Beautiful Assassin (29 page)

“Thank you,” I said in my awkward English.

Instead of leaving, though, she sat down on the side of the bed and patted the spot next to her, inviting me to come and sit. So I did. She reached out and grasped my hands in both of hers and smiled benevolently at me. There was something about her, a gentleness that put me completely at ease. Then she said something, which of course I didn’t understand. She said it again, but I still didn’t get what she was trying to tell me. Suddenly she held up a finger, got up, and walked over to the mantel above the fireplace and picked up a framed picture. Returning to the bed, she showed it to me—a photograph of her and the president with a number of children gathered around them. She pointed at each of the children and then touched her chest possessively.

“
Vashi deti
?” I said. “Yours?”

She smiled and nodded, pleased that I had got her meaning. Then she cradled her arms together and rocked an imaginary infant, and pointed at me.

I understood what she was asking, I just didn’t know how to respond. How does one explain something as complicated as the death of a child when one didn’t share the other’s language? I thought perhaps I ought just to shake my head and leave it at that. But Mrs. Roosevelt gave me such a kindly expression, I wanted to invite her into my world, to share my heart’s truth with her. I wanted to share my loss with another mother who would understand.

“
Dochka,
” I finally said.

She gave me a puzzled expression, so I removed the small leather case and took out the picture of my daughter and Kolya. I pointed at Masha, said her name, and then touched my chest as she had done. “
Moya dochka
.”

Mrs. Roosevelt smiled and said something else, waiting for me to tell her more.

“
Umerla,
” I said, the word for
died
. Then I put my hands together and lay my head against them and closed my eyes, the universal sign for sleep. “
Umerla,
” I repeated.

Mrs. Roosevelt only frowned.

So I walked over and picked up the paper and pen from the nightstand. Unlike Kolya, I was never much good at drawing things. Words had always been my strength. Still, I tried my hand at sketching a plane sweeping low over the ground. Unfortunately it looked more like a bird than a plane. From beneath its wings I made dots for bullets, which trickled like rain to the earth. The rain-bullets dropped onto a long-haired stick-figure child lying on the ground. I pointed at the child in my crude drawing, then at the picture of my daughter. “Masha,” I said, touching my chest as she had done. Then I lay my head on my hands again, to show that she slept. Finally I pointed heavenward. I watched as Mrs. Roosevelt slowly grasped what I was trying to tell her. She stared at me with such a depth of compassion, her awkward mouth furrowed with sympathy. A tear slid down her cheek, rested at the corner of her
mouth before she wiped it away. She said something, which I took to mean that she was offering me her sympathy, and I nodded and thanked her. Then she reached out and put her arm around my shoulder and drew me slowly to her, as if I were a child needing comfort. As if I were one of her own children in the picture she had shown me. She stroked my hair and uttered something soothing to me. Though the moment was all quite bizarre, I nonetheless gave myself over completely to her kindness. I had for so long denied myself any feeling, had maintained such a hard shell around me. But it felt good to be in another’s arms, to be comforted as my mother had once comforted me. Her gentle touch reminded me, in fact, of my mother’s, how she used to hold me when I was frightened or sick. We sat like this for a long time. We needed no words to explain what we felt. I was no longer a Soviet soldier, and she was no longer the wife of the president. We were just two women comforting each other.

After a while, she squeezed my hand and bid me good night.

A
s I lay in bed, I thought back to Masha’s death. It was the first time I had permitted myself to think about it. Perhaps because now I was not preoccupied with war, with killing or being killed. Or perhaps it was because of the kindness of Mrs. Roosevelt.

After Kolya had left for the war, Masha and I had moved into my parents’ house so that we could all be together, share what little we had in the way of food, which was already growing short. My father kept saying the Germans would be stopped, that they would never get within a hundred kilometers of the Dnieper. Then fifty. Then twenty. Even when the Germans were poised on the outskirts of Kiev, their artillery lobbing shells into the city, he stubbornly refused to accept the inevitable. When we heard the sirens, he wouldn’t leave our home to take refuge in the subways. He’d stay there, as my mother and I and Masha rushed for cover. People were already fleeing Kiev, streaming eastward by the tens of thousands, heading for Brovary and Romny, for Kharkov, for the distant Urals, anywhere away from the German onslaught. The railroads had been conscripted for military use, so that left only the roads for civilians. Yet they were clogged with long lines of lorries and horse-drawn wagons, bicycles, and people pushing carts and slogging on foot, their belongings on their backs. My mother tried to get my father to see the light, that we should try to leave before it was too late, but he remained steadfast. “You watch,”
he said. “Marshal Budyonny will defeat the fascists.” Budyonny was the general in charge of the defense of Kiev.

My mother told me to go, to take Masha and leave quickly before the Germans completed the encirclement of the city. She gave me a purse filled with rubles and a necklace made of gold, and she packed some food in a basket. I threw some things in a suitcase, clothes for us, some personal effects, including a pile of poems I’d written. Then I said good-bye to my parents. My father hugged me, as he always did, stiffly, formally, then turned and headed into his study, as if to await the German advance. My mother kissed Masha, then hugged me. “I love you, Tanyusha,” she said. When I begged her to come with us, she said her place was beside her husband. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would never see my parents again.

