The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1)

The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1) Page 11

11

“My days are too long,” Tatiana said to him one Friday evening, smiling the beaten smile of someone who had worked solidly for twelve hours. “I made you a whole tank today, Alexander! With a red star and a number thirty-six. Do you know how to operate a tank?”

“Better than that,” he replied. “I know how to command it.”

“What’s the difference?”

“I do nothing except shout orders and get killed.”

Tatiana didn’t smile back. “How is that better?” she muttered. “I want to get transferred to the breadmaking facility. Instead of tanks, some lucky people are making bread.”

“The more the better,” said Alexander.

“Tanks?”

“Bread.”

“They promised all of us a bonus — can you believe it? — if we made tanks over our quota. A bonus!” Tatiana chuckled. “The economics of profit during war: strange that we should want to work harder for a couple of extra rubles — goes against everything they’ve been teaching us from birth — but there it is.”

“There it is, indeed, Tania,” said Alexander. “But don’t worry, they won’t stop reconstructing you until you won’t want to work harder even for a couple of extra rubles.”

“Stop being subversive.” She smiled. “No wonder you’re not safe. In any case, it nearly killed Zina. She said she was ready to join the volunteers, that it couldn’t be worse than this pressure.”

Alexander was thoughtful. The pavement was wide, but they walked close together, their arms bumping. “Zina is right,” he said finally. “Don’t make any mistakes. You’ve heard the story of Karl Ots, haven’t you?”

“Who?”

“He used to be the Kirov plant director when it was still called Putilov Works. Karl Martovich Ots. After Kirov’s assassination in 1934, Ots tried to maintain order, to protect his workers from the threat of . . . retaliation, for lack of a better word.”

Tatiana had heard something about Sergei Kirov from her father and grandfather. “Arrest? Death?” she said.

Alexander nodded. “Yes and yes. Anyway, one day when a T-28 tank was being inspected, a bolt was found to be missing. The tank had been about to be delivered to the army. There was of course a scandal and a frenzied search for the ‘enemy saboteurs’ to reveal themselves.” Alexander took a breath. Tatiana waited.

“Now, Ots knew,” he continued as they stopped at a junction, “that it had just been a stupid mistake, an oversight of the mechanic who had forgotten to screw in the bolt — no more, no less. Ots knew, so he refused to permit a witch hunt.”

“Let me guess,” Tatiana said. “He failed.”

“It was like walking into a tornado and saying, but it’s just wind.”

“A tornado?” Tatiana asked quizzically.

Alexander went on. “Hundreds more people vanished from the factory.”

Tatiana bowed her head. “Ots?”

“Hmm. With him vanished his able successor, the heads of the bookkeeping department, the tank-production units, the personnel department, the machine-tool shop, not to mention former Putilov plant workers — those who had moved on and were employed elsewhere in high positions in the government, such as the Novosibirsk Party Secretary, the Secretary of the Neva Party region — oh, and let’s not forget the Mayor of Leningrad. He disappeared, too.”

The light had turned green, then red, then green again. When it was red, the two of them crossed the street, not touching arms anymore. Tatiana was deep in thought. Finally she spoke. “So what you’re saying is, be careful with the bolts?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Zina is right. We don’t need that kind of pressure. She is exhausted. All she wants is to go to Minsk and join her sister.” Minsk was the capital of Byelorussia.

Alexander rubbed his eyes and adjusted his cap. “Tell her,” he said tensely, “to forget Minsk. Concentrate on the tanks. How many are you supposed to make in a month?”

“One hundred and eighty. We’re falling short.”

“They’re asking too much of you.”

“Wait, wait.” Tatiana put her hand on his arm and then, surprised at herself, took it away. “Why forget Minsk?”

“Minsk fell to the Germans thirteen days ago,” Alexander said with grave finality.

“What?”

“Yes.”

“Thirteen days ago? Oh, no, no.” She shook her head. “No, Alexander, it can’t be. Minsk is only a few kilometers south of . . .” Tatiana couldn’t say it.

“Not a few, Tania, many,” he said by way of comforting her. “Hundreds of kilometers.”

“No, Alexander,” said Tatiana, feeling her legs giving out. “Not that many. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tania, it’s classified army information! I tell you as much as I can, and then no more. I keep hoping you will hear something on the radio that sounds like the truth. When I know you haven’t heard, I tell you some more. Minsk fell after only six days of war. Even Comrade Stalin was surprised.”

“Why didn’t he tell us when he spoke to us last week?”

“He called you his brothers and sisters, didn’t he? He wanted you to rise up with anger and fight. What good would it do to tell you how deep in the Soviet Union the Germans are?”

“How deep are they?”

When Alexander didn’t answer, she asked in a despondent voice, barely able to get the words out, “What about our Pasha?”

“Tania!” he said loudly. “I don’t understand what you want me to do. I have been coming here and telling you from day one to get him out of Tolmachevo!”

Tatiana turned her face away from him and struggled not to cry. She didn’t want him to see that.

“They’re not in Luga yet,” said Alexander, quieter. “They haven’t reached Tolmachevo. Try not to worry. But I’ll just tell you that on the first day of war, we lost 1,200 planes.”

“I didn’t know we had 1,200 planes.”

“About that many.”

“So what are we going to do?”

“We?” said Alexander, glancing at her and pausing. “I told you, Tania. Leave Leningrad.”

“And I told you my family isn’t going without Pasha.”

Alexander said nothing. They continued to walk.

“Are you tired?” he asked quietly. “You want to go home?”

I am tired. I don’t want to go home.

When Tatiana didn’t reply, Alexander said, “Want to walk to Palace Bridge? I think they still sell ice cream in a shop near the river.”

