Tatiana drove down the marshy wooded path, carefully and uncertainly, with both hands clutching the big wheel and her feet barely reaching the three pedals. Finding the road that stretched along the Gulf of Finland from Lisiy Nos to Vyborg was easy. There was only one road. All she had to do was head west. And west she could find by the location of the gloomy, barely interested March sun.
In Vyborg she showed her Red Cross credentials to a sentry and asked for fuel and directions to Helsinki. She thought he asked her about her face, pointing to it, but since she didn’t speak Finnish, she didn’t answer and drove on, this time on a wide paved road, stopping at eight sentry points to show her documents and the wounded doctor in the back. She drove for four hours until she reached Helsinki, Finland, in late afternoon.
The first thing she saw was the lit-up Church of St. Nicholas, up on a hill overlooking the harbor. She stopped to ask directions to “Helsingin Yliopistollinen Keskussairaala,” the Helsinki University Hospital. She knew how to say it in Finnish, she just couldn’t understand the directions in Finnish. After she’d made five stops for directions, finally someone spoke enough English to tell her the hospital was behind the lit-up church. She could find that.
Dr. Sayers was well known and loved at the hospital where he had worked since the war of 1940. The nurses brought a stretcher for him and asked Tatiana all sorts of questions she did not understand: most of them in English, some in Finnish, none in Russian.
At the hospital she met another American Red Cross doctor, Sam Leavitt, who took one look at the gash in her face and said she needed stitches. He offered her a local anesthetic. Tatiana refused. “Suture away, Doctor,” she said.
“You’ll need about ten stitches,” the doctor said.
“Only ten?”
He stitched her cheek as she sat mutely and motionlessly on a hospital bed. Afterward he offered her some antibiotic, some painkiller, and some food. She took the antibiotic. She did not eat the food, showing Leavitt her swollen and bloody tongue. “Tomorrow,” she whispered. “Tomorrow it will be better. Tomorrow I will eat.”
The nurses brought her not only a new, clean, oversize uniform that hid her stomach but also warm stockings and a flannel undershirt, and they even offered to launder her old, soiled clothes. Tatiana gave them the uniform and her woolen coat but kept her Red Cross armband.
Later Tatiana lay on the floor by Dr. Sayers’s bed. The night nurse finally came in and asked her to go and sleep in another room, lifting her and leading her out. Tatiana allowed herself to be led out, but as soon as the nurse went down the hall to her station, Tatiana returned to Dr. Sayers.
In the morning he was worse and she was better. She got her old uniform back, starched and white, and managed to eat a bit of food. She remained all day with Dr. Sayers, staring out the window to the patch of the iced-over Gulf of Finland she could see past the stone buildings and the bare trees. Dr. Leavitt came in the late afternoon to check on her face and to ask her if she wanted to go and lie down. She refused. “Why are you sitting here? Why don’t you go get some rest yourself?”
Turning her head to Matthew Sayers, Tatiana didn’t reply, thinking, because that’s what I do—then, now. I sit by the dying.
At night Sayers was worse still. He had a high fever of nearly 42°C, and was parched and sweaty. The antibiotics weren’t helping him. Tatiana didn’t understand what was happening to him. All she wanted was for him to regain consciousness. She fell asleep in the chair next to his bed, her head near him.
In the middle of the night she woke up, feeling suddenly that Dr. Sayers wasn’t going to make it. His breathing—it was too familiar to her by now, the last gasping rattles of a dying man. Tatiana took his hand and held it. She placed her hand on his head, and with her broken tongue whispered to him in Russian, in English, about America and about all the things he would see when he got better. He opened his eyes and said in a weak voice that he was cold. She went and got him another blanket. He squeezed her hand. “I’m so sorry, Tania,” he whispered, rapidly breathing through his mouth.
“No, I’m so sorry,” she said inaudibly. Then louder, “Dr. Sayers,” she said. “Matthew…” She tried to keep her voice from cracking. “I beg you—please tell me what happened to my husband. Did Dimitri betray him? Was he arrested? We’re in Helsinki. We’re out of the Soviet Union. I’m not going back. I want so little for myself.” She bent her head into his arm. “I just want a little comfort,” she whispered.
“Go to… America, Tania.” His voice was fading. “That will be his comfort.”
“Comfort me with the truth. Did you really see him in the lake?”
The doctor stared at her for a long moment with an expression that looked to Tatiana to be one of understanding and disbelief, and then he closed his eyes. Tatiana felt his hand trembling in hers, heard his breath sputtering in his chest. Soon it stopped.
Tatiana didn’t let go of his hand until morning.
A nurse came in and gently led Tatiana away, and in the hall she put her arms around Tatiana and said, in English, “Honey, you can do your very best for people, and they still die. We’re at war. You can’t save everybody, you know.”
Sam Leavitt approached her in the hall on the way to his rounds, asking her what she intended to do. Tatiana said she needed to get back to America. Leavitt stared at her and said, “Back to America?” Leaning toward her, he said, “Listen, I don’t know where Matthew found you, your English is pretty good, but it’s not that good. Are you really an American?”
Paling, Tatiana nodded.
“Where is your passport? Can’t get back without a passport.”
She stared at him mutely.
“Besides, it’s too dangerous now. The Germans bomb the Baltic mercilessly.”
“Yes.”
“Ships go down all the time.”
“Yes.”
“Why don’t you stay here till April, work until the ice melts? Your face has to heal. The stitches need to come out. And we could use another pair of hands. Stay in Helsinki.”
Tatiana shook her head.
“You’ll have to stay here anyway until we get you a new passport. Do you want me to take you to Senate Square later? I’ll take you to the U.S. consulate. It’ll take them at least a month to issue you new documents. By that time the ice will have melted. Getting to America is hard these days.”
Tatiana knew that the U.S. State Department, digging around to find a Jane Barrington, would discover only that she was not Jane Barrington. Alexander told her they could not stay a second in Helsinki—the NKVD had a long arm. Alexander said that they had to get to Stockholm. Shaking her head, Tatiana backed away from the doctor.
She left the hospital, carrying her backpack, her nurse’s bag, her Jane Barrington travel documents. She walked to the semicircular south harbor in Helsinki and sat on the bench, watching the vendors at Market Square pack up their carts and their tables and sweep the square clean.
Calm descended again.
The seagulls screeched overhead.
Tatiana sat on the bench and waited interminable hours until night fell, and then she got up and walked past a narrow street leading up to the gleaming Church of St. Nicholas. She barely glanced at it.
In the dark she meandered up and down the harbor until she spotted trucks with the blue-and-white Swedish flag, loading small amounts of lumber lying in piles on the ground. There was quite a bit of activity in the harbor. Tatiana could see that night was the time for the supplies to get across the Baltic. She knew that the trucks did not travel by day, when it was easy to spot them. Though the Germans generally did not bomb neutral trade vessels, sometimes they did. Sweden had finally started sending all its shipping and trucking trade with protective convoys. Alexander told her that.