Beautiful Assassin (12 page)

He was so earnest and sweet when he said this to me, so tender and caring, that my heart welled up in my chest, not because of what I felt for him as much as because of my nagging guilt. I would smile and stroke his face and tell him that I loved him too. And I tried hard to believe this, and in some fashion I succeeded in convincing myself I
did love him. Though I suppose some part of me always knew it was a conditional love, not as he loved me, with all of his heart and soul, but only narrowly, as a dear friend. Yet as the weeks turned into months, and the months to years, I slowly came to resent his touch, and when we made love, I would close my eyes and go off to my own private place. Occasionally, I would be unfaithful to him. No, I don’t mean that I took on lovers. But in my mind. I would pretend I was with someone else—a student I’d seen at the library, one of my instructors, a young man I saw in a café, even the lover in some poem by Akhmatova. Sometimes, when I couldn’t endure his touch, I would tell him I was tired and turn away. “Is anything wrong, Tanyusha?” he would ask, never in anger, only with genuine tenderness for me. To which I would reply that I was merely fatigued from my studies. The truth was, I wasn’t a good wife. No, I was never unfaithful, except for those transgressions in my mind. But I wasn’t truthful with him, wasn’t fair with him or, for that matter, with myself. I felt as if I were in a beautiful gilded cage, but a cage is still a cage nonetheless. I wish he would have gotten angry with me, wish he’d have yelled and screamed, even struck me, said he’d had enough. It would have made things much easier for me, for both of us. Or I wish I’d simply had the courage to tell him the truth. But it was equally true that he was my dearest friend, such a kind and gentle soul, and as such I had vowed never to hurt him. He seemed content enough with our unspoken “arrangement,” with that small part of me that he had access to. He was a man, as I have said, of great patience and of modest needs, and his work took much of his time. Perhaps he was just waiting for me to come around, as my mother said I would.

And I? What was I waiting for? I was not unhappy with our arrangement, or at least I told myself this over and over, knowing that one can convince oneself of almost anything. Besides, when I compared my lot with that of my fellow Ukrainians, so many of whom were suffering terribly, who were starving by the tens of thousands or being shipped off to gulags, what right did I, with my bourgeois romanticism, have to complain in such a world? No, I’d made my bed, so to speak, and now had to lie in it.

Yet just when you think you have life figured out and can see it all
the way to the grave, something happens to surprise and amaze you. In my case, it was two things. The first was Mariya, who came like a glorious ray of morning sunlight after a night of bad dreams. Kolya and I had talked vaguely of having a family, someday, “down the road.” He wanted children more than I, but I knew it was something expected of me. After all, every good Soviet wife was called upon to produce children, healthy workers for the state. But there was my poetry, my studies to think about. And secretly, I wasn’t sure if I wanted children, not yet, perhaps not ever. I had seen what the loss of a child did to my parents. Besides, I guess I looked upon children as a kind of period to the end of my sentence, a final gesture that would forever lock me in the life I was trapped in. But how wrong I was! As soon as Masha, as we came to call her, entered my body and my soul, she became my entire existence, my joy, my passion, my poetry. I loved her with the unconditional love I hadn’t been able to find with Kolya. As I’ve said, I could almost tell the moment she entered my body. That warmish summer day, I was lying on the bed, the breeze lifting the curtains, and suddenly that tiny presence attached itself deep inside me, swelling me with life. From that moment on, my
moy krolik
—my little rabbit—completely captivated me, stole my heart and ran off with it. Both of ours. I remember Kolya had been away for a few weeks working on a bridge project near Zaporozh’ye. When he came home that night, I excitedly threw my arms around him and told him the good news. “We’re going to have a baby, Kolya,” I cried. He looked stunned. I wasn’t sure if it was more due to the news itself or to the way in which I’d reacted to it.

Our daughter turned out to be blond like him, to have his thin, soft hair and blue-gray eyes. We put her cradle in what had been my study. After I nursed her, she would fall asleep in my arms, her rose-petal mouth pressed against my breast.

“Isn’t she just the most perfect thing, Kolya?” I would say.

“She looks just like you,” he would reply.

Kolya made a wonderful father. He was kind and loving, patient and gentle, and watching him with her, I felt this newfound tenderness toward him, found myself drawn closer to him, the way parents, even those not in love, will sometimes be brought closer because of their
mutual love for a child. I would watch with bemused adoration as he swept her up and placed her on his shoulders, and carried her squealing with laughter about the apartment. She formed that missing link between us, a link that held us fast together.

