“Nearly five hundred kilometers, Mama.” I blinked fiercely, keeping the wobble out of my voice. “I leave tomorrow. I didn’t know it would be so soon.”
“Surely you didn’t have to enlist yet.” She was weeping, and I heard my father in the background: Give her peace, our daughter knows her mind.
The line was silent for a moment, and then I heard his quiet voice. “Did you have trouble enlisting, malyshka?”
“A little. The first military registrar I went to wouldn’t even look at my certificates.” He’d muttered something about women who wanted to be soldiers but had no idea how hard it was and tossed me unceremoniously out of the office.
“They don’t know Belov women,” my father said, adding somewhat ominously, “Do I need to have a word with someone for you?”
He could, I knew. My father was a good, kind man, devoted to the Party and to his family, but he was also not a man to be crossed, ever. As the saying goes, he knew people—the kind of people who organized one-way trips into rivers, gulags, or vats of concrete. It was the reason Alexei had married me when I was fifteen: my father informed him I was pregnant, then informed him he would do the right thing by me, and Alexei probably reflected it was better to say yes than to lose his thumbs. Surgeons need thumbs.
But I didn’t want my father pulling strings to get me to the front. “I found another enlistment officer, Papa.” A much more amiable fellow than the first, though I’d still been asked Does your husband have any objection to your volunteering for the Red Army? At least the officer hadn’t made me go get some piece of paper from Alexei. If he had, I might have wrecked the office.
“Don’t pack too much,” my father cautioned. “All you need in war is dry socks, a good pair of boots, and something to read. And be sure—”
“For the love of Lenin, Papa!” I borrowed his own words to tease him. “Stop fretting. I have plenty of socks, and I packed my dissertation.” Somehow I couldn’t bear to leave it behind. Curling my fingers tight around the handset, I made myself add, “I’m . . . I’m sorry I didn’t come home first to say goodbye, then enlist afterward. I could have, but—”
“Harder to leave once you’ve had Slavka’s big eyes fixed on you,” my father said.
I bit my lip savagely. “Yes.” How would I ever be able to tear myself away if I had my son clinging to my waist, sobbing and begging me: Mamochka, don’t go, don’t go, please . . . And what kind of mother would I be then—a mother who wouldn’t fight for her child, for the world she wanted her child to grow up in?
“I’m proud of you, malyshka.” My father’s rumble brought tears to my eyes. I cuffed them away. “When you get to the front, just remember—”
“Belovs don’t retreat,” we both chanted, and that gave me enough strength to bid goodbye to Slavka over the telephone.
What a little life I had in Odessa—packing it away took almost no time at all. Goodbyes to my library colleagues and to my professors; hugs to Sofya. Just a few short days after my enlistment, I found myself crammed into a military train full of jostling new recruits—some in uniform, most still in civilian dress. I searched the car hopefully for another woman and saw none. My heart sank under the lace-edged collar my mother had insisted on stitching to my sturdiest traveling dress to make it pretty. The soldiers around me looked friendly enough, but—
“Here!” A slender hand waved from a bench by a window, and I saw a lanky blonde in a too-big overcoat. “Olena Ivanovna Paliy,” she said briskly as I fought my way through. “I’ll watch while you sleep if you do the same for me. Personally I’d rather arrive at the front without getting pawed.”
I put out my hand. “Lyudmila Mikhailovna Pavlichenko. Mila.”
“Lena.” She made room for me on the bench by the window, scowling at a big red-haired soldier who tried to squeeze down between us. “Find somewhere else, blyat,” she said with a casually obscene gesture, and I backed her up with a steely look. We might not know each other yet, but we were two women traveling alone in a compartment full of rowdy young men—such alliances are fast, practical, nearly primal. “Medical battalion for me,” Lena Paliy went on. “Last week I was a second-year student in the Odessa medical institute, slicing up shriveled blue corpses on the dissection table. You?”