4
During those long, terrible months at Sevastopol, the lone joy I had was the occasional dream of Masha. It was as if because I tried so hard to banish her from my waking mind, like any child she craved her mother’s attention and would come rushing up to me as soon as I fell asleep. “Mama,” she would cry. And how could I deny her. In one dream we were on holiday at the seashore. I was sitting on warm sand, gazing out at her playing along the water’s edge. She would follow the breaking waves, fleeing from them like a sandpiper as they chased her up the shore, squealing and laughing with delight. She scampered about, her wet, lithe body filled with a magical energy. Even in the dream I carried with me that vulnerability a mother has with her always, as if she is holding a small candle against a strong wind, fearing that sooner or later its flame would be extinguished. I called to her, “Come, my little rabbit.”
“Sergeant.”
A hand roused me roughly from sleep.
“Masha?” I mumbled.
“Sergeant, it’s me,” came Zoya’s voice. “Time to get up.”
I sat up, the sun and water suddenly vanishing, replaced by the murky dankness of the bunker. Masha’s face turned into that of Zoya’s. She squatted next to me, holding a lantern. Rubbing my eyes, I asked, “What time is it?”
“Three hundred hours, Sergeant. Would you like some tea?”
“Please.”
Zoya headed over to the far side of the bunker where someone was boiling water over a small gas stove. She returned in a moment and handed me a metal cup.
“Here,” she said.
As the steam rose up before me, I could still smell Masha’s wet hair. Sweet, like rose petals just beginning to rot.
Zoya pursed her lips. “We have a little time yet.” Then leaning toward me, she whispered apologetically, “I’ve gotten my monthly. I have to go change.”
I took another sip of tea, a substance as unappealing as bathwater but which at least warmed the belly. We had an hour before we had to be in position, two hours before sunrise. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I glanced around at my comrades sprawled on the bunker’s floor. The Second, dubbed the Shock Company because of its reputation for toughness in battle, was made up mostly of young troops, nineteen, twenty, with a few older veterans like Gasdanov and Captain Petrenko, who was in his mid-thirties, and Yuri Sokur, the medic. At twenty-five, I was one of the senior ones. We came primarily from the Ukraine, but there were some replacements mixed in from as far away as Stalingrad and Yakutsky in Siberia, and from all walks of life—teachers and students, factory workers and scientists, tailors and shoemakers, miners and peasants. There was even a concert pianist, a young man named Nasreddinov, who had played all over Europe before the war. There were about a dozen women in our company. A machine gunner, a radioman, several riflemen, a mortar team. We used to have a medic named Yana Marianenko, a good-natured girl who always had a pleasant smile on her face. But she’d crawled out into no-man’s-land to tend to a wounded soldier, and that’s when the King of Death picked her off with a shot to the head. Zoya and I were the only female sniper team in the Second.
I tossed the rest of my tea on the ground and stood, my head almost touching the timbers of the low-ceilinged roof of the bunker. It was now a couple of days after I had killed the King of Death. I gathered up my things—a canteen of water, enough to last me the sixteen hours I’d remain in my sniper cell, some cheese and hard bread and a tin of kippered herrings I’d taken off a Romanian I’d shot several days earlier, and stuffed it all into my rucksack. I threw on my camouflage poncho and then checked the clip of my Tokarev pistol before sliding it into my holster. I grabbed a couple extra magazines for my rifle and the two grenades snipers always carried—one for the Germans, the other for myself and Zoya if it came to that. We’d been trained not to be taken prisoner. The Germans were especially brutal on captured Soviet snipers, more so even with females. Months earlier we’d counterattacked just outside a small village north of Odessa. Hanging from a tree were the mutilated remains of a young woman, a sign dangling from her neck: Flintenwieb. Gun-woman. She’d been stripped naked, her breasts cut off by the filthy bastards. That’s why the second grenade.
Finally, I threw the strap of my rifle over my shoulder and headed for the door, stepping carefully over the sleeping forms on the floor. Outside the bunker, I shivered in the cool, sharp morning air, though I actually welcomed the change from the fetid atmosphere belowground. Above, the predawn sky was speckled with stars like fragments of mica in dark rock. At different points along the trench sentries stood watch behind the breastworks, facing north and east toward the German entrenchments below in the valley, in some places only a kilometer away. Nearby, Captain Petrenko sat on an empty ammo case, smoking a cigarette and talking with Zoya, who was squatting and arranging things in her pack.
“Good morning, Comrade,” he said to me. “And how many will you get today?”
“That all depends, Captain,” I said.
“On what?”
“On how foolishly the Fritzes behave.”
