Beautiful Assassin

2

That night when we got back to our lines, word quickly spread that I’d gotten the King of Death. The news buoyed our company’s spirits immeasurably, so little had we to celebrate over the past several months. Many of my comrades came by to offer their congratulations. Kolyshkin, the radioman, thanked me for the Iron Cross I’d brought him as a memento, and some looked at the German’s Mauser, touching the rifle reverently, as if it were a religious relic. Our company commander, Captain Petrenko, even broke out a bottle of vodka he’d been saving and toasted the two of us.
“To Levchenko and Kovshova,” he said. “For getting the son of a bitch.”
The troops whooped and hollered, and gave us a cheer, which embarrassed me a little but also made me feel quite proud. I bathed in the sweet afterglow of victory.
Zoya delighted in relating the story of how I’d managed to pull it off. The way I’d fallen from the tree, how I’d tricked the King of Death into believing he’d shot me, then lured him into my trap and sprung it when he got close enough.
“You should have seen the look on that Fritz’s face,” she said, mimicking the surprised expression of the German. A number of us were in an underground bunker, the ceiling of which was reinforced with heavy timbers and several meters of earth against the Germans’ bombing runs. It was lit by several smoky lanterns that made the eyes burn. Zoya held the Mauser and pretended she was the King of Death sneaking up on me, taking exaggerated steps, like a character in a dumb show. She was quite the little actress. The other soldiers laughed heartily at her antics. Even I couldn’t help but smile, this despite the fact that the image of the German continued to sit uneasily in my thoughts. I kept seeing his blue eyes staring at me, his whispering that name to me. Of course, I hadn’t told Zoya about any of that. The fact that she hadn’t even seen my shot didn’t stop her in the least from embellishing the story. She was always bragging about my marksmanship, which made me a bit uncomfortable. Though I worked hard at being a good soldier and was proud of my accomplishments as a sniper, I didn’t want my comrades to feel jealous about the acclaim I’d received, especially from the higher-ups.
“The kraut comes walking toward the sergeant and realizes he’s f*cked,” Zoya explained. She’d come to the unit a simple country girl, modest and plainspoken, in some ways as pious as a nun. But now, especially in front of the others, she swore like a fishwife. With me, though, she was still the same innocent girl. “And the German takes to his heels. The sergeant here”—she glanced over at me, winking—“puts a round in the kraut’s back from three hundred meters. Three hundred meters, without a scope!”
“She exaggerates,” I said. “Not a third that distance.”
“It’s the God’s truth,” pleaded Zoya, crossing herself.
And so it went.
Over the next several days, each time she would retell it, the difficulty of the shot as well as the distance grew. Nonetheless, the troops enjoyed hearing the story about the killing of the German, and so I thought, let her tell her story. They could use some good news for a change. There was a collective sigh of relief that the King of Death could kill no more. It was as if we’d won a great battle, instead of defeating just one stinking fascist. Several of the other snipers in the unit came up to me to offer their congratulations.
“Good shooting, Sergeant,” said a young man named Cheburko, who came from Donetsk after that city fell to the Germans. There was among the other snipers and myself a friendly sort of competition. We joked and chided one another, playfully bragging among ourselves of our exploits, the difficulty of certain shots, the number of our kills. In the first months of the war, when I’d started to make a name for myself as a sniper, some of them, I must say, begrudged my success. What does a woman know about sniping, I knew they sneered behind my back. But as time went on, most grew at first to accept, then to respect, me. Among snipers there is a certain camaraderie, as among members of a football squad.
“Thank you, comrade,” I said. “Our team was successful.”
“What team?” scoffed Zoya. “I didn’t do a thing. It was all the sergeant’s doing. Such shooting you would not believe.”
Later, Yuri Sokur, the company medic, tended to the laceration along the back of my scalp.
“I guess congratulations are in order, Sergeant,” he said to me. Yuri was a small, wiry man with a pinched and contemplative face that reminded one of a very brooding monkey. Before the war, he’d been an undertaker, and with his knowledge of the body they had sent him for medical training. He was known for his poor bedside manner, perhaps owing to the fact that his previous patients weren’t able to complain very much. But for some reason he liked me, looked out for me like an older brother.
“You have yourself a nasty wound,” he told me as he cleaned and began stitching the cut.
“Just a scratch,” I replied.
“Scratch nothing. You could have a fractured skull for all I know.”
“Ouch,” I cried as he roughly drew the sutures through my scalp, as if to make his point.
“This big killer of Germans, afraid of a little needle?” he teased. “You need to take better care of yourself.”
“I did what I had to.”
“This makes, what, the fourth time you’ve been wounded?”
I shrugged.
The first two injuries I received were minor shrapnel wounds. The other, a bullet to my thigh, was more serious. It came during the evacuation of Odessa. My unit was pulling back toward the harbor. I was running for cover to a bombed-out building when a round ripped through my thigh. I would have bled to death if Zoya hadn’t tied a tourniquet around the wound and pulled me to safety.
“Even a cat has only nine lives, Sergeant,” Yuri warned me.
“That kraut needed to be stopped.”
“Does the captain know about your wound?”
I shook my head.
“If he got wind of it, he’d probably have you shipped off to a field hospital just to be on the safe side. They don’t want anything to happen to their star.”
He said this not out of jealousy or sarcasm, but out of concern.
“I’m just doing my duty,” I replied. “But you won’t tell him, will you?”
Yuri paused and came around so he could look me in the eye. “You have done the one thing that we’ve not been able to do to those kraut bastards.”
“And what is that?”
“You have pricked their Aryan pride. A woman has humbled the mighty Reich. And you’ve given us something to be proud of. So take care of yourself, Sergeant. We need you to stay alive.”


