Beautiful Assassin

PART I

Let him who desires peace, prepare for war.
—VEGETIUS



1

Sevastopol, 1942

Imagine a woman in a tree, a silly, foolish young woman holding a gun and preparing to kill a man she does not even know. There she sits, waiting, hopeful of the smallest of lapses that will spell death for her opponent. She is fearless. She has on her side the vanity of youth, the blindness that comes from a righteous sense of revenge. She believes herself on a sacred mission, that each death she inflicts on the enemy brings her a little closer to peace. She doesn’t yet know that she could kill every single German in the Third Reich, and she would not find peace. She has yet to learn this. But she will.
That time in the tree was mere luck. Nothing more than that. In war, you cannot count on luck. You can only avoid making mistakes. If you make one mistake in battle, you pay for it, usually with your life. That day I had made not one, but two mistakes. The first was hiding in the tree. The second was that I had let myself daydream. It was so unlike me to let my thoughts drift when I was in position, rifle at the ready, all of my senses heightened like those of a wolf stalking its prey. Such an indiscretion often ends badly, let me tell you. But there I was, recalling a summer morning before the war, remembering a way of life that seemed unreal, as gossamer as a fairy tale. In the memory I lay in bed alone. Kolya, my husband, was already off to his job working for the city of Kiev. I recalled that the bedroom window was open, the yellow curtains I’d made the first year of our marriage ballooning like a bellows. The cool air from the Dnieper was wafting into the room, and from the apartment below ours drifted the wistful cello notes of the music student who lived there. Mostly, though, what I remembered of that morning was the feeling, that strange and altogether wondrous sensation somewhere deep down inside a woman when she feels—no, when she knows—she is carrying life within her. I lay very still, feeling that life beginning in me, taking hold, filling me, knowing already that I loved the tiny creature that was sharing my body, loved it with all my heart and soul, loved it so much that the tears welled up in my eyes as I listened to something hauntingly beautiful by Rachmaninoff. I thought to myself, This is love. This feeling. This moment. I had never felt it before, not even with my husband, but I knew right then what it was.
At that moment, the war had faded far, far away.
But sentimentality is a luxury a soldier cannot afford. That’s when the first bullet murmured softly behind my left ear. Its passage was no more than a feather over my skin, a warm breath along my neck, yet it was enough to yank me back to the present. I knew that breath all too well: it carried the foul stench of death itself. Its wake caused the hairs on my scalp to stand at attention, and the leaves surrounding me to jingle like a wind chime. I noticed a single leaf, prematurely aged, detach itself and spiral lazily toward the gravestones below. The ground was already littered with its comrades. Though only late spring, the leaves had begun to turn color and drop. Perhaps it was due to the general disruption in things—the gritty ash that rained constantly from the skies, the pounding of the big siege guns the Germans had brought up by train, the fearsome shuddering from the nightly air raids, the intense heat and smoke of the fires that had scorched the earth all the way to the hazy mountains west of Yalta. Whatever it was, it seemed even nature itself was in full-scale retreat, like the people in the city who’d taken to the sewers, trying to get to a place of safety, a place that no longer existed. And certainly not to be found in a lone apple tree in the middle of a cemetery.
Dura, I cursed to myself. For I was a fool, an arrogant fool. You see, I didn’t fear death, that was my biggest mistake of all. My life had long ago stopped mattering to me. It was but an instrument of my revenge. I was like Hamlet. For me the readiness was all, ready to spill my blood at the drop of a hat. Yet I didn’t want to squander my life by a foolish mistake, didn’t want that German sobaka across the way to beat me.
I pressed against the tree’s slender trunk and froze. I waited five, ten, thirty minutes or more, not allowing so much as the twitch of a muscle to give away my position, though obviously that was a question already in doubt. When I thought enough time had elapsed, I slowly grasped the field glasses hanging from my neck, brought them up, and cautiously scanned the valley to the northwest. Once it had been rolling farmland, green and fertile and verdant, but now it resembled more a lunar landscape than any place on earth. An apple orchard, most of whose trees were broken and splintered as if by a giant’s angry fist. Grazing land pockmarked by the Germans’ 88s. The blackened remains of a farmhouse, in the yard of which lay the rotting corpse of a cow, its belly bloated obscenely in the heat. To the right of the house was the barn, curiously still intact. I inspected the upper and lower doors closely, then the stone wall that ran behind it, but instinct told me the shot had not come from there. About a hundred meters to the north was a stand of alder trees and dense undergrowth that lined the banks of a stream. Is that where he is? The gitlerovets. My fascist adversary. The one I’d been stalking and who, in turn, had been stalking me for the past several days. That strange dance we’d been engaged in, that terrible act of intimacy which is at the heart of killing. Yesterday he’d hidden in the loft of the barn. Knowing him as I’d come to, it should have been obvious, but then again, in my attempt to get inside his head and outwit him, I’d thought the barn would have been too obvious, too pedestrian for someone as clever as he, and so I’d ignored it. And because of my oversight, he’d managed to pick off three of my comrades and seriously wound a fourth before I was able to locate his position. By then, of course, he’d moved on, slithered away in that reptilian fashion of his to blend in somewhere else and kill again—two more times. A good day for him, a bad one for me. From the vantage point of the tree, I felt I’d have the upper hand. It looked right down the valley, on the German lines below. Wherever he would take up today, as soon as he fired, I would have him in my grasp. I would kill him. But I should’ve known he’d counter my move, and now he was the one with the advantage. Wherever he was.
