“Twenty-one.” I swiped at my eyes. Even that small movement sent a jolt of pain through my spine. “Officially.”
“What do you mean, officially?” Lena pulled out a pack of Litka cigarettes. “Is it twenty-one or not?”
“It’s not like picking apples, and just counting how many are in your basket,” I flared. “The only marks added to the official tally are the ones someone else has verified, or the ones that I’ve verified by bringing back dog tags or papers from—”
She struck a match. “From the bodies?”
“Yes.” A part of my new assignment that I loathed, but it had to be done, so I did it. “If there isn’t verification, the mark isn’t added to my tally. And sometimes I can’t tell if I’ve hit a target or not, so those aren’t added, and neither are the ones I hit when I’m fighting alongside my whole company. It’s not—clean-cut. It’s twenty-one official, and I don’t even know how many unofficial.” I waited for her to ask if it bothered me. She didn’t, just silently offered a cigarette. I shook my head. “I don’t smoke.”
“I don’t, either.” She inhaled with a sigh of satisfaction, sitting down on the end of my bed.
I moved my feet for her, feeling another wrench of pain along my back. “Don’t you have other patients?”
“I’m on break. And there’s a captain on the second floor I’m avoiding until he’s done with his rounds. Drooling for a frontline wife, thinks I don’t know he has the real thing back in Moscow.” She made a certain face. “Officers can be such shits.”
I made a noise in agreement, glad not to be talking about tallies and kills anymore. “The rank-and-file boys aren’t nearly as bad, are they?” When Lena and I cut our hair on first arriving at the front, we’d both been bracing ourselves for being outnumbered by the men in our companies, but they hadn’t turned out to be the problem. You developed your own way of dealing with fellow soldiers: Lena’s, I could see, was deft avoidance and blunt profanity; mine was a kind of breezy, no-nonsense toughness I’d perfected as a tomboy running with the local boys. Do it right, and the men in your company came to look at you as a kind of honorary male: cheerful, sexless, useful in a crisis. （The uniform helped, too. Much to the disappointment of the American press I’d meet later, a woman soldier’s uniform in the Red Army was not tight, svelte, or alluring. It had all the grace of a potato sack, but itchier.）
No, it was the officers who turned out to be the problem, not the rank-and-file soldiers. Those damned shiny lieutenants and captains who regarded female soldiers as a perk of rank—they’d come prowling whenever they heard a new woman had arrived at the front. There’s nothing quite like sitting in a dugout with a needle file, working on the bolt mechanism of your rifle, only to see some amorous bit of brass with three or four bars on his collar come sniffing around with a gleaming smile, a bar of chocolate, and an indecent proposal.
“Have the officers come at you yet?” Lena asked, thoughts clearly mirroring mine. “Or are they just marginally smart enough to steer clear of a woman with more than twenty kills?”
“I’ve got a good captain. Sergienko shoos the officers off the women in his battalion.”
“Some don’t like hearing no, regardless what a fellow officer says,” Lena warned. “They’ll slither at you when his back’s turned, so keep your eyes as sharp as your sights.”
“Same for you.” I struggled to sit up, catching the hiss of pain in my teeth. “Any other news while I’ve been out?”
“Odessa’s changed, from what the locals say. Sandbags in the streets, antiaircraft guns in the squares, windows taped up. No holiday people swanning into the resorts.”
I remembered that beautiful day on the beach, the crowded café filled with laughter. “What else?”