That night, we sat listening as the Germans made their usual bombing sorties over the city. Sometimes fifteen hundred a night, the steady drone of their planes like a horde of angry bees. Even from this distance the explosions made the ground quake. Occasionally one of their big thousand-kilo bombs would strike close enough that the dirt above us was shaken loose and fell upon our heads. And yet, we’d almost gotten used to it. Some soldiers occupied themselves cleaning their weapons, others with making tea or playing cards or darning socks. A few wrote letters or read mail by the frail lantern light.
A short distance away, a sergeant we called the Wild Boar and a few of his friends were passing around a bottle of vodka and talking about the Brits and Americans. They were debating when our supposed “allies” were going to open up a second front we’d all heard so much about. They used the disparaging term Amerikosy for the Americans, whom we thought of as spoiled capitalists fearful of the Germans. Occasionally we’d see the things the Amerikosy sent us through lend-lease—canned meats and radios, tires and trucks, barbed wire and guns and ammo. Most of us just wanted to know when the capitalists were actually going to get their hands dirty, when they were going to fight and die as we Soviets had been doing by the tens of thousands since the war began the previous year.
“What need have we for those capitalist dogs?” boasted Drubich, a bony man with gray skin and the large, flat eyes of a carp. He was one of the Wild Boar’s cronies, a boot-licking sycophant. A cowardly man in battle, he liked to boast when the bullets weren’t flying. “To hell with those bastards.”
“I think we can use all the help we can get,” replied another soldier named Nurylbayev, a dark-complected man who spoke with a Kazakh accent.
“F*ck the Yanks. And the Brits too,” added Drubich. “By the time they get their britches on we’ll have the krauts running back to Berlin. Ain’t that right, Sergeant?” he said, looking over at the Wild Boar.
The sergeant only grunted. He was staring at Zoya, I noticed. She sat on the floor a few feet away, cleaning her machine gun.
“But they are supposed to be our allies,” said Nurylbayev. “Why are we doing all the fighting, while they get to sit on their asses?”
“The Brits are too busy drinking their f*cking tea,” Drubich said, pretending he was sipping from a cup, his little finger raised in an attitude of high society. “And the Americans with their cricket.”
“The British play cricket, you ignorant bastard,” explained Nurylbayev. “In America they play baseball.”
“And how the hell would you know?”
“I had a cousin who moved to Boston. He wrote me about the Boston Red Stockings baseball team.”
“Red Stockings?” joked Drubich, sipping vodka from the bottle. “I didn’t know they had Communists over there.”
A few laughed at his joke.
“Gimme that,” grunted the Wild Boar, wrenching the bottle away from Drubich while he was still drinking, so that some of it spilled down onto his pants. “It’s that goddamned Jew-loving Roosevelt. He only cares about the Jews anyway. As long as they’re making money from the war, they could give a shit about who’s winning. Hitler had that part right. Too bad he didn’t finish the f*cking job before he took us on.”
As he said this, the Wild Boar glanced over at me. Of course, I thought. Like the rest, he’d heard the rumor that I was a Jew. Because I had the dark hair and eyes of a Gypsy. Most of all, I guess because I killed the krauts with such cold intensity, such that only a Jew could have for the Nazis.
“Still, the capitalists ought to be fighting with us,” replied Nurylbayev. “Not hiding like frightened children.”
“F*ck ’em,” added the Wild Boar. “Besides, when we get to Berlin, that’ll leave more pretty fr?uleins for the rest of us.”
“That’s right,” said Drubich, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic.
I’d heard such talk before. How we were taking the brunt of the Wehrmacht while the Americans hung back, testing the waters of war with their big toe in North Africa. My own feeling was that we needed help, the sooner the better. We all knew that America was a big and wealthy country, one that could well afford to build bombers and tanks and battleships, a country that had plenty of young men to fight, soft and well-fed pampered boys who played baseball and watched moving picture shows and drove big automobiles. Yet in truth, all that I knew about America came from what I’d read—how it was a lazy and decadent land filled with lazy and decadent people. That and what a former teacher of mine, Madame Rudneva, had told me about it.
From his rucksack, the Wild Boar took out a large sausage, hacked off a piece with his knife, jabbed it with the point, and stuck it into his mouth. His real name was Ilya Gasdanov, but behind his back everyone called him the Wild Boar. Partly because he was thickset with a coarse beard that covered most of his face, and because he had small feral eyes and a broad, upturned nose that resembled the snout of a pig. But mostly we called him that because he acted like some wild beast—in the way he ate, the way he fought, the way he treated the soldiers under his command, especially the way he treated the women soldiers. He was always in possession of such rare delicacies as sausage. He had connections, knew people in the black market who could get whatever you wanted, at least for the right price—real cigarettes, German schnapps, Black Sea caviar, even silk stockings, which he would dangle like bait in front of the dozen or so women in the company.
“Would you care for a piece, Corporal?” he said to Zoya. She had the Degtyaryov spread out in pieces on a section of canvas in front of her. With the pan off, she was loading it with copper-plated 7.62 mm cartridges, her movements nimble and precise, and I could just imagine how, before the war, her hands would have worked using a needle and thread to darn a sock or hem a dress. In front of her too lay a letter she’d gotten during mail call. I’d watched her as she read it, saw whatever news it brought from home fill her eyes with that familiar distant longing that such letters always bring. Even good news tended to make one sad, because you were away from those you loved. She glanced up at the Wild Boar, then across at me. I sat with my back to the earthen wall of the bunker, working on a poem in my journal, a small leather-bound notebook I kept in my pocket. I guess I still clung to the notion that I was a poet. Before the war I had dreamed of being the next Akhmatova. Now I wrote just to occupy my time, to keep my sanity.
