17
A few blistering summer days later, Tatiana was jumping up and down again. “What are you making now?” she asked. “You already made a bench. Stop all this building. Let’s go swimming. Swimming! Come on, even the Kama is warm nowadays. Let’s dive in, and I’ll try to stay under longer than you.”
Alexander was inside the house, having just brought in the two logs he had been working on, each about a meter tall. They came up to just below his hips.
“Later. I’ve got to make this.”
“What are you making?” Tatiana repeated.
“Wait and you’ll see.”
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
“A countertop.”
“What for? What we need here is a table.” She jumped up and down again. “We keep eating dinner on our laps. Why don’t you make a table? Better yet, come swimming with me.” She pulled on him.
“Maybe later. Is there anything to drink? God, this heat.”
Tatiana left and came back instantly with water and a cut cucumber. “Do you want a cigarette?”
“Yes.”
She brought him a cigarette. “But, Shura, we don’t need a countertop. We need a table.”
“I’ll make a high table. Or we’ll use this as a high bench.”
“Why don’t you just make it lower?”
“Wait and you’ll see. Tatia, did anyone ever tell you that patience is a virtue?”
“Yes!” she said impatiently. “Tell me what you’re making.”
Alexander led her out of the house. “Can you go and get me some bread? I’m hungry. Please?”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll have to go to Naira’s. We haven’t got any.”
“Good. Go to Naira’s. Just be back soon.”
Soon she came back with the bread, some butter, eggs, and cabbage. “Shura! I’m going to make cabbage pie tonight.”
“Can’t wait. I’m starving now.”
“You’re always starving. I can’t keep you fed.” She smiled. “Are you hot? You took off your shirt.”
“So hot.”
Tatiana beamed. “Are you done yet?”
“Almost. I’m just planing it.”
Coming up to the bench, Tatiana looked at it, looked at him, and said, “Planing?”
“Making it smooth. We don’t want to get splinters.”
She was puzzled. “We don’t? Shura, do you know what Dusia told me?”
“No, sweet girl. What did Dusia tell you?”
“That this is the hottest summer they’ve had in Lazarevo in seventy-five years, since 1867! Since she was four years old.”
“Really?” said Alexander. Tatiana held out a flask of water for him. He drank it down whole and asked for more. He left the refilled flask on the countertop next to him as he continued to plane the flat top.
Tatiana watched him. “I don’t understand,” she said. “It comes up to my ribs. Why did you build it so high?”
Shaking his head, Alexander put down his wood plane and went to wash his hands and face in the bucket of water. “Come here,” he said. “I’ll help you up.”
He lifted her to the countertop and stood in front of her. “Well? How do you like it?”
“I feel high,” Tatiana said, looking at him. His eyes were peaceful, his lips were happy. “But I’m not afraid of heights.” She paused. “And my face almost comes up to your face. I like that. Come closer, soldier.”
Alexander opened her legs and stood between them. For a moment, their eyes nearly level, they gazed at each other, and then they kissed. He ran his hands under her dress up her thighs to her hips. She wasn’t wearing any underwear.
“Hmm.” He played with her and then untied his drawstring shorts. “Tell me, Tatiasha,” Alexander murmured, guiding himself inside her and tugging her forward. “Is this close enough?”
“I think so,” she said hoarsely, gripping the countertop.
Holding her hips up to him, he moved in and out of her and then yanked her sundress down to her waist, bent, and sucked her nipples. “I want your wet nipples against my chest,” he said. “Grab my neck.”
She couldn’t.
“Grab my neck, Tania,” he said, increasing his pace. “Do you still think the countertop is too high?”
She couldn’t reply.
“That’s what I thought,” Alexander murmured, pressing her to him, enfolding her bare body in his avid hands. “Suddenly — it seems just the right height . . . doesn’t it, my impatient wife, doesn’t it—”
And afterward, as Alexander stood in front of her, panting and drenched, Tatiana, also panting and drenched, kissed his wet throat and asked, “Tell me, did you build it just for this?”
“Well, no,” Alexander said, taking a long drink from the flask and then pouring the rest of the water over her face and breasts. “We can put potatoes on it.”
Laughing, Tatiana said, “But we don’t have any potatoes.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Shura, you were right, this countertop is the perfect height! I finally have a place to knead the dough for my pies.” Tatiana smiled at him while flouring her hands. The yeast dough had risen at last, and she was about to make them cabbage pie.
