Текст книги "The Bronze Horseman"

Автор книги: Paullina Simons

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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Fortress Pieces

THE flip side of white nights—Leningrad’s December. White nights—light, summer, sunshine, a pastel sky. December—darkness, blizzards, cloud cover, a hunkering sky. An oppressive sky.

Bleak light appeared at around ten in the morning. It hovered around until about two, then reluctantly vanished, leaving darkness once more.

Complete darkness. In early December the electricity was turned off in Leningrad not for a day but seemingly for good. The city was plunged into perpetual night. Trams stopped running. Buses hadn’t run in months because there was no fuel.

The workweek was reduced to three days, then two days, then one day. Electricity was finally restored to a few businesses essential to the war effort: Kirov, the bread factory, the waterworks, Mama’s factory, a wing in Tatiana’s hospital. But the trams had stopped running permanently. There was no electricity in Tatiana’s apartment and no heat. Water remained only on the first floor, down the icy slide.

These days brought a pall with the morning that blighted Tatiana’s spirit. It became impossible to think about anything but her own mortality—impossible as it was.

At the beginning of December, America finally entered the war, something about the island of Hawaii and the Japanese. “Ah, maybe now that America is on our side…” said Mama, sewing.

A few days after news of America, Tikhvin was recaptured. Those were words Tatiana understood. Tikhvin! It meant railroad, meant ice road, meant food. Meant an increase in ration?

No, it didn’t mean that.

A hundred and twenty-five grams of bread.

When the electricity went out, the radio stopped working. No more metronome, no more news reports. No light, no water, no wood, no food. Tick tock. Tick tock.

They sat and stared at each other, and Tatiana knew what they were thinking.

Who was next?

“Tell us a joke, Tania.”

Sigh. “A customer asks the butcher, ‘Can I have five grams of sausage, please?’

“ ‘Five grams?’ the butcher repeats. ‘Are you mocking me?’

“ ‘Not at all,’ says the customer. ‘If I were mocking you, I would have asked you to slice it.’ ”

Sighs. “Good joke, daughter.”

Tatiana was coming back to the rooms dragging her bucket of water behind her through the hall. Crazy Slavin’s door was closed. It occurred to Tatiana that it had been closed for some time. But Petr Petrov’s door was open. He was sitting at his small table trying unsuccessfully to roll a cigarette.

“Do you need help with that?” she asked, leaving her bucket on the floor and coming in.

“Thank you, Tanechka, yes,” he said in a defeated voice. His hands were shaking.

“What’s the matter? Go to work, there’ll be something there for lunch. They still feed you at Kirov, don’t they?”

Kirov had been nearly destroyed by German artillery from just a few kilometers south in Pulkovo, but the Soviets had built a smaller factory inside the crumbled façade, and until a few days ago Petr Pavlovich took tram Number 1 all the way to the front.

Tatiana faintly remembered tram Number 1.

“What’s the matter?” she asked. “You don’t want to go?”

He shook his head. “Don’t worry about me, Tanechka. You’ve got enough to worry about.”

“Tell me.” She paused. “Is it the bombs?”

He shook his head.

“Not the food, not the bombs?” She looked at his bald shrunken head and went to close the door to his room. “What is it?” she asked, quieter.

Petr Pavlovich told her that he was moved to Kirov only recently to fix the motors of tanks that had broken down. There were no shipments, no new parts, and no actual tank motors.

“I figured out a way to make airplane motors fit the tanks. I figured out how to repair them to use in the tanks, and then I fix them for airplanes, too.”

“That sounds good,” she said. “For that you get a worker’s ration, right?” She added, “Three hundred and fifty grams of bread?”

He waved at her and took a drag of the cigarette. “That’s not it. It’s the Satan spawn, the NKVD.” He spit with malice. “They were ready to shoot the poor bastards before me who couldn’t fix the engines. When I was brought in, they stood over me with their fucking rifles to make sure I could fix the equipment.”

Tatiana listened to him, her hand on his back, her bones chilled, her heart chilled. “But you did fix them, comrade,” she breathed out.

