Paullina Simons: Tatiana and Alexander

She raised her eyes to the mirror. Behind her Alexander stood. He brushed the hair away from her neck and bent to her. She couldn’t smell him, nor feel his lips on her. Just her eyes saw him, almost felt his black hair on her neck.

Tatiana closed her eyes.

She went and had breakfast at Spivak café, her usual two helpings of bacon, two cups of black coffee, three poached eggs. She pretended to read the English paper she had bought at the kiosk across the street; pretended because the words were gases inside her head, her mind could not catch them. She read better in the afternoon when she was calmer. Leaving the café, she walked to the industrial pier, where she sat on the bench and watched the Swedish dockhand load up his barges full of finished paper to be taken over to Helsinki. She watched the longshoreman steadily. She knew that in a few minutes, he would go off to talk to his friends fifty meters down the pier. He would have a smoke and a small cup of coffee. He would be gone from the barge thirteen minutes. He would leave the covered barge unattended, the plank connected to the cabin of the shipping vessel.

Thirteen minutes later he would come back and continue loading the paper from the truck, wheeling it down the plank on his hand trolley. In sixty-two minutes the captain of the barge would appear; the longshoreman would salute him and untie the ropes. And the captain would take his barge across the thawed Baltic Sea to Helsinki.

This was the seventy-fifth morning Tatiana had watched him.

Helsinki was only four hours from Vyborg. And Tatiana knew from the English newspapers she bought daily that Vyborg—for the first time since 1918—was back in Soviet hands. The Red Army had taken Russia’s Karelian territories back from the Finns. A barge across the sea to Helsinki, a truck across the forests to Vyborg, and she too would be back in Soviet hands.

“Sometimes I wish you were less bloody-minded,” Alexander says. He had managed to receive a three-day furlough. They’re in Leningrad—the last time they’re in Leningrad together, their last everything.

“Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”

He grunts. “Yes. I wish the kettle were less black.” He snorts in frustration. “There are women,” he says, “I know there are, who listen to their men. I’ve seen them. Other men have them—”

She tickles him. He does not seem amused. “All right. Tell me what to do,” she says, lowering her voice two notches. “I will do exactly as you say.”

“Leave Leningrad and go back to Lazarevo instantly,” Alexander tells her. “Go where you will be safe.”

Rolling her eyes, she says, “Come on. I know you can play this game.”

“I know I can,” Alexander says, sitting on her parents’ old sofa. “I just don’t want to. You don’t listen to me about the important things …”

“Those aren’t the important things,” Tatiana says, kneeling in front of him and taking hold of his hands. “If the NKVD come for me, I will know you are gone and I will be happy to stand against the wall.” She squeezes his hands. “I will go to the wall as your wife and never regret a second I spent with you. So let me have this here with you. Let me smell you once more, taste you once more, kiss you once more,” she says. “Now play my game with me, sorrowful as it is to lie down together in wintry Leningrad. Play the miracle with me—to lie down with you at all. Tell me what to do and I will do it.”

Alexander pulls on her hand. “Come here.” He opens his arms. “Sit on top of me.”

She obeys.

“Now take your hands and place them on my face.”

She obeys.

“Put your lips on my eyes.”

She obeys.

“Kiss my forehead.”

She obeys.

“Kiss my lips.”

She obeys. And obeys.

“Tania …”

“Shh.”

“Can’t you see I’m breaking?”

“Ah,” she says. “You’re still in one piece then.”

She sat and watched the dockhand when it was sunny and she sat and watched him when it rained. Or when it was foggy, which is what it was nearly every morning at eight o’clock.

This morning was none of the above. This morning was cold. The pier smelled of fresh water and of fish. The seagulls screeched overhead, a man’s voice shouted.

Where is my brother to help me, my sister, my mother? Pasha, help me, hide in the woods where I know I can find you. Dasha, look what’s happened. Do you even see? Mama, Mama. I want my mother. Where is my family to ask things of me, to weigh on me, to intrude on me, to never let me be silent or alone, where are they to help me through this? Deda, what do I do? I don’t know what to do.

This morning the dockhand did not go over to see his friend at the next pier for a smoke and a coffee. Instead, he walked across the road and sat next to her on the bench.

This surprised her. But she said nothing, she just wrapped her white nurse’s coat tighter around herself, and fixed the kerchief covering her hair.

In Swedish he said to her, “My name is Sven. What’s your name?”

After a longish pause, she replied. “Tatiana. I don’t speak Swedish.”

In English he said to her, “Do you want a cigarette?”

“No,” she replied, also in English. She thought of telling him she spoke little English. She was sure he didn’t speak Russian.

He asked her if he could get her a coffee, or something warm to throw over her shoulders. No and no. She did not look at him.

Sven was silent a moment. “You want to get on my barge, don’t you?” he asked. “Come. I will take you.” He took her by her arm. Tatiana didn’t move. “I can see you have left something behind,” he said, pulling on her gently. “Go and retrieve it.” Tatiana did not move.

“Take my cigarette, take my coffee, or get on my barge. I won’t even turn away. You don’t have to sneak past me. I would have let you on the first time you came. All you had to do was ask. You want to go to Helsinki? Fine. I know you’re not Finnish.” Sven paused. “But you are very pregnant. Two months ago it would have been easier for you. But you need to go back or go forward. How long do you plan to sit here and watch my back?”

Tatiana stared into the Baltic Sea. “If I knew, would I be sitting here?”

“Don’t sit here anymore. Come,” said the longshoreman.

She shook her head.

“Where is your husband? Where is the father of your baby?”

“Dead in the Soviet Union,” Tatiana breathed out.

“Ah, you’re from the Soviet Union.” He nodded. “You’ve escaped somehow? Well, you’re here, so stay. Stay in Sweden. Go to the consulate, get yourself refugee protection. We have hundreds of people getting through from Denmark. Go to the consulate.”

Tatiana shook her head.

“You’re going to have that baby soon,” Sven said. “Go back, or move forward.”

Tatiana’s hands went around her belly. Her eyes glazed over.

The dockhand patted her gently and stood up. “What will it be? You want to go back to the Soviet Union? Why?”

Tatiana did not reply. How to tell him her soul had been left there?

“If you go back, what happens to you?”

“I die most likely,” she barely whispered.

“If you go forward, what happens to you?”

“I live most likely.”

He clapped his hands. “What kind of a choice is that? You must go forward.”

“Yes,” said Tatiana, “but how do I live like this? Look at me. You think, if I could, I wouldn’t?”

“So you’re here in the Stockholm purgatory, watching me move my paper day in and day out, watching me smoke, watching me. What are you going to do? Sit with your baby on the bench? Is that what you want?”