If it was for Alexander and she said yes, she liked Dimitri, then she would hurt Alexander’s feelings, and she didn’t want to do that either. What were girls supposed to say? Weren’t they supposed to play some kind of game? Lure, pull, pretend.

Alexander was Dasha’s. Did Dasha’s younger sister owe him an honest answer?

Did he want one?

He wanted one.

“No,” she finally said. Tatiana didn’t want to hurt Alexander’s feelings most of all.

She saw by his face that she had given him the right answer.

“Dasha says I should give him a chance though. What do you think?”

“No,” he replied at once.

They were stopped at the corner of Second Soviet and Grechesky Prospekt. The dome of the church across from her building glistened a few hundred meters in the distance. Tatiana couldn’t take the thought of him leaving. Now that he had come, asked the impossible, and been refused, she was afraid she would not see him like this again. Alone like this again.

She couldn’t let him leave just yet. Not just yet. “Alexander,” she asked quietly, looking into his face, “are your . . . mother and father still in Krasnodar?”

“No,” he said. “They’re not in Krasnodar.”

She didn’t look away. His eyes poured into her. “Tania, so many things I can’t explain but want to.”

“So explain,” Tatiana said softly, holding her breath.

“Just remember, what’s happening right now in the Red Army — the confusion, the unpreparedness, the disorganization — none of it can be understood except through the events of the last four years. Do you see?”

Tatiana stood still. “I don’t see. What does it have to do with your parents?”

Alexander stepped a shade closer, shielding her from the setting sun. “My parents are dead. My mother in 1936, my father in 1937.” He lowered his voice even more. “Shot,” he whispered. “By the NKVD — the not-so-secret police. Now I have to go, all right?”

Tatiana’s shocked face must have slowed him, because he patted her on the arm and said, smiling grimly, “Don’t worry. Sometimes things don’t work out the way we hope, do they? No matter how much we plan, or how much we wish. True?”

“No, they don’t,” replied Tatiana, lowering her gaze. For some reason she didn’t think he was talking just about his parents. “Alexander, do you want to—”

“I have to go,” he cut in. “I’ll see you.”

All she wanted to ask was, when? but all she said was, “All right.”

Tatiana didn’t want to go back to her apartment, inside the kitchen, inside. She wanted to be on the tram again, or at the bus stop, even at the store, on the street — anywhere, as long as it wasn’t in the apartment without him.

When Tatiana got to her building, she stood dumbly on the landing, mindlessly drawing the outline of the figure eight with her fingers, readying herself for the climb up and beyond.

With a heavy heart she ambled upstairs.


2


The family was discussing the war. There was no birthday dinner, but there was plenty of drink. And plenty of loud argument. What was going to happen to Leningrad? As Tatiana arrived, her father and grandfather were disagreeing on Hitler’s intentions — as if they both knew him personally. All Mama wanted to know was why Comrade Stalin had not spoken to the people. Dasha wanted to know if she should continue working.

“As opposed to what?” snapped an irritated Papa. “Look at Tania. She is barely seventeen, and she doesn’t ask if she should continue working.”

Everybody looked at Tatiana, including Dasha — unhappily.

Tatiana put down her bag. “Seventeen today, Papa.”

“Ah, yes!” Papa exclaimed. “Of course. The day has been so crazy. Let’s drink a toast to Pasha’s health.” He paused. “And to Tania’s.”

The room was somehow smaller because Pasha wasn’t with them.

Tatiana leaned against the wall, wondering when would be a good time to bring up her brother and Tolmachevo. Hardly anyone even noticed she was holding up the wall, except Dasha, who glanced at her from the couch and said, “Why don’t you have some chicken soup? It’s outside on the stove,” and Tatiana thought that was a good idea. In the kitchen, she poured herself two ladlefuls of carrots and a bit of chicken and then sat on the window ledge and looked out into the yard as the soup got cold next to her. She couldn’t eat anything hot. She was burning up inside.

When Tatiana walked back into their rooms, she heard her mother say consolingly to her father, “This war will not continue into winter. By then it will all be over.”

Papa was quiet, rubbing the folds of his shirt. He said, “You know, Napoleon, too, came to the Soviet Union with his armies in June.”

“Napoleon!” Mama screeched. “What does Napoleon have to do with this, Georgi Vasilievich? Please. I beg of you.”

