The Bronze Horseman (75 page)

Alexander kissed her between her breasts.

“You have fixed me.” And Tatiana smiled.

Murmuring and whispering, Tatiana lay happily under Alexander, having been once again loved and relieved, and relieved… “Oh, and I thought I loved you before.”

His lips pressed into her temple. “This does add a whole new dimension, doesn’t it?” His hands did not leave her body. Nothing of him left her body. He was holding her from underneath, still moving inside her.

Turning her face up to him, a smile coming to her lips, a smile of youth and ecstasy, Tatiana said, “Alexander, you are my first love. Did you know that?”

He squeezed her bottom, pressed himself into her, licked the salt off her face, and nodded. “That I know.”

“Oh?”

“Tatia, I knew it even before you yourself knew it.” He grinned. “Before you finally found the word to describe to yourself what you were feeling, I knew it from the start. How else could you have been so shy and guileless?”

“Guileless?”

“Yes.”

“Was I that obvious?”

“Yes.” Alexander smiled. “Your inability to look at me in public, yet your total devotion to my face when we were together—like now,” he said, kissing her. “Your embarrassment at the smallest things—I couldn’t even keep my hand on you in the tram without you blushing… your fingers on me when I was telling you about America… your smile, your
smile
, Tania, when you ran to me from Kirov.” Alexander shook his head at the memory. “What a prison you have set up for me with your first love.”

She put her arms tighter around him and said teasingly, “Oh, so the first love part you believe, but the first kiss part you have a problem with? What kind of girl do you think I am?”

“The nicest girl,” he whispered.

“Are you ready for more?”

“Tania…” Alexander shook his head in smiling disbelief. “What’s gotten into you?”

She laughed, her hands caressing his stomach. “Shura… am I wanting too much?”

“No. But you are going to kill
me
.”

Tatiana craved something, but she just couldn’t find a way out of her timidity to ask him. Quietly, thoughtfully, she stroked his stomach and then cleared her throat. “Honey? Can I lie on top of you?”

“Of course.” Alexander smiled, opening his arms. “Come and lie on top of me.”

She lay down on him and softly, wetly kissed his lips. “Shura…” she whispered, “do you like that?”

“Mmm.”

Her lips were on his face, on his throat, on the top of his chest. She whispered, “You know what your skin feels like to me? The ice cream that I love. Creamy, smooth. Your whole body is the color of caramel, like my crème brûlée, but you’re not cold like ice cream, you’re warm.” She rubbed her lips back and forth against his chest.

“So—better than ice cream?”

“Yes.” She smiled, moving up to his lips. “I love you better than ice cream.” After kissing him deeply, she gently, gently sucked his tongue. “Do you like
that
?” she whispered.

He groaned his assent.

“Shura, darling…” she asked very shyly, “is there… anywhere else you might like me to do that?”

Pulling away, he gaped at her. Silent and tantalized, Tatiana watched his incredulous face.

“I think,” Alexander said slowly, “there is a place where I might like you to do that, yes.”

She smiled back, trying to hide her excitement. “You’ll just—you’ll just have to tell me what to do, all right?”

“All right.”

Tatiana kissed Alexander’s chest, listened to his heart, moved lower, lay her head on his rippled stomach. Moving lower still, she brushed her blonde hair against him and then rubbed her breasts against him, feeling him already swollen underneath her. She kissed the arrow line of his black hair leading down from his navel and then grazed her lips against him.

Kneeling between Alexander’s legs, Tatiana took hold of him with both hands. He was extraordinary. “And now…”

“Now put me in your mouth,” he said, watching her.

Her breath leaving her body, she whispered,
“Whole?”
and took what she could of him into her mouth.

“Move up and down on me.”

“Like this?”

There was a thickening pause. “Yes.”

“Or…”

“Yes, that’s good, too.”

Tatiana felt him hard against her fervent lips and rubbing fingers. When Alexander gripped her hair, she, stopping for a moment, looked into his face. “Oh, yes,” she whispered, hungrily putting him deeper inside her mouth and moaning.

“You’re doing so well, Tatia,” he whispered. “Keep going, and don’t stop.”

