The Bridge to Holy Cross by Paullina Simons
“Stop it, stop it, let go!”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Alexander threw down his weapons and squared off against her, who stood in front of him, her trembling hands palms out at her chest. “What do you want? Why did you come here?
Was your goal to leave our son without his mother? Don’t you understand it’s either you and me, or it’s them? There is no middle ground. It’s fucking war, don’t you understand that?”
“Please—just—”
“No, I don’t think you do!” He grabbed her, squeezed her. “He was watching us, watchingyou , probably from the very beginning, he saw everything, heard everything, and you know what he was waiting for? For me to finish so he could kill me and then have you all to himself. And then he would have killed you. We don’t know who he is, he may be an army man, he may be a deserter, but one thing I know, his intentions were not to partake in our lunch!”
“Oh my God, what’s happened to you?”
He shoved her away. “What, areyou of all people judging me?” He spat on the ground. “I’m a soldier, not a fucking saint.”
“I’m not judging you. Shura, please…” she whispered, opening her hands to him.
“Us or them, Tatiana.”
“You, Alexander,you. ” She swayed. He took hold of her with one arm to steady her, but did not press her to him, did not comfort her.
“Don’t you understand anything? Go clean his blood off and get dressed. We have to move out.”
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They left the clearing within ten minutes, and back in olive drab, they walked through the woods not speaking except to stop, have a drink, move on. Alexander smoked as he walked. He would stop to listen for the ambient noise of the countryside and then cautiously proceeded forward.
They avoided villages and paved roads, but the farms were also problematic. It was summer, planting season, crop season, harvest season. The combine harvesters, the simple threshers, the tractors, the field-hands were out everywhere. They had to walk around the perimeter of busy fields just to avoid the workers.
They walked through the meadows and woods for six hours,finally heading in a southerly direction.
Tatiana wanted desperately to stop. But he wasn’t slowing his stride and so she wouldn’t slow hers.
They came to a potato field and she, very hungry, walked out in front of him. He immediately grabbed her and pulled her back. “Don’t walk in front of me, You don’t know anything about this field.”
“Oh, and you do.”
“Yes, because I’ve seen thousands like it.”
“I’ve seen a field before, Alexander.”
“A mined field?”
This gave her pause. “It’s a potato field. It’s not mined.”
“And you know this how? Did you look at it through your binoculars? Did you examine the ground? Did you crawl through it, your bayonet in front of you feeling for the mines? Or are you just thinking that when you were a little girl growing up in the Luga fields, they weren’t mined?”
“Stop it, okay?” she said quietly.
He took out the binoculars. He examined the earth. He said he thought it looked safe, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He pored over a relief map for a few minutes, and said, “Let’s go to the left. On the right there’s a highway. Too dangerous. But the woods on the other side are thick and cover about ten miles.”
He let her dig out five or six potatoes from the edge of the field.
The sun was setting by the time they got to the woods. When they stopped at a stream for a drink, Tatiana said, “Maybe we could catch a fish? If you build a fire, I can cook these potatoes and a fish.
We’ll eat. Break camp, you know.” She wanted to smile at him but he looked so grim that she reconsidered.
“Fire? You’ve completely lost your mind, haven’t you? They smelled my cigarette in a barn. What do you think their dogs are trained to sniff out, if not the scent of cooking fish?”
“Oh, Alexander. They’re not looking for us anymore. They’re not here.”
“No, they’re there.” He waved in a nebulous direction. “By the time they’re here, it’ll be too late.”
“So we’re not going to eat?”
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“We’ll eat the potatoes raw.”
“Great,” muttered Tatiana.
They ate the potatoes raw. They had their second to last can of Spam. Tatiana would have brought more, but who would have thought they weren’t going to be able to build a fire, to cook a fish, a potato?
They washed again, he smoked again and said, “Ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“We have to go.”
“Oh, please no more, no more! It’s eight in the evening. We need to rest, we’ll walk tomorrow during the day.” She wanted to add that she was afraid to walk at night, but didn’t want him to see her weakness, so she said nothing, waiting for him to do the right thing.
He was silent.
She was silent.
“Let’s go until ten,” he said with a sigh. “Then we’ll stop.”
She stayed very close behind him. But she hated that there was no one behindher . She kept feeling that there was someone there, and would whirl around every time Alexander stopped to listen to the woods.
Once, something fell, a rock rolled, or a branch hit something, and Tatiana cried out and grabbed for Alexander.
He put his hand on her. “What, Tatiasha?” he said softly.
“Nothing, nothing.”
Patting her, he said, “Let’s stop.”
She had to bite her lip to keep from begging him to find a barn, a shed, a ditch near a house, a mined field even, anything as long as they didn’t have to spend the night in the woods.
