The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1)

The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1) Page 17

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Tatiana ran to work the next morning, carrying hope with her. She had learned to ignore the ignoble, ever-present, blue-uniformed NKVD militia troops standing by the front doors of Kirov with their obscene rifles, walking through the factory floors, almost marching, carrying their weapons close to their hips. A few of them would look at her as she passed by, and it was the only time in her life when she wished she were smaller than she already was and less noticeable. With their grave, unyielding faces, they stared at Tatiana, hardly blinking, while she blinked frequently as she hurried past them, pushing through the doors, to the relative anonymity of the assembly line.

So that the workers didn’t get bored and therefore negligent on any one production facet of the KV-1, they were moved around every two hours. Tatiana went from working the pulley that lifted the treadless tank and placed it on tread, to painting the red star on a finished tank ready to be flatbedded and put into production. She spray-painted not only the red star but the white words for stalin! on the hull that stood out markedly against the glossy green paint.

Ilya, the skinny boy with the crew cut, had not left Tatiana alone after Alexander stopped coming at night. He would ask her all sorts of questions that she was too polite not to answer, but in the end even Tatiana gave way to slight rudeness. I have to concentrate on my work, she would tell him, wondering how in the world he always managed to get a position next to her, no matter how many times she got transferred during the day to different tank-building responsibilities. In the canteen Ilya would get his plate and sit next to her and Zina, who could not stand him and frequently told him so.

But today Tatiana felt sorrier for him. “He is just lonely,” she said, biting into her meat cutlet, lapping up the gravy, her mouth full. “He doesn’t seem to have anybody. Stay, Ilya.” So Ilya stayed.

Tatiana could afford to be generous. She couldn’t wait for her day to end. After going to see Alexander yesterday, she was certain he would come after work to see her at Kirov. She wore her lightest skirt and her lightest, softest blouse, and even had a bath in the morning, having just taken one the night before.

That evening she ran out of the Kirov doors, her golden hair shining and down, her face scrubbed and pink, and turned her smiling head, breathless for Alexander.

He wasn’t there.

It was after eight, and she sat on the bench until after nine with her hands on her lap. Then she got up and walked home.

There was no news of Pasha, and Mama and Papa were miserable. They kept crying intermittently. Dasha was not home. Deda and Babushka were slowly packing their things. Tatiana went out onto the roof and sat watching the airships float like white whales across the northern sky, listening to Anton and Kirill reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, evoking their brother Volodya, lost in Tolmachevo. Tatiana listened with half an ear, thinking of her brother Pasha, lost in Tolmachevo.

Alexander didn’t come to see her. He had no news. Or the news he had was bad and he couldn’t face her. But Tatiana knew the truth: he didn’t come to see her because he was done. Done with her, with her childish ways, done with that part of his life. They had been friends walking in the Summer Garden, but he was a man, and now he was done.

He was right, of course, not to come. And she would not cry.

But to face Kirov day after day without him and without Pasha, too, to face evening after evening without him and without Pasha, to face war, to face herself without Alexander and without Pasha filled Tatiana with such a pervasive emptiness that she nearly groaned out loud, right in front of the laughing Anton and Kirill.

She needed just one thing now — to lay her eyes on the boy who had breathed the same air as her for seventeen years, in the same school, in the same class, in the same room, in the same womb. She wanted her friend and her twin back.

Tatiana thought she could feel Pasha while sitting out on the roof under the darkening sky; the white nights had ended on July 16. Her brother was not harmed. He was waiting for Tatiana to come for him, and she would not fail him. She wasn’t going to be like the rest of her family, sitting around, smoking, fretting. Doing nothing. Tatiana knew: five minutes with Pasha’s light heart and she would forget much of the last month.

She would forget Alexander. And she needed to do something to forget Alexander.

After everyone had gone to bed, Tatiana went downstairs, got a pair of kitchen scissors, and began to mercilessly lop off her blonde hair, watching it fall in long strands into the communal sink. Afterward the small, grimy mirror showed only a vague reflection. All she saw was her sulky lips and her sad, hollow eyes that glowed greener without the hair to frame her face. The freckles on her nose and under her eyes stood out even more prominently. Did she look like a boy? All the better. Did she look younger? More frail? What would Alexander think of all her hair gone? Who cared? She knew what he would think. Shura, Shura, Shura.