“You are far too skinny, Corporal,” the Wild Boar said. “How are you going to kill those f*cking krauts if you don’t keep up your strength?” With his knife, he hacked off another large chunk of sausage, speared it with the point, and shoved it into the hairy cavity that was his mouth. The weapon, a dagger he’d taken off a dead SS officer, was a delicate-looking thing with a fancy engraved handle, something that resembled an expensive letter opener. “Uhm,” he said, making an exaggerated show of the pleasure it gave him. His lips smacked as he chewed and his throat made the guttural sounds of a dog eating. He cut another piece and extended it on the end of the dagger toward Zoya. “Have some. Don’t be shy, little one.”
At first she shook her head.
“Go on. Take it. There’s plenty more where that came from.” He smiled at her. “Think of it as a reward for your good work today, comrade.”
“For getting that kraut,” chipped in Drubich.
Hesitantly, she reached out and accepted the proffered piece of meat.
“Spasibo,” she said as she tore hungrily into it.
“Is good, no?”
She looked over and met my gaze, then turned away, embarrassed.
I went back to my journal. Each day I wrote something in it: random thoughts, observations, lines of a poem I never quite seemed to finish. It also served as my kill log, where I kept the official record of the men I dispatched as a sniper. Ironic, I knew, that between the same covers I both wrote poetry and recorded the number of Germans I shot. Creation and destruction in one book. My journal, though, was one of the few places that was private, a thing I didn’t have to share with anyone else. And it was the one part of my old life that I hadn’t lost, the one part of me that had remained constant. I sometimes felt that privacy was the worst casualty of war. I don’t mean by this personal modesty. The year of fighting had nearly purged me of that. Although it had been awkward at first, I’d long since ceased to worry about bathing or changing clothes or attending to personal needs in front of a company of mostly men. And they hardly batted an eye at seeing a woman pull her trousers down, squat, and relieve herself. The war had made modesty a luxury no one could afford. No, for me at least, it had to do with the absence of any privacy of mind, the time and silence to be alone with one’s thoughts, without being interrupted or pestered, without having to listen to a hundred other people jabbering or laughing, eating or farting, or snoring in their sleep. I missed the quiet evenings alone with a book, doing research in the musty-smelling stacks of the university library, sitting by myself along the river and working on a poem, allowing one line to open up an entire sonnet I hadn’t even known dwelled within me.
“And what about the sergeant?” the Wild Boar asked, as if he could read my thoughts and wished to disrupt them on purpose. “Would she care for a piece of my sausage?”
I looked up from my journal. “No,” I said flatly, then returned to my writing.
Despite already having eaten the watery gruel, the stale hunk of black bread, and the meager piece of dried meat or salted fish we all were given for our evening meal, I was still hungry. I was always hungry, as were we all, having been reduced to half rations since the Germans had tightened the noose around the city. All that is, except for the COs and commissars and the Party’s blue hats—those feared political officers—and those like the Wild Boar who knew how to take care of themselves. With the revolution, we were all supposed to be equal. But the war only proved what we all knew already—that a select few got plenty while the rest got the scraps. It was just like before the revolution, only now we called it communism.
Though my stomach growled from hunger, I wasn’t about to accept food from the Wild Boar. I didn’t like him, found him repulsive. The Wild Boar was old school, a battle-hardened career soldier who’d been in the czar’s army and didn’t think they should let women fight. He thought we “shlyukhi”—cunts—as I’d heard him refer to us, just got in the way and were bad for morale. To him, a woman belonged in the kitchen or the bedroom, not the battlefield.
Early in the war, there had been many such men, men who didn’t accept the notion of having women on the front lines. They felt defending the Motherland, killing Germans, was a man’s job. I could still recall my experience at the recruiting station where I’d gone to enlist, in a small village west of Kharkov. My face haggard and hair a mess, my dress still covered in blood. I stopped by a farmer’s water trough and asked if I could clean up. The woman there kindly gave me a bar of soap and some rags. I cleaned up, washed my face, tried to look presentable. From a wild cherry tree beside the road, I picked a couple of cherries, crushed them between my fingers, and rubbed their juice into my cheeks. I didn’t want to give the appearance of being pale and weak. I wanted to show them I was healthy, that I was strong and capable of fighting.
The country was in utter chaos, with thousands fleeing eastward before the fascists and their “lightning war” machine. There were long lines at the recruiting office, which was set up in an abandoned factory. I noticed one or two other women, not many. They’d just begun the call-up for women to fight, the very fact suggesting just how desperate the situation had become. A couple of men whistled at me, and they spoke in those leering undertones that men do in the presence of a woman they find desirable. I hardly felt desirable. I hardly felt like a woman even. More simply a vessel filled with anger, with hatred and the compulsion to do violence, so filled with it I thought I would burst. When I finally reached the front of the line, there were two officers seated behind a table. They looked me up and down, traded smiles.
“Yes?” one of them said. He was a skinny man with a red face scarred by smallpox. He used a matchbook to pick at his teeth.
“I wish to sign up to fight,” I explained.
“To fight?” he said with a laugh.
“Yes. For a combat unit.”
“What do you think war is, pretty girl? A dance?” He and the other officer chuckled at this.
“I want to fight,” I repeated.
“We have openings for nurses. If you want to be a nurse, I can get you in.”
“I am trained as a marksman.”
“Marksman!” he said in a mocking tone.
