3
“Look who I found!” Tatiana exclaimed as Alexander walked in behind her. Dasha shrieked, running to him.
Tatiana went to put the water on to boil for his bath. She found soap for him, and fresh towels, and a razor, and Alexander went and had a hot bath.
“Is it warm enough?” she called to him from the kitchen, boiling more water, just in case.
His laughing voice carried from the bathroom. “No, not at all. Come, bring me another jug. Come in here, Tania.”
Blushing and smiling, Tatiana went and asked Dasha to bring Alexander another jug of boiling water.
He came inside the room all scrubbed and flushed and clean-shaven, so warm, his black hair so damp and shiny, his teeth so white, his mouth so moist that Tatiana didn’t know how she kept from flinging her arms around him. While he sat in his long johns and thermal shirt, Dasha went to wash his uniform. Marina, Babushka, and Tatiana clucked around him; everyone did except surly Mama.
Tatiana didn’t tell Mama she had eggs. She was going to, but when she saw that Mama was not prepared to forgive Alexander for yelling at her and Papa, Tatiana was not prepared to share eggs with her. Forgiveness had to come first.
Alexander had given them a kilo of butter. Tania hid it under the sack of flour on the windowsill. Mama had a weak cup of tea with some bread and butter, gruffly thanked Alexander, and went to work.
Babushka took some silverware, some silver candlesticks, some money, old blankets off the bed, and stuffed them all into a sack as she, too, got ready to leave.
Tatiana had to go and cook breakfast, but she remained in the room, sitting quietly in a chair, staring at Alexander.
“Where is she going?” Alexander inquired.
“Oh, across the Aleksandr Nevsky Bridge to Malaya Ochta,” said Dasha, coming into the room. Tatiana quickly lowered her gaze. “She’s got friends there,” Dasha continued, “and she trades our things for potatoes or carrots. She was good to them when things were good, and now they’re good to her when things are not. Your clothes won’t dry for a while,” she said to Alexander, smiling.
“That’s all right,” he said, smiling back. “I don’t have to report to base for four days. Will they be dry by then?”
Tatiana’s heart skipped with joy. Four days of Alexander!
“Tania, are you going to go and make breakfast?” Dasha asked, leaving again. Marina was in the other room, getting ready to go to university.
Alexander turned to Tatiana. “Tatiasha,” he said, “can I have some tea?”
Instantly she got up from the table. What was she thinking, sitting around? He must be so tired, so hungry. “Of course.” He was sitting and smoking, with his long legs stretching across the floor all the way to the couch. There was no room for Tatiana to walk past, and Alexander wasn’t moving his legs. Tatiana stared at him. He was smiling.
“Excuse me, Alexander,” Tatiana said quietly, trying very hard to keep a straight face.
“Step over them,” he said, lowering his voice. “Just take care not to trip. Because then I’d have to catch you.”
Turning red, Tatiana raised her eyes and saw Marina watching her from the door. “Excuse me, Alexander,” Tatiana repeated, keeping her breathy voice even.
Reluctantly Alexander moved his legs. “Come here, Marina,” he said with a sigh. “Let me take a look at you. How have you been keeping?”
Tatiana brought Alexander a cup of tea, making it nice and strong and sweet for him, just the way he liked it. “Thank you,” he said, looking up at her.
“You’re welcome.” She gazed down at him.
“My legs still in your way?”
“Yes, you’re too large for this room,” Tatiana whispered.
Before he could reply, Dasha came back with some clean sheets. “Girls, how does your Babushka do across the Neva?” Alexander asked, taking his tea and looking away from Tatiana.
Folding sheets and putting them away, Dasha said, “Yesterday she brought five turnips and ten potatoes. But all of Mama’s wedding dishes are now gone. After these candlesticks, I don’t know what else she’ll have to sell.”
“How about those gold teeth you took from the dentist, Dasha?” Tatiana asked. “Would the farmers like some gold?” She sat down at the table next to the wall, her back to Dasha, her eyes to Alexander.
“What could they possibly do with gold?”
“What would they do with candlesticks?”
Alexander said, “Ah, have light. Have heat. Use them as weapons against the Germans.” He turned to Tatiana. “Tania . . .” He smiled. “Where is this promised oatmeal? Where are those promised eggs?”
There was a knock at the front door, and Tatiana went to answer it. It was Nina Iglenko wanting to know if they had any extra anything she could give Anton. Tatiana knew that Nina was having a hard time sustaining him on a dependent’s ration after he was wounded on the roof. Alexander came out to the hallway, enormous and imposing, standing next to her small, sweater-wrapped body. His arm pressing into Tatiana’s arm, Alexander said, “Comrade Iglenko, everyone collects the same dependent ration. I’m sorry, we have nothing.” And he shut the door, turning to Tatiana. “You didn’t tell me that Anton got wounded on the roof.” He was still very close to her. Not only could she smell him, breathe him, inhale him, but in one moment his chest would touch her face.
