After she came home that night, Tatiana struck up a conversation with her father about evacuation and about Pasha.

Papa listened to her long enough for him to take three puffs of his cigarette. Tatiana counted. Then he got up and, stubbing out the cigarette to punctuate his words, said, “Tanyusha, where in hell are you getting your ideas from? The Germans are not coming here. I’m not going away from here. And Pasha is safe. I know it. Listen, if it will make you feel better, Mama will call him tomorrow to make sure all is well. All right?”

Deda said, “Tania, I did ask to be evacuated east to the Molotov Oblast near the Urals. I have a cousin in Molotov.”

“He’s been dead for ten years, Vasili,” said Babushka, shaking her large head. “Since the hunger of ’31.”

“His wife still lives there.”

“She died of dysentery in ’28.”

“That was his second wife. His first wife, Naira Mikhailovna, still lives there.”

“Not in Molotov. Remember? She lives where we used to live, in that village called—”

“Woman!” Deda interrupted. “Do you want to come with me or not?”

“I’ll come with you, Deda,” Tatiana said brightly. “Is Molotov nice?”

“I’ll come with you, too, Vasili,” said Babushka, “but don’t pretend we have people in Molotov. We might as well go to Chukhotka.”

Tatiana intervened. “Chukhotka… isn’t that near the Arctic circle?”

“Yes,” said Deda.

“Isn’t that near the Bering Strait?”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Well, maybe we should go to Chukhotka,” Tatiana said. “If we have to go somewhere.”

“Chukhotka? Who is going to let me go there?” Deda exclaimed. “Do you think I can teach math there?”

“Tania is a fool,” agreed Mama.

Tatiana fell quiet. She wasn’t thinking about Deda teaching math. She was thinking about something ridiculous. So outlandish that if she weren’t in front of her judgmental family, she would have laughed.

“Why are you thinking about the Bering Strait, Tania?” asked Deda.

“She always thinks about preposterous things,” Dasha piped in. “She’s got a preposterous inner life.”

“I have no inner life, Dasha,” said Tatiana. “What’s on the other side of the Bering Strait?”

“Why, Alaska,” said Deda. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Yes, Tania, shut up, will you?” said Mama.

The next night Tatiana’s father came home with ration cards for the family. “Can you believe it?” he said. “Rations already. Well, we can manage. They’re not bad, actually.” Workers got 800 grams of bread a day. Also, one kilo of meat a week and half a kilo of cereals. It seemed like plenty of food.

“Mama, did you try to call Pasha?” Tatiana wanted to know.

“I did,” she replied. “I even went to the intercity telephone bureau on Ulitsa Zhelyabova. Couldn’t get through. I’ll try again tomorrow.”

Information from the front was ominous. The war bulletins—posted all over Leningrad on wooden boards where the daily papers had once been posted—were haunting in their vagueness. The radio announcer said that the Red Army was winning but the German forces were gaining some ground.

How could the Red Army be winning if the Germans were gaining ground? Tatiana wondered.

A few days later Deda said the chances were very good that he was going to get the evacuation post in Molotov and suggested that the family start thinking about packing.

“I’m not leaving without Pasha,” snapped Mama. “Besides,” she said, in a calmer voice, “at the uniform factory I’m now making Red Army uniforms. I’m needed for the war effort.” She nodded. “It’s all right. The war will be over soon. You heard on the radio. The Red Army is winning. They’re repelling the enemy.”

Deda shook his head. “Oh, Irina Fedorovna,” he said calmly, “the enemy is the best-armed, best-trained enemy in the world. Have you not heard? En-gland has been fighting them for eighteen months. Alone. England, with their RAF, have not beaten the enemy.”

“Yes, but, Papochka,” interjected Papa coming to the defense of his wife, “now the Nazis are engaged in a real war, not just some air war. The Soviet front is massive. The Germans are going to have a hard time with us.”

“I say we don’t stay to find out how hard.”

Mama repeated, “I’m not leaving.”

Dasha said, “I’m with Mama on this.”

I bet you are, thought Tatiana.

Pasha was no longer there, so he didn’t speak.

They sat in their long, narrow room, Papa and Mama smoking, Baba and Deda shaking their quiet gray heads, Dasha sewing.

Tatiana kept to herself, thinking, well, I am not leaving either.

She was entrenched. She had dug a trench all around herself called Alexander, and she couldn’t leave. Tatiana lived for that evening hour with him that propelled her into her future and into the barely formed, painful feelings that she could neither express nor understand. Friends walking in the lucent dusk. There was nothing more she could have from him, and there was nothing more she wanted from him but that one hour at the end of her long day when her heart beat and her breath was short and she was happy.

At home Tatiana surrounded herself with her family to protect herself, yet withdrew from them, wanting to be away from them. She watched them at night, as she did now, watched their mood, didn’t trust it.

“Mama, did you call Pasha?”

“Yes. I got through. But there was no answer,” Mama said. “No answer at the camp. I think I may have gotten the wrong number. I called the village Dohotino, where the camp was, but there was no answer from the Soviet council there either. I’ll try again tomorrow. Everybody is trying to call. The lines must be overloaded.”

Mama tried again and again, but there was no word from Pasha, and there was no good news from the front, and there was no evacuation.

Alexander stayed away from the apartment at night. Dasha worked late. Dimitri was up near Finland.

But every single day after work Tatiana brushed her hair and ran outside, thinking, please be there, and every single day after work Alexander was. Though he never asked her to go to the Summer Garden anymore or to sit on the bench under the trees with him, his hat was always in his hands.

Exhausted and slow, they meandered from tram to canal to tram, reluctantly parting at Grechesky Prospekt, three blocks away from her apartment building.

During their walks sometimes they talked about Alexander’s America or his life in Moscow, and sometimes they talked about Tatiana’s Lake Ilmen and her summers in Luga, and sometimes they chatted about the war, though less and less because of the anxiety over Pasha, and sometimes Alexander taught Tatiana a little English. Sometimes they told jokes, and sometimes they barely spoke at all. A few times Alexander let Tatiana carry his rifle as a balancing stick while she walked a high ledge on the side of Obvodnoy Canal. “Don’t fall into the water, Tania,” he once said, “because I can’t swim.”

“Is that true?” she asked incredulously, nearly toppling over.

Grabbing the end of his rifle to steady her, Alexander said with a grin, “Let’s not find out, shall we? I don’t want to lose my weapon.”

“That’s all right,” Tatiana said, precariously teetering on the ledge and laughing. “I can swim perfectly well. I’ll save your weapon for you. Want to see?”

“No, thank you.”

And sometimes, when Alexander talked, Tatiana found her lower jaw drifting down and was suddenly and awkwardly aware that she had been staring at him so long that her mouth had dropped open. She didn’t know what to look at when he talked—his caramel eyes that blinked and smiled and shined and were grim or his vibrant mouth that moved and opened and breathed and spoke. Her eyes darted from his eyes to his lips and circled from his hair to his jaw as if they were afraid she would miss something if she didn’t stare at everything all at once.