Alexander was sitting on top of the counter, swinging his legs back and forth. “Tatiana, don’t try to change the subject! Are you honestly telling me,” he said, “that Peter the Great should not have built Leningrad and modernized Russia in the process?”
“I’m not saying that,” Tatiana replied. “Watch it — your leg is in my flour. Pushkin is saying that. Our Pushkin was of two minds about it when he wrote ‘The Bronze Horseman.’ ”
“How long is this pie going to take?” Alexander asked, not moving a centimeter away. He flicked a bit of flour in Tatiana’s face. “And Pushkin was not of two minds about it. The point of ‘The Bronze Horseman’ was that Russia needed to be brought into the New World — even if it was to be kicking and screaming.”
Tatiana said, “Pushkin did not think Leningrad was built at a fair price. And don’t start the flicking game,” she said, throwing a handful of flour at Alexander. “You know you’ll lose.” She smiled. “The pie will take forty-five minutes.”
“Yes, after you put it in the oven.” Alexander brushed the flour off his face and swung his legs harder, not taking his eyes off Tatiana. “Look at what Pushkin wrote. Was it not thus, a towering idol, hard by the chasm, with iron bridle, you reared up Russia to her fate? Fate, Tania. Destiny. Can’t fight against destiny.”
“Shura, move a bit, can you?” said Tatiana, taking a rolling pin to roll out the dough. “Pushkin also wrote, The emperor’s generals went speeding,” she continued, “to save the people, who unheeding, with fear were drowning where they dwelled. Fear, Alexander, drowning! That’s what I mean about ambivalence. The people did not want to be saved or modernized, Pushkin wrote.”
Alexander did not move away, his thigh deliberately bumping the rolling pin. “Tania, but there is a city where there was none before. There is a civilization where before there were marshes!”
“Stop bumping! Tell that to Pushkin’s Eugene. He went mad. Tell that to Pushkin’s Parasha. She drowned.”
“Eugene was weak. Parasha was weak. I don’t see a statue built to them.” He did not stop bumping.
“Maybe,” Tatiana said. “But, Shura, there is no denying that Pushkin himself was ambivalent. Was the human cost too high a price to pay for building Leningrad? he was asking.”
“There is yes denying,” said Alexander adamantly. “I don’t think he was ambivalent at all. Is this pie going to have a filling, or are you just going to bake the crust in the oven?”
Tatiana stopped rolling out the dough and stood still, staring at him. “Shura, how can you say that?”
“How can I say that? There is no filling.”
She tapped his leg lightly with the rolling pin. “Go and get me my frying pan off the hearth. How can you say he was not ambivalent?” Tatiana repeated, watching Alexander. “Look what Pushkin writes. Why, it’s the point of his whole poem!” She took a breath:
“And in the moonlight’s pallid glamour,
Rides high upon the charging brute,
Hand outstretched ‘mid echoing clamor,
The Bronze Horseman in pursuit.”
And another breath. “Pushkin doesn’t end his poem as he began it, with the gorgeous granite parapets and golden spires of Leningrad and white nights and the Summer Garden.” Her heart swelling at the mention of the Summer Garden, Tatiana smiled at Alexander, who smiled back. She continued. “Pushkin ends the poem by telling us that yes, Leningrad was built, but the statue of Peter the Great came to life as if in a nightmare and is chasing Eugene — our frantic wretch — for eternity through those beauteous Leningrad streets:
And all through that long night, no matter,
What road the frantic wretch might take,
There would pound with ponderous clatter,
The Bronze Horseman in his wake.”
Tatiana shivered slightly. Why did she shiver? It was so hot.
Alexander held the cast-iron pan in front of her. “Tania, can you argue with me and put the filling in the dough at the same time? Or am I going to have to agree with you so you can make dinner?”
“Shura, that’s the price of Leningrad! Parasha dead and drowned. Eugene pursued by the Bronze Horseman for eternity,” Tatiana said as she spooned the filling inside the dough shell and started to seal up the edges. “I think Parasha would have liked to have her life. And Eugene didn’t want to pay with his sanity, certainly. He would have preferred living in a swamp.”
Alexander hopped back up onto the counter, his legs parted wide.”Here lay asprawl my luckless knave, and here in charity they buried, the chill corpse in a pauper’s grave.” He shrugged casually. “Whatever. I say Eugene is a fair price to pay for the free world.”
Tatiana paused, thought, looked up at him. “Is Eugene a fair price to pay to create ‘socialism in one country,’ too?” she asked quietly.
