There were some things she could not do.

She had watched Alexander steal one look; she could not. Since Vova had carried her trunk up the path over two months ago, Tatiana had not returned to the place where she had lived with Alexander. Vova boarded up the windows, put the padlock back on, and carried all of Alexander’s cut wood to Naira’s house.

In Molotov, Tatiana first went to the local Soviet to see if there was any money from Alexander for September.

Surprisingly, there was!

She asked if there was any telegram or letter with the money. There wasn’t.

If he was still getting soldier’s pay, it meant that he had neither died nor deserted. Taking the 1,500 rubles, Tatiana wondered what would make Alexander send her ring money but not write? Then she remembered the months it had taken for her grandmother’s letters to reach them in Leningrad. Well, she didn’t care if she got thirty letters from Alexander all at once, one for each day of September.

At the train station in Molotov, Tatiana told the Party domestic passport inspector that Leningrad was experiencing a dire shortage of nurses, what with the war and the hunger, and she was returning to help. She showed him the employment stamp from Grechesky Hospital in her passport. He didn’t have to know she had washed floors and toilets and dishes and sewed body bags. For his help Tatiana offered him a bottle of vodka.

He asked for the letter from the hospital inviting her to return to Leningrad. Tatiana replied that the letter got burned, but here were her credentials from the Kirov factory, from the Grechesky Hospital, and here was a citation for valor in the Fourth People’s Volunteer Army, and here was another bottle of vodka for his trouble.

He stamped her passport, and she bought her ticket.

Before she boarded her train, she went to see Sofia, who was so excruciatingly slow, Tatiana felt herself aging as she waited. Tatiana thought she would miss her train for sure, but Sofia finally managed to procure the two photographs she had taken of Alexander and Tatiana on the steps of St. Seraphim’s church on their wedding day. Tatiana stuffed them in her backpack and ran to catch her train.

The train she was departing on was much better than the one on which she had arrived. It was a semblance of a passenger train, and it was going southwest to Kazan. Southwest was the wrong direction for Tatiana, who needed to be heading north. But Kazan was a big city, and she would be able to catch another train. Her plan was to somehow make her way back to Kobona and to catch a barge across Lake Ladoga to Kokkorevo.

As the train was pulling out, Tatiana looked across the road at the Kama in the far distance, obscured by pines and birches, and thought, will I ever see Lazarevo again?

She did not think so.

In Kazan, Tatiana got on a train headed to Nizhny Novgorod—not the Novgorod of her childhood and of Pasha, another Novgorod. She was now less than 300 kilometers east of Moscow. She caught another train, this one a freight train heading northwest to Yaroslavl, and from there a bus north to Vologda.

In Vologda, Tatiana found that she could take the train to Tikhvin, but that Tikhvin was under constant and oppressive German fire. And from Tikhvin getting to Kobona was apparently impossible. The trains were being knocked out of operation three to four times a day, with heavy loss of life and supplies. Thank God for the train inspector, who sold her the ticket to Tikhvin and who was more than willing to chat with her.

She asked the inspector how the food was getting into the blockaded Leningrad if the Kobona route was blocked by German fire.

After she found out, Tatiana decided to follow the food. From Vologda she took a train headed for Petrozavodsk, far north on the western shores of Lake Onega, and simply got off early, in Podporozhye, and walked fifty kilometers to Lodeinoye Pole, which was ten kilometers from the shores of Lake Ladoga.

In Lodeinoye Pole, Tatiana felt the earth rumbling underneath her feet and knew she was close.

While stopping at a canteen to have some soup and bread, Tatiana overheard four transport drivers talking at the next table. Apparently the Germans had practically stopped bombing Leningrad, diverting all their air power and artillery to the Volkhov front—where Tatiana was headed. The Soviet general Meretskov’s 2nd Army was only four kilometers away from the Neva, and the German field marshal Manstein was determined not to let Meretskov push him from his positions along the river. Tatiana heard one of the men say, “Did you hear about our 861st division? Could not move the Germans at all, spent all day under their fire, and lost 65 percent of its men and 100 percent of its commanding officers!”

“That’s nothing!” another exclaimed. “Did you hear how many men Meretskov lost in August-September in Volkhov? How many dead, wounded, missing in action? One hundred and thirty thousand!”

“Is that a lot?” said another. “In Moscow—”

“Out of one hundred and fifty thousand men!”

Tatiana had had quite enough of listening to other people’s discussions. But she needed just a little bit more information. After striking up a conversation with the truck drivers, she found out that food barges departed on Lake Ladoga just south of a small town called Syastroy, about ten kilometers north of the Volkhov front. Syastroy was about a hundred kilometers south from where Tatiana was at the moment.

Tatiana was going to ask the men for a ride but didn’t like the sound of them. They were staying in Lodeinoye Pole overnight, and the way one of them looked at her, even with her brown plaid kerchief…

She wiped her mouth, thanked them, and left. She felt better knowing she was carrying Alexander’s loaded P-38.

It took Tatiana three days to walk the hundred kilometers to Syastroy. It was early October and cold, but the first snow had not fallen yet, and the road was paved. Many other people walked along with her—villagers, evacuees, itinerant farmers, occasionally soldiers returning to the front. She walked for half a day next to one who was returning from furlough. He looked as forlorn as Alexander must have felt. Then he caught a ride from an army truck, and Tatiana kept walking.

The bursting roar of heavy bombs exploding in the near distance never stopped shaking the earth underneath her feet as she walked, her pack on her back, her eyes to the ground. No matter how bad this seemed, it was better than running through the potato field in Luga. It was better than sitting in the train station in Luga, realizing that the Germans weren’t leaving until Tatiana was dead. It was better than that, but not much. She kept walking, her eyes to the ground.

She walked even at night—it was calmer at night, and after eleven there were no bombings. She would walk for another few hours and then find a barn to sleep in. One night she stayed with a family who offered her dinner and their oldest son. She ate the dinner, passed on the son, offering money instead. They took it.

Ten kilometers west of Syastroy, right on the Volkhov River, Tatiana found a small barge about to take off across the lake around the horn of Novaya Ladoga. The longshoreman was untying the rope. She waited as the plank was just about to go up and then ran up to the man and told him she had food for the war effort, for the blockade, taking out five cans of ham and a bottle of vodka. The longshoreman stared longingly at the vodka. Tatiana asked him to keep the vodka for himself and let her go to see her dying mother in Leningrad. Tatiana knew this was a dire time for local people. Most of their relatives who had lived in Leningrad were either dead or dying. The dockhand gratefully kept the vodka and waved her on. “Warning you, though—it’s a bad passage. Too long in the water, and the Germans bomb the barges all day long.”