From my pocket I took out the certificate I’d received from the Osoviakhim, the paramilitary shooting club that my father had had me join back in Kiev when I was a girl. I had qualified as a marksman with a Mosin-Nagant rifle. At one hundred yards without a scope, I could put five shots within a five-centimeter pattern. I had won competitions throughout the Ukraine. I was a quite a good marksman.
“See,” I said, presenting the certificate to him.
He gave it a cursory inspection and tossed it back across the table at me. “I told you, we need nurses.”
“But you see there, I am good with a rifle.”
“Do you think shooting Germans is like shooting targets, pretty girl?” he huffed at me. “Come here,” he instructed, waving me to approach him. I hesitated, then leaned down toward him. “Closer,” he said. “I won’t bite.” I leaned still closer. When I was close enough that I could smell the leeks on his breath, he aimed his finger at my face and went bang loudly enough that it startled me. I jumped backward, almost into the man behind me. Both officers laughed again, as did a few of the others standing in line. I felt like a fool, felt my face grow hot, the familiar burning sensation beginning again at the corners of my eyes, as it had for so many days past. But I was not about to let the idiot get the better of me. So I squinted hard, tightening the flesh around my eyes. I think it was then that the change in me really began, when I became something other than just another victim of the Nazis. You see, our Motherland had rapidly become a nation of grieving mothers, so much grief and mourning and heartache that it hung in the air, palpable as smoke, choking the lungs.
“I want to enlist in a fighting unit,” I said firmly, struggling to control my voice.
“Don’t be silly. Consider becoming a nurse.”
“I don’t want to be a nurse. I want to shoot Germans.”
“Go home. Killing’s a man’s job,” the red-faced officer exclaimed. Glancing past me he said, “Next.”
But I didn’t budge. I stood there, staring down at him. At that moment, I hated the red-faced officer almost as much as I did the Germans.
“You’re right,” I said, and then, despite my best efforts, I felt sudden hot tears pushing out of the corners of my eyes. But they were tears of vengeance, of a mother’s love, fierce and irrepressible, tears that could singe anything they touched. Staring down at the officer I pointed a finger at him, all of my sadness turning to rage, boiling up in my breast. “Yes. Killing is a man’s job,” I cried. From the pocket of my dress I got out the leather case in which I had all of my worldly possessions. I removed the picture of my daughter and Kolya, my husband, and laid it on the table before them. “That’s my little girl,” I said, pointing at Masha. “I want to kill those Germans for her. If I have to, I will join the partisans and fight with them. But I will fight. Do you understand me? One way or another, I will fight.”
I had spoken loud enough that those behind me heard what I’d said. A few started to grumble. One voice said, “Let her fight.” I turned and looked at the men behind me. Then another called out, “Yeah, give her a chance.” And another: “We need every fighter we can get.”
Finally, sensing the tide turning against him, the red-faced officer relented. “Fill this out and come back tomorrow,” he said, thrusting a form at me. “Just remember, when you are getting your pretty ass shot at, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
In the Red Army we women had to prove ourselves, not once but over and over. If a man was afraid, if he cried or recoiled from the horrors of war, it was viewed as a momentary failing, something he could overcome with willpower or determination, or experience, or by a gun placed to the back of his head. But such a thing from a woman only proved what they already knew, that she was by nature weak, not cut out for war, for killing. We women had to push those natural emotions that all soldiers have deep down inside us. We had to deny not only our womanhood but also our common humanity. We had to be cold and remorseless. We couldn’t cry, couldn’t show fear or sympathy or tenderness. We had to become as cold and heartless as those Germans we fought against.
Only when I’d proved that I could kill as well as any man did my comrades begin to accept me. Still, there were many like the Wild Boar, who treated the women soldiers with contempt. He would give us menial jobs like digging the latrine or carrying the pails of soup to the front lines, or stripping the German dead of ammo and rations. The Wild Boar scorned our fighting ability, questioned our courage under fire. He cracked jokes about us and made condescending remarks. He called us shlyukhi. Except the pretty ones. With them he was friendly. Too friendly. When I first arrived in his unit, I’d heard the stories about him and was warned to keep my distance. Despite the lectures by the political commissars and the NKVD officers warning against fraternization between the sexes, how such things could cause problems and would therefore be dealt with harshly, that still didn’t stop some from having affairs. In the loneliness of war, relationships inevitably formed between men and women. You could not stop it with government decrees. But there were some men like the Wild Boar who used their influence to pressure or lure women into doing their bidding. He would especially befriend the new recruits, who arrived weekly to replace those that had been killed, with small favors—a piece of cheese, a cup of vodka, a pair of silk stockings many liked to keep in their pockets to remind them what silk felt like against their skin. A few of the women in my unit would respond to his advances, out of fear of how hard he could make things for them or from simple hunger, or even out of the gnawing loneliness the war had brought into our lives, a loneliness that made even the Wild Boar’s company seem appealing.
When I’d first arrived with the Second Company, he used to come sniffing around me, too. He would tell me how pretty I was, offering me things, chocolates and tins of sardines, bragging how he could get anything I wanted, anything at all. It didn’t matter to him that I was married. When I told him, he laughed. He said we were at war and could die at any moment. I’d managed to keep him at bay, sometimes using cleverness, other times with not-so-veiled threats of going to Captain Petrenko, or even to the NKVD officer, Major Roskov. Then when my work as a sniper during the siege of Odessa got me promoted to sergeant and I was, at least technically, his equal in rank, he left me alone. Though, of course, I knew he was jealous of me. He didn’t like the fact that I was educated, that I spent my free time writing in my journal, that I read. That I wasn’t intimidated by him. And he certainly didn’t like all the attention I’d gotten of late. “What courage does it take to sit in a little hole and kill at three hundred meters?” I’d overheard him say once to another soldier. Lately, I had begun to notice how the Wild Boar had become friendly with Zoya, talking with her, offering her food and small treats. She was young and na?ve, and perhaps he thought he could take advantage of her some night out behind the latrines. I had cautioned her about him.


