QUOTE : Soldier! Let me cradle your head and caress your face, let me kiss your dear sweet lips and cry across the seas and whisper through the icy Russian grass how I feel for you…Luga, Ladoga, Leningrad, Lazarevo…Alexander, once you carried me, and now I carry you. Into my eternity, now I carry you. Through Finland, through Sweden, to America, hand outstretched, I stand and limp forward, the galloping steed black and riderless in my wake. Your heart, your rifle, they will comfort me, they’ll be my cradle and my grave. Lazarevo drips you into my soul, dawn drop by moonlight drop from the river Kama. When you look for me, look for me there, because that’s where I will be all the days of my life. “Shura, I can’t bear the thought of you dying,” Tatiana said to him when they were lying on the blanket, having made love by the fire in the dewy morning. “I can’t bear the thought of you not breathing in this world.” “I’m not crazy about the thought of that myself.” Alexander grinned. “I’m not going to die. You said so yourself. You said I was meant for great things.” “You are meant for great things,” she replied. “But you better keep yourself alive for me, soldier, because I can’t continue to live without you.” That’s what she said, looking up into his face, her hands on his beating heart. He bent down and kissed her freckles. “You can’t continue? My cartwheeling queen of Lake Ilmen?” Smiling, he shook his head. “You will find a way to live without me. You will find a way to live for both of us,” Alexander said to Tatiana as the swelling Kama River flowed from the Ural Mountains through a pine village named Lazarevo, once when they were in love, and young.