It was early, but already the sun exploded into my hiding spot. What had seemed before dawn to be the perfect position, now appeared for what it was: a trap. Too many leaves had fallen, making the upper branches of the tree resemble the head of an old man going bald. Sunlight from the east streamed into my sniper’s nest through a hundred gaping holes. I felt suddenly naked and vulnerable. I should have listened to Zoya, the young corporal who was my spotter. We worked in teams, a sniper and a spotter. Zoya, always the cautious one, had warned me against taking up a position in the tree, especially one off by itself. The first thing we’d been taught in sniper training was that you must always have an escape route. You must move often, so that your position couldn’t be discovered. Shoot and move, that was how we were taught. But now it was too late to move. I’d been discovered, my position known by my foe. So I did the only thing I could—I adjusted my feet on the branch below me, shifted my weight a bit, and accepted whatever slight protection the tree’s narrow trunk offered.
Save for the raspy cawing of a lone crow somewhere in the distance, it was quiet for a long while. Then I heard Zoya calling me.
“Sergeant,” she whispered hoarsely. Zoya had hidden in the foxhole over at the cemetery’s edge, behind a hedgerow. Where I should have been. “Jump and run for it.”
Yet I remained silent, unmoving.
I mulled over my options. It was four or five meters to the ground, which was a small cemetery. Beneath the tree, the earth was flat and clear, save for a few gravestones, most of which were small or composed of wooden crosses, and they offered little cover. It was a tiny village cemetery on the outskirts of the city. The closest cover was behind the small hill at the western edge of the cemetery where Zoya was dug in, some thirty meters off. If I landed cleanly, I could make a run for it. I was swift of foot, had won medals in track back in school. I figured with my pack and rifle I could cover that distance in five, perhaps six, seconds. Maybe I could make it. But that, I told myself, was wishful thinking. Before I reached safety I would have to surmount the small hill, then make it through the hedgerow. At this distance, in broad daylight, I would present an easy target. I wouldn’t make it two steps up that hill before a bullet tore into my back. Then he’d have won, he’d have beaten me. In some ways that thought was more bitter than death itself. To lose to the fascist dog, to have him put me down in his kill log as another notch. No, I thought. Better just to stay put and hope that something else presented itself. Maybe I would get lucky.


Before dawn that morning, Zoya and I had crawled to the cemetery’s edge, a half kilometer forward of our front lines. As always we had scouted out the position the day before and had planned on digging in, getting concealed and set up before first light. A sniper’s life is one of careful planning, of concealment, of surprise, of infinite patience, and of course, of much luck. Behind that little hill at the edge of the cemetery was a good position, one that commanded much of the valley to the north where the German lines were. Yet as Zoya removed her entrenching tool and began to dig our foxhole, I happened to notice, in the middle of the cemetery, the darker, jagged outline of the tree set against the lighter blue of the predawn sky. I’d seen it the previous day, a single apple tree set off by itself amid the graves. Long ago, somebody visiting a loved one must have tossed an apple core, and the thing took root and sprouted there among the dead. I imagined its roots reaching down, entwining with the bones of those who lay sleeping. From its branches, it offered a tantalizing view of the valley, one even better than where we were now. A perfect sniper cell, one which he would never think to look in, exactly because it was too risky.
“What of that tree?” I whispered in the darkness. The spot where Zoya was digging offered shelter from the German lines, so we felt free to talk, at least in measured whispers.
“What about it?” Zoya asked.
“What if I took up position there?”
Zoya gave her usual humph when she felt something undeserving of comment, and kept digging.
“It looks right down at the barn,” I explained. “From there you can see the entire valley. It’s a good position.”
“This is a good position,” she said.
“But that is a better one.”
“Vot cholera,” she said, one of her odd, Ossetian curses. “Sergeant, you and I both know that would be foolishness.”
“I would have a clear shot at him.”
“And he of you,” said the young woman in her heavy accent, one that sounded as if she had smooth tiny pebbles in her mouth.