Tatiana opened her mouth to speak, to say something about Tolmachevo, but not only was she not sure of the message she was supposed to relay to her mature, all-knowing, insufferable family, it suddenly occurred to her that she might have to explain how she came by this information on the Germans’ future advance into Russia.

Might? she thought. She closed her mouth.

Papa sat by Mama’s side, looking into his empty glass. “Let’s have another shot,” he said. “And drink to Pasha.”

“Let’s go to Luga!” exclaimed Mama. “Let’s go to our dacha, get away from the city.”

How could Tatiana not say something now? “Maybe,” she coughed up, with the confidence of a lamb, spluttering at her own audacity, “maybe we could bring Pasha back from camp in the meantime.”

Papa, Mama, Dasha, Deda, and Babushka all stared at Tatiana with confusion and remorse, as if, one, they had been surprised she could speak and, two, they were sorry for saying grown-up things in the presence of a child.

Mama started to cry. “We should bring him back. Today is his birthday, and he is all by himself.”

It’s my birthday, too, Tatiana thought. She got up, deciding to go and have a bath.

“Where are you going?” Papa called to her.

“To wash.”

“To wash what?” snapped Mama. “Take some plates into the kitchen, will you?”

“To wash myself,” replied Tatiana, gathering the dirty plates from the table.

Dasha went out, Tatiana didn’t ask where. She suspected it was to see Alexander. She was not one to feel sorry for herself, and she wasn’t going to start now. If there was anything to feel sorry for, it was the turn of events that allowed feeling into her heart, only to have that feeling squashed by the ludicrous hands of fate. She wasn’t going to allow pointless self-pity inside — that angry fiend.

Tatiana forced herself to reread some of Chekhov’s stories, which never failed to ease her with their inertness. Reading seven of his short stories put her right to sleep, the last one about a girl sitting on a bench with an older man.

She kept hearing Deda and Papa argue about the war. Deda said that many people did not view it as sheer tragedy. The idea of war was terrible, but might not war bring freedom to them? Might not this new horror bring in its wake some good? Might it not lift from Russia’s back the savage burden of the Bolsheviks and give the nation a chance for a new, normal, and humane life?

Tatiana heard Papa’s voice, laden with vodka. “Nothing will lift from Russia the savage burden of the Bolsheviks. Nothing will bring us a normal life.”

Tatiana thought Papa was a pessimist. Vodka tended to make him even more morose.

Something had to bring them all a chance for a new life. But what? As if she had any answers. She slept.

She was awakened at one forty-five in the morning by a sound she had never heard before coming from outside. It was a screeching siren piercing the dusky night. She cried out, and her father came over and told her not to worry, it was just an air-raid siren. She wanted to know if she had to get up; were the Germans bombing them already?

“Go to sleep, Tanechka, dear,” said Papa, but how could she, with the siren shrieking and Dasha not home? The siren stopped after a few minutes, but Dasha was still not home.


3


At the morning meeting at Kirov the next day, Tatiana was told that the workday, in honor of the war effort, was extended until seven in the evening, until further notice. Until further notice, Tatiana guessed, was until the war ended. Krasenko informed the workers that he and the Party secretary from Moscow decided to step up production of the KV-1, heavy tank for the defense of Leningrad. Krasenko said that Leningrad would be defended with what tanks, ammunition, artillery they could make at Kirov. Stalin would not redeploy arms from the southern front to the Leningrad front to protect the city.

Whatever Leningrad could produce to defend itself — arms and food — would have to be sufficient.

After that meeting so many workers volunteered for the front that Tatiana thought the factory would be closed down. But no such luck. She and another worker — a worn, middle-aged woman named Zina — returned to their projectile assembly line.

Late in the day the nail gun broke, and Tatiana had to nail the crates shut with a hammer. By seven her back and her arm ached.



Tatiana and Zina walked along the Kirov wall, and before she got to the bus stop, Tatiana saw Alexander’s black-haired head rising above the tide of others.

“I have to go,” Tatiana said, losing a breath and speeding up. “See you tomorrow.”

Zina mumbled something in return.

“Hello,” she greeted him, her heart racing, her voice steady. “What are you doing here?” She was too tired to feign disinterest. She smiled.

“I’m coming to take you home. Did you have a nice birthday? Did you talk to your parents?”