In another world, these would not be some of the last words they say to each other: her asking to be held, him reassuring her of his presence. In another world, another place or time, they might leave the bed for a while. They might bathe together. They might have a bed made for more than just one person, and yet sleep close together anyway.
But that is not their life. There's no tub to share, no luxurious bed,
and no days after tomorrow.
--
Josephine Parker sleeps deeply. Rest weighs on her as heavily as on a child. She never told him how long she's been a widow, but it can't have been all that long: she sleeps like she is used to having a body beside her own. But perhaps that is just something one only forgets until it happens again, the limbs and skin suddenly remembering.
--
Tomorrow comes. She has the day off. It's not an alarm that wakes them but the noise in the hallway of women talking, going to and from the washrooms. The noise is muffled and the air is stale; the blankets he stuffed at the crack under the door are still in place.
He can feel her eyelashes against his chest when she opens her eyes. He can feel how she doesn't move, doesn't turn or breathe in too deeply, doesn't let him know that she's awake. But there really is no hiding it, not when they're this close.
The first flurry of noise is followed by a quiet, and then, not long after: a new, more muted sound. The nurses from the night shift are coming home, eating breakfast, heading upstairs to wash and go to bed for the day. This place runs like a clock; the girls who have a rare day off know not to flaunt it around to the ones who are in the middle of their own exhaustion.
By then, Josephine has begun stroking his back with her fingertips. Slow. Hypnotic. Mindless. Perhaps it's cruel of her to touch him like that, softly and with such familiarity. Perhaps he'd be better off if she didn't.
Too late for that, though, really.
--
In time the halls are quiet. Girls are asleep or girls are at work. There really is no reason for them to wait: he can slip into the penumbra, he doesn't have to find a window to climb out of or sneak out the back way. But it's a convenient enough excuse to wait a while, even after they've awoken. It's a convenient enough excuse to go on holding one another, smelling each other, touching each other.
They don't kiss in the bed again. That is left to last night. But eventually one of them stirs. Sits up. The other does too, a moment later. The lamp is turned on. They are naked. She picks up her robe and drags it around her shoulders, slides her bare arms into the sleeves, folds it somewhat over her body. He picks his stolen clothes up from the floor, puts them on. They aren't looking at each other much.
The room smells like their feast, like gin, like sex, like burnt candles. She watches him rise and it is all happening so fast but there is no other way for it to happen.
The last thing he puts on is the hat he stole, the felted wool cap. And she's sitting on the edge of the bed, in that quilted, floral robe, her feet resting on the puddle of cream-colored satin on the floor that is her nightgown, that was her signal to him of what she intended when she told him to come into her bed. Not a white flag; a beacon.
But maybe it wasn't the nightgown. Something in her eyes. Something about her. Something that draws him near again, this morning.
He comes to stand before her.
He holds out his hand to her, his palm lifted, open.
Josephine looks up at him, with those depthless black eyes. Looks at him for a very long moment, before she sets her hand in his, palm to palm, skin to skin. She lets him bring her up, lift her to him, standing so close they can't avoid touching each other. He can hear how it makes her breath catch, ever so slightly.
They make no more promises. She is grateful for that. Perhaps that's what she means, that she's grateful, when she says his name, caught and tight and aching with all the things she does not know how to say:
"Nikolai --"
He answers by kissing her. It's fervent. It's as hungry as the first one last night, his bare body against her, his arms encircling her. He does it again now, wrapping her up as tightly as he can, holding her tight to his chest. Her hands touch his face, hold him, kissing him back with an urgency and passion that almost eclipses the night before.
It... cannot last long. None of this can.
They have to stop to breathe, and both of them know: they have to stop.
Their eyes meet.
Her palm is on his cheek.
His thumb is on her lower lip.
The last kiss is something much softer. Slower. It is not quite chaste. It begs of her to stay alive. It tells him to come back.
--
And then he steps away. He focuses on something other than her for a moment, or perhaps something in her eyes is enough to open the doorway between one world and the next. A smile, then. A tip of his hat. She doesn't even roll her eyes; she just shakes her head at him, maybe even fondly. There are tears in her eyes.
Only two escape, to be quickly wiped away. And that is only after he is gone.
--
What follows can be spoken of only two ways.
The first is in the days immediately after.
--
Nikolai escapes London through a network of penumbral alleyways and furtive runs across the territories of enemies both mortal and cosmic. By the time he returns to Moscow his ribs are showing more than they were when he made love to Josephine. By the time he is reasonably safe again, there is a ragged, ugly scar wrapping around the left side of those ribs, a pink line across his gut. It is a horrific reminder of what it was like to die,
alone,
in foreign and hostile lands.