I felt her hesitation was partly owing to the fact that she didn’t like the idea of crawling through the cemetery in the dark. Zoya Kovshova was very superstitious. A mere girl of eighteen, she’d come from some tiny village way up in the Caucasus where the women were married off at thirteen and wore black for a year when their husbands died, and where a hare hopping across your path was considered an ill omen. She was forever crossing herself and uttering some oath against bad luck. Facing the Germans she was as fearless as any soldier in the entire Chapayev Division. During the evacuation of Odessa, for instance, when we were savagely fighting the German advance street by street, Zoya had remained behind in what was left of Birzhevaya Square, firing her machine gun until she’d run out of ammo. And only then did she leave her post when Captain Petrenko ordered her to do so. But if a crow lighted in a tree and squawked three times, she would mumble something in her strange mountain tongue and throw a handful of dirt over her shoulder; otherwise, she worried she would never be able to bear children after the war. And what man would want a bride whose womb had been dried up by a crow? But she was, I knew, also just watching out for me. Zoya was as protective as a mother hen. In fact, as a joke I sometimes called her “malen’kaya”—little mother. Now and then when I would shoot an enemy soldier and I’d lie in wait to claim a second one I could sense was nearby, she would touch my arm. “Don’t get greedy, Tat’yana. It’s not safe here,” she would caution me. “Yes, little mother,” I would reply.
“The sun will be in his eyes,” I had said this morning.
“But if you’re spotted, you cannot get out of it.”
“I won’t be spotted. He’s a clever one, this German, and I have to outfox him.”
Zoya straightened and turned to face me. I could feel her gray eyes fixing me even in the darkness.
“This is madness. You take too many risks, Tat’yana Levchenko.” When it was just the two of us, she still called me by name, though I had by now been promoted to sergeant. I didn’t mind. We were good friends as well as comrades. The fighting had brought us close in ways that only danger and the letting of blood can. During brutally cold winter nights, when we were in a foxhole, we sometimes used to sleep in each other’s arms for warmth. Other times, when I would make a difficult shot she would throw her arms around me and kiss me on the cheek. So I usually permitted such familiarity, especially when we were alone.
“We are at war,” I said. “Everything we do is a risk.”
“But you take too many.”
“Wait here then,” I told her, picking up my rifle to leave.
“Has all the talk gone to your head?” she said.
I turned on her and said sharply, “That will be enough, Corporal.” I had only recently been promoted to sergeant and wasn’t used to pulling rank on her. For months as corporals, we’d worked well as a sniper team, sharing the demands and discomforts and dangers of our profession—sweating under the hot summer sun, freezing in the snow and cold of winter, shivering in the rain, many times coming within a hairs-breadth of catching a sniper bullet. And always taking equal credit for the kills. Sometimes, however, friendship had to take a backseat to duty, to the necessity of command. Besides, I knew the potential danger I was courting, and yet I wanted so very much to get this German, and I was willing to do almost anything, risk anything. But I couldn’t permit Zoya to sacrifice her life for my prideful need for vengeance.
She picked up the bulky Degtyaryov automatic and the ammo pouches and started to follow me.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I am coming with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“But we are a team, Sergeant.”
“Not this time.”
She shook her head in annoyance. “Well, you’d better take this,” she said, offering up her own canteen. I tried to refuse it, but Zoya was adamant, so I accepted it with thanks.
As I turned to leave, she touched my wrist. “Be careful, Tat’yana. This German has a powerful gift.” More of her superstition. Still, it unnerved me a bit.
“He’s just a man,” I replied. “And like any man, he can be killed.”
“So far no one has. Watch yourself,” she said, getting in the last word.
The notion that this kraut was something more than an ordinary man had begun to spread through our lines. Like a fever it had permeated our troops, undermining our spirit. But then, realizing these could be my last words to Zoya, I softened my tone: “Don’t worry. I shall be careful, little mother.”
I crawled through the cemetery until I reached the tree. Quietly, I started climbing it, my rifle slung over my shoulder. I got into position, remained motionless, and waited for the dawn. From there, as the darkness melted slowly away into the folds and creases of the valley, I scoped the territory to the north, searching for some sign of the German, a clue as to his position. Some movement. The glint from a gun barrel. A portion of the landscape that had been disturbed from the previous day—a branch that had been moved, a section of overturned earth, a piece of wood that didn’t look natural. As clever as these Germans were, the one thing they lacked was patience. They had the impulsiveness of spoiled children, the privileged sort who’d grown up in luxury and were used to having their every desire met instantly. Also, from the tree I had the advantage of the sun over my shoulder, which meant he had it in his eyes, at least until noon, when the tables would slowly be turned. I hoped to catch it flashing off his scope as he searched for me. I was excited by the prospect of getting him, of having my comrades cheer me when I returned to our lines. Yes, I must admit that I looked forward to that moment as an athlete does to the laurel crown of victory. And yet I knew when the moment of truth came, I would have to still my heart, keep my thoughts, my pride, my burning vengeance under control. I wouldn’t pull the trigger until I was sure to send him to his Valhalla.