“He’s fine,” Tatiana said in a dismissive tone, trying not to breathe erratically. “It’s just a scratch on his leg.” She didn’t want Alexander to worry.
“Tania, did you know that everyone collects the same dependent ration?” Alexander said pointedly, edging forward and scaring Tatiana into the coat-rack.
“I heard that.”
“You don’t have any more than Nina does.”
“I know. Excuse me. I have to go and make you breakfast.” Tatiana couldn’t spend another second standing with him in the narrow hallway while he was wearing his long johns. She walked out and caught up with Nina in the corridor, handing her a hunk of the butter.
“God bless you, Tanechka,” said Nina. “God bless you as long as you live. You’ll see. He will protect you all your life for your kind heart.”
Tatiana returned to the kitchen and was making eggs and oatmeal, when Alexander came in and leaned against the stove, facing her.
“Careful, your back will get burned,” said Tatiana, not looking at him.
He didn’t say anything at first, but then a fierce whisper came out of him. “Tania, better than anyone else, I know what you are. I know what you’re doing—”
“What?” she said. “I’m making oatmeal. And eggs.”
Alexander put his finger under her chin and turned her face up to him. “You cannot give your food away, do you understand? There isn’t enough for you and your family.”
Opening her mouth and pretending to bite his finger, Tatiana nodded. Alexander left his fingers on her for a moment.
Tatiana made the oatmeal with a couple of tablespoons of milk, some butter, and a few teaspoons of sugar. And water. She made enough for four small bowls and divided it into four uneven parts, the largest one for Alexander, the next for Dasha, then Marina, and the smallest for her. He had brought them twenty eggs. She scrambled five of them with butter and salt. It felt as if they were having a feast.
Alexander took one look at his bowl and said he would not eat it. Dasha had already finished her oatmeal by the time he had stopped speaking. Marina, too. And her eggs.
Only Tatiana gazed down into her bowl as Alexander gazed down at his. “What is the matter with you two?” Dasha said. “Alex, you need much more food than she does. You’re a man. She is the smallest. She needs the least out of all of us. Now, eat. Please.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana, still not looking up. “You’re a man. I am the smallest. I do need the least. Now, eat. Please.”
Alexander switched his bowl with Tatiana’s. “Now, you eat,” he said. “I can get food at the barracks. Eat.”
Gratefully Tatiana ate every last bite in seconds. Then she finished her eggs.
Dasha said, “Oh, Alexander, how different things are since the last time you were here. It’s a lot harder now. People are harder. Everyone is now only for themselves, it seems.” She sighed, glancing away.
Alexander and Tatiana silently stared at Dasha.
“We’re getting only three hundred grams of bread a day,” she continued. “How much worse can it get?”
“Much worse,” said Tatiana, sparing Alexander an answer. “Because our provisions will soon be gone.”
“How many cans of ham do you have left?” he asked.
“Twelve.”
“Yes,” said Tatiana, “but four days ago we had eighteen. We ate six cans in four days. We’ve been hungry at night.” She wanted to add that they were hungry every waking and sleeping minute of every day but didn’t.
The girls had to go to work. Tatiana watched Dasha come close to Alexander, who put his hands on her waist. “Oh, Alexander, I’ve gotten so thin,” Dasha said. “You’re not going to like me anymore, thin like this. Soon I’ll start looking like Tania.” She kissed him. “Are you going to be all right while we’re gone? What are you going to do?”
Alexander smiled. “I’m going to fall down in your bed and not wake up until you come home.”
Tatiana ran home at five o’clock, bombing or no bombing.
At home it was toasty warm. Alexander came out of the room grinning happily at her, and Tatiana, grinning happily back, said, “Hello, Alexander, I’m home!”
He laughed.
She wanted to kiss him.
He had gone and retrieved a dozen bundles of wood from the basement and brought them upstairs. Dasha came in from the kitchen. “Isn’t it cozy in here, Tania?” she said, hugging Alexander.
“Girls,” he said, “you will have to keep heating these rooms. It’s getting too cold.”
“We’re getting heat from the central heating system, Alex,” argued Dasha.
“Dash,” he said, “the Leningrad Council is heating residential buildings to a maximum of ten degrees Centigrade. You think that’s warm enough?”
“It hasn’t been so bad,” said Tatiana, taking off her coat.
Alexander patted Dasha’s arm. “I’m going to bring you more wood from the basement and leave it for you. Heat your rooms with the big stove, not the little bourzhuika that can’t warm up a penguin. All right, Tania?”