“Yes, but what if I didn’t?” he said. “Isn’t the cold, the hunger, the Germans enough? How many more ways are there to kill us?”

Tatiana backed away. “I’m sorry about your wife,” she uttered, opening the door.

That afternoon as she was coming back home, his door was still open. Tatiana glanced in. Petr Pavlovich Petrov was still sitting behind his desk, the half-smoked cigarette Tatiana had rolled for him in his hands. He was dead. With trembling fingers Tatiana made the sign of the cross and closed the door.

They stared at each other from the couch, from the bed, across the room. The four of them. They slept and ate in one room now. They would put the plates on their laps and they would have their evening bread. And then they would sit in front of the bourzhuika and watch the flames through the small window in the stove. That was the only light in the room. They had plenty of wick, and they had matches, but they had nothing to burn. If only they had some—

Nothing to burn. Oh, no. Tatiana remembered.

The motor oil. The motor oil Alexander had told her to buy on the Sunday in June when there was still ice cream, and sunshine, and a glimmer of joy. He had told her—and she hadn’t listened.

And now look.

No tick tock, tick tock anymore.

“Marina, what are you doing?”

Marina was peeling the wallpaper off the wall one December afternoon. Ripping off a chunk, she went to the bucket of water, dipped her hand in it, and moistened the backing.

“What are you doing?” Tatiana repeated.

Taking a spoon, Marina started to scrape off the wallpaper paste. “The woman in front of me in line today said some of the wallpaper paste was made with potato flour.” She was scraping frantically at the paper.

Carefully Tatiana took the paper away from Marina. “Potato flour and glue,” Tatiana said.

Marina ripped the paper back from Tatiana. “Don’t touch that. Get your own.”

Tatiana repeated, “Potato flour and glue.”

“So?”

“Glue is poison.”

Marina laughed soundlessly, scraping off the damp paste and spooning it into her mouth.

“Dasha, what are you doing?”

“I’m lighting the bourzhuika.” Dasha was standing in front of the stove window, throwing books onto the flames.

“You’re burning books?”

“Why not? We have to be warm.”

Tatiana grabbed Dasha’s hand. “No, Dasha. Stop. Don’t burn books, please. We haven’t been reduced to that.”

“Tania! If I had more energy, I would kill you and slice you open and eat you,” Dasha said, throwing another book onto the fire. “Don’t tell me—”

“No, Dasha,” Tatiana said, holding on to her sister’s wrist. “Not books.”

“We have no wood,” said Dasha matter-of-factly.

As quickly as she could, Tatiana went and checked under her bed. Her Zoshchenko, John Stuart Mill, the English dictionary. She remembered that on Saturday afternoon she had been reading Pushkin and had carelessly left the precious volume by the couch. She turned to Dasha, who kept relentlessly throwing more books onto the fire.

In horror, Tatiana saw The Bronze Horseman in her sister’s hands. “Dasha, no!” she screamed, and lunged at her sister. Where did she find the strength to scream, to lunge? Where did she find the strength for emotion?

She grabbed it, YANKED it out of Dasha’s hands. “No!” She clutched her book to her chest. “Oh, my God, Dasha,” Tatiana said trembling. “That’s my book.”

“They’re all our books, Tania,” Dasha said apathetically. “Who cares now? To stay warm is everything.”

Licking her lips, Tatiana couldn’t speak for a while, she was so shaken. “Dasha, why books? We have the whole dining room set. A table and six chairs. It will last us the winter if we’re careful.” She wiped her mouth and stared at her hand. It was streaked with blood.

“You want to saw up the dining room set?” Dasha said, throwing Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto onto the fire. “Be my guest.”

Something was happening to Tatiana. She didn’t want to scare her mother or her sister. She knew that Marina was beyond fear. Tatiana waited for Alexander. She would ask him what was happening to her. But before he came back and she had a chance to ask him, she noticed that Marina, too, was bleeding from her mouth. “Let’s go, Marina,” she said. “Let’s go to the hospital.”

Finally a doctor came to take a look at them. “Scurvy,” the doctor said flatly. “It’s scurvy, girls. Everybody has it. You’re bleeding from the inside out. Your capillaries are getting too thin, and they’re breaking. You need vitamin C. Let’s see if we can get you a shot.”

