Beautiful Assassin (7 page)

“Is good, no?”

She looked over and met my gaze, then turned away, embarrassed.

I went back to my journal. Each day I wrote something in it: random thoughts, observations, lines of a poem I never quite seemed to finish. It also served as my kill log, where I kept the official record of the men I dispatched as a sniper. Ironic, I knew, that between the same covers I both wrote poetry and recorded the number of Germans I shot. Creation and destruction in one book. My journal, though, was one of the few places that was private, a thing I didn’t have to share with anyone else. And it was the one part of my old life that I hadn’t lost, the one part of me that had remained constant. I sometimes felt that privacy was the worst casualty of war. I don’t mean by this personal modesty. The year of fighting had nearly purged me of that. Although it had been awkward at first, I’d long since ceased to worry about bathing or changing clothes or attending to personal needs in front of a company of mostly men. And they hardly batted an eye at seeing a woman pull her trousers down, squat, and relieve herself. The war had made modesty a luxury no one could afford. No, for me at least, it had to do with the absence of any privacy of mind, the time and silence to be alone with one’s thoughts, without being interrupted or pestered, without having to listen to a hundred other people jabbering or laughing, eating or farting, or snoring in their sleep. I missed the quiet evenings alone with a book, doing research in the musty-smelling stacks of the university library, sitting by myself along the river and working on a poem, allowing one line to open up an entire sonnet I hadn’t even known dwelled within me.

“And what about the sergeant?” the Wild Boar asked, as if he could read my thoughts and wished to disrupt them on purpose. “Would she care for a piece of my sausage?”

I looked up from my journal. “No,” I said flatly, then returned to my writing.

Despite already having eaten the watery gruel, the stale hunk of black bread, and the meager piece of dried meat or salted fish we all were given for our evening meal, I was still hungry. I was always hungry, as were we all, having been reduced to half rations since the Germans had tightened the noose around the city. All that is, except for the COs and commissars and the Party’s blue hats—those feared political officers—and those like the Wild Boar who knew how to take care of themselves. With the revolution, we were all supposed to be equal. But the war only proved what we all knew already—that a select few got plenty while the rest got the scraps. It was just like before the revolution, only now we called it communism.

Though my stomach growled from hunger, I wasn’t about to accept food from the Wild Boar. I didn’t like him, found him repulsive. The Wild Boar was old school, a battle-hardened career soldier who’d been in the czar’s army and didn’t think they should let women fight. He thought we “
shlyukhi
”—cunts—as I’d heard him refer to us, just got in the way and were bad for morale. To him, a woman belonged in the kitchen or the bedroom, not the battlefield.

Early in the war, there had been many such men, men who didn’t accept the notion of having women on the front lines. They felt defending the Motherland, killing Germans, was a man’s job. I could still recall my experience at the recruiting station where I’d gone to enlist, in a small village west of Kharkov. My face haggard and hair a mess, my dress still covered in blood. I stopped by a farmer’s water trough and asked if I could clean up. The woman there kindly gave me a bar of soap and some rags. I cleaned up, washed my face, tried to look presentable. From a wild cherry tree beside the road, I picked a couple of cherries, crushed them between my fingers, and rubbed their juice into my cheeks. I didn’t want to give the appearance of being pale and weak. I wanted to show them I was healthy, that I was strong and capable of fighting.

The country was in utter chaos, with thousands fleeing eastward before the fascists and their “lightning war” machine. There were long
lines at the recruiting office, which was set up in an abandoned factory. I noticed one or two other women, not many. They’d just begun the call-up for women to fight, the very fact suggesting just how desperate the situation had become. A couple of men whistled at me, and they spoke in those leering undertones that men do in the presence of a woman they find desirable. I hardly felt desirable. I hardly felt like a woman even. More simply a vessel filled with anger, with hatred and the compulsion to do violence, so filled with it I thought I would burst. When I finally reached the front of the line, there were two officers seated behind a table. They looked me up and down, traded smiles.

“Yes?” one of them said. He was a skinny man with a red face scarred by smallpox. He used a matchbook to pick at his teeth.