It is and will always be a reminder, too, of what it was like to come back from that, first in a bleeding, roaring frenzy of violence and savagery he has seldom ever felt and only recalls now in flashes. Then the later return: still alone, still in hostile lands, the rain pattering on his face to wake him, the mud underneath him a mixture of loose soil and his own blood, the rain a mix of blessed water and choking ash.
Perhaps he thinks it very strange that he thinks of her then, forcing himself to move, his body now marred with a scar of the battles that make up what really will be the war to end all wars. But he does think of her then, for whatever reason, and moves on.
--
Josephine has the day off. She takes a shower, later in the day than she usually would. She has to do all of her laundry today: uniforms and aprons and linens and towels. She does, but she keeps her quilt as it is. He slept atop it. It retains at least some of his scent, and she's not ready to let that go yet.
She's hungry, but she doesn't eat the salt beef. She puts that away, somewhere cool and dark. She puts away her candles and matches. She returns the blankets, once laundered, to the people she borrowed them from, setting them folded outside their doors.
Breakfast is done, so she eats lunch alone downstairs, staring at her plate. But then the matron comes to fetch her: the people in the country have called about her son. It's no emergency, but she goes to their office to take the call. Adam is not quite old enough for a conversation, but his caretakers prompt him along, and she hides her face behind her hand to try and stop from crying as he babbles in her ear. The connection is not very strong, so that blessing is brief. They tell her how he is doing: he likes to help, but usually ends up playing with the animals. He is eating well and had a bit of a cough last week from a wet spell of weather, but he is healthy.
And then she has to do her shopping. This she does numbly. She wants to go back to the hospital, she wants to work, she doesn't want to feel this gnawing emptiness, this sense of profound loss, with nothing to distract her.
In the end, she does indeed go to the hospital. In a fresh, starched uniform, she loses herself in the rush and busy-ness of it all. She will be exhausted, but she's grateful all the same. That night when the shelling starts up again, she closes her eyes and hears him, again:
You need only endure a while longer.
--
The only other way to speak of the time after that night together is this:
years.
--
The shelling does end. The cleanup and restoration of London happens with wheelbarrows and kerchiefs tied around noses and mouths. Everyone works. The soldiers keep coming to the hospital, with bloody bodies and shaking breaths. They are often shocked to their core, their minds sometimes very far away.
Women keep coming to the hospital, birthing babies with bloody bodies and powerful, screaming lungs. Their minds seem far away, too, but everyone sees this as a blessing: they have no idea whatsoever what the world they've been born to is like. Wherever they are, they have other concerns to attend to.
And so it goes.
It takes some time, but Josephine Parker's life moves on. She works very hard, and she is put in charge of her shift, her floor. She is offered a position as one of the matrons of the dormitory, but she declines. She finds a small apartment she can afford. She cleans it carefully and does what she can to furnish it, though it is terribly sparse at first.
One day she goes to the train station and Adam is a bit wary of her, and his haircut is a bit ragged, but when she comes close he inhales, smells her, remembers. She is shaken, though: he is so much bigger. He talks so much more, and sometimes with country sayings and accent that she will spend a great deal of time training out of him. But he is with her again, and they take a taxi to the apartment, and she's so nervous.
He is amazed at how noisy the city is, but equally amazed that he has his own little room, however small it is. He sleeps that night with her, though, because there's a rainstorm, and -- she thinks -- because he knows how badly she missed him. She sleeps, smelling the top of his head like she did when he was a very small baby.
--
Russia and Germany dissolve their alliance. Josephine hears of it and wonders. She left her forwarding address with the dormitory, but she wonders if he'll ever be able to write. Adam is going to school now, and she's hired a young girl to walk him home from school, make him supper, and generally watch over him until Josephine comes home. Money is thin. She goes to church though she doesn't believe a thing about it, and this helps: Adam benefits from the charity of the congregation, though it galls his mother and she refuses to take their food or extra clothing or help. What she can accept is all for him: new shoes. A raincoat. Books, because it turns out he loves to read.
A letter arrives. It's very late, it was postmarked over a month ago, but it's here, and tattered, and she has to close herself in her bedroom and her closet so that her son won't hear her sobbing from a relief she had no idea she would feel. She gasps against her palm with the force of it, the strength of hope she mostly had let go of surging back into her, filling her bones, rushing through her veins.
He is alive. He is not being posted to London. He gives her a place she can write to, though he won't be there long.
He tells her some of what is in his heart.
And not very long after -- though it is a very long time since he wrote the letter -- a telegram is sent to the address he gave her. The short message only tells him that she is well, that Adam is with her again, and gives him her new address.
