“Too young for you, Dimitri, regardless,” Alexander said coolly.

Dimitri was silent. “She is very pretty,” he finally said.

“Yes. Still too young for you.”

“What do you care? You’re close to the older sister, I’m going to get to know the younger.” Dimitri chuckled. “Why not? We could make a… foursome, don’t you think? Two best friends, two sisters… there’s a symmetry—”

“Dima,” said Alexander, “what about Elena last night? She told me she liked you. I can introduce you next week.”

Waving him off, Dimitri said, “You actually talked to Elena?” He laughed. “No. I can get dozens like Elena. Besides, why not Elena, too? No. Tatiana is not like the others.” He rubbed his hands together and smiled.

Not a muscle moved on Alexander’s face. Not a tic in his eye, not a tightening of his lips, not a furrowing of his brow. Nothing moved, except his legs, faster and faster down the street.

Dimitri broke into a trot. “Alexander, wait. About Tania… I just want to make sure… you don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course, not, Dima,” Alexander said evenly. “Why would I?”

“Absolutely!” He slapped Alexander on the back. “You’re a good man. Quick question—do you want me to arrange entertainment for—”

“No!”

“But you’ll be on duty all night. Come on, we’ll have fun like always?”

“No. Not tonight.” He paused. “Not again, all right?”

“But—”

“I’m late,” said Alexander. “I’m going to run. I’ll see you at the barracks.”

Uncharted Tides

THE next morning when Tatiana woke up, the first image in her mind was Alexander’s face. Tatiana did not speak to Dasha, tried in fact not to look at her sister, who, as she was leaving said, “Happy birthday.”

“Yes, Tanechka, happy birthday,” said Mama, hurrying out. “Don’t forget to lock up.”

Papa kissed her on the head and said, “Your brother is seventeen today, too, you know.”

“I know that, Papa.”

Papa worked as a pipe engineer at the Leningrad waterworks plant. Mama was a seamstress at a Nevsky hospital uniform facility. Dasha was an assistant to a dentist. She had worked for him since leaving university two years ago. They had had a romance, but once it was over, Dasha continued there because she liked the job. It paid well and demanded little from her.

Tatiana went to Kirov, where the whole morning she sat in on meetings and patriotic speeches. The manager of her department, Sergei Krasenko, asked if anyone wanted to join the People’s Volunteer Army to dig trenches down south to help defeat the hated Germans.

Today the German was hated. Yesterday he was beloved. What about tomorrow?

Yesterday Tatiana had met Alexander.

Krasenko continued to speak. The fortifications north of Leningrad, along the old frontier with Finland, were to be put into full defensive order. The Red Army suspected that the Finns were going to want Karelia back. Tatiana perked up. Karelia, Finland. Alexander spoke about that yesterday. Alexander… Tatiana perked down.

The women listened to Krasenko, but no one sprang up to volunteer for anything. No one, that is, except Tamara, the woman who followed Tatiana on the assembly line. “What have I got to lose?” she whispered with fervor as she scrambled to her feet. Tatiana had suspected that Tamara’s job was just too boring.

Today before lunch she received goggles, a protective mask for her hair, and a brown factory coat. After lunch she was no longer packaging spoons and forks. Now small cylindrical metal bullets came to her down the assembly line. They fell by the dozen into small cardboard containers, and Tatiana’s job was to put the containers into large wooden crates.

At five o’clock Tatiana took off her coat and her mask and goggles, splashed water on her face, retied her hair into a neat ponytail, and left the building. She walked on Prospekt Stachek, along the famous Kirov wall, a concrete structure seven meters tall that ran fifteen city blocks. She walked three of those blocks to her bus stop.

And waiting for her at the bus stop was Alexander.

When she saw him—Tatiana couldn’t help herself—her face lit up. Putting her hand on her chest, she stopped walking for a moment, but he smiled at her and she blushed and, gulping down whatever was in her throat, walked toward him. She noticed that his officer’s cap was in his hands. She wished she had scrubbed her face harder.

The presence of so many words inside her head made her incapable of small talk, just at the time when she needed small talk most. “What are you doing here?” she asked timidly.

“We’re at war with Germany,” Alexander said. “I have no time for pretenses.”

Tatiana wanted to say something, anything, not to let his words linger in the air. So she said, “Oh.”

“Happy birthday.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you doing something special tonight?”

“I don’t know. Today is Monday, so everyone will be tired. We’ll have dinner. A drink.” She sighed. In a different world, perhaps, she might have invited him over for dinner on her birthday. Not in this world.

They waited. Somber people stood all around them. Tatiana did not feel somber. She thought, but is this what I’m going to look like when I’m here by myself, waiting for the bus like them?

Is this what I am going to look like for the rest of my life?

And then she thought, we’re at war. What is the rest of my life even going to look like?

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“Your father told me yesterday you worked at Kirov. I took a chance you’d be waiting for the bus.”

“Why?” she asked lightly. “Have we had so much luck with public transportation?”

Alexander smiled. “You mean we in the sense of the Soviet people? Or do you mean you and I?”

She blushed.

Bus Number 20 came with room for two dozen people. Three dozen piled on. Alexander and Tatiana waited.

“Come, let’s walk,” he said finally, leading her away.

“Walk where?”

“Walk back home. I want to talk to you about something.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “Home is eight kilometers from here.” She glanced at her feet.

“Are your shoes comfortable today?” He was smiling.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, cursing herself for her little-girl awkwardness.

“I’ll tell you what,” he suggested. “Why don’t we walk one long block over to Govorova Ulitsa, and take tram Number 1 from there? Can you walk one long block? Everybody here is waiting for the bus or the trolleybus. We’ll catch tram Number 1 instead.”

Tatiana thought about it. “I don’t think that tram drops me off at my apartment,” she said at last.

“No, it doesn’t, but you can change at the Warsaw railroad station for tram Number 16 that will take you to the corner of Grechesky and Fifth Soviet, or you can change with me for tram Number 2, which will drop me off close to my barracks and you at the Russian Museum.” He paused. “Or we can walk.”

“I’m not walking eight kilometers,” said Tatiana. “No matter how comfortable my shoes are. Let’s go to the tram.” She already knew she would not be getting off at some railroad station to catch another tram back home by herself.

When the tram didn’t come for twenty minutes, Tatiana agreed to walk a few kilometers to tram Number 16. Govorova turned into Ulitsa Skapina and then meandered diagonally northward until it ended in the embankment of the Obvodnoy Canal—the Circular Canal.

Tatiana didn’t want to get to her tram. She didn’t want him to get to his. She wanted to walk along the blue canal. How to tell him that? There were other things, too, to ask him. Always she tried to be less forward. Always she tried to find the right thing to say and didn’t trust the etiquette pendulum swinging in her head, so she simply said nothing, which was perceived either as painful shyness or haughtiness. Dasha never had that problem. She just said the first thing that came into her head.