You see, in that strange communion that develops between snipers, this German and I had come to know the other, each one’s habits and instincts, the other’s preferences and idiosyncrasies. For instance, I knew that he liked to scope the terrain right to left, instead of the other way around, as most snipers did. That he sometimes took up positions in what would appear to be the most obvious, and therefore the least likely. That he had a tendency to shoot too quickly, which resulted in a wounded target rather than a kill. That he preferred flashy head shots to the safer torso strikes that most snipers aimed for. We had been playing a kind of cat and mouse game for the past several days, of move and countermove, a complicated dance. Before this day, he had fired at me several times, barely missing me once at twilight when I was changing my socks, soaked from a day of rain. And one time I had squandered a difficult but clearly possible shot at five hundred meters. Zoya had spotted him hiding in a hollow tree trunk at the edge of the woods. In my eagerness to take him, I had jerked the trigger instead of “kissing” it, as my first shooting instructor in the Osoviakhim, Sergeant Tarasov, had termed it, and the Mosin-Nagant had shot high, as it had a tendency to do. The tree, I felt, would give me the edge I needed. I’d convinced myself that with my camouflage poncho, I could blend into my surroundings. Besides, I had one important advantage over him—patience. People in my unit told me I had the patience of a saint, though I doubt there are any saints in war. I would wait him out, I thought. I would let him make a mistake and then kill him. I could even picture the surprised look in his eyes as my bullet caressed his heart.
But no sooner had the sun spilled over the mountainous country to the east than I’d begun to wonder if I myself had not made the first mistake. Had I convinced myself of the safety of the tree not because it was safe, but because I was beginning to think myself invincible? Perhaps Zoya had been right. Maybe all the talk about my successes—the 287 kills, the medals, surviving three wounds, the articles in the military newspaper, even those newspapers from as far away as Moscow—maybe all that had gone to my head. Maybe I’d acted out of pride, instead of cold calculation, as I normally did. It was cold calculation, you see, that had made me not only the sniper with the highest kill total in the entire southern front of the Red Army, but had kept me alive as well. Since the war began I had learned that the most important lesson of sniping wasn’t marksmanship, a technical skill; in fact, it had very little to do with one’s expertise with a gun. It was something inside, controlling one’s emotions. You could hate the Germans with all your heart and soul, but you had to kill them with dispassion, with a cool head and a steady finger. That was the key. You had to turn your hatred into ice.
Still, I’d wanted this particular gitlerovets so badly. I burned to defeat him. Over the past week, he’d scored some two dozen kills against my comrades—dispatching machine gunners, a female medic, a mortar team, two officers, a cook, a radioman, even several wounded soldiers being evacuated to a field hospital. The Red Cross sign meant nothing to him. He killed without discriminating, as one would crush ants beneath his boot heel; he seemed almost to take a capricious delight in his selection of targets, not out of military necessity, but like some arrogant god striking down whom he wished simply to show that he could. But the one that disturbed me most was a fresh recruit from Kiev University, where I had been working on my thesis before the war. I’d spoken to him once or twice. A pleasant, boyish-faced youth named Gorobets. Bookish and retiring, he was studying philosophy. Like myself, he wanted to be an academic, to teach and write, to spend his evenings quietly pouring over books. Foolishly, he’d crawled out of the trenches to get a page of a letter that had blown away. The story went that it had been a letter from his sweetheart, and because he was so far back of the front lines and therefore believed himself in no danger, he’d gone over the breastworks to retrieve it. The German had killed him with a head shot from fifteen hundred meters. Which was, of course, utter nonsense. No one killed with a Mauser from that distance. It was impossible, even for someone as good as this German. The first time I’d heard the story back at camp it had been only a third that distance, but it had grown with each successive telling and with each soldier the German chalked up, as did his reputation among our troops. Some were beginning to call him Korol’ Smerti—the King of Death. He had begun to get under our soldiers’ skin, to plague their thoughts, their dreams. They would speak of him in those hushed and nervous tones little children use when talking of the buka hiding under their beds. In the evening, I could see the haunted look in their eyes as they discussed the troops he’d dispatched that day. Even my brave little Zoya had been affected. I thought if I could get him, it would put an end to such nonsense. They would see that these Germans were just men like any other. That they could be killed. That we could beat them eventually, and drive them from our soil.
