5
“Alexander?” Dr. Sayers said, sitting in the chair next to him. “If I talk quietly, can I speak in English? Russian is so hard for me day in and day out.”
“Of course,” Alexander replied, also in English. “It’s good to hear the language again.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t been able to come by sooner.” He shook his head. “I can see I’m getting myself mired in the hell that is the Soviet front. I’m running out of all my supplies, the Lend-Lease shipments can’t come quickly enough, I’m eating your Russian food, sleeping without a mattress—”
“You should have a mattress.”
“The wounded have a mattress. I have thick cardboard.”
Alexander wondered if Tatiana also had thick cardboard.
“I thought I’d be out of here already, but look at me. Still here. My days are twenty hours long. Listen, I have a bit of time finally. You want to talk?”
Alexander shrugged, studying the doctor. “Where are you from, Dr. Sayers? Originally?”
Sayers smiled. “Boston. Familiar with Boston?”
Alexander nodded. “My family was from Barrington.”
“Ah, well,” Sayers exclaimed. “We’re practically neighbors.” He paused. “So tell me. Long story with you?”
“Long.”
“Can you tell me? I’m dying to know how an American ended up as a major in the Red Army.”
In response Alexander studied the doctor, who said gently, “How long have you lived not being able to trust anyone? Trust me.”
Taking a deep breath, Alexander told him. If Tatiana trusted this man, it was good enough for him.
Dr. Sayers listened intently and then said, “That’s some mess.”
“You’re not kidding,” said Alexander.
Now it was Sayers’s turn to study Alexander. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Alexander did not reply at first. “You owe me nothing.”
Sayers paused. “Do you . . . want to come home?”
“Yes,” said Alexander. “I want to come home.”
“What can I do?”
Alexander looked at him. “Talk to my nurse. She’ll tell you what to do.” Where was his nurse? He needed to lay his eyes on her.
“Ina?”
“Tatiana.”
“Ah, Tatiana.” The doctor’s face eased into affection. “She knows about you?”
Alexander did a double take at the doctor’s expression and then laughed softly, shaking his head. “Dr. Sayers, I am indeed going to trust you with everything. You will hold two lives in your hands. Tatiana . . .”
“Yes?”
“. . . is my wife.” Those words trickled warmth all over his insides.
“She’s what?”
“My wife.”
The doctor stared at him incredulously. “She is?”
With quiet amusement Alexander watched the doctor’s reaction as he blanked, then cleared, then thought back, then understood with a spark of mixed sadness and comprehension. “Oh, how stupid of me,” he said. “Tatiana is your wife. I should’ve known. So many things are suddenly clear.” Breathing hard, Dr. Sayers said, “Well, well. Lucky you.”
“Yes—”
“No, Major. I mean, you’re a lucky man. But never mind.”
“No one knows but you, Doctor. Talk to her. She is not on morphine. She is not injured. She’ll tell you what she wants you to do.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” said Dr. Sayers. “I can see, I’m not leaving anytime soon. Anyone else you’d like me to help?”
“No, thank you.”
As he stood up, Dr. Sayers shook Alexander’s hand.
“Ina,” Alexander asked the nurse, who took care of him between Tatiana’s visits, “when am I going to be moved to the convalescent wing?”
“What’s your hurry? You’ve just regained consciousness. We will take care of you here.”
“All I lost is a little blood. Let me out of here. I’ll walk there myself.”
“You’ve got a hole in your back, Major Belov, the size of my fist,” said Ina. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“You’ve got a small fist,” said Alexander. “What’s the big deal?”
“I’ll tell you what the big deal is,” she said. “You’re not going anywhere, that’s the big deal. Now, let me turn you so I can clean that nasty wound of yours.”
Alexander turned over himself. “How nasty is it?”
“Nasty, Major. The shell ripped off a hunk of your flesh.”
He smiled. “Did it rip off a pound of my flesh, Ina?”
“A what?”
“Never mind. So tell me the truth — how bad was I hurt?”
While changing his dressings, Ina said, “Bad. What, Nurse Metanova didn’t tell you? She’s impossible. Dr. Sayers took one look at you after they brought you in and said he didn’t think you were going to make it.”
That didn’t surprise Alexander. He had floated so long on the periphery of consciousness. It hadn’t felt much like life. Yet dying seemed inconceivable. He lay on his stomach while Ina cleaned his wound and listened to her.
“The doctor is a good man, and he wanted to save you, feeling personally responsible. But he said you had lost just too much blood.”
“Oh. That’s why I’m in critical care?”
