It slid out of the pack into my hands: a bloodstained, oil-smeared English copy of War and Peace. Kostia’s. I’d seen him prop his rifle on it if there wasn’t time to construct a parapet; he pulled it out to read on long stakeouts; he carefully tore a strip from its blank end pages to light our cigarettes when we were out of matches. We’d teased him that he loved it more than his babushka. “It was my babushka’s,” he retorted.
I didn’t know if he’d left it with me as a farewell when I was carried off the battlefield for the last time, or if he’d died back there and some well-meaning orderly tucked it among my things as a memento. I didn’t know, and maybe I never would know. My partner.
I doubled over weeping, clutching the book, as the submarine slid through the alien waters toward a safety I didn’t want, away from a death I would have welcomed, abandoning everyone I loved.
“LYUDMILA MIKHAILOVNA, IS that you?”
I turned as I approached the Novorossiysk commandant’s office. At first I didn’t recognize the grim-faced, weary-looking man in his fine greatcoat and cluster of aides. Then I saw his rank and hastily saluted. “Comrade Major General Petrov, sir.”
Twelve days since the submarine slid into Novorossiysk and off-loaded its wounded to the hospital wards, me among them. Just one day since I had been released from my cot there, told to come to the commandant’s office and testify to my recovery—at least, testify that I had recovered enough to hold a rifle again. And here was Petrov himself, turning away from his idling staff car and coming toward me with a smile. I remembered meeting the man before evacuating Odessa, and I knew he’d been the one to put my name up for my first combat medal after the duel on the bridge, but we hadn’t traded any further words. If he’d recognized my gaunt, unsmiling face with its centipede of stitches still marching up my neck and ear, he had a good memory.
He spoke baldly, no niceties. “You’ve heard?”
“Yes, Comrade Major General.” The Pravda had printed the news yesterday: By order of the Red Army Supreme command dated 3 July, Soviet forces have abandoned the city . . . I’d been knocking on every door I could find for the last twenty hours, begging for information on Sevastopol’s survivors. There had to be survivors. The rest of my platoon . . .
“Who else from Chapayev division made it out with you, Lyudmila Mikhailovna?” General Petrov had been there until the end, so I’d been told—evacuated with the rest of the top brass right before the city fell. I gave him all the names I could, the soldiers I’d been evacuated with on the submarine, the ones I’d seen in the hospital wards afterward. I saw him filing each one away. “I have one name for you, Comrade Senior Sergeant. Your doctor husband, Alexei Pavlichenko, was on the last transport out. Headed for Krasnodar, I think.” A smile. “He’s being decorated for his service to the wounded. A valiant servant of the Red Army.”
“Valiant,” I echoed. Kostia’s quiet stoicism, Vartanov’s bitter endurance, Lena’s humor under fire—they were the valiant ones. But I couldn’t deny Alexei’s surgeon hands had probably saved hundreds if not thousands of lives, and the general clearly thought he had given me good news. So I nodded my thanks and asked the question I’d dreaded to ask. “The rest of my division, the ones in Sevastopol when I was evacuated at the end of June?”
“There is no more Chapayev division,” Petrov said gently. “They fought to the end—burned their staff papers, buried their seals, threw their standards into the sea. The Hitlerites won’t be parading your division’s colors through Berlin as trophies.”
My eyes filled with tears again; I managed to keep them from brimming over as I gave a stiff nod. The general managed a smile, more like a death’s-head rictus. I remembered hearing a rumor that he’d tried to shoot himself rather than flee Sevastopol, and someone from his military council had prevented him. Just one of those wild army rumors that fly everywhere like chaff, but suddenly I believed this one. General Petrov looked haunted, a dead man walking. “Tell me, Comrade Senior Sergeant, have you received new orders?”