I thought I even knew this King of Death’s voice, could pick it out from the other Germans who called across the lines at night. Sometimes the Germans would call things across the divide of no-man’s-land between our two lines, hoping to trick us, to goad us, to undermine our morale. They were good at propaganda, these Aryans, good at getting into one’s head. With me it had started months back when my kill total had reached first one hundred, then two hundred. I began to get something of a reputation, not only on my own side but on theirs as well. Somehow they’d learned my name. It wasn’t a hard thing, finding out my identity. Perhaps they got it from a tongue, what we called a captured soldier, or from one of the army newsletters that had fallen into their hands. Some of the things the Germans called were of a flirtatious nature, only what a brash Ukrainian boy back home might have said to me. “Tat’yana Levchenko, why don’t you come over here,” they’d say. “I have some schnapps and we can get to know each other.” Their cockiness made me almost smile in spite of myself. Others, though, called out crude epithets, threats or taunts, aimed at provoking me into acting rashly and giving away my position. “You had better keep out of our way, Flintenweib”—“gun woman,” the term the Germans used, part contempt, part awe, for female snipers. “If we catch you, we will tear you into two hundred little pieces and scatter them to the winds.” Two hundred pieces—for the number of Germans I had at the time tallied. Once or twice, I’d heard a voice that for some unknown reason, I assumed to be that of the King of Death himself. He’d call out in crude Russian, “Put down your gun, Tat’yana, and I let you live. You can be my shlyukha.” His whore. But I never let him—or whoever it was—get to me. I never lost my temper. Let them say what they would, I thought. I would let my gun speak for me.
Still, it was sometimes hard to ignore them, the personal things they said. Occasionally they would call out about one’s mother or father, even one’s children. Those despicable bastards would even stoop to that. They were good at finding a person’s weakness. “How are your little ones, Tat’yana Levchenko? Are they getting enough to eat?” And, “What sort of mother leaves her children alone to go off and fight?” I knew they did this to other women soldiers too, said things of a general nature to make them feel guilty for going off to war. But unlike me, most of the women soldiers were actually unmarried, didn’t even have families. That didn’t stop the Germans. Of course, I realized the krauts knew nothing about my little girl. Nothing at all. How could they? Nonetheless, when I heard such things, they were like a dagger in my heart. If I could, I’d have gladly killed them with my bare hands, slowly, painfully, taking pleasure in it.


There, caught in my apple tree, I decided I would just have to remain still and wait for darkness—some eight hours hence. The bright day stretched out flat and thin and brittle, each second exaggerated, seeming to last an hour. My watch had been damaged by shrapnel several days earlier, so I had to estimate the time by the sun’s passage. I picked out a gravestone below and marked the movement of its shadow across the ground.
By midday it was scorching. I felt the sweat soaking my shirt and tunic, running down my back. A bee buzzed near my head, drawn by the sweet fragrance of last season’s apples rotting below. I watched an ant crawl up my sleeve, across my chest, onto the skin of my neck. Then I could feel it moving down between my breasts, tickling me, teasing me, as if knowing it could do whatever it pleased with impunity. A little German sympathizer, I thought to myself. Of course, I dared not move to crush it. To do so could spell death, so I bit on my lower lip to create a pain to neutralize the other. In the distance there was the sporadic pock…pock of small arms fire, the occasional tat-tat-tat of automatic weapons, but other than that the day was eerily still. For weeks we’d heard that the Germans were getting ready to attack, a final offensive to take the city. Supposedly they were bringing up reinforcements, two more divisions, as well as tanks and heavy artillery for the last thrust that would push us into the sea. The fine spring day unfolded like a ripe flower raising its head toward the sun. Now and then I caught a whiff of salt in the air from the sea just a few kilometers to my back. It would have been a wonderful day if not for the war.
When a second shot didn’t follow the first for what I estimated was four hours, maybe more, I began to wonder if the danger I was in was real or imagined. Perhaps he didn’t have a clear shot after all. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he take it? Or maybe he hadn’t even spotted me. Maybe the first shot wasn’t even his, just a stray that happened to come close. It was, after all, a battlefield. I wasn’t the only object of their guns.
My right leg had gone numb, so I chanced shifting my position ever so slightly. I moved one foot on the branch below, started to shift my thigh. That’s when the next bullet thudded into the tree trunk: whht. I could feel its impact through the wood, a firm tapping against my cheek, a knock on the door of my mortality. And then another—whht. And two more after that. Whht, whht. The last grazed the bark at an angle, flying past the tree but spitting fragments of wood into my face. Was the German simply toying with me? Did he intend to savor his advantage for a while, prolong my agony before dispatching me?