The Wild Boar wasn’t a man to have his authority questioned. He got up and came over toward me. He squatted on his haunches and waved the thick sausage in front of my nose tauntingly. To be honest, its smoky flavor set my mouth watering. When one is hungry, one will do almost anything for food.
“Go ahead, Sergeant,” he said. “Think of it as a reward for getting that kraut.”
“I am not hungry,” I lied, this time without bothering to look up.
“It is a simple compliment I am paying you, Comrade Levchenko. Surely such bravery as yours deserves recognition,” he said, his tone edged with sarcasm.
“I said ‘I’m not hungry.’”
“I am only being generous.”
“I know all about your generosity, Gasdanov.”
At this he snorted. “And what the hell does that mean?”
“I think you know what it means.”
“What is it with you, Levchenko?” he said, dropping any pretense of being cordial. “Has all the big talk gone to your pretty little head?”
“I just don’t want your sausage.”
“Is my meat not good enough for the likes of you?” he replied, dangling the sausage obscenely between his thick legs. Smiling, he glanced over his shoulder at Drubich and the others, to see if they thought his joke funny. Drubich, his lapdog, sniggered nervously, but the others were reluctant to openly choose sides. Both of us were, after all, sergeants. The Wild Boar, a decorated veteran who’d fought in the Winter War against Finland in ’39, was known as someone you crossed at your own peril; and while I was a woman and only newly promoted, they’d seen the way the higher-ups had treated me with deference. And there was the official-looking document that Captain Petrenko had nailed to a beam in the bunker several weeks earlier:
This is to certify that Senior Sergeant Tat’yana Aleksandrovna Levchenko, 25th Division, 54th Regiment, 2nd Company, is a sniper-destroyer of the invading German fascists. She has single-handedly eliminated 244 of the enemy. The Soviet people offer her their heartfelt thanks.
Army Military Council
Closing my journal, I stared at the sausage, then eyed the Wild Boar coldly. “Your sardel’ka, Comrade Gasdanov, is far too small to satisfy my hunger,” I said to him. At this, Nurylbayev and Drubich and a few of the others dared to let out a chuckle.
The Wild Boar stared at me with his gray little pig eyes. “The hell with you then,” he said. Snubbed, he turned his attentions back to Zoya.
“Have some more, Corporal,” he said, squatting in front of her.
This time, taking my lead, she told him, “No, thank you, Sergeant.”
“Go on,” he said, insisting. “Don’t listen to her. You’re skinny as a scarecrow.”
“No,” she repeated.
“Men like women with some meat on them.”
“Leave her alone, Sergeant,” I interjected.
“Butt out. This is not your business, Levchenko,” he replied, pivoting on his heels and pointing the dagger threateningly at me.
“I can make it my business,” I said.
“Is that so?”
“It is.”
He leaned toward me so that the others wouldn’t hear him. This close I caught a whiff of his sour breath, a strong metallic smell like diesel fuel. “The big hero,” he said mockingly. “The famous kraut killer. Huh! You think I give a shit about all that, Levchenko?”
“I don’t particularly care what you think, Sergeant.”
“Wait till it comes to real fighting. When you have to look a man in the eyes and kill him. Then we’ll see what you can do.”
“If it’s trouble you’re looking for, Gasdanov, I can give you all you want.”
“Do you think your threats scare me?”
“The major would be very interested to hear about your ‘activities.’”
Major Roskov was NKVD, one of the blue caps, the Party’s secret police among the troops. Along with the political commissars, the NKVD, or chekisty as many called the hated and feared secret police, saw to it that the Party’s political will was carried out even at the front lines. They wielded much more power than the military officers, and they could countermand any orders given by the military. They also had spies everywhere and were well known for their brutality. Even before the war, we’d heard the rumors about what they’d done to the Poles in the woods at Katyn. And we’d seen firsthand how they would shoot anyone who dared retreat. They’d established what were called “blocking detachments” in the rear of our lines, machine-gun emplacements whose sole purpose was to shoot, not Germans, but our own retreating troops. Everyone in the company gave Major Roskov a wide berth and was careful what they said around him. Even Captain Petrenko, who didn’t take shit from anyone, was usually guarded around Roskov. The blue hats would come around, disciplining those who had spoken out against some action of the military or handing out medals or giving political lectures to urge the troops on against the Germans. Though some of the blue hats were bold fighters, most led an easy, often pampered existence, usually far from harm’s way, slinking back only when a battle was over to lap up whatever credit they could garner. But they could be brutal when it came to discipline. While I detested men like Roskov, I realized that sometimes they could be useful. Like now.
“The devil take you both,” cursed the Wild Boar, who stood and spat on the ground near my boot. As he stomped off, he muttered under his breath, “F*cking shlyukha.” Whore—what the German had called me. Drubich got up and followed the Wild Boar through the canvas door of the bunker and out into the night.
I looked over at Zoya.
“Remember what I told you about him,” I said.
“I know,” Zoya replied. “But I was hungry.”
At this, I recalled the chocolate I’d taken off the German. I removed it from my pocket and tossed it to her. “Here.”
Zoya got up and came over and sat down beside me. “We’ll share it,” she said.
She was a small woman, with thin wrists and the delicate bones of a sparrow. She was pretty in a peasant sort of way, with a broad, heart-shaped face and the high cheekbones and hooded eyes of a Kalmyk. Though she cursed and fought like a hardened veteran, she was still just a girl, na?ve and unworldly, especially when it came to men.
