The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons Page A

dinner on her birthday. Not in this world.
    They waited. Somber people stood all around them. Tatiana did not feel somber. She thought, but is this what I’m going to look like when I’m here by myself, waiting for the bus like them?
    Is this what I am going to look like for the rest of my life?
    And then she thought, we’re at war. What is the rest of my life even going to look like?
    “How did you know I’d be here?”
    “Your father told me yesterday you worked at Kirov. I took a chance you’d be waiting for the bus.”
    “Why?” she asked lightly. “Have we had so much luck with public transportation?”
    Alexander smiled. “You mean
we
in the sense of the Soviet people? Or do you mean you and I?”
    She blushed.
    Bus Number 20 came with room for two dozen people. Three dozen piled on. Alexander and Tatiana waited.
    “Come, let’s walk,” he said finally, leading her away.
    “Walk where?”
    “Walk back home. I want to talk to you about something.”
    She looked at him doubtfully. “Home is eight kilometers from here.” She glanced at her feet.
    “Are your shoes comfortable today?” He was smiling.
    “Yes, thank you,” she said, cursing herself for her little-girl awkwardness.
    “I’ll tell you what,” he suggested. “Why don’t we walk one long block over to Govorova Ulitsa, and take tram Number 1 from there? Can you walk one long block? Everybody here is waiting for the bus or the trolleybus. We’ll catch tram Number 1 instead.”
    Tatiana thought about it. “I don’t think that tram drops me off at my apartment,” she said at last.
    “No, it doesn’t, but you can change at the Warsaw railroad station for tram Number 16 that will take you to the corner of Grechesky and Fifth Soviet, or you can change with me for tram Number 2, which will drop me off close to my barracks and you at the Russian Museum.” He paused. “Or we can walk.”
    “I’m not walking eight kilometers,” said Tatiana. “No matter how comfortable my shoes are. Let’s go to the tram.” She already knew she would not be getting off at some railroad station to catch another tram back home by herself.
    When the tram didn’t come for twenty minutes, Tatiana agreed to walk a few kilometers to tram Number 16. Govorova turned into Ulitsa Skapina and then meandered diagonally northward until it ended in the embankment of the Obvodnoy Canal—the Circular Canal.
    Tatiana didn’t want to get to her tram. She didn’t want him to get to his. She wanted to walk along the blue canal. How to tell him that? There were other things, too, to ask him. Always she tried 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 or haughtiness. Dasha never had that problem. She just said the first thing that came into her head.
    Tatiana knew she needed to trust her inner voice more. It was certainly loud enough.
    Tatiana wanted to ask Alexander about Dasha.
    But he began with, “I don’t know how to tell you this. You might think I’m being presumptuous. But…” He trailed off.
    “If I think you’re being presumptuous,” Tatiana remarked, “you probably are.”
    He stayed silent.
    “Tell me anyway.”
    “You need to tell your father, Tatiana, that he has to get your brother back from Tolmachevo.”
    As she heard those words, she saw the imperially ornate Warsaw train station across the street, and she was thinking fleetingly about what it would be like to see Warsaw and Lublin and Swietokryst, and suddenly there was Pasha and Tolmachevo, and…
    Tatiana wasn’t expecting it. She had wanted something else. Instead, Alexander had mentioned Pasha, whom he did not know and had never met.
    “Why?” Tatiana asked at last.
    “Because there is some danger,” Alexander said after a pause, “that Tolmachevo will fall to the Germans.”
    “What are you talking about?” She did not