Moving my head cautiously, I saw the last bullet’s mark along the side of the trunk. It came from a Mauser 98k, the standard weapon of my enemy. The Mauser was bolt action, had a five-round clip, and shot a 197-grain, steel-jacketed bullet at 840 meters per second, if loaded with high-velocity machine-gun ammo, as I knew this King of Death did. The rifle had an effective kill range of five hundred meters, not as good as our Soviet rifle, but with a scope and in competent hands the Mauser could kill well beyond that distance. And this kraut was much more than competent. He was good. He was very good. I studied the angle the last shot had made along the bark, and using its trajectory I followed it to a point about three hundred meters east of where I’d previously assumed him to be. There the land fell abruptly away toward what had been a quarry. It ran for a half kilometer along the Soviet right flank. I’d passed it when our Second Company had been ordered to fall back and take up positions along this high ground overlooking the city. So, I thought. That’s where you are. He was moving clockwise, to my right, getting out of the sun’s rays and trying to outflank me, to put the sun in my eyes and get in position for a clear shot. And yet, if I kept moving to maintain the trunk between us, soon I’d be exposed to other German snipers and machine gunners to the north and west. I was vulnerable one way or the other.
Time was running out for me. I felt I had to come up with a plan quickly, before I became a sitting duck. Finally, I decided what I must do. I’d tempt him into shooting again and then pretend that he’d hit me and fall from the tree. This strategy, I knew, had only a slim chance for success, but it was better than waiting to be killed. I worked things out, trying to design my “death” so that it would look real. When I fell I wanted to make sure I was facing in the direction of the German’s position, and that my rifle landed within reach. Cautiously, I removed the scope, not wanting it to get damaged, and put it in my rucksack, hanging over my shoulder. I also had to make sure to avoid hitting any branches on the way down. That might spin me out of control and I could very well break my neck. But at the same time my fall had to appear natural to be convincing—that I’d been hit and killed.
I took off my forage cap and placed it on the end of my bayonet and extended it ever so slowly just a little ways beyond the trunk, just enough so as to lure the German into thinking it was still sitting atop my head. He didn’t disappoint me. In a moment the bullet’s impact flung my cap backward into the leaves. As if hit, I released my grip on the tree and let myself go, plunging earthward.
I slammed into the ground, the back of my head striking painfully against something hard. Luckily, my right side took the brunt of the fall, so that it was diffused along the entirety of my body. Still, the impact knocked the wind out of me, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe because of a stabbing pain in my side. I thought perhaps I’d broken some ribs. I could also feel a hot wetness inching down along my scalp behind my right ear. I didn’t think that I’d been hit, but I couldn’t be sure. Fortunately for me, the German, who was down below in the valley, didn’t have a clear shot of where I now lay on the ground; otherwise, he’d have put another round in me just to be certain. If the tables had been turned I’d have done nothing less. I figured he’d probably come closer to make certain. So I had to lie perfectly still and pretend I was dead. That was my only chance.
I tried to gain control of my breathing, but each breath sent a new wave of pain knifing through me. I hoped that my act was convincing. From somewhere behind me, I could hear Zoya calling. She couldn’t see me where I lay, not without leaving the safety of the foxhole and exposing herself.
“Tat’yana! Tat’yana, are you all right?” When I didn’t answer, Zoya called again. “I’m coming for you.”
“Don’t!” I hissed through clenched teeth.
I would wait until dark and then crawl back to safety. However, the pain in my side was fierce, and coupled with an intense throbbing that commenced at the back of my skull, I felt my head reeling. I saw a flickering shadow pass overhead, crossing between myself and the sunlight. I thought of that poem by the American poet Dickinson that one of my teachers back in school, a Madame Rudneva, had had me recite in English: With blue—uncertain stumbling buzz—between the light—and me. I thought at first it was a plane or a bird, but then I realized I was losing consciousness. I shivered, feeling cold creep suddenly over my limbs, as if I were slipping into frigid water. My eyesight began to fail. After a while, darkness stole over me completely. In that darkness I remember calling out Masha’s name.


When I came to—minutes? hours? later—I felt a burning thirst. My tongue was swollen and dry in my mouth, like an old piece of leather. It hurt to swallow. After a time, I chanced opening my eyes a crack, the light which poured in scalding my brain. Was I in the land of the dead? I wondered. When my eyes had had a chance to adjust, the first thing I saw was an old, weathered gravestone. It was that of a woman—Elyzaveta Fedutenko. Next to hers was another headstone, what I assumed was her husband, and next to that, two others, their children, I guessed from the dates of their births. They had all died in the same year: 1932. Doubtless they’d perished in the Holodomor, the great famine that had swept across the Ukraine when I was a girl.
