Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(204)

"Wait, you're injured--"

He put his hand over her mouth. "Stop shouting," Alexander said to her. "You'll get your hearing back in a little while, just keep quiet and follow me."

Tatiana pointed at his bleeding chest. Shrugging, he crouched down. She ripped away the sleeve of his shirt. It was a shell grazing; she pulled the pieces of shrapnel out of his shoulder; one was deeply stuck in his deltoid and pectoral. Shura, look, she thought she said.

He leaned to her. "Just grab it with your fingers and pull it out."

She yanked it out, nearly fainting at the pain she knew he must have felt. He winced but did not move. She washed out the wound with an antiseptic and bandaged it.

"What about your face?"

His scalp wound had reopened.

"Stop speaking. It's fine. Later. Let's just go." Her face was stained with his blood from when he had pressed her to him. She didn't wipe it off.

Leaving the empty machine gun, Alexander picked up his pistols, the sub-machine-gun, and the backpack; Tatiana grabbed her nurse's bag and they ran as fast as they could down the hill.

Around the perimeters of the fields along tree walls and stone walls they ran and walked and crawled for the next two to three hours until the dwellings became progressively more residential and less farm-like, and finally there were streets and finally there was a white sign posted on the side of a three-story bombed-out building that said, "YOU ARE ENTERING THE BRITISH SECTOR OF THECITY OFB ERLIN."

Tatiana could hear now. She grabbed his good arm, smiled and said, "Almost there."

There was no reply from Alexander.

And in a few hundred feet she knew why. Berlin was not abandoned, and there were trucks and jeeps on the road, and though many of them belonged to the Royal armed forces, quite a few of them didn't. They saw a truck up ahead barreling forward, honking, with the hammer and sickle on the crest, and Alexander yanked her into a doorway and said, "How far to the American sector?"

"I don't know. I have a street map of Berlin."

It turned out to be five kilometers. It took them all day. They would run from building to building and then stop in broken-down entrance-ways, hallways, doorways, and wait.

By the time they got to the American sector it was four in the afternoon. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

They found the U.S. embassy on Clayallee at four thirty.

And they could not cross the street to it, because the hammer-and-sickle jeeps were parked four in a row across the entrance.

This time it was Tatiana who pulled him inside the doorway, under the stairs.

"They're not necessarily here for us," she said, trying to sound optimistic. "I think it's standard procedure."

"I'm sure it is. You don't think they've been notified to be on the lookout for a man about my size and a woman, yours?"

"No, I don't think so," she said in a doubting voice.

"All right then, let's go." He began to get up.

She stopped him.

"Tatiana, what are you thinking?"

She thought about it. "I'm an American citizen. I have a right to ask to go into the embassy."

"Yes, but you'll be stopped before you get a chance to exercise that right."

"Well, we have to do something."

He was quiet. She kept thinking, looking him over. He wasn't so tense as before. The fight seemed to have left his body. Reaching out, she touched his face. "Hey," she said. "Rear up. We're not done fighting, soldier." She pulled on him. "Let's go."

"Where to now?"

"To the military governor's house. It's not too far from here, I think."

When they got to the U.S. command headquarters, Tatiana hid inside a building across the boulevard, changed from olive drab into her grimy nurse's uniform, and motioned Alexander to follow her to the armed, gated entrance. It was five in the evening. There were no Soviet vehicles nearby.

"I'll wait here, you go in by yourself and then come out for me," he said.

She took hold of his hand. "Alexander," she said, "I'm not leaving you behind. Let's go. Just put your weapons away."

"I'm not crossing the street without my weapon."

"It's empty! And you're coming up to the military governor's house. Who is going to let you in brandishing weapons? Put them away."

They had to leave the machine gun--it was too big. With the other weapons in the backpack, they Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

walked up to the gate and Tatiana, standing shoulder to shoulder with Alexander, asked the sentry if she could see Governor Mark Bishop. "Tell him Nurse Jane Barrington is calling for him," she said.

Alexander was looking at her. "Not Tatiana Barrington?"

"Jane was the name on the original Red Cross documents," she replied. "Besides, Tatiana sounds so Russian."

They stared at each other. "Itis so Russian," he said quietly.

Mark Bishop came to the gate. He took one look at Tatiana, one look at Alexander and said, "Come through." Before they got inside he said, "Nurse Barrington, what a ruckus you've been causing."

"Governor, this is my husband, Alexander Barrington," Tatiana said in English.