“Right.”
“Edward—”
“It’s Dr. Ludlow to you!” Brenda, the nurse, exclaimed loudly.
“Nurse! Let her call me Edward if she wants. What do you care?”
Huffing, Brenda left, and Edward took a small towel and wiped Tatiana’s tears. “I know you must be sad. It is frightening. But I have a good feeling about you. Everything is going to be just fine.” He smiled. “I promise.”
Through her grieving green eyes, Tatiana looked at the doctor and said, “You Americans do like to promise.”
Nodding, Edward said, “Yes, and we always keep our word. Now, let me get our Public Heath Department administrative nurse for you. If Vikki is a little grouchy, don’t worry. She’s having a bad day, but she’s got a good heart. She’ll bring you the birth certificate papers.” Edward stared at the boy warmly. “He’s a cute one. Look, he’s got a full head of hair. A miracle, isn’t it? Have you thought about a name for him?”
“Yes,” said Tatiana, weeping into her baby’s black hair. “He is going to have his father’s name. Anthony Alexander Barrington.”
Soldier! Let me cradle your head and caress your face, let me kiss your dear sweet lips and cry across the seas and whisper through the icy Russian grass how I feel for you… Luga, Ladoga, Leningrad, Lazarevo . . . Alexander, once you carried me, and now I carry you. Into my eternity, now I carry you.
Through Finland, through Sweden, to America, hand outstretched, I stand and limp forward, the galloping steed black and riderless in my wake. Your heart, your rifle, they will comfort me, they’ll be my cradle and my grave.
Lazarevo drips you into my soul, dawn drop by moonlight drop from the river Kama. When you look for me, look for me there, because that’s where I will be all the days of my life.
“Shura, I can’t bear the thought of you dying,” Tatiana said to him when they were lying on the blanket, having made love by the fire in the dewy morning. “I can’t bear the thought of you not breathing in this world.”
“I’m not crazy about the thought of that myself.” Alexander grinned. “I’m not going to die. You said so yourself. You said I was meant for great things.”
“You are meant for great things,” she replied. “But you better keep yourself alive for me, soldier, because I can’t continue to live without you.” That’s what she said, looking up into his face, her hands on his beating heart.
He bent down and kissed her freckles. “You can’t continue? My cartwheeling queen of Lake Ilmen?” Smiling, he shook his head. “You will find a way to live without me. You will find a way to live for both of us,” Alexander said to Tatiana as the swelling Kama River flowed from the Ural Mountains through a pine village named Lazarevo, once when they were in love, and young.
Appendix
Lev and Maria’s Story
Paullina Simons’s Tribute to Her Grandparents, Survivors of Russia’s Terrible Twentieth Century
My grandparents, Lev and Maria Handler, met in a factory in Leningrad when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-one. Maria was an assembly line worker and Lev was an engineer and designer of engines. They went together for two years before they married in 1934. My father, Yuri, was born in 1936, my uncle, Alex, in 1938. They lived in Leningrad on a street called Fifth Soviet, in the two rooms in a communal apartment that I use as a setting for The Bronze Horseman. There were six of them before World War II began: my grandparents, my father and his brother, and my grandfather’s parents.
My grandmother was one of the very few Soviet women at that time who did not work outside the home. My grandfather did not want an exhausted wife coming home late, and so she stayed home and took care of him, his parents, and her children. She was very happy with that arrangement, “Because it pleased your grandfather.”
In August of 1941, my grandmother with her boys, ages five and two, and her in-laws, rode one of the last trains out of Leningrad. They were evacuated to a small village 1500 miles away in Saratov County on the Volga, a hundred miles north of Stalingrad. My grandfather, a skilled and essential worker, remained in Leningrad. His factory was quickly retrofitted to manufacture airplanes, and he was assigned to design and repair their engines.
During the evacuation, my grandmother became separated from her children and her in-laws – she was aboard one boat on the Volga while they traveled on another. She had all the money (though not for long: she would be robbed during the night) and her in-laws had the documents, the luggage, and the kids. It was several days before they were all reunited at their designated evacuation post, but now they were broke and would remain penniless until my grandfather’s paycheck finally reached the village where they would live out the war.
My grandmother’s mother, Dusia, had stayed behind in Leningrad to be with her partner of thirty years, Mikhail; but only a few weeks after the evacuation he would be dead of tuberculosis. Dusia then moved in to the Fifth Soviet apartment with my grandfather. They lived there during that first terrible winter of the German blockade when half a million Soviet civilians perished from famine and pestilence. My grandfather says that he only survived because of Dusia’s daily excursions across the frozen Neva River to barter with her farmer friends, trading personal items for potatoes.
Believing, however, that he would not make it through another winter in a blockaded city, my grandfather joined the Red Army in the summer of 1942. His talent for repairing all types of engines was much in demand and he became a decorated lieutenant. Dusia remained in Leningrad for the remainder of the war, ever the survivor – until cancer of the stomach claimed her in 1977 at the age of eighty-three.
My grandfather’s father, Wolf Lazarevich, was a professor of mathematics. He died of pneumonia in September of 1943 at the age of sixty-one. During his short time in evacuation, Wolf taught mathematics to the villagers and was so beloved that when he died they gave him a funeral procession – carrying his body above their heads through the village – and a Christian burial (although he was a Jew). My grandfather’s lifelong regret is that he never again saw his father after the day he put him on the evacuation train in 1941. Wolf was already dead by the time his son was finally granted a ten-day furlough to visit his family in their village. To this day, my grandfather grieves for his father and loves him deeply.
After the war was over, my grandparents and my father and uncle lived in Moscow with relatives while Leningrad was being rebuilt. They came back to Fifth Soviet in the late 1940s and continued to live there until 1963. Both my widowed great-grandmothers lived in the rooms with them. My grandfather’s mother died in 1953 of heart failure. In 1962, my father, twenty-six, met my mother, twenty-two, and married her two months later (despite the inconvenience of a prior wedding engagement). My parents continued to live separately after their wedding because there was no room for my mother in my grandparents’ rooms.
It was when my mother became pregnant with me (I don’t know how!) that life slightly improved. My grandparents, after spending years on a waiting list, were finally given a small one-bedroom apartment of their own into which they took my great-grandmother. And so my mother, my father, and I, remained in one room on Fifth Soviet while my uncle, my aunt, and their baby lived in the other.
My parents and I left the Soviet Union for America in 1973 and my uncle and his new family soon followed. My grandparents, now retired, missed their children and grandchildren terribly. So in 1979 they accepted my father’s invitation to come and live with us in the United States. My grandfather, then seventy-two, arrived at JFK carrying his prized Soviet fishing rod – because he didn’t think they could make fishing rods like that in America.