“How is your head, Sergeant?” she asked me.
“Not so bad,” I lied, touching the bandage. “What’s the news from home?”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I received word from Maksim that our mother was still the same. The doctor doesn’t know if she will recover. My brother blames me for her falling ill.”
“How was it your fault?”
She shrugged. “He is angry that he had to stay and take care of her. Help out with the little ones. While I get to go and fight.”
“You’re the oldest. You don’t have a family of your own. It was your duty.”
“He thought my duty was to stay home. That as the eldest boy, it should have been he that went off to fight for the Motherland.”
“But your brother is only fourteen.”
“Not even. It doesn’t matter though. He still thinks a girl’s place is in the home.”
“Ach,” I scoffed. “Too many men think like that.” I glanced around the bunker. The air raid had stopped, and that unnatural glasslike stillness had taken over as it always did after their bombing runs, where it seemed that every noise had been sucked away, leaving the earth with the feel of an empty cathedral.
“Let’s get some air,” I said, shoving my journal into my pocket. I wanted to be able to talk freely.
Outside we made our way along the trench for a while, passing a sentry. It was Corporal Nurylbayev, a tall, potbellied man with bowed legs.
“Evening, Sergeant,” he said. Nodding toward the west, he added, “Looks like the krauts hit something.”
The usually darkened city below us burned brightly. A tire plant near the wharf was engulfed in flames, sending up dense plumes of tar-black smoke. A sweet, chemical stench was already wafting up into the surrounding hills, one that made your stomach retch.
We picked a private spot and sat down, our backs against the dirt walls of the trench. I took out my pack of cigarettes and offered one to Zoya. That was another change the war had produced in me. When I was single, I’d have the occasional cigarette, mostly as an affectation. At university I used to wear a beret and smoke brown Turkish cigarettes, and think myself quite the bohemian, a kind of wild-spirited Akhmatova. After Masha was born, I put aside my bohemian ways and stopped. Now it was something I did without thinking, something I needed as one does air or food. This despite the fact that most of the cigarettes we got were ersatz tobacco, made from chicory or dried potato peels or roots.
The evening was warm, oddly quiet, not a breeze stirring.
“Too many of them still think that all we are good for is to cook and clean and make babies. Like that pig Gasdanov. What we do in this war will change things, Zoya.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Assuredly. We will show them women can do anything we set our minds to.”
“Including killing?” she said uncertainly.
“Yes, even that. You have heard of Anka?” I asked.
She was the famous machine-gunner who’d fought with the great patriot Chapayev in the civil war after the revolution. Over the years her story had grown into mythic proportions. Whoever she’d been in reality, she’d long ago crossed over into legend. But it was a myth a young girl could latch on to and hold as a model of womanhood.
“Of course,” Zoya replied. “What schoolchild hasn’t read of her?”
“Well, we shall become modern-day Ankas, you and I.”
Zoya shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I fight only to drive those devils from our soil.”
“Do you think I want that any less than you? But we are fighting and dying just like men. And after the war, shouldn’t we take our rightful place beside them, not as their maids or whores?”
Despite all the talk that the revolution had given women the same rights and opportunities as men, we knew the truth—that we were still second-class citizens. It was men who made the decisions, who had the real power and control. They were the ones who decided what everyone would do, how we women would live our lives, what choices we would have, if and when we had children, even what we would think. But sometimes I let myself believe that the war might actually change things. That if we showed them we were as strong and brave and tough and valuable as they, perhaps they would allow us the same freedoms and opportunities. The women I fought with made good soldiers, as good as or better than the men. We had more endurance and more patience, and with us the fighting had less to do with ego. Men fought out of pride, to show off in front of their comrades. Women fought to protect their home, their children, their loved ones.
“Yes,” Zoya said, but I could tell she was unconvinced. Zoya was old-fashioned, a simple country girl with backward notions. “But a woman should be a woman, and a man, a man.”
“And yet we are doing things now that only men used to do.”
“You know what I mean. When I get married, I want a man who is strong. Who has broad shoulders. I wouldn’t want to be with someone who is weak.”
“Nor would I,” I said. “But there are different kinds of strength. There is the strength to be gentle. The strength to be kind and generous. Those are the qualities of a real man.”
Zoya nodded.
“And your husband, he has such qualities, Tat’yana?” she asked.
Her comment caught me a little off guard. “He is a good man.”
“I bet he must be very handsome.”
“Why do you say that?”
“To have a wife so pretty and smart as you. Do you have a picture of him?”
I reached into the inside pocket of my tunic and removed the small, worn leather case in which I kept my personal effects—a photograph of my parents, a poem I’d had published in a literary magazine before the war, a ticket stub to a symphony Kolya and I had gone to in Kiev, my wedding band, a locket of hair I had clipped from my daughter’s head before we laid her to rest. The lone photo I had of Kolya, Masha, and myself. It had been taken at the park Vladimirskaya Gorka in Kiev, down near the river, the summer before the war. In good weather, a man would set up his camera there on Sundays and take your photograph for a few kopeks. In it Kolya was holding Masha in his arms while I stood next to him. She was two. She wore a blue cotton dress I had made for her, and I’d put a matching blue ribbon in her fine blond hair. It brought out the blue of her eyes. Though I’d told Zoya about Masha, I hadn’t shown her the picture. Hadn’t shown anyone. Perhaps because I didn’t want to go anywhere near that terrible place inside me. Nonetheless, I carefully extracted the photo and handed it to Zoya. I removed another cigarette and lit it, then held the match so she could inspect the photo.
“That’s him. Kolya,” I said.
“He is quite handsome,” Zoya remarked.
While I knew she was being kind, Kolya did have a certain boyish charm despite being over thirty in the picture, with his blond hair that fell casually in his face, beneath which his blue-gray eyes stared soberly out at the camera like a diligent student listening to a teacher’s lecture.
“Have you had any word from him?” she asked.
I shook my head. I’d had only one letter from him since the previous summer. He had gone north to fight in the defense of Leningrad, and we all had heard how badly things were going there.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” she said, trying to reassure me. “You must love him very much.”
I took a drag on my cigarette.
“What is it like to be in love, Tat’yana?”
What could I say in answer? How does one explain one’s life to another, make sense of the convoluted longings of the heart, or those longings that are stifled? That I was fond of Kolya. That I respected him. That he was a kind and gentle man, a good friend, a wonderful father. But that I didn’t love him. That I’d never loved him. I felt almost embarrassed to admit what seemed now, during such difficult times, a petty and selfish notion—love!—a feeling that I had put too fine a point on.
“Have you heard of the poet Tsvetaeva?” I asked.
I wasn’t surprised that Zoya, who could hardly read, shook her head.
“She said this about love: ‘Ah! is the heart that bursts with rapture.’ You will know that you are in love when your heart feels about to burst.”
“I have never been in love,” my young friend replied.
“Surely you must have had a crush on some boy in your village, Zoya,” I said with a smile.
“No,” she replied.
“Not even once?”
“My parents were very strict. Now with the war, I fear that I will die and not know what it is like to love someone.”
Suddenly I shared her fear: to die without ever having truly loved. What a waste of a life, I thought.
“You will live to find out what love is about.”
Then she stared at the picture again. “May I ask you a question, Tat’yana? If it’s not of too personal a nature.”
“Of course,” I said.
“What is it like to, you know…be with a man?”
I glanced over at her, smiled. “That would all depend, I suppose.”
“On what?”
“The man.”
“My mother told me that it hurts the first time,” she stated.
“A little perhaps. Not too much.”
“How do you know what…to do?”
Here she could kill men so coldly, and yet she’d never been with one. Was I any more experienced, though, at her age? I thought of my own wedding night. Kolya and I were both virgins. Nervous, I lay there in my nightgown waiting for him to make the first move. Then when he did, there was an awkward fumbling of cloth and hands, a frantic pushing and shoving, a last grunting and shudder by my new husband. It was over before I knew what had happened. That was my first time. I had expected more, but life never gives you what you expect, and the trick is to learn to accept what you get. That’s what I told myself, anyway.
“When the time comes,” I explained, “your heart will guide you.”
“Did it with you?”
Sometimes it is better to lie. “Of course.”
Before handing the picture back, Zoya glanced at it again.
“Is that your daughter?”
I nodded.
“How old was she there?”
“Two.” Then I shared with her the pet name I used to call Masha by: moy krolik. My little rabbit.
She touched my shoulder with her hand. “When this is over, you will go home and you and your husband will have many more children.”
“Perhaps.”
“No, you will. We must all have large families.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t imagine bringing another child into this grotesque world. It hardly seemed right or fair. And yet, another part of me knew it was exactly what we needed to do. I knew that we must all have children, lots and lots of children, not to forget those who had died but to begin anew. To rebuild our country. To rebuild ourselves. And deep down I knew that I secretly hoped I would have another child, that I would feel life growing in me again, filling the vast hole the war had torn in me. It was a thought that both saddened me and gave me a strange glimmer of hope. There would be plenty of time, when the war was over, for me to consider being a mother again. But now I had to harden myself and be a soldier still. I could not yet think of bringing forth another life. I could concern myself only with the taking of it.
“I will pray for your mother,” I said to her.
“Thank you. And I will pray for your husband.”
“And after the war, you must come to Kiev and visit us.”
“I don’t like big cities. Too many people.”
“But you’ll make an exception for me, won’t you?”
She smiled and said, “Well, all right.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t turn you into a city girl.”
“We should try to get some sleep,” Zoya said. “We have to be up in a few hours.”
“You go on. I’ll be in soon.”
The truth was I wasn’t tired. My body was exhausted, but my mind rambled on. After fifteen or sixteen hours hunkered down in a sniper’s nest, concentrating on killing, most nights as soon as I closed my eyes, I slept a dreamless, leaden sleep, like someone drunk on strong gorilka. Even the nightly bombardment by the Luftwaffe or our own howling Katyushas didn’t keep me up. Tonight though, was one of those nights when my mind seemed to drone dully with random thoughts like a bottle filled with horseflies.
I took out my journal and turned on my electric torch. I opened the small notebook and read a poem I’d begun earlier:
A na?ve girl I left for war
In a filthy railroad car
With men grasping guns,
Grunting and swearing,
The world turned upside down
All my hopes undone.
I had hundreds of such snippets of poetry. Scattered lines, isolated verses. I’d managed to finish only a handful. The more I killed, it seemed, the less I could write. It was as if killing sapped me of my muse, robbed me of my inspiration. Or perhaps it was that killing had become my new poetry, the new expression of my imagination.
Below the poem was the entry of my last kill.
26 May 1942. Number 288. Taken three kilometers northeast of Sevastopol. One shot to the chest. Recovered a Mauser in good working order. Witnessed by Z. Kovshova.