Suddenly shivering, Tatiana said nothing at first. “Alexander, these wood-burning stoves take a lot of wood,” she said, and hurried out to make him dinner.
Babushka brought seven potatoes from Malaya Ochta. They ate one more can of ham and all of the potatoes. After dinner Alexander suggested that from now on they eat only half a can of ham a day. Dasha got upset. She said they could barely make it on the whole can. He said nothing.
When the air-raid siren sounded, he motioned for the family to go down into the shelter — everyone, including Tatiana. When Dasha asked him to come with them, Alexander looked at her thoughtfully and said, “Dasha, go on now, and don’t worry about me.” When she insisted, he said, more firmly, “What kind of a soldier would I be if I ran for shelter every time there was a little bombing? Now, go. And, Tania, you, too. You haven’t been on the roof, have you?”
No one answered him as they filed out, certainly not Tatiana.
Later that night Dasha said, “Marinka, can you sleep with Babushka tonight? Please? It’s warm in her room, not like ours. I want Alexander to sleep next to me. Mama, you don’t mind, do you? We are getting married.”
“Next to you and Tania?” Marina gave Tatiana a look that Tatiana did not return.
“Yes.” Dasha smiled, getting clean bedding out of the dresser. “Alexander, you don’t mind sleeping in the same bed as Tania?”
He grunted.
“Tanechka, tell me,” Dasha said teasingly, as she started to make the bed, “should I put him in the middle, between us?” She laughed lightly. “It will be good for Tania. It’ll be the first time she has slept with a man.” Amused at herself, Dasha pinched Alexander’s arm and said, “Though, darling, maybe she shouldn’t start with you.”
Not looking at Tatiana, Alexander muttered that he really wouldn’t be comfortable in the middle, and Tatiana, not looking at him, muttered that he was right, and Dasha said to him, “Relax, you don’t think I was really going to put you next to my sister?”
At bedtime Tatiana climbed in next to her wall, Dasha climbed in next to her, and Alexander fitted in on the end in his thermals. There was no room to move, but it was warmer, and his presence so close, yet so far away, a whole heart away, softened Tatiana’s eyes. Quietly they lay in bed listening to Mama as she cried on her sofa.
Then Tatiana heard Dasha whispering to Alexander, “You said before that we would get married — when, my love, when?”
He whispered back, “Let’s wait, Dasha.”
“No,” she said. “Wait for what? You said we would do it when you got leave. Let’s get married tomorrow. We’ll go to the registry office and get married in ten minutes. Tania and Marina can be our witnesses. Come on, Alexander, we have nothing to wait for.”
Tatiana turned to the wall.
“Dasha, listen to me. The fighting is too intense. And haven’t you heard? Comrade Stalin has made it a crime to be taken prisoner. It’s now against the law to fall into German hands. To prevent me further from willingly giving myself up to the Germans, our great leader has decided to take away family rations from the Soviet POW. If I get taken by the Germans and we’re married, you will lose your rations. You. Tania. Your mother, grandmother. All of you. I will have to get killed to keep you getting your bread.”
“Oh, Alexander. Oh, no.”
“We’ll wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“For a better time.”
“Will there be a better time?”
“Yes.”
Then they fell quiet.
Tatiana turned away from the wall, to Dasha, and stared at the back of Alexander’s head. She was remembering lying in his arms, naked and broken in Luga, with his breath in her hair.
In the middle of the night Dasha got up to go to the bathroom. Tatiana thought Alexander was asleep, but he turned around and faced her. In the dark she made out his liquid eyes. Under the blanket his leg moved sideways and touched hers; she was wearing socks and two layers of flannel pajamas. When she heard Dasha in the outside hallway, she closed her eyes. Alexander moved his leg away.
The following evening Tatiana cooked only half a can of ham for all of them. It was about a tablespoonful each, but at least it was ham. Dasha grumbled that it wasn’t enough.
“Anton is dying,” said Tatiana. “Eat the ham. Nina Iglenko has not had ham since August.”
After dinner Mama went to her sewing machine. Since the start of September she had been bringing work home. The army needed winter uniforms, and the factory offered Mama a bonus if she made twenty uniforms a day instead of ten. A bonus of a few rubles and one extra ration. Mama worked until one in the morning for 300 grams of bread and some rubles. This evening she went to her sewing seat, sat down, took her materials, and said, “Where is my sewing machine?”
No one spoke.
“Where is my sewing machine? Tania, where is my sewing machine?”
“I don’t know, Mama,” said Tatiana.
Babushka limped forward and said, “Irina, I sold it.”
“You what?”