“Now you are.” Ina shook her head. “You weren’t here to begin with.” Patting his shoulder, she said, “You went right to terminal.”
“Oh.” His smile evaporated.
“It’s that Tatiana nurse,” said Ina. “She is . . . well, frankly, I think she’s concentrating too much on the terminal cases. She ought to be helping the critical, but she’s always in the terminal ward trying to save the hopeless.”
So that’s where she was. “How does she do?” muttered Alexander.
“Not too good. They’re dying left and right there. But she stays with the patients until the end. I don’t know what it is with her. They still die, but—”
“They die happy?”
“Not happy, just — I can’t explain.”
“Not afraid?”
“Yes!” she exclaimed, bending over and looking at Alexander. “That’s it. Not afraid. I say to her, ‘Tania, they’re going to die anyway, leave them alone.’ And not just me. Dr. Sayers keeps telling her to come and work in the critical wing. But she doesn’t want to hear it.” Ina lowered her voice. “Not even from the doctor!”
That brought a smile back to Alexander’s face.
“She’s got some mouth on her, too. I don’t know how she gets away with a tenth of the things she says to that nice man who is running ragged around this hospital. When they first brought you in, like I said, the doctor looked at you and shook his head. ‘He is bled out,’ he said, and he said it sadly. I could tell he was upset.”
Bled out? Alexander paled.
Ina continued. “ ‘Forget him,’ he said. ‘There is nothing we can do.’ ” She stopped washing Alexander for a second. “And do you know what that Tatiana said to him?”
“I can’t imagine,” said Alexander. “What?”
Ina’s voice was full of gossipy, hot frustration. “I don’t know who she thinks she is. She came up really close to him, lowered her voice, looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Well, it’s good thing, Doctor, that he didn’t say the same thing about you when you were floating unconscious in the river! It’s a good thing he didn’t turn his back on you when you fell, Dr. Sayers.’ ” Ina laughed gleefully. “I couldn’t believe her nerve. To talk that way to a doctor.”
“What was she thinking?” muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania.
“She was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,” Ina said. “She gave the doctor a liter of blood for you—”
“Where did she get it from?”
“Herself, of course.” Ina smiled. “Lucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.”
Of course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut.
Ina continued. “The doctor told her she couldn’t give any more, and she said a liter wasn’t enough, and he said, ‘Yes, but you don’t have more to give,’ and she said, ‘I’ll make more,’ and he said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Yes,’ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.”
Alexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound. He was barely breathing.
“The doctor told her, ‘Tania, you’re wasting your time. Look at his burn. It’s going to get infected.’ There wasn’t enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was so low.” Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. “So I’m making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She’s sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to a catheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won’t believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV.” Ina’s eyes bulged. “I watch her draining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, ‘Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You’re siphoning blood from yourself into him?’ She said to me in her calm, I-won’t-stand-for-any-argument voice, ‘Ina, if I don’t, he will die.’ I yelled at her. I said, ‘There are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don’t you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?’ And she said, ‘He’s not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine.’ Can you believe it, Major? But that’s what she said. ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said to her. ‘Fine, die yourself. I don’t care.’ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn’t following procedure, told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her.” Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. “We found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, ‘Maybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?’ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment out of you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage, to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That’s when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, ‘Tania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,’ and she said, ‘You think so?’ ” Ina tutted again. Paused. “Are you all right, Major? Why are you crying?”
That afternoon, when Tatiana came to feed him, Alexander took her hand and for a long time couldn’t speak.
“What’s the matter, darling?” she whispered. “What hurts?”
“My heart,” he answered.
She leaned from her chair to him. “Shura, honey, let me feed you. I need to feed ten other very sick people after you. One of them doesn’t have a tongue. Imagine the difficulty there. I’ll come back tonight if I can. Ina knows me. She thinks I’ve taken a shine to you.” Tatiana smiled. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Alexander still couldn’t speak.
Later that night Tatiana came back. The lights were out, and everyone was asleep; she sat by Alexander’s side.
“Tatia . . .”
Quietly she said, “Ina’s got a big mouth. I told her not to upset my patient. I didn’t want you to worry. She couldn’t help herself.”
“I don’t deserve you,” he said.
“Alexander, what do you think? You think I was going to let you die when I knew we were meant to get out of here? I couldn’t get that close and then lose you.”
“I don’t deserve you,” he repeated.
“Husband,” she said, “did you forget Luga? God, did you forget Leningrad? Our Lazarevo? I haven’t. My life belongs to you.”