“I wish to sign up to fight,” I explained.

“To fight?” he said with a laugh.

“Yes. For a combat unit.”

“What do you think war is, pretty girl? A dance?” He and the other officer chuckled at this.

“I want to fight,” I repeated.

“We have openings for nurses. If you want to be a nurse, I can get you in.”

“I am trained as a marksman.”

“Marksman!” he said in a mocking tone.

From my pocket I took out the certificate I’d received from the Osoviakhim, the paramilitary shooting club that my father had had me join back in Kiev when I was a girl. I had qualified as a marksman with a Mosin-Nagant rifle. At one hundred yards without a scope, I could put five shots within a five-centimeter pattern. I had won competitions throughout the Ukraine. I was a quite a good marksman.

“See,” I said, presenting the certificate to him.

He gave it a cursory inspection and tossed it back across the table at me. “I told you, we need nurses.”

“But you see there, I am good with a rifle.”

“Do you think shooting Germans is like shooting targets, pretty girl?” he huffed at me. “Come here,” he instructed, waving me to approach him. I hesitated, then leaned down toward him. “Closer,” he
said. “I won’t bite.” I leaned still closer. When I was close enough that I could smell the leeks on his breath, he aimed his finger at my face and went
bang
loudly enough that it startled me. I jumped backward, almost into the man behind me. Both officers laughed again, as did a few of the others standing in line. I felt like a fool, felt my face grow hot, the familiar burning sensation beginning again at the corners of my eyes, as it had for so many days past. But I was not about to let the idiot get the better of me. So I squinted hard, tightening the flesh around my eyes. I think it was then that the change in me really began, when I became something other than just another victim of the Nazis. You see, our Motherland had rapidly become a nation of grieving mothers, so much grief and mourning and heartache that it hung in the air, palpable as smoke, choking the lungs.

“I want to enlist in a fighting unit,” I said firmly, struggling to control my voice.

“Don’t be silly. Consider becoming a nurse.”

“I don’t
want
to be a nurse. I want to shoot Germans.”

“Go home. Killing’s a man’s job,” the red-faced officer exclaimed. Glancing past me he said, “Next.”

But I didn’t budge. I stood there, staring down at him. At that moment, I hated the red-faced officer almost as much as I did the Germans.

“You’re right,” I said, and then, despite my best efforts, I felt sudden hot tears pushing out of the corners of my eyes. But they were tears of vengeance, of a mother’s love, fierce and irrepressible, tears that could singe anything they touched. Staring down at the officer I pointed a finger at him, all of my sadness turning to rage, boiling up in my breast. “Yes. Killing
is
a man’s job,” I cried. From the pocket of my dress I got out the leather case in which I had all of my worldly possessions. I removed the picture of my daughter and Kolya, my husband, and laid it on the table before them. “That’s my little girl,” I said, pointing at Masha. “I want to kill those Germans for her. If I have to, I will join the partisans and fight with them. But I
will
fight. Do you understand me? One way or another, I
will
fight.”

I had spoken loud enough that those behind me heard what I’d said.
A few started to grumble. One voice said, “Let her fight.” I turned and looked at the men behind me. Then another called out, “Yeah, give her a chance.” And another: “We need every fighter we can get.”

Finally, sensing the tide turning against him, the red-faced officer relented. “Fill this out and come back tomorrow,” he said, thrusting a form at me. “Just remember, when you are getting your pretty ass shot at, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

In the Red Army we women had to prove ourselves, not once but over and over. If a man was afraid, if he cried or recoiled from the horrors of war, it was viewed as a momentary failing, something he could overcome with willpower or determination, or experience, or by a gun placed to the back of his head. But such a thing from a woman only proved what they already knew, that she was by nature weak, not cut out for war, for killing. We women had to push those natural emotions that all soldiers have deep down inside us. We had to deny not only our womanhood but also our common humanity. We had to be cold and remorseless. We couldn’t cry, couldn’t show fear or sympathy or tenderness. We had to become as cold and heartless as those Germans we fought against.

