"I don't know," she replied. "What happens when war is over?"

"Wait," Gulotta said, coming around his desk and going to stand in front of his office door before he opened it for her.

"I go now," she barely said. "I must get train back."

"Wait," he repeated, putting his hand out. "For a second, sit."

"I don't want to sit anymore."

"Listen to me," Gulotta said, motioning her to sit. She was grateful to fall into the chair. "There is one more thing..." He sat in the chair next to her. Anthony grabbed hold of his leg. Gulotta smiled. "Have you remarried?"

"Of course I haven't," she said faintly.

Gulotta looked at the boy.

"That's his child," said Tatiana.

Gulotta didn't speak for a while. "Don't talk about this to anyone. About Alexander Barrington. Don't go to the Justice Department, don't go to the INS offices in New York or Boston. Don't go looking for his relatives."

"Why?"

"Not today, not tomorrow, not next year. Don't trust them. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. You don't want them making inquiries either on his behalf or out of some misplaced affection. If I contact the Soviets asking them for information on Alexander Barrington they will be less than accommodating. If I ask them the whereabouts of a man named Alexander Belov, who is really Alexander Barrington, if he is still alive, that might only lead the Soviet authorities to him."

"I understand that even better than you think I do," Tatiana said, looking down at her boy and away from Gulotta.

"You said you have residency here?"

She nodded.

"Get your citizenship as soon as possible. Your boy, he's an American citizen or-"

"He's American."

"That's good. Good." He cleared his throat. "There is one more thing..."

She said nothing.

"According to his files, last year, in March 1943, the Soviet authorities contacted the State Department about one of their citizens, a Tatiana Metanova, who was wanted for espionage, desertion, and treason, and was suspected of escaping to the West. They sent a telegraph wire asking if a Tatiana Metanova had either sought asylum in the United States or had tried to make inquiries about her husband-an Alexander Belov who is suspected of being Alexander Barrington. Tatiana Metanova apparently has not revoked her Soviet citizenship. Last year we said she had not contacted us. They asked us to get in touch with them if she did and requested she be denied asylum status."

For the longest time, Tatiana and Sam were utterly quiet. Finally Sam asked, "Has a Tatiana Metanova tried to make inquiries about an Alexander Barrington?"

And finally Tatiana answered. "No." It was just a breath.

Sam nodded. "I didn't think so. There will be nothing for me to put in the file."

"No," said Tatiana. She felt his hand on her back, easing her up, patting her slightly.

"If you give me your address, I can write if I hear anything. But you understand-"

"I understand everything," whispered Tatiana.

"Maybe this cursed war will end, maybe what's going on in the Soviet Union will end, too. If things get more relaxed, we can make some inquiries. After the war might be better."

"After which war?" asked Tatiana, without raising her eyes. "Maybe I write you myself. This way you don't have to keep my address on record. You can always find me at Ellis Island hospital. I don't actually have address yet. I don't live-" She broke off. With her teeth grit and her jaw set, she could not even extend her hand to Sam Gulotta. She wanted to, she just couldn't.

"I'd help you if I could. I'm not the enemy," he said quietly.

"No," she said, moving past him and out of his office. "But it turns out that I am."

Tatiana took two weeks off work, she said for a "needed vacation." She tried to convince Vikki to come with her, but Vikki was juggling two interns and a blind musician and couldn't come.

"I'm not going on some surprise train trip. Where do you think you're going?"

"Anthony wants to see Grand Canyon."

"Anthony is one! He wants to see his mother find herself an apartment and a new husband, not necessarily in that order."

"No. Just Grand Canyon."

"You told me we would look for an apartment."

"Come with us and maybe I look for apartment when I come back."

"You're such a liar."

Tatiana laughed. "Vikki, I am good here at Ellis."

"That's the whole problem. You're not good here at Ellis. You're all alone, you live in one room with your child, you share a communal bathroom. You're in America, for God's sake. Rent yourself an apartment. That's what we Americans do."

"You don't have an apartment."

"Oh, for the love of Jesus and Mary! I have a home."

"I do, too."

"You deliberately don't want a place of your own. Because that keeps you from getting involved with someone."

"I don't need to be kept from getting involved with someone."

"When are you going to start being young? What do you think, if he was alive, he'd be faithful to you? He would not be waiting for you, I'll tell you that. This very second, he would be knocking his brains out."

"Vikki, how do you go around thinking you know so much when you know nothing?"

"Because I know men. They're all the same. And don't start telling me yours is different. He is a soldier. They're worse than musicians."

"Musicians?"

"Never mind."

"I'm not having this talk. I'm not talking to you. I have patients. I have to go to Red Cross. Did I tell you I been hired on part-time basis for American Red Cross? They really need people. Maybe you should apply."

"Mark my words. Knocking his brains out. Just like you should be doing."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO.

