“Your patients were asking for you,” Sayers said softly. “Do you think—”

“No.” Through her hands. “Please leave me. I need to be alone.”

Until night fell, she sat on the floor in Dr. Sayers’s office. She put her head into her knees, and sat against the wall. Until she couldn’t sit up anymore, and then she lay down, curled into a ball.

Dimly she heard the doctor return. She heard his gasp and tried to get up but couldn’t. Helping her up, Sayers sucked in his breath when he saw her face. “God, Tania. Please. I need you—”

“Doctor!” Tatiana exclaimed. “All the things you need me to be, I can’t be right now. I’ll be what I can. Is it time?”

“It’s time, Tania. Let’s go.” He lowered his voice. “Look, I went to your bed and got your backpack. It’s yours, right?”

“Yes,” she said, taking it.

“Do you have anything else you need to bring?”

“No,” Tatiana whispered. “The backpack is all I have. Is it just you and me going?”

Dr. Sayers paused before he answered her. “Chernenko came to me earlier today and asked if our plans had changed now that—”

“And you said . . .” Her weak legs weren’t holding her. She sank into the chair and looked up. “I can’t go with him,” she said. “I just can’t.”

“I don’t want to take him either, but what can I do? He told me, not in so many words, that without him we wouldn’t be able to get you through the first checkpoint. I want to get you out, Tania. What else can I do?”

“Nothing,” said Tatiana.

She helped Sayers collect his few things and carried his doctor’s bag and her nurse’s bag outside. The Red Cross vehicle was a big jeep without the enclosed solid steel body customary for ambulances. This one had glass covering the passenger cab but only canvas covering the back, not the safest for the wounded or medical personnel. But it had been the only truck available at the time in Helsinki, and Sayers could not wait for a proper ambulance. The square Red Cross badges were sewn into the tarpaulin.

Dimitri was waiting by the side of the truck. Tatiana did not look or acknowledge him as she opened the tarpaulin and climbed in to load the first aid kit and the box of plasma.

“Tania?” Dimitri said.

Dr. Sayers came up from behind, and said to Dimitri, “All right, let’s hurry along. You get in the back. Once we leave here, you can change into the Finnish pilot’s clothes. I don’t know how you’re going to get your arm through . . . Tania, where are those clothes?” Then to Dimitri, “Do you need morphine? How is your face doing?”

“Terrible. I can barely see. Is my arm going to get infected?”

Tatiana glanced at Dimitri from inside the truck. His right arm was in a cast and sling. His face was swollen black and blue. She wanted to ask what had happened to him, but she didn’t care.

“Tania?” Dimitri called to her. “I heard about this morning. I’m sorry.”

Tatiana retrieved the Finnish pilot’s clothes from their hiding place and threw them on the truck floor in front of Dimitri.

“Tatiana, come,” Dr. Sayers told her. “Let me help you down, we have to get going.”

Taking Sayers’s hand, Tatiana jumped down past Dimitri.

“Tania?” Dimitri repeated.

She lifted her eyes to him filled with such unwavering condemnation that Dimitri could not help but look away. “Just put on the clothes,” Tatiana said through her teeth. “Then get down on the floor and lie very still.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I know how you—”

Clenching her fists, Tatiana lunged furiously at Dimitri, and she would have punched him in his broken nose had Dr. Sayers not restrained her from behind, saying, “Tania, God. Please. No. No.”

Backing away, Dimitri opened his mouth and stammered, “I said I was very s—”

“I don’t want to hear your fucking lies!” she yelled, her arms still being held by Dr. Sayers. “I don’t want you to speak to me ever again. Do you understand?”

Dimitri, mumbling nervously that he didn’t understand why she should be upset with him, got into the back of the truck.

Dr. Sayers got behind the wheel and stared wide-eyed at Tatiana.

“Ready, Doctor. Let’s go.” Tatiana buttoned up her nurse’s white coat with the Red Cross badge on the sleeve, and she tied her little white hat over her hair. She had all of Alexander’s money, she had his Pushkin book, she had his letters and their photographs. She had his cap, and she had his ring.

They drove into the night.

Tatiana held Sayers’s open map but could not have helped him get to Lisiy Nos. Through the northern Russian woods Dr. Sayers drove his small truck, as they made their way on unpaved, muddy, snowy, liquid roads. Tatiana saw nothing at all, staring out the side window into the darkness, counting inside her head, trying to keep herself upright.

Sayers kept talking to her nonstop in English. “Tania, dear, it will be all right—”

“Will it, Doctor?” she asked, also in English. “And what are we going to do with him?”

