How long did that take? Two minutes? Three?

She felt herself starting to slip down into a black abyss. Not only could she not open her eyes, she did not want to.

How long for her life to end, to continue? How long for Dr. Sayers to sleep, how long for Dimitri to stand alone in the glare? How long for Tatiana? How much longer for her?

How long did it take for Alexander to rescue Dr. Sayers and get hit himself? Tatiana had watched it all from the Red Cross truck, positioned behind the trees on the clearing leading to the slope to the river, the slope down which Alexander ran for Anatoly Marazov.

Tatiana had watched it all.

Those two minutes of watching Alexander run for Marazov, shout at Dr. Sayers, run to Dr. Sayers, pull him out, and then drag three men to the truck had been the longest two minutes of Tatiana’s life.

He had been so close to safety. She watched the shell from the German plane fall on the ice and explode. She watched Alexander fly headfirst into the armored truck. When Alexander went down, Tatiana grabbed a box full of cylindrical plasma containers and her nurse’s bag, jumped down from the back of the Red Cross truck, and ran down the embankment, caught near the ice by a corporal who yanked her down and yelled, “What are you, crazy?”

“I’m a nurse,” she said. “I have to help the doctor.”

“Yes, you’ll be a dead nurse. Stay down.”

She stayed down for exactly two seconds. She saw Dr. Sayers hiding behind the armored vehicle that protected him and Alexander from direct fire. She saw him waving for help. She saw Alexander not getting up. Tatiana jumped up and ran out onto the ice before the corporal could utter a sound. She ran at first and then got scared by the crashing artillery shells and dropped onto her stomach, crawling the rest of the way. Alexander was motionless. His shredded white camouflage coat had an enlarging red stain on the right side of his back, surrounded by black ash. Tatiana crawled on her hands and knees to him and pushed the helmet away from his blood-covered head.

One look at Alexander’s face told Tatiana he was about to die.

He was gray and flaxen. The ice underneath him was slippery from his blood. She was kneeling in it. Tatiana said, “Hypovolemic shock. Needs plasma.” Dr. Sayers instantly agreed. While he was searching for a surgical instrument to cut open Alexander’s sleeve, Tatiana took off her hat and pressed it hard into Alexander’s side to slow his blood loss. Reaching down into his right boot, she pulled out his army knife and threw it to Dr. Sayers, saying, “Here, use this.” She didn’t think she breathed once.

Sayers cut open Alexander’s coat and his uniform to expose his left forearm, found a vein, and attached a syringe, a tube, and a plasma drip to him. When he left to get the stretcher and some help, Tatiana, by this time sitting on Alexander’s wound, cut open his other sleeve, got out another bottle of plasma, another syringe, another catheter, and attached it to a vein on his right forearm. She adjusted the syringe so that it dripped the fluid into Alexander’s body at sixty-nine drops a minute, the maximum possible. She sat on his back pressing into him as hard as she could, her white hat and her white coat saturated in his blood, waiting for the stretcher and muttering, “Come on, soldier, come on.”

By the time the doctor came back, her plasma bottle had emptied and Tatiana had attached another one. Taking off her stained coat, Tatiana laid it on the stretcher sideways, and when they lifted Alexander onto it, she wrapped her coat tightly around his wound. He was excruciatingly heavy to lift, because his clothes were wet. Dr. Sayers asked how they were going to carry him, and she replied that they were just going to pick him up on three and carry him, and he said incredulously, you are going to carry him? and she said without blinking, yes, I will carry him, NOW.

And afterward Tatiana struggled with the Soviet doctors, with the Soviet nurses, and even with Dr. Sayers, who had taken a look at Alexander’s blood loss and the hole in his side and said, forget it. We can’t do anything for him. Put him in the terminal ward. Give him a gram of morphine, but no more.

Tatiana hooked an IV to Alexander’s vein herself and fed him morphine and fed him plasma. And when that wasn’t enough, she gave Alexander her blood. And when that wasn’t enough, and it looked as if nothing was going to be enough, she trickled blood from her arteries into his veins.

Drop by drop.

And as she sat by him, she whispered. All I want is for my spirit to be heard through your pain. I sit here with you, pouring my love into you, drop by drop, hoping you’ll hear me, hoping you’ll lift your head to me and smile again. Shura, can you hear me? Can you feel me sitting by you letting you know you’re still alive? Can you feel my hand on your beating heart, my hand letting you know I believe in you, I believe in your eternal life, I believe you will live, live through this and grow wings to soar over death, and when you open your eyes again, I will be here. I will always be here, believing in you, hoping for you, loving you. I’m right here. Feel me, Alexander. Feel me and live.

He lived.

Now as Tatiana lay under the Red Cross truck in the coming of the cold March dawn, she thought, did I save him so he could die on the ice without my arms to hold him, to hold his young, beautiful, war-ravaged body, the body that loved me with all its great might? Could my Alexander have fallen alone?

She would rather have buried him as she had buried her sister than live through this. Would rather have known she had given him peace than live through another starless second of this.

Tatiana could not endure another moment of herself. Not another moment. In one more instant there was going to be nothing left of her.

Dimly she heard Dr. Sayers moan. Tatiana blinked, blinked away Alexander, opened her eyes, and turned to Sayers. “Doctor?” He was semiconscious. The forest was still. The dawn was steel blue. Tatiana disentangled herself from him and crawled out from under the truck. Rubbing her face, she saw it was covered in blood. Her fingers touched a chunk of glass stuck in her cheek. She tried to pull it out, but it hurt too much. Grabbing it by one side, Tatiana wrenched it out, screaming.

It didn’t hurt enough.

She continued to scream, her eviscerated cries echoing back to her through the barren woods. Her hands gripping her legs, her stomach, her chest, Tatiana knelt in the snow and screamed as the blood dripped from her face.

She lay down on the ground and pressed her bleeding cheek into the snow. It wasn’t cold enough. It couldn’t numb her enough.

There was nothing sharp in her mouth anymore, but her tongue was torn and swollen. Getting up, Tatiana sat in the snow, looking around. It was eerily quiet; the bleak, bare birches contrasted somberly with the white earth. No sound anymore, not an echo, not even of her, not a gray branch out of place. Deep in the marsh, close to the Gulf of Finland.

But things were out of place. The Red Cross truck was ruined. One NKVD man in his dark blue uniform lay to the right of her. Dimitri was on the ground within a meter of the truck. His eyes were still open, and his hand remained extended to Tatiana, as if by some providential miracle he expected to be delivered from his own eternity.

Tatiana stared for a moment into Dimitri’s frozen face. How Alexander would enjoy the story of Dimitri’s getting recognized by the NKVD. She looked away.

Alexander had been right — this was a good spot to get through the border. It was poorly manned and poorly defended. The NKVD troops were lightly armed; they had their rifles, and from what she could see they had one mortar, but one wasn’t enough to keep them alive — the Finns had bigger shells. On the Finnish side of the border things were quiet, too. Despite the size of their shells, were they also all dead? Looking through the trees, Tatiana could see no movement. She was still on the Russian side. What to do? New NKVD reinforcements would no doubt be here soon, and she would quickly be whisked away for questioning, and then?

Tatiana felt her stomach through her coat. Her hands were freezing.

She crawled back under the Red Cross truck. “Dr. Sayers,” she whispered, putting her hands on his neck. “Matthew, can you hear me?” He was not answering. He was in bad shape; his pulse was around forty, and his blood pressure felt weak through his carotid. Tatiana lay down by the doctor, and from his coat pocket she pulled out his U.S. passport and both their Red Cross travel documents. They plainly stated in English that one Matthew Sayers and one Jane Barrington were headed for Helsinki.

What should she do now? Should she go? Go where? And go how?

Climbing inside the cabin, she turned the ignition. Nothing. It was hopeless. Tatiana could see what extensive damage had been done by the gunfire to the front end. She peered through the woods across the Finnish side. Was anyone moving? No. She saw human forms on the snow and behind them a Finnish army truck, a little bigger than their Red Cross one. That wasn’t the only difference between them: the Finnish truck didn’t look ruined.

Tatiana hopped out and said to Dr. Sayers, “I’ll be right back.”

He didn’t reply.

“All right, then,” she said, and walked across the Soviet-Finnish border. It felt about the same, she thought, being in Finland as being in the Soviet Union. Tatiana walked carefully among the half dozen dead Finns. In the truck sat another man, dead behind the wheel, his body keeled forward. To get inside she would have to pull him out.