Majdanek, July 1944 THEY HAD STOPPED NEAR the woods in eastern Poland and were rearming and taking a drink.

"Why do we have to keep talking about God and about the Germans and the Americans and the war and Comrade Stalin?" said Ouspensky.

"We don't talk about that," said Telikov. "You do. You're the only one who brings that shit up. Before you walked over, do you know what Commander Belov and I were discussing?"

"What?" barked Ouspensky.

"Whether the river perch or the river bass is easier to clean and which fish makes a better soup. I personally think the perch makes a great soup."

"That's because you've never had soup out of bass. Look, you're dropping your ammo as you're standing up," said Alexander. "What kind of a soldier are you?"

"I'm a soldier that needs to lie down with a woman, sir. Or stand up with a woman. Basically anything with a woman," replied Telikov, picking up his magazines.

"We got it, Telikov. The army does not supply women at the front."

"We've noticed that. But I also heard that the 84th battalion a few kilometers south has three women nurses who accompany them in the rear. Why do we have only medics?"

"You're a bunch of fucking convicts. Who will give you a female nurse? There are two hundred of you. That woman wouldn't be alive in an hour."

"I hardly think that matters, sir, to men like us."

"And that's why you're not getting a female nurse," said Alexander.

Telikov glanced at him in surprise. "Are you the reason we don't have a woman nurse?"

Ouspensky said to Alexander, "I really don't think it's very fair of you, Captain, just because your own balls have been melted and frozen into igneous rock, that we should suffer. The rest of us are actually made of flesh and blood."

"Yes, and we're about to spill some of that blood, Lieutenant. Stop talking about my balls. Order your men to the firing line."

Alexander went forward with 200 men, and by the time they reached Majdanek, at the end of July 1944, they had eighty.

They trod into Majdanek, which had been liberated by the Soviets barely three days earlier. The Nazi camp lay on a plate-flat field of brown-green grass and its squat, long green barracks looked almost like camouflage. Alexander smelled the acrid-sweet smell of burning flesh in the air, but said nothing, though by the gradual quieting down in his tank and around his formations, he could tell his men smelled it, too.

"Why did they want us to come here?" asked Telikov, coming up to Alexander and staring with him at the city of Lublin through the barbed wire fence. Lublin was just over the field and down a slope.

"The high command wants us to see what we're dealing with as we force our way into Germany," said Alexander. "So we don't feel pity for the Germans."

Ouspensky asked if the residents of Lublin could smell what he smelled, and Alexander replied that they had probably been smelling it every day for months.

The camp was small and seemed almost serene-as if the humanity had left it, leaving behind only ghosts- And ash- And bones- And blue remnants of Zyclon B gas on the concrete walls.

Femur bones, and clavicles...

And spy holes in steel doors.

A "bathhouse" on one side of the small camp.

And ovens with one long tall chimney stack on the other.

A road that connected them.

Barracks that divided them.

A commandant's house.

SS barracks.

And nothing else.

The men walked through slowly and silently, and then bent their heads, and finally, standing at the back of the camp, they took off their caps.

"Can't pretend this was a forced labor camp, can you?" Ouspensky said to Alexander.

"No, can't."

But something else, too-past the ovens with white ash and white pieces of human skeletons, there were mounds of white ashes. Not ant mounds but sand dunes, pyramids, two stories high of white ash, and on even ground nearby the white ash was spread out, and on it grew enormous cabbages. Alexander, and his lieutenant and his sergeants and his corporals and his privates, stared at the ash and the cabbages the size of mutant pumpkins, and then someone said that he had never seen cabbages so big before, and if they took one, they would have dinner for eighty men tonight. Alexander didn't let them touch it. In the long wooden warehouse full of shoes and boots and sandals, shoes of all sizes, boots lined and leather, he did let them take a pair of boots each, mindful of how hard it was to get requisitioned footwear in the Red Army, particularly in the penal battalions. The shoes were piled from floor to ceiling, jammed three meters high behind a wire netting.

"How many shoes you think there are here?" asked Ouspensky.

"What am I, a mathematician?" snapped Alexander. "Hundreds of thousands, I would guess."

They left the camp silently and didn't stop at the barbed wire fence to glance at the steeple churches of Catholic Lublin just a couple of kilometers away.

"Who do you think they did that to, Captain? Poles?"

"Hmm. Poles, yes. Mainly Jewish Poles, I think," Alexander replied. "The command won't say, though. They don't want the Soviet army to be less outraged."

"How long do you think it took them?" asked Ouspensky.

"Majdanek became operational eight months ago. Two hundred and forty days. Slightly less time than it takes one woman to make one life, they managed to snuff out a million and a half lives."

No one spoke until they were a kilometer away.

Afterward, Ouspensky said, "A place like that just shows me the communists are right. There is no God."