Tatiana and Alexander. Paullina Simons

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СКАЧАТЬ 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?”

      “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 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 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.

      It was Tatiana who had pulled him back from the four horsemen who came for him, counting his good and bad works on their black-gloved fingers. Tatiana, whom he had told, “Leave Leningrad and go back to Lazarevo instantly.” Lazarevo, deep at the foot of the Ural Mountains, a small fishing village buried in the pine woods, nestled on the shores of the Kama River, Lazarevo, where for an instant in time she could have been safe.

      But she was like the doctor: she had no sense. No, she said to him. She was not going. And she said no to the four horsemen, shaking her fist at them. It’s too early for you to claim him. And then defiantly: I won’t let you take him. I will do everything in my power to keep you from taking him.

      And she did. With her own blood, she had kept them from Alexander. She poured her blood inside him, she drained her arteries and filled his veins, and he was saved.

      Alexander may have owed Tatiana his life but Dr. Sayers owed Alexander his, and he was going to take Alexander and Tatiana to Helsinki, from where they would make their way to the United States. With Tatiana’s help they concocted a plan, and for months Alexander lay in the hospital while his back healed and carved figures and cradles and spears out of wood and imagined driving through America with her, their hurt all vanished, just the two of them, singing to the radio.

      He had lived on the fleeting wings of hope. It was such a translucent hope. He knew it even as he drowned in it. It was the hope of a man surrounded by the enemy, who, as he makes his last run to safety, his back turned, prays he will have a chance to dive into a pit of life before the enemy reloads, before they send the heavy artillery out. He hears their guns, he hears their shouts behind him, but still he runs, hoping for a reprieve from the whistle of the shell. Dive into hope, or die in despair. Dive into the River Kama.

      Alexander’s fate was sealed. He wondered how long ago it had been sealed, but he did not want an answer to that question.

      Since he left his small room in Boston back in December 1930, that’s how long.

      Alexander could not leave Russia. But one small СКАЧАТЬ