He built them a small lean-to with some sturdy branches and the trench blanket. He said he would be right along, but after fifteen minutes of not being right along, she climbed out and found him sitting against a nearby tree, smoking.
“Shura,” she whispered. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Go to sleep. We have a long day tomorrow.”
“Come in the lean-to.”
“It’s too small, I’m fine here.”
“It’s not too small. We’ll sleep side by side, come.” She pulled on his arm. He pulled it away.
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Kneeling by him, she studied him and then her hands went on his face. “Shura…”
“Look,” he said, “you’ve got to stop fighting with me. I’m on your side. You have to let me do what I know we need to do. I can’t have it out with you every time we’re in danger.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. But you know I can’t help it. It’s my nature.”
“Youhave to help it. I know it’s hard, and I know you’re overwhelmed, but you have to win that battle inside yourself. One way or another, you have to make it right inside you. Or don’t you care if the Huns win?” His arms went around her.
She pressed her face into his throat. “I care if the Huns win. I will try, all right?” she whispered.
“You willdo ,” he said, holding her. “You will do as I say, and you will not heal those who mean to kill us, that’s what you will do.” He took her face into his hands. “Tania, last time in Morozovo, I let you go, but not this time. This time we live together or we die together.”
“Yes, Alexander,” she breathed out.
“I’ve put away everything in my nature except what I need to do to get us out of here, and you will put away everything in yours.”
“Yes, Alexander. Come in and sleep.”
He shook his head.
“Please,” she whispered. “I’m scared at night in the woods.”
He came inside and fit in behind her. She covered them up with her cashmere blanket. “I bought this for you,” she said. “
“It’s light and warm,” he said. “Good blanket.Oh, God, make small the old, star-eaten blanket of the sky, that I may fold it round me, and in comfort lie.”
They lay fitted into each other, like two metal bowls.
“Tania,” he said, “tell me, I won’t be upset. I wanted you to be happy. Have you been with someone else?”
“I have not,” she said, pausing slightly, remorsefully, remembering how close she had come with Jeb, how close she had come with Edward. “Who is blessed like you, endowed like you with gifts from the gods?” Tatiana felt Alexander’s body tense. She wanted to ask him, but couldn’t.
“I haven’t.” He paused. “Though I would have liked to once, twice, to stave off death.”
She closed her eyes. “Yes, me too,” she said. “You want to finish the earlier…staving off?”
“No,” he said.
When she opened her eyes again, it was still dark and he was not behind her. He was sitting outside the lean-to by the trees, with a machine gun in his hands.
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“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Watching over you,” he replied.
Tatiana brought the blanket out and covered him with it, and then lay down on the ground with her head in his lap. She closed her eyes and restlessly slept.
When she awoke, her head was covered by the blanket. She moved it off her and found him staring at her in the near darkness and smoking. His body was as stiff as a springboard.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered.
“I didn’t want to drop ashes on your hair.”
“No, I mean…what’swrong? ”
Alexander looked away. “I don’t think we’re going to make it, Tatiana,” he whispered.
She watched him for a moment and then closed her eyes, settling deeper into his lap. “Live as if you have faith,” she said, “and faith shall be given to you.”
He said nothing.
She took the rings off her neck. She fitted the small one onto her ring finger and took his hand—though it took some doing to get him to release the gun—and slipped the larger band onto his finger. He squeezed her hand, and then picked up the M1911 again.
“Do you want to sleep?I’ll sit.”
“No,” he said. “I can’t sleep.”
She caressed his arm. “What can I do?” She nudged him. “AnythingI can do?”
“No.”
“No?” With surprise.
“No,” he repeated flatly. “Too much around us. I’m not losing the edge, not even for a moment. Look what nearly happened.”
Tatiana slept. He shook her awake sometime when the trees turned blue with dawn. Silently they brushed their teeth, picked up their things. She went a few meters away into the woods and when she returned, his back was to her.
“Are you hungry?” Tatiana asked, and before she was finished inflecting, Alexander whirled around, two cocked pistols pointing at her. A second went by before he lowered his arms and without a word turned back to what he was doing.
She went to see what he was doing. He was going through every inch of her backpack.
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“What are you looking for?”
“You have any more cigarettes?”
“Of course. I brought six packs.”
He paused. “Besides them.”
She paused. “You smokedsix packs of cigarettes last night?”
He resumed looking through the backpack.
“What about the pack you took from the Soviets?”
“What about it?” said Alexander.
Tatiana came to him, took the backpack out of his hands. She tried to take the weapons out of his belt but he wouldn’t let her. She hugged him with the pistols and the ammunition belt between them. “Shura,”
she whispered. “Darling, husband, it’ll be—”
“Let’s go,” he said, moving away. “Let’s get going.”
