The Bronze Horseman (82 page)

His voice breaking, his arms encircling her, Alexander whispered back, “What
is,
Tatia?”

She made love to him, kneeling on top of him, pressing her fragile self into him, bearing down on him, praying to him, wanting him to swallow her, to impale her, to save her and to kill her, wanting from him everything and yet for herself nothing, only to give
back
to him,
only to give his life back to him
. At the end she was crying again, all her strength gone, panting and melting and burning and crying.

“Tatiasha,” Alexander whispered, still unceasing, “stop crying. What’s a man to think when every time he makes love to his wife, she cries?”

“That he is his wife’s only
family,
” Tatiana replied, cradling his head. “That he is her
whole
life.”

“As she is his,” said Alexander. “But you don’t see him crying.” He was turned away from her. Tatiana couldn’t see his face.

After the air raid was over and they were finished, they bundled up and went out. “Too cold to be out,” Tatiana said, clinging to him.

“Why didn’t you wear a hat?”

“So you can see my hair. I know you like it.” She smiled.

Taking off his glove, he ran his hand across her head. “Put on your scarf,” he said, tying it around her. “You’ll be cold.”

“I’m fine.” She took his arm. “I like your new coat. It’s big, like a tent.” In sadness, she lowered her eyes. She shouldn’t have said the word
tent
. Too many Lazarevo memories. Some words were like that. Whole lives attached to them. Ghosts and lives and ecstasy and sorrow. The simplest words, and suddenly she couldn’t continue to speak. “It looks warm,” she added quietly.

Alexander smiled. “Next week I will have better than a tent. I’ll have a room in the main headquarters, just five doors away from Stepanov. There is heat in the building. I’ll actually be warm.”

“I’m glad,” said Tatiana. “Do you have a blanket?”

“My coat is my blanket, and I have another one, yes. I’m all right, Tania. It’s war. Now, where do you want to go?”

“To Lazarevo—with you,” she said, unable to look at him. “Barring that, let’s walk to the Summer Garden.”

He sighed heavily. “To the Summer Garden it is, then.”

They walked silently for many minutes. With her arm through his, Tatiana kept pressing her head into Alexander’s sleeve. Finally she took a deep breath. “Talk to me, Alexander,” Tatiana began. “Tell me what’s going on. We’re alone now. We have a little
privacy.
Tell me. Why did you take half the money?”

Alexander said nothing. Tatiana listened. Still nothing. She put her face on his woolen coat. Still nothing. She looked at the slushy snow at her feet, at the trolleybus that went by, at the policeman on a horse that trotted by, at the broken glass they stepped over, at the red traffic light up ahead. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

She sighed. Why was this so difficult for him? More difficult than usual. “Shura, why didn’t you take
all
of the money?”

“Because,” he let out slowly, “I left you what was mine.”

“It’s all yours. All the money is yours. What are you talking about?”

Nothing.

“Alexander! What did you take five thousand dollars for? If you’re running, you need all of it. If you’re not running, you don’t need any of it. Why did you take half?”

No reply. It was like Lazarevo. Tatiana would ask, he would answer, tight-lipped and thoughtful, and she would spend an hour trying to decipher what was between the single words. Lisiy Nos, Vyborg, Helsinki, Stockholm, Yuri Stepanov, all multisyllables with Alexander hidden in the middle of them, saying nothing.

“You know what?” Tatiana said, exasperated, detaching herself from him. “I’m tired of this game. In fact, I’m done with it. You either tell me everything without holding back, without stupid guessing games where I’m trying to figure things out and getting them wrong, you tell me everything right now, or just turn around, go and get your things, and get away from me. Go on.
The choice is yours.
” Tatiana stopped walking near the Fontanka Canal, folded her arms, and waited.

Alexander stopped walking, too, but didn’t reply.

“Are you thinking it over?” she exclaimed, pulling on his arm, trying to look deeper—behind his constricted face. Letting go of him, her voice unable to hide her anguish, she said, “I know, Alexander, that when you’re wearing these clothes, your army clothes, you wear them as armor against me, so you don’t have to tell me anything. Because I also know that when you’re naked and making love to me, you’re completely defenseless, and if only I were stronger, I could ask anything then, and you would tell me. Trouble is…” Her voice broke. “I’m not stronger. I’m just as defenseless against you. So you, afraid I’m going to see the truth and your agony, afraid I’ll see that you’re saying good-bye to me, you turn me over because you think if I don’t see it, I can’t feel it.” She started to cry. I’m not doing so well, she thought. Where is my strength?

