“Can you use me, Comrade Captain?” I asked. “As a sniper?”
My scarred instructor had often used that word. This was the first time I spoke it.
“Oh, yes.” Sergienko strung his binoculars over his arm, looking suddenly so serious my heart began to thud. “There’s just one thing.”
“W-what?”
“Seven shots on two Nazis! You need to conserve cartridges, Lyudmila Mikhailovna. Such waste!” His scowl held for a moment, then cracked to a somewhat lugubrious smile. For the first time in weeks, I found myself laughing. A shaky laugh, but still a laugh. Laughter at the front—I hadn’t known such a thing could feel so good, be so necessary.
“I’ll get it right next time, Comrade Captain.” I saluted, smiling but kicking myself, too. Seven shots for two marks—my instructor would have scratched his scar and asked if I wouldn’t mind aiming for Moscow next time instead of Paris. “Two lives, two bullets next time.”
“Do try. They’ll be crawling back soon, and there’s no one but us to stamp on them.”
“America,” I said, because there were rumors: the Americans would join the war, they’d send troops to the east to take pressure off our lines. But Captain Sergienko shook his head.
“The Americans would rather leave us to rot. It’s all on us.” He nodded dismissal, turning to head toward his command post, but then turned back to me. “You’ve opened your tally today, sniper. Let the record show that L. M. Pavlichenko’s tally now stands at two.”
“No,” I heard myself say.
My captain raised his eyebrows.
“These two were test shots.” They still counted—I’d never forget them—but it hadn’t been official, not yet. And I wanted it to be clear that I didn’t care about padding a tally at all costs, counting lives like coins. That was another kind of showing off, and I still didn’t like it. Maybe this was the moment the midnight side of my moon started to wax from crescent to full, but making some game out of my skills was still distasteful to me. I just wanted to do a job and repel this invasion, not build myself a reputation. “Sniper-Soldier Pavlichenko will open her tally tomorrow.”
Chapter 7
My memoir, the official version: Before an attack, you steel yourself with thoughts of the motherland and Comrade Stalin.
My memoir, the unofficial version: Before an attack, you usually feel sick.
THE PRE-BATTLE FIT of gloom—everyone has their own way of combating it. Most of the men in 2nd Company with me relied on a stiff belt of vodka, a bracing exchange of the dirtiest jokes possible, and a rousing chorus or two of “Broad Is My Native Land” or “Over There Across the River.” I liked to pull my now-dog-eared dissertation out of my pack and leaf through it. There was something wonderfully soothing about Bogdan Khmelnitsky when I was about to come under shellfire.
A state of siege had been declared in my lovely city of Odessa; it was nearly September, and my sniper’s tally was—well, it had been officially opened and I’d been adding to it almost every day, becoming accustomed to that dark and bloody-handed work without too many innate lurches between fear and anger, queasiness and perfectionism. But today I was off with the rest of 2nd Company, not on one of those routine sorties that made up so much of war, but something different.
Smoke drifting over water, screams echoing across the flat plain of the isthmus between the Khajibeisk and Kuyalnik estuaries. The 3rd Battalion was pinned down, hammered by three days of shelling, cut down to no more than four hundred defenders. Romanians spilled over the plain, a sandy-gray mass firing wherever they saw movement, grappling and clawing with anyone they could drag out of the half-destroyed fortifications. Someone was shouting orders; the scream of artillery overhead turned the words to nonsense. I slipped and scrambled into a half-dug trench with a makeshift parapet, set up with my rifle, began taking shots—and almost as soon as I began, the thunder of guns died away.