Beautiful Assassin (15 page)

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
.

I
n the claustrophobic darkness, the first thing I became aware of was the moaning, the lonely terror of a body in pain. It came, I realized, from directly above me. A man’s voice, though fragile and petulant as a child’s. And then I recognized the odor. I’d smelled it back in Odessa, in the bombed-out buildings of Sevastopol, in all those places where they hadn’t a chance to bury the dead. The rankness of corruption, the foul stench of flesh gone bad. It surrounded me in the darkness, made me almost want to retch.

I felt groggy, my thoughts sluggish and disoriented, my head aching dully. I glanced at my right arm, seemingly frozen from shoulder to wrist. A strange and heavy armor appeared to cover it. It seemed to glow in the darkness, white as a bone left exposed to the sun. With my free hand I reached over and touched the surface, which had a pleasing smoothness to it. As I moved my free arm I became aware of the long, slender snake whose fangs were sunk into the back of my left hand. Curious, I followed the snake to where its tail was attached to a bag dangling over my bunk. The movement brought about a stabbing pain low in my belly. I tried to lie still, hoping it would go away. As I lay there, I slowly became aware of another sensation—a feeling of being in motion, moving, gliding through the darkness. It was an unsettling sensation, like that of falling in a dream.

“Oaaah,” came the moaning again. I heard someone pound the
bunk above me with a fist. “For Christ’s sakes, I can’t take it anymore,” he called out.

From somewhere else in the darkness another voice cursed back: “Shut the hell up.”

“Fuck you.”

“We’re all in pain. If you don’t shut up, I’ll come over there and wring your goddamned neck.”

With that, the man in the bunk above me quieted down for a while.

Slowly coming to, I glanced around the narrow, cavelike room, with its low ceiling and concave walls, which seemed to press inward. As my eyesight adjusted to the darkness, I could make out double bunks lining each side of it, with only a small space dividing the upper and lower rows. Bodies lay on the bunks. I saw an arm draped loosely over the edge, a pale leg drawn up, the white incandescent glow of dressings. The armor on my arm, I realized, was merely a cast; the snake in my hand an IV. Occasionally someone coughed or groaned, while others snored. The man above me leaned over the side of the bunk, only the outline of his shaggy head visible.

“Ssp. Are you awake?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Did they give you your meds yet?”

I had to think for a moment. “I don’t know,” I told him.

“My leg is killing me. Do you hear me, you bastards?” he cried out again.

“I’m warning you,” came the other voice once more.

Besides the ache in my belly, there was a faint ringing in my ears, like frozen leaves making a tinkling sound in the winter wind. Things slowly, grudgingly returned to me. Every time I woke it was like this. I had to start from scratch, put what had happened back in place again—my memory like a large, complicated jigsaw puzzle I’d worked hard to piece together, only to find it scattered on waking. I remembered climbing through the sewer with Zoya. Finding the little girl down there. Shooting the Germans in the trench and finally getting the sniper. Then running and being thrown by the explosion. Lying on the ground, unable to move, the piece of blue sky hanging
overhead. Clutching the grenade, waiting for the Germans to come. And then, right before I lost consciousness, thinking of my daughter. I remembered all that. The rest since then was just loose bits and pieces scattered in my head. Coming to for a few minutes, occasionally seeing the strangely familiar face of someone leaning over me, adjusting the IV, the cries and moans of those around me. Then more darkness and that odd sense of movement, of slipping through space and time.

“Christ, how do they expect me to stand this,” the man hollered again.

After a time someone did come by to check on us. A small, thin man, he carried an electric torch in one hand, while in the other he had a metal box with supplies—dressings and bandages, syringes and vials of medicine.

“It’s about time,” the man in the bunk above me cried.

“Stop your bellyaching,” the small man told him. His voice was one I’d heard before, but I couldn’t make out his face behind the bright light of the torch. The medic checked the man’s vitals, then drew him a shot of something from a small vial. “There,” he said. “That should shut you up for a while.”

Soon the man did quiet down, and in short order he was snoring lightly.

Then the medic squatted beside my bunk.

“How are you feeling, Sergeant?” he asked.

And then it came to me. “Yuri?” I replied. It was Yuri Sokur, our medic.