They both got a shot of vitamin C.

Tatiana got better.

Marina didn’t.

In the night she whispered to Tatiana, “Tania, you listening?”

“What, Marinka?”

“I don’t want to die,” she whispered, and if she could have cried, she would have. She was barely able to emit a low wail. “I don’t want to die, Tania! If I hadn’t stayed here with Mama, I would be in Molotov right now with Babushka, and I wouldn’t die.”

“You’re not going to die,” said Tatiana, putting her hand on Marina’s head.

“I don’t want to die,” whispered Marina, “and not feel just once what you feel.” She struggled for her breath. “Just once in my life, Tania!”

As if from a distance, Dasha’s voice came at them. “What does Tania feel?”

Marina didn’t reply. “Tanechka…” she whispered. “What does it feel like?”

“What does what feel like?” asked Dasha. “Indifference? Cold? Wasting away?”

Tatiana continued to gently caress Marina’s forehead. “It feels,” she whispered, “as if you’re not alone. Now, come on, where is your strength? Do you remember us with Pasha, me rowing and you and Pasha swimming alongside trying to keep up? Where is that strength, Marinka?”

The next morning Marina lay dead beside Tatiana.

Dasha said, “We have her rations until the end of the month,” barely blinking at the sight of her dead cousin.

Tatiana shook her head. “As you know, she has already eaten them. It’s the middle of the month. She’s got nothing left until the end of December.”

Tatiana wrapped her cousin in a white sheet, Mama sewed up the top and bottom, and they slid Marina down the stairs and onto the street. They tried to put her in the sled, but they couldn’t lift her. After Tatiana made the sign of the cross on Marina, they left her on the snowy pavement.

2

One more day, another shot of vitamin C. Another two hundred grams of blackened bread. Tatiana pretended to go to work so she could continue to receive a worker’s ration, but there was nothing for her to do at work, except sit by the dying.

A week after Marina died, Tatiana, Dasha, and Mama were sitting on the sofa in the quiet night in front of a nearly extinguished bourzhuika. All the books were gone, except for what Tatiana hid under her bed. The embers did not light up the room. Mama was sewing in the dark.

“What are you sewing, Mama?” Tatiana asked.

“Nothing,” Mama said. “Nothing important. Where are my girls?”

“Here, Mama.”

“Dasha, remember Luga?”

Dasha remembered.

“Dashenka, remember when Tania got a fish bone stuck in her throat, and we couldn’t get it out for anything?”

Dasha remembered. “She was five.”

“Who got it out, Mama?”

“Pasha. He had such small hands. He just stuck his hand in your throat and pulled it out.”

“Mama,” Dasha said, “remember when our Tania fell out of the boat in Lake Ilmen, and we all jumped after her, because we thought she couldn’t swim, and she was already dog-paddling away from the boat?”

Mama remembered. “Tania was two.”

“Mama,” Tatiana said, “remember how I dug that big hole in our yard to trap Pasha and then forgot to fill it up, and you fell in?”

“Don’t remind me,” said Mama. “I’m still angry about that.”

They tried to laugh.

“Tania,” said Mama, her hands moving on her sewing work, “when you and Pasha were born, we were in Luga, and while the whole family was clucking around our new boy Pasha, saying what a great boy he was and what a fine boy, Dasha over here, all seven years of her, picked you up and said, ‘Well, you can all have the black one. I’m taking the white one. This baby is mine.’ And we all teased her and said, ‘Fine then. Dasha, you want her? You can name her.’ ” Mama’s voice cracked once, twice. “And our Dasha said, ‘I want to name my baby Tatiana… ’ ”

One more day, one more shot of vitamin C for Tatiana, whose fingers trickled blood onto the two hundred grams of bread she cut up for her mother and sister.

One more day, a bomb fell in the corner of the Fifth Soviet roof. No Anton to put it out, no Mariska, no Kirill, no Kostia, and no Tatiana. It caught fire and burned through the fourth floor, which faced the church on Grechesky Prospekt. No one came to put it out. It smoldered for a day and then gradually burned itself out.

