The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1)

The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1) Page 19

5

Tatiana jumped off the train and rolled down the hill without much ado. It was a breeze compared to what they used to do in Luga, taking a running jump and heaving themselves down a hard, pebbled, steep embankment to the river. The grassy hill was positively soft by comparison. The shoulder on which she fell hurt a little.

Finding the boys’ camp in Dohotino abandoned traumatized Tatiana, and for one day she stayed in one of the tents at the camp, not knowing what to do. She swam in the pond and ate blueberries. She had brought a few dried and toasted bread pieces in her knapsack, but she was saving them.

When she and her brother were younger, they used to race across the Luga River to see who could swim the fastest. Pasha was slightly bigger and stronger than Tatiana, but what she had that he did not was endurance. The first time they raced, he won. The second time they raced, he won. The third time he did not win. Tatiana smiled as she thought back to that, smiled at the memory of Pasha screaming in his frustration, at the memory of herself squealing in her delight.

She wasn’t going to give up on her brother yet. Tatiana figured that Pasha and his campmates had been taken into volunteer work somewhere near Luga. She decided to go ahead to Luga to look for Pasha and maybe find Zina, too, and convince her to return to Leningrad. She didn’t want Zina on her conscience, the way Pasha lay on her conscience.

But the following morning as she set out, the German planes shelled the village of Dohotino, where Tatiana was walking completely alone. She ran and hid in one of the huts, but suddenly a small incendiary bomb fell through the roof and set ablaze the wooden wall in front of her. She saw the old kerosene lamp just in time. Forgetting everything, she ran like mad, and the house exploded seconds later, incinerating the hut she had been in, three surrounding huts, and a stable nearby. She was left without her tent, or her sleeping bag, or her knapsack, or her toast.

Tatiana dropped into the bushes behind the huts, crawled on her stomach through the nettles, and hid herself under a fallen oak. The bombing continued over the village and nearby Tolmachevo for another hour. She could see the nettles burning — nettles she had just crawled through burning. The bombs fell into the forest, igniting the top branches, which fell in flames to the ground on which Tatiana lay.

I’m going to die, she thought. Alone, in this village, under an oak. No one will ever find me. Who in my family will come to look for me? I’m going to die here alone in the woods and turn to moss, and on Fifth Soviet they will open up another bottle of vodka and chase me down with pickles, and say, this is for our Tania.

After the bombing ended, she stayed under her oak for another hour or so, just in case. Her face and arms felt swollen and stung — nettles. Better that than the bombs. She was grateful for the forethought that had kept her domestic passport with a stamp from Krasenko in her shirt pocket. Without it she wouldn’t get far; she’d be detained in one of many army checkpoints, or perhaps in a local Soviet office.

Tatiana walked back to Tolmachevo and knocked at a house, where she asked for something to eat. The family let her stay with them until morning, when she left and spotted a military truck near the town Soviet. Showing her passport, she asked for a lift to Luga. The truck dropped her off at the easternmost end of the Luga defense line, closest to Novgorod.

The first day Tatiana dug for potatoes and then dug trenches across the field. Not seeing any groups of boys dressed in camp uniforms, she asked an army sergeant about camp volunteers, and he mumbled something about Novgorod. “The camp volunteers were sent there,” he said, and walked away.

Novgorod? Lake Ilmen? Is that where her Pasha was? Is that where she was meant to go? Tatiana washed in the stream and slept near a tree on the grass.

The following morning the German planes shelled the potatoes, and the trenches, and Tatiana.

The fragmentation bombs were too terrifying to watch, exploding as if they meant to kill just her. She realized she had to get out of Luga at all costs. Wondering how in the world she was going to make her way to Novgorod, Tatiana wandered through the smoke. No sooner had she thought about Lake Ilmen than three soldiers came up to her, asking her if she was injured and then ordering her to follow them to the hospital field tent. Reluctantly she followed. She was even more reluctant when she found out what they wanted her to do — which was to tend to the dying. And there were many dying. Soldiers, civilian women, village children, old people. All in the hastily put-up army tent, all dying.

Having never seen death up close before, Tatiana shut her eyes and wanted to go back home, but there was no turning around and no going back. The NKVD militia stood by the entrance flaps, ready to maintain order and make sure that a volunteer like Tatiana stayed where she was supposed to.

Her heart and teeth clenched, Tatiana learned how to clot wounds by pressing on them with sterile bandages. The wounds clotted, and then the wounded died. What Tatiana could not do was give blood transfusions, because there wasn’t any blood. What she could not do was stop the limbs from infection; what she could not do was stop the limbs from pain. The doctors refused to give morphine to the dying, under orders instead to give it to the less severely wounded, who could go back to the front line.

