Tatiana and Alexander
A powerful story of grief, hope and an epic love, from the Russian-born author of internationally bestselling novels, TULLY and ROAD TO PARADISE.The world at war … two people in love.Tatiana is eighteen years old and pregnant when she miraculously escapes war-torn Leningrad to the West, believing herself to be a widow. Her husband, Major Alexander Belov, a decorated hero of the Soviet Union, has been arrested by Stalin's infamous secret police and is awaiting imminent death as a traitor and a spy.Tatiana begins her new life in America. In wartime New York City she finds work, friends and a life beyond her dreams. However, her grief is inescapable and she keeps hearing Alexander calling out to her.Meanwhile, Alexander faces the greatest danger he's ever known. An American trapped in Russia since adolescence, he has been serving in the Red Army and posing as a Soviet citizen to protect himself. For him, Russia's war is not over, and both victory and defeat will mean certain death.As the Second World War moves into its spectacular close, Tatiana and Alexander are surrounded by the ghosts of their past and each other. They must struggle against destiny and despair as they find themselves in the fight of their lives. A master of the historical epic, Paullina Simons takes us on a journey across continents, time, and the entire breadth of human emotion, to create a heartrendingly beautiful love story that will live on long after the final page is turned.
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PAULLINA SIMONS
TATIANA AND ALEXANDER
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Flamingo an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2003 and also under the title The Bridge to Holy Cross
Copyright © Paullina Simons 2003
Paullina Simons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007118892
Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780007370078
Version: 2015-03-09
Once again for my grandfather and grandmother, ninety-eight and ninety-four, who still plant cucumbers and grow flowers and live happily ever after,
and
for our good friend Anatoly Studenkov, still as ever left behind in Russia, who does not.
And in the moonlight’s pallid glamour
Rides high upon the charging brute
Head held high ’mid echoing clamour
The Bronze Horseman in pursuit.
And all through that long night no matter
What road the frantic wretch might take
There would pound with ponderous clatter
The Bronze Horseman in his wake.
—Aleksandr Pushkin
CONTENTS
Boston, December 1930
ALEXANDER BARRINGTON STOOD IN front of the mirror and adjusted his red Cub Scout tie. Rather, he was attempting to adjust his Cub Scout tie, because he couldn’t take his eyes off his face, a face uncharacteristically glum. His mouth was turned down. His hands were fidgeting with the gray-and-white tie, unable to do a good job, today of all days.
Stepping away from the mirror, he looked around the small room and sighed. It wasn’t much, a wood floor, drab brown-branch wallpaper, a bed, a nightstand.
It didn’t matter about the room. It wasn’t his room. It was a rented room, a furnished rented room and all the furniture belonged to the landlady downstairs. His real room was not in Boston but back in Barrington, and he had really liked his old room and hadn’t felt the same way about any other room he had lived in since. And he had lived in six different rooms since two years ago when his father sold their house and took Alexander out of Barrington.
Now they were leaving this room, too. It didn’t matter.
Rather, that’s not what mattered.
Alexander looked in the mirror again. He came up flush to the mirror, stuck his face against the glass and breathed out deeply. “Alexander,” he whispered. “What now?”
His best friend Teddy thought it was the most exciting thing in the world, Alexander’s leaving the country.
Alexander couldn’t have disagreed more.
Through his partly open door, he heard his mother and father arguing. He ignored them. They tended to argue through stress. Presently the door opened and his father, Harold Barrington, came in.
“Son, are you ready? The car is waiting for us downstairs. And your friends are downstairs, too, waiting to say goodbye. Teddy asked me if I would take him instead of you.” Harold smiled. “I told him I just might. What do you think, Alexander? You want to trade places with Teddy? Live with his crazy mother and crazier father?”
“Yes, because my own parents are so sane,” said Alexander. Harold was thin and of medium height. His one distinguishing feature was a resolutely set chin on a broad, square-jawed face. At the age of forty-eight his light-brown, graying hair was still thick upon his head, and his eyes were intense and blue. Alexander liked it when his father was in a good mood because then the eyes lost some of their seriousness.
