“What about her?” Alexander said tiredly.

“Was Dasha… ?” Tatiana couldn’t get the words out.

“Tatia, please,” said Alexander, shaking his head. “Don’t think about these things. Ask Dasha what kind of a girl she was. I’m not the one to tell you.”

“Alexander, but Dasha is an entanglement!” Tatiana exclaimed. “Dasha does have strings attached to her. Dasha has her heart.”

“No,” he said. “She has you.”

Tatiana sighed heavily. This was too hard for her—talking about Alexander and her sister. Hearing about Alexander and meaningless girls was easier than hearing about one Dasha. Tatiana sat with her hands around her knees. She wanted to ask him about the present time but couldn’t get the words out. She didn’t want to ask him about anything. She wanted to go back to how it was before the night in the hospital, before the wretched confusion of her body blinded her to the truth she felt about him.

Alexander rubbed her thighs. “I can feel you’re afraid.” Quietly, he added, “Tania, I beg you—don’t let stupidity come between us.”

“All right,” she said with remorse.

“Don’t let bullshit that has nothing to do with us keep you away from me. We already have so much keeping you away from me.” He paused. “Everything.”

“All right, Alexander.”

“Let it all fall away, Tatiana. What are you afraid of?”

“I’m afraid of being wrong about you,” she whispered.

“Tania, how could you of all people be wrong about me?” Alexander clenched his fists in frustration. “Can’t you see,” he said, “it’s exactly because of who I had been that I came to you? What’s the matter?” he asked. “You couldn’t see my loneliness?”

“Barely,” Tatiana replied, clutching her hands to her chest, “through my own.” Falling back against the railing, Tatiana said, “Shura, I’m surrounded by half-truth and innuendo. You and I don’t have a moment to talk anymore, like we used to, a moment to be alone—”

“A moment of privacy,” said Alexander, speaking the last word in English.

“Of what?” She didn’t know that word. She would have to look it up when she got home. “What about now? Besides Dasha, are you still—”

“Tatiana,” said Alexander, “all the things you’re worried about—they’re gone from my life. Do you know why? Because when I met you, I knew that if I continued and a good girl like you ever asked me about them, I wouldn’t be able to look you in the face and tell you the truth. I would have to look you in the face and lie.” He was looking into her face. The wordless truth was in his eyes.

Tatiana smiled at him and breathed out, the tight, sick feeling in her stomach dissolving with her exhaled breath. She wanted him to come and hug her. “I’m sorry, Alexander,” she whispered. “I’m sorry for my doubt. I’m just too young.”

“You’re too much of everything,” he said. “God!” he exclaimed. “How insane this is—never to have the time to explain, to talk anything out, never to have a minute—”

We’ve had a minute, Tatiana thought. We had our minutes on the bus. And at Kirov. We had our minutes in Luga. And in the Summer Garden. Breathless minutes, we had. What we want, she thought, keeping herself from welling up, is eternity.

“I’m sorry, Shura,” Tatiana said, grasping his hands. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Tania, if only we could have a moment of privacy,” Alexander said, again speaking the last word in English, “you would never doubt me again.”

“What is this privacy?” she repeated.

Alexander smiled sadly. “Being secluded from the view or from the presence of other human beings. When we need to be alone together to have intimacy, that’s impossible in two rooms with six other people,” he explained in Russian. “We say, we want some privacy.”

“Oh.” Tatiana blushed. So that was the word she had been searching for, ever since she met him! “There is no word for anything like that in Russian.”

“I know,” he said.

“And there is a word for this in America?”

“Yes,” said Alexander. “Privacy.”

Tatiana remained silent.

Alexander slid closer, putting both his legs around her. “Tania, when will we next have a moment alone?” he asked, peering into her eyes.

“We’re alone now,” she said.

“When will I next be able to kiss you?”

“Kiss me now,” she whispered.

But Alexander didn’t. He said grimly, “Do you know that it might be never? The Germans are here. Do you know what that means? Life, as you knew it, is over.”

“What about this summer?” she asked. “Nothing’s been quite the same since June 22.”

“No, it hasn’t,” he agreed. “But before today we were simply arming ourselves. Now it’s war. Leningrad will be the battleground for your freedom. And at the end, how many of us will be left standing? How many of us will be free?”

Oh, God. “Is that why you come every chance you get, even if it means dragging Dimitri with you?” Tatiana asked.

With a small nod and a large sigh, Alexander said, “I’m always afraid it’ll be the last time I’m going to see your face.”

Tatiana swallowed, curled into her knees. “Why… do you always drag him with you?” she asked. “Can’t you ask him to leave me alone? He doesn’t listen to me. What am I going to do with him?”

Alexander made no reply, and Tatiana anxiously tried to catch his eye. “Tell me about Dimitri, Shura,” she said quietly. “What do you owe him?”

Alexander looked at his cigarettes.

Faintly Tatiana said, “Do you owe him… me?”

“Tatiana,” Alexander said, “Dimitri knows who I am.”

“Stop,” she uttered almost inaudibly.

“If I tell you, you won’t believe it,” Alexander said. “Once I tell you, there will be no going back for us.”

“There is no going back for us now,” Tatiana said, and wanted to mouth a prayer.

“I don’t know what to do about him,” Alexander said.

“I will help you,” said Tatiana, her heart scared and swelling. “Tell me.”

Alexander moved away on the narrow balcony to sit diagonally across from her against the wall, stretching his legs out to her. Tatiana continued to sit against the railing. She sensed he didn’t want her too close. Taking off her one shoe, Tatiana stretched her bare feet out to his boots. Her foot was half the size of his.

Shuddering as if trying to stave off a beast, Alexander began. “When my mother was arrested,” he said, not looking at Tatiana, “the NKVD came for me, too. I wasn’t even able to say good-bye to her.” Alexander looked away. “I don’t like to talk about my mother, as you can imagine. I was accused of distributing some capitalist propaganda when I had been fourteen, still in Moscow, and going to Communist Party meetings with my father. So at seventeen, in Leningrad, I was arrested and taken right to Kresty, the inner-city prison for nonpolitical criminals. They didn’t have room for me at Shpalerka, the Big House, the political detention center. I was convicted in camera in about three hours,” Alexander said with scorn. “They didn’t even bother with an interrogation. I think all their interrogators were tied up with more important prisoners. I got ten years in Vladivostok. Can you imagine?”

“No,” said Tatiana.

“You know how many of us finally got on that train headed for Vladivostok? A thousand. One man said to me, ‘Oh, I just got out, and now this again.’ He told me the prison camp we were going to had 80,000 people in it. Eighty thousand, Tania! One camp. I told him I didn’t believe it. I had just turned seventeen.” Alexander looked at her. “Like you are now.” He continued, “What could I do? I couldn’t spend ten years of my youth in prison, could I?”

“No,” she said.

“I had always believed, you see, that I was meant to live a good life. My mother and father believed in me. I believed in myself—” He broke off. “Prison never entered into it. I never stole, I never broke windows, I didn’t terrorize old ladies. I did nothing wrong. I wasn’t going. So,” he said, “we were crossing the river Volga, near Kazan, thirty meters up over a precipice. I knew it was either now or I was going to Vladivostok for what seemed to me like the rest of my life. I had too much hope for myself. So I jumped right into the river.” Alexander laughed. “They didn’t even stop the train. They thought for sure I had died in the fall.”