A WINDOW TO THE WEST

AFTER Alexander left, Tatiana wrote to him every day until her ink ran out. When her ink ran out, she went across the street to Vania Rechnikov’s apartment. She had heard he had ink he lent sometimes. Vania was dead at his writing table. He had put his head down on the letter he had been writing and died. Tatiana couldn’t pry the pen from his stiff fingers.

Tatiana went to the post office every day in hopes of hearing from Alexander. She couldn’t take the silence in between the letters. Alexander wrote her a stream, but the stream would come in a flood instead of a steady trickle. The damn mail.

She stayed in her room when she was not working and practiced her English. During air raids she read her mother’s cookbook. Tatiana started cooking dinner for Inga, who was sick and alone.

One afternoon the postmaster wouldn’t give her any of Alexander’s letters, offering her not only his letters but a bag of potatoes, too, in return for something from her.

She wrote to Alexander about it, afraid that none of his future letters would get through.

Tania,

Please go to the barracks and ask for Lieutenant Oleg Kashnikov. He is on base duty, I think from eight to six. He has three bullets lodged in his leg and can’t fight anymore. He is the one who helped me dig you out in Luga. Ask him for some food. I promise he won’t ask for anything in return. Oh, Tatia.

Also, give him your letters, and he will bring them to me in a day. Please don’t go to the post office.

What do you mean, Inga is alone? Where is Stan?

Why are you still working such crazy hours? The winter is getting harsher.

I wish you knew how much solace I have thinking of you not too far from me. I’m not going to tell you that you were right to come back to Leningrad, but . . . Did I mention that we were promised ten days off after we broke the blockade?

Ten days, Tania!

I wish until then there were a place you could be comforted. But you hang on until then.

Don’t be worried about me, we’re not doing anything but bringing troops and munitions in for our assault on the Neva sometime very early in the new year.

Wait till you hear this! I don’t even know what I did to deserve it, but I’ve received not only another medal but a promotion to go with it. Maybe Dimitri is right about me — somehow I manage to turn even a defeat into a victory, don’t know how.

We’re testing the ice on the Neva. The ice doesn’t seem strong enough. It’ll hold up a man, a rifle, maybe a Katyusha, but will it hold a tank?

We think yes. Then no. Then yes. Then one general engineer who had been designing the Leningrad subway gets the idea to put the tank on a wooden outrigger, flat wood boards on ice, sort of a wooden railroad, to distribute the pressure from the treads evenly. The tanks and all the armored vehicles would use this outrigger to cross. All right, we say.

We build the outrigger.

Who is going to drive the tank out on the water to test it?

I step up and say, sir, I’ll be glad to do it.

The next day my commander is not pleased at all when all five generals show up for our little demonstration. Including Dimitri’s new friend. Commander motions to me: don’t blow it.

So here I go, I get into our best and heaviest, the KV-1 — you remember them, Tatia? And I drive this monster out onto the ice with my commander walking beside the tank and the five generals right behind us, saying, well done, well done, well done.

I went about 150 meters, and then the ice started to crack. I heard it and thought, oops. The generals from the back yelled at my commander, run, run!

So he ran, they ran, the tank broke a canyon in the ice and sank into it, like a, well, like a tank.

Me with it.

The turret was open, so I swam up.

The commander pulled me out and gave me a swig of vodka to warm me up.

One general said, give this man the order of the Red Star. I’ve also been made a major.

Marazov says I have become really insufferable. He says I think everyone should listen only to me. You tell me — does that sound like me?

Alexander

Dearest MAJOR Belov!

Yes, Major, it does sound like you.

I’m very proud of you. You’ll be a general yet.

Thank you for letting me give my letters to Oleg. He is a very nice, polite man and yesterday even gave me some dehydrated eggs, which I found amusing and didn’t know quite what to do with. I added water to them, they’re kind of — oh, I don’t know. I cooked them without oil on Slavin’s Primus. Ate them. They were rubbery.

But Slavin liked them and said Tsar Nicholas would have enjoyed them in Sverdlovsk. Sometimes I don’t know about our crazy Slavin.

Alexander — there is one place I’m comforted. I wake up there, and I go to sleep there; I am at peace there, and loved there: your subsuming arms.

Tatiana