She stopped. He opened his eyes. Smiling, Tatiana said, “I want to hear you groan for me not to stop.”

Alexander sat up and kissed her wet mouth. “Please don’t stop.” Then he gently pushed her face down on him, falling back on the blanket.

Right before the end he pulled her head away and said, “Tania, I’m going to come.”

“So come,” Tatiana whispered. “Come in my mouth.”

Afterward, as she lay cradled in his chest, Alexander said, gazing at her in stark amazement, “I’ve decided that I like it.”

“Me, too,” she said softly.

For a long time she lay next to him, feeling his tender fingers feather her.

“Why did we spend two days fighting when we could have been doing this?”

Alexander ruffled her hair. “That wasn’t fighting, Tatiasha. That was foreplay.”

They kissed each other. “I’m sorry again,” Tatiana whispered.

“Me, too, again,” he whispered back.

Then Tatiana fell quiet.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”

How does he know me so well? she thought. All I have to do is blink, and he knows I’m thinking, or fretting, or anxious. She took a breath. “Shura… have you loved many girls before?” she asked in a small voice.

“No, my angel face,” Alexander said passionately, caressing her. “I have not loved many girls before.”

Tears forming at the base of her throat, she asked, “Did you love Dasha?”

He was silent for a moment. “Tania, don’t do this.”

She was silent herself.

“I don’t know what answer you want me to give you,” Alexander said. “I’ll give you whatever answer you want.”

“Give me only the truth.”

“No, I did not love Dasha,” Alexander said. “I cared for her. We had some good times.”

“How good?”

“All right,” he said.

“The truth.”

“Just all right,” he repeated. He tweaked her nipple. “Haven’t you figured out yet,” Alexander said, “that Dasha was not my type?”

“What will you say about me to your next girl?”

He grinned. “I’ll say that you had perfect breasts.”

“Stop it.”

“That you had young, perky, incredible breasts with the biggest, most sensitive cherry nipples…” he said, climbing on top of her and holding up her legs high against his arms. “And lips for the gods, and eyes for kings. I will say,” Alexander whispered hotly, pushing himself inside her and groaning, “that you
felt
like nothing else on this earth.”

“What time is it, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he replied sleepily. “Toward evening.”

“I don’t want to go back to them.”

“Who’s going back?” said Alexander. “We’re not moving from here.” He paused.
“Ever.”

“We’re not?”

“Try to leave.”

Before night set, they crept out of the tent, and Tatiana sat on a blanket with Alexander’s uniform tunic around her shoulders while he built a fire with the twigs and dry branches she had found earlier. The fire was a raging blaze in five minutes.

“You build a good fire, Shura,” Tatiana said quietly.

“Thank you.” He pulled out two cans of
tushonka
, some dry bread and water.

“Look what else I’ve got.” In a piece of aluminum foil he had a few squares of chocolate.

“Wow,” Tatiana mouthed, staring at him in wonder, not even looking at the chocolate.

TATIANA
went back to their house, lay down on their bed, and did not get up.

During her semiconscious sleep Tatiana kept hearing the four old women in the room. They were talking quietly while fixing her blankets, adjusting the pillows under her head, stroking her hair.

Dusia said, “She needs to trust in the Lord. He will get her out of this.”

Naira said, “I told her it wasn’t a good idea to fall in love with a soldier. All they do is break your heart.”

Raisa tremulously said, “I think the problem isn’t that he’s a soldier. The problem is she loves him too much.”

Axinya whispered, patting Tatiana’s back, “Lucky girl.”

“What’s lucky?” Naira said indignantly. “If only she had listened to us and stayed at our house, none of this would have happened.”

“If only she came to church with me more often,” said Dusia. “The Lord’s rod and His staff, they would comfort her.”

“What do you think, Tanechka?” Axinya said, standing close to Tatiana. “You think the Lord’s rod and staff would comfort you right now?”

Naira said, “This is no good. We are not helping her.”

Dusia: “I never liked him.”

Naira: “Me neither. Never understood what Tania saw in him.”

Raisa: “She is too good for him.”

Naira: “She is too good for anybody.”

