“You’re welcome,” said Tatiana in a dull voice. If he was in Dasha’s life again, he would be in her life again.

Why did that feel so hollow?

“Tania… do you think Pasha is alive somewhere?”

Tatiana thought of the leaflets floating down from the sky like confetti, of the shells exploding in midair like metal rain, of the bleakness of the artillery guns pointed at her and at Alexander. And at Pasha.

“I don’t think so,” said Tatiana, closing her eyes. Whatever had happened to him, Pasha felt permanently lost.

Tatiana’s eyes were still closed an hour later when she thought she heard the door creak. As she opened her eyes, Alexander was sitting on her bed. How did he do that, carry his body and his rifle with such quiet?

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Came to see how you were.”

“You just leave Dasha?”

He nodded. “I’m on my way to St. Isaac’s. I do air-raid duty above the dome, in the rotunda arcade. Until one. Petrenko is on duty before me. He is a good soldier. He covers me if I’m a little late.” St. Isaac’s Cathedral was the tallest structure in Leningrad.

“What are you doing here?” Tatiana repeated.

“Wanted to make sure you were all right. And I wanted to talk to you about Dasha—”

“I’m great. Really. And you shouldn’t do this. Come around like this. Dasha is right. I’ve made enough of a mess already. You shouldn’t be late for your patrol.”

“Don’t worry about me. How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” she said, glaring at him. “You’re quite the hero, aren’t you, Alexander?” she said. “My family thinks Dasha could not have done better.” Tatiana lowered her eyes.

“Tatia…”

“She told me that you two are back together,” Tatiana said with false brightness. “Why not? With the war so close, what have you got to lose, right? The whole Luga fiasco really worked out all the way around.”

“Tatia…”

“Don’t Tatia me,” she snapped.

Alexander sighed. “What would you like me to do?”

“Just leave me alone, Alexander.”

“How can I, Tatiana?”

“I don’t know. But you better find a way. And you see how solicitous Di-mitri is being? This has brought out all his best qualities, too,” Tatiana said. “I never knew he could be so kind.”

“Yes, he’s kissing you kindly,” said Alexander, his eyes darkening.

“He is being very kind.”

“And you’re letting him.”

“Oh?” Tatiana said, “Well, at least I’m not knocking him.”

Alexander sucked in his breath. So did Tatiana. She couldn’t believe herself.

“What?” he said scathingly. “Is that next for you two?”

Shaken, she did not reply.

A nurse came in and left the door open, “for some fresh air.”

When they were alone again, he said, “Tania, I don’t know what you want me to do. I told you from the beginning, let’s not play this game.” He paused. “But now it’s too late. Now Dimitri—” Alexander broke off, shaking his head. “Now it’s become doubly difficult.”

All she wanted was for him to kiss her again. “Which leads me for the third time to my next question,” she said angrily. “What are you doing here?”

“Don’t be upset.”

“I’m not upset!”

Alexander lifted his hand to touch her. She whirled her face away.

“Oh,” he said, getting up. “From me you turn away.” He was at the door when he spun around. “And for your information,” he barked, “it’s impossible for you to be knocking him.”

Tatiana was told by vivacious Vera that she would have to remain in the hospital until the middle of August, until her ribs healed enough for her to walk around on crutches. Her shinbone was fractured in three places and had been set in a cast from her knee to her toes.

Tatiana’s family brought her food, which she ate with relish. Pirozhki with cabbage, chicken cutlets, some hamburger patties, and blueberry pie, which she didn’t enjoy as much as she used to, having practically lived on blueberries during her stint in the volunteer army.

First Mama and Papa visited her every day. Soon it became every other day. Dasha would breeze in, radiant, healthy, cheerful, arm in arm with the uniformed Lieutenant Alexander Belov, kiss Tatiana on the head, and say she really couldn’t stay. Dimitri would come over and, with his arm around her, sit by her side and then leave with them.

One night when to pass the time the four of them were playing cards, Dasha told Tatiana that her dentist had evacuated. He had asked Dasha to come with him to Sverdlovsk on the other side of the Urals, but Dasha had refused, finding work instead with Mama at the uniform factory. “Now I can’t evacuate. I’m indispensable to the war effort, too,” said Dasha, smiling at Alexander and showing Tatiana a handful of gold teeth.

“Where did you get those?” Tatiana asked.

Dasha replied that she got them as payment from the patients who came to the dentist in the last month, asking that the gold be taken out of their mouths.

“You took their gold teeth?” Tatiana asked with surprise.

“The gold teeth were my payment,” Dasha said unapologetically. “We can’t all be so pure as you.”

Tatiana didn’t pursue it. Who was she to pontificate to Dasha?

Tatiana changed the subject to war. War was like weather—always something to talk about. Alexander said the Luga line was about to fall any day, and she again felt the stamp of failure. All that effort on the part of thousands, only to have it crumble in a few days. She stopped asking. Being in the hospital imbued her with a sense of the unreal, even more than being in the deserted Dohotino village. She was stuck between four gray walls with a window, and she saw no one except the people who sporadically came to see her. She knew nothing except what she chose to ask about. Maybe if she didn’t ask about war, by the time she left the hospital, the war would somehow be over.

And then what? Tatiana would ask herself.

Nothing, she would answer in the dark of night. Nothing except the life I had. I’ll go back to work. Maybe next year I’ll go to university, as I planned. Yes, I’ll go to university, I’ll study English, and I’ll meet someone. I’ll meet some nice Russian university student who is studying to be an engineer. We’ll get married and go to live with his mother and grandmother in their communal apartment. And then we’ll have a child.

Tatiana could not imagine that life. She could not imagine any life except this hospital bed, except this hospital window facing the buildings on Grechesky Prospekt, except eating oatmeal for breakfast and soup for lunch and boiled chicken for dinner. All she wanted was for Alexander to come and see her on his own. She wanted to say she was wrong, to say she had no right to behave badly. She wanted to feel him close to her again.

She read Zoshchenko’s funny short stories about the ironic realities of Soviet life but couldn’t find any humor in them all of a sudden.

Tatiana lay in her room day in and day out, and the days were long, and at night she couldn’t sleep. The tears she saw in her mother’s eyes ate at her heart, and the silence of her father ate at her even more. The feeling of failure over Pasha sickened her. But the absence of Alexander ate at Tatiana most of all.

At first she was sorry, then she was angry, then she was angry at herself for being angry. Then she felt hurt. Finally she felt resigned.

And it was on the day she felt resigned that Alexander came in the middle of the afternoon when she wasn’t expecting him at all—right after lunch—and brought her an ice cream.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

“You’re welcome,” he replied just as quietly, and then sat in the chair by her bed and watched her eat it. “I’m on city patrol,” he said. “I’m walking around the streets, making sure the windows are all taped, checking to see if there are any strange disturbances.”