Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(182)

"I'm an old professional. I can see you are fine from a distance."

He laughed joyously, and then, a smile still big on his face, said, "What is it about you that looks so familiar to me? You speak such good Russian. What's your name again?"

She had Penny give him a small medical kit and a food parcel while she herself left in a hurry. How long Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

before Ouspensky put her face together with his memory?

Slower and slower she walked through the last barrack. She dawdled and paused at every bed, even talked to some of the men, slower, slower. If Ouspensky was here, wouldn't it mean that Alexander was here, too? But barrack twenty proved just as fruitless. Two hundred and sixty-eight men, none of them Alexander. Twenty barracks, five thousand men, none of them Alexander. There was the rest of the camp to get through, but Tatiana had few illusions. Alexander would be where the Soviets were. He wouldn't be with the German civilians. Besides, Karolich told her as much. All the Soviets were together. The camp didn't like to mingle the German and Russian prisoners. In the past, violent conflicts erupted over nothing.

When they stepped outside, she left the others for a minute and walked over to the short barbed-wire fence that separated the housing units from the cemetery. It was June, and wet. It had been lightly drizzling since dawn. She stood, in her soiled white pants, her soiled white tunic, her black hair falling out of her hat, her arms around herself, and motionlessly gazed at the small freshly dug elevated hills without markers, without crosses.

Karolich came up to her. "Are you all right?" he asked.

With a pained sigh she turned to him. "Lieutenant, the men who died in the barracks yesterday, where are they buried?"

"They're not buried yet."

"Where did you take them?"

"For now they're in the corpse cellar, in the autopsy barracks."

She didn't know how she got the next words out. "Could we see the corpse cellar, please?"

Karolich laughed. "Sure. You don't think the dead are getting fair treatment?"

Martin and Penny returned to the infirmary and Tatiana went with Karolich. The autopsy room was a small, white-tiled bunker with high tiled berths for the bodies.

"Where's the cellar?"

"We slide them to the cellar this way." Karolich pointed.

At the back of the room Tatiana saw a long metal chute that led down twenty feet into darkness.

She stood silently over the chute.

"How do you"--her voice was untrustworthy--"how do you bring the bodies up from there?"

"We often don't. It's connected to the kilns in the crematorium." Karolich grinned. "Those Germans thought ofeverything ."

Tatiana stood and stared down into the darkness. Then she turned and walked outside.

"I just need a couple of minutes, Lieutenant, all right? I'm going to go over there and sit on the bench." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

She attempted a smile. "It will be a little easier for you when some of the Soviets get shipped out, no? You'll have more room."

"Yes." He waved dismissively. "They bring more in. It never stops. But the bench is wet."

She sank down. He waited a bit. "Do you want me to, um, leave you alone?"

"Would you mind? For just a few minutes."

Tatiana's lower stomach was burning. That's what it felt like, a slow charring away of her insides. There was such a thing, wasn't there, as feeling better, eventually and forever? She couldn't feel this old into eternity, could she?

In eternity, wouldn't she be young, wearing her white dress with red roses, her golden hair streaming down past her shoulders?

She would be walking in the Summer Garden late at night, strolling down the path with the ghostly sculptures standing to attention before her, and she would break into a run, as her hair flowed, and a smile was on her face.

In eternity she would be running all the time.

Tatiana thought of Leningrad, of her white-night, glorious flowing river Neva, and over it Leningrad's bridges and in front of it the statue of the Bronze Horseman, and St. Isaac's Cathedral rising up, beckoning her with its arcade, with its balustrades, with its wrought-iron railing above the dome, where they had stood once before, a lifetime ago, and looked out onto the blackest night, waiting for war to swallow them.

And it did.

She sat in disbelief.

Something was finishing inside her, she felt it.

Had it been raining all this time and she didn't even notice?

Tatiana lay down on the bench in the rain.

"Nurse Barrington?"

She opened her eyes. Karolich helped her up. "If you're not feeling well, I'll be glad to take you back to the house. You can have a rest. We can do the camp prison and the rest of the barracks another time. There is no hurry."

Tatiana stood up. "No," she said. "Let's do the camp prison now. Are there many in there?"

"It's in three wings, two of them we closed, but the operational one is half full." He spat. "They break the rules all the time. Disobey, don't come to roll call, or even worse, constantly try to escape. You'd think they'd learn." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html