Tatiana saw that many people could have been saved had there been some blood, or any of that new medicine, penicillin; at the very least they could have been spared the agony of death with morphine. The pervasive helplessness she felt the first night in the field hospital nearly drowned the helplessness she felt at not finding her brother.

The next morning one of the soldiers, mortally wounded in the chest, asked her if she was a boy or a girl.

“I’m a girl,” she said sadly.

“Prove it,” he said, but before she had a chance to prove it, the soldier died.

On the radio near the officers’ tents, Tatiana heard heavily accented German voices inviting her in Russian to go to Germany with them. They threw passes for her to cross the front line, and when she didn’t go, they tried to kill her with bombs and machine-gun fire. Then the Germans were quiet until evening, when the shelling resumed. In between the attacks Tatiana washed the dying and bandaged their wounds.

The following afternoon she went a kilometer into the fields to get a potato to eat. She heard the planes before she saw them and thought, but it isn’t evening yet, instantly dropping down between the low bushes. For fifteen minutes she lay there. When the planes left, Tatiana got up and ran back to the field tent, only to discover a bonfire in its place, with charred and groaning bodies crawling out of it.

Hundreds of surviving volunteers got helmets and buckets and cups and whatever else they could find and ran down to the river and back to help put out the fire. It took three hours, well into evening, when there was more shelling, and then night. There was no tent for the wounded anymore. They lay on the ground on blankets or on the grass, moaning their last breaths into the summer air. Tatiana couldn’t help anyone. Wearing a green helmet with a red star that she had used to bring water up from the river, all Tatiana could do was sit by one woman who had lost her child in the attack and who herself was gravely wounded in the stomach. She now lay in front of Tatiana, crying for her small girl. Pulling the helmet tighter over her head, Tatiana took the woman’s hand and held it until the woman stopped crying for her small girl.

Then she got up and went near the tree line and lay down on the ground. I’m next, she thought. I can feel it. I’m next.

How was she supposed to get to Novgorod, one hundred kilometers east of here?

She washed and slept in the field with the helmet on her head, and as soon as morning broke, she looked across the river and saw the turrets and the guns of the German tanks on the other side. A corporal, who had been sleeping nearby, gathered together Tatiana and a few other volunteers and ordered them to leave immediately and return to the city of Luga.

She pulled the corporal aside and quietly asked him if there was a way she could get to Novgorod instead. The corporal pushed her hard away with his rifle and yelled, “Are you out of your mind? Novgorod is in German hands!”

The look on Tatiana’s face stopped him. “Comrade — what’s your name?” he said more reasonably.

“Tatiana Metanova.”

“Comrade Metanova. Listen to me, you are too young to be here. How old are you, fifteen?”

“Seventeen.”

“Please. Return to Luga immediately. I think there are still military trains running from Luga Station back to Leningrad. Are you from Leningrad?”

“Yes.” She did not want to cry in front of a stranger. “All of Novgorod is in German hands?” she said faintly. “What about our volunteers there?”

“Will you just shut the hell up about Novgorod!” the corporal yelled. “Did you not hear me? There are no Soviets left in Novgorod. And soon there will be no Soviets left in Luga, you included. So do yourself a favor, get out of here. Let me see your passport.”

She showed him.

Handing it back to her, he said, “You have dispensation from Kirov. Go back to Kirov. Go home.”

How did she go home without Pasha? But Tatiana couldn’t tell the corporal that.

There were nine in Tatiana’s group. She was the smallest and the youngest. It took them the rest of the day to walk through the fields and the forests, twelve kilometers back to Luga. Tatiana said that they were getting to Luga just in time for the evening bombing. Her weary companions dismissed her. She felt as if she were back with her family.

The group got to Luga Station at six-thirty and waited for the train.

The train did not come, but at seven o’clock Tatiana heard the German planes. The volunteers were huddled inside the small station that had at first seemed so safe, the building made of brick and looking as if it could withstand a little shelling and gunfire.

But during the raid one of the women became so afraid that she screamed and ran outside, where she was instantly cut down. The other eight people watched in horror, but it soon became obvious that what the Germans wanted was to take out the very station that hid them. The Nazis were intent on knocking out the railroad. The planes weren’t leaving until the station was no longer standing. Tatiana sat on the floor with her knees to her chest and pulled the green helmet over her closed eyes. She thought that the helmet would muffle the sound of death.

The train station crumbled like wet paper. Tatiana crawled from the beams and the fire, but there was nowhere for her to go. Through the smoke she could feel bodies around her. Hot and faint, she felt for them with her hands. The gunfire came from right outside the door, but when the lattice beam fell from the ceiling, all sounds faded away, all faded away, and there was no more fear. Only regret was left. Regret for Alexander.