Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(4)

This morning the dockhand did not go over to see his friend at the next pier for a smoke and a coffee. Instead, he walked across the road and sat next to her on the bench.

This surprised her. But she said nothing, she just wrapped her white nurse's coat tighter around herself, and fixed the kerchief covering her hair.

In Swedish he said to her, "My name is Sven. What's your name?"

After a longish pause, she replied. "Tatiana. I don't speak Swedish."

In English he said to her, "Do you want a cigarette?"

"No," she replied, also in English. She thought of telling him she spoke little English. She was sure he didn't speak Russian.

He asked her if he could get her a coffee, or something warm to throw over her shoulders. No and no. She did not look at him.

Sven was silent a moment. "You want to get on my barge, don't you?" he asked. "Come. I will take you." He took her by her arm. Tatiana didn't move. "I can see you have left something behind," he said, pulling on her gently. "Go and retrieve it." Tatiana did not move.

"Take my cigarette, take my coffee, or get on my barge. I won't even turn away. You don't have to sneak past me. I would have let you on the first time you came. All you had to do was ask. You want to go to Helsinki? Fine. I know you're not Finnish." Sven paused. "But you are very pregnant. Two months ago it would have been easier for you. But you need to go back or go forward. How long do you plan to sit here and watch my back?"

Tatiana stared into the Baltic Sea. "If I knew, would I be sitting here?" Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"Don't sit here anymore. Come," said the longshoreman.

She shook her head.

"Where is your husband? Where is the father of your baby?"

"Dead in the Soviet Union," Tatiana breathed out.

"Ah, you're from the Soviet Union." He nodded. "You've escaped somehow? Well, you're here, so stay. Stay in Sweden. Go to the consulate, get yourself refugee protection. We have hundreds of people getting through from Denmark. Go to the consulate."

Tatiana shook her head.

"You're going to have that baby soon," Sven said. "Go back, or move forward."

Tatiana's hands went around her belly. Her eyes glazed over.

The dockhand patted her gently and stood up. "What will it be? You want to go back to the Soviet Union? Why?"

Tatiana did not reply. How to tell him her soul had been left there?

"If you go back, what happens to you?"

"I die most likely," she barely whispered.

"If you go forward, what happens to you?"

"I live most likely."

He clapped his hands. "What kind of a choice is that? You must go forward."

"Yes," said Tatiana, "but how do I live like this? Look at me. You think, if I could, I wouldn't?"

"So you're here in the Stockholm purgatory, watching me move my paper day in and day out, watching me smoke, watching me. What are you going to do? Sit with your baby on the bench? Is that what you want?"

Tatiana was silent.

The first time she laid eyes on him she was sitting on a bench, eating ice cream.

"Go forward."

"I don't have it in me."

He nodded. "You have it. It's just covered up. For you it's winter." He smiled. "Don't worry. Summer's here. The ice will melt."

Tatiana struggled up from the bench. Walking away, she said in Russian, "It's not the ice anymore, my Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

seagoing philosopher. It's the pyre."



BOOK ONE

The Second America

...Hold your head up all the more

This tide

And every tide

Because he was the son you bore

And gave to that wind blowing and that tide

Rudyard Kipling

CHAPTER ONE

In Morozovo Hospital, March 13, 1943

IN THE DARK EVENING, in a small fishing village that had been turned into Red Army headquarters for the Neva operation of the Leningrad front, a wounded man lay in a military hospital waiting for death.

For a long time he lay with his arms crossed, not moving until the lights went out and the critical ward grew tired and quiet.

Soon they would be coming for him.

He was a young man just twenty-three, ravaged by war. Months of lying wounded in bed threw a pallor on his face. He was unshaven, and his black hair was cropped close to his scalp. His eyes, the color of toffee, were blanks as he stared into the far distance. Alexander Belov looked grim but he was not a cruel man, and he looked resigned but he was not a cold man.

Months earlier on the ice during the Battle of Leningrad, Alexander had run out for his lieutenant Anatoly Marazov, who lay on the river Neva with a bullet in his throat. Alexander ran out to the hopeless Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

Anatoly, and so did a doctor with no sense--an International Red Cross doctor from Boston named Matthew Sayers, who fell through the ice, and whom Alexander had to pull out and drag across the river to the armored truck for cover. The Germans were trying to blow up the truck from the air, and in their attempts they blew up Alexander instead.