Beautiful Assassin (6 page)

“Mother of Jesus,” Zoya replied, crossing herself. She threw her arms around me and hugged so hard my bruised ribs hurt.

“Easy,” I said.

“What is it?”

“I injured my side when I fell.”

“For a while there I thought you…”

“That’s what he thought too,” I said with a nod of my head back toward where the German lay.

“Did you get him?”

By way of answer I handed her the Mauser.

“Wait till they hear back at camp!” she exclaimed. “You killed the King of Death, Tat’yana! You got him.”

“Yes,” I replied. “I got him.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes, little mother, I’m fine.”

As we headed back to our lines, though, something didn’t sit right with me. Though I should have been exalted and proud of what I’d
pulled off, that I was still alive, I couldn’t get the image of the German out of my mind. The way he’d stared at me, how he’d insisted on telling me the name of his wife or sweetheart or whoever the hell it was. I could still feel the pressure of his hand locked on my wrist, a cruel reminder that even the Germans were human.

T
hat night when we got back to our lines, word quickly spread that I’d gotten the King of Death. The news buoyed our company’s spirits immeasurably, so little had we to celebrate over the past several months. Many of my comrades came by to offer their congratulations. Kolyshkin, the radioman, thanked me for the Iron Cross I’d brought him as a memento, and some looked at the German’s Mauser, touching the rifle reverently, as if it were a religious relic. Our company commander, Captain Petrenko, even broke out a bottle of vodka he’d been saving and toasted the two of us.

“To Levchenko and Kovshova,” he said. “For getting the son of a bitch.”

The troops whooped and hollered, and gave us a cheer, which embarrassed me a little but also made me feel quite proud. I bathed in the sweet afterglow of victory.

Zoya delighted in relating the story of how I’d managed to pull it off. The way I’d fallen from the tree, how I’d tricked the King of Death into believing he’d shot me, then lured him into my trap and sprung it when he got close enough.

“You should have seen the look on that Fritz’s face,” she said, mimicking the surprised expression of the German. A number of us were in an underground bunker, the ceiling of which was reinforced with heavy timbers and several meters of earth against the Germans’ bombing
runs. It was lit by several smoky lanterns that made the eyes burn. Zoya held the Mauser and pretended she was the King of Death sneaking up on me, taking exaggerated steps, like a character in a dumb show. She was quite the little actress. The other soldiers laughed heartily at her antics. Even I couldn’t help but smile, this despite the fact that the image of the German continued to sit uneasily in my thoughts. I kept seeing his blue eyes staring at me, his whispering that name to me. Of course, I hadn’t told Zoya about any of that. The fact that she hadn’t even seen my shot didn’t stop her in the least from embellishing the story. She was always bragging about my marksmanship, which made me a bit uncomfortable. Though I worked hard at being a good soldier and was proud of my accomplishments as a sniper, I didn’t want my comrades to feel jealous about the acclaim I’d received, especially from the higher-ups.

“The kraut comes walking toward the sergeant and realizes he’s fucked,” Zoya explained. She’d come to the unit a simple country girl, modest and plainspoken, in some ways as pious as a nun. But now, especially in front of the others, she swore like a fishwife. With me, though, she was still the same innocent girl. “And the German takes to his heels. The sergeant here”—she glanced over at me, winking—“puts a round in the kraut’s back from three hundred meters. Three hundred meters, without a scope!”

“She exaggerates,” I said. “Not a third that distance.”

“It’s the God’s truth,” pleaded Zoya, crossing herself.

And so it went.

Over the next several days, each time she would retell it, the difficulty of the shot as well as the distance grew. Nonetheless, the troops enjoyed hearing the story about the killing of the German, and so I thought, let her tell her story. They could use some good news for a change. There was a collective sigh of relief that the King of Death could kill no more. It was as if we’d won a great battle, instead of defeating just one stinking fascist. Several of the other snipers in the unit came up to me to offer their congratulations.

“Good shooting, Sergeant,” said a young man named Cheburko, who came from Donetsk after that city fell to the Germans. There was
among the other snipers and myself a friendly sort of competition. We joked and chided one another, playfully bragging among ourselves of our exploits, the difficulty of certain shots, the number of our kills. In the first months of the war, when I’d started to make a name for myself as a sniper, some of them, I must say, begrudged my success.
What does a woman know about sniping
, I knew they sneered behind my back. But as time went on, most grew at first to accept, then to respect, me. Among snipers there is a certain camaraderie, as among members of a football squad.