--
Their communication is spotty. He always knows where to send her letters, but he is being moved around a great deal, one city to the next, and sometimes he comes back to one place to find telegrams and letters have piled up. Sometimes she references another letter, one he never received and can never find. The conversation is staggered and overlapping, but most of the time it doesn't matter: every missive is proof that the other still lives, that the other is still out there, that the other
still feels the same.
In his letters he tries to tell her where he will be, what is happening, what he expects, but it is always changing. He tells her how he feels for her. He asks a thousand questions, ten thousand, and so many of them terribly personal.
Only now: he gets answers. Personal, deeply felt answers. And each one spawns another dozen questions, and on and on and on.
He learns so much about her in her letters, where she is far more forthcoming than she ever was verbally. He hears about her days, about her position in the hospital, about the books that Adam is reading. She wants to know what he likes to read. She asks him about his family, his upbringing. Sometimes she writes out whole poems that she just read, wanting to know what he thinks of them, does he understand? She tells him about her husband, that he was decent and that she loved him, but that he was not always kind.
He reads in her letters of her brother's death. He can tell that she is writing right after learning the news; something in the shaking of her script, something in the way the words pour out of her, but there are no tear stains on the page.
And in every letter, he reads not his name at the top of the page. She addresses him, each time:
Beloved.
--
Years. It is years. Years before the depth of atrocity in Germany is fully understood and ended. Years before the war ends. Years of letters, some with months in between.
It comes in a telegram: the train, and the day and time it is to arrive in London.
She sends one back immediately, hoping it isn't too late. Tells him she will be there. But it is too late: he has already left. So he sits on the train. She goes to the station and sits on a bench, a sandwich wrapped in paper on her lap, a thermos of coffee. Adam is at home with the girl, only aware that mummy's friend is finally coming back to London, and one always goes to greet their dearest friends at the train. He is at the table in the apartment, now much more furnished and homey than it was a few years ago, and he is drawing a train.
It is a very good drawing of a train, but it looks nothing like the train that is pulling in, all smoke and noise, pulling to a stop, making Josephine's head jerk up.
People pour off. Soldiers and travelers, refugees and families.
It is not hard for her to find him: his uniform is like no one else's in the crowd, and people give him wide berth as they walk around him.
It is not hard for him to find her: he would find her anywhere.
--
The first thing he says to her is a joke about the sandwich and thermos, which are for him.
She does not weep, but laughs, and then finds herself weeping anyway,
finds herself pulled into his arms, held trembling-tight to his chest, his face buried in her neck.
--
He visits that very afternoon, still in his uniform, taking off his hat as Josephine leads him into her home. He meets Adam, dark-eyed and dark-haired, who very carefully explains his drawing of a train to his guest. He asks what seem like hundreds of questions, trying to fill in the gaps of what his mother has obviously told him about her dear friend, Nikolai. He is a bold young thing, awfully serious, but respectful.
When he goes to bed, Nikolai takes Josephine to a cafe just a few doors down, though she lets a neighbor know she'll be out for a bit to eat.
They cannot stop looking at each other. And for all their thousands of words on paper, they spend most of that first evening in silence, holding hands on the table, eating sandwiches of salt beef. But this time they have chips, too.
--
He takes her to where he's staying. They have to be quick, furtive, and she has to get back, but they cannot stop themselves. For the second time in five years, what feels like a hundred, she lays her head on his chest, closing her eyes to the sound of his heartbeat. His hand strokes over her back.
She asks him about the scar.
He is quiet for a while, but then he tells her.
It's a bit mad, but she whispers back to him, as if to explain how he could have survived: You had to come back to me.
And it isn't a joke. Not at all.
--
They take their time, but not very much of it, all told. Within a few weeks, Josephine agrees to marry him.
She quits the church, and they stand in front of a judge with Adam and another nurse, another soldier as witnesses. Nikolai joins her and her son in the little apartment.
In time, Viktoria is born, fair-haired and black-eyed, and it is her big brother Adam who first suggests that she should have her own room, too, and she could if they had a real house.
Josephine looks at Nikolai, who looks back at her, and they need no words. Words were all they had, for years, and now it seems like they need none at all.
--
This is how their life goes on: in years, thereafter. Years made up of moments like the one between white curtains in a hospital as shells fell outside, moments in a small dormitory room with candles flickering and Offenbach stirring the air, moments found in the careful unfolding of a letter, another letter, another. Moments of eyes meeting, of hands touching, of fighting to wake the dead, of making love in the dark corner room of their house together, moments of raising a son who takes after his mother and a daughter who takes after her father,
millions of these, years of these,
a whole future, together,
of moments.
