“Lyudmila, can you take hot baths at the front?”
I blinked, surprised partly by the question and partly by the fact that he didn’t bother using my rank. “What?”
“Baths,” the man repeated, a lanky fellow from the Washington Post. “Hot.” He mimed sweating.
I stared at him. “Yes, I get a hot bath two or three times a day, whenever I’m sitting in a trench and there’s an artillery attack. That’s a real bath for you, only it’s a dust bath.”
A ripple of surprised laughter answered my response. Then a man in a checked tie rose. “Are you women soldiers able to wear lipstick?”
I glanced at Krasavchenko. He made a little urging motion. “With bullets coming at you, you’re more likely to reach for a rifle than a lipstick.” Kostia translated me with an impassive face, but I could hear his buried amusement.
A woman journalist came next, pursing her lips at me. “Is that your parade uniform or your everyday uniform?”
“We have no time for parades at the—”
“The cut is very unflattering. That skirt length makes you look fat! Don’t you mind?”
I let my breath out slowly as anger licked through me and leached the color out of the room. My briefing in Moscow had warned me: Some Americans will be convinced a woman cannot do what you have done, Lyudmila Mikhailovna—that you’re an actress prepped by propagandists. Disabuse them, but gently.
I’d already decided this morning at the White House breakfast that if the questions were insulting enough, I wasn’t going to bother with gentle.
“I am proud to wear the uniform of my army,” I answered the woman journalist. “It has been soaked by the blood of my comrades who have fallen in combat.” A sudden, horrendous flash of Lyonya’s blood drenching my tunic as splinters drove like spikes of ice into his lungs; of being spattered with the gray slurry of Fyodor Sedykh’s brains when I put him out of his agony on a Sevastopol rooftop. Breathe. Breathe. “I wish you could experience a bombing raid, ma’am. Trust me, you would forget about the cut of your outfit.”
I couldn’t even see the next journalist through the blur of fury fogging my eyes, only hear the faint leer in his voice. “Lyudmila, what color of underwear do you prefer?”
Kostia didn’t translate that. The embassy interpreter did, as my partner sat radiating cold rage and so Krasavchenko and Pchelintsev on either side of me. Oddly, that checked the furious beat of my pulse. Perhaps I had a platoon around me after all.
I looked at the journalist, and I smiled. It was the smile that made new recruits back up a few steps, if they had even a thimble of sense. “In Russia,” I began, nodding at Kostia to translate, “you’d get a slap in the face for asking any such question. That’s an inquiry for your wife or your mistress. I’m neither to you, newsman, so if you’d like to come closer, I’d be happy to give you a slap.”
To my surprise, the room burst into outright guffaws. Even the man who’d asked the question shook his head ruefully, as if he knew he’d earned my sharpness. I didn’t trust myself to say anything more, so I rose before the applause could cease. “We’re done here.”
I braced myself for a reprimand from the Soviet ambassador as we retreated into the corridor, but he only gave me a look of grim amusement. “Well said, Lyudmila Mikhailovna. Washington cockroaches . . .”
“I feel I must apologize for our press.” The serious tones of the First Lady made us all straighten. “They can be something of a trial.” She was followed by a comet-like tail of White House secretaries and flunkies, and she wore a practical navy blue dinner dress. I am a working woman, that dress said, not a clotheshorse. Which was starkly at odds to the summation I’d heard in my Moscow briefing: an aristocrat, a millionairess, a member of the exploiting class.