Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(174)

"Well, no."

"I didn't think so. Which is why you should trust me on this one. Just this one, all right? We will need the vodka."

Martin turned to Penny. "What do you think?"

"Tatiana here is the chief nursing practitioner at Ellis Island for New York's Department of Public Heath," said Penny. "If she says we should bring vodka, we should bring vodka."

Tatiana didn't want to correct her, she didn't want to saywas the chief nursing practitioner.

In the DP camps as they traveled hundreds of kilometers through Allied-occupied western Germany, Tatiana found something else besides money, jewelry, pens and paper: the many hands of the desperately Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

lonely-for-home soldiers. Nearly each one, as she bent over him, touched her and whispered something, in French, or Italian, or German, or in familiar warming English, about what a nice girl she was and what a dark girl and what a pretty girl, and was she lonely too, was she married, was she willing, was she, was she, was she, and to every one of them, Tatiana--who did not stop touching their heads to bring them comfort--would quietly say, "I'm here to look for my husband, I'm here to find my husband, I'm not one for you, I'm not the one."

Penny, however, was not attached and was not looking for her husband. What wasshe looking for? Tatiana was glad Vikki had not come to this cauldron of reckless male want. Vikki would have thought the gods were finally answering her prayers. Penny, less attractive than Vikki--and maybe therein lay the problem--could not stop herself from feeling flattered and from succumbing to their pleas, and every week or so, needed to take injections of penicillin to ward off sicknesses the thoughts of which made Tatiana a little bit sick herself.

There were some wards and some camps, in Bremen for instance, where things were so heated that the Red Cross nurses were not allowed to go into the wards by themselves, either without an armed convoy or without a male Red Cross representative. Trouble was, the convoy sometimes was paid to look the other way, and the Red Cross male reps were unreliable. In all honesty, who could Martin have stopped?

Tatiana took to carrying the P-38 on her at all times, tucked into her belt at her back. Often she did not feel safe.

To get to Berlin, they had to pass through a number of Soviet checkpoints. Every five miles or so, they were stopped by another military post on the road. Tatiana thought of them not as checkpoints but as ambushes. Every time they looked at her American passport, her heart thumped extra loud in her chest. What if one of them was alerted to the name Jane Barrington?

As they pulled away after one checkpoint, Martin said, "Why do you call yourself Tania if your name is Jane Barrington?" He paused. "Rather, why did you name yourself Jane Barrington if your name is Tania?"

"Martin! Don't be such a clod," exclaimed Penny. "Don't you know anything? Tania escaped from the Soviet Union. She wanted to give herself an American name. Right, Tania?"

"Something like that."

"So why would you be going back into Soviet-occupied territory if you escaped from the Soviet Union?"

"Oh, thatis a good question, Martin," said Penny. "Why, Tania?"

"I go where I'm needed most," said Tatiana slowly. "Not where it's most convenient."

Every other checkpoint, the Soviet soldiers asked to inspect the jeep. Since the truck of the jeep was packed to the gills, all the soldiers did was open the doors and close them again. They did not know about the hidden compartment so they never requested to look in there, nor did they look through the personal belongings. Martin would have had a conniption if he saw how much morphine Tatiana was carrying in her nurse's bag. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"Where is this Berlin already?" said Tatiana.

Penny replied, "You're in it."

Tatiana looked around at the long rows of houses. "This is not Berlin."

"Yes, it is. What were you expecting?"

"Big buildings. The Reichstag. The Brandenburg game."

"What do you think firebombing means?" Martin said loftily. "There is no more Reichstag. There are no more big buildings." They drove on to the center of town.

Tatiana pointed. "I see the Brandenburg gate is still standing."

Martin fell quiet.

Berlin.

Post-war Berlin.

Tatiana didn't know what she was expecting, but having lived through a bombed Leningrad, she had braced herself for the worst, and was still surprised by the destruction she found. Berlin wasn't a city, it was a ruin of biblical devastation. Most buildings in inner Berlin were lying in rubble, and the residents lived in the shadow of those ruins, as their children played amid the broken concrete, as they hung their washing out to dry from one mangled steel post to another. They built tents around the places where they used to live, and made fires in pits in the ground, and ate what they could and lived how they could. That was the American sector.

The Tiergarten Park that had made Berlin famous was now the stomping ground for thousands of displaced Berliners, the River Spree was polluted with cement ash, glass, sulfur, sodium nitrate--the debris of firebombing that left nearly three quarters of the central city razed to the pavement.

Penny was right. Berlin was not cramped like New York into a cigarette pack of an island, was not even like Leningrad, a neat ink blot stopped by the gulf. Berlin sprawled in all directions, broken buildings jutting out for miles.