Was it Tatiana’s imagination, or was the city quieter? Either she was going deaf or there was less bombing. There was still some every day, but shorter in duration, milder in intensity, almost as if the Germans were bored with the whole thing. And why not? Who was left to bomb?

Well, Tatiana.

And Dasha.

And Mama.

No, not Mama.

Her hands still held the white camouflage uniform she was sewing, and underneath her wool hat she wore her kerchief. In front of the frail fire from the small bourzhuika, Mama said, “I can’t anymore. I just can’t.” Her hands stopped moving, and her head, too. Her eyes remained open. Tatiana could see short spasms of breath leaving her mouth, short, brief, then gone.

Tatiana and Dasha kneeled by their mother. “I wish we knew a prayer, Dasha.”

“I think I know part of something called the Lord’s Prayer,” said Dasha.

Tatiana’s back was to the fire, and her back was warm, but her front was cold. “Which part do you know?”

“Only the part with Give us this day our daily bread.”

Tatiana placed her hand on her mother’s lap. “We’ll bury Mama with her sewing.”

“We’ll have to bury her in her sewing,” Dasha said, and her voice was weak. “Look, she was sewing herself a sack.”

“Dear Lord,” said Tatiana, holding her mother’s cold leg. “Give us this day our daily bread…” She paused. “What else, Dasha?”

“That’s all I know. What about Amen?”

“Amen,” said Tatiana.

For dinner they cut the bread into three pieces. Tatiana ate hers. Dasha ate hers. They left their mother’s on her plate.

That night Tatiana and Dasha held each other in their bed. “Don’t leave me, Tania. I can’t make it without you.”

“I’m not going to leave you, Dasha. We are not going to leave each other. We can’t be left alone. You know that we all need one other person. One other person to remind us we are still human beings and not beasts.”

“We’re the only two left, Tania,” said Dasha. “Just you and me.”

Tatiana held her sister closer. You. Me. And Alexander.

3

Alexander returned a few days later. The dark circles around his eyes and his thick black beard gave him a robber baron look, but otherwise he seemed to be holding up. That made Tatiana warmer on the inside. Seeing him, in fact… well, what could she say? Dasha stood in the hallway, and his arms were around Dasha, while Tatiana stood back and watched them. And he watched her.

“How are you?” she said faintly.

“I’m fine,” he said. ‘How are my girls?’

“Not so good, Alexander,” said Dasha. “Not so good. Come, look at our mother. She’s been dead for five days. The council doesn’t come anymore. We can’t move her.”

Behind Dasha, Alexander walked past Tatiana and glided his gloved hand across her face.

He placed their mother in the white camouflage uniform cape and carried her—taking care not to slip on the ice—down the stairs, put her on Tatiana’s red and blue shiny sled, and pulled her to the cemetery on Starorusskaya as the girls walked beside him. He moved the frozen bodies at the entrance gate to make way for the sled and pulled Mama all the way inside, where he gent-ly laid her in the snow. He broke off two small branches and held them in front of Tatiana, who with a piece of twine tied them together in a cross, which they laid on top of Mama.

“Do you know a prayer, Alexander?” asked Tatiana. “For our mother?”

Alexander stared at Tatiana, then shook his head. She watched him cross himself and mutter a few words under his cold breath.

As they were walking out, Tatiana asked, “You don’t know a prayer?”

“Not in Russian,” he whispered back.

Back in the apartment he was almost cheerful. “Girls,” he said, “you won’t believe what goodies I have for you.” He paused. “Just for you.”

He had brought them a sack of potatoes, seven oranges he had found God knows where, half a kilo of sugar, a quarter kilo of barley, linseed oil, and, smiling with all his teeth at Tatiana, three liters of motor oil.

If she could have, Tatiana would have smiled back.

Alexander showed her how to make light with the motor oil. After pouring a few teaspoons of the oil between two saucers, he placed a moistened wick inside, leaving the end out, and lit the wick. The oil illuminated an area big enough to sew or read by. Then he went out and returned half an hour later with some wood. He said he had found the broken beams in the basement. He fetched them water.