As I lay there looking at the stone, I thought again of my own child, my Masha. Perhaps because my head was still dazed, for a moment her memory came as a thing of undiluted joy. I pictured her in the park near the Dnieper, not far from where we’d lived. I saw her running toward me, her hair, blond and fine like Kolya’s, bouncing as she ran, calling out to me, “Mama, Mama.” As I lay there, I felt the sun’s warmth waning, saw that its angle had changed. It had slid off toward the western horizon, beyond the sea. From the lengthening shadow of the nearby gravestone, I guessed it to be six, maybe seven o’clock. If only I could make it a little while longer. More time passed. Who could say how much? When you are lying half dead, waiting for your executioner to come, time has little meaning.
But as twilight settled in over the cemetery, out of the corner of my eye I caught the faintest movement toward the northeast. A figure in khaki detached itself from the woods and approached stealthily over the uneven terrain, moving up the hill through the now sparse orchard. Moving toward me. I could make him out only from his chest up. He carried a rifle and moved quickly but cautiously in a crouch. I wondered what to do. Where Zoya waited, she might not see him approach from this angle. I remained still until the German dipped momentarily out of sight, then I grabbed my rifle and rolled behind the headstone of Elyzaveta Fedutenko. I flicked off the safety and fixed my sights on the general area where I’d last seen the kraut. It was barely a hundred meters, so I wouldn’t need the scope.
I didn’t spot him for a while and panic seized my chest. He was a clever one. What if he were trying to outflank me, come around from the side? But just at that moment, I saw the top of his head bobbing as he approached from the northeast. He was flitting from tree to tree, moving cautiously. He waited at the last tree, surveying the cemetery. From this vantage point, he still couldn’t quite see the ground beneath the tree from which I’d fallen. He paused there for a moment, and I found myself doing that odd thing I sometimes did—entering my enemy’s thoughts, trying to imagine what he would be thinking. The Russian whore thought she was so clever! The Germans were a prideful lot, I’d come to understand. They did not like to be bested, and certainly not by a mere woman. It brought out in them a boyish bravado, a recklessness that made them vulnerable. If I had been a male sniper he’d have been satisfied, I’m quite sure, to leave things as they were, simply to chalk me up in his kill log and call it a day, go back to his German lines and celebrate with some warm food. But my being a woman compelled him to want to stand over my dead body, to take something that was mine. My cap, my Red Banner medal, my leather case containing my personal effects, the letter from Kolya, the lock of hair of Masha’s. Something to possess, to show his mates.
So this led the German to make his own foolish mistake. Without seeing my body, he took several quick steps into the cemetery, out into the open. When he could finally view the ground beneath the tree and he didn’t see me, he froze. Nervously, he scanned the area, his gun swung up to his shoulder, his knees bent in a position to fire. It took him only a moment to understand the full measure of his error, but when he did, he whirled and started to run back toward cover. He and I shared one thought: he was a dead man. Before he’d taken three steps, I had him in my sights. Quickly but calmly, I aimed the rifle and kissed the trigger. As always when a bullet strikes true, I could feel it before I saw its effects, could feel it in my right shoulder and in my trigger finger, in my bowels, in some part of my brain, too. I could usually tell as soon as I fired, the sweet certainty of putting a bullet exactly where I’d meant to. The impact spun the German halfway around. He staggered sideways and dropped to one knee. His rifle had fallen to the ground before him, and he struggled to get to it. Even now he was a soldier, and I felt a grudging admiration for that, despite the hatred I bore him. Without thinking, I worked the bolt and chambered another round. I was prepared to put a second bullet into him, but he suddenly collapsed onto his face and lay still. As our ammo was becoming scarce, we Soviets knew to be frugal. This one was dead. Then I told myself what I always did after killing a German: For you, Masha. For you, my love.
I got up and trotted to where he lay, keeping my rifle trained on his prone figure, my head low so as not to be exposed to the enemy lines below. Up close I nudged him with my boot, ready to shoot him again if he showed any sign of life. He didn’t move, so I rolled him over. The bullet had entered through his left shoulder blade and exited the middle of his chest, tearing away his NCO’s breast eagle and leaving a jagged, bloody hole in his tunic. A dark, wet stain had spread out over the front of his uniform. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted and forming what looked like a vague smile. Up close, I saw that my adversary was younger than I by a few years, perhaps only twenty-one. Good-looking in that frugal, Aryan sort of way, with angular features, straight white teeth, close-cropped, light brown hair. At his neck he wore the Iron Cross, which he’d no doubt won for his marksmanship. I could just imagine this King of Death in some beer hall back in Berlin or Munich bragging to all the pretty fr?uleins about how he’d got the better of some Red whore who was supposed to be such a deadly sniper. And yet, lying there, he didn’t look much like a king now. Merely a cocky boy who needed to be taught some manners. Am I your whore now? I thought with a prideful anger. What surprised me about war wasn’t the fact that killing had become so easy. No. It was that one grows to actually enjoy it, to savor it, as you would any other hard-earned skill. Writing poetry or winning a footrace.
