suggest—”
“Not with me. All Dimitri wants—listen carefully—all he craves, all he desires, all he covets is power. That’s the only thing that’s important to him. That’s the love of his life. Power.”
“Power over you?”
“No, Alexander! Power over you. I’m just a means to an end. I’m just ammunition.”
When he looked at her skeptically, she continued. “Dimitri doesn’t have any. You have it all. All he has is what he has over you. That’s his whole life.” She shook her head. “How sad for him.”
“Sad for him!” Alexander exclaimed. “Whose side are you on?”
Tatiana didn’t speak for a moment. “Shura, look at you. And look at him. Dimitri needs you, he is fed and sheltered and grown by you, and if you’re stronger, he becomes stronger, too. He knows that and depends on you blindly for so many things that you are glad to provide. And yet… the more you have, the more he hates you. Self-preservation may be his driving force, but all the same, every time you get a promotion, you go up in rank, you get a new medal, you get a new girl, every time you laugh with joy in the smoky corridor, it diminishes and lessens him. Which is why the more powerful you become, the more he wants from you.”
“Eventually,” said Alexander, glancing at Tatiana, “he is going to want from me something I can’t give. And then what?”
“Coveting from you the best of what you have will eventually lead him into hell.”
“Yes, but me into death.” Alexander shook his head. “Unspoken underneath all his pleas and requests is that one word from him about my American past to the NKVD general at the garrison, one vague accusation, and I instantly vanish into the maw of Soviet justice.”
Nodding sadly, Tatiana said, “I know it. But maybe if he had more, he wouldn’t want so much.”
“You’re wrong, Tania. I have a bad feeling about Dimitri. I have a feeling he is going to want more and more from me. Until,” Alexander said, “he takes it all.”
“No, you’re wrong, Shura. Dimitri will never take all away from you. He will never have that much power.” He might want to. He just doesn’t know who he is dealing with, Tatiana thought, raising her venerating eyes to Alexander. “Besides, we all know what happens to the parasite when something happens to the host,” she whispered.
Alexander gazed down at her. “Yes. He finds himself a new host. Let me ask you,” he finally said, “what do you think Dimitri wants the most from me?”
“What you want most.”
“But, Tania,” said Alexander intensely, “it’s you that I want most.”
Tatiana looked into his face. “Yes, Shura,” she said. “And he knows it. As I said from the beginning—Dimitri has not fallen for me at all. All he wants is to hurt you.”
Alexander was quiet for a spate of eternity under the August sky.
So was Tatiana until she whispered, “Where is your brave and indifferent face? Put it on and he will back away and ask you to give him what you wanted most before me.”
Alexander did not move and did not speak.
“Before me.” Why was he so silent? “Shura?” She thought she felt him shudder.
“Tania, stop. I can’t talk to you about this anymore.”
She could not steady her hands. “All of this—all this between us, and my Dasha, too, now and forever, and still you come for me every chance you can.”
“I told you, I cannot stay away from you,” said Alexander.
Flinching with sadness, Tatiana said, “God, we need to forget each other, Shura. I can’t believe how not meant to be we are.”
“You don’t say?” Alexander smiled. “I will bet my rifle that your ending up on that bench two months ago was the most unlikely part of your day.”
He was right. Most of all, Tatiana remembered the bus she had decided not to take so she could buy herself an ice cream. “And you would know this how?”
“Because,” said Alexander, “my walking by that bench was the most unlikely part of mine.” He nodded. “All this wedged between us—and when we do our best, and grit our teeth, and move away from one another, struggling to reconstruct ourselves, fate intervenes again, and bricks fall from the sky that I remove from your alive and broken body. Was that also not meant to be, perhaps?”
Tatiana inhaled a sob. “That’s right,” she said softly. “We can’t forget that I owe you my life.” She gazed at him. “We can’t forget that I belong to you.”
“I like the sound of that,” Alexander said, hugging her tighter.