By then the Germans had the city nearly surrounded. Only to the east, across the river, was there still a small window for escape, but a window that was growing smaller by the day. Already there was savage street fighting against what was left of the trapped Red Army. I made my way through the city, hoping to slip through the German net and head for Kharkov.

“Where we going, Mama?” asked Masha, in her arms a rag doll she called her baby.

“To safety,” I said.

“What of
baba
and
dedushka
?” she asked of her grandparents.

“They have to stay, my love.”

“Will they be all right?”

“Yes,” I lied.

We traveled by night, hid in bombed-out buildings by day, sometimes coming so close to German troops we could hear their voices. I knew what would happen if they caught us. I would be raped and killed, and my child, as I had heard about other blond, fair-skinned children, would be sent back to Germany to be raised as Aryan.

We wandered south, looking for a way to cross. We chanced upon a family who were crowding into a small rowboat. Though they hardly had enough room for themselves, I begged to let us join them. The father, a burly man named Vidayev, took pity on us and finally allowed us in the
boat. We crossed the river under cover of darkness and somehow managed to slip through the German lines. The next day we met up with a farmer driving a team of plow horses pulling a wagon. The wagon was filled with various farm implements, chickens in crates, cord wood, a pile of turnips, a can of petrol, a small piano that his wife played. He had us sit in back and we continued eastward, along the dusty road that led toward Kharkov. The days were blistering hot, the sun beating down on our heads like an iron mallet. But at least we had escaped. At night, we boiled turnips and fried eggs, and slept by the roadside under the warm summer sky, Masha lying in my arms. Vidayev’s wife played the piano while seated on the wagon.

Several times during the day, we heard the faraway drone of approaching aircraft. Out of the bottomless blue sky that hung over the steppes, enemy planes would appear on the western horizon, small at first, then growing larger, swarming like bees. Each time the farmer would stop the wagon, and we’d rush to a ditch or small stand of trees at the side of the road and take what cover we could find. Sometimes the only cover afforded us along that skillet-flat landscape was beneath the wagon itself. The planes, Messerschmitts and Heinkels, would buzz overhead, but when they saw it was just a lone farmer’s wagon, they’d pass on, heading eastward for more important targets.

We were three days’ ride from Kharkov when a squadron of Messerschmitts approached from the north coming in low over the fields. We were caught out in the open. Before we’d had a chance to take cover, they opened up with their 20 mm cannons. I tried to shield Masha with my body. Bullets snapped and hissed and crackled all around us, exploding turnips and showering splinters of wood down upon us. As soon as the planes had passed over, I grabbed Masha. “Are you all right?” I cried. But except for being shaken, she was fine. I breathed a sigh of relief. Yet no sooner had I thought this, than one of the planes broke away from the squadron, which continued on out of sight. This plane banked sharply to the left, then leveled out and came straight for us again.

“Take cover,” someone yelled as we scrambled down and hid beneath the wagon.

“I’m afraid, Mama,” my daughter whispered near my ear.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” I tried to calm her. “Everything will be all right.”

The whine of the Messerschmitt’s engine intensified, then its twin cannons opened up, strafing us. I could hear the bullets tearing into the wagon, and the
pft-pft-pft
as they bit into the dirt of the road, kicking up little puffs of dust, then the
twong, twong
as they plunked the piano keys. They say you never hear the bullet that is meant for you. I don’t know if that is true or not, but I could hear them all around me, hungry for flesh. One of the horses let out with a frantic whinny, then collapsed dead in its traces, blood spurting from its neck. After a while, I smelled petrol.

“Get out,” cried Vidayev. “Hurry.” We dragged ourselves out from under the wagon and rushed out into a field of sugar beets and lay down. The remaining horse, crazed with fear, was whinnying and dragging its heavy burden down the road, trying to escape. The dead horse was pulled along in the dirt, leaving a trail of dark blood in its wake. That’s when I remembered the suitcase filled with all of our things, our clothes, my purse with the rubles and my mother’s gold necklace. Also, my poems. I thought it safe then to leave the field and try to recover my belongings before they were consumed in the fire. I instructed Masha to stay there; then I got up and sprinted toward the wagon. By now, though, the vehicle was engulfed in flames, black smoke billowing upward far into the sky. I tried to reach into the back and grab my suitcase, but the heat was too intense and soon I had to give up and turn back.

And what happened next is something I could never understand: off in the southern sky, I saw the German pilot bank again to the left and come back for a third strike. Why? I wondered. Why are you doing this?

I heard a voice calling, “Mama. Mama.” When I turned I saw Masha running toward me. “Get down!” I cried, waving her to take cover. But she continued on, her doll jangling in her arms, her thin legs propelling her forward. I rushed toward her. That’s when the German cut loose with a burst of cannon fire. I could see the small explosions of dust as they seemed to chase her across the road. Before I could reach her, bullets riddled her body and she collapsed onto the dirt of the road like a puppet whose strings had suddenly been cut. The blood soaked her
dress, turning it black as night. I heard someone screaming, but it took me a moment to realize it was I. When I reached her, I picked her up, cradled her in my arms. “No!” I cried. “Dear God, no!” Part of me knew that she was already gone, but another part would not give in to such a strange notion as a world without my child. With my hands I tried to stanch the flow of blood, to keep what little life remained in her. Yet her blood spilled over my useless fingers and down the front of my dress, onto my lap. I glanced up at the sky. This time the plane continued on, receding to a small gray speck in the vast blue. I have never hated anything as I have hated that pilot. All of the other Germans I was to shoot over the course of the war were that one pilot, killing him over and over again.

