“I don’t know, Comrade Captain. It hasn’t been that kind of shooting.” I’d fired like a good soldier—when I was told, blindly, over the lip of trenches and behind trees, as the Chapayev division continued its retreat. You couldn’t see what you were firing at in such moments; you fired because you were being fired on, not because you had anything in your sights. I didn’t know if I’d hit anyone; I knew only that I was less afraid when I had the comforting weight of a rifle in my hand. Nonsensical, really—having a weapon didn’t make me invulnerable—but I felt less helpless. I couldn’t push my fear away, but I could push it into my weapon.
“Come with me,” Sergienko said, and I followed him out of the command post through the mess of crates and tents, makeshift desks and earth plowed into bulwarks, some ways distant to a bombed-out peasant hut where he could point toward the far end of Belyayevka. Among the distant overgrown trees was a large house with a ridge-roofed porch, gleaming in the setting sun. “You see?”
I nodded. Two officers in sandy-gray uniforms came out onto the porch; I could see the gleam of their insignia, their pudding-basin helmets. Not Hitlerites; Romanians—Germany’s ally. So close. I had not yet seen an enemy so clearly; until now they had all been shadowy shapes on the other side of trenches, helmeted outlines in the cockpits of planes strafing overhead. These two men weren’t even half a kilometer away. Standing there on a porch in the sunshine, scratching themselves, having a laugh. Our invaders.
The fear banked constantly in my stomach began to curl again. I usually felt the fear cold and blue-violet as a shaving of tungsten twisting under a lathe, but this time the metal of it was forging from blue to red. Fear to rage.
“That’s likely their staff headquarters,” the weary-looking Captain Sergienko was saying. “You showed me your certificates; from our records you’re the only one yet who’s come in with an advanced marksmanship course already under her belt. Now that we’ve a moment to breathe”—between retreats, he didn’t say, but he might as well have—“let me see what you can do.”
I was already unslinging my rifle.
Sergienko stood back, watching. I felt the pulse beating under my jaw as I began setting up to shoot at the two men. Targets, I told myself, but couldn’t ignore the reality that these weren’t painted circles on a range or glass bottles in cleft sticks.
They are enemies, the anger inside me said, stoking higher as I moved through my preparations. Invaders. I hadn’t asked them to come here. I hadn’t asked them to ally with Germany, to make grandiose plans for renaming Odessa Antonescu once they captured it; to purge any territory they captured of Jews and Gypsies, Ukrainians and Russians, because we were racially undesirable. I hadn’t asked for any of this. I wanted to stay home, cuddle my son, finish my damned dissertation. I didn’t necessarily want the other side dead; I only wanted them gone. But they weren’t going, and so help me, I would settle for dead.
I never stopped moving, never hesitated. What hesitation can there truly be, after three weeks of desperate retreat under enemy fire? I just exhaled my rage and let training take over.
A good shooter moves without haste, every movement as deliberate as a clock’s hour hand ticking over. One . . . Take the first cool, measuring glance through the sights, the moment the soul falls silent and the eye takes control. Two . . . Estimate the horizontal sight line; I saw it cover the shoulders of the officer at the top of the porch steps. Three . . . Use that benchmark to calculate distance, the equation I’d learned in my shooting course employed in a blink: four hundred meters. Four . . . Sliding Ball L light bullets into place. Five . . . Finding a firing position in the bombed-out farmhouse where we stood: trying a belly-down angle—not possible; trying a kneeling position behind the half-shattered wall with the stones supporting my rifle’s barrel—better. Six . . . Settle in: weight resting on the heel of the right boot, left elbow on bent left knee, hold it until you are still, until you are stone, until frost could gather on your lashes. Seven . . . Adjust the rifle strap under the elbow, let it carry the weapon’s weight. Eight . . . Find the target again through the sight, adjust for wind. Nine . . . Find the trigger, take aim. Ten . . . Breathe in. Eleven . . . Breathe out.