“I traded it in for those soybeans and oil you had tonight. They were so good, Ira.”
“Mama!” Irina screamed. She became hysterical. For minutes she sobbed into her hands. Tatiana stood and watched Alexander’s pained expression as he went out into the hallway.
“Mama, how could you do that?” Irina cried. “You know that every night they offer me work, and every night I kill myself on that thing to make something for myself, to bring something for my family, something just for us! Don’t you know they were telling me I could get some oats every day, too, if I managed to get up to twenty-five uniforms. Oh, Mama, what have you done?”
Tatiana left the room herself. Alexander was sitting on the hallway sofa, smoking. Taking a pen, she went behind the sofa, knelt on the floor, and started lifting the bag of oats so she could mark its level. The oatmeal, the flour, the sugar just kept disappearing. Behind her she heard Alexander say, “Come on, get up off the floor. It’s too hard for you. Let me help.” She moved out of his way, and he lifted the bag for her as she looked inside and drew a black line on the outside. “What do you think, Tatia?” Alexander said, calling her Tatia quietly. “Private enterprise for your mother? Who would’ve thought?”
“It’s everywhere, though,” said Tatiana. “‘Socialism in one country’ seems not to work so well when the country is fighting a war.” She motioned to the bag of flour.
Picking it up, Alexander nodded. “Just like during the Russian civil war and right after. Have you noticed that during war, to preserve its own life, the beast subsides and lies low . . .”
“Just long enough to get strong again and rear its head. Wait, hold the flour a little lower.” Her hand with the pen touched his hand holding the bag. She did not look up.
“What’s your Mama going to do, Tania?”
“I don’t know. What’s Babushka going to do? She’s got nothing left to sell.” Taking her hand away, Tatiana went into the kitchen to wash the dishes from dinner.
As she headed back to the room, Alexander entered the kitchen. They were alone. She went to walk past him, and he moved in front of her; she tried to go the other way, and he moved in front of her. Tatiana looked up at him and saw that his eyes were twinkling.
Her own eyes twinkling, she stood still for a moment and then moved right, left, and was around him. Glancing back and smiling, Tatiana said quietly, “Got to be quicker than that, Shura,” and he laughed loudly.
Alexander left after four days and went back to base. Everybody missed him when he went.
The good news was he was staying in Leningrad for another week or so, doing patrol work and base maintenance, building barricades and training new recruits. He couldn’t stay over anymore, but he spent most evenings with them, and in the mornings he came at six-thirty and walked Tatiana to Fontanka to get her rations.
One morning when he came, he said, “I heard Dimitri’s been shot!”
“No!”
“True.” He paused.
“What happened? Did he go down in a blaze of glory?”
“He shot himself in the foot with his Nagant sidearm.”
“Oh, I forget,” Tatiana said. “He is not you.”
Placing a hand on her coat, Alexander told her Dimitri was in a Volkhov hospital, indefinitely out of action. “On top of the foot wound, he’s got dystrophy.”
“What’s that?”
Tatiana felt that Alexander almost did not want to tell her. “Dystrophy,” he said slowly, “is a muscle-mass disease, degenerative. Brought on by acute malnutrition.”
Patting him lightly, Tatiana said in a weak voice, “Don’t worry, Shura. I won’t get it. I have no muscles.”
They waited patiently for her rations.
Alexander kept looking down at her, trying to get her to meet his expectant gaze. Tatiana strongly sensed that he wanted something from her, but what it was she didn’t know and couldn’t guess at.
Couldn’t? Or didn’t want to?
Alexander’s rations helped them stretch their food supplies a little longer. He got a king’s ration — 800 grams of bread per day! — more than half of what they were getting for the five of them. He also received 150 grams of meat and 140 of cereals and half a kilo of vegetables.
Tatiana was elated when he came for dinner, bringing with him his food for the day. Was it because she was happy to see him or was it because she was happy to eat better? Alexander would hand her the food, telling her to divide it into six portions. “And, Tania,” he would tell her every time, “six equal portions.”
The meat in his ration was not beef but some kind of pasty pork or sometimes an aged chicken leg with thick skin. It took all of Tatiana’s mental strength not to give him the largest cut. She did what she could and gave him the best.
There were no more candlesticks to trade and no more dishes, except for the six plates the Metanovs kept for themselves and Alexander. Babushka wanted to trade their old blankets and coats, but Mama put her foot down. “No. Winter is cold here in the city. We will need them.” The temperature had dropped below freezing in the third week of October. Only six sheets remained for three beds, only six towels. Babushka wanted to trade one of the towels, but Tania put her foot down, remembering that Alexander needed a towel, too.
Babushka Maya stopped going across the Neva.