“Thank you, comrade,” I said. “Our team was successful.”

“What team?” scoffed Zoya. “I didn’t do a thing. It was all the sergeant’s doing. Such shooting you would not believe.”

Later, Yuri Sokur, the company medic, tended to the laceration along the back of my scalp.

“I guess congratulations are in order, Sergeant,” he said to me. Yuri was a small, wiry man with a pinched and contemplative face that reminded one of a very brooding monkey. Before the war, he’d been an undertaker, and with his knowledge of the body they had sent him for medical training. He was known for his poor bedside manner, perhaps owing to the fact that his previous patients weren’t able to complain very much. But for some reason he liked me, looked out for me like an older brother.

“You have yourself a nasty wound,” he told me as he cleaned and began stitching the cut.

“Just a scratch,” I replied.

“Scratch nothing. You could have a fractured skull for all I know.”

“Ouch,” I cried as he roughly drew the sutures through my scalp, as if to make his point.

“This big killer of Germans, afraid of a little needle?” he teased. “You need to take better care of yourself.”

“I did what I had to.”

“This makes, what, the fourth time you’ve been wounded?”

I shrugged.

The first two injuries I received were minor shrapnel wounds. The other, a bullet to my thigh, was more serious. It came during the evacu
ation of Odessa. My unit was pulling back toward the harbor. I was running for cover to a bombed-out building when a round ripped through my thigh. I would have bled to death if Zoya hadn’t tied a tourniquet around the wound and pulled me to safety.

“Even a cat has only nine lives, Sergeant,” Yuri warned me.

“That kraut needed to be stopped.”

“Does the captain know about your wound?”

I shook my head.

“If he got wind of it, he’d probably have you shipped off to a field hospital just to be on the safe side. They don’t want anything to happen to their star.”

He said this not out of jealousy or sarcasm, but out of concern.

“I’m just doing my duty,” I replied. “But you won’t tell him, will you?”

Yuri paused and came around so he could look me in the eye. “You have done the one thing that we’ve not been able to do to those kraut bastards.”

“And what is that?”

“You have pricked their Aryan pride. A woman has humbled the mighty Reich. And you’ve given us something to be proud of. So take care of yourself, Sergeant. We need you to stay alive.”

That night, we sat listening as the Germans made their usual bombing sorties over the city. Sometimes fifteen hundred a night, the steady drone of their planes like a horde of angry bees. Even from this distance the explosions made the ground quake. Occasionally one of their big thousand-kilo bombs would strike close enough that the dirt above us was shaken loose and fell upon our heads. And yet, we’d almost gotten used to it. Some soldiers occupied themselves cleaning their weapons, others with making tea or playing cards or darning socks. A few wrote letters or read mail by the frail lantern light.

A short distance away, a sergeant we called the Wild Boar and a few of his friends were passing around a bottle of vodka and talking about the Brits and Americans. They were debating when our supposed “allies” were going to open up a second front we’d all heard so much about.
They used the disparaging term
Amerikosy
for the Americans, whom we thought of as spoiled capitalists fearful of the Germans. Occasionally we’d see the things the Amerikosy sent us through lend-lease—canned meats and radios, tires and trucks, barbed wire and guns and ammo. Most of us just wanted to know when the capitalists were actually going to get their hands dirty, when they were going to fight and die as we Soviets had been doing by the tens of thousands since the war began the previous year.

“What need have we for those capitalist dogs?” boasted Drubich, a bony man with gray skin and the large, flat eyes of a carp. He was one of the Wild Boar’s cronies, a boot-licking sycophant. A cowardly man in battle, he liked to boast when the bullets weren’t flying. “To hell with those bastards.”

“I think we can use all the help we can get,” replied another soldier named Nurylbayev, a dark-complected man who spoke with a Kazakh accent.

“Fuck the Yanks. And the Brits too,” added Drubich. “By the time they get their britches on we’ll have the krauts running back to Berlin. Ain’t that right, Sergeant?” he said, looking over at the Wild Boar.

The sergeant only grunted. He was staring at Zoya, I noticed. She sat on the floor a few feet away, cleaning her machine gun.

“But they are supposed to be our allies,” said Nurylbayev. “Why are we doing all the fighting, while they get to sit on their asses?”

“The Brits are too busy drinking their fucking tea,” Drubich said, pretending he was sipping from a cup, his little finger raised in an attitude of high society. “And the Americans with their cricket.”

“The British play cricket, you ignorant bastard,” explained Nurylbayev. “In America they play baseball.”

