"I know, Steve. It's just..." She looks away, as if searching for something to say, when her gaze lands on the photo-frame on her coffee-table. Well. All right.
She hesitates and then leans over to pick it up, keeping the face towards her.
"Let me...explain something. Before we go into the rest.
There was a boy.
He was a bit older than me, but we lived in the same apartment building. When the war came, he enlisted. By the end of the war, well. You heard the stories of what the Eastern Front was like. I thought he was dead, like everyone else.
Moscow, after the war, I was in a park and someone said my name. 'Natalia', it's common. 'Natalia Alianovna' is not. I turned and there he was. Alive. Well. Very dashing in his uniform," she adds, and despite how tense and bitter she's been, here her smile is almost happy. It doesn't last.
"We were married for about ten years before he was killed. Plane crash, into the Pacific. He was the only person I really had left, so I think you know what that would have felt like.
I don't..." Natasha hesitates and then looks up. Her mouth is bitter and her green eyes are shiny with unshed tears. "My point is he," and she turns the photograph around so he can see, "he is not the kind of person you forget."
It is, on the face of it, a very ordinary post-World War II wedding photograph. The groom in his best uniform and still looking a bit nervous, the bride wearing a dark winter coat with her veil almost defiantly in place. The couple are young, and while the bride is more at ease than her new husband (indeed, her smile is only just short of a grin), the sheer closeness of their stance is telling. More than any vow or legal authority, they are determined to stay together, for better or for anything worse than the war they just survived.
no subject
Natasha breathes something that could be a laugh.
"I know, Steve. It's just..." She looks away, as if searching for something to say, when her gaze lands on the photo-frame on her coffee-table. Well. All right.
She hesitates and then leans over to pick it up, keeping the face towards her.
"Let me...explain something. Before we go into the rest.
There was a boy.
He was a bit older than me, but we lived in the same apartment building. When the war came, he enlisted. By the end of the war, well. You heard the stories of what the Eastern Front was like. I thought he was dead, like everyone else.
Moscow, after the war, I was in a park and someone said my name. 'Natalia', it's common. 'Natalia Alianovna' is not. I turned and there he was. Alive. Well. Very dashing in his uniform," she adds, and despite how tense and bitter she's been, here her smile is almost happy. It doesn't last.
"We were married for about ten years before he was killed. Plane crash, into the Pacific. He was the only person I really had left, so I think you know what that would have felt like.
I don't..." Natasha hesitates and then looks up. Her mouth is bitter and her green eyes are shiny with unshed tears. "My point is he," and she turns the photograph around so he can see, "he is not the kind of person you forget."
It is, on the face of it, a very ordinary post-World War II wedding photograph. The groom in his best uniform and still looking a bit nervous, the bride wearing a dark winter coat with her veil almost defiantly in place. The couple are young, and while the bride is more at ease than her new husband (indeed, her smile is only just short of a grin), the sheer closeness of their stance is telling. More than any vow or legal authority, they are determined to stay together, for better or for anything worse than the war they just survived.