“Please, stop,” Alexander whispered, not looking at her.

“Well, I
can
feel it, Shura,” Tatiana said, wiping her face and grabbing his hand. He pulled it from her. “You came here, angry, yes, upset, yes, because you thought you had said good-bye to me for good in Lazarevo—”

“That’s not why I was angry and upset.”

“As it turns out,” Tatiana continued, “you’re going to have to say good-bye to me in Leningrad. But you’ll have to do it to my
face,
all right?”

Tatiana saw Alexander’s tormented eyes.

She stepped up. He backed away. What a waltz they danced in the stark morning. But Tatiana’s heart was strong; she could take it. “Alexander. I know—you think I don’t know? I’ve got nothing to do but think about the things you tell me. You have wanted to escape to America all your Soviet life. It was the only thing that had kept you going the years before me, those years in the army. That someday you might return home.” She stretched out her hand to him. He took it. “Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Alexander said. “But then I met you.”

Then I met you. Stop, stop.
Oh, the summer last year, the white nights by the Neva, the Summer Garden, the northern sun, his smiling face.
Tatiana looked at his heartbreaking face. She wanted to speak. Where were all those words she once knew? Where were they now when she needed them most?

Alexander shook his head. “Tania, it’s too late for me. From the moment my father decided to abandon the life we had in America, he doomed us all. I knew it first—even then. My mother second. My father third, last, but most heartfelt. My mother could ease her pain by blaming him. I thought I could ease mine by joining the army and by being young, but who did my father have to point a finger to?”

Tatiana came up to him and held on to his coat. Alexander put his arms around her. “Tania, when I found you, I felt for that hour or two we were together—before Dimitri, before Dasha—that somehow I was going to right my life.” Alexander smiled bitterly. “I had a sense of hope and destiny that I can neither explain nor understand.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Then our Soviet life interfered. You saw, I tried to stay away. I thought, I must stay away. I must keep away. Before Luga. After Luga. Look how I tried after I came to see you at the hospital. I tried to put distance between us after St. Isaac’s, after the Germans closed the ring around Leningrad.” He paused. He shook his head. “I should have, somehow…”

“I didn’t want you to,” Tatiana said faintly.

“Oh, Tania,” Alexander said. “If only I hadn’t come to Lazarevo!”

“What are you talking about?” she gasped. “What are you saying? How can you regret—” She didn’t finish. How could he be regretting
them
? She stared at him, perplexed and ashen.

Alexander didn’t respond. “Some destiny. I’ve done nothing since the day I met you but hurt your heart and—worse—drag you into my own destruction.” He shook his head so hard his cap fell off.

Tatiana picked up his cap, brushed off the slush, and gave it back to him.

“What are you talking about? Hurt my heart? Forget all that, it’s done with. Alexander… and I came willingly.” She paused, frowning. “What destruction? I’m not doomed,” said Tatiana slowly, not understanding. “I’m lucky.”

“You’re blind.”

“Then open my eyes.”
Like you did once before.
She pulled the scarf tighter around her neck, wanting to bundle up, wanting to be near a fire, wanting to be in Lazarevo.

Tatiana watched Alexander gulp down his fear. He turned his face away and started to walk along the canal pavement. Not looking at her, Alexander said, “I took the five thousand dollars because I was going to give it to Dimitri. I’ve been trying to convince him to run by himself—”

Tatiana laughed without feeling. “Stop it.” She shook her head. “I suspected that was why you took half the money. The man who wouldn’t go half a kilometer out onto the ice with me? Is that the man you think is going to
America
by himself? Honestly.” They stopped for a red light just past Engineers Castle, last winter used as a hospital and now nearly unrecognizable after repeated bombings. “Dimitri would never go by himself,” Tatiana went on. “I already told you. He is a coward and a parasite. You are his courage and his host. What are you even thinking? As soon as Dimitri realizes you’re not going, he won’t go either, and if he remains in the Soviet Union and sees suddenly that he’s got no hope of escape, then he’s going straight to his new friend Mekhlis of the
NKVD
, and you will be instantly—”

Tatiana broke off, staring at Alexander. Something dawned on her. His face was too miserable. “You know all this. You know he’ll never go without you. You know this already.”