After having ice cream, Alexander and Tatiana were walking along the Neva embankment heading west into the sunset and across from the green-and-white splendor of the Winter Palace when on the opposite side of the street Tatiana spotted a man who made her stop suddenly.

A tall, thin, middle-aged man with a long, gray Jovian beard stood outside the Hermitage Museum with an expression of absolute shattered regret.

Tatiana instantly reacted to his face. What could make a man look this way? He was standing next to the back of a military truck, watching young men carry wooden crates down the ramp from the Winter Palace. It was these crates the man looked at with such profound heartbreak, as if they were his vanishing first love.

“Who is that man?” she asked, tremendously affected by his expression.

“The curator of the Hermitage.”

“Why is he looking at the crates that way?”

Alexander said, “They are his life’s sole passion. He doesn’t know if he is ever going to see them again.”

Tatiana stared at the man. She almost wanted to go and comfort him. “He’s got to have more faith, don’t you think?”

“I agree, Tania.” Alexander smiled. “He’s got to have a little more faith. After the war is over, he will see his crates again.”

“The way he is looking at them, after the war is over he is going to bring them back single-handedly,” declared Tatiana. Four gray armored trucks were parked outside the museum. “What do you think is going on?”

Alexander said nothing but he stopped her from walking further, motioning her to watch. In a moment four more men appeared out of the wide green doors carrying wooden crates down the ramp. The crates had holes drilled in them.

“Paintings?”

He nodded.

“Four truckloads of paintings?”

“That’s nothing, I’m sure it’s a small percentage of their load.”

“Alexander, why are they getting the paintings out of the Hermitage?”

“Because there’s a war on.”

“So they’re getting the artwork out?” Tatiana said indignantly.

“Yes.”

“If they’re so worried Hitler is going to come to Leningrad, why don’t they get the people out?”

Alexander smiled at her, and she nearly forgot her question. “Tania, who will be left to fight the Nazis if the people leave? Paintings can’t fight for Leningrad.”

“Wait, we are not trained in fighting.”

“No, but we are. That’s why I’m here. Our garrison is thousands of soldiers strong. We will barricade the city and fight. First we will send the frontovik—”

“You mean Dimitri?”

“Yes, him. Into the streets with a gun. When he is dead, we will send me, with a tank, like the one you’ve been making for me. When I’m dead, all the barricades down, all the weapons and tanks gone, they will send you with a rock.”

“And when I’m dead?” Tatiana asked.

“You’re the last line of defense. When you’re dead, Hitler will march through Leningrad the way he marched through Paris. Do you remember that?”

“That’s not fair. The French didn’t fight,” Tatiana said, wanting to be anywhere right now but standing in front of men loading artwork from the Hermitage onto armored trucks.

“They didn’t fight, Tania, but you will fight. For every street and for every building. And when you lose—”

“The art will be saved.”

“Yes! The art will be saved,” Alexander said emotionally. “And another artist will paint a glorious picture, immortalizing you, with a club in your raised hand, swinging to hit the German tank as it’s about to crush you, all against the backdrop of the statue of Peter the Great atop his bronze horse. And that picture will hang in the Hermitage, and at the start of the next war the curator will once again stand on the street, crying over his vanishing crates.”

Tatiana watched the men disappear behind the green doors and descend the ramp a few minutes later with more crates. “You make it sound so romantic,” she said to him. “You make dying for Leningrad sound almost worthwhile.”

“Isn’t it worthwhile?”

“Maybe it’s not so bad to be a Nazi.” Tatiana raised her right arm outward and upward. “We can salute the Führer. We salute Comrade Stalin now anyway.” She bent her arm in a salute. “We won’t be free, we’ll all be slaves. But so what? We’ll have food. We’ll have our life. A free life is better, but any life is better than no life, right?”

When Alexander, staring at her, did not reply, Tatiana continued, “We won’t be able to go to other countries. But we can’t now. Who wants to go to the dissolute Western free world slums anyway, where strangers kill each other for fifty — what is it? — cents? Isn’t that what they teach us in Soviet schools?” Tatiana peered into Alexander’s eyes. “You know,” she said, “maybe I would rather die in front of the Bronze Horseman with a rock in my hand and have someone else live the free life that I can’t even fathom.”

“Yes,” Alexander said hoarsely, “you would,” and in a gesture both desperate and tender, he placed his palm on Tatiana’s bare skin, right below her throat. His palm was so large it covered her from her clavicle to the top of her breast. Her heart nearly flew out of her chest into his hand.

Tatiana looked up at him helplessly and watched him bend to her, but a uniformed guard stepped up to the curb and shouted across the street, “Move it, you two! Move it! What are you standing gawking for? What’s there to gawk at? That’s enough! You’ve seen it all. Move on!”

Alexander took his hand away from Tatiana, turned around, and glared at the guard, who backed off, muttering that Red Army officers were as bound by the law as anyone else.

When they said good-bye to each other a few minutes later, they did not speak about what had happened, but neither could Tatiana look up at Alexander, which was just as well, because Alexander didn’t look at Tatiana.

At home was a dinner of cold potatoes and cold fried onions. Tatiana ate quickly and then went up to the roof to sit and look at the sky for enemy planes, but the planes could have come and razed the whole city, because all Tatiana could see was Alexander’s impassioned eyes, all Tatiana could feel was Alexander’s impassioned hand on her rapidly beating heart.

Somewhere in those weeks Tatiana’s innocence was lost. The innocence of honesty was gone forever, for she knew she would have to live in deceit, every day in verse and prose, in close quarters, in the same bed, every night when her foot touched Dasha’s, she would live in deceit. Because she felt for him.

But what Tatiana felt for Alexander was true.

What Tatiana felt for Alexander was impervious to the drumbeat of conscience.

Oh, to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn and the dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, to the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won’t you, and I’ll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does.

But my innocence is forever gone.