“Tomorrow night,” I told my partner. And I was back.
Chapter 22
My memoir, the official version: Thanks to the valiant spirit of the Red Army and the leadership of our brave officers, none of us believed Sevastopol would fall.
My memoir, the unofficial version: I remember the exact moment I knew Sevastopol was doomed.
A QUIET MARCH, April, May, when I hunted every night in no-man’s-land and slept like the dead through the day . . . and then the sudden savage Nazi attack that claimed the Kerch Peninsula in mid-May; the massive air strikes afterward on the main naval base of the Black Sea Fleet, turning the city into a sea of fire and smoke—and then the main assault itself, long-awaited, long-dreaded, in the first week of June.
“Psychological attack,” Kostia said as we watched the massive wave of German infantry advancing on the front line of our defenders. He was thinking, I knew, of the Romanians advancing in a Napoleonic column under their shrieking priest, looking to overwhelm us with fear as much as numbers.
I stared through my binoculars over the lip of the sniper trench where the two of us lay on our bellies, taking in the tanks sliding forward like centipedes, German riflemen with Mausers, submachine gunners with MP 40s, all half hidden by coils of black smoke from the dawn artillery bombardment. “New arrivals,” I said, noting well-fed bodies in those Nazi uniforms, not yet whittled down by Russian cold and Russian resistance. “Imperial Germans. Probably transferred from Donetsk, the 17th Army.” I tossed the binoculars, set my rifle into my shoulder, and saw an officer marching at the side of his troops, striding right into my sights. I fired, the rifle kicked, and down he went. “This batch won’t be any luckier than the first two assaults last year.”
I believed that. I was still in the grip of the agonized fury that had taken me in its jaws after Lyonya; I’d spent three months killing Hitlerites six nights a week and spending the seventh trying to write letters to Slavka, folding dried flowers into torn end pages of my dissertation. The third assault began, and I joined the firing with my platoon, and it didn’t occur to me that we would lose.
But every day the hammer fell: five-hour mortar attacks, tanks and infantry columns pushing along the road that led toward the Mekenzi Hills railway station. Every day the Nazis nibbled at our defenses like the rats they were, pushing centimeter by centimeter toward the northern side of the main bay. Ten days, maybe eleven of continuous fighting, and I was staggering along a path in the Martynov gully, wondering where I could get a cold meal and an hour’s sleep, when I nearly collided with a line of boys struggling along under the exhortations of the regimental Young Communist League organizer. “Comrade Senior Sergeant Pavlichenko,” he hailed me. “Look lively, boys! Our very own girl sniper, a true hero of the motherland. How many is it now, Lyudmila Mikhailovna?”
“I don’t know,” I said wearily. Three hundred? Who cared?
“The Hitlerites fear the shadow of her rifle,” the organizer told his boys, who just stared at me in exhaustion, white-eyed and blank-faced. They looked so young—surely some weren’t any more than fourteen. I snapped off a salute, tried to smile, and the organizer’s cheer suddenly broke. He put a hand to his mouth to hide its tremble, and I drew him aside.
“How bad in your sector?” I asked, low-voiced.
“The Fritzes have the entire Kamyshly gully,” he muttered. “The railway station, Verkhny Chorgun, Nizhny Chorgun, Kamary . . . battles are raging around the Fraternal Cemetery.”
My gut twisted. Lyonya’s grave—it might be vandalized by Germans now, his red star splintered.
The Young Communist League organizer went on in a monotone. “This is all that’s left of my lads—” waving a hand at the swaying, gray-faced line of boys. “I lost two-thirds of my entire league in nine days. We’ve no more ammunition coming in. Foodstuffs and water, well . . .”
We will lose, I realized then, gazing at those doomed boys in their deathly exhaustion, swaying under the scorching hot sun. They looked barely older than my Slavka, who in his last letter had told me he got an Excellent for Russian dictation and a Good for mental arithmetic; that he missed me and that he was making a book of all my plant samples—he was the best in his Young Pioneers troop at biology, Mamochka . . .