Beautiful Assassin (5 page)

Time was running out for me. I felt I had to come up with a plan quickly, before I became a sitting duck. Finally, I decided what I must do. I’d tempt him into shooting again and then pretend that he’d hit me and fall from the tree. This strategy, I knew, had only a slim chance for success, but it was better than waiting to be killed. I worked things out, trying to design my “death” so that it would look real. When I fell I wanted to make sure I was facing in the direction of the German’s position, and that my rifle landed within reach. Cautiously, I removed the scope, not wanting it to get damaged, and put it in my rucksack, hanging over my shoulder. I also had to make sure to avoid hitting any branches on the way down. That might spin me out of control and I could very well break my neck. But at the same time my fall had to appear natural to be convincing—that I’d been hit and killed.

I took off my forage cap and placed it on the end of my bayonet and extended it ever so slowly just a little ways beyond the trunk, just enough so as to lure the German into thinking it was still sitting atop my head. He didn’t disappoint me. In a moment the bullet’s impact flung my cap backward into the leaves. As if hit, I released my grip on the tree and let myself go, plunging earthward.

I slammed into the ground, the back of my head striking painfully against something hard. Luckily, my right side took the brunt of the fall, so that it was diffused along the entirety of my body. Still, the impact knocked the wind out of me, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe because of a stabbing pain in my side. I thought perhaps I’d broken some ribs. I could also feel a hot wetness inching down along my scalp behind my right ear. I didn’t think that I’d been hit, but I couldn’t be sure. Fortunately for me, the German, who was down below in the valley, didn’t have a clear shot of where I now lay on the ground; otherwise, he’d have
put another round in me just to be certain. If the tables had been turned I’d have done nothing less. I figured he’d probably come closer to make certain. So I had to lie perfectly still and pretend I was dead. That was my only chance.

I tried to gain control of my breathing, but each breath sent a new wave of pain knifing through me. I hoped that my act was convincing. From somewhere behind me, I could hear Zoya calling. She couldn’t see me where I lay, not without leaving the safety of the foxhole and exposing herself.

“Tat’yana! Tat’yana, are you all right?” When I didn’t answer, Zoya called again. “I’m coming for you.”

“Don’t!” I hissed through clenched teeth.

I would wait until dark and then crawl back to safety. However, the pain in my side was fierce, and coupled with an intense throbbing that commenced at the back of my skull, I felt my head reeling. I saw a flickering shadow pass overhead, crossing between myself and the sunlight. I thought of that poem by the American poet Dickinson that one of my teachers back in school, a Madame Rudneva, had had me recite in English:
With blue—uncertain stumbling buzz—between the light—and me
. I thought at first it was a plane or a bird, but then I realized I was losing consciousness. I shivered, feeling cold creep suddenly over my limbs, as if I were slipping into frigid water. My eyesight began to fail. After a while, darkness stole over me completely. In that darkness I remember calling out Masha’s name.

When I came to—minutes? hours? later—I felt a burning thirst. My tongue was swollen and dry in my mouth, like an old piece of leather. It hurt to swallow. After a time, I chanced opening my eyes a crack, the light which poured in scalding my brain. Was I in the land of the dead? I wondered. When my eyes had had a chance to adjust, the first thing I saw was an old, weathered gravestone. It was that of a woman—Elyzaveta Fedutenko. Next to hers was another headstone, what I assumed was her husband, and next to that, two others, their children, I guessed from the dates of their births. They had all died in the same year: 1932.
Doubtless they’d perished in the Holodomor, the great famine that had swept across the Ukraine when I was a girl.

As I lay there looking at the stone, I thought again of my own child, my Masha. Perhaps because my head was still dazed, for a moment her memory came as a thing of undiluted joy. I pictured her in the park near the Dnieper, not far from where we’d lived. I saw her running toward me, her hair, blond and fine like Kolya’s, bouncing as she ran, calling out to me, “Mama, Mama.” As I lay there, I felt the sun’s warmth waning, saw that its angle had changed. It had slid off toward the western horizon, beyond the sea. From the lengthening shadow of the nearby gravestone, I guessed it to be six, maybe seven o’clock. If only I could make it a little while longer. More time passed. Who could say how much? When you are lying half dead, waiting for your executioner to come, time has little meaning.