Only when I’d proved that I could kill as well as any man did my comrades begin to accept me. Still, there were many like the Wild Boar, who treated the women soldiers with contempt. He would give us menial jobs like digging the latrine or carrying the pails of soup to the front lines, or stripping the German dead of ammo and rations. The Wild Boar scorned our fighting ability, questioned our courage under fire. He cracked jokes about us and made condescending remarks. He called us
shlyukhi
. Except the pretty ones. With them he was friendly. Too friendly. When I first arrived in his unit, I’d heard the stories about him and was warned to keep my distance. Despite the lectures by the political commissars and the NKVD officers warning against fraternization between the sexes, how such things could cause problems and would therefore be dealt with harshly, that still didn’t stop some from having affairs. In the loneliness of war, relationships inevitably formed between men and women. You could not stop it with government decrees. But there were some men like the Wild Boar who used their influence to pressure or lure women into doing their bidding. He would
especially befriend the new recruits, who arrived weekly to replace those that had been killed, with small favors—a piece of cheese, a cup of vodka, a pair of silk stockings many liked to keep in their pockets to remind them what silk felt like against their skin. A few of the women in my unit would respond to his advances, out of fear of how hard he could make things for them or from simple hunger, or even out of the gnawing loneliness the war had brought into our lives, a loneliness that made even the Wild Boar’s company seem appealing.

When I’d first arrived with the Second Company, he used to come sniffing around me, too. He would tell me how pretty I was, offering me things, chocolates and tins of sardines, bragging how he could get anything I wanted,
anything
at all. It didn’t matter to him that I was married. When I told him, he laughed. He said we were at war and could die at any moment. I’d managed to keep him at bay, sometimes using cleverness, other times with not-so-veiled threats of going to Captain Petrenko, or even to the NKVD officer, Major Roskov. Then when my work as a sniper during the siege of Odessa got me promoted to sergeant and I was, at least technically, his equal in rank, he left me alone. Though, of course, I knew he was jealous of me. He didn’t like the fact that I was educated, that I spent my free time writing in my journal, that I read. That I wasn’t intimidated by him. And he certainly didn’t like all the attention I’d gotten of late. “What courage does it take to sit in a little hole and kill at three hundred meters?” I’d overheard him say once to another soldier. Lately, I had begun to notice how the Wild Boar had become friendly with Zoya, talking with her, offering her food and small treats. She was young and naïve, and perhaps he thought he could take advantage of her some night out behind the latrines. I had cautioned her about him.

The Wild Boar wasn’t a man to have his authority questioned. He got up and came over toward me. He squatted on his haunches and waved the thick sausage in front of my nose tauntingly. To be honest, its smoky flavor set my mouth watering. When one is hungry, one will do almost anything for food.

“Go ahead, Sergeant,” he said. “Think of it as a reward for getting that kraut.”

“I am not hungry,” I lied, this time without bothering to look up.

“It is a simple compliment I am paying you, Comrade Levchenko. Surely such bravery as yours deserves recognition,” he said, his tone edged with sarcasm.

“I
said
‘I’m not hungry.’”

“I am only being generous.”

“I know all about your generosity, Gasdanov.”

At this he snorted. “And what the hell does
that
mean?”

“I think you know what it means.”

“What is it with you, Levchenko?” he said, dropping any pretense of being cordial. “Has all the big talk gone to your pretty little head?”

“I just don’t want your sausage.”

“Is my meat not good enough for the likes of you?” he replied, dangling the sausage obscenely between his thick legs. Smiling, he glanced over his shoulder at Drubich and the others, to see if they thought his joke funny. Drubich, his lapdog, sniggered nervously, but the others were reluctant to openly choose sides. Both of us were, after all, sergeants. The Wild Boar, a decorated veteran who’d fought in the Winter War against Finland in ’39, was known as someone you crossed at your own peril; and while I was a woman and only newly promoted, they’d seen the way the higher-ups had treated me with deference. And there was the official-looking document that Captain Petrenko had nailed to a beam in the bunker several weeks earlier: