“in the dark room she sits and in front of her is a plate and on the plate lies a black hunk of bread the size of a deck of cards. The bread has sawdust in it, and cardboard. She takes a knife and a fork, and cuts it slowly into four pieces. She eats one, chews it deliberately, pushes it with difficulty through her dry throat. eats another and another and finally the last one. She lingers especially on the last one. She knows after this piece is gone there will be no more food until tommorow morning. She wishes she could be strong enough to save half of the bread until dinner, but she isn't, she can't. When she looks up from her plate, her sister Dasha, is staring at her. Her plate is long empty. " I wish Alexander was coming back" says Dasha. " He might have food for us"I wish Alexander was coming back, thinks Tatiana.”

“Tatiana said. "Go on with Dasha. She is right for you. She is a woman and I'm-" "Blind!", Alexander exclaimed. Tatiana stood, desolately failing in the battle of her heart. "Oh, Alexander. What do you want from me..." "Everything", he whispered fiercely.”

“Eachday brought just another minute of the things they could not leave behind. Jane Barrington sitting on thetrain coming back to Leningrad from Moscow, holding on to her son, knowing she had failed him, cryingfor Alexander, wanting another drink, and Harold, in his prison cell, crying for Alexander, and YuriStepanov on his stomach in the mud in Finland, crying for Alexander, and Dasha in the truck, on theLadoga ice, crying for Alexander, and Tatiana on her knees in the Finland marsh, screaming forAlexander, and Anthony, alone with his nightmares, crying for his father.”

“Tatiana...you and I had only one moment..." said Alexander. "A single moment in time, in your time and mine...one instant, when another life could have still been possible." He kissed her lips. "Do you know what I'm talking about?" When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street."I know that moment," whispered Tatiana.”

“All she had to do was stay where she was, go on as she was.But there was no Tatiana here. Tatiana remained with Alexander. Her arms were around him in LakeLadoga, where she lay down with him every night. Her arms were holding him bleeding out into the LakeLadoga ice. She could have let go of him then, could have given him to God; God was certainly callingfor him.But she didn’t.And because she didn’t, she was here in America, sitting on the ledge of the rest of her life. It certainlyfelt that way, that seminal moment where she knew that whatever her decision, her life would take eitherone course or it would take another.One way the path was plain and vivid.And the other was black and fraught with doubt”

“Tatiana lived for that evening hour with him that propelled her into her future and into the barely formed, painful feelings that she could neither express nor understand. Friends walking in the lucent dusk. There was nothing more she could have from him, and there was nothing more she wanted from him but that one hour at the end of her long day when her heart beat and her breath was short and she was happy.”

“Shura,” she whispered. “I’m going to have a baby.”At first she didn’t think Alexander heard her, he was mute so long. “You what?” he said in horror.“I’m going to have a baby,” she mouthed, her shoulders quaking, her swollen lips quivering.”