Tatiana and Alexander (62 page)

“Shura…”

He loomed over her. “You will come down when I tell you to come down, do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said in a small voice. She tucked the weapon into her slacks and raised her arms. The first branch of the tree was too high for her to reach. He lifted her up, she grabbed on and climbed. He ran
to the trench and lined up all of his pistols and magazines, threaded the ammo belt into the light machine gun he set up on a bipod, wrapping the rest of the belt around himself and finally settling down behind the bipod. The Shpagin was by his side. The belt had 150 rounds in it.

Tatiana climbed as high as she could go. It was hard to see: the linden tree, known for its shade, was leafy in the summer. She broke off some of the softer branches and perched herself astride a thick branch close to the trunk. From her height she could make out the sloping countryside even in the first haze of dawn. The shapes of the men were small and far down below. They were scattered, meters from each other, not a formation but a blot.

“How many?” Alexander called out.

She looked through her binoculars. “Maybe twenty.” Her heart was pulverizing her breastbone. At least twenty, she wanted to add, but didn’t. The dogs she couldn’t see. What she could see, however, was the men holding the dogs, because they were moving faster than the others and more jerkily, as if the dogs were yanking them forward.

“How far now?”

She couldn’t tell how far. They were down below, still small. Alexander would be able to tell how far, she thought, but he can’t do both, spot them and kill them. The Commando had a sight and was extremely accurate, maybe he could spot the dogs with it?

“Shura, can you see the dogs?”

She waited to hear from him. She saw him picking up the Commando, aiming it; there was a sound of two shots being fired and then the barking stopped.

“Yes,” he replied.

Tatiana looked through her binoculars. The commotion below was considerable. The band started dispersing. “They’re moving out!”

But Alexander did not have to be told. He jumped up and opened machine-gun fire. For many seconds that’s all Tatiana heard, the bursts of popping. When he stopped there was a whistling sound, and a grenade exploded a hundred meters below them. The next one exploded fifty meters below them. The next one twenty-five.

“Where, Tania?” he yelled out, machine gun rest still propped against his shoulder.

She kept looking through her binoculars. Her eyes were playing tricks on her. The men now seemed to be crawling in their dark uniforms,
crawling along the ground, moving closer. Were they crawling or writhing?

A few got up. “There are two at one o’clock, three at eleven,” she called out. Alexander opened fire again. But then he stopped suddenly and threw the machine gun off him. What happened? When Tatiana saw him picking up the Shpagin, she knew he must have run out of ammunition. But the Shpagin had only half a drum in it—maybe thirty-five rounds. They were gone in seconds. He picked up the Colt pistols, fired eight times, paused for two seconds, fired eight times, paused for two seconds. The rhythm of war, Tatiana thought, wanting to close her eyes. The three men at eleven o’clock suddenly became five at two o’clock, and four more at one. Alexander, crouching down, never stopped firing except for the two seconds it took him to reload.

There was rapid fire from below. It was haphazard fire, but it was coming their way. She looked again. The men firing were giving off a flame charge every time their machine guns went off. It made them much easier to spot. Alexander spotted them. It occurred to Tatiana that his pistols were giving off a flame charge that made him also easier to see, and she yelled for him to get down. He was back on his stomach in the trench.

One man was coming up the hill, only about a hundred meters below them, right in front of Tatiana’s tree.

She saw him throw something, and it whistled through the air, landed very close to Alexander and exploded. The bushes and the grass in front of him burst into flames. Alexander popped the pins out of two grenades and threw them, but he threw them blindly, he couldn’t see where the men were.

Tatiana could. She cocked her P-38, aimed it at the shape in front of her, and before she had a moment to reconsider, fired. The recoil was violent, it threw her shoulder back, but the deafening sound was worse, because now she could not hear. The bushes and the grass in front of Alexander’s trench were burning.

Alexander? she thought she whispered, but could hear no sound coming out of her mouth. She looked through the binoculars. It was getting lighter, and the shapes on the ground were still. She fired again and again. There were no more mortar shells, but suddenly there was sporadic machine-gun fire from below, all aimed at Alexander’s small trench. Tatiana found them, lying behind the bushes, halfway up the hill. Because she couldn’t speak to Alexander, and could not hear his response to her, she aimed her weapon again, not sure if the bullets would
carry two hundred meters, but fired anyway. She wished she could hear sounds from below, but she couldn’t. She reloaded six times.