“Retreat, Shura,” Tatiana whispered. “Retreat and take your weapons with you. Spare me from him.” She paused. “He just needs to believe you don’t care for me, and then he will lose all interest. You’ll see. He’ll go away, he’ll go to the front. We all have to get through the war before we get to what’s on the other side. So will you do that?”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Are you going to stop coming around?” she asked tremulously.
“No,” said Alexander. “I can’t retreat that far. Just stay away from me.”
“All right.” Her heart skipped. She clutched him.
“And forgive me in advance for my cold face. Can I trust you to do that?”
Nodding, Tatiana rubbed her cheek against his arm, pressing her head to him. “Trust me,” she whispered. “Trust in me. Alexander Barrington, I will never betray you.”
“Yes, but will you ever deny me?” he asked tenderly.
“Only in front of my Dasha,” she replied. “And your Dimitri.”
Lifting her face to him, with an ironic smile Alexander said, “Aren’t you glad now that God stopped us at the hospital?”
Tatiana smiled lightly back. “No.” She sat wrapped in his arms. They stared at each other. She put her palm out to him. He put his palm against hers. “Look,” she said quietly. “My fingertips barely come up to your second knuckle.”
“I’m looking,” he whispered, threading his fingers through hers and squeezing her hand so hard that Tatiana groaned and then blushed.
Bringing his face to hers, Alexander kissed the skin near her nose. “Have I ever told you I adore your freckles?” he murmured. “They are very enticing.”
She purred back. Their fingers remained entwined as they kissed.
“Tatiasha…” Alexander whispered, “you have amazing lips…” He paused and pulled away. “You are”—reluctantly she opened her eyes to meet his gaze—”you are oblivious to yourself. It’s one of your most endearing, most infuriating qualities…”
“Don’t know what you mean…” She had no brain left. “Shura, how can there be not a single place in this world we can go?” Her voice broke. “What kind of a life is this?”
“The Communist life,” Alexander replied.
They huddled closer.
“You crazy man,” she said fondly. “What were you doing fighting with me at Kirov, knowing all this was stacked against us?”
“Raging against my fate,” said Alexander. “It’s the only fucking thing I ever do. I just refuse to be defeated.”
I love you, Alexander, Tatiana wanted to say to him, but couldn’t. I love you. She bowed her head. “I have too young a heart…” she whispered.
Alexander’s arms engulfed her. “Tatia,” he whispered, “you do have a young heart.” He tipped her back a little and kissed her between her breasts. “I wish with all of mine, I wasn’t forced to pass it by.”
Suddenly he moved away and jumped to his feet. Tatiana herself heard a noise behind them in the arcade. Sergeant Petrenko stuck his head out onto the balcony, saying it was time for a shift change.
Alexander carried Tatiana down on his back, and then, with his arm around her, they hobbled through the city streets, back to Fifth Soviet. It was after two in the morning. Tomorrow their day would begin at six, and yet here they both were, clinging to each other in the last remaining hours of night. He carried her in his arms down Nevsky Prospekt. She carried his rifle. He carried her on his back.
They were very alone as they made their way through dark Leningrad.
7
The next evening after work Tatiana found her mother moaning in the room and Dasha sitting in the hallway, crying into her cup of tea. The Metanovs had just received a telegram from the long-defunct Novgorod command, informing them that on 13 July 1941 the train carrying one Pavel Metanov and hundreds of other young volunteers was blown up by the Germans. There were no survivors.
A week before I went to find him, thought Tatiana, pacing dully through the rooms. What did I do on the day that my brother’s train blew up? Did I work, did I ride the tram? Did I even think once of my brother? I’ve thought of him since. I’ve felt him not being here since. Dear Pasha, she thought, we lost you and we didn’t even know it. That’s the saddest loss of all, to go on for a few weeks, a few days, a night, a minute, and think everything is still all right when the structure you’ve built your life on has crumbled. We should have been mourning you, but instead we made plans, went to work, dreamed, loved, not knowing you were already behind us.