Dusia: “She can be even better, closer to the Lord.”

Naira: “My Vova is such a kind, gentle boy. He cared for her.”

Raisa: “I bet you Alexander’s not going to come back for her. He’s left her here for good.”

Naira: “I’m sure you’re right. He married her—”

Dusia: “Soiled her—”

Raisa: “And discarded her.”

Dusia: “I always suspected he was godless.”

Axinya whispered to Tatiana, “The only thing that will keep him away is death.”

Thank you, Axinya, thought Tatiana, opening her heavy eyes and lifting her body out of bed. But that’s exactly what I’m afraid of.

The old girls convinced Tatiana without much effort to come back and live with them. Vova helped her to carry the trunk and sewing machine back to Naira’s house.

At first Tatiana could not get through her day without physically holding herself together. There was no comfort inside her, and she knew it. There was nowhere she could turn to inside herself to leave the darkness. No memory she could fondly think of, no gentle joke, no musical refrain. There was no part of her body she could touch without shuddering. Nowhere she could look without seeing Alexander.

This time she didn’t have the hunger to dull her sorrow. She didn’t have infected lungs. There was nothing for her healthy body to do but grit its teeth and lift the buckets that went on her shoulders every morning, and milk the goat and pour the warm milk for Raisa, who could not pour it herself, and hang the clothes on the line and have the women say at night how wonderful the clothes smelled, having been hung by Tania in the sunshine.

Tatiana sewed for them and for herself, she read to them and to herself, she bathed them and herself, she tended their garden and looked after their chickens and took the apples off the trees, and little by little, bucket by bucket, book by book, shirt by shirt, their need enveloped her again, and Tatiana was comforted.

Just like
before
.

After two weeks came the first letter from Alexander.

Tatiasha,

Can there be anything harder than this? Missing you is a physical aching that grips me early in the morning and does not leave me, not even as I draw my last waking breath.

My solace in these waning empty summer days is the knowledge that you’re safe, and alive, and healthy, and that the worst that you have to go through is serfdom for four well-meaning old women.

The wood piles I’ve left are the lightest in the front. The heaviest ones are for the winter. Use them last, and if you need help carrying them, God help me, ask Vova. Don’t hurt yourself. And don’t fill the water pails all the way to the top. They’re too heavy.

Getting back was rough, and as soon as I came back, I was sent right out to the Neva, where for six days we planned our attack and then made a move in boats across the river and were completely crushed in two hours. We didn’t stand a chance. The Germans bombed the boats with the Vanyushas, their version of my rocket launcher, the boats all sank. We were left with a thousand fewer men and were no closer to crossing the river. We’re now looking at other places we can cross. I’m fine, except for the fact that it’s rained here for ten days straight and I’ve been hip deep in mud for all that time. There is nowhere to sleep, except in the mud. We put our trench coats down and hope it stops raining soon. All black and wet, I almost felt sorry for myself until I thought of you during the blockade.

I’ve decided to do that from now on. Every time I think I have it so tough, I’m going to think of you burying your sister in Lake Ladoga.

I wish you had been given a lighter cross than Leningrad to carry through your life.

Things are going to be relatively quiet here for the next few weeks, until we regroup. Yesterday a bomb fell in the commandant’s bunker. The commandant wasn’t there at the time. Yet the anxiety doesn’t go away. When is it going to come again?

I play cards and soccer. And I smoke. And I think of you.

I sent you money. Go to Molotov at the end of August.

Don’t forget to eat well, my warm bun, my midnight sun, and kiss your hand for me, right in the palm and then press it against your heart.

Alexander

Tatiana read Alexander’s letter a hundred times, memorizing every word. She slept with her face on the letter, which renewed her strength.

My love, my dear, dear Shura,

Don’t talk about my cross—first heave your own off your shoulders.

How did I live last winter? I don’t know, but I think almost longingly of it now. Because I moved. There was movement inside me. I had energy to lie, to pretend to Dasha, to keep her alive. I walked, I was with Mama, I was too busy to die myself. Too busy hiding my love for you.

But now I wake up and think, how am I going to go through the rest of my day until sleep?