The captain chuckled. He was a lean, muscular man, with a dusky complexion, broad face, and high cheekbones. Before the war he had been a chemist back in a factory in his native Georgia. I liked and respected Captain Petrenko. Soft-spoken, a man who never lost his temper or his composure, never complained, though he was a brave fighter and a good but cautious leader. He kept to himself, never shared much about his personal life. He wouldn’t order his troops to do something he himself wouldn’t do. And he refused to wantonly sacrifice their lives, unlike some of the field commanders who would do anything to curry favor with the higher-ups. Each death of one of his troops affected the captain deeply, and every time he had to write a pokhoronka letter home to the family of one of his soldiers, he would agonize over it. He not only supported my promotion to sergeant but had put my name in for the Order of the Red Banner.
“There’s talk of another big push for the city,” Captain Petrenko said to us.
“We’ve heard that before,” I replied.
“There may be something to it this time.”
“What have you heard?”
“That they’ve called up two more divisions. One armored,” said Petrenko, taking a long drag on his cigarette.
“More big rumors.”
“Not this time. Roskov said they captured a German officer. The NKVD boys got him to talk, the poor bastard.”
I’d seen firsthand the chekisty’s methods of interrogating German prisoners. Back in Odessa, I’d had to report to the CO’s headquarters once. Off in a corner of the room, they had a German soldier tied to a chair. He was a bloody mess, his wrists tied to the arms of the chair. Then I noticed several bloody hunks of what looked like sausages on the floor beneath him. They turned out to be his fingers, which had been hacked off, the pieces strewn about the floor like offal in a butcher’s shop. His mouth had a gag stuffed in it, and his head was encircled by a belt and held immobile from behind by one of the two chekisty conducting the interrogation.
“This time,” said Petrenko, “it looks as if the Germans are coming at us.”
“We still have the navy to fend them off,” I said. The Soviet Black Sea Fleet lay just twenty kilometers off the coast. It was their big guns that had largely been responsible for keeping the Germans at bay for the nine-month siege. Nonetheless, we were under no illusions. Von Manstein, the German commander, had nine full-strength divisions, plus three more Romanian divisions as well as heavy artillery and tanks. He had us completely surrounded, our backs to the sea. And we knew that Stalin had already written us off. We were fighting simply to give the Red Army elsewhere, in Stalingrad and Moscow, time to regroup, to establish defenses. We knew that Sevastopol was doomed, the army there merely cannon fodder to slow the German advance and to draw needed troops and matériel from other more important fronts. We knew this and yet we tried to believe it wasn’t true.
“Sergeant,” Captain Petrenko said to me, “you be careful out there. Anything happens to you, Roskov will have my neck.”
“And here I thought you were just worried about my safety,” I said.
“I’ll make sure she’s safe, Captain,” Zoya offered.
“If those bastards didn’t want anything to happen to her, then they should’ve pulled her from the front,” Petrenko added.
“They want it both ways,” Zoya said.
“Then they should’ve put her in some cushy desk job back in Moscow.”
I found it odd how they spoke about me as if I weren’t there, as if I were gone already. Or dead.
“But I don’t want a cushy desk job,” I interjected. “I want to stay here and fight.”
You see, Zoya was right—they did want it both ways. The higher-ups, the military brass and the Party big shots, liked the propaganda value attached to my success as a sniper, but they didn’t want me to get hurt again. They considered me too important to morale for anything to happen to me. The captain had heard rumors that they had “plans” for me, whatever that meant. With my growing reputation as a sniper, I’d become something of a poster girl for the Soviet military, a figure to rally our countrymen around. However, I didn’t want all the fuss and attention, didn’t want to be pulled away from my job of killing Germans. I wanted to reach my goal of 300.
I’d been pulled from the front once already, back when I’d reached two hundred kills during the early siege of Sevastopol the previous winter. From the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner, one of the country’s highest military honors, and one conferred on only a handful of women. I was drawing notice, making a name for myself, something for which I was proud but which also made me a little uncomfortable. They were going to send me off for a few days to Stalingrad; this, of course, was before the Germans had arrived and turned it into hell. I didn’t want to go, but Zoya had told me, “Tat’yana, do you know how many would give their right arm to sleep in a soft bed and be able to take a warm bath.” In Stalingrad, I was paraded around, placed on display like a ballerina for the Bolshoi. I was gawked at and fawned over, patronized by elderly Party officials smoking expensive cigars and eating caviar, and drinking Belaya Bashnya vodka simply because that’s the brand Stalin drank, and carrying on as if there wasn’t a war on at all. I had to put up with toadying sycophants and sleazy opportunists who knew nothing of battle, who would trivialize the bravery and sacrifice of our soldiers for their own ends. “Comrade Levchenko,” they would ask of me, “how does one so lovely become such an accomplished killer?” One reporter from Izvestiya called me “The Ukrainian Lion,” after the famous thirteenth-century prince Lev Danilovich, known for his ferocity. They interviewed me and took pictures of me with Party officials and high-ranking generals of the Red Army. There I met Chairman Kalinin, whom as children we had been taught by our teachers to call Dedushka—grandfather—as well as Foreign Secretary Molotov, and General Zhukov, who was at the moment preparing for the defense of the city. They had me tour the Red October steelworks and the Barrikady armaments factory, places that in just a few short months would be the stage for the infamous “War of the Rats.”
