“A glass of water, kroshka?” Alexei murmured, hovering.
“I can get my own water. I don’t require the delegation doctor to get it for me.”
That was the post he’d landed: official physician for the Soviet delegation to Washington. “How did you manage to worm your way onto this mission?” I’d sputtered back in Moscow, still reeling from the surprise of seeing him again. “What does a student delegation need with a combat surgeon?”
“They want a Soviet doctor to attend to any of the delegation’s health needs, another soldier with a sterling record, and I’ve done my share of general doctoring.” Alexei had looked golden and confident in his immaculate uniform, not a smudge of Sevastopol’s horrors on him. “As for how I got this assignment . . . well, naturally I kept my ear to the ground for any news of my wife.” Straightening the Order of Lenin at my breast, fingers lingering on the proud red ribbon. “And naturally, a husband would wish to accompany his wife overseas if she were sent on such a long journey—”
“You are trading on my name to get out of frontline service and into a cushy post,” I’d hissed, but there was no undoing it. Even halfway around the world, I wasn’t going to be able to escape my husband.
And he’d been solicitous ever since: first in Moscow, those few frantic days we were all being briefed and prepared for the journey; then on the long flight from Moscow to Tehran and then to Cairo, cadging the seat beside me as I clutched the armrest during takeoff, offering to hold my hand if I felt afraid.
“What do you want?” I’d asked bluntly.
He just smiled. “Can’t I tell my wife how brave she is? Your first flight; you’re doing so well, kroshka.”
“Oh, and you’ve flown on airplanes so many times, yourself,” I scoffed. But his smile didn’t waver, and after we flew from Cairo to Miami he knocked on my hotel room door and asked if I wanted to walk on the beach—“Let’s get some sun on that pretty face.” All this niceness was making me twitchier than a two-day stakeout.
I swatted him away now, looking back to the bank of microphones and cameras as we were herded into position. “If you three will take your seats, Mrs. Pavlichenko in the center . . .” I did as I was told, banishing my husband from my thoughts if not my presence. Krasavchenko was shuffling the pages of his statement on my right, at my left lounged Lieutenant Pchelintsev, our third student delegate, looking haughty. “You have coffee on your tunic,” I said, and he nearly overturned his cup in his haste to brush himself off. I couldn’t really dislike Pchelintsev—in some ways he wasn’t so different from me, just an earnest university student before the war turned him down a different road and made him a sniper. But it was hard not to regard him a little cynically all the same, because he was three years younger than I and his official tally was half mine, but he was a senior lieutenant to my junior and he’d been made Hero of the Soviet Union and not just Chevalier of the Order of Lenin. I wasn’t eaten up with jealousy for his gold star, but it was hard not to look at the burnished young Lieutenant Pchelintsev and wonder if I’d be where he was if I’d simply been born a man.
Hit four hundred on your tally, little boy, I thought the first time I met Pchelintsev’s superior gaze in Moscow. Then you can look down your nose at me.
But it wasn’t my impressive tally that had won my place here with Pchelintsev and Krasavchenko, and I knew it. I’d heard two of the Moscow suits arguing over my appointment while I was getting fitted for the uniform skirt I was now wearing: “Should have chosen that tank driver from the Leningrad literary program, Vassily Something. Who wants a woman on a delegation? Too emotional, too difficult to control.”
“But this one’s pretty, and she’ll present the USSR in a more favorable light . . .”
“We’re beginning.” Krasavchenko’s whisper across the table snapped me back to the present. “Remember, listen to our interpreter, not theirs.”