If my Slavka had been here in Sebastopol, he might have been carrying a rifle, because the city was going to fall.
“Do you have a word of encouragement for my boys?” the organizer begged. “Just a word?”
I had no encouragement, no hope at all. But I looked at those boys, making myself remember their faces, and I said, “I swear I will fight for you all till the last drop of blood.”
“We swear—we so swear—we also swear.” The oaths rippled from them like a wave of hot, dying wind through grain. We saluted each other and passed by, on our way to defend our city as it entered its death throes. When I returned to my platoon, and we faced the next wave of Nazi soldiers advancing in their smug, well-fed ranks, the wave of hatred that came over me nearly turned me blind.
“Don’t aim for the first rank,” I ordered my men. “Aim for the second, aim for the gut—and don’t miss.” Rifles began to spit bullets, and Hitlerites in the second ranks began to scream, doubling over; the third rank tripped on them, and the first rank turned as they heard the shrieks; the column lost its unity. “Keep it up,” I shouted, sinking steel into one soft German belly after another—me, the woman who prided herself on clean, quick, merciful kills, shooting now to maim. “Break their focus. Make them hurt. Slow them down.”
They were going to take Sevastopol, but Mila Pavlichenko was going to make them pay for it.
It took nearly a month for the city to fall, and it took 300,000 German soldiers, over four hundred tanks, and more than nine hundred aircraft. But I wasn’t there to see it.
On what turned out to be my last day of battle on the Black Sea front, I trekked wearily down from the heights of a shattered church I’d been using to pick off German spotters. They were like crows, nesting in trees, on hilltops, in upper floors of buildings—I should have had Kostia at my back, but we were spread too thin now to double up, and I saw him come down from the building across the street, face streaked in grime. “Got nine,” he said.
“Got twelve.” Not that it did any good. Shoot twelve spotters and twelve more took their place, calling strikes down on the city in walls of fire—Luftwaffe planes were now strafing individual cars and pedestrians on Sevastopol’s ruined streets. The city where I’d walked arm in arm with Lyonya, admiring the Monument to the Sunken Ships and planning our future, had become a slaughterhouse. “Fyodor?”
“One block over, on the bakery roof.”
We fell into step, rifles in the crook of our arms. Neither of us flinched at the crackle and boom of artillery thundering overhead, at the shrieks of the dying and the roar of collapsing masonry following it. This wasn’t just the morning chamber music anymore; it was a symphony of death. A symphony that never ended.
We clambered up to the bakery roof where Fyodor Sedykh had wedged himself behind a chimney to pick off more spotters, Kostia pulling me up through the hole in the bombed-out roof as I called out, “Fyodor?” But my huge lumbering ox of a junior sergeant was beyond answering; an air strike had hit the roof, toppled the chimney, and pinned him in a welter of shattered beams and broken bricks. The whole lower half of his face was gone, but his eyes begged. Kostia and I went to him, either side of that big, hopelessly broken body, and Kostia took Fyodor’s hands and murmured the question we all knew to ask, if a day like this ever came. Fyodor nodded, writhing, eyes not leaving mine, and I nodded back. “Hero of the Soviet Union Fyodor Sedykh,” I rasped, “the honor has been mine—”
And I fired a single, merciful shot.
Kostia and I were too ravaged to weep as we climbed down from the shattered rooftop. We just clung to each other for a few numb seconds, then disentangled and made our way toward the regimental staff headquarters. There were only four left in my platoon besides us. “Check on Vartanov and the others,” I told Kostia as we waited for new orders from the reconnaissance officer, and that was when a shell hit the dugout.
No time to shout a warning to my partner.