3
Alexander thought as he traveled halfway across the Soviet Union: Dasha, Tania — wouldn’t they have written to him if they were alive?
His doubt attacked him like shell fire.
To go sixteen hundred miles east, across Lake Ladoga, over the Onega River and the Dvina River, over the Sukhona River and the Unzha River, to the Kama River and the Ural Mountains, to go having heard nothing for six months, for half a year, for all those minutes in between, having heard not a sound from her mouth or a word from her pen, was it lunacy?
Yes, yes, it was.
During his four-day journey to Molotov, Alexander recalled every breath he took with her. Sixteen hundred kilometers of the Obvodnoy Canal, of coming to see her at Kirov, of his tent in Luga, of her holding on to his back, of the hospital room, of St. Isaac’s, of her eating ice cream, of her lying in the sled as he pulled her, nearly out of life. Sixteen hundred kilometers of her giving her food to everyone, of her jumping up and down on the roof under German planes. There were some memories of last winter from which Alexander flinched, recalling them all nonetheless. Her walking alongside him after burying her mother. Her standing motionless in front of three boys with knives.
Two images continually sprang to his mind in a restless, frantic refrain.
Tatiana in a helmet, in strange clothes, covered with blood, covered with stone and beams and glass and dead bodies, herself still warm, herself still breathing.
And
Tatiana on the bed in the hospital, bare under his hands, moaning under his mouth.
If anyone could make it, would it not be the girl who every morning for four months got up at six-thirty and trudged through dying Leningrad to get her family their bread?
But if she had made it, how could she not have written to him?
The girl who kissed his hand, who served him tea, and who gazed at him, not breathing as he talked, gazed at him with eyes he had never seen before — was that girl gone?
Was her heart gone?
Please, God, Alexander prayed. Let her not love me anymore, but let her live.
That was a hard prayer for Alexander, but he could not imagine living in a world without Tatiana.
Unwashed and undernourished, having spent over four days on five different trains and four military jeeps, Alexander got off at Molotov on Friday, June 19, 1942. He arrived at noon and then sat on a wooden bench near the station.
Alexander couldn’t bring himself to walk to Lazarevo.
He could not bear the thought of her dying in Kobona, getting out of the collapsed city and then dying so close to salvation. He could not face it.
And worse — he knew that he could not face himself if he found out that she did not make it. He could not face returning — returning to what?
Alexander actually thought of getting on the next train and going back immediately. The courage to move forward was much more than the courage he needed to stand behind a Katyusha rocket launcher or a Zenith antiaircraft gun on Lake Ladoga and know that any of the Luftwaffe planes flying overhead could instantly bring about his death.
He was not afraid of his own death.
He was afraid of hers. The specter of her death took away his courage.
If Tatiana was dead, it meant God was dead, and Alexander knew he could not survive an instant during war in a universe governed by chaos, not purpose. He would not live any longer than poor, hapless Grinkov, who had been cut down by a stray bullet as he headed back to the rear.
War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.
But Tatiana was order. She was finite matter in infinite space. Tatiana was the standard-bearer for the flag of grace and valor that she carried forward with bounty and perfection in herself, the flag Alexander had followed sixteen hundred kilometers east to the Kama River, to the Ural Mountains, to Lazarevo.
For two hours Alexander sat on the bench in unpaved, provincial, oak-lined Molotov.
To go back was impossible.
To go forward was unthinkable.
Yet he had nowhere else to go.
He crossed himself and stood up, gathering his belongings.
When Alexander finally walked in the direction of Lazarevo, not knowing whether Tatiana was alive or dead, he felt he was a man walking to his own execution.