The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1)

The Bronze Horseman (The Bronze Horseman #1) Page 28

Part Two

WINTER’S FIERCE EMBRACE

BESET AND BESIEGED

WHAT did it cost the soul to lie? At every step, with every breath, with every Soviet Information Bureau report, with every casualty list and every monthly ration card?

From the moment Tatiana woke up until she fell into a bleary sleep, she lied.

She wished Alexander would stop coming around. Lies.

She wished he would end it with Dasha. Alas. More lies.

No more trips to St. Isaac’s. That was good news. Lies.

No more tram rides, no more canals, no more Summer Garden, no more Luga, no more lips or eyes or palpitating breath. Good. Good. Good. More lies.

He was cold. He had an uncanny ability to act as if there were nothing behind his smiling face, or his steady hands, or his burned-down cigarette. Not a twitch showed on his face for Tatiana. That was good. Lies.

Curfew was imposed on Leningrad at the beginning of September. Rations were reduced again. Alexander stopped coming every day. That was good. More lies.

When Alexander came, he was extremely affectionate with Dasha, in front of Tatiana and in front of Dimitri. That was good. Lies.

Tatiana put on her own brave face and turned it away and smiled at Dimitri and clenched her heart in a tight fist. She could do it, too. More lies.

Pouring tea. Such a simple matter, yet fraught with deceit. Pouring tea, for someone else before him. Her hands trembled with the effort.

Tatiana wished she could get out from the spell that was Leningrad at the beginning of September, get out from the circle of misery and love that besieged her.

She loved Alexander. Ah, finally. Something true to hold on to.

After news of Pasha, Papa worked sporadically, being frequently too intoxicated. His being home made it difficult for Tatiana to cook, to clean, to be in the rooms, to read. More lies. That’s not what made it difficult. It’s what made it unpleasant. Sitting on the roof was the only peace left to Tatiana, and even then peace was relative. There was no peace inside her.

While she was on the roof, she closed her eyes and imagined walking, without a cast, without a limp, with Alexander. They walked down Nevsky, to Palace Square, down the embankment, all around the Field of Mars. They meandered across the Fontanka Bridge, through the Summer Garden, and back out onto the embankment, and then to Smolny and then past Tauride Park, to Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin, past their bench, and on to Suvorovsky, and home. And as she walked with him, it felt as if she were walking into the rest of her life.

In her mind they had walked along the streets of their summer while she sat on the roof and heard the echo of gunfire and explosions. It was a small solace to think the gunfire wasn’t as close as it had been at Luga. Alexander wasn’t as close as he had been at Luga either.

Alexander’s own visits became as truncated as Tatiana’s rations. He was rationing himself the way the Leningrad Council was rationing food. Tatiana missed him, wishing for a second, a moment alone with him again, just to remind herself that the summer of 1941 had not been an illusion, that there had indeed been a time when she had walked along a canal wall, holding his rifle, while he was looking at her and laughing.

There was little laughing nowadays.

“The Germans aren’t here yet, right, Alexander?” asked Dasha over tea — the damned tea. “When they come, will we repel von Leeb?”

“Yes,” Alexander replied. Tatiana knew. More lies.

Tatiana would grimly watch Dasha nuzzling Alexander. She would avert her eyes and say to Dimitri, “Hey, want to hear a joke?”

“What, Tania? No, not really. Sorry, I’m a little preoccupied.”

“That’s fine,” she would say, watching Alexander smile at Dasha. Lies, lies, and lies.

All that Alexander was doing wasn’t enough. Dimitri wasn’t leaving Tatiana alone.

Meanwhile, Tatiana hadn’t heard from Marina about coming to live with them, and in the hospital Vera, along with the other nurses, was anxious about the war. Tatiana felt it herself — war was no longer something on the Luga River, something that had swallowed Pasha, something that was fought by the Ukrainians far away in their smoldering villages or by the British in their distant and proper London. It was coming here.

Well, something better come here, Tatiana thought, because I can’t imagine continuing this way.

The city seemed to hold its collective breath. Tatiana certainly held hers.

For four nights in a row Tatiana cooked fried cabbage for dinner, with less and less oil each day.

“What the hell are you cooking for us, Tania?” asked Mama.

“You call this cooking?” Papa remarked.

“I can’t even dip my bread in the oil. Where is the oil?”

“Couldn’t find any,” said Tatiana.

The radio offered only the most depressing news. Tatiana thought the announcers must deliberately wait until Soviet performance at the front was particularly awful and then begin broadcasting. After Mga fell at the end of August, Tatiana had heard that Dubrovka was under attack — her mother’s mother, Babushka Maya, lived in Dubrovka, a rural town just across the river, right outside city limits.

And then Dubrovka fell on September 6.

Suddenly Tatiana got unexpectedly good news, and good news was becoming as hard to come by as oil. Babushka Maya was coming to live with them on Fifth Soviet! Sadly, Mikhail, Mama’s stepfather, had died of TB a few days earlier, and when the Germans burned Dubrovka, Babushka Maya escaped to the city.

When Babushka came, she took one room, and Mama and Papa moved back in with Dasha and Tatiana. No more please, Tania, go away.

Babushka Maya had lived all her long life in Leningrad and said that it had never even occurred to her to evacuate. “My life, my death, all right here,” she told Tatiana as she unpacked.

She had married her first husband back at the turn of the century and had Tatiana’s mother. After her husband disappeared in the war of 1905, she never remarried, though she lived with poor tubercular Uncle Mikhail for thirty years. Tatiana had once asked Babushka why she never married Uncle Mikhail, and Babushka had replied, “What if my Fedor comes back, Tanechka? I’d be in quite a pickle then.” Babushka painted and studied art; her paintings had hung in galleries before the revolution, but after 1917 she made her living by illustrating propaganda materials for the Bolsheviks. Everywhere in her house in Dubrovka, Tatiana would find sketchbooks filled with pictures of chairs and food and flowers.

