“I’m a surgeon. It’s what surgeons do.” He smiled. “Though I’ll be more than a surgeon someday.”
“What do you want to be?”
“Great,” he said simply. “I’ll make the name Pavlichenko resound from Moscow to Vladivostok someday.” He grinned, to show he was joking, but I knew he wasn’t. Not really. He burned bright with ambition.
“I can see it now,” I answered, laughing. “Alexei Pavlichenko, Hero of the Soviet Union . . .”
“Has a nice ring to it.” He laughed too, looking at me. “And what do you want, Lyudmila?”
Hearing the story, my new friend Lena whistled. “And you swooned into his arms like a plucked lily?”
“More or less.” Barely fifteen, poised somewhere between raiding orchards with the local boys and studying for my advanced exams—neither the bookish girl who dreamed of university nor the sunburned mischief-maker who was the best shot in the neighborhood with a slingshot stood a chance against a tall golden Viking who pulled me into his orbit to help him save a life, then asked me what I wanted. I did what any girl would have done: leaned in and kissed him before my nerve gave out, and maybe I was caught off guard by how fast everything moved after that, how quickly buttons were slipping free and clothes disappearing, but I was too eager, too dazzled to want to pull away.
“Nine months later,” I told Lena now, “there was Slavka.”
She whistled again. “And the blond bastard?”
“Moving up in the world. He’s the best surgeon in the region, I’ll give him that.” I’d had to contact him a year or so ago for some piece of paper required for my student enrollment: Does your husband have any objection to your registration at the University of Kiev? He’d been amiable enough as he wrote out a brief confirmation that we had not lived together in years. He didn’t ask anything about Slavka, just pulled my wrist toward him asking if I’d give him a kiss for old times’ sake. I’d wanted to say something cutting, but I didn’t dare because I needed the paper he’d just written out. So I just smiled tightly, avoiding the kiss, and he grinned and held the paper over my head. Jump for it, kroshka! And I actually did jump, because I had to, and he only made me jump three times before he let me have it. The thought of that still made my toes curl in shame.
“Let’s not talk about him anymore,” I told Lena, swallowing the anger I always felt thinking about Alexei. Rage was no use to a mother, a student, a future historian, and productive member of society, and it certainly wouldn’t help me be a calm and effective soldier, either. Alexei was the past, the war was the future, so I nudged Lena with my shoe and said, “Your turn.”
“I’ve got a blond bastard or two in my past . . .” She launched into some colorful story that pushed Alexei out of my mind, hopefully for good.
Nearly forty-eight hours of cold, malodorous discomfort and aching bones before we were decanted from the train: three in the morning, pushing and shoving to line up on a strange railway siding, shivering in the cold damp. Shouted into rough order, we began the long trek down a dirt road. By seven, my feet were blistered inside my canvas lace-ups and I smelled dense pine, tree sap . . . and gunsmoke. The smell of war, or at least my war. My father said his time at the front had smelled of mud and wire, but perhaps every war smells different.
Mine was trees and smoke and blood.
Since that day, I have never gotten it out of my nose.
THERE IS A sameness to how war stories begin, isn’t there? The story flows like a film, with suitably themed music. The proud recruit; the family farewells; the donning of the uniform—the music swells, tender and poignant. The taking of the soldier’s oath; a dramatic moment—something with patriotic brass is called for. Then the training period as the wide-eyed new recruit learns to handle their weapon—put it to a military march, lots of drums. By then the recruit （and his audience, as he tells this story） is ready for battle.