7
Friday at work Tatiana noticed that hardly anyone worthwhile was left at Kirov. Only the very young, like her, and the very old. The few men that remained were all over sixty or in management positions, or both.
In the first five days of war there had been suspiciously little news from the front. The radio announcers lauded wide-scale Soviet victories, while saying nothing at all of the German military power, nothing at all of the German position in the Soviet Union, nothing at all of danger to Leningrad or of evacuation. The radio was on all day as Tatiana filled her flamethrowers with thick petroleum and nitrocellulose, while through the open double doors the metal machine poured projectiles of different sizes onto the conveyor belt.
She heard clink, clink, clink from the metal rounds like the passing of seconds, and there were many seconds in her long day, and all she heard during them was clink, clink, clink.
And all Tatiana thought about was seven o’clock.
During lunch she heard on the radio that rationing might start next week. Also during lunch Krasenko told his waning staff that probably by Monday they were going to start military exercises, and that the working day was going to be extended until eight in the evening.
Before she left, Tatiana scrubbed her hands for ten minutes to get the petroleum smell out and failed. As she hurried out of the factory doors with Zina and made her way down the Kirov wall, she wanted to tell someone of her ambivalence and distress.
But then she saw Alexander’s officer’s cap tilted to the side, and she saw him take the cap off his head and hold it in his hands as he waited for her to walk up to him, and Tatiana forgot everything. She had to keep herself from breaking into a run. They crossed the street and made their way to Ulitsa Govorova.
“Let’s walk a bit.” Tatiana couldn’t believe it was she who uttered those words after her day. But she didn’t feel her day. She knew she wasn’t going to have a minute with him on the weekend.
“What’s a bit?”
She took a deep breath. “Let’s walk all the way.”
Slowly they strolled through the nearly deserted streets, anonymous to everyone. The railroad tracks and farm fields lay to their right, the industrial buildings of the Kirov borough rose to their left. There were no air-raid sirens, no planes flying overhead, just the pale sun shining. There were no other people.
“Alexander, why isn’t Dima an officer like you?”
Alexander paused for a few moments. “He wanted to be an officer. We entered Officer Candidate School together.”
Tatiana didn’t know that. She told him Dimitri had not said a word about it.
“He wouldn’t. We went in together, thinking we were going to stay together, but unfortunately Dima didn’t make it.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. He couldn’t stay underwater long enough without panicking, couldn’t hold his breath, couldn’t be quiet enough under false fire, didn’t keep his cool, lost his nerve, his time in the five-mile wasn’t good enough. Couldn’t do fifty push-ups in a row. He just didn’t make it. On many levels. He is a good soldier. A pretty good soldier,” Alexander amended. “But he wasn’t cut out to be an officer.”
“Not like you,” said Tatiana, taking an excited breath on the you.
With amusement Alexander glanced at her and shook his head. “I,” he said, “am too angry a fighter.”
The tram stopped right in front of them. Reluctantly they climbed aboard.
“How does Dimitri feel about it all?”
Tatiana had stopped trying to avoid Alexander as the tram bumped them together. She lived for that bumping now. Every time the tram moved, she moved with it in Alexander’s direction, barely holding on to the handle. And he stood there like an inverted pyramid, catching her waist with his arm. Tonight, as he caught her, his hand remained around her. He motioned her to continue talking. But she couldn’t until he took his hand away.
He took his hand away. “About what? Not becoming an officer?”
“No. About you.”
“About how you’d think.”
The tram stopped. To steady her, Alexander took hold of Tatiana’s upper arm. Goose bumps broke out all over her body. Letting her go, he continued. “I think Dimitri often feels that things come too easily to me.”
“What things?” Tatiana asked bravely.
“Don’t know. Things in general. The army, the shooting range . . .” He stopped.
She looked at him, waiting. What was he going to say next? What else came too easily to Alexander?
“Nothing comes easily to you, Alexander,” Tatiana said at last. “You’ve had the hardest life.”
“And it has barely begun,” he said. But when he spoke again, Tatiana detected a forced mildness. “Listen, Dimitri and I have a long history together. If I know Dima, in due course he will tell you things about me that you will not want to believe. I’m surprised he hasn’t already.”