“Who cares? He can do what he likes once we get to Helsinki. I’m not thinking about him at all. All I’m thinking about is you. We will get to Helsinki, drop off some supplies, and then you and I will take a Red Cross plane to Stockholm. Then from Stockholm we’ll ride the train to Göteborg on the North Sea, and we’ll take a protected vessel across the North Sea to England. Tania, can you hear me? Do you understand?”

“I can hear you,” she said faintly. “I understand.”

“In England I’ve got a couple of stops to make, but then we’ll either fly to the U.S. or take one of the passenger liners from Liverpool. And once you’re in New York—”

“Matthew, please,” whispered Tatiana.

“I’m just trying to make you feel better, Tania. It’s going to be all right.”

From the back Dimitri said, “Tania, I didn’t know you could speak English.”

Tatiana did not reply at first. Then she picked up a metal pipe from under Dr. Sayers’s feet that she knew he kept in case of trouble. Swinging her arm, she smashed the pipe hard against the metal divider separating her from Dimitri, startling Dr. Sayers nearly off the side of the road. “Dimitri,” she said loudly, “you have to stay quiet and stop talking. You are a Finn. Not another Russian syllable out of you.”

Dropping the pipe onto the floor, she folded her arms around her stomach.

“Tania . . .”

“Don’t, Doctor.”

“You haven’t eaten, have you?” the doctor asked gently.

Tatiana shook her head. “I’m not thinking about food at all,” she replied.

In the middle of the night they stopped by the side of the road. Dimitri had already slipped on the Finnish uniform. “It’s very big,” Tatiana heard him say to Dr. Sayers. “I hope I don’t have to stand up in it. Anyone will see it doesn’t fit me. Do you have any more morphine? I’m—”

Dr. Sayers came back a few minutes later. “If I give him any more morphine, he’ll be dead. That arm is going to give him trouble.”

“What happened to him?” Tatiana asked in English.

Dr. Sayers was quiet. “He was nearly killed,” he said at last. “He has a very nasty open fracture.” He paused. “He may lose that arm. I don’t know how he is conscious, upright. I thought he’d be in a coma after yesterday, yet today he is walking.” Sayers shook his head.

Tatiana didn’t speak. How could he still be standing? she thought. How could the rest of us — strong, resolute, spirited, young — be falling on our knees, be demolished by our life, while he remains standing?

“Someday, Tania,” Sayers said in English, “you will have to explain to me the—” He broke off, pointing to the back of the truck. “Because I swear to Christ, I don’t understand at all.”

“I do not think I could explain,” whispered Tatiana.

On the way to Lisiy Nos they were stopped half a dozen times at checkpoints for papers. Sayers presented papers on himself and papers on his nurse, Jane Barrington. Dimitri, who was a Finn named Tove Hanssen, had no papers, just a metal dogtag with the dead man’s name on it. He was a wounded pilot being taken back to Helsinki for a prisoner exchange. All six times the guards opened the tarpaulin, shined a flashlight in Dimitri’s battered face, and then waved Sayers on.

“It’s nice to be protected by the Red Cross flag,” said Sayers.

Tatiana nodded.

The doctor pulled over by the side of the road, turning the engine off. “Are you cold?” he asked.

“I’m not cold.” Not cold enough. “Do you want me to drive?”

“You know how to drive?”

In Luga, when she was sixteen, the summer before she met Alexander, Tatiana had befriended an army corporal stationed with the local village Soviet. The corporal let Tatiana and Pasha drive around in his truck for the whole summer. Pasha was annoying because he always wanted to be behind the wheel, but the corporal was kind and let her behind the wheel, too. She drove the truck well, better than Pasha, she thought, and the corporal told her she was a quick learner.

“I know how to drive.”

“No, it’s too dark and icy.” Sayers closed his eyes for an hour.

Tatiana sat quietly, her hands in her coat. She was trying to remember the last time she and Alexander had made love. It was a Sunday in November, but where was it? She couldn’t recall. What did they do? Where were they? Did she look up at him? Was Inga outside their door? Was it in the bath, on the couch, on the floor? She couldn’t remember.

What did Alexander say to her last night? He made a joke, he kissed her, he smiled, he touched her hand, he told her he was going across to Volkhov to get promoted. Were they lying to him? Was he lying to her?

He had been trembling. She had thought he was cold. What else did he say? I’ll see you. So casual. Not even blinking. What else? Remember Orbeli.