After she arrived, Babushka told Tatiana that she didn’t have time to get anything out of her house before it burned. “Don’t worry, Tanechka. I’ll draw you a nice new picture of a chair.”

Tatiana said, “Maybe you can draw me a nice apple pie instead? It’s the season for them.”

The following evening, on September 7, Marina finally arrived — just before dinner. Marina’s father had died in the fighting around Izhorsk, died as an untrained assistant gunner in a tank he had made himself. Uncle Boris was beloved by the Metanovs, and his death would have been a terrible blow, had the family not been reeling from their own nightmare of losing Pasha.

Marina’s mother remained hospitalized; unrelated to the war, she was slowly dying of renal failure. Tatiana’s na?veté surprised even herself. How could anything that happened nowadays be unrelated to the war? First Uncle Misha, now Aunt Rita. There was something universally unfair about that — for people to be dying of causes unrelated to the trenches Alexander had been digging.

Papa looked at Marina’s suitcase. Mama looked at Marina’s suitcase. Dasha looked at Marina’s suitcase. Tatiana said, “Marinka, let me help you unpack.”

Papa asked if she was staying for a while, and Tatiana said, “I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Papa, her father is dead and your sister is dying. She can stay with us for a while, no?”

“Tania,” Marina said, “have you not told Uncle Georg that you invited me? Don’t worry, I brought my ration card, Uncle Georg.”

Papa glared at Tatiana. Mama glared at Tatiana. Dasha glared at Tatiana.

Tatiana said, “Let’s unpack you, Marina.”

That night there was a small problem with dinner. The girls had left the food on the stove for a moment, and when they came back to the kitchen, they found that the fried potatoes, onions, and one small fresh tomato had disappeared. The frying pan had been left empty and dirty. A few of the potatoes had stuck to the bottom, and there they remained, encrusted and covered with a bit of oil. Dasha and Tatiana looked around the kitchen incredulously and vacuously, even coming back inside, thinking maybe they had already brought the dinner in and simply forgotten.

The potatoes were gone.

Dasha, because that was her way, dragged Tatiana with her, knocking on every door of the apartment, asking about the potatoes. Zhanna Sarkova opened the door, looking unkempt and haggard, almost as if she were related to crazy Slavin.

“Is everything all right?” Tatiana asked.

“Fine!” barked Zhanna. “Potatoes — my husband’s disappeared! You haven’t seen him in Grechesky, have you?”

Tatiana shook her head.

“I thought maybe he was wounded somewhere.”

“Wounded where?” Tatiana gently wanted to know.

“How should I know? And no, I haven’t seen your stupid potatoes.” She slammed the door.

Slavin was lying on the floor, muttering. His small room reeked of everything but fried potatoes.

“How is he going to feed himself?” asked Tatiana as they walked by.

“That’s not our problem,” said Dasha.

The Iglenkos were not even home. After the loss of Volodya alongside Pasha, Petr Iglenko spent all his days and nights at the factory that melted down old scrap metal for ammunition. They had just got more bad news. Petka, their eldest son, had been killed in Pulkovo. Only their two youngest, Anton and Kirill, remained.

“Poor Nina,” said Tatiana as they headed back down the corridor to their rooms.

“Poor Nina!” exclaimed Dasha. “What the hell are you talking about, Tania? She still has two sons. Lucky Nina.”

When they returned to the door that led to their own hallway, Dasha said, “They’re all lying.”

“They’re all telling the truth,” said Tatiana. “Fried potatoes with onions are not easy to hide.”

The Metanovs ate bread with butter for dinner that night and complained the whole time. Papa yelled at the girls for losing his dinner. Tatiana kept quiet, heeding Alexander’s warning that she should be careful around people who were likely to hit her.

But after dinner the family wasn’t taking any more chances. Mama and Babushka brought the canned goods, the cereals and the grains, soap and salt and vodka into the rooms, stacking it all in the corners and in the hallway behind the sofa. Mama said, “How fortunate we are that we have the extra door partitioning our corridor from the rest of the scavengers. We’d never keep our food otherwise, I see that now.”

Later that night, when Alexander came by and heard about the potatoes, he told the Metanovs to keep the rear entrance to the kitchen locked.

Dasha introduced Alexander to Marina. They shook hands and both stared at each other for longer than was appropriate. Marina, embarrassed, stepped away, averting her gaze. Alexander smiled, putting his arm around Dasha. “Dasha,” he said, “so this is your cousin Marina.” Tatiana wanted to shake her head at him, while a perplexed Marina remained speechless.

Later on in the kitchen, Marina said to Tatiana, “Tania, why did Dasha’s Alexander look at me as if he knew me?”

“I have no idea.”

“He is adorable.”

“You think so?” said Dasha, who was heading past the girls to the bathroom, leaving Alexander in the corridor. “Well, keep your hands off him,” she added cheerfully. “He’s mine.”

“Don’t you think?” Marina whispered to Tatiana.

“He’s all right,” said Tatiana. “Help me wash this frying pan, will you?”

Adorable Alexander stood in the doorway, smoking and grinning at Tatiana.

Papa continued to grumble about Marina’s arrival. Her student rations would bring little to the family, and another mouth to feed would only drain their resources further. “She just came here to eat my father’s cans of ham,” he said to Mama, gazing at the cans. Tatiana couldn’t tell if Papa wanted to eat the cans or to kiss them. “She is your niece, Papa,” Tatiana whispered, so Marina wouldn’t overhear. “She is your only sister’s only daughter.”