“Things that are true or things that are complete lies?”
“I cannot answer that,” Alexander replied. “Some will be true, some will be complete lies. Dimitri’s got a gift, if you will, for mixing lies with just enough of the truth to drive you crazy.”
“Some gift,” she said. “So how will I know?”
“You won’t. It will all sound true.” Alexander glanced at her. “If you want to know the truth, ask me and I will tell you.”
“If I ask, you’ll tell me the truth about anything?” She looked up at him.
“Yes.”
Tatiana held her breath because for a moment her heart had stopped beating. It stopped as she bit her lip to keep the question off her tongue. Do you love me? she wanted to ask him. She wanted to slap herself into a terror that would paralyze her and make even thinking that impossible, but she could not. He wanted a question? That was the question yelling through her closed teeth and her silence and her breathless heart.
“You have a question for me, Tania?” he asked mildly.
“No,” she replied, looking down at the metal handle and at the gray head of the woman in front of her.
“Here we are,” Alexander said, as they got off at Obvodnoy Canal. They didn’t take their second tram as usual. They ambled the five kilometers back home.
They passed an iron gate with a door behind it. The gate and the door did not look like an entryway to a building, but as if they had been built and now led to nowhere. Pointing, Alexander said, “Those gates, those doors, they can all be listening, now, yesterday, tomorrow, to you at Kirov, lying with a glass to the wall on the other side of your bed—”
“I know you’re kidding. My grandparents are on the other side of my bed. You’re not saying they’re informers?”
“I’m not saying that.” He paused. “What I’m saying is . . . no one at all can be trusted. And no one is safe.”
“No one?” Tatiana asked teasingly, looking at him. “Not even you?”
“Especially not me.”
“Can’t be trusted or is not safe?” She smiled.
He smiled back. “Is not safe.”
“But you’re an officer in the Red Army!”
“Yes? Tell that to the officers in the Red Army in 1937 and 1938. They were all shot. Which is why now no one wants to take responsibility for this war.”
Silently she sidled up to him and finally asked, “Am I safe?”
“Tatiana,” he whispered, leaning close to her ear, “we are followed, always, everywhere. The day might come when someone will jump out at you from a secret door, and then you will be presented to a man behind a desk, and he will want to know what Alexander Belov spoke to you about on your walks home.”
“You have told me way too much, Alexander Belov,” Tatiana declared, leaning away from him. “Why did you do that if you thought I was going to be interrogated about you?”
“I needed to trust someone.”
“Why didn’t you tell Dasha and risk her life?”
Alexander paused before he replied. “Because I needed to trust you.”
“You can trust me,” Tatiana said cheerfully, shoving him lightly with her body. “But do me a favor, don’t tell me anything else, all right?”
“It’s too late,” he said, shoving her lightly back.
“Are you saying we’re doomed?” she asked, laughing.
“Eternally,” replied Alexander. “Can I buy you an ice cream?”
“Yes, please.” She beamed.
“Crème br?lée, right?”
“Always.”
They sat on a bench while she ate it, but even after she was done, they continued to sit and talk and not move until Alexander glanced at his watch and got up.
It was nearing ten o’clock by the time they stopped at the corner of Grechesky and Second Soviet, three blocks away from her building.
Tatiana paused. “So are you coming a little later?” She sighed. “Dasha said you might be.”
“Yes.” He sighed also. “With Dimitri.”
Tatiana was silent. They stood facing each other.
He was so near her she could smell him. Tatiana had never known anyone to smell as good and as clean as Alexander.
She thought he wanted to say something to her. He had opened his mouth, bent his head forward, frowned. She waited tensely, wanting it desperately, not wanting it, hating her ugly brown work boots, wishing she were wearing red sandals, remembering they were Dasha’s, remembering she had no nice shoes of her own, wanting to be barefoot in front of him, and swelling with feeling and guilt previously unknown to her. Tatiana took a step back.
Alexander took a step back. “Go,” he said. “I will see you tonight.”
She walked away, feeling his eyes behind her. Turning around, she found him looking at her from a distance.