Just before dawn that day, the Germans attacked, the big offensive we’d been expecting for weeks. It was preceded by a massive artillery barrage, which lasted two hours. Luckily Zoya and I had been able to crawl back to our lines. The krauts had unleashed their huge 800 mm Big Dora, lobbing its massive five-thousand-kilo shells at us. Each one that stuck within a kilometer deafened you for several minutes. In its wake, all sound seemed to have been sucked away, the remaining silence as profound as that underwater. This was followed by heavy aerial bombing from their Junkers and Heinkels. Our own antiaircraft guns lit up the early morning sky, while offshore, the Black Sea Fleet responded with its own guns. With my head pressed against the dirt of the trench, I felt the earth shudder.
“They’re coming this time,” Captain Petrenko warned all along the line. “Fix bayonets.”
And he was right. When daylight came, the ground attack commenced.
Though we fought bravely that day, outnumbered and outgunned, we ultimately had to retreat down the heights toward the outskirts of the city. I saw firsthand some of our troops shot by our own blocking detachments, machine-gunning those retreating from the German advance. Still, over the next several days, the Germans pressed the attack, slowly forcing us to fall back into Sevastopol itself. The enemy advanced on all fronts, supported by its Panzers and artillery. However, we made them pay heavily for each inch of ground we relinquished. We fought savagely along the entire front, from Balaklava in the south to Bel’bek and Kamyshi in the north. The staunch resistance we put up was partly due to the fact that we were fighting in defense of our own soil. Most of us were Ukrainians, and many came from Sevastopol itself. We fought for our homes, for our families, for our pride. But we fought also because of the fear we had for the chekisty, who shot those falling back.
I hardly recognized Sevastopol, which lay in ruins from the nine months’ seige. Save for the post office and a handful of other structures that had somehow miraculously been spared during the bombing, everything had been reduced to rubble. Entire blocks were little more than charred and empty shells. The roads were pitted with bomb craters and strewn with debris from collapsed buildings. The smoke from fires hung above the city, raining a gritty ash down on everything. The grand old buildings along Grafskaya Quay, the House of the Pioneers, the Seaside Parkway, Nahimova Square—all the places I had once visited on holiday were utterly demolished. The sight saddened me, no doubt because of all the memories I’d had of the city, coming here first as a child with my parents, then after I was married with Kolya and Masha.
The city’s remaining inhabitants scurried through the bombed-out streets, pallid figures, lifeless as ghosts. For months, those Sevastopolians who hadn’t been lucky enough to escape or die had eked out an existence in the cellars and sewers. They’d lived on scraps of food, on the garbage dumps of the troops, on dead fish that the bombing had washed up on shore, on pigeons and seagulls and crows, on rats, even on dogs. The summer temperatures had hit one hundred degrees, forcing people out into the open in search of water. As our unit moved through the city, several emaciated children emerged from a sewer and came running up, begging for food and something to drink. As it turned out, they were from an orphanage that had been bombed, and they had been huddled together underground for weeks without an adult’s supervision. We gave what we could spare, which wasn’t much, as we’d been on half rations ourselves. I saw the bodies of the dead lying where they’d been killed, rotting in the streets or alleyways or left among the wreckage of buildings. An old and emaciated man pushing a wheelbarrow passed by with a pair of shapes wrapped in winding clothes. He paused for a moment when he saw us. “Look what those whores did to my children,” he cried. My heart, of course, went out to him. “We will make them pay, dedushka,” I offered to him.
Down at the harbor we saw them frantically loading ships with vehicles and munitions and other matériel. It was obvious now that the higher-ups considered the battle for Sevastopol utterly lost. Most of us hoped that he or she would be one of the lucky few to get a spot on a ship leaving this hellhole. There were some who even purposely wounded themselves so they could get transferred out on a hospital ship. Though even that wasn’t entirely without risk. Fewer and fewer ships were getting through the heavy bombing by the Luftwaffe over the Black Sea. We’d all heard of the sinking of the Armenia, a Red Cross ship carrying wounded and civilians, near Gurzuf. Over five thousand went to a watery grave.
Rumors, as they always do in war, circulated as to what would happen to those left behind. The optimists said there would be reinforcements coming from the Soviet Forty-fourth or Forty-seventh up north, and that we just had to hold out until they could reach us. Others said that the navy was sending transport ships to evacuate the remaining troops. After all, they couldn’t just sacrifice the hundred thousand remaining troops, could they, this despite the fact that we knew that in Kiev they had let six hundred thousand troops fall into German hands? Everyone wondered how long we could hold out, with supplies and ammunition and food growing short. Despite hearing about units fighting to the last man, word also spread of entire battalions, sometimes even regiment or brigade levels, surrendering to the Germans. Soldiers debated whether it was better to die fighting or to take their chances as prisoners, and many had already written letters home saying their good-byes to loved ones.