How could we not have known?
Wasn’t there a sign? Your reluctance to go? The packed suitcase? The not hearing from you?
Something we could point to so that next time we can say, wait, here is the sign. Next time we will know. And we will mourn right from the start.
Could we have kept you with us longer? Could we have all hung on to you, held you closer, played in the park once more with you to stave off the unforgiving fate for a few more days, a few more Sundays, a few more afternoons? Would that have been worth it, to have you for one more month before you were claimed, before you were lost to us? Knowing your inevitable future, would it have been worth it to see your face for another day, another hour, another minute before you were blink and gone?
Yes.
Yes, it would have been worth it. For you. And for us.
Papa was drunk, spread out on the couch, and Mama was wiping the couch, crying into the bucket of water. Tatiana offered to clean up. Mama pushed her away. Dasha was in the kitchen, crying while she was cooking dinner. Tatiana was filled with an acute sense of finality, a sharp anxiety for the days ahead. Anything could happen in a future forged by the incomprehensible present in which her twin brother was no longer alive.
As they prepared dinner, Tatiana said to Dasha, “Dash, a month ago you asked me if I thought Pasha was still alive, and I said—”
“Like I pay any attention to you, Tania,” snapped Dasha.
“Why did you ask me?” questioned a surprised Tatiana.
“I thought you were going to give me some comforting pat answer. Listen, I don’t want to talk about it. You might not be shocked, but we all are.”
When he came for dinner, Alexander raised his questioning eyebrows to Tatiana, who told him about the telegram.
No one ate the cabbage with a little canned ham that Dasha had made, except Alexander and Tatiana, who, despite a small hope, had been living with a lost Pasha since Luga.
Papa remained on the couch, and Mama sat by his side listening to the tick-tock, tick-tock of the radio’s metronome.
Dasha went to put the samovar on, and Alexander and Tatiana were left alone. He didn’t say anything, just bent his head slightly and peered into her face. For a moment they held each other’s eyes.
“Courage, Alexander,” she whispered.
“Courage, Tatiana.”
She left and went out onto the roof, looking for bombs in the chilly Leningrad night. Summer was over. Winter wasn’t far off.
Part Two
Winter’s Fierce Embrace
Beset and Besieged
WHAT did it cost the soul to lie? At every step, with every breath, with every Soviet Information Bureau report, with every casualty list and every monthly ration card?
From the moment Tatiana woke up until she fell into a bleary sleep, she lied.
She wished Alexander would stop coming around. Lies.
She wished he would end it with Dasha. Alas. More lies.
No more trips to St. Isaac’s. That was good news. Lies.
No more tram rides, no more canals, no more Summer Garden, no more Luga, no more lips or eyes or palpitating breath. Good. Good. Good. More lies.
He was cold. He had an uncanny ability to act as if there were nothing behind his smiling face, or his steady hands, or his burned-down cigarette. Not a twitch showed on his face for Tatiana. That was good. Lies.
Curfew was imposed on Leningrad at the beginning of September. Rations were reduced again. Alexander stopped coming every day. That was good. More lies.
When Alexander came, he was extremely affectionate with Dasha, in front of Tatiana and in front of Dimitri. That was good. Lies.
Tatiana put on her own brave face and turned it away and smiled at Di-mitri and clenched her heart in a tight fist. She could do it, too. More lies.
Pouring tea. Such a simple matter, yet fraught with deceit. Pouring tea, for someone else before him. Her hands trembled with the effort.
Tatiana wished she could get out from the spell that was Leningrad at the beginning of September, get out from the circle of misery and love that besieged her.
She loved Alexander. Ah, finally. Something true to hold on to.
After news of Pasha, Papa worked sporadically, being frequently too intoxicated. His being home made it difficult for Tatiana to cook, to clean, to be in the rooms, to read. More lies. That’s not what made it difficult. It’s what made it unpleasant. Sitting on the roof was the only peace left to Tatiana, and even then peace was relative. There was no peace inside her.