But as twilight settled in over the cemetery, out of the corner of my eye I caught the faintest movement toward the northeast. A figure in khaki detached itself from the woods and approached stealthily over the uneven terrain, moving up the hill through the now sparse orchard. Moving toward me. I could make him out only from his chest up. He carried a rifle and moved quickly but cautiously in a crouch. I wondered what to do. Where Zoya waited, she might not see him approach from this angle. I remained still until the German dipped momentarily out of sight, then I grabbed my rifle and rolled behind the headstone of Elyzaveta Fedutenko. I flicked off the safety and fixed my sights on the general area where I’d last seen the kraut. It was barely a hundred meters, so I wouldn’t need the scope.

I didn’t spot him for a while and panic seized my chest. He was a clever one. What if he were trying to outflank me, come around from the side? But just at that moment, I saw the top of his head bobbing as he approached from the northeast. He was flitting from tree to tree, moving cautiously. He waited at the last tree, surveying the cemetery. From this vantage point, he still couldn’t quite see the ground beneath the tree from which I’d fallen. He paused there for a moment, and I found myself doing that odd thing I sometimes did—entering my enemy’s thoughts, trying to imagine what he would be thinking.
The Rus
sian whore thought she was so clever!
The Germans were a prideful lot, I’d come to understand. They did not like to be bested, and certainly not by a mere woman. It brought out in them a boyish bravado, a recklessness that made them vulnerable. If I had been a male sniper he’d have been satisfied, I’m quite sure, to leave things as they were, simply to chalk me up in his kill log and call it a day, go back to his German lines and celebrate with some warm food. But my being a woman compelled him to want to stand over my dead body, to take something that was mine. My cap, my Red Banner medal, my leather case containing my personal effects, the letter from Kolya, the lock of hair of Masha’s. Something to possess, to show his mates.

So this led the German to make his own foolish mistake. Without seeing my body, he took several quick steps into the cemetery, out into the open. When he could finally view the ground beneath the tree and he didn’t see me, he froze. Nervously, he scanned the area, his gun swung up to his shoulder, his knees bent in a position to fire. It took him only a moment to understand the full measure of his error, but when he did, he whirled and started to run back toward cover. He and I shared one thought: he was a dead man. Before he’d taken three steps, I had him in my sights. Quickly but calmly, I aimed the rifle and kissed the trigger. As always when a bullet strikes true, I could feel it before I saw its effects, could feel it in my right shoulder and in my trigger finger, in my bowels, in some part of my brain, too. I could usually tell as soon as I fired, the sweet certainty of putting a bullet exactly where I’d meant to. The impact spun the German halfway around. He staggered sideways and dropped to one knee. His rifle had fallen to the ground before him, and he struggled to get to it. Even now he was a soldier, and I felt a grudging admiration for that, despite the hatred I bore him. Without thinking, I worked the bolt and chambered another round. I was prepared to put a second bullet into him, but he suddenly collapsed onto his face and lay still. As our ammo was becoming scarce, we Soviets knew to be frugal. This one was dead. Then I told myself what I always did after killing a German:
For you, Masha
.
For you, my love.

I got up and trotted to where he lay, keeping my rifle trained on his prone figure, my head low so as not to be exposed to the enemy lines
below. Up close I nudged him with my boot, ready to shoot him again if he showed any sign of life. He didn’t move, so I rolled him over. The bullet had entered through his left shoulder blade and exited the middle of his chest, tearing away his NCO’s breast eagle and leaving a jagged, bloody hole in his tunic. A dark, wet stain had spread out over the front of his uniform. His eyes were closed, his lips slightly parted and forming what looked like a vague smile. Up close, I saw that my adversary was younger than I by a few years, perhaps only twenty-one. Good-looking in that frugal, Aryan sort of way, with angular features, straight white teeth, close-cropped, light brown hair. At his neck he wore the Iron Cross, which he’d no doubt won for his marksmanship. I could just imagine this King of Death in some beer hall back in Berlin or Munich bragging to all the pretty fräuleins about how he’d got the better of some Red whore who was supposed to be such a deadly sniper. And yet, lying there, he didn’t look much like a king now. Merely a cocky boy who needed to be taught some manners.
Am I your whore now
? I thought with a prideful anger. What surprised me about war wasn’t the fact that killing had become so easy. No. It was that one grows to actually enjoy it, to savor it, as you would any other hard-earned skill. Writing poetry or winning a footrace.