I knelt and lay my weapon down and began riffling through his clothes. I found some letters, one or two pictures, which I tossed aside. I didn’t want to know his name, his past, anything about him. He was just a cipher to me: 288. Nothing more than that. Another number to chalk up in my kill log. In one pocket I came upon a half-eaten piece of chocolate, his teeth marks scalloping the edges. Zoya loved chocolate, so I stuffed it in my tunic as a gift to her. Next, I stripped him of his ammo pouches and his bayonet. A comrade of mine named Kolyshkin, a radioman, liked to collect German souvenirs, so I leaned down to take the Iron Cross from about his throat. The pin was fastened tight, and I struggled getting it free. That’s when an odd thing happened—the dead man opened his eyes and stared at me.
Startled, I was forced backward onto my heels. I grasped his bayonet and brought it toward his throat, prepared to finish him off. But for some reason I paused, curiously watching him. He didn’t move, just stared up at me. It had been a definite kill shot and by rights he should have been dead. And yet he wasn’t. His breathing was shallow and labored, a sucking noise rattling from lungs slowly drowning in their own blood. A fine red froth began to gather at the corners of his mouth. He lay there looking up at me, a peculiar expression in his light-blue eyes. It wasn’t hatred or fear or even desperation. He seemed well beyond such earthly concerns. His eyes were almost calm, and there was in them a kind of resigned understanding, the sort that sometimes—though not always—comes to one about to die in battle.
I wondered what to do. This had never happened to me before. Should I just turn and leave him there to die, as I knew he would shortly? Or should I use his bayonet to give him the coup de grace? Even a German should not die such a death, I felt. As I made a move with the knife, though, he reached out and grasped my wrist. For a moment I thought he intended to fight me. So I switched the bayonet to my other hand, was about to plunge it into his throat, but I realized he had no fight left in him. The color had already left his face, and while I thought to pull away, I didn’t. For some reason, I permitted his hand to remain locked on my wrist. I don’t know why. To this day, I don’t know why. Perhaps I was just too startled to do otherwise. His lips came together, and he appeared to be struggling to say something.
“What?” I asked, my tone impatient. I wanted him to get on with this business of dying. I was hungry and tired, my body aching from the fall, and I wanted only to get back to my own lines. To warm food and the comforting banter of my comrades around me, and to the oblivion of sleep.
He tried again, but nothing came out save for that rattling sound in his chest. So I leaned down and placed my ear near his mouth. His breath had the metallic odor of blood on it, the stink of the grave.
This time he said something. It sounded like a name: “Senta.”
“What?” I asked.
He said it again, staring up at me, his eyes pleading. “Senta.”
I knew only a few German expressions, so I decided to try the little English I possessed. “Your wife?” I asked.
But I could see the humanness rapidly ebbing from his eyes, the pupils seeming to relax, to widen, as if to allow his soul room to exit through them. He repeated the word a third time, staring up at me imploringly. “Senta.”
“What do you want?” I cried.
He stared at me silently. I brought the bayonet to his throat, unsure whether it was to put him out of his misery or to end my own discomfort. But his eyes glazed over and his end on this earth came.
Only then did I realize that his hand was still locked on my wrist. I had to pry his fingers off. Freed of them, I could see their imprint still in my flesh. I stood then, staring down at my dead foe. I didn’t exactly feel remorse, but something closer to anger, a sudden, inexplicable anger. Don’t blame me, I felt like saying to him. You brought this on yourself. But he merely continued to stare up at me with his dead, accusatory eyes, like the stony eyes of a statue.
It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to be mistakenly shot by my own sentries, so I collected his rifle and the other spoils of the victor, and trotted quickly back toward where Zoya was waiting.
“It’s me,” I called as I approached.
“Mother of Jesus,” Zoya replied, crossing herself. She threw her arms around me and hugged so hard my bruised ribs hurt.
“Easy,” I said.
“What is it?”
“I injured my side when I fell.”
“For a while there I thought you…”
“That’s what he thought too,” I said with a nod of my head back toward where the German lay.
“Did you get him?”
By way of answer I handed her the Mauser.
“Wait till they hear back at camp!” she exclaimed. “You killed the King of Death, Tat’yana! You got him.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I got him.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, little mother, I’m fine.”
As we headed back to our lines, though, something didn’t sit right with me. Though I should have been exalted and proud of what I’d pulled off, that I was still alive, I couldn’t get the image of the German out of my mind. The way he’d stared at me, how he’d insisted on telling me the name of his wife or sweetheart or whoever the hell it was. I could still feel the pressure of his hand locked on my wrist, a cruel reminder that even the Germans were human.