For a long time, I remember sitting in the road, holding Masha’s lifeless body, rocking her, sobbing. When the others tried to tell me that we needed to get going, that we had to move on before more planes came, I yelled at them, howled like a madwoman. When they tried to take her from me, I swore and snarled at them. I wouldn’t give her up. I was out of my mind, you see, crazy with grief, and too with the already growing sense of guilt I felt. For having left her to get our things from the wagon. Finally, Vidayev’s wife touched my shoulder. “Tat’yana,” she said softly, “we must bury your little one.” Something about her look calmed me, convinced me of the rightness of her words. After a while, I gave in and surrendered my baby to her. I watched as Vidayev and the farmer used a charred shovel from the wagon to scratch out a shallow grave there in the beet field. We had no shroud, nothing to wrap her in, had to lay her directly on the black dirt of the hole. However, the woman placed an embroidered handkerchief over Masha’s face. Before they began to cover her with dirt, I said, “Wait.” I wanted a lock of her hair, something to keep with me. The farmer gave me a pocketknife and I hacked off a piece of her hair. I put it in the small leather case I’d had in my pocket, which, along with a few other personal effects, was all that I could say was mine in the world. Then I remembered her doll and ran and got it from where it lay in the road. It too was covered with blood, but I placed it beside her in the grave so she wouldn’t be lonely.

And just like that, we moved on, walking on foot. I kept glancing
back, watching the newly turned spot of earth, trying to force myself to remember where her grave was, so that in some unimaginable future, an unimaginable Tat’yana Levchenko might return to it, kneel beside her grave, say a prayer for her. But the vast, indistinguishable landscape of the steppes soon swallowed the spot.

Over the next several days as we plodded along, I felt that change in me, a physical sensation, that of my heart or soul or whatever you want to call it, shrivel up and turn to stone inside my chest. A stone as hard as any gem, and just as dazzling. I felt my blood become thick with hatred, with a bloodlust for revenge on those German bastards.

I don’t remember much of the next few days. I know only that I hadn’t changed my dress, which was caked with her blood, hadn’t washed the blood from my hands. It was as if I wanted even that gruesome a reminder of her to hold on to. After several days, we came at last to a small village not far from Kharkov. Somewhere during that time, I’d come to a decision. I decided I would enlist and fight those monsters. Vidayev’s wife tried to talk me out of it, to argue that I had a husband to live for now, that he would need me. But I was adamant. Nothing less than the blood of Germans would appease my anger. So I said good-bye to them and went to the recruiting station in an empty factory and signed up to fight.

The next day I boarded a train, a cattle car that still smelled of manure, and with thousands of fellow recruits we headed back east to meet the invaders. One of the political commissars came into our cattle car to explain how it was our job to slow the advance of the southern flank of the German army, to give the Soviet forces time to prepare defenses for Odessa and the Crimea, where, he said, the fascists would be routed and driven from our soil. He told us that ours was a glorious mission in the defense of the Motherland, that we should be grateful that we could offer up our lives for our country. Nearby, I overheard a man say sneeringly, “The fucking German Panzers will tear us to pieces.” He was a thin fellow with the blackened hands and stained features of a collier. Somehow what he’d said must have gotten back to the commissar—there were spies and informants everywhere. At the next stop, the man was dragged from the train, brought kicking and plead
ing out into a field of rye. It was a warm day and the sun beat down relentlessly. The commissar held the man by the hair and yelled that this was how traitors were dealt with. Whereupon he pulled out his pistol and shot the man in the side of the head. A stream of bright red blood gushed out, staining the rye surrounding him. They left his body lying there, and we moved on. I wondered about the man’s family, if they would be notified of his death and the manner of it.

The train paused at several junction stops long enough for more recruits to board and for us to be fed a watery potato soup and a brick-like piece of bread. After the first time, though, there were no more hot meals; we were given foul-tasting tins of
tushonka
and sprat fish and cold tea. At one stop we were issued military gear and uniforms. We had to change right in the crowded, weaving cattle cars. The half dozen of us women were shy at taking off our clothes in front of the men. A couple of them whistled or said something as we undressed. But a captain told the offenders to shut up, that he had a sister who had joined to fight, that we were all Soviet soldiers, not men or women anymore.

One of the political officers, a lean man with a shaggy mustache like the tail of a dog, instructed us on the proper use of rifles. He opened the doors, and as we rumbled along toward the battlefront, had us shoot out into the fields, at fence posts and haystacks and road signs. Most were farmers or factory workers with no experience shooting a rifle. They shot nervously, jerking the gun.

“Can any of you sons of whores shoot straight?” the political officer cried.