They got going. This time they headed south. Gradually he stopped letting her get even a meter away.
There was no swimming in streams, no fire, and they were out of Spam and crackers. They picked some blueberries while walking. They found another field of potatoes.
At the end of the day, she asked if they could build a fire. After all, they hadn’t heard anything suspicious all day. He told her no. She was surprised they had gone only ten miles, they seemed to be moving so slowly. Tatiana wondered if he was for some reason afraid to get to Berlin. But why? “I think we’re very close. We seem close. Don’t you think?”
“No. We’re—yes, we’re only about six miles away.”
“We can do that by tomorrow.”
“No. I think we should wait in the woods for a while,” he said.
“Wait in the woods? But you insist on walking, you don’t want to stop.”
“Let’s stop.”
“When we stop, we can’t build a fire, can’t cook, can’t eat, can’t swim, or sleep, or…anything. What are we waiting in the woods for?”
“They’ll be looking for us now. Don’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Them. Around the edges, in the distance, agonizing back and forth, don’t you hear it?”
Tatiana didn’t. “Even so,” she allowed, “North Berlin is spread out. They’re not going to be looking for
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us everywhere.”
“They are. We should stay here.”
She put her hands on him. “Come on, Alexander,” she said. “Let’s go, let’s push on, push on until we’re done.”
He moved away and said, “Fine, if that’s what you want. Let’s go.”
The woods became sparse in the last stretch before Berlin. There was a sloping countryside, a flat countryside, some trees partitioning the fields. They were moving slowly, and once they sat in the bushes for two hours because, on the horizon, Alexander glimpsed a truck gliding by.
There were no streams and nowhere to hide. He was getting more and more tense, holding his sub-machine-gun in front of him as he walked. Tatiana didn’t know how to help him. They were out of cigarettes.
At nine in the evening, as he was letting her rest her feet, she said, “You don’t think the countryside is quiet?”
“No,” he said. “The countryside is anything but quiet. On the periphery of the fields, in the echo of distance, I hear trucks constantly, I hear voices, I hear dogs barking.”
“I don’t hear them,” she said.
“Why would you?”
“Why wouldyou ?”
“Because that’s what I do. Come on, are you ready?”
“No. Can you show me on the map where we are?”
Sighing, he brought out the relief map. She followed his finger. “Shura, but that’s great! A few kilometers ahead of us is a hill, with not too big an elevation—six hundred meters is not too big? Six hundred meters up, six hundred meters down. When we get down on the other side, we’ll stop, and Berlin is just a few kilometers away. We’ll be in the American sector by noon tomorrow.”
Alexander watched her. Without saying a word, he put the map away and began walking.
The moon was out in the clear sky and it was possible to walk at night without shining a flashlight. When they got to the top of the hill, Tatiana thought she could almost see Berlin in the distance. “Come on,” she said. “We can run the last six hundred meters to the bottom.”
He sank into the ground. “It’s obvious to me you were not paying attention to the war around Leningrad.
Have you learned nothing from Pulkovo, from Sinyavino? We’re not moving from the top of the hill. It’s the only advantage we have, height. Perhaps a small element of surprise. At the bottom of the hill, we might as well wait for them with our hands up.”
She remembered
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going.
He didn’t build a lean-to, telling her to take nothing out of the backpack except the blanket if she needed it, so they could be ready to run at any moment.
“Run? Shura, look how quiet everything is, how peaceful.”
Alexander wasn’t listening. He walked away and began doing something on the ground. Tatiana could just make out his silhouette. “What are you doing?” she asked, coming closer.
“Digging. Can’t you see?”
She watched him for a moment. “What are you digging?” she asked quietly. “A grave?”
Without glancing up, he said, “No, a trench.”
Tatiana didn’t understand him. She feared the lack of cigarettes and his acute anxiety were turning into a temporary (temporary, right?) madness. She wanted to tell him he was being paranoid, but she didn’t think that would be helpful, so she bent down and helped him dig with a knife and her bare hands until the pit was long enough for him to lie down in and be covered.
He was finished around two in the morning.
They sat under the linden tree, Alexander against the trunk, Tatiana in his lap. He refused to lie down or to put down his machine gun, but once she felt it fall on top of her only to scare her and make him jump up, knocking her to the ground.
After they sat back down, she tried to sleep, but it was impossible to relax into sleep with his body so tense around her.
She heard him say, “You shouldn’t have come back for me. You had a good life. You were taking care of our son. You were working, you had friends, the promise of new things, New York. We were over.
You should have let it be.”
What are you talking about? she wanted to cry out. He didn’t mean what he was saying, no matter how grim he sounded. “Well, why then did you give me Orbeli in my nightmare if you wanted me to let it be?”
she asked. “Why did you give me a glimpse of your wasted life?”