Paullina Simons

Tatiana: "Why did we spend two days fighting when we could have been doing this?"Alexander: "That wasn't fighting, Tatiana. That was foreplay.

Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.

I__ getting off the boat at Coconut Grove. It__ six and you__e not on the dock. I finish up, and start walking home, thinking you__e tied up making dinner, and then I see you and Ant hurrying down the promenade. He is running and you__e running after him. You__e wearing a yellow dress. He jumps on me, and you stop shyly, and I say to you, come on, tadpole, show me what you got, and you laugh and run and jump into my arms. Such a good memory.I love you, babe.

Lupe would have a lot to say about this. I can almost hear her gravelly voice in my head. There is no hate without fear, she'd say. Hate is fear crystallized, fear objectified. We hate what threatens our selves, our dreams, our plans, our freedom, our place in the world, our place in the hearts of the people we love. We fear first. Then we hate.And I know what I would say to her in response. Lupe, I'd say. My troubles are just beginning.

Ask yourself these three questions, Tatiana Metanova, and you will know who you are. Ask: What do believe in? What do you hope for? What do you love?

Though outwardly Kristina maintained that a clean room was a symptom of a diseased mind (for how could she, while studying the world's greatest thinkers, be bothered with such mundane earthly issues as cleaning?), inwardly she hated untidyness and made a point of spending as little time in the room as possible.

War was the ultimate chaos, a pounding, soul-destroying snarl, ending in blown-apart men lying unburied on the cold earth. There was nothing more cosmically chaotic than war.

Alexander moved her off him, laid her down, was over her, was pressed into her, crushing her. Anthony was right there, he didn't care, he was trying to inhale her, trying to absorb her into himself. "All this time you were stepping out in front of me, Tatiana," he said. "Now I finally understand. You hid me on Bethel Island for eight months. For two years you hid me and deceived me - to save me. I am such an idiot," he whispered. "Wretch or not, ravaged or not, in a carapace or not, there you still were, stepping out for me, showing the mute mangled stranger your brave and indifferent face."Her eyes closed, her arms tightened around his neck. "That stranger is my life," she whispered. They crawled away from Anthony, from their only bed, onto a blanket on the floor, barricading themselves behind the table and chairs. "You left our boy to go find me, and this is what you found..." Alexander whispered, on top of her, pushing inside her, searching for peace.Crying out underneath him, Tatiana clutched his shoulders."This is what you brought back from Sachsenhausen." his movement was tense, deep, needful. Oh God. Now there was comfort. "You thought you were bringing back him, but Tania, you brought back me.""Shura...you'll have to do..." Her fingers were clamped into his scars."In you," said Alexander, lowering his lips to her parted mouth and cleaving their flesh, "are the answers to all things."All the rivers flowed into the sea and still the sea was not full.

She ate it and cried.Soon, he put the melting ice cream away."Shura," Tatiana whispered, "darling, forget what should have been. Remember all that was.""Tatiasha, babe," Alexander whispered, coming back to bed to be covered, "my one and only wife, forget our age, our splendid youth, forget it all and let our crazy love make us young.

Marx himself wrote that capitalism produces above all its own gravediggers. Do you think that perhaps he wasn't talking about capitalism?

All great things worth having require great sacrifice worth giving.

What was she thinking?_ muttered Alexander, closing his eyes and imagining his Tania.__he was determined. It was like some kind of a personal crusade with her,_ Ina said. __he gave the doctor a liter of blood for you____here did she get it from?___erself, of course._ Ina smiled. __ucky for you, Major, our Nurse Metanova is a universal donor.__f course she is, thought Alexander, keeping his eyes tightly shut.Ina continued. __he doctor told her she couldn__ give any more, and she said a liter wasn__ enough, and he said, __es, but you don__ have more to give,_ and she said, ____l make more,_ and he said, __o,_ and she said, __es,_ and in four hours, she gave him another half-liter of blood.__lexander lay on his stomach and listened intently while Ina wrapped fresh gauze on his wound.He was barely breathing.__he doctor told her, __ania, you__e wasting your time. Look at his burn. It__ going to get infected._ There wasn__ enough penicillin to give to you, especially since your blood count was solow._ Alexander heard Ina chuckle in disbelief. __o I__ making my rounds late that night, and who do I find next to your bed? Tatiana. She__ sitting with a syringe in her arm, hooked up to acatheter, and I watch her, and I swear to God, you won__ believe it when I tell you, Major, but I see that the catheter is attached to the entry drip in your IV._ Ina__ eyes bulged. __ watch herdraining blood from the radial artery in her arm into your IV. I ran in and said, __re you crazy? Are you out of your mind? You__e siphoning blood from yourself into him?_ She said to me inher calm, I-won__-stand-for-any-argument voice, __na, if I don__, he will die._ I yelled at her. I said, __here are thirty soldiers in the critical wing who need sutures and bandages and their wounds cleaned. Why don__ you take care of them and let God take care of the dead?_ And she said, __e__ not dead. He is still alive, and while he is alive, he is mine._ Can you believe it, Major? But that__ what she said. __h, for God__ sake,_ I said to her. __ine, die yourself. I don__ care._ But the next morning I went to complain to Dr. Sayers that she wasn__ following procedure,told him what she had done, and he ran to yell at her._ Ina lowered her voice to a sibilant, incredulous whisper. __e found her unconscious on the floor by your bed. She was in a dead faint, but you had taken a turn for the better. All your vital signs were up. And Tatiana got up from the floor, white as death itself, and said to the doctor coldly, __aybe now you can give him the penicillin he needs?_ I could see the doctor was stunned. But he did. Gave you penicillin and more plasma and extra morphine. Then he operated on you, to get bits of the shell fragment outof you, and saved your kidney. And stitched you. And all that time she never left his side, or yours. He told her your bandages needed to be changed every three hours to help with drainage,to prevent infection. We had only two nurses in the terminal wing, me and her. I had to take care of all the other patients, while all she did was take care of you. For fifteen days and nights she unwrapped you and cleaned you and changed your dressings. Every three hours. She was a ghost by the end. But you made it. That__ when we moved you to critical care. I said to her, __ania, this man ought to marry you for what you did for him,_ and she said, __ou think so?_ _ Ina tutted again. Paused. __re you all right, Major? Why are you crying?

Do you remember what you're supposed to do now? Kiss the palm of your hand and press it against your heart.

There were other things,too, to ask him. Always she tries to be less forward. Always she tried to find the right thing to say and didn't trust the etiquette pendulum swinging in her head, so she simply said nothing, which was perceived either as painful shyness of haughtiness. Dasha never had that problem. She just said the first thing that came into her head. Tatiana knew she needed to rust her inner voice more. It was certainly loud enough

Tatiana hugged him and said, __nd here__ mine: __oney, what do you prefer__y beautiful body or my beautiful face?__ __our sense of humor,_ returned Alexander, holding her to him until she couldn__ breathe.

When I was in Colditz, that impenetrable fortress, whittling away my life, I wanted to know this.""Looks like you're still there, Shura.""No," he said. "I'm in New York, a fly on the wall, trying to see you without me.

This is days and days and months and years and all the minutes in between, just you me.

I'm not hungry," Alexander whispered. "I'm famished. Watch out for me. Now, don't make a single sound," he said, moving on top of her. "Tania, God....I'll cover your mouth, just like this, and you hold on to me, just like this, and I'm going to-just like this-