Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(3)

Whathad she been doing?

She'd been seeing Alexander everywhere.

Everywhere she walked, everywhere she sat, she would turn her head to the right, and there he would be, tall in his officer's uniform, rifle slung on his shoulder, looking at her and smiling. She would reach out and touch thin air, touch the white pillow on which she saw his face. She would turn to him and break the bread for him and sit on the bench and watch him making his slow sure way to her, crossing the street for her. She would walk after Swedish men during the day, men whose backs were broad, whose stride was long, she would stare impolitely into the faces of strangers because it was Alexander's face she saw etched there. And then she would blink, blink again and he would be gone. And she would be gone, too. She would lower her gaze, and walk on.

She raised her eyes to the mirror. Behind her Alexander stood. He brushed the hair away from her neck and bent to her. She couldn't smell him, nor feel his lips on her. Just her eyes saw him, almost felt his black hair on her neck.

Tatiana closed her eyes.

She went and had breakfast at Spivak caf?, her usual two helpings of bacon, two cups of black coffee, three poached eggs. She pretended to read the English paper she had bought at the kiosk across the street;pretended because the words were gases inside her head, her mind could not catch them. She read better in the afternoon when she was calmer. Leaving the caf?, she walked to the industrial pier, where she sat on the bench and watched the Swedish dockhand load up his barges full of finished paper to be taken over to Helsinki. She watched the longshoreman steadily. She knew that in a few minutes, he would go off to talk to his friends fifty meters down the pier. He would have a smoke and a small cup of coffee. He would be gone from the barge thirteen minutes. He would leave the covered barge unattended, the plank connected to the cabin of the shipping vessel.

Thirteen minutes later he would come back and continue loading the paper from the truck, wheeling it down the plank on his hand trolley. In sixty-two minutes the captain of the barge would appear; the longshoreman would salute him and untie the ropes. And the captain would take his barge across the thawed Baltic Sea to Helsinki. Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

This was the seventy-fifth morning Tatiana had watched him.

Helsinki was only four hours from Vyborg. And Tatiana knew from the English newspapers she bought daily that Vyborg--for the first time since 1918--was back in Soviet hands. The Red Army had taken Russia's Karelian territories back from the Finns. A barge across the sea to Helsinki, a truck across the forests to Vyborg, and she too would be back in Soviet hands.

"Sometimes I wish you were less bloody-minded," Alexander says. He had managed to receive a three-day furlough. They're in Leningrad--the last time they're in Leningrad together, their last everything .

"Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?"

He grunts. "Yes. I wish the kettle were less black." He snorts in frustration. "There are women," he says, "I know there are, who listen to their men. I've seen them. Other men have them--"

She tickles him. He does not seem amused. "All right. Tell me what to do," she says, lowering her voice two notches. "I will do exactly as you say."

"Leave Leningrad and go back to Lazarevo instantly," Alexander tells her. "Go where you will be safe."

Rolling her eyes, she says, "Come on. I know you can play this game."

"I know I can," Alexander says, sitting on her parents' old sofa. "I just don't want to. You don't listen to me about the important things..."

"Those aren't the important things," Tatiana says, kneeling in front of him and taking hold of his hands. "If the NKVD come for me, I will know you are gone and I will be happy to stand against the wall." She squeezes his hands. "I will go to the wall as your wife and never regret a second I spent with you. So let me have this here with you. Let me smell you once more, taste you once more, kiss you once more," she says. "Now play my game with me, sorrowful as it is to lie down together in wintry Leningrad. Play the miracle with me--to lie down with you at all. Tell me what to do and I will do it."

Alexander pulls on her hand. "Come here." He opens his arms. "Sit on top of me."

She obeys.

"Now take your hands and place them on my face."

She obeys.

"Put your lips on my eyes."

She obeys.

"Kiss my forehead."

She obeys.

"Kiss my lips." Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

She obeys. And obeys.

"Tania..."

"Shh."

"Can't you see I'm breaking?"

"Ah," she says. "You're still in one piece then."

She sat and watched the dockhand when it was sunny and she sat and watched him when it rained. Or when it was foggy, which is what it was nearly every morning at eight o'clock.

This morning was none of the above. This morning was cold. The pier smelled of fresh water and of fish. The seagulls screeched overhead, a man's voice shouted.

Where is my brother to help me, my sister, my mother? Pasha, help me, hide in the woods where I know I can find you. Dasha, look what's happened. Do you even see? Mama, Mama. I want my mother. Where is my family to ask things of me, to weigh on me, to intrude on me, to never let me be silent or alone, where are they to help me through this? Deda, what do I do? I don't know what to do.