“I agree, sir.”

“Do you, Alexander? Have you seen what’s happened to our men at Tikhvin and Mga last winter and this spring?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you heard what’s been happening to our men in Nevsky Patch across the river from Dubrovka?”

“Yes, sir,” Alexander said. Nevsky Patch was a Red Army enclave inside enemy lines—a place the Germans used for daily target practice. Russian soldiers were dying there at a rate of 200 a day.

Shaking his head, Stepanov said, “We’re going to move across the Neva in pontoon boats. We have limited artillery—you. We have single-shot rifles—”

“Not me, sir, I have a Shpagin machine gun. And my rifle is an automatic.” Alexander smiled.

Smiling himself, Stepanov nodded. “I’m making it sound brutal.”

“It is, sir.”

“Captain, don’t get scared off by the good fight, an unequal fight though it may be.”

Alexander, raising his eyes to Stepanov and squaring his shoulders, said, “Sir. When have I ever?”

Coming up to him, Stepanov said, “If we had more men like you, we would have won this war long ago.” He shook Alexander’s hand. “Go. Have a good trip. Nothing will be the same when you come back.”

3

Alexander thought as he traveled halfway across the Soviet Union: Dasha, Tania—wouldn’t they have written to him if they were alive?

His doubt attacked him like shell fire.

To go sixteen hundred miles east, across Lake Ladoga, over the Onega River and the Dvina River, over the Sukhona River and the Unzha River, to the Kama River and the Ural Mountains, to go having heard nothing for six months, for half a year, for all those minutes in between, having heard not a sound from her mouth or a word from her pen, was it lunacy?

Yes, yes, it was.

During his four-day journey to Molotov, Alexander recalled every breath he took with her. Sixteen hundred kilometers of the Obvodnoy Canal, of coming to see her at Kirov, of his tent in Luga, of her holding on to his back, of the hospital room, of St. Isaac’s, of her eating ice cream, of her lying in the sled as he pulled her, nearly out of life. Sixteen hundred kilometers of her giving her food to everyone, of her jumping up and down on the roof under German planes. There were some memories of last winter from which Alexander flinched, recalling them all nonetheless. Her walking alongside him after burying her mother. Her standing motionless in front of three boys with knives.

Two images continually sprang to his mind in a restless, frantic refrain.

Tatiana in a helmet, in strange clothes, covered with blood, covered with stone and beams and glass and dead bodies, herself still warm, herself still breathing.

And

Tatiana on the bed in the hospital, bare under his hands, moaning under his mouth.

If anyone could make it, would it not be the girl who every morning for four months got up at six-thirty and trudged through dying Leningrad to get her family their bread?

But if she had made it, how could she not have written to him?

The girl who kissed his hand, who served him tea, and who gazed at him, not breathing as he talked, gazed at him with eyes he had never seen before—was that girl gone?

Was her heart gone?

Please, God, Alexander prayed. Let her not love me anymore, but let her live.

That was a hard prayer for Alexander, but he could not imagine living in a world without Tatiana.

Unwashed and undernourished, having spent over four days on five different trains and four military jeeps, Alexander got off at Molotov on Friday, June 19, 1942. He arrived at noon and then sat on a wooden bench near the station.

Alexander couldn’t bring himself to walk to Lazarevo.

He could not bear the thought of her dying in Kobona, getting out of the collapsed city and then dying so close to salvation. He could not face it.

And worse—he knew that he could not face himself if he found out that she did not make it. He could not face returning—returning to what?

Alexander actually thought of getting on the next train and going back immediately. The courage to move forward was much more than the courage he needed to stand behind a Katyusha rocket launcher or a Zenith antiaircraft gun on Lake Ladoga and know that any of the Luftwaffe planes flying overhead could instantly bring about his death.

He was not afraid of his own death.

He was afraid of hers. The specter of her death took away his courage.

If Tatiana was dead, it meant God was dead, and Alexander knew he could not survive an instant during war in a universe governed by chaos, not purpose. He would not live any longer than poor, hapless Grinkov, who had been cut down by a stray bullet as he headed back to the rear.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

But Tatiana was order. She was finite matter in infinite space. Tatiana was the standard-bearer for the flag of grace and valor that she carried forward with bounty and perfection in herself, the flag Alexander had followed sixteen hundred kilometers east to the Kama River, to the Ural Mountains, to Lazarevo.

For two hours Alexander sat on the bench in unpaved, provincial, oak-lined Molotov.

To go back was impossible.

To go forward was unthinkable.

Yet he had nowhere else to go.

He crossed himself and stood up, gathering his belongings.

When Alexander finally walked in the direction of Lazarevo, not knowing whether Tatiana was alive or dead, he felt he was a man walking to his own execution.

4

Lazarevo was ten kilometers through deep pine woods.

The forest wasn’t just pine; it was mixed with elms and oaks and birches and nettles and blueberries all drifting their pleasing way into his senses. Alexander walked carrying his rucksack, his rifle, his sidearm and ammunition, his large tent and blanket, his helmet, and a sack filled with food from Kobona. He could hear the nearby rush of the Kama River through the trees. He thought of going and washing, but by this point he needed to keep moving forward.

He picked a few blueberries off the low bushes as he walked. He was hungry. It was very warm, very sunny, and Alexander was suddenly filled with a pounding hope. He walked faster.

The woods ended, and in front of him was a dusty village road, flanked on both sides by small wooden huts, overgrown grasses, and old falling-down fences.

To the left, past pines and elms, he could see the glimmer of the river, and past the river, past more voluminous, voluptuous forest, the round-topped, evergreen-covered Ural Mountains.

He inhaled deeply. Did Lazarevo smell of Tatiana? He smelled firewood burning and fresh water and pine needles. And fish. Alexander saw the smokestack of a fishing plant on the outskirts of the village.

He continued down the road, passing a woman sitting on the bench outside her house. She stared at him; he understood. How often did these people see a Red Army officer? The woman got up and said, “Oh, no! You’re not Alexander, are you?”

Alexander didn’t know how to answer that. “Oh, yes,” he finally said. “I am Alexander. I’m looking for Tatiana and Dasha Metanova. Do you know where they live?”

The woman started to cry.

Alexander stared at her. “I’ll just ask someone else,” he muttered, walking on.

The woman ran after him in small steps. “Wait, wait!” She pointed down the road. “On Fridays they have a sewing circle in the village square. Straight ahead, over there.” Shaking her head, she walked back.

“So they are alive?” Alexander said in a weak voice, flooded with relief.

The woman could not answer. Covering her face, she ran back to her house.

She said they? They meaning… he asked for two sisters; she replied they. Alexander slowed down, lighting a cigarette and taking a drink out of his flask. He walked on but stopped before he got to the village square thirty meters ahead.