While she was on the roof, she closed her eyes and imagined walking, without a cast, without a limp, with Alexander. They walked down Nevsky, to Palace Square, down the embankment, all around the Field of Mars. They meandered across the Fontanka Bridge, through the Summer Garden, and back out onto the embankment, and then to Smolny and then past Tauride Park, to Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin, past their bench, and on to Suvorovsky, and home. And as she walked with him, it felt as if she were walking into the rest of her life.
In her mind they had walked along the streets of their summer while she sat on the roof and heard the echo of gunfire and explosions. It was a small solace to think the gunfire wasn’t as close as it had been at Luga. Alexander wasn’t as close as he had been at Luga either.
Alexander’s own visits became as truncated as Tatiana’s rations. He was rationing himself the way the Leningrad Council was rationing food. Tatiana missed him, wishing for a second, a moment alone with him again, just to remind herself that the summer of 1941 had not been an illusion, that there had indeed been a time when she had walked along a canal wall, holding his rifle, while he was looking at her and laughing.
There was little laughing nowadays.
“The Germans aren’t here yet, right, Alexander?” asked Dasha over tea—the damned tea. “When they come, will we repel von Leeb?”
“Yes,” Alexander replied. Tatiana knew. More lies.
Tatiana would grimly watch Dasha nuzzling Alexander. She would avert her eyes and say to Dimitri, “Hey, want to hear a joke?”
“What, Tania? No, not really. Sorry, I’m a little preoccupied.”
“That’s fine,” she would say, watching Alexander smile at Dasha. Lies, lies, and lies.
All that Alexander was doing wasn’t enough. Dimitri wasn’t leaving Tatiana alone.
Meanwhile, Tatiana hadn’t heard from Marina about coming to live with them, and in the hospital Vera, along with the other nurses, was anxious about the war. Tatiana felt it herself—war was no longer something on the Luga River, something that had swallowed Pasha, something that was fought by the Ukrainians far away in their smoldering villages or by the British in their distant and proper London. It was coming here.
Well, something better come here, Tatiana thought, because I can’t imagine continuing this way.
The city seemed to hold its collective breath. Tatiana certainly held hers.
For four nights in a row Tatiana cooked fried cabbage for dinner, with less and less oil each day.
“What the hell are you cooking for us, Tania?” asked Mama.
“You call this cooking?” Papa remarked.
“I can’t even dip my bread in the oil. Where is the oil?”
“Couldn’t find any,” said Tatiana.
The radio offered only the most depressing news. Tatiana thought the announcers must deliberately wait until Soviet performance at the front was particularly awful and then begin broadcasting. After Mga fell at the end of August, Tatiana had heard that Dubrovka was under attack—her mother’s mother, Babushka Maya, lived in Dubrovka, a rural town just across the river, right outside city limits.
And then Dubrovka fell on September 6.
Suddenly Tatiana got unexpectedly good news, and good news was becoming as hard to come by as oil. Babushka Maya was coming to live with them on Fifth Soviet! Sadly, Mikhail, Mama’s stepfather, had died of TB a few days earlier, and when the Germans burned Dubrovka, Babushka Maya escaped to the city.
When Babushka came, she took one room, and Mama and Papa moved back in with Dasha and Tatiana. No more please, Tania, go away.
Babushka Maya had lived all her long life in Leningrad and said that it had never even occurred to her to evacuate. “My life, my death, all right here,” she told Tatiana as she unpacked.
