I found myself down by the bay, fingers curling and uncurling around the rail overlooking the sea. On the summer stage of Marine Boulevard nearby, a brass band was playing a military march, the notes nightmarishly cheerful. The water glittered, and dimly I could see the outlines of the Black Sea Fleet warships out in the bay. Gunboats, destroyers, an old cruiser that had been re-equipped as a minelayer . . . I wondered if any of them would be here within the week. I wondered if anyone out walking and laughing and clapping along to the band’s drumbeats would be here within the week, either, or if it would all be uniforms and grim faces.
This beautiful world. This nighttime wonder that was my city, my country. Slavka’s world, the one I wanted to show him, build for him, pour into his hands. Overrun by German thugs with their ranting little toothbrush of a dictator and their smug dreams of world superiority.
“Were you Soviets any better?” a half-drunk American journalist asked me later. “Some nerve you’ve got, feeling righteous, wanting to make the whole world commie . . .”
There are things my homeland can apologize for. We have a long way to go, and we train ourselves to see not the world around us, but the world as it will become, knowing that world is still a ways away. But whatever our faults, I will never apologize for fighting the war that came to our doorstep in 1941. Germany invaded us. Germany wanted our oil, our cities, our flag added to their imperial crown. They wanted to see their damned eagles staked high, from the blue and gold palaces of Leningrad to the icebergs of Lake Baikal, and what we wanted was of no importance, so they invaded. The first shots fired were theirs, the first boots crossing borders were theirs, and if we rolled over and let them do it, my Slavka would be mass-churned into the Hitler Youth and taught to salute a monster.
Is Germany truly so surprised that every mother, every father, every soul born in this vast icy land of ours objected to that fate?
Are you?
The anger that had kindled in my stomach upon hearing the announcement of war was burning higher, becoming fury as I thought of swastikas flying over Odessa. The fury clawed and coiled, liquid and molten at the core of me, a tangible white-hot thing being manufactured in the fires of some monstrous factory. Enough rage to churn a sea to boiling fury.
What use is it being angry? whispered the voice of doubt inside me as I stared out at the calm water. Students like you are no use during a war. The voice sounded very much like Alexei’s. I could imagine him saying A man sees chances in war, Mila . . . but not little bookworms like you. Go roll bandages.
And I could—finish my dissertation, dig tank traps, enlist to work at the nearest hospital. Stick to the careful plan, stick to the roles I knew: the library staffer, the researcher, Slavka’s mother. These were roles I could fill with never a mistake.
But here, unlike in England and France and America, a woman’s fight was not limited to hospitals. And I had more in me than filing and note-taking and far too much seventeenth-century Ukrainian history. No matter how hard the metal, I’d told Vika that afternoon, it yields to human strength. All you have to do is devise the right weapon.
I was a weapon. I’d learned to shoot, after all. And I’d vowed to be Slavka’s father as well as his mother.
In times of war, fathers go fight for their children.
So I let out a shaky breath, went home to my student digs for my passport, student card, and marksmanship certificates, and went—still in my crepe de chine dress and high-heeled sandals—to enlist.
Chapter 4
My memoir, the official version: When I arrived at the front on Bessarabian soil, I was impressed by the efficiency and organization of the Red Army officers, and I took on my new duties with stoicism and resolve.
My memoir, the unofficial version: When I arrived at the front, it was a complete and utter disaster and so was I, because I’d gone to war without saying goodbye to my son.
“NO TIME TO come home?” my mother cried through the telephone line, hearing me say it. “It’s not so long a journey—”