“Last week, alphabetizing periodicals. Tomorrow”—I thought of my marksmanship badges—“I can be useful wherever they put me, if they just give me a rifle.”
“You’d think more women would be here besides us.” Lena took a beet out of her pack and began to eat it raw. “Hitlerites pouring over the border like roaches, and we’re the only two skirts in this train? Makes you ashamed to be female. If girls want to stay home and cower behind their soup kettles while the men fight, let them move to England. Prance around Piccadilly with Princess Margaret Rose and put their hair in pin curls.”
I grinned, deciding I was going to like Lena Paliy.
The train chugged slowly out of the station, snaking west toward the steppe. The gleaming surface of the Dniester estuary soon shone off to the right, then the string of stations. Shabo, Kolyesnoye, Sarata, Artsyz, Hlavani . . . I choked down a wave of homesickness. What am I doing so far from everything I love? But I stamped down on that thought before it could flower into self-pity. Slavka. This is for him.
A long night—Lena dozed first as I kept watch; then I put my forehead against the glass and took my turn. An even longer day to follow; more strange depots; more unfamiliar towns. Lena and I traded stories; I admired the scarf her mother had knitted; she admired my picture of Slavka. “Cute,” she said, touching his round baby face. “And his father?”
“Not so cute. A real bastard, in fact.”
“I sense a story.” Lena made a tell-me gesture, and I normally wasn’t so forthcoming with new people, but I found myself recounting the tale: fifteen-year-old Mila Belova at her first dance, the tall fair-haired man who pulled her away from her girlfriends into a two-step and said, Shall I show you?
“That’s all it took?” Lena raised her eyebrows. “Must have been some dance.”
I grimaced. “Any ordinary night, I’d have danced with him once and gone back to my friends. But right before my eyes, he saved a life.”
Alexei and I had circled the dance floor only twice when a stranger by the wall suddenly bent over, red-faced with vodka, eyes wide with panic, choking on something. His friends didn’t know it was serious, guffawing even as he slipped to his knees clawing at his throat—but Alexei knew. He melted through the crowd to the man’s side and flipped him on his back on the hot dance floor, trying to expel whatever was choking him. By the time I fought my way through the crush, he’d shoved his pristine sleeves up and was yanking a fountain pen and a small knife from his pocket. Seeing me, he tossed the pen into my hands and barked, “Take it apart, give me the barrel!” even as he was seizing a bottle of vodka from the nearest table and using the icy liquor to sterilize the penknife. I went to my knees beside Alexei, heart thudding, and saw he was very calm. He took the disassembled fountain pen, tossing his handkerchief at me. “When I tell you, mop up the blood.”
And he cut into the man’s throat just under the Adam’s apple, down to the windpipe in one firm stroke, and I was mopping blood, terrified but moving under that cool voice, and he was fashioning a breathing tube from the hollow fountain pen, and the man wasn’t dying. All because of the steady, long-fingered hands of Alexei Bogdanovich, Dr. Pavlichenko, whose name I didn’t even learn until an hour later, when we were sitting under an oak tree in the cool, shadowed garden outside the dance hall, the patient taken away to the hospital.
“You’re good in a crisis, little—what’s your name? Mila?” Taking my hand in both of his, twining it in those long fingers in a way that rendered me completely breathless.
“I’m not so little,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t guess my age, feeling relieved when he smiled.
“No, I can see you’re not.”
（“That was a lie,” I told Lena. “He made a very accurate guess how old I was, which was too young, which was exactly the age he liked.”）
“How did you do that surgery?” I’d pressed. “Save that man?”