When Masha would grasp my hair with her chubby pink fingers, I felt my heart so swollen with love, I thought it would burst into a thousand tiny pieces. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would get up from bed and go into her room and lean down, close enough to make sure I could hear her breathing, that fear no doubt inspired by the example of my mother’s loss of her firstborn. I loved the smell of her, of her hair and skin, the sweet hoppy fragrance of her breath after she’d taken suck. The way her eyes would dart beneath her closed lids, as if watching butterflies in her sleep. I would whisper into her ear “My sweet love” and “My little rabbit.” When I was at school, I would take her to my mother’s. Later, when she could walk, she’d scurry up the path from my parents’ front door and throw her arms around my neck, crying, “Mama,” as if she’d not seen me for ages. It was the most precious of feelings. My chest would ache with love, a love I could never have imagined before. I came to realize that what I had lost by marrying, I had more than gained with the gift of my daughter. I was happy at long last, prepared—no, eager—to spend the rest of my days like this.

But then the second change came into my life.

22 June 1941

It fell like a fiery comet from the sky, scorching everything in its path, obliterating everything. It was the day that monster from Berlin invaded my country. We were walking in the park, the three of us. A warm, bright summer day, the sun gleaming off the buildings, the smell of roses in the air. That’s when a boy came running by, yelling that Germany had invaded. We couldn’t believe it. Just two years earlier, Molotov had signed a nonaggression treaty between our two countries. War had been averted, we all thought. When we got back to our apartment, we heard the foreign minister on the radio saying that we’d been attacked
by Germany and that a state of war existed between our countries. Later we heard the pleas of Bishop Sergey, one of the few clergy who hadn’t been arrested or executed by Stalin, asking for all to help fight the invaders. We were shocked and dismayed, though in hindsight it should not have surprised anyone. Not just because of what Germany had been doing—the military buildup along our borders, the Nazi rhetoric that had openly called for Lebensraum, the need for the land of the Untermensch for their superior race—but also because of our own country’s complicity. The treaty with Hitler, permitting us to chop up Poland and the Baltic states as if they were pieces of meat, was a deal we’d cut with the devil himself. Then there were Stalin’s own purges, which had liquidated most of the military’s top brass, replacing them with sycophants and incompetents. But now all that didn’t matter. Our country was under attack. We were all Soviets, all patriots united against our common foe.

Kolya and I talked things over. He said he wanted to enlist straightaway, that the Motherland needed every available body to fight the fascists. That day he went down to the recruiting office and signed up, and the next day, Masha and I accompanied him to the station where he was to board a train heading north, to Leningrad he’d been told. The station was utter chaos. Thousands of new recruits and their loved ones had gathered there, hugging and crying, exchanging packages and saying their good-byes. Over the loudspeaker an announcement was made that the Germans had crossed the Dvina River and were pushing toward Leningrad.

“We must stop these fascist bastards,” Kolya said to me. I found it surprising because he hardly ever cursed, and never in front of Masha.

I took his face in my hands and said, “You listen to me, Nikolai. You be careful. Don’t be a hero.”

“You will move in with your parents?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I love you, Tanyusha,” he said.

“And I love you too,” I replied.

I hugged him tightly to me, not wanting to let him go. I felt closer to him at that moment than I ever had. A tenderness, the sort, I suppose,
one would feel for a brother going off to war. He kissed Masha, then, taking my face in his long, slender hands, he said to me, “Don’t let anything happen to my girls.”

His girls?
I thought. The expression would come to haunt me. He was entrusting our safety and our love to me. I would come to feel as if I had betrayed him. Was I his girl? And hadn’t I let something happen to Masha? He boarded the train with the other soldiers and waved as it pulled out of the station.

“Wave good-bye to your father,” I told Masha.

“Where’s
tato
going?” she asked.

“To fight the Germans,” I replied.

“Why?”

How do you explain to a child the reason why adults kill one another? How would I ever have been able to tell her of all the men I aligned in my sights and sent to their deaths?

“Because he loves us.”

“Will he come back?”

“Of course,” I said.

As we walked home I told myself over and over that Kolya was a good man and that I would remain loyal to him, that I would love no other and that I would be waiting for him when he came home. But I saw through this flimsy pretense. In my heart I held the blackest of secrets, a maggot devouring my soul. Some part of me hoped that he wouldn’t come back. Yes, it’s true. I thought that if he died in the war, I could grieve for him publicly, honor him by wearing widow’s weeds for a year. But then I would be free from my cage, free to live my own life as I chose, and not that which others had chosen for me or to which I had with cowardice surrendered. Only later would I understand the harsh wisdom of being cautious of what you wish for.

D
uring 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.