“What did I say!” Mama bellowed.
Dasha leaned over and whispered to Tatiana, “Wait until you meet him. You’ve never met anybody so handsome.”
“You mean better-looking than that Sergei you tortured me with? Didn’t you tell me he was so handsome?”
“Stop it,” hissed Dasha, smacking Tatiana’s leg.
“Of course.” Tatiana grinned. “And wasn’t that just last week?”
“You’ll never understand because you are still an incorrigible child.” There was another smack. Mama yelled. The girls stopped.
Tatiana’s father, Georgi Vasilievich Metanov, came in. A short man in his forties, he sported a full head of untidy black hair that was just beginning to turn to salt and pepper. Dasha got her curly hair from Papa. He walked past the bed, glanced vacantly at Tatiana, her legs still under the sheets, and said, “Tania, it’s noon. Get up. Or there’s going to be trouble. I need you dressed in two minutes.”
“That’s easy,” Tatiana replied, jumping up on the bed and showing her family that she was still wearing her shirt and skirt from yesterday. Dasha and Mama shook their heads; Mama nearly smiled.
Papa looked away toward the window. “What are we going to do with her, Irina?”
Nothing, Tatiana thought, nothing as long as Papa looks the other way.
“I need to get married,” Dasha said, still sitting on the bed. “So I can finally have a room of my own to get dressed in.”
“You’re joking,” said Tatiana, jumping up and down on the bed. “You’ll just be in here with your husband. Me, you, him, all sleeping in one bed, with Pasha at our feet. Romantic, isn’t it?”
“Don’t get married, Dashenka,” her mother said absentmindedly. “Tania is right for once. We have no room for him.”
Her father said nothing, turning on the radio.
Their long, narrow room had one full bed on which Tatiana and Dasha slept, one sofa on which Mama and Papa slept, and one low metal cot on which Tatiana’s twin brother, Pasha, slept. His cot was at the foot of the girls’ bed, so Pasha called himself their little footdog.
Tatiana’s grandparents, Babushka and Deda, lived in the adjacent room, joined to theirs by a short hallway. Occasionally Dasha would sleep on the small sofa in the hallway if she came in late and didn’t want to disturb her parents and thereby get into trouble the next day. The hall sofa was only about one and a half meters long, more suitable for Tatiana to sleep on, since she was just over one and a half meters long herself. But Tatiana didn’t need to sleep in the hall because she rarely came in late, whereas Dasha was a different story.
“Where’s Pasha?” Tatiana asked.
“Finishing breakfast,” Mama replied. She couldn’t stop moving. While Papa sat on the old sofa, still as a building, Mama bustled all around him, picking up empty packs of cigarettes, straightening books on the shelf, wiping down the little table with her hand. Tatiana continued to stand on the bed. Dasha continued to sit.
The Metanovs were lucky—they had two rooms and a sectioned-off part of the communal hallway. Six years earlier they had built a door to partition the very end of the corridor. It was almost like having an apartment of their own. The Iglenkos down the hall had to sleep six to a large room—off the corridor. Now that was unlucky.
The sunshine filtered in through the billowing white curtains.
Tatiana knew there would be only an instant, a brief flicker of time that bathed her with the possibilities of the day. In a moment it would all be gone. And in a moment it all was. Still… that sun streaking through the room, the distant rumble of buses through the open window, the slight wind.
This was the part of Sunday that Tatiana loved most: the beginning.
Pasha walked in with Deda and Babushka. Despite being Tatiana’s twin, he looked nothing like her. A compact, dark-haired boy, a smaller version of their father, he acknowledged Tatiana by casually nodding in her direction and mouthing, “Nice hair.”
Tatiana stuck out her tongue. She just hadn’t brushed and tied it up yet.
Pasha sat on his low cot, and Babushka snuggled up next to him. Because she was the tallest of the Metanovs, the whole family deferred to her in all matters except matters of morality, in which everyone deferred to Deda. Babushka was imposing, no-nonsense, and silver-haired. Deda was humble and dark and kind. He sat next to Papa on the sofa and murmured, “It’s something big, son.”
Papa nodded anxiously.
Mama continued to clean anxiously.
Tatiana watched Babushka stroke Pasha’s back. “Pasha,” Tatiana whispered, crawling to the edge of the bed and pulling on her brother. “Want to go to Tauride Park later? I’ll beat you in war.”
“Dream on,” said Pasha. “You will never beat me.”
The radio began to make a series of clicking sounds. It was 12:30 p.m. on June 22, 1941.
“Tania, be quiet and sit down,” Papa ordered his daughter. “It’s about to begin. Irina, you, too. Sit.”
Comrade Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin’s Foreign Minister, began:
Men and women, citizens of the Soviet Union—the Soviet government and its head, Comrade Stalin, have instructed me to make the following announcement. At 4 a.m., without declaration of war and without any claims being made on the Soviet Union, German troops attacked our country, attacked our frontier in many places, and bombed from the air Shitomir, Kiev, Sevastopol, Kaunas, and other cities. This attack has been made despite the fact that there was a nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, a pact the terms of which were scrupulously observed by the Soviet Union. We have been attacked, although during the period of the pact the German Government had not made the slightest complaint about the USSR’s not carrying out its obligations…
The government calls upon you, men and women citizens of the Soviet Union, to rally even more closely around the glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet government and our great leader, Comrade Stalin. Our cause is just. The enemy will be crushed. Victory will be ours.
The radio went dead, and the family sat in stunned and heavy silence.
Finally Papa said, “Oh, my God.” And from the sofa he stared at Pasha.
Mama said, “We have to immediately go and get our money out of the bank.”
Babushka Anna said, “Not evacuation again. Can we survive another one? Almost better to stay in the city.”
Deda said, “Can I even get another evacuation teaching post? I’m nearly sixty-four. It’s time to die, not move.”
Dasha said, “The Leningrad garrison doesn’t go to war, right? The war comes to the Leningrad garrison?”
Pasha said, “War! Tania, did you hear? I’m going to enlist. I’m going to go and fight for Mother Russia.”
Before Tatiana could say what she was thinking—which was an immeasurably excited “Wow!”—her father jumped up off the sofa and, responding only to Pasha, exclaimed, “What are you thinking? Who do you think will take you?”
“Come on, Papochka,” said Pasha with a smile. “The war always needs good men.”
“Good men, yes. Not children,” barked Papa as he kneeled on the floor, looking under Tatiana and Dasha’s bed.
“War, why, that’s not possible,” Tatiana said slowly. “Didn’t Comrade Stalin sign a peace treaty?”
Mama poured tea and said, “Tania, it’s for real. It’s for real.”
Tatiana tried to keep the thrill out of her voice when she said, “Will we have to… evacuate?”
Papa pulled an old, ratty suitcase from under the bed.
“So soon?” said Tatiana.
She knew of evacuation from the stories Deda and Babushka had told her of the unrest around the time of the Revolution of 1917, when they went just west of the Ural Mountains to live in a village whose name Tatiana could never remember. Waiting for the train with all their belongings, crowding in, crossing the Volga on barges…