After an intense day of fighting, what remained of my company had pulled back yet again and taken up position in the wreckage of a marine engine factory down near the quay. Though the roof had caved in, most of the walls were still relatively intact, providing us with enough cover to dig in and make a last-ditch defense. Not fifty meters behind us was the sea. The stench of burning oil hung heavily in the air from a tanker ship that the Luftwaffe had hit out in the harbor. Dense black smoke drifted in, stinging our eyes.
A half-dozen soldiers from my unit had dug in behind what had once been a loading dock of the factory. From there, two hundred meters to the east we could see where the Germans had taken refuge in a bombed-out building, and beyond along the hills overlooking the water.
To our rear, several four-wheel GAZ vehicles drove past, bouncing over the craters in the road. They passed close enough that we could see the officers inside. They avoided our gazes. All were being chauffeured down toward the docks and rescue.
“Sons of bitches,” Drubich complained, waving a fist in the air. He was crumbling cigarette butts he’d scrounged from off the ground and using the tobacco to roll himself a cigarette. For paper he used propaganda leaflets the Germans had begun dropping from the skies, telling us in bad Russian that if we surrendered we would be treated fairly, be given food and vodka.
“If you could save your neck, wouldn’t you do the same?” replied a soldier named Ivanchuk, a big man with a pink, swollen face like the udder of an unmilked cow. He was loading a captured Maschinengewehr.
“We have to stay and die, while those bastards get evacuated,” said Drubich.
“They could give a shit about us,” Ivanchuk scoffed.
“I heard the old man wouldn’t even ransom his own son,” said another soldier named Polevoi, a signalman.
The old man, of course, was Stalin. His son had been captured by the Germans, and Stalin had refused to trade a captured German soldier for him.
“So why would he care what happens to us?” added Ivanchuk.
Drubich glanced over his shoulder, then in an undertone said, “We could surrender.”
“Do you know what the krauts do to those they capture?” replied Ivanchuk. He made his right index finger into the barrel of a gun, put it to his temple, and said, “Bang!”
“Kill all of us? I don’t believe it,” countered Drubich.
“Believe it.”
“I have a wife and baby. I want to see them again. Even the krauts can’t be such monsters.”
“They’re worse than monsters,” scoffed Ivanchuk. “And if you’re not afraid of them, you’d better be afraid of our own side. At least for your family’s sake.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Those that surrender, their families fttt,” he said, making a slashing motion across his throat.
“What?” cried Drubich.
“They’re sent to the camps. Or worse.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s true. So before you go surrendering, Drubich, you ought to think about that wife and kid of yours.”
“Let Roskov catch you talking like that, Drubich,” said Polevoi, “he’ll shoot you even before the Nazis have a chance.”
Several of the soldiers laughed nervously, that sort of hollow gallows laughter.
Lowering his voice and glancing over his shoulder, Drubich said, “And where the hell is Roskov, anyway? Has anybody seen him lately?”
“Maybe he was shot,” Polevoi joked.
“We should be so lucky,” replied Ivanchuk.
“Why should we be sacrificed?” said Drubich, his tone that of a petulant child. “Besides, how could the krauts kill a hundred thousand prisoners. They couldn’t kill that many. Not if we surrendered.” He turned toward me. “What do you think, Sergeant?”
“Nothing the Germans do anymore surprises me,” I replied.
“So we are to fight and die for those bastards?” he said, flicking his thumb toward the road where the officers had just passed.
“No, not for them,” I replied. “We fight for ourselves.”
“Why the hell should we?”
“Because no one else will, that’s why.”
“So they can give you more medals, Sergeant?” Drubich said bitterly to me.
“I never wanted any medals,” I replied.
“The rest of us fight and die, and she’s the one who gets the credit.”
“All right, Drubich,” said the captain, “that’ll be enough.” He glanced over at me.
“I don’t mind fighting,” Drubich offered. “But this is crazy.”
“It’s all crazy,” said Ivanchuk. “The whole f*ckin’ mess.”
“I have a family,” Drubich continued. “I don’t want to die like this.”
“Stop your f*cking bellyaching,” said the Wild Boar, who had been sitting quietly a short distance away smoking a cigarette.
“I didn’t sign up to be slaughtered like cattle.”
“I told you to shut the f*ck up,” grunted the Wild Boar. He pulled his Tokarev from his holster and pointed it at Drubich. “I should shoot you myself and save the krauts a bullet.”
Drubich looked warily at the Wild Boar, then at Captain Petrenko. “I was just talking.”
The Wild Boar didn’t say anything but kept the gun trained on Drubich. He had a crazed look in his eyes. For a moment I wasn’t sure whether he would do it or not.
Then Captain Petrenko said, “Put it away, Sergeant.”
Finally, the Wild Boar lowered the gun and stuffed it into his holster.
Thousands of our troops, though, had already made the choice to surrender as the Germans tightened the noose around the city. I certainly didn’t want to die, but the thought of surrendering was even more abhorrent. I’d heard what the Germans did to those who surrendered, especially to women. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take the chance. Still, like the others, I felt betrayed by the Soviet high command. That they were so willing to let us all die here. And for what?
During a quiet moment, I scribbled a note to Kolya, more words tossed into the howling storm.
My Dearest Kolya,
We have fought hard and with great determination in the defense of Sevastopol. But it is now quite apparent that we shall soon be forced to admit defeat. I do not know what will become of us, or if I shall ever see you again, but you are in my thoughts. If I die, at least I can hope we will all be reunited in heaven.
I pray you are safe. Take care of yourself. Please remember me always.
I remain your loving wife,
Tat’yana
As I wrote these words, the distance that I felt toward Kolya seemed suddenly unimportant, even trivial. My heart welled up with emotion. I felt very much the loving wife I’d portrayed in the letter, a wife who, if the war had ended right then, would gladly have returned to her husband, would have considered myself fortunate to be able to live the rest of my days with him, sleeping beside him, reading to each other, growing old in his company. With death looming so close, everything appeared suddenly very clear. All the details of my past with Kolya came rushing back to me—his gentleness of spirit, his quiet intelligence, the way his blond hair fell into his face, the pale blueness of his eyes. How, as he left for work in the morning, he’d gently cup my face as I slept and say, “I love you, Tat’yana.” His love was something I’d taken for granted in the past. Can love sit dormant in a heart like a seed, I mused, until a moment like this, when it breaks out of its shell and begins to grow? I recall thinking then that it had taken a war for me to realize this. Of course, the irony was that I realized this only when it was too late.
I managed to give the letter to a wounded comrade who was being evacuated by submarine.
As night fell, Captain Petrenko gathered the company together.
“I don’t have to tell you the fix we’re in, comrades,” he said in his usual even tone. “But I’ve got orders to hold this position.”
“For how long?” asked the Wild Boar.
“We are to hold it, period.”
A low grumbling began among the troops.
Finally the Wild Boar said what was on everyone’s mind. “So those f*ckin’ predateli can sneak out in the middle of the night.”
Another soldier said, “Yes, they are traitors to leave us while they scatter like chickens.”
“General Petrov should be held accountable,” a third cried.
Petrov was the general in charge of Sevastopol’s defense.
“All right, shut up,” Petrenko said. “It doesn’t do any good to whine about any of this now.”
“When can we expect reinforcements?” I asked the captain.
“There won’t be any.”
“None?”
“That’s right. Look, I don’t like this any more than you do.”
“We could attempt to break through the German lines,” offered a corporal named Timoshenko, a slight man who had the dark glossy hair of a crow.
“To where?” Petrenko replied. “The entire Crimea has fallen into German hands.”
“The only option then is surrender,” Drubich called out. There was a momentary silence, the startled sort, like that after a plate crashes to the floor while people are eating dinner. Then several soldiers followed this up with “he’s right” and “why not?” One man shouted, “Why should we just sit here and wait to be slaughtered by their Panzers?”
Petrenko looked around at the troops. “I have my orders,” he said.
“Where’s Major Roskov anyway?” one soldier shouted tentatively.
Another chimed in with “Yes, where the hell is he?”
“He’s already been evacuated,” the captain replied.
“Wouldn’t you know it,” Timoshenko cried.
Growing bolder, someone else cursed, “The gutless prick.” Then a chorus of taunts ridiculed the once-feared chekist officer.
“I’m in charge now,” Petrenko explained.
“Maybe Drubich’s right,” said another soldier. “To continue fighting is crazy.”
A few shouted out in agreement, while others called the group advocating surrender traitors. They went back and forth, their voices growing heated.
“All right, quiet down,” said Petrenko, raising his hands for silence. “If any soldier decides to surrender, I won’t stop him. Each of you will have to make that decision for yourselves. But I should warn you, the krauts are as likely to shoot you as not.”
That seemed to sober them. After a while the grumbling died down. One soldier, the young sniper named Cheburko, said, “We might as well die fighting the bastards.”
Several followed this with “He’s right” or “Let’s die like soldiers.”
Afterward, we sat in the growing darkness. Some cleaned their weapons or counted their rounds, while others scribbled letters by candlelight. All of us knew that we had reached the end of the line, that there would be no more retreats, no more tomorrows. That this was it. Then someone began to hum the melody for “Katyusha.” Soon others joined in and they began to sing the words:
Apple and pear trees were a-blooming.
Mist was creeping on the river,
Katyusha set out on the banks,
On the steep and lofty banks.
She was walking, singing a song
About her true love,
Whose letters she was keeping.
Petrenko approached me and whispered, “A word, Sergeant.”
I followed him into a small room at the far end of the building, one that looked as if it had been a boiler room.
“They want you out,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘out’?”
“The higher-ups. They want you on the next submarine out of here.”
“Why?” I asked, though of course I knew.
“They don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“I can’t leave,” I cried. “Not now.”
I was neither a fool nor a hero. I didn’t want to stay and die. But I also didn’t want to abandon my comrades. I thought of what Drubich had said about my being given special treatment. To him and the others this would only confirm that.
“You don’t have a choice, Sergeant. It’s an order.”
“When?” I asked.
Petrenko took a long drag on his cigarette. “Some time tomorrow. A sub is to arrive. You’re to be on it.”
“What of the rest?”
He smiled sadly. “We’re f*cked.”
“What if I refuse to go?”
The captain shook his head. “This comes straight from the top. Hell, anybody else would give his right arm to be out of this shit hole. But you, you want to stay.” Petrenko let out with a brittle laugh.
“I merely want to fight like everyone else.”
“Don’t worry. You’ve done more than your share of fighting.” Petrenko’s face glowed orange as he took another pull on the cigarette. He reached out and laid his hand on my shoulder. “Sometimes, Sergeant, we can serve best indirectly. They have big plans for you.”
“Plans?” I said. “What have you heard, Captain?”
He smiled at me. Instead of answering my question, he said, “There will be other chances to fight them. And other means.”
I nodded, though I didn’t really believe it. You fought those bastards by putting a bullet into their flesh, by killing them before they killed you. Still, I couldn’t blame Petrenko. I knew it wasn’t his fault. He had been a good unit commander.
“It was an honor serving with you, Captain,” I said.
“The same goes for you, Sergeant.”
He offered me his hand. “Good luck, Sergeant,” he said.
“Thank you, Captain. You too.”
“By the way,” he said, reaching into his jacket and bringing out a letter. “If you get out, could you see that this gets posted. It’s to my wife.”
“I will.”
The submarine I was to depart on didn’t arrive the next day or the day after that either. Few ships were getting past the Luftwaffe. On the third morning, at daybreak, the Germans launched what was to prove their final assault. They pounded us with mortars and artillery as well as with tanks they’d maneuvered up onto the high ground overlooking the harbor. Our company was pinned down beneath heavy automatic weapons fire, and a German sniper had taken up a position on our right flank, somewhere up above us in the rubble of buildings. From that vantage point he had already killed three soldiers. The second had been a runner Captain Petrenko had sent to the Fourth Company on our right flank asking if they had any ammo they could spare. He hadn’t made it ten meters before the sniper cut him down. And when another soldier had crawled out to help him, the sniper had killed him as well.
“We must do something,” Zoya said.
“We don’t even know where he is,” I replied. For hours we’d been scoping the bombed-out shells of the buildings above us, trying to locate him but without success.
Then I felt Zoya tugging on my sleeve.
“Look,” she said. She was pointing at a shallow ditch that ran along to our right. Draining into it some fifty meters away was a narrow sewer pipe that angled sharply up toward the high ground above. “I wonder where that leads?”
I looked at the pipe, then glassed the area above it, all the way up the hill past the German lines. The landscape was mostly covered with debris from buildings destroyed in the bombing.
“If we could crawl through that pipe,” Zoya said, “maybe we could flank him.”
I considered it for a moment. We had to try something.
“Come on. Let’s talk with the captain,” I said.
We crawled over to Petrenko, who was talking with two of his unit leaders.
“Excuse me, Captain,” I said. “But if we don’t stop that sniper he’ll cut us to pieces.”
“So what do you suggest, Sergeant?” he said.
I told him of Zoya’s plan.
“You don’t know where that sewer goes,” he said. “Besides, they might have mined it already.”
“We have to do something. We can’t just sit here.”
His dark, broad face took on a brooding expression. Finally, he turned to Zoya. “Corporal,” he said, “go find Cheburko and the two of you investigate it.”
“No,” I said.
Petrenko glared at me. “What?”
“Sorry, sir. But I should be the one to go.”
“I’ll say who goes.”
“But I’m your best marksman.”
He rubbed the stubble on his cheek. “You’re supposed to be on that ship out of here.”
“Captain, we don’t know when it’s coming. Or even if it’s coming.”
Petrenko mulled this over for a moment. Then he said, “All right. But be careful, you hear me?”
Under covering fire, we crawled down into the drainage ditch, with Zoya as always in the lead. Keeping low, we dragged ourselves through the slimy muck, our weapons draped over our shoulders. The ditch smelled rankly of sewage and raw earth. The foul smell sickened me, but I was able to push the sensation away and focus on the job at hand.
When we reached the pipe, which was two feet above the ditch, we cautiously pulled ourselves up into it. The sides were slick, and given the pipe’s upward angle, we found the going hard. We kept slipping and had to wedge our boots or fingers in any crack or crevice we could manage to pull ourselves forward. The pipe was hardly wide enough to squeeze our shoulders through, and we had to crawl on our bellies. It was dark, and it grew progressively darker as we went along. After a while, Zoya had to take out her electric torch in order to light the way. Soon the sewer opened up a little so we could now move on all fours. We came to a Y where the tunnel divided to the right and left, and we had to decide which way to go. Zoya mumbled something, a kind of prayer. Finally she said, “This way,” and took the route to our left.