“That’s right.”

“You made it out?”

“By the skin of my teeth,” he joked. “And how’s our famous patient doing?”

“My stomach hurts.”

He nodded. “You had yourself a very serious injury, Sergeant.”

He took my pulse and listened to my heart, then fiddled with the IV.

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked, pointing toward the bunk above me.

“Lost a foot. Now the leg’s going bad,” Yuri explained with the prac
ticed callousness of those who’d seen a lot of suffering. He sniffed. “Can’t you smell it? Let’s have a look at you, Sergeant.”

He carefully lifted the bandage on my stomach and inspected my wound, an ugly, jagged T that ran from just to the right of my navel down to the line of my pubic bone, then at right angles across my lower belly. On either side of the wound, the skin was bruised a dark wine color and puckered from the many stitches. There was crusted blood along the length of it. And it smelled too.

“This will hurt a little,” he explained as he cleaned the wound with carbolic acid.

He was right—it did hurt. But not a little. I winced as he worked. “Jesus!”

“Sorry. I can give you something for the pain.”

“Where are we?” I asked as he readied a syringe.

“In the Black Sea.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three days. Maybe four.”

He explained how I was transferred to the sub with a group of wounded from a makeshift field hospital in Sevastopol. Now we were headed for the Caucasus.

“I think I recall asking you all this before.”

“That’s all right,” he said, smiling good-naturedly. “You’ve been in and out.”

He started to rub alcohol on my arm. Before he would shoot me up with morphine, I said, “Wait. How did I get out?”

“I don’t know. All hell broke loose those last few days. I was pulled out to help with the wounded on the sub.”

I tried to sit up, but he stopped me. “Easy. You don’t want to open your wound.”

“What happened to the rest of our unit?”

“Gone,” was all he said.

“Gone? Did anyone get out?”

“Cheburko,” he said.

“That’s it. What of Corporal Kovshova?”

He shrugged. “I only know that the Germans took the city.”

“How many were they able to evacuate?”

“A handful.”

“Out of a hundred thousand troops!” I exclaimed. “What of the rest?”

Yuri shook his head. “You were one of the last to be evacuated. Count yourself lucky.”

At this, I felt a great sadness settle over me. I thought of Zoya, of Captain Petrenko, of the others in my unit. All those with whom I’d fought and suffered and endured that hellhole for nine months—gone.

“My things?” I said. “I had a case with some pictures. Personal effects.”

“I don’t know about any of that.”

Then I remembered the girl we’d found in the sewer.

“There was a little girl we came upon in the sewer. She returned with Corporal Kovshova. Do you know what happened to her?”

Yuri shook his head. I closed my eyes to keep from crying.

“You have nothing to be ashamed of, Sergeant,” he offered.

“I should be back there with them,” I said.

“What good would that do anyone?” Then, trying to cheer me, Yuri said, “You have made the entire nation very proud of you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The name Tat’yana Levchenko is on everyone’s lips. Wait.” Yuri held up a finger and hurried off. He returned in a moment carrying a copy of
Krasny Chernomorets
, the newspaper of the Black Sea Fleet. “See,” he said, shining his torch on the front page. There was my picture. The headline read, “Woman Sniper Reaches 300 Fascist Kills.”

“You are a national hero,” Yuri exclaimed.

I’d forgotten about all that, my goal of reaching three hundred kills. At one time such an accomplishment would have made me proud. Now it didn’t matter in the least. In fact, it seemed mere vanity. What I had done was meaningless, knowing that my comrades were prisoners, or worse. That Zoya was gone. And then I wondered how they’d arrived at that 300 figure. I’d talked to no one, and there had been no witnesses to my last dozen kills. Where had they got it? Probably, I thought, just made it up out of whole cloth, the way the Soviet propaganda usually did.

“When I am an old man,” Yuri said, “I will tell my grandchildren that I knew the great sniper, Tat’yana Levchenko.”

Then he rubbed my arm with alcohol and slid the needle into my flesh. I felt the prick, followed by the cool, intoxicating rush of the morphine. Soon I was drifting on a warm wave in a bright green sea. I dreamed of starfish and mermaids.

Except for once when we surfaced and were dive-bombed by German planes, the trip across the Black Sea was uneventful. Yet I was hardly aware of the passage of time, spending most of my days dozing fitfully in an unsettled world of shifting darkness. What sleep I did manage was continually interrupted by the cries of the wounded around me or by my own pain, which sometimes seemed like a large hand grabbing me around the belly and shaking me to consciousness. Yuri would then stop by and give me another shot of morphine, and I would sink back down into that darkness again. However, as I started to improve a bit, from somewhere he scrounged up a frayed copy of
Eugene Onegin,
hoping a book would prove a healthy distraction for me. Yet the story of the dilettante Onegin and the strange relationship he had with his beloved, ironically a woman named Tat’yana, held little interest for me now. My mind wandered, and the ringing in my ears distracted me. I felt depressed, filled with black thoughts. At odd moments, I found myself weeping. Through all the months of fighting, I’d never felt this way. The momentum of war, the simple acts of fighting, of surviving each day—those things had kept at bay what I was feeling now. But now I wept inconsolably—for my lost comrades, for Zoya and Captain Petrenko. For the little girl Raisa. For my parents. Most of all, I wept for my daughter. I guess because of the war I hadn’t had a chance to properly mourn her passing. The hatred—and perhaps too my guilt—had so filled me that there wasn’t room for anything else. Now in the darkness of my bunk, I felt her death as if it had happened only yesterday. I couldn’t get the image of those last few moments of her life out of my head. Her calling to me, running toward me. The bullets tearing into her tiny body. How I had watched the spot that was her grave fade into the anonymous vastness of the countryside. Suddenly, I just felt so terribly sad.

Some of the wounded as well as a number of the sailors stopped by my bunk to see how I was doing. They treated me deferentially, as if I were someone famous. One of the wounded was Cheburko, the young sniper from my unit. With a mop handle, he hobbled about on one leg. He pulled up a stool beside my bunk and sat down.

“How are you feeling, Sergeant?” he asked.

“A little better. You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette?”

From his pocket he took out a pack and gave me one, then struck a match and lit it for me.

“Would you know what happened to Second Company?”

He shook his head.

“It was crazy. We ran out of ammo and were fighting the krauts with bayonets.”

“How did you manage to get out?” I asked.

He shrugged, glancing down at his missing leg. From his coat pocket, Cheburko took out a small flask and handed it to me. I took a sip of watered-down vodka and handed the flask back to him. The vodka didn’t even burn the throat going down, it was so weak. “
Za zdorov’ye,
” I said.

“
Za zdorov’ye,
” he said, taking a sip. “To a lot of good soldiers.” He glanced over his shoulder, then whispered, “Good soldiers stayed and died while those fucking officers took to their heels. An entire army gone like
that,
” he said, snapping his fingers.

Cheburko looked down at his missing leg, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was actually gone, as if it might still reappear and he’d be whole again. “I guess it’s a small price to pay. Now I can go home to my family. How about you?”

“I don’t know. As soon as I’m well enough, I’d like to get back to my unit.”

“There is no unit, Sergeant. They’re all gone.”

We reached port finally, a small town on the Georgian coast. As I was carried off the sub, I saw sunlight for the first time in weeks. An even stranger sight accosted me—a landscape that hadn’t yet been touched by war. The town’s streets weren’t pockmarked with craters and the
buildings were unscathed. Along with the other wounded soldiers, I was loaded onto a rickety twin engine Yakovlev transport plane and flown over the mountains to a hospital in the Azerbaijan city of Baku.

There I was treated like royalty. I had a sunny room to myself, with a window that looked out at the Caspian Sea. Instead of the ground, I slept between clean sheets on a soft featherbed with a pillow in place of a backpack. A tall, awkward nurse with a toothy grin would come by and give me a bath, then wash and comb my hair. And each morning she brought me an enormous breakfast of hot tea with cream and sugar, salami and goat cheese, eggs and oat porridge,
vareniki
and
dovag
. The irony was that while I’d been so hungry during the fighting, now when I could eat to my heart’s content I didn’t have much of an appetite. The nurse would cajole me with, “Eat! Eat!” She would even go so far as to pick up a spoon and try to force-feed me, as if I were a finicky baby.