“Oh, come on now!” Alexander exclaimed. “Surely you’re not equating Peter the Great with Stalin!”
“Answer me.”
Alexander jumped off the counter. “Kicking and screaming, Tatiana, but into the free world! Not kicking and screaming into slavery. It’s a vital, essential, crucial difference. It’s the difference between dying for Hitler and dying to stop him.”
“Still dying, though, right, Shura?” said Tatiana, coming close to him. “Still dying.”
“I’m going to be dying myself soon if I don’t get fed,” Alexander muttered.
“It’s going in the oven now.” She put the pie in and crouched to wash her hands and face in the bucket. The cabin was too hot with the stove on. The open doors, the open windows, nothing helped. Straightening up, Tatiana glanced at Alexander and said, “We have forty-five minutes. What do you want to do? No, wait. Forget I said that. God, all right, but can we clean the counter first? Look, I’m getting covered in flour. You like that, don’t you? Oh, Shura, you’re insatiable. We can’t do this all the time . . .
“Oh, Shura, we can’t . . .
“Oh, Shura . . .
“Oh . . .”
“And I know that you’re just being contrary,” Tatiana said to Alexander as they sat outside in the last light under the waxing crescent moon and ate their cabbage and onion pie with a tomato salad and black bread with butter. “I know you think that dying for Hitler and dying for Stalin amounts to the same thing.”
Alexander swallowed his bite of pie. “I do, yes, but dying to stop Hitler does not. I am America’s ally. I am fighting on the side of America.” Resolutely he nodded once. “I’ll take that fight.”
Tatiana looked into her cabbage pie. “I think it wasn’t cooked long enough,” she said quietly.
“It’s nine o’clock at night. I’d have eaten it raw four hours ago.”
Not wanting to let their discussion go — because she thought she was right — Tatiana resumed. “Back to Pushkin, though. Russia, as represented by Eugene, didn’t want to be modernized. Peter the Great should have left well enough alone.”
“Well enough?” exclaimed Alexander. “There was no Russia! While the rest of Europe was forging into the age of enlightenment, Russia was still in the dark ages. After Peter built Leningrad, suddenly there was French language and culture and education and travel, there was a market economy, an emerging middle class, a sophisticated aristocracy. There was music, and books. Books, Tania, that you love. Happy families that Tolstoy wrote about. Tolstoy could never have written his books had it not been for what Peter the Great built a hundred years before him. Eugene and Parasha’s sacrifice meant that a better world order prevailed.” He paused. “That light triumphed over darkness.”
Tatiana said, “Yes, well, easy for you to talk about their sacrifice. You’re not being chased by a block of bronze.”
“Look at it another way,” Alexander said, eating his bread. “What are we having for dinner tonight, dinner that’s turned into a late-night supper? Cabbage pie. Bread. Why? Do you know why?”
She tutted. “I don’t see—”
“Be patient, and you’ll see in a minute. We’re eating rabbit food because you did not want to get up at five this morning. I said, we have to go now if we’re going to have some trout. Otherwise the fish will leave. Did you listen?”
She grunted. “Sometimes I listen . . .”
“Yes.” He nodded. “And on the days you listen, we have fish. Was I right? Of course. Certainly it’s terrible to get up so early. But afterward we have real food.” Alexander ate the pie happily. “And that’s my point: all great things worth having require great sacrifice worth giving. That’s how I feel about Leningrad. It was worth it.”
Tatiana paused. “Stalin?”
“No! No, no, and no!” He put his plate on the blanket. “I said great things worth having. Sacrifice for Stalin’s world order is not only execrable, it’s meaningless. What if I made you get up, made you, told you, you had no choice, you had to get up, bleary-eyed and exhausted, and go out into the cold, not for fish but for mushrooms? And not just for mushrooms but the kind of mushrooms I pick, the poisonous mushrooms I keep yanking from the ground, the ones that singe your liver upon contact, with death following in three to five minutes?” Alexander laughed. “Tell me — would you want to get up then?”
“I don’t want to get up now,” Tatiana grumbled, pointing to his plate. “Eat your food. It’s not fish—”
He picked up his plate. “It’s lovely Tania pie,” said Alexander, his mouth full, cheerfully blinking at Tatiana. “There are some battles, no matter how much you don’t want to fight them, that you just have to fight. That are worth giving your life for.”
“I guess . . .” she said, looking away.
