Nothing.

“Alexander! What did you take five thousand dollars for? If you’re running, you need all of it. If you’re not running, you don’t need any of it. Why did you take half?”

No reply. It was like Lazarevo. Tatiana would ask, he would answer, tight-lipped and thoughtful, and she would spend an hour trying to decipher what was between the single words. Lisiy Nos, Vyborg, Helsinki, Stockholm, Yuri Stepanov, all multisyllables with Alexander hidden in the middle of them, saying nothing.

“You know what?” Tatiana said, exasperated, detaching herself from him. “I’m tired of this game. In fact, I’m done with it. You either tell me everything without holding back, without stupid guessing games where I’m trying to figure things out and getting them wrong, you tell me everything right now, or just turn around, go and get your things, and get away from me. Go on. The choice is yours.” Tatiana stopped walking near the Fontanka Canal, folded her arms, and waited.

Alexander stopped walking, too, but didn’t reply.

“Are you thinking it over?” she exclaimed, pulling on his arm, trying to look deeper—behind his constricted face. Letting go of him, her voice unable to hide her anguish, she said, “I know, Alexander, that when you’re wearing these clothes, your army clothes, you wear them as armor against me, so you don’t have to tell me anything. Because I also know that when you’re naked and making love to me, you’re completely defenseless, and if only I were stronger, I could ask anything then, and you would tell me. Trouble is…” Her voice broke. “I’m not stronger. I’m just as defenseless against you. So you, afraid I’m going to see the truth and your agony, afraid I’ll see that you’re saying good-bye to me, you turn me over because you think if I don’t see it, I can’t feel it.” She started to cry. I’m not doing so well, she thought. Where is my strength?

“Please, stop,” Alexander whispered, not looking at her.

“Well, I can feel it, Shura,” Tatiana said, wiping her face and grabbing his hand. He pulled it from her. “You came here, angry, yes, upset, yes, because you thought you had said good-bye to me for good in Lazarevo—”

“That’s not why I was angry and upset.”

“As it turns out,” Tatiana continued, “you’re going to have to say good-bye to me in Leningrad. But you’ll have to do it to my face, all right?”

Tatiana saw Alexander’s tormented eyes.

She stepped up. He backed away. What a waltz they danced in the stark morning. But Tatiana’s heart was strong; she could take it. “Alexander. I know—you think I don’t know? I’ve got nothing to do but think about the things you tell me. You have wanted to escape to America all your Soviet life. It was the only thing that had kept you going the years before me, those years in the army. That someday you might return home.” She stretched out her hand to him. He took it. “Am I right?”

“You’re right,” Alexander said. “But then I met you.”

Then I met you. Stop, stop. Oh, the summer last year, the white nights by the Neva, the Summer Garden, the northern sun, his smiling face. Tatiana looked at his heartbreaking face. She wanted to speak. Where were all those words she once knew? Where were they now when she needed them most?

Alexander shook his head. “Tania, it’s too late for me. From the moment my father decided to abandon the life we had in America, he doomed us all. I knew it first—even then. My mother second. My father third, last, but most heartfelt. My mother could ease her pain by blaming him. I thought I could ease mine by joining the army and by being young, but who did my father have to point a finger to?”

Tatiana came up to him and held on to his coat. Alexander put his arms around her. “Tania, when I found you, I felt for that hour or two we were together—before Dimitri, before Dasha—that somehow I was going to right my life.” Alexander smiled bitterly. “I had a sense of hope and destiny that I can neither explain nor understand.” He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Then our Soviet life interfered. You saw, I tried to stay away. I thought, I must stay away. I must keep away. Before Luga. After Luga. Look how I tried after I came to see you at the hospital. I tried to put distance between us after St. Isaac’s, after the Germans closed the ring around Leningrad.” He paused. He shook his head. “I should have, somehow…”

“I didn’t want you to,” Tatiana said faintly.

“Oh, Tania,” Alexander said. “If only I hadn’t come to Lazarevo!”

“What are you talking about?” she gasped. “What are you saying? How can you regret—” She didn’t finish. How could he be regretting them? She stared at him, perplexed and ashen.

Alexander didn’t respond. “Some destiny. I’ve done nothing since the day I met you but hurt your heart and—worse—drag you into my own destruction.” He shook his head so hard his cap fell off.

Tatiana picked up his cap, brushed off the slush, and gave it back to him.

“What are you talking about? Hurt my heart? Forget all that, it’s done with. Alexander… and I came willingly.” She paused, frowning. “What destruction? I’m not doomed,” said Tatiana slowly, not understanding. “I’m lucky.”

“You’re blind.”

“Then open my eyes.” Like you did once before. She pulled the scarf tighter around her neck, wanting to bundle up, wanting to be near a fire, wanting to be in Lazarevo.

Tatiana watched Alexander gulp down his fear. He turned his face away and started to walk along the canal pavement. Not looking at her, Alexander said, “I took the five thousand dollars because I was going to give it to Dimitri. I’ve been trying to convince him to run by himself—”

Tatiana laughed without feeling. “Stop it.” She shook her head. “I suspected that was why you took half the money. The man who wouldn’t go half a kilometer out onto the ice with me? Is that the man you think is going to America by himself? Honestly.” They stopped for a red light just past Engineers Castle, last winter used as a hospital and now nearly unrecognizable after repeated bombings. “Dimitri would never go by himself,” Tatiana went on. “I already told you. He is a coward and a parasite. You are his courage and his host. What are you even thinking? As soon as Dimitri realizes you’re not going, he won’t go either, and if he remains in the Soviet Union and sees suddenly that he’s got no hope of escape, then he’s going straight to his new friend Mekhlis of the NKVD, and you will be instantly—”

Tatiana broke off, staring at Alexander. Something dawned on her. His face was too miserable. “You know all this. You know he’ll never go without you. You know this already.”

Alexander didn’t reply.

They began walking again, over the crippled-by-shelling Fontanka Bridge, stepping over the granite pieces. “So what are you even talking about, then?” Tatiana said, nudging him slightly and looking up into his face, full of incomprehensible fear. She could not imagine that Alexander was afraid for himself. Whom was he afraid for?

“You’re not thinking of me—” Tatiana wanted to continue, but the words got stuck in her throat.

Her eyes opened; her heart opened.

Truth flowed in, but not the truth she had known with Alexander. No. Truth illuminating terror. Truth lighting up those hideous corners of an ugly room, with the rotting wood and the broken plaster and the ratty furniture. Once Tatiana saw it, once she saw what was left—

She came around and stood in front of Alexander, stopping him from walking. Too many things were making themselves clear on this desolate Leningrad Saturday. Alexander was thinking of her. He was thinking only of her.

“Tell me…” Tatiana said faintly, “what do they do to wives of Red Army officers arrested on suspicion of high treason? Arrested for being foreign infiltrators? What do they do to wives of American men who jumped out of trains on the way to prison?’