I needed only twelve more to reach my personal goal of three hundred. I couldn’t say why exactly this arbitrary number was important to me. Still, I couldn’t deny its significance. No male sniper had that many, and no female Soviet sniper had reached a third that number. I preferred to tell myself that I was doing it for noble reasons, began to believe what the newspapers and the Party propaganda had said about me—that I was a hero, that I was doing it for my country, for the Soviet people, giving them something to lift up their hearts in these dark days of retreat and humiliation, death and defeat. Even for my fellow women. I liked to think how young girls would see my picture in Pravda or Izvestiya and say to themselves, If Tat’yana Levchenko could do this, perhaps I could, too. My work, like that of the thousands of other women just like me in this war, was a bold and defiant act of liberation for our sex. To show not only the Germans but also our own Soviet men that we were their equal. But killing is never an answer to anything, and even when it is necessary, it is never something noble, never something to be admired. For all my fancy talk to Zoya of fighting to liberate women, my own reason was far more simple and selfish—hatred. Yes. I killed simply because I hated the Germans. Hated them for what they’d done to my country, to my loved ones, to me. And once I’d started to kill, to give in to that hatred, I found I was no better than the Germans. I enjoyed it, took a perverse pride in my skill at killing. I wasn’t satisfied with just being a good sniper. I wanted to be the best, the very best sniper in the entire Soviet Army. I wanted the Germans to hear my name and tremble at it. I guess I thought that if I killed enough, that if I were, as Macbeth said, “in blood stepp’d in so far,” then I would be able to let the hatred and rage and need for revenge go, and acquire some measure of peace.
Sometimes, though, it seemed that hatred was the only solid thing inside me, the only thing that propped me up and kept me going. Every other emotion seemed to have dried up in my breast. All the death, all the unimaginable suffering I’d seen or been a party to—all of this had numbed me, had made my heart like a piece of polished stone, smooth and impenetrable. Once, passing a bombed-out building in Odessa, I caught a glimpse of this woman staring out at me. I paused, struck by the likeness of her to someone I’d once known. But this woman was older, with a stiffening of the flesh around the mouth, sunken cheeks, the haggard look in the eyes of one who’d gazed upon some terrible thing. I was captivated, even more so when I realized I was looking in a broken mirror at myself. Before the war, I had been an attractive woman, or so I was told. Young, filled with, as my mother used to say, silly romantic notions, an aspiring poet. And now I was…what? A cold-blooded killer. I felt myself changed in ways I could hardly even fathom. Was I the same woman who had given suck to my little girl? Who had so loved the feel of her mouth against my breast, the smell of her skin, the sound of her voice? What had become of her? Sometimes I wondered if all the killing, all the death and bloodshed, had altered something so fundamental in me that when the war was over, I could never return to the person I’d been. Could I ever go back to enjoying such simple pleasures as a cup of tea in the evening, reading a book, a Sunday afternoon stroll along the Dnieper? Above all, in that other world after the war was over, when the dead were buried and the guns silenced, when the blood had had a chance to seep deeply into the stained earth, would love even be possible again? Could I love another ever again?
Still, now and then, the meaning of those numbers in my journal would creep into my consciousness. The numbers would become more than the immutable facts of war. I thought of the German sniper again. How he’d stared at me, gripped my wrist so desperately, as if to keep himself among the living. Who was Senta? I wondered. What was he trying to tell me? Was it his wife? A girlfriend? What if it were his daughter? I had brought life into the world, had loved and nurtured it, and knew what it was to lose it. I knew that those I killed, like the one today, had wives and sweethearts and, yes, even children, had dreams of returning home to family someday. If now and then a momentary tremor of remorse did begin to flower in me, I would normally resist the temptation to feel any humanity for those I dispatched. I’d only have to conjure the sweet face of my darling child. That usually was enough to stanch any misplaced sympathy.
I got out the solitary letter I’d received from Kolya. From handling, it was dog-eared and brittle as an old leaf. It was just a few lines, the only word I’d had from him since we’d parted at the railroad station. It had come eight months earlier, and there had been nothing since, despite the fact that I must have written a dozen letters to him. I felt I was throwing my words into a storm, that they were scattered and cast away. We’d heard that the mails were sporadic along the entire front, but especially in the north at Leningrad where his Twenty-third Army had been sent. Kolya’s normally careful and precise handwriting was messy, as if written under duress, in a wobbling freight car or as bombs fell from the skies.
My Dearest Love
I miss you and my darling Masha dearly. I long to see you both again. Keep yourself safe, my dearest.
Yours, Kolya
Sometimes even, during quiet moments like these after a long, hard day of battle, I’d try convince myself that what I felt for Kolya was, indeed, love, at least a form of love, that the war had somehow distorted everything, twisted my feelings all about, drained me of my ability to feel anything. Or sometimes I wondered, what was love anyway? Hadn’t my mother warned me about my silly romantic notions, that love didn’t put a roof over your head or comfort you in old age? What would its absence really matter after such a terrible thing as this war? Kolya and I had been good friends, we would be good friends again. We would comfort each other. I would read my poetry to him, and we would listen to the music student Kovalevsky’s cello strains floating upward into our apartment (though, of course, all that was gone, our apartment building, all of Kiev). We would take long walks along the river, both of us secretly imagining Masha holding our hands, our love for her and our shared pain over her absence binding us together as love never had. At night, I pictured Kolya and I clutching each other like a pair of frightened children, until we fell asleep. For each, the presence of the other would soften loss, would help us to forget all the death that we’d seen, all the death we’d caused. I’d promised myself that I would remain loyal to him and his soothing love would sustain us both. Perhaps, I told myself, I hadn’t really known how to love before the war. Perhaps whatever I’d thought was missing from our life together then would somehow seem inconsequential after all of this. And perhaps, as Zoya said, some night we would come together in our terrible loneliness and need, and begin another life.