Tatiana wanted to touch him. But Dasha was taking care of that. Dasha was not leaving his side. Tatiana couldn’t even meet his eyes. She got a pot and made some tea and put sugar in it; what a revelation. She cooked three potatoes and some barley. She broke their bread. They ate. Afterward she warmed up the water on the bourzhuika, asked Alexander for some soap, and washed her face and neck and hands.

“Thank you, Alexander,” said Tatiana. “Have you heard from Dimitri?”

“You’re welcome,” he replied. “And no, I haven’t. You?”

Tatiana shook her head.

“Alexander, my hair has started to fall out,” said Dasha. “Look.” She pulled out a black clump.

“Dash, don’t do that,” he said, turning back to Tatiana. “Has your hair begun to fall out, too?” His eyes on her were so warm, almost like a bourzhuika.

“No,” she muttered softly. “My hair can’t afford to fall out. I’ll be bald tomorrow. I’m bleeding, though.” She glanced at him and wiped her mouth. “Maybe an orange will help.”

“Eat all seven of them, but slowly. And, girls, don’t go out in the street at night. It’s too dangerous.”

“We won’t.”

“And always lock your doors.”

“We always do.”

“Then how come I waltzed right in?”

“Tania did it. She left it open.”

“Stop blaming your sister. Just lock the damn doors.”

After dinner Alexander retrieved a saw from the kitchen and sawed the dining-room table and the chairs into small pieces to fit into the bourzhuika. As he was working, Tatiana stood by his side. Dasha sat on the couch, bundled in blankets. The room was cold. They never went into this room anymore. They slept and ate and sat in the next room, where the windows weren’t broken.

“Alexander, how many tons of flour are they feeding us on now?” asked Tatiana, taking the sawed pieces from him and stacking them in the corner.

“I don’t know.”

“Alexander.”

Great sigh. “Five hundred.”

“Five hundred tons?”

“Yes.”

Dasha said, “Five hundred sounds like a lot.”

“Alexander?”

“Oh, no.”

“How many tons of flour did they give us during the July rations?” Tatiana wanted to know.

“What am I, Leningrad food chief Pavlov?”

“Answer me. How many?”

Great sigh. “Seventy-two hundred.”

Tatiana said nothing, glancing at Dasha sitting on the couch. Dasha is withdrawing, Tatiana thought, her unblinking eyes focusing on Alexander. Putting on her most chipper voice, Tatiana said tremulously, “Look on the bright side—five hundred tons goes a lot further than it used to.”

The three of them sat huddled on the couch in semidarkness in front of the bourzhuika that had just a bit of light coming out from its little metal door. Alexander was between Tatiana and Dasha. Tatiana wore her quilted coat that Mama had sewn for her and quilted trousers. She pulled her hat over her ears and her eyes. Only her nose and mouth were exposed to the air in the room. A blanket lay across their legs. At one point Tatiana thought she was going to sleep and leaned her head to the right—on Alexander. His hand came to rest on her lap.

Alexander spoke. “The saying goes, ‘I’d like to be a German soldier with a Russian general, British armaments, and American rations.’ ”

“I would just like to have American rations,” said Tatiana. “Alexander, now that the Americans are in the war, will it be easier for us?”

“Yes.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“Absolutely. Now that the Americans are in the war, there is hope.”

Tatiana heard Dasha’s voice. “If we come out of this, Alexander, I swear we are leaving Leningrad and moving to the Ukraine, to the Black Sea, somewhere where it isn’t ever cold.”

“No place like that in Russia,” he replied. He wore his quilted khaki coat on top of his uniform, and his shapka covered his ears. Dasha insisted. Alexander said, “No. We’re too far north. Winters are cold in Russia.”

“Is there a place on earth where it doesn’t get below freezing in the winter?”

“Arizona.”

“Arizona. Is that somewhere in Africa?”

“No.” Mildly he sighed. “Tania, do you know where Arizona is?”

“America,” Tatiana replied. The only warmth was coming from the little window in the stove. And from Alexander. She pressed her head into his arm.