We’d been crawling through the tunnel for a while when Zoya suddenly stopped. Up ahead, in the glare of the electric torch, we saw a sudden movement. With one hand, Zoya swung her machine gun around, but before she could fire, I cried, “Wait.”
A pair of eyes nearly hidden behind a tangled mass of hair stared back at us. It was a little girl, perhaps six years old. Yet she was so filthy and bedraggled she hardly resembled a child at all. As we started toward her, she suddenly turned and began to scurry away from us.
“Hold on,” I called to her. “We’re Soviet soldiers.”
The girl stopped and looked uncertainly over her shoulder at us. “It’s all right. We’re not Germans,” said Zoya. The child still appeared ready to bolt.
“Come, little one,” I pleaded. “You have nothing to fear from us.”
Slowly, she turned and started crawling toward us. When she’d gotten to within a few feet, she stopped, her small, dirty hand trying to block the light of Zoya’s torch. I saw that she had long hair whose color could not be deciphered because of its filth, hair that fell across her emaciated face in straggly lines. Her pipe-thin arms were befouled, her dress torn and soiled. Her shoes, far too big for her feet, were obviously some pair she’d scrounged up somewhere or other. And yet, beneath the filth, I could see that she was a pretty child, with large, dark eyes and white teeth, which glistened in the light. She huddled with her scrawny arms wrapped around knees scraped raw from crawling about the sewers. She was older than she’d first appeared, perhaps eight or nine, and yet she had the weary eyes of an old person.
Zoya asked, “What’s your name, little one?”
The girl hesitated, then said, “Raisa.”
“How long have you been down here, Raisa?” I asked.
In reply, she lifted her thin shoulders. “I don’t know.”
“Where are your parents?”
She brought her dirty hand to her face and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. “Mama was killed early in the war. Tato went off one morning to look for food. But he didn’t return. Then I went down here. There used to be others but they died.”
I reached out and stroked her hair. “Are you hungry?”
The girl nodded. From my tunic I took out a piece of hard bread wrapped in brown paper and gave it to her. She tore into it.
Zoya turned to me. “What are we going to do with her, Sergeant?”
I thought for a moment. Finally, I said, “You bring her back to camp.”
“What about you?”
“I have to try to get the sniper.” Then to the girl, I said, “Go with her, Raisa.” I turned back to Zoya. “Give me your grenade and your torch.”
Zoya handed them over, then hugged me. “Don’t be a hero,” she told me.
“I’ll see you back in camp.”
Then to the girl, Zoya said, “Follow me, little one.” She turned and started back the way we’d come.
The girl hesitated, though, staring at me.
“It will be all right, I promise,” I said. I reached out and stroked the girl’s cheek. At this, she literally leapt into my arms. I could feel the sharp bones beneath her clothing, her small, trembling body. She clung to me with such desperation, such need. And I, who hadn’t held a child in so long, clung to her with equal desperation. I kissed the top of her head, remembering how I used to do that with my own daughter. And for a moment it was as if I had Masha back in my arms again. “It’s all right, Raisa,” I said as I rocked her.
“Perhaps you should return with us, Sergeant?” Zoya asked.
“No, you take her back. And don’t let anything happen to her,” I said, recalling what Kolya had told me that day at the train station.
“I won’t. Good luck, Tat’yana.”
Then to the little girl, I said, “Go now. You’ll be safe with Zoya.” Only then did she relax her grip on me and follow Zoya down the tunnel.
With that I turned and continued on my way. The sewer grew gradually lighter, so that soon I could turn off the torch. Rounding a bend, I saw up ahead a broad bar of sunlight streaming down into the sewer. As I neared the spot, I removed my pistol. Cautiously, I peered up. Overhead a dozen feet or so, I saw a piece of blue sky, bisected by a splintered wooden beam that lay across the opening. I climbed metal rungs built into the side of the wall. Near the top I waited for my eyes to adjust to the harsh brightness. Not far away, I could hear the incessant tat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire, the thwonk of mortars, the deafening blasts from their Panzers. More distantly I could make out a German voice, someone barking orders. Cautiously, I shoved the beam aside and inched my shoulders through and peeked over the top of the manhole. It was sheltered by debris, fallen timbers, bricks and plaster from a wall that had collapsed around it. I pushed some of the wreckage aside and climbed up farther. To the west, I saw the sea glistening under the midday sun, while to the northeast, well up on the hill, I made out the muzzle of a German tank poking out from beneath camouflage netting. Directly ahead of me, though, were the remains of a brick wall, which blocked my view of the German lines below. I carefully lifted myself out of the hole and crawled over the debris to it. Slowly, I peered over the jagged top of the wall.