She had married her first husband back at the turn of the century and had Tatiana’s mother. After her husband disappeared in the war of 1905, she never remarried, though she lived with poor tubercular Uncle Mikhail for thirty years. Tatiana had once asked Babushka why she never married Uncle Mikhail, and Babushka had replied, “What if my Fedor comes back, Tanechka? I’d be in quite a pickle then.” Babushka painted and studied art; her paintings had hung in galleries before the revolution, but after 1917 she made her living by illustrating propaganda materials for the Bolsheviks. Everywhere in her house in Dubrovka, Tatiana would find sketchbooks filled with pictures of chairs and food and flowers.
After she arrived, Babushka told Tatiana that she didn’t have time to get anything out of her house before it burned. “Don’t worry, Tanechka. I’ll draw you a nice new picture of a chair.”
Tatiana said, “Maybe you can draw me a nice apple pie instead? It’s the season for them.”
The following evening, on September 7, Marina finally arrived—just before dinner. Marina’s father had died in the fighting around Izhorsk, died as an untrained assistant gunner in a tank he had made himself. Uncle Boris was beloved by the Metanovs, and his death would have been a terrible blow, had the family not been reeling from their own nightmare of losing Pasha.
Marina’s mother remained hospitalized; unrelated to the war, she was slowly dying of renal failure. Tatiana’s naïveté surprised even herself. How could anything that happened nowadays be unrelated to the war? First Uncle Misha, now Aunt Rita. There was something universally unfair about that—for people to be dying of causes unrelated to the trenches Alexander had been digging.
Papa looked at Marina’s suitcase. Mama looked at Marina’s suitcase. Dasha looked at Marina’s suitcase. Tatiana said, “Marinka, let me help you unpack.”
Papa asked if she was staying for a while, and Tatiana said, “I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Papa, her father is dead and your sister is dying. She can stay with us for a while, no?”
“Tania,” Marina said, “have you not told Uncle Georg that you invited me? Don’t worry, I brought my ration card, Uncle Georg.”
Papa glared at Tatiana. Mama glared at Tatiana. Dasha glared at Tatiana.
Tatiana said, “Let’s unpack you, Marina.”
That night there was a small problem with dinner. The girls had left the food on the stove for a moment, and when they came back to the kitchen, they found that the fried potatoes, onions, and one small fresh tomato had disappeared. The frying pan had been left empty and dirty. A few of the potatoes had stuck to the bottom, and there they remained, encrusted and covered with a bit of oil. Dasha and Tatiana looked around the kitchen incredulously and vacuously, even coming back inside, thinking maybe they had already brought the dinner in and simply forgotten.
The potatoes were gone.
Dasha, because that was her way, dragged Tatiana with her, knocking on every door of the apartment, asking about the potatoes. Zhanna Sarkova opened the door, looking unkempt and haggard, almost as if she were related to crazy Slavin.
“Is everything all right?” Tatiana asked.
“Fine!” barked Zhanna. “Potatoes—my husband’s disappeared! You haven’t seen him in Grechesky, have you?”
Tatiana shook her head.
“I thought maybe he was wounded somewhere.”
“Wounded where?” Tatiana gently wanted to know.
“How should I know? And no, I haven’t seen your stupid potatoes.” She slammed the door.
Slavin was lying on the floor, muttering. His small room reeked of everything but fried potatoes.
“How is he going to feed himself?” asked Tatiana as they walked by.
“That’s not our problem,” said Dasha.
The Iglenkos were not even home. After the loss of Volodya alongside Pasha, Petr Iglenko spent all his days and nights at the factory that melted down old scrap metal for ammunition. They had just got more bad news. Petka, their eldest son, had been killed in Pulkovo. Only their two youngest, Anton and Kirill, remained.
“Poor Nina,” said Tatiana as they headed back down the corridor to their rooms.
“Poor Nina!” exclaimed Dasha. “What the hell are you talking about, Tania? She still has two sons. Lucky Nina.”
When they returned to the door that led to their own hallway, Dasha said, “They’re all lying.”
“They’re all telling the truth,” said Tatiana. “Fried potatoes with onions are not easy to hide.”
The Metanovs ate bread with butter for dinner that night and complained the whole time. Papa yelled at the girls for losing his dinner. Tatiana kept quiet, heeding Alexander’s warning that she should be careful around people who were likely to hit her.
But after dinner the family wasn’t taking any more chances. Mama and Babushka brought the canned goods, the cereals and the grains, soap and salt and vodka into the rooms, stacking it all in the corners and in the hallway behind the sofa. Mama said, “How fortunate we are that we have the extra door partitioning our corridor from the rest of the scavengers. We’d never keep our food otherwise, I see that now.”
Later that night, when Alexander came by and heard about the potatoes, he told the Metanovs to keep the rear entrance to the kitchen locked.
Dasha introduced Alexander to Marina. They shook hands and both stared at each other for longer than was appropriate. Marina, embarrassed, stepped away, averting her gaze. Alexander smiled, putting his arm around Dasha. “Dasha,” he said, “so this is your cousin Marina.” Tatiana wanted to shake her head at him, while a perplexed Marina remained speechless.
Later on in the kitchen, Marina said to Tatiana, “Tania, why did Dasha’s Alexander look at me as if he knew me?”
“I have no idea.”
“He is adorable.”
“You think so?” said Dasha, who was heading past the girls to the bathroom, leaving Alexander in the corridor. “Well, keep your hands off him,” she added cheerfully. “He’s mine.”
“Don’t you think?” Marina whispered to Tatiana.
“He’s all right,” said Tatiana. “Help me wash this frying pan, will you?”
Adorable Alexander stood in the doorway, smoking and grinning at Tatiana.
Papa continued to grumble about Marina’s arrival. Her student rations would bring little to the family, and another mouth to feed would only drain their resources further. “She just came here to eat my father’s cans of ham,” he said to Mama, gazing at the cans. Tatiana couldn’t tell if Papa wanted to eat the cans or to kiss them. “She is your niece, Papa,” Tatiana whispered, so Marina wouldn’t overhear. “She is your only sister’s only daughter.”
2
The following day, on September 8, there was unrest in the city from early morning. The radio said, “Air raid, air raid!”
At work, Vera grabbed Tatiana’s hand and exclaimed, “Do you hear that noise?”
They walked out the front entrance of the hospital on Ligovsky Prospekt, and Tatiana heard distant heavy thundering that didn’t get closer, just increased in frequency. Calmly, Tatiana said to Vera, “Verochka, it’s just the mortars. They make that sound when they release the bombs.”
“Bombs?”
“Yes. They set this machine in the ground—I don’t know exactly how it works—but it fires big bombs, little bombs, explosive bombs, short-fuse, long-fuse. Fragmentation bombs are the worst,” said Tatiana. “But also they have these little antipersonnel bombs. They fire them a hundred at a time. They’re lethal.”
Vera stared at Tatiana, who shrugged. “Luga. Wish I hadn’t gone. But… Listen, can you saw my leg off?”
They went inside. Vera said, “How about if I just remove the cast? I think taking the leg off is a bit drastic.”
It was the first time Tatiana had seen her leg in over six weeks. She wished she had more time to contemplate her peculiar, wilted limb without the cast, but as she was wobbling around, she heard a commotion down the hall at the nurses’ station. All the nurses ran upstairs. Tatiana followed them limply. Her leg hurt when she put weight on it.
On the roof she watched two formations of eight planes each fly above her. Half a city away there was an explosion, followed by fire and black smoke. She thought, it’s really happening. The Germans are bombing Leningrad. I thought I had left it all behind in Luga. I thought what I had seen there was the worst I was ever going to see. At least I was able to leave Luga and come back to peace. Where can I go now?
Tatiana smelled acrid acidity and thought, what is that? “I’m going home,” she said to Vera. “To my family.” But all she could think about was that smell.
By afternoon they knew. The Badayev storage warehouses supplying Leningrad with food had been bombed by the Germans and now lay in flaming ruins. The acrid smell was burning sugar.
