I taught them to try again without shame when they missed a shot. That failure was not always a death sentence.
I taught them everything I knew and I saluted them when they left me and I grieved them when they died . . . and the ones who lived, I hosted here in Moscow to drink vodka and trade stories of old nightmares and comrades in arms long gone, and we’d part with tears on our cheeks and smiles on our lips: the girl snipers who lived.
Maybe I could have added more Nazis to my tally, but more than two thousand women fought for their homeland as sharpshooters by the end of the war, and a good portion of them were trained by me. The tally of every woman I trained stands alongside mine, and as a woman of forty-one I cannot look back and see my switch from sniper to sniper instructor as a waste.
“Besides,” I said now to Eleanor, smiling, “I wanted to be a historian, not a sniper. And I became one.”
“Certainly you did—Lyudmila, are you putting jam in your tea?”
“It’s the Russian way.” I added a heaping spoonful of cherry jam to her cup. “I hope you’ll have time on your visit to meet with the Committee of War Veterans?”
“Of course. You work with them now that you’re retired from—what was your position again?”
“Research assistant in the Soviet Navy fleet history section.” I’d retired a few years ago, my old war wounds acting up. All those concussions, all that shell shock, all that scar tissue . . . it sank deeper as I got older, rather than fading away. “But retirement is no reason to sit around doing nothing.”
“I could not agree more,” said the former First Lady.
Kostia slipped in then, still lean as a wire, his hair now iron gray, our dog bounding in front of him. He’d finished his war at my side, my shadow to the end, helping me train young snipers . . . and then he found himself at the Red Star Kennel helping train military dogs, who he said were much smarter than most military recruits. We had a big black Russian terrier puppy of our own now; Kostia romped with her all over Gorky Park every day, ignoring his old limp. “My husband,” I introduced him as he came to drop a kiss on my hair and shake Eleanor’s hand, but no more than that. For many reasons, Kostia kept a low profile.
“He looks familiar,” Eleanor said thoughtfully as Kostia nodded farewell and took the dog into the next room for a brushing. “Was he on the Washington delegation?”
“Mmm,” I murmured.
“Perhaps I’m thinking of your first husband . . . I didn’t realize until later that he had accompanied the tour to Washington.”
“Mmm.” I smiled.
“You didn’t paint a very flattering portrait of him, little as you told me.” Eleanor’s eyes regarded me calmly over the rim of her glass. “Perhaps it’s no great tragedy that he didn’t end up leaving with the rest of you.”
“Mmm.” Alexei Pavlichenko had officially died on tour of a burst appendix—all part of the frantic behind-the-scenes scurrying to make sure nothing from Rock Creek Park surfaced to embarrass either the Soviet delegation or the White House. Nothing at all, of course, was said of the marksman.
I still woke at night sometimes thinking of his mud-colored eyes, wondering what his name had been. Who had hired him. Eleanor and I had never had the opportunity to speak of such things, even when we met afterward in England.
Now . . .
“Remember that eccentric American businessman who proposed marriage to me?” I mused, stirring my tea. “I always wondered what became of him. Who his friends were, the people he worked with.”
（It would be foolish to assume there were no listening ears tuned to hear this conversation. Eleanor and I might be friends, but our nations no longer were, much as that grieved me.）
“My husband had a good idea who your suitor’s friends were,” Eleanor said. “He spoke with a few of them, after your departure. There was a certain settling of accounts . . . I don’t believe anyone gave much trouble after that.”