To my surprise, I’d come out some fifty meters behind the enemy positions. Below me, I saw two Germans in a foxhole, their backs exposed to me. One was firing a machine gun toward our lines, the other feeding the belt. Beyond them I saw more Germans dug in all along the crest of the hill, what looked like an entire battalion. I made a quick scan of the area, looking for the sniper’s position, then got out my field glasses and carefully glassed the area below me. Nothing. I continued looking. Still nothing. I could keep searching, hoping to find him, or I could take what was given to me. I decided on the latter course. Slowly, I slid the barrel of my rifle through a crack in the wall.
I shot the machine gunner first; then, before his assistant knew what had happened, I shot him too, both in the back. I moved down the line toward the other Germans in the trench. I shot a soldier smoking a cigarette. Then a man loading a mortar. When his companion reached for his rifle, I shot him too. I continued down the line and shot three more men. It was like shooting targets at the range. I wasn’t thinking, just acting on instinct, a soldier’s instinct. I had no fear. I figured my life was already over and I thought only of killing as many as I could before I died.
The Germans now were in a wild state of panic, scurrying about, trying to find the direction from which the fire was raining down upon them. I’d reloaded and was able to kill four more before the krauts finally realized it was coming from behind them, and then they swung around and began to return fire. I had to duck down behind the wall as rounds zipped overhead and sent fragments of bricks and red dust raining down on me. At least one machine gun had opened up on my position. I took out a grenade and tossed it down the hill, more simply to create a diversion. I used the explosion to crawl east along the wall for twenty-five meters, so as not to present the same target. Besides my remaining grenade, I had only four rounds left. Cautiously I peered through debris covering what had once been a window. With my field glasses, I scanned the area below and to the west. Still nothing. The Germans continued to lay down a murderous fire, and I was about to abandon the mission, turn and make my way back to the sewer, when something caught my eye. About seventy-five meters away, in what was left of a stairwell of a building, two stories off the ground, I saw the tell-tale glint of sunlight off metal. When I looked more closely I recognized it as a rifle barrel, then a scope. As I continued to inspect it, I was able to make out a hand attached to the rifle, next a finger wrapped around a trigger, and finally, behind that, the crest of a field cap projecting just above some bricks. There he was. My sniper.
Doubtless he’d heard the commotion and had swung around and was searching behind the German lines. Searching for me. In fact, the barrel seemed aimed right at me. Had he spotted me? I wondered. Should I make a run for it? Instead, recalling the time I’d been caught in the tree, I decided to take my chances and remain perfectly still. I waited for the bullet that would slam into me, but after a moment, I saw him move his scope to my right, up the hill, hunting. This gave me all the opportunity I needed. I slowly brought my rifle up and into position. He didn’t present much of a target. Just the top half of his field cap. That would have to be enough. I flicked the safety off and took aim at a point just below the crest of the hat. I breathed in, blew out, breathed in again and held my breath. Then I fired. I could feel the bullet strike home even before I saw the spray of blood against the wall behind him, saw the rifle barrel drop from the hand that held it and fall to the ground below.
Though I didn’t know it then, it would be my last kill.
The others now knew my position and started to fire on me. I returned fire until I ran out of ammo, then took out my pistol and shot until it was empty too. At that point, I got up and, in a crouch, started running back toward the sewer. That’s when I heard the familiar, high-pitched scream of a mortar descending to earth. I didn’t hear the blast—one never does—but felt myself pitched forward and then slammed headlong into the ground. I lay there momentarily on my side, dazed, my ears ringing, the coppery taste of blood in my mouth. My teeth felt loose from the impact. Turning my head slightly, I saw a jagged piece of blue sky off by itself, as if the sky too had been shattered by the blast. I stared at it with a vague curiosity. My right arm lay beneath me, at an odd angle. Yet I didn’t feel any pain. I didn’t feel much of anything, in fact. There was a burning low in my belly, the sensation of something warm running down along my side, soaking my tunic. Then I heard muffled voices. I couldn’t tell whether they were speaking German or Russian, but I knew they were getting nearer. Get up, I told myself. Get up or you will die. Despite this warning, I didn’t move. I felt so tired, so weary suddenly, as if all the fighting and killing, all the war, had only now caught up with me. I just wanted to close my eyes and sleep for a long while.
Yet I was aware enough to know I didn’t want to be captured. I turned my head and searched the ground for my rifle, but with my right arm immobile the weapon, I knew, would be useless anyway. Then I remembered the remaining grenade. With my left hand I grasped it and brought it up to my mouth so I could pull the pin with my teeth. I would wait for them to come close, close enough so that I could take some of them with me. I found the feel of the grenade in my hand strangely comforting. Above, the segment of blue sky wavered and began to darken. So this was how it would be, I thought. Oddly, I didn’t fear death. In fact, in some ways I almost welcomed it. If there was a life after this, I thought, I would be reunited with my baby. And if not, at least I would no longer have to live without her. The last image I had was of her running along the beach, as in that dream. Her blond hair bouncing, her legs churning. Mama, she called to me. Mama.