Clearly not. If there were any further attempts on his life, they had evidently failed: he had sailed unharmed into a fourth term, after all. “I wish President Roosevelt could have lived to see the end of the war.” I’d saved him from death on Halloween night of 1942, and he’d lived long enough to fulfill his promise that American soldiers would come to aid my countrymen . . . but he’d died before Hitler’s fall.
“He might not have lived to see victory, but he lived long enough to ensure it.” And Eleanor raised her cup to me, in silent thanks.
I raised mine in return. We held each other’s eyes a long moment, and then we both began clattering our saucers like the middle-aged ladies we were. “Such good weather for your visit, Eleanor—”
“Yes, and I do hope I can see more of this country in your company while I am here, Lyudmila!”
“This time I will be your tour guide. There’s so much I want to show you. Leningrad, Tsarskoye Selo, the Hermitage, and the Russian Museum . . . But for tonight,” I said, “the opera. I have tickets for Eugene Onegin, since my friend Vika is dancing a variation in the ballroom scene. She was a tank driver in the war, you know—decorated three times for bravery, and now she’s a Bolshoi ballerina.”
“What extraordinary women your country produces,” Eleanor observed.
“I’ll introduce you to more of them.” I knew so many now through my work with female war veterans: Vika, prickly and incorrigibly elegant despite the fact that she’d lost an eye during the final drive toward Berlin; a dark-haired Hero of the Soviet Union named Yelena Vetsina who had flown nine hundred bombing runs with the Night Witches . . . and best of all, my darling friend Lena Paliy. She hadn’t died in the fall of Sevastopol after all. She’d turned up emaciated but alive after retreating into the hills from the German invasion, and now we went walking every month in Gorky Park to talk about old times. I was usually late, and she’d pound on my apartment door with a shouted, Wake up, sleepyhead!
“Vodka during the day?” Eleanor shook her head disapprovingly when I proposed a toast before we headed out. “Very bad habit, Lyudmila dear.”
“You can’t call yourself a veteran until you have at least one bad habit you can’t kick.” I grinned.
In truth, I have more than one. I drink too much, this I know. I wake at night gasping from the old memories of battle, or dreams where I am frozen in that lightning-split beech tree beside Rock Creek until the marksman comes to put a bullet through my eye instead of the other way round. On those nights Kostia has to hold me until the shudders subside, and on other nights I do the same when his own demons of war come snarling and red-clawed through the land of sleep to hunt for him. I still tense up whenever I hear anything that sounds like a shot, and I can’t enter a room, a building, or an open space without parsing the movement lines and the potential threats. But that is the cost, as much as the old physical wounds that still sometimes cause me pain. The invisible wounds can hurt just as much—if not more.
The Party is encouraging me to write my memoirs. A straightforward account of your heroics on the front line, Comrade Pavlichenko, with suitably stoic reflections on courage, duty, and the bright future of the motherland. But, as I have frequently reflected in the years since my war concluded, there will be a great difference between any official account of my time in the Red Army and the version that lives in my memory. I can write honestly about the friends I lost, about my work as a sniper and the demands it places upon the soul. I can write about the extraordinary people I met on my goodwill tour from America to Canada to Britain, from Charlie Chaplin to Franklin Roosevelt, from Paul Robeson to Winston Churchill. I will not lie in my memoir . . . but there is much I will leave out.
Alexei Pavlichenko will not appear in those pages, except in a line or two as the infatuation of a foolish girl hardly out of childhood and the father of my son. Let him disappear from memory, from the pages of history, into the leaf mold of a Washington park.
Kostia will not appear in those pages, either, for very different reasons. Not long after we returned from our overseas tour, he had quiet word that his unofficial father, that Baikal fur trapper who had passed his diamond eye and savage skill to the son he’d fathered in Irkutsk, had been denounced for speaking against Comrade Stalin. It took half my diamonds—the uncut ones I’d scavenged from the marksman’s pockets, and the bracelets from the jewelry set he’d given me in a duelist’s challenge—to keep Kostia’s name off the warrants that swept up the rest of his father’s family, the sons and daughters who bore the name Markov and not Shevelyov. I keep the rest of my jewels in reserve, and Kostia lives quietly, not drawing on the fame that could be his as a decorated sniper and the husband of Lady Death. I sometimes look at him and wonder if he has regrets: the children we weren’t able to have, the family he left behind in America . . . but if so, he never voices them. I hope I have been enough for him, and since he made the choice to yoke his life to mine, I have sworn to keep him safe. Red Army records may say I was intimate with my sniper partner, but the partner in my memoir won’t be named as Konstantin Shevelyov. I’ll give that title to one of my other platoon members instead—one of the men too long dead to gainsay my word—and I’ll keep my husband anonymous.