“At targets?”
“At anything.”
AND THAT IS my secret, if you’re curious. You are, aren’t you? Everyone is, when they first meet me. Even Eleanor Roosevelt wondered, when we met later on the steps of the White House in August of 1942. I could see it in her eyes: How does a girl like me—a mother, a student, an aspiring historian—become a sniper and kill hundreds of men? What’s her secret?
Hardly anyone comes right out and asks me. Partly they’re afraid I’ll be annoyed and add them to my tally—but it’s more than that. People love war heroes, but such heroes are supposed to be clean, honorable, white-cloaked. They fight in the open, in the sunlight, face-to-face with their enemies. They deal death from the front. When someone （especially a woman） earns their stars as I have done, people shiver. Anyone who walks in the night, melts into shadows, looks through telescopic sights at an unwary face—at a man who doesn’t know I exist, even as I learn that he nicked himself shaving this morning and wears a wedding ring—when I learn all that and then pull a trigger so he is dead before he hears the report . . .
Well. Anyone who can do that over and over again and still manage to sleep at night must surely have a dark side.
You are not wrong to think that.
But you are wrong about who has such a dark side, waiting to be tapped. You think that surely someone like me is a freak of nature, gnawing a rifle in her cradle, hunting at five and killing wolves at eight, emerging from the wilds of Siberia （it’s always Siberia） fully formed. Americans especially loved to imagine me that way—one of those icy Russian women of dark myth, crawling with bloodied teeth and bloodied hands from some snowbound hellscape: a killer born.
Then you meet me: little Mila Pavlichenko with her wide smile and her bag crammed with books, a student from Kiev only too happy to tell you how she wants to be a historian someday and show you pictures of her adored, chubby-cheeked son—and you are crestfallen. This is Lady Death? This is the girl sniper from the frozen north? How disappointing.
Or . . . and this is your second reaction, the one you won’t ever voice . . . how unsettling. Because if a twenty-six-year-old library researcher has such a dark side to her moon, who else does?
I don’t know.
I know only that mine awoke when I realized there was no room in my life for mistakes. When I realized I could not miss, not ever. When I heard a rifle sing in my hands as I buried a bullet through the neck of a bottle and sent the base flying into diamond shards . . . and realized who and how I could be.
Chapter 3
June 1941
Odessa
Patriotic memoirs have become all the fashion—as the Party would say, they are popular, edifying, and good for public morale （if also somewhat sleep-inducing）。 But if I were ever to write my memoir. I’d have to modify my story a good deal, or just leave parts out altogether, because there are many, many things about the life of Lyudmila Pavlichenko that would never make it into any memoir. Or at least not the official version.
For example, my account of the day war broke out in the Soviet Union. An official memoir might say, “The day Hitler invaded, I was attending a Komsomol meeting and reflecting on my duties as a future Party member.”
The truth? The unofficial version? I was a student in Odessa, and I was at the beach.
“You have beaches?” I can just imagine Americans wrinkling their noses. They think Russia is nothing but a vast waste of snow glittering under the white nights—no coasts, no summer days, only ice and wolves. Really, does anyone look at a map? Odessa is farther south than Paris, Munich, or Vienna—and that June day was beautiful, the sky clear and hot, the glittering expanse of the Black Sea stretched flat and shining to the horizon.
I hadn’t intended to go swimming, but my friend Sofya rapped my knuckles the day before, both of us enduring the last hour of an endless shift at the front desk of the Odessa public library. “Vika and Grigory are finally back from Moscow, and we’re all going to the beach.”