Feeling herself pale inside and out, and hoping Dimitri didn’t see and didn’t hear the paling of her voice, Tatiana said, “I asked for everybody I knew.”

“Everybody except Petrenko,” Dimitri said, as if he knew. “Even though you were quite friendly with him, coming around as often as you used to last year. Why didn’t you ask for your friend, Ivan Petrenko? Before he got himself killed, he told me that he sometimes used to walk you to the ration store. On orders of Captain Belov, of course. He was quite helpful to you and your family. Why wouldn’t you ask about him?”

Tatiana was stunned. She felt herself to be so ridiculously in need of Alexander, so ridiculously in need of protection against this specter of a man in her room that she didn’t know what to say.

Tatiana hadn’t asked about Petrenko because she knew that Petrenko was dead. But she only knew he was dead from Alexander’s letters, and Alexander could not be writing to her.

What to do, what to do, to end this revolting lie enveloping her life.

Tatiana was so fed up, so frustrated, so tired, so desperate, that she nearly opened her mouth and told Dimitri about Alexander. Truth was better than this. Tell the truth and live with the consequences.

It was the consequences that stopped her.

Straightening her back and staring coldly at Dimitri, Tatiana said firmly, “Dimitri, what the hell are you trying to get out of me? Stop trying to manipulate me with your questions. Either ask me outright or keep quiet. I’m too tired for your games. What do you want to know? Why I didn’t ask for Petrenko? Because I asked for Marazov first, and once I knew he was at the garrison, I stopped asking. Now, enough!”

Dimitri stared at her with uneasy surprise.

There was a knock on the door. It was Inga. “What’s going on?” she said sleepily, standing in her tattered gray bathrobe. “I heard so much noise. Is everything all right?”

“Yes, thank you, Inga,” Tatiana said, slamming the door. Tatiana would deal with Inga later.

Dimitri came up to her and said, “I’m sorry, Tania. I didn’t mean to upset you. I just misunderstood your intentions.”

“That’s fine, Dimitri. It’s late. Let’s say good night.”

Dimitri tried to come near her, and Tatiana backed away.

Stepping away himself, he shrugged. “I always wished it had worked out for us, Tania.”

“Did you, Dimitri?” said Tatiana.

“Of course.”

“Dimitri! How—” Tatiana exclaimed and broke off.

Dimitri stood in a room in which he had once spent many evenings being fed and watered. He had sat with Tatiana’s family, who had invited him into their home and made him a part of their life. He had been in this room now for an hour. He had talked freely about himself, accused Tatiana of she didn’t know what. He’d told her things that sounded like lies. She didn’t know. What he did not do was ask her what had happened to the six people who had once been in this room with him. He did not ask about her mother, or her father, or her grandparents, or Marina, or her mother’s mother. He did not ask her in Kobona in January, he did not ask her now. If he knew about their fate, he did not utter a single commiserating word, he did not make a single comforting wave of his hand. How did Dimitri think it could have worked out for him and anyone, but especially for him and Tatiana, when he could not look for a second beyond himself into anyone else’s life or heart? Tatiana didn’t care that he didn’t ask after her family. What she wanted was for him not to pretend to her, as if she didn’t know the truth.

Tatiana wanted to say this to Dimitri. But it wasn’t worth it.

Though she suspected that the truth was plain in her eyes, because bowing his head and appearing even more hunched, Dimitri stammered, “I just can’t seem to say the right thing.”

“We’ll say good night,” Tatiana said coldly. That will be the right thing.

He went to the door, and she followed him. “Tania, I think this is good-bye. I don’t think we’re going to see each other again.”

“If we’re meant to, we will.” Tatiana swallowed hard, numb inside, her legs weak.

Dimitri lowered his voice, and whispered, “Where I’m going, Tatiana, you will never see me again.”

“Oh, yes?” she mouthed, her strength gone.

He left at last, leaving black turmoil behind for Tatiana, who lay on her cot between the wall and the back of the couch, lay in all her clothes clutching her wedding ring to her chest, not moving or sleeping until morning.

3

In Morozovo, Alexander was sitting behind a table in his officer’s tent when Dimitri stepped inside with some cigarettes and vodka. Alexander was wearing his coat, and his injured hands were numb from the cold. He was thinking of going to the mess tent to get some warmth and some food, but he couldn’t leave his tent. It was Friday, and he had a meeting with General Govorov in an hour to talk about their preparations for an assault on the Germans across the river.

It was November, and after four failed attempts to cross the Neva, the 67th Army was now impatiently waiting for the river to freeze. Finally the Leningrad command concluded that it would be easier to attack with the foot soldiers in line formations on ice instead of being clustered in easy-to-destroy pontoon boats.

Dimitri placed the bottles of vodka and the tobacco with the rolling papers on the table. Alexander paid him. He wanted Dimitri to leave. He had just been reading a letter from Tatiana that was puzzling him. He hadn’t written to her for the few weeks that he’d been hurt, even though he could have had a nurse write the letter for him. Alexander knew that if Tatiana saw a letter in someone else’s handwriting, she would go insane reading between the lines into how badly he was really injured. Not wanting her to worry, he had sent her his September money and waited until he could hold a pen, writing to her himself toward the end of the month.

He wrote that his burn wounds were just God’s way of protecting him. Unable to function at his weapons, Alexander had missed two disastrous assaults on the Neva in September, which had decimated the first and second line armies so utterly that all reserves had to be brought in from the Leningrad garrison. The Volkhov front would have been glad to supply the Leningrad front with men—if only they had some. But after Hitler’s directive to Manstein to hold the Neva and the blockade around Leningrad at all costs, there were hardly any men left in Meretskov’s 2nd Army in Volkhov.

Elsewhere, Stalingrad was being razed to the ground. The Ukraine was Hitler’s. Leningrad was barely holding. The Red Army was thoroughly debilitated. Govorov was planning another attack on the Germans across the Neva. And Alexander was sitting at his desk, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with his wife.

Here it was November, and none of her letters that came with steady and conversational regularity, though without some of her usual candid fervor, mentioned a word about his injuries. He was driving himself to distraction trying to read between the lines of her letters when Dimitri had come in with the supplies. And now Dimitri wasn’t leaving.

“Alexander, can you pour me a drink? For old times’ sake?”

Reluctantly Alexander poured Dimitri a drink. He poured himself a smaller one. He sat behind his desk, Dimitri in a chair opposite him. They talked about the impending invasion and about the frightful battles with the Germans across the Neva on the Volkhov side.

“Alexander,” Dimitri said quietly, “how can you sit there so calmly knowing what’s ahead of you? Four attempts to cross the Neva, most of our men dead, and I hear that the fifth attack once the ice freezes is going to be our last one, that not a single man will be allowed to return until the blockade is broken; did you hear that, too?”

“I heard something about it, yes.”