Alexander continued to fire. The bushes may have gone up in flames from the explosives out of his own weapons. Tatiana couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. She pointed her gun down the hill, closed her eyes and fired and reloaded and fired until all the bullets were gone.

Then all was quiet. Maybe all wasn’t quiet.

She opened her eyes.

“Watch your back!” she screamed, and Alexander rolled out of the trench just as a soldier, coming up behind him, shot into the pit. Alexander kicked the rifle out of the man’s hands, kicked him again in the legs, pulled him down and they grappled with one another on the ground. The man grabbed a knife out of his boot. Tatiana, losing all sense of self, nearly fell out of the tree. She ripped off the rope around her, scrambled down and ran across the clearing to the two fighting men. Stop, stop, she shouted, raising her pistol, cocking it, knowing it didn’t have any bullets left. Stop, but she couldn’t hear herself so how could they hear her? The man was forcing his knife toward Alexander, who was barely stopping him.

Tatiana ran up close and, raising her empty-chambered pistol, brought it down hard on the soldier’s neck. He jumped from the blow but did not release Alexander—his fingers remained around the knife handle, Alexander’s remained around the man’s wrist, just stopping him from sinking that knife into his abdomen. Crying out, Tatiana hit the man again, but she couldn’t hit him hard enough. Alexander grabbed the man around the neck, twisted him fast and hard, and he went slack. Throwing the man off him, he sprang to his feet, all bloodied and wired. He said something, she didn’t hear. He motioned her back. Tatiana dropped her gun and backed away. Picking up her pistol, Alexander aimed at the soldier and pulled the trigger, but there was no sound.

The gun is empty, Tatiana wanted to say, but Alexander knew that. He picked up the Commando which still had bullets in the cylinder, aimed at the soldier, but didn’t fire. The man’s neck was broken. Dropping the gun, he came to her then and held her to him for a few moments to calm her down.

They were both panting hard. Alexander was covered with black as hand bleeding from his arm, his head, the top of his chest, his shoulder.

He said something and she said, what?

He bent to her ear. “Well done, Tania. But I thought I was clear: don’t move until I tell you to move.”

She looked up at him to see if he was joking. She couldn’t tell.

Squeezing her, he said, “We have to go. We have only revolver rounds left.”

Did you get them all? she mouthed.

“Stop shouting. I’m sure I didn’t, and in any case, they’ll be sending a hundred men next, with bigger bombs. Let’s run.”

“Wait, you’re injured—”

He put his hand over her mouth. “Stop shouting,” Alexander said to her. “You’ll get your hearing back in a little while, just keep quiet and follow me.”

Tatiana pointed at his bleeding chest. Shrugging, he crouched down. She ripped away the sleeve of his shirt. It was a shell grazing; she pulled the pieces of shrapnel out of his shoulder; one was deeply stuck in his deltoid and pectoral. Shura, look, she thought she said.

He leaned to her. “Just grab it with your fingers and pull it out.”

She yanked it out, nearly fainting at the pain she knew he must have felt. He winced but did not move. She washed out the wound with an antiseptic and bandaged it.

“What about your face?”

His scalp wound had reopened.

“Stop speaking. It’s fine. Later. Let’s just go.” Her face was stained with his blood from when he had pressed her to him. She didn’t wipe it off.

Leaving the empty machine gun, Alexander picked up his pistols, the sub-machine-gun, and the backpack; Tatiana grabbed her nurse’s bag and they ran as fast as they could down the hill.

Around the perimeters of the fields along tree walls and stone walls they ran and walked and crawled for the next two to three hours until the dwellings became progressively more residential and less farm-like, and finally there were streets and finally there was a white sign posted on the side of a three-story bombed-out building that said, “Y
OU ARE ENTERING THE BRITISH SECTOR OF THE
C
ITY OF
B
ERLIN
.”

Tatiana could hear now. She grabbed his good arm, smiled and said, “Almost there.”

There was no reply from Alexander.

And in a few hundred feet she knew why. Berlin was not abandoned, and there were trucks and jeeps on the road, and though many of them belonged to the Royal armed forces, quite a few of them didn’t. They saw a truck up ahead barreling forward, honking, with the hammer and sickle on the crest, and Alexander yanked her into a doorway and said, “How far to the American sector?”

“I don’t know. I have a street map of Berlin.”

It turned out to be five kilometers. It took them all day. They would run from building to building and then stop in broken-down entrance-ways, hallways, doorways, and wait.

By the time they got to the American sector it was four in the afternoon.

They found the U.S. embassy on Clayallee at four thirty.

And they could not cross the street to it, because the hammer-and-sickle jeeps were parked four in a row across the entrance.

This time it was Tatiana who pulled him inside the doorway, under the stairs.

“They’re not necessarily here for us,” she said, trying to sound optimistic. “I think it’s standard procedure.”

“I’m sure it is. You don’t think they’ve been notified to be on the lookout for a man about my size and a woman, yours?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said in a doubting voice.

“All right then, let’s go.” He began to get up.

She stopped him.

“Tatiana, what are you thinking?”

She thought about it. “I’m an American citizen. I have a right to ask to go into the embassy.”

“Yes, but you’ll be stopped before you get a chance to exercise that right.”

“Well, we have to do something.”

He was quiet. She kept thinking, looking him over. He wasn’t so tense as before. The fight seemed to have left his body. Reaching out, she touched his face. “Hey,” she said. “Rear up. We’re not done fighting, soldier.” She pulled on him. “Let’s go.”

“Where to now?”

“To the military governor’s house. It’s not too far from here, I think.”

When they got to the U.S. command headquarters, Tatiana hid inside a building across the boulevard, changed from olive drab into her
grimy nurse’s uniform, and motioned Alexander to follow her to the armed, gated entrance. It was five in the evening. There were no Soviet vehicles nearby.

“I’ll wait here, you go in by yourself and then come out for me,” he said.

She took hold of his hand. “Alexander,” she said, “I’m not leaving you behind. Let’s go. Just put your weapons away.”

“I’m not crossing the street without my weapon.”

“It’s empty! And you’re coming up to the military governor’s house. Who is going to let you in brandishing weapons? Put them away.”

They had to leave the machine gun—it was too big. With the other weapons in the backpack, they walked up to the gate and Tatiana, standing shoulder to shoulder with Alexander, asked the sentry if she could see Governor Mark Bishop. “Tell him Nurse Jane Barrington is calling for him,” she said.

Alexander was looking at her. “Not Tatiana Barrington?”

“Jane was the name on the original Red Cross documents,” she replied. “Besides, Tatiana sounds so Russian.”

They stared at each other. “It
is
so Russian,” he said quietly.

Mark Bishop came to the gate. He took one look at Tatiana, one look at Alexander and said, “Come through.” Before they got inside he said, “Nurse Barrington, what a ruckus you’ve been causing.”

“Governor, this is my husband, Alexander Barrington,” Tatiana said in English.

“Yes,” was all Bishop said, before falling completely silent. “Is he injured?”

“Yes.”

“Are you?”

“No. Governor, could one of your men please give us a ride to the embassy? We need to see the consul, John Ravenstock. He is waiting for us.”

“He is, is he?”

“Yes.”

“Is he waiting for your husband, too?”

“Yes. My husband is American citizen.”

“Where are his papers?”

Tatiana leveled a look at Bishop. “Governor,” she said. “
Please
. Let’s have
the
consulate take care of everything. No use getting you involved, too. I would really appreciate
a
”—special emphasis on the indefinite article—“ride.”

Bishop summoned two of his on-duty privates. “Would you like a jeep, Nurse Barrington, or…”

“A covered truck would be best, Governor.”

“But of course.”

She asked Bishop if Dr. Flanagan and Nurse Davenport had reached the American sector.

“Not without a fight, but we did get them back two days ago, yes.”

“I’m very sorry. I’m glad they’re back and safe.”

“Don’t apologize to me, Nurse Barrington. Apologize to them.”

Two privates drove Tatiana and Alexander to the embassy. They sat in the back on the floor, close together, not speaking. Tatiana tried to wipe the dried blood off his temple. He pulled his head away.