“So you’re not hanging back out of good instincts, then. You’re not wary of showing off; you’re just . . . afraid you’ll lose. Afraid to miss.”
I gave him a level look and went to kneel at the firing line, sinking back on my right heel, socking the rifle into the hollow of my shoulder. Index finger on the trigger, the comb of the butt against my cheek, rifle supported with the strap under my bent elbow as I rested on my left knee and slid my hand closer to the muzzle to steady even further. I stared through the telescopic sight at the bottle in its cleft stick. Even with fourfold magnification, it looked no bigger than the period at the end of a sentence—a full stop in bold type. But I didn’t stop. I fired, and in the flash of the shot I remembered the way I’d missed the target when Alexei watched me.
But this time when I lowered the rifle, I saw that the base of the bottle had been blown away in a diamond-sparkle of broken glass scattered across the snow . . . and the neck was intact.
“Well done,” my instructor said calmly. “Can you repeat it?”
I felt a grin spreading across my face, barely hearing the applause of my classmates. “Yes.”
That was the first day I heard it: the song a rifle could sing in my hands, its stock hard against my shoulder, my finger curled through the trigger. I’d somehow slipped away from my jockeying classmates and their flashy antics and found myself in a place of silence—an island in that raucous atmosphere of fun and games. I blocked everything out, the whole world, all so I could hear the song the Three Line was singing in my hands.
That afternoon I blew the base out of three bottles in a row, setting up every shot with painstaking care, not chipping a single bottle neck. I waited for my instructor to say something—Scorn that, I dare you—but he came for me with a fond, surprising hug. “Well done, my long-braided beauty,” he said, giving my waist-length plait a tug. “I knew you’d win.”
I blinked. “You did?”
“From whom much is given, much is demanded,” he quoted. And the day I graduated from his course over a year later, he gave me an autographed copy of his booklet “Instructions for Sharpshooters” inscribed simply: Don’t miss, Lyudmila Pavlichenko.
“Quite an achievement, malyshka,” my father said that evening when I came home and proudly showed my certificate. “My daughter’s become a dangerous woman.”
“Hardly, Papa.” I kissed him on both cheeks: my solid, reliable father in the gabardine service jacket he still preferred to wear even though his military days were long behind him, the Order of the Red Banner worn proud on his breast, hands folded around a steaming cup of tea at the kitchen table. He’d been helping Slavka with his schoolwork, I could tell. My father had helped me with my schoolwork at this table too, as long as I could remember. Even if he didn’t get home from work until midnight, he always made time to sit with his children, look over their assignments, and hear their problems—even when we drove him to distraction and he groaned, For the love of Lenin, you’re driving an old man mad!
Slavka was running his fingers over the round seal crest on my marksmanship certificate. “I can teach you whenever you like,” I said, tugging him into my lap and kissing his chocolate-dark hair, the same as mine and Papa’s. “Shall we go to the range?”
“Maybe when I’m a Young Pioneer,” he said very seriously. “When I get the red kerchief.”
“When you’re older,” I agreed. It didn’t distress me that he wasn’t eager to learn yet. I had the skills when he was ready; that was what mattered. “Let’s see that assignment, morzhik. Plant biology, I always liked that at your age. Can you name me all the parts of a leaf?”
I listened to his earnest voice until my slender, beaming mother came home, swooping to exclaim over my certificate. She was proud but a little baffled: “What is such a thing good for, malyshka?”