We’d been passing Kostia’s flask of vodka back and forth as he talked. I took another swallow, gazing at the row of graves. Lyonya’s was still heaped up, the earth black and tumbled, but it would soon be just another mound of drying earth topped by a forlorn fading star. I didn’t have any flowers, so I took a heel of bread from my canvas gas-mask bag and crumbled it over the earth so the Sevastopol sparrows would circle and sing here. For my golden front-line husband.
Kostia poured a stream of vodka over the grave. “Rest in peace, brother.”
I tried to reply, but my throat closed on the words. We fell into silence then, sitting in the cooling afternoon for more than an hour, passing the vodka again. The sparrows swooped down, fluttered, swooped away. Such a beautiful day.
“I heard you’re a senior sergeant now,” I said at last. Kostia nodded. “The platoon’s yours.”
He shook his head. “We need you, Mila.”
I held up my hand. Still trembling. He put the flask into it and I drank, feeling the scorch down my throat and into my stomach. “You don’t need me. You need someone who can shoot.”
“We need you. Mila—”
“Stop.” I gave him a sudden furious shove; he went off the stump but came to his feet at once, standing with his hands open and his eyes black and steady.
“You’re the best.” His voice was implacable as granite. “The Hitlerites fear you. The platoon believes in you. We need you back.”
“I can’t shoot,” I shouted, erupting to my feet and shoving him again. He braced, taking it. I hit him this time, a closed fist to his sternum, and he took that, too. “All I want is to kill them, and I can’t shoot—”
“You have to,” he said. “We need you.”
I drained another long swallow from the flask and hurled it at his feet. “It’s not that I’m afraid.” My tongue fumbled the words, and I realized how hard the vodka had hit my empty, burning stomach.
“I didn’t say you were.” Kostia took a step closer. I slammed my fists into his chest again; he was my height; I didn’t have to reach up. “Mila—”
My eyes were swimming. I staggered when I raised my hands again, looking down at the grave. “I was the one with the dangerous job. It was supposed to be me.”
“It wasn’t,” my partner said simply.
“I’m going to get you all killed,” I whispered.
“Then we die like Lyonya.” I saw the tears in Kostia’s black eyes then. “We die like soldiers.”
“In agony, with iron splinters in our lungs?” My voice slurred. I was so drunk. Why didn’t the vodka ease the pain?
“We die brave. Like him.” Kostia reached out and took my shoulders, as much to steady himself as me. He could put it away like a Siberian, but he was drunk, too. “And you and me, Mila? We die shooting.”
He pulled me into his chest as the sobs exploded out of us both. He wept into my neck and I wept into his, the two of us grappled together swaying over Lyonya’s grave. I don’t know how long it took that explosion of grief to tear itself free, only that we ended up back on the tree stump, leaning against each other, faces salt-streaked and chests still heaving, gulping the last of the vodka and watching twilight fall. In the darkness we kept on sitting in a sniper’s silence, motionless as death. Which still hovered at my shoulder, breathing black and silent.
Kostia looked at me. “Comrade Senior Sergeant?” he asked formally.
I took a long breath and held up my hand. I hadn’t slept in a week; my eyes were swollen to slits; I had a belly full of vodka, a heart full of hatred, and a soul full of grief—but my hand was steady as a rock.