Alexander didn’t reply.

They began walking again, over the crippled-by-shelling Fontanka Bridge, stepping over the granite pieces. “So what are you even talking about, then?” Tatiana said, nudging him slightly and looking up into his face, full of incomprehensible fear. She could not imagine that Alexander was afraid for himself. Whom was he afraid for?

“You’re not thinking of me—” Tatiana wanted to continue, but the words got stuck in her throat.

Her eyes opened; her heart opened.

Truth flowed in, but not the truth she had known with Alexander. No. Truth illuminating terror. Truth lighting up those hideous corners of an ugly room, with the rotting wood and the broken plaster and the ratty furniture. Once Tatiana saw it, once she saw what was left—

She came around and stood in front of Alexander, stopping him from walking. Too many things were making themselves clear on this desolate Leningrad Saturday. Alexander
was
thinking of her. He was thinking
only
of her.

“Tell me…” Tatiana said faintly, “what do they do to wives of Red Army officers arrested on suspicion of high treason? Arrested for being foreign infiltrators? What do they do to wives of American men who jumped out of trains on the way to prison?’

Alexander said nothing, closing his eyes.

And suddenly—the flip side. His eyes were closed. Hers were open.

“Oh, no, Shura…” she said. “What do they do to wives of deserters?”

Alexander did not reply. He tried to go around her, but Tatiana stopped him, putting both her hands on his chest. “Don’t turn your face from me,” she said. “Tell me, what does the Commissariat of Internal Affairs do with wives of soldiers who desert, soldiers who run into the woods in marshy Finland, what do they do with the Soviet wives who remain behind?”

Alexander didn’t answer her.

“Shura!” she cried. “What is the
NKVD
going to do with me? The same thing they do to wives of MIAs? Or POWs? What did Stalin call it,
protective custody
? What is that a euphemism for?”

Alexander was silent.

“Shura!” Tatiana wasn’t letting him off the bombed-out bridge. “Is that a euphemism for being
shot
? Is it?” She was panting.

Tatiana stared at Alexander in disbelief, inhaling the cold wet air, her nose hurting from the frost, and she thought back to the river Kama—the icy water every morning on
her
naked body as it touched
him
, thought back to all Alexander had tried to hide from her in the corners of his soul where he hoped she would not peek. But in Lazarevo, Tatiana’s eyes saw only the Kama sunrise. It was only here in dreary Leningrad that all was exposed, the darkness and the light, the day and the night. “Are you telling me,” she breathed out, “that whether you go or stay,
I
am done for?”

Turning his agonized face away from her, Alexander said nothing.

Tatiana’s scarf fell off her head. Numbly she picked it up and held it in her hands. “No wonder you couldn’t tell me. But how could I not have seen?” she whispered.

“How? Because you never think of yourself,” Alexander said, grabbing his rifle, moving from foot to foot, not looking at her. “And that’s why,” he said, “I wanted you to stay in Lazarevo. I wanted you to stay as far away from here, as far away from
me
, as possible.”

Tatiana shivered, putting her hands inside the pockets of her coat. “What did you think?” she said. “If you kept me in Lazarevo, you’d keep me safe?” She shook her head. “How long do you think it would take the village
Soviet
right next to the bathhouse to receive the order by that long Lend-Lease telegraph line to have me come in for a few questions?”

“That’s why I liked Lazarevo so much,” he said, not looking at her. “The village
Soviet
didn’t have a telegraph line.”

“Is
that
why you liked Lazarevo so much?”

Alexander lowered his head to his chest, his warm eyes cooling off, his breath a vapor. His back to the stone wall, he said, “Now do you see? Now do you understand? Are your eyes opened?”

“Now I see.”
Everything
. “Now I understand.”
Everything.
My eyes are opened.

“Do you see there is only one way out before us?”

Narrowing her eyes at him, Tatiana stopped talking, backing away from Alexander, tripping over her scarf, and falling on the bombed, deserted bridge under the liquid sky. Alexander went to help her up and then let go. He could not continue to touch her, Tatiana saw that. And for a moment she could not touch him. But it was just a moment. At first it was black, but the clearing inside her own head made her breathless. Suddenly, through the darkness, there was light, light! She saw it up ahead and she flew to it, knowing what it was, and before she opened her mouth to speak, she felt such relief as if her weight—and his—had been lifted.