“Yes. It’s a state in America,” he said. “Near California. It’s desert land. Forty degrees in the summer. Twenty degrees in the winter. Every year. Never freezes. Never has snow.”

“Stop it,” said Dasha. “You’re telling us fairy tales. Tell it to Tatiana. I’m too old for fairy tales.”

“It’s the truth. Never.”

Her eyes closed, Tatiana listened to the resonant lilting of Alexander’s voice. She never wanted him to stop talking. You have a good voice, Alexander, she thought. I can imagine myself drifting off, hearing only your voice, calm, measured, courageous, deep, spurring me on to eternal rest. Go, Tatia, go.

“That’s impossible,” said Dasha. “What do they do in the winter?”

“They wear a long-sleeved shirt.”

“Oh, stop it,” said Dasha. “Now I know you’re making it up.”

Tatiana pulled up her hat and stared into the flickering copper light of the stove.

“Tatia?” Alexander said quietly. “You know I’m telling the truth. Would you like to live in Arizona, ‘the land of the small spring’?”

“Yes,” she replied.

Her voice flat and apathetic, Dasha asked, “What did you call her?”

“Tatiana,” Alexander said.

Dasha shook her head. “No. The accent was in the wrong place for Tatiana. Tátia. I’ve never heard you call her that before.”

“Really, Alexander,” said Tatiana, pulling the hat over her face. “What’s gotten into you?”

Dasha struggled up. “I don’t care. Call her anything you want.”

She stepped out to go to the bathroom.

Tatiana continued to sit next to Alexander, but her head was not resting on him anymore.

“Tatia, Tatiasha, Tania,” he whispered, “can you hear me?”

“I can hear you, Shura.”

“Press your head into me again. Go on.”

She did.

“How are you holding up?”

“You see.”

“I see.” He took her mittened hand and kissed it. “Courage, Tatiana. Courage.”

I love you, Alexander, thought Tatiana.

The following day Alexander came back in the evening and said happily, “Girls! You know what day today is, don’t you?”

They looked at him blankly. Tatiana had gone to the hospital for a few hours. What she did there, she could not remember. Dasha seemed even more unfocused. They attempted to smile, and failed. “What day is it?” asked Dasha.

“It’s New Year’s Eve!” he exclaimed.

They stared.

“Come, look, I brought us three cans of tushonka.” He grinned. “One each. And some vodka. But only a little bit. You don’t want to be drinking too much vodka.”

Tatiana and Dasha continued to stare at him. Tatiana finally said, “Alexander, how will we even know when it’s New Year? We have only the wind-up alarm clock that hasn’t been right in months. And the radio is not working.”

Alexander pointed to his wristwatch. “I’m on military time. I always know precisely what time it is. And you two have got to be more cheerful. This is no way to act before a celebration.”

There was no table to set anymore, but they laid their food out on plates, sat on the couch in front of the bourzhuika, and ate their New Year’s Eve dinner of tushonka, some white bread and a spoonful of butter. Alexander gave Dasha cigarettes and Tatiana, with a smile, a small hard candy, which she gladly put in her mouth. They sat chatting quietly until Alexander looked at his watch and went to pour everyone a bit of vodka. In the darkened room they stood up a few minutes before twelve and raised their glasses to 1942.

They counted down the last ten seconds, and clinked and drank, and then Alexander kissed and hugged Dasha, and Dasha kissed and hugged Tatiana, and said, “Go on, Tania, don’t be afraid, kiss Alexander on New Year’s,” and went to sit on the couch, while Tatiana raised her face to Alexander, who bent to Tatiana and very carefully, very gently kissed her on the lips. It was the first time his lips had touched hers since St. Isaac’s.

“Happy New Year, Tania.”

“Happy New Year, Alexander.”

Dasha was on the couch with her eyes closed, a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other. “Here’s to 1942,” she said.

“Here’s to 1942,” echoed Alexander and Tatiana, allowing themselves a glance before he went to sit next to Dasha.

Afterward they all lay down in the bed together, Tatiana next to her wall, turned to Dasha, turned to Alexander. Are there any layers left? she thought. There is hardly life left, how can anything be covering our remains?

