For two hours the heavy fire from 4,500 rifles did not cease. The mortars were deafening. Alexander thought the Soviet soldiers did better than expected—remarkably better. With his binoculars he spotted a number of downed men on the other shore, but he also spotted many running up the bank and hiding in the trees.

Three German planes flew low overhead, firing at the Soviet soldiers and breaking holes in the ice—more danger zones for trucks and men to avoid. A little lower, a little lower, Alexander thought, opening machine-gun fire on the aircraft. One plane exploded; the other two quickly gained altitude to avoid being hit. Alexander loaded a high-explosive shell into the Zenith and fired. Another of the planes burst into flames. The last one gained more altitude and was now unable to fire at the ice; it flew back to the German side of the Neva. Alexander nodded and lit a cigarette. “You’re doing well,” he yelled to his men, who were so busy loading the shells and firing they didn’t hear him. He hardly heard himself: his ears were muffled to prevent hearing loss.

At 11:30 a.m. a green flash went off as a signal for the motorized division to move across the Neva in the second wave of attack.

The go-ahead was too early, but Alexander hoped the element of surprise would work in their favor—it might if they could move across the ice quickly. Alexander motioned for Marazov to take his men and run. “Go,” Alexander yelled. “Stay covered! Corporal Smirnoff!” One of the men turned around. “Take your weapons,” said Alexander.

Marazov saluted Alexander, grabbed the handles of the 76-millimeter field gun, yelled to his men, and they started down the short slope and onto the ice. Two other corporals were running holding the 81-millimeter mortars. The 120-millimeter guns were left behind. They were too heavy to transport without a truck. Three soldiers in the front were running with their Shpagins.

Alexander watched Marazov knocked down by fire, barely thirty meters onto the ice. “God, Tolya!” he shouted and looked up. The German plane was making one pass over the Neva, firing at the men on the ice. Marazov’s soldiers dropped. Before the plane had a chance to reverse and return, Alexander swung the barrel of the Zenith, aimed, and fired a high-explosive impact shell. He did not miss. The plane was low enough; it burst into flames and dead-spiraled into the river.

Marazov continued to lie motionless on the ice. Watching him helplessly, Marazov’s men hovered by the field gun. The river was being pummeled by shell fire. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Alexander ordered Ivanov—the remaining corporal—to man the Zenith, grabbed his machine gun, jumped off the slope, and ran to Marazov, yelling for the rest of the soldiers to continue across the river. “Go! Go!” They grabbed the field gun and the mortars and ran.

Marazov was splayed on his stomach. Alexander saw why his men had watched him with such helplessness. Kneeling by him, Alexander wanted to turn him over, but the soldier was breathing so painfully that Alexander was afraid to touch him. “Tolya,” he said, panting. “Tolya, hang on.” Marazov had been hit in the neck. His helmet had fallen off. Alexander desperately looked around to see if he could find a medic to give him some morphine.

Alexander saw a man appear on the ice, carrying not a weapon but a doctor’s bag. The man wore a heavy woolen overcoat and a woolen hat—not even a helmet! He was running to the right of Alexander to a group of downed men near a hole in the ice. Alexander had just enough time to think, what a fool, a doctor on the ice, he is insane, when he heard soldiers behind him screaming at the doctor, “Get down! Get down!” But the gunfire was too loud, black smoke was clouding all, and the doctor, standing erect, turned around and yelled in English, “What? What are they saying? What?”

It took Alexander an instant. He saw the doctor on the ice, in the middle of enemy fire but—more important—on the edge of the trajectory path of shells from the German side. Alexander knew he had one quarter second, a splinter of time to think. He jumped up and screamed at the top of his lungs in English, “GET THE FUCK DOWN!”

The doctor heard immediately and dropped. Just in time. The conical shell flew a meter over the man’s head and exploded on impact just behind him. The doctor was propelled like a projectile across the ice and landed head first in the water hole.

With clear eyes Alexander glanced at Marazov, who, with fixated pupils, was spurting blood from his mouth. Making the sign of the cross on him, Alexander picked up his machine gun and ran twenty meters across the ice, fell on his stomach, and crawled another ten to the water hole.

The doctor was unconscious, floating in the water. Alexander tried to reach him, but the man was facedown and too far away. Alexander threw his weapons, ammo, and ruck down onto the ice and jumped in. The water was a piercing, frozen deluge and then an instant whole-body anesthetic, numbing him like morphine. Grabbing the doctor by the neck, Alexander pulled him to the edge of the hole and with all his strength hurled him out with one hand while holding on to the ice with the other. Crawling out himself, he lay breathing heavily on top of the doctor, who came to and groaned. “God, what happened?” In English.

“Quiet,” said Alexander in English. “Stay down. We have to get you to that armored truck on the wooden boards, do you see it? It’s twenty meters. If we can get behind it, we’ll be safer. We’re out in the open here.”

“I can’t move,” said the doctor. “The water is freezing me from the outside in.”

Feeling the wet bitter cold himself, Alexander knew what the doctor meant. He scanned the immediate ice. The only cover was the three bodies near the water hole. Crawling across on his stomach, he pulled one body to the doctor and lay it on top of him. “Now, just lie still, keep the body on you, and don’t move.”

Then he crawled and retrieved another body, throwing it over his back, and picked up his ruck and his weapons. “You ready?” he said to the doctor, in English.

“Yes, sir.”

“Hold on to the bottom of my coat for your life. Don’t let go. You’re going for an ice skate.”

As quickly as he could with one dead man on top of him, Alexander dragged the doctor and the additional corpse twenty meters to the armored truck.

Alexander felt as though he were losing his hearing, the bursting noise around him filtering in and out in fits through his helmet and his conscious mind. He had to make it. Tatiana made it through the blockade, and she didn’t have a dead man covering her. I can do this, he thought, pulling the doctor faster, faster, faster amid the black, snarling clatter. He thought he heard the whiz of a low plane and wondered when Ivanov was going to shoot the fucker down.

The last thing Alexander remembered was a whistling noise closer than he’d ever heard before, an explosion, then painless but severe impact, as he was propelled with frightening force helmet first into the side of an armored truck. Lucky I have a dead man on top of me, thought Alexander.

2

Opening his eyes took too much energy out of him. It was such an effort that as soon as he opened them, he closed them again and slept for what felt like a week or a year. It was impossible to tell. He heard faint voices, faint noises; faint smells trickled in: camphor, alcohol. Alexander dreamed of his first roller coaster, the stupendous Cyclone on the shores of Revere Beach in Massachusetts. He dreamed of the sand on Nantucket Sound. There was a short wooden boardwalk, and on this boardwalk they sold cotton candy. He bought three red cotton candies and ate them in his dreams, and every once in a while something would smell not like cotton candy and not like the salt water, and instead of looking forward to a roller coaster, or swimming, or playing cops and robbers under the boardwalk, Alexander started trying to place the smell.