“And how the hell would you know?”

“I had a cousin who moved to Boston. He wrote me about the Boston Red Stockings baseball team.”

“Red Stockings?” joked Drubich, sipping vodka from the bottle. “I didn’t know they had Communists over there.”

A few laughed at his joke.

“Gimme that,” grunted the Wild Boar, wrenching the bottle away
from Drubich while he was still drinking, so that some of it spilled down onto his pants. “It’s that goddamned Jew-loving Roosevelt. He only cares about the Jews anyway. As long as they’re making money from the war, they could give a shit about who’s winning. Hitler had that part right. Too bad he didn’t finish the fucking job before he took us on.”

As he said this, the Wild Boar glanced over at me. Of course, I thought. Like the rest, he’d heard the rumor that I was a Jew. Because I had the dark hair and eyes of a Gypsy. Most of all, I guess because I killed the krauts with such cold intensity, such that only a Jew could have for the Nazis.

“Still, the capitalists ought to be fighting with us,” replied Nurylbayev. “Not hiding like frightened children.”

“Fuck ’em,” added the Wild Boar. “Besides, when we get to Berlin, that’ll leave more pretty fräuleins for the rest of us.”

“That’s right,” said Drubich, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic.

I’d heard such talk before. How we were taking the brunt of the Wehrmacht while the Americans hung back, testing the waters of war with their big toe in North Africa. My own feeling was that we needed help, the sooner the better. We all knew that America was a big and wealthy country, one that could well afford to build bombers and tanks and battleships, a country that had plenty of young men to fight, soft and well-fed pampered boys who played baseball and watched moving picture shows and drove big automobiles. Yet in truth, all that I knew about America came from what I’d read—how it was a lazy and decadent land filled with lazy and decadent people. That and what a former teacher of mine, Madame Rudneva, had told me about it.

From his rucksack, the Wild Boar took out a large sausage, hacked off a piece with his knife, jabbed it with the point, and stuck it into his mouth. His real name was Ilya Gasdanov, but behind his back everyone called him the Wild Boar. Partly because he was thickset with a coarse beard that covered most of his face, and because he had small feral eyes and a broad, upturned nose that resembled the snout of a pig. But mostly we called him that because he acted like some wild beast—in
the way he ate, the way he fought, the way he treated the soldiers under his command, especially the way he treated the women soldiers. He was always in possession of such rare delicacies as sausage. He had connections, knew people in the black market who could get whatever you wanted, at least for the right price—real cigarettes, German schnapps, Black Sea caviar, even silk stockings, which he would dangle like bait in front of the dozen or so women in the company.

“Would you care for a piece, Corporal?” he said to Zoya. She had the Degtyaryov spread out in pieces on a section of canvas in front of her. With the pan off, she was loading it with copper-plated 7.62 mm cartridges, her movements nimble and precise, and I could just imagine how, before the war, her hands would have worked using a needle and thread to darn a sock or hem a dress. In front of her too lay a letter she’d gotten during mail call. I’d watched her as she read it, saw whatever news it brought from home fill her eyes with that familiar distant longing that such letters always bring. Even good news tended to make one sad, because you were away from those you loved. She glanced up at the Wild Boar, then across at me. I sat with my back to the earthen wall of the bunker, working on a poem in my journal, a small leather-bound notebook I kept in my pocket. I guess I still clung to the notion that I was a poet. Before the war I had dreamed of being the next Akhmatova. Now I wrote just to occupy my time, to keep my sanity.

“You are far too skinny, Corporal,” the Wild Boar said. “How are you going to kill those fucking krauts if you don’t keep up your strength?” With his knife, he hacked off another large chunk of sausage, speared it with the point, and shoved it into the hairy cavity that was his mouth. The weapon, a dagger he’d taken off a dead SS officer, was a delicate-looking thing with a fancy engraved handle, something that resembled an expensive letter opener. “Uhm,” he said, making an exaggerated show of the pleasure it gave him. His lips smacked as he chewed and his throat made the guttural sounds of a dog eating. He cut another piece and extended it on the end of the dagger toward Zoya. “Have some. Don’t be shy, little one.”

At first she shook her head.

“Go on. Take it. There’s plenty more where that came from.” He smiled at her. “Think of it as a reward for your good work today, comrade.”

“For getting that kraut,” chipped in Drubich.

Hesitantly, she reached out and accepted the proffered piece of meat.

“
Spasibo,
” she said as she tore hungrily into it.