The day after New Year’s, Alexander and Tatiana slowly made their way to the post office. Every week Tatiana still went to check if there were any letters from Babushka and to send her a short note. Since Deda died, they had received just one letter from her, telling them she had moved from Molotov to a fishing village on the mighty Kama.

Tatiana’s letters were brief; she could not get out more than a few paragraphs. She wrote to Babushka about the hospital, about Vera, about Nina Iglenko, and a little about crazy Slavin, who before his inexplicable disappearance two weeks earlier had spent the days and nights, as always, on the floor of the corridor, halfway in, halfway out, indifferent to the bombing and the hunger, his only nod to winter being a blanket over his sunken frame. Slavin, Tatiana could write about. Herself, she could not; even less about the family. She left that to Dasha, who always seemed to manage to write a bright sentence to tack onto Tatiana’s grim paragraph. Tatiana didn’t know how to hide the Leningrad of October, November, December 1941. Dasha, however, hid it all, constantly and cheerfully writing only about Alexander and their plans for marriage. Well, she was a grown-up. Grown-ups could hide so well.

The letter Tatiana was carrying today did not have an addendum from Dasha, who had been too tired yesterday to write.

Alexander and Tatiana made their careful way in the snow, their faces down and away from the choking wind. The snow was getting inside Tatiana’s shredded boots and not melting. Holding on to Alexander’s arm, she was thinking about her next letter. Maybe in the next letter she could write about Mama. And Marina. And Aunt Rita. And Babushka Maya.

The post office was on the first floor of the old building on Nevsky. It used to be on the ground floor, but high explosives blew out the windows on the ground floor, and the glass could not be replaced. So the post office moved upstairs. The problem with upstairs was that it was hard to get to. The stairs were covered with ice and bodies.

At the foot of the stairs Alexander said, “It’s getting late, I have to go. I have to report back at noon.”

“It’s many hours till noon,” said Tatiana.

“No, actually, it’s eleven. It took us an hour and a half to get here.”

Tatiana felt even colder. “Go, Shura, get out of the cold,” she muttered.

Fixing her scarf, Alexander said, “Don’t go to any stores. Go straight home. I already gave you my ration. And we spent all my money.”

“I know. I will.”

“Please.”

“All right,” she said. “Are you coming back tonight?”

Shaking his head, he said, “I’m leaving tonight. I’m going back up. My replacement gunner—”

“Don’t say it.”

“I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

“All right. You promise?”

“Tatia, I’m going to try to get you and Dasha out of Leningrad on one of the trucks. You hang on until I can do it, all right?”

They stared at each other. She wanted to tell him she was grateful to be able to look into his face but didn’t have the energy. Nodding, she turned to walk up the stairs. Alexander remained at the bottom. She slipped on the second step and stumbled backward. Putting his hands out, Alexander caught her, straightening her up. She grabbed on to the railing and then turned around to him. Something resembling a smile passed over her face. “I really am all right without you,” she said. “I can manage.”

“What about the ravenous boys who follow you home?”

Tatiana warmed her eyes, so she could look at him with the truth that was inside her. “I really am not all right without you,” she said. “I can’t manage.”

“I know,” Alexander said. “Hold on to the rail.”

Slowly Tatiana walked up the slippery stairs. At the top she turned around to see if Alexander was still there. He was, looking up at her. She pressed her gloved hand to her lips.

The morning after the post office Dasha could not get up. “Dasha, please.”

“I can’t. You go.”

“Of course I will go, but, Dasha, I don’t want to go by myself. Alexander is not here.”

“No, he’s not.”

Tatiana fixed the blankets and coats on top of her. Even as she begged Dasha to get up, Tatiana knew that her sister wasn’t going anywhere. Dasha’s eyes were closed, and she was lying in the same position in which she had fallen asleep the night before. Dasha had also been very quiet the night before. Very quiet except for a cough. “Please get up. You need to get up.”

“I’ll get up later,” said Dasha. “I just can’t right now.” Her eyes were closed.

Tatiana went to fetch water from downstairs. That took her an hour. She lit the fire in the bourzhuika, putting a chair leg in it, and when the fire was started, she made Dasha some tea.