Just as dawn was breaking, Tatiana put on the only pair of beige trousers she could find, packed some baking soda and peroxide for her teeth, her toothbrush — she never took trips without her toothbrush — retrieved Pasha’s sleeping bag from his old days at camp, left a one-sentence note for her family, and set out for Kirov on foot.

During her last morning at work Tatiana was assigned to the diesel engines. She screwed the glow plugs into the combustion chambers. The plugs warmed up the compressed air in the cylinders before ignition could take place. She was very good at that part of the assembly, having performed it many times before, so she did her job mindlessly, while all morning struggling with her nerve.

At lunchtime she went to see Krasenko, bringing a willing Zina along, and told him they both wanted to join the People’s Volunteer Army. Zina had talked about joining the volunteers for over a week.

Krasenko told her she was too young.

She persisted.

“Why are you doing this, Tania?” Krasenko asked with sympathy in his voice. “Luga is not for a girl like you.”

She told him she knew how hopeless things were there. The bulletin boards at work shouted, “At Luga — to the trenches!” She said she knew that boys and girls of fourteen and fifteen were working in the fields digging trenches. She and Zina wanted to do all they could to help the Red Army soldiers. Zina nodded mutely. Tatiana knew she needed special dispensation from Krasenko. “Please, Sergei Andreevich,” she said.

“No,” he said.

Tatiana persisted. She told Krasenko she would take leave that was due to her, starting tomorrow, and get down to Luga one way or another if she had to. She was leaving, with or without his help. Tatiana was not afraid of Krasenko. She knew he liked her. “Sergei Andreevich, you can’t keep me here. How would it look if you were keeping eager volunteers from helping their motherland, helping the Red Army?”

Zina stood nodding by Tatiana’s side.

Krasenko sighed heavily and wrote them both passes and permissions to leave Kirov and stamped their domestic passports. As they were about to leave, he got up and wished her luck. Tatiana wanted to tell him she was going to go and find her brother, but she didn’t want him to talk her out of it, so she said nothing except thank you.

The girls went to a dark, gymnasium-size room, where after a physical exam they were outfitted with pickaxes and shovels that Tatiana found much too heavy for her, and were then sent to Warsaw Station on the bus to catch the special military truck transportation destined for Luga.

Tatiana wondered if they were going to be armored trucks like the ones that transported paintings from the Hermitage or like the ones that Alexander said he sometimes drove to the south of Leningrad.

They weren’t. They were just regular trucks covered with khaki tarpaulin, the kind Tatiana saw constantly around Leningrad.

Tatiana and Zina climbed aboard. Forty more people piled in. Tatiana observed the soldiers loading crates onto the truck. They would have to sit on them. “What’s in them?” she asked one of the soldiers.

“Grenades,” he replied, grinning.

Tatiana stood.

The trucks left Warsaw Station in a convoy of seven and started down the highway, bound south for Luga.

In Gatchina everyone was told to get off and take a military train the rest of the way.

“Zina,” Tatiana said to her friend, “it’s good we’re taking the train. That way we can get off in Tolmachevo, all right?”

“What are you, crazy?” said Zina. “We’re all going to Luga.”

“I know. You and I will get off, and then we’ll get back on another train and go to Luga.”

“No.”

“Zina, yes. Please. I have to get off in Tolmachevo. I have to find my brother.”

Zina stared at Tatiana with incredulity. “Tania! When you told me Minsk had fallen, did I say to you, come with me because I have to find my sister?” she said, her small, dark eyes blinking, her mouth tight.

“No, Zina, but I don’t think Tolmachevo has fallen to the Germans yet. I still have hope.”

“I’m not getting off,” Zina said. “I’m going like everybody else to Luga, and I’m going to help our soldiers, like everybody else. I don’t want to get shot by the NKVD as a deserter.”

“Zina!” Tatiana exclaimed. “How can you be a deserter? You’re a volunteer. Please come with me.”

“I’m not getting off, and that’s it,” Zina said, turning her head away from Tatiana.

“Fine,” said Tatiana. “But I’m getting off.”