Lena hesitated. “Lots of casualties,” she said briefly. We traded another set of looks; I took her hand in mine and gave a silent squeeze. Defeatism wasn’t allowed; you couldn’t go about griping that the motherland was losing to the Hitlerites . . . but Lena had only to count the dead passing through, and I had only to count the waves of artillery fire booming over the steppe. Easily three enemy salvos to every one of ours.
“Looks like I’d better head back to the front and nab a few more,” I said, trying to keep my voice even.
“Bag a few for me.” She squeezed my hand back, then stubbed out her cigarette in a discarded bottle cap. “I’d better get moving. Hopefully the captain with the wandering eye has gone creeping back to his sewer by now. I’ll be back in a few hours—maybe even with mail. Letters find us a lot easier here, closer to the city.”
Four letters caught up with me within the week. Darling Mama, scolding me not to drink untreated water on the march, enclosing a precious scribbled scrap from Slavka that began Dear Mamochka and brought me to tears . . . Quiet Papa, telling me about his days in the army: Belovs have always been lucky in battle. My family was such a long way away from me now, evacuated to Udmurtia—they might as well have been writing from Paris, or the moon.
Another letter from Sofya in Odessa: Did you hear Vika’s twin enlisted in the tank corps? Vika says men who are dancers are usually boneheads, but she never thought her brother was the biggest bonehead of them all. I should dash to the library now; I’m boxing up the more valuable scrolls in case of evacuation. The place is humming!
For a moment I smelled not antiseptic and blood, but the Odessa library’s scent of old leather, parchment, books. My favorite smell in the world. At the front with my rifle, Mila the student seemed very far away, but here I could feel her with me, shuffling note cards and pencils in her bag, organizing her research according to color-coordinated tabs. How had that woman ended up here, with her ears ringing and her spine aching from mortar fire? All that woman wanted was an orderly life with no mistakes in it; to ride the train chugging through her life right to its end because she couldn’t afford to miss any more stops.
Well, I’d stepped off that train and found myself on a different set of tracks, with a different set of targets. Only here, the cost if I missed was much higher.
The sterile, stuffy air in the ward suddenly choked me. I reached out an arm and managed to push open the window by the bed, drinking in the breeze. The unpruned branches of the tree outside were nearly knocking on the sill. I broke off a leaf, smoothing along its veins, and picked up my son’s letter. He was about to go on his first hike with the Young Pioneers; he was so proud of that new red kerchief that he even wore it to bed, and he was worried he wouldn’t fit in with the country lads who knew everything about the woods. I’m a city boy, Mamochka, I don’t know anything about trees and plants . . .
“What kind of trees are those outside?” I asked the nearest nurse, pointing to the window. She answered, and