Alexander swallowed his food and set down his plate. “Come here.”
Tatiana crawled to him on the blanket. “Let’s not talk about this anymore,” she said, hugging him tightly.
“Please let’s not,” said Alexander. “Let’s go and dive into the evening Kama.”
The next morning Tatiana was screaming from inside the cabin. Her shrieks carried to Alexander through the pines, over the sound of his ax falling down on the cracking wood. He dropped the axe and ran to the house to find her crouching on top of the high counter. Her legs were drawn up to her neck.
“What?” he exclaimed, panting.
“Shura, a mouse ran by my feet as I was cooking.”
Alexander stared at the eggs on the hearth, at the small pot of bubbling coffee on the Primus stove, at the tomatoes already on their plates, and then at Tatiana, ascended a meter from the floor. His mouth reluctantly, infectiously drew into a wide grin. “What are you” — he was trying to keep from laughing — “what are you doing up there?”
“I told you!” she yelled. “A mouse ran by and brushed his” — she shivered — “his tail against my leg. Can you take care of it?”
“Yes, but what are you doing up there?”
“Getting away from the mouse, of course.” She frowned, looking at him unhappily. “Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to catch it?”
Alexander walked to the counter and picked her up. Tatiana grabbed his neck but did not put her feet down. He hugged her, kissed her, kissed her again with enormous affection, and said, “Tatiasha, you goose, mice can climb, you know.”
“No they can’t.”
“I’ve seen mice climb the pole of the commander’s tent in Finland, trying to get to the piece of food at the very top.”
“What was food doing at the top of the tent pole?”
“We put it there.”
“Why?”
“To see if mice could climb.”
Tatiana almost laughed. “Well, you’re not getting breakfast, or coffee, or me in this house until that mouse is gone.”
After carrying her outside, Alexander went back for the breakfast plates. They ate on the bench, side by side. Alexander turned and stared at her incredulously. “Tania, are you . . . afraid of mice?”
“Yes. Have you killed it?”
“And how would you like me to do that? You never told me you were afraid of mice.”
“You never asked. How would I like you to kill it? You are a captain in the Red Army, for goodness’ sake. What do they teach you there?”
“How to kill human beings. Not mice.”
She barely touched her food. “Well, throw a grenade at it. Use your rifle. I don’t know. But do something.”
Alexander shook his head. “You went out into the streets of Leningrad while the Germans were throwing five-hundred-kilo bombs that blew arms and legs off the women standing ahead of you in line, you stood fearless in front of cannibals, you jumped off a moving train to go and find your brother, but you are afraid of mice?”
“Now you got it,” Tatiana said defiantly.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Alexander said. “If a person is fearless in the big things—”
“You’re wrong. Again. Are you done with your questions? Anything else you want to ask? Or add?”
“Just one thing.” Alexander kept his face serious. “It looks like,” he said slowly, his voice calm, “we’ve found three uses for that too-high potato countertop I built yesterday.” And he burst out laughing.
“Go ahead, laugh,” Tatiana said. “Go ahead. I’m here for your amusement.” Her eyes twinkled.
Putting his own plate on the bench, Alexander took the plate out of her hands and brought her to him to stand between his legs. Reluctantly she came. “Tania, do you have any idea how funny you are?” He kissed her chest, looking up at her. “I adore you.”
“If you really adored me,” she said, trying to twist herself out of his arms, unsuccessfully, “you wouldn’t be sitting here idly flirting when you could be militarizing that cabin.”
Alexander stood up. “Just to point out,” he said, “it’s not called flirting once you’ve made love to the girl.”
After Alexander went inside, a smiling Tatiana sat on the bench and finished her food. In a few minutes he emerged from the cabin holding his rifle in one hand, his pistol in the other, and a bayonet attachment between his teeth. The dead mouse was swinging at the end of the bayonet.
He spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “How did I do?”
Tatiana failed to keep a straight face. “All right, all right,” she said, chortling. “You didn’t have to bring out the spoils of war.”
“Ah, but I know you wouldn’t believe in a dead mouse unless you saw it with your own eyes.”
“Will you stop quoting me back to me? Shura, you tell me, I will believe it,” said Tatiana. “Now, go on, get out of here with that thing.”
“One last question.”
“Oh, no,” said Tatiana, covering her face, trying not to laugh.
“Do you think this dead mouse is worth the price of a . . . killed mouse?”
“Will you just go?”
Tatiana heard his boisterous laughter all the way to the woods and back.