Tatiana and Alexander: A Novel(73)



"Oh,Bozhe moi ," Orbeli said. "Oh,koshmar. What's going to happen? What's going to happen to my Hermitage? They'll bomb it like they bombed London. There will be nothing left of our city, nothing left of our spires, our churches, our national monuments. There will be nothing left of our art," he said in a breaking voice.

"St. Paul's is still standing," said Alexander, by way of comfort. "Westminster Abbey. Big Ben. London Bridge. The Germans couldn't touch the British national monuments. Forty thousand Londoners are dead, though."

"Yes, yes." Orbeli waved him off impatiently. "People always die at war. But what about my art?"

Alexander stepped slightly away. "Well, we can't evacuate St. Isaac's Cathedral, or the Bronze Horseman statue. But we will evacuate our people. And we can evacuate your art."

"Where can we possibly ship it?" Orbeli exclaimed in a high voice. "Who will look after it? Where will it be safe?"

"The art will have to take care of itself," said Alexander. "Ship it anywhere, it doesn't matter. It will be safer than in Leningrad."

"My Tamerlane? Renoir? Rembrandt? Faberg?? My precious, priceless treasures. All of it, without me?"

Alexander tipped his cap lightly. "All of it will be safer somewhere else. And someday the war will be over. Good day, citizen."

"Nothing good about this day," Orbeli muttered, and turned to walk across the road to his museum.

Alexander, amused, continued down the Neva embankment, past the Winter Palace, past Moika Canal. It was a Sunday afternoon in Leningrad, and here on the embankment everything was quiet, unlike the harried rabble that crowded on Nevsky where the lines in all the stores were out the door, people Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

shoving and screaming obscenities at each other. There was no one here and Alexander liked it better. He passed the Summer Garden, strolling down to Smolny monastery with a rifle on his shoulder.

At the corner of Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin Alexander paused briefly. A few blocks to the right of the river, Tauride Park stretched pleasantly down the street and he quite liked walking past it in the summer. But Smolny and its grounds straight ahead might have some problems, some crowds in need of control. Which way to go? To go straight to Smolny and then circle around the Tauride Park or to walk along the park road and then circle around to the monastery?

He lit a cigarette and stood for a few seconds, looking at his watch.

He had a bit of time. What was the rush, anyway? Any crowd problems would still be there in a half-hour just as well as in fifteen minutes. He was only one man; he couldn't be everywhere at once. Alexander turned right and walked down Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin.

The street was deserted, and the trees were rustling in the summer wind. He was thinking about Barrington. He remembered the woods by Barrington. He and Teddy used to lie down in the woods and listen to the trees swaying above them. He liked the sound.

He heard another sound. A soft sound, of someone singing.

It was very faint. Alexander looked down the street and saw no one.

Alexander looked across the street and saw a girl on a bench.

The first thing he noticed was a mass of light, long blonde hair covering the girl's face and the second thing he noticed was her white dress with red roses. Covered by a leafy canopy of forest-green trees, she sat on a bench like a white flurry, her golden hair, her white dress, her blood-red roses. She was eating ice cream and softly singing to herself in between the licks of the cone. Alexander recognized the tune. She was singing "We'll Meet Again in Lvov, My Love and I"--a current popular song. She somehow managed to sing, to lick her ice cream, to bounce her bare leg, her foot gussied up with a red sandal, and to pull the hair back from her face. All at once. She was oblivious not just to Alexander standing across the street dumbly staring at her, but also to the war, to the world, to all the things that guided Leningraders on this Sunday. In the moment she was in, she had herself and her lustrous hair and her magnificent dress and her ice cream and her soft voice. She was in a world Alexander had never seen, swimming on the moon in a sea of tranquility. He could not move from the spot on the pavement.

And he still could not move from that spot on the pavement, from seeing her for the first time. That's where he was to this day, knowing that had he walked straight ahead instead of making a right, he would be living a different life. Had he walked by her even at the moment of seeing her. He could have been provident, he did not have to cross the street. He could have gaped at her and gone on, couldn't he?

But on that sunlit Sunday, Alexander knew nothing, thought nothing, imagined nothing. He forgot Dimitri and war and the Soviet Union and escape plans, and even America, and crossed the street for Tatiana Metanova.

Later he watched her hands gesticulating as she spoke. Her fingers were slender and well formed. Her nails were meticulous. He asked her why she kept them so spotless and she replied that she had once known a girl with dirty fingernails. The girl had been much trouble. She had never forgotten it.

"Do you think she was trouble because of the dirty fingernails?" Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

"I'm almost sure of it."

Alexander wanted her spotless hands on him.

He was afraid she was too young for his man's gaze, much less for his man's hands.

Paullina Simons's Books