I knelt and lay my weapon down and began riffling through his clothes. I found some letters, one or two pictures, which I tossed aside. I didn’t want to know his name, his past, anything about him. He was just a cipher to me:
288
. Nothing more than that. Another number to chalk up in my kill log. In one pocket I came upon a half-eaten piece of chocolate, his teeth marks scalloping the edges. Zoya loved chocolate, so I stuffed it in my tunic as a gift to her. Next, I stripped him of his ammo pouches and his bayonet. A comrade of mine named Kolyshkin, a radioman, liked to collect German souvenirs, so I leaned down to take the Iron Cross from about his throat. The pin was fastened tight, and I struggled getting it free. That’s when an odd thing happened—the dead man opened his eyes and stared at me.

Startled, I was forced backward onto my heels. I grasped his bayonet and brought it toward his throat, prepared to finish him off. But for some reason I paused, curiously watching him. He didn’t move, just
stared up at me. It had been a definite kill shot and by rights he should have been dead. And yet he wasn’t. His breathing was shallow and labored, a sucking noise rattling from lungs slowly drowning in their own blood. A fine red froth began to gather at the corners of his mouth. He lay there looking up at me, a peculiar expression in his light-blue eyes. It wasn’t hatred or fear or even desperation. He seemed well beyond such earthly concerns. His eyes were almost calm, and there was in them a kind of resigned understanding, the sort that sometimes—though not always—comes to one about to die in battle.

I wondered what to do. This had never happened to me before. Should I just turn and leave him there to die, as I knew he would shortly? Or should I use his bayonet to give him the coup de grâce? Even a German should not die such a death, I felt. As I made a move with the knife, though, he reached out and grasped my wrist. For a moment I thought he intended to fight me. So I switched the bayonet to my other hand, was about to plunge it into his throat, but I realized he had no fight left in him. The color had already left his face, and while I thought to pull away, I didn’t. For some reason, I permitted his hand to remain locked on my wrist. I don’t know why. To this day, I don’t know why. Perhaps I was just too startled to do otherwise. His lips came together, and he appeared to be struggling to say something.

“What?” I asked, my tone impatient. I wanted him to get on with this business of dying. I was hungry and tired, my body aching from the fall, and I wanted only to get back to my own lines. To warm food and the comforting banter of my comrades around me, and to the oblivion of sleep.

He tried again, but nothing came out save for that rattling sound in his chest. So I leaned down and placed my ear near his mouth. His breath had the metallic odor of blood on it, the stink of the grave.

This time he said something. It sounded like a name: “Senta.”

“What?” I asked.

He said it again, staring up at me, his eyes pleading. “Senta.”

I knew only a few German expressions, so I decided to try the little English I possessed. “Your wife?” I asked.

But I could see the humanness rapidly ebbing from his eyes, the
pupils seeming to relax, to widen, as if to allow his soul room to exit through them. He repeated the word a third time, staring up at me imploringly. “Senta.”

“What do you want?” I cried.

He stared at me silently. I brought the bayonet to his throat, unsure whether it was to put him out of his misery or to end my own discomfort. But his eyes glazed over and his end on this earth came.

Only then did I realize that his hand was still locked on my wrist. I had to pry his fingers off. Freed of them, I could see their imprint still in my flesh. I stood then, staring down at my dead foe. I didn’t exactly feel remorse, but something closer to anger, a sudden, inexplicable anger.
Don’t blame me,
I felt like saying to him.
You brought this on yourself.
But he merely continued to stare up at me with his dead, accusatory eyes, like the stony eyes of a statue.

It was getting dark, and I didn’t want to be mistakenly shot by my own sentries, so I collected his rifle and the other spoils of the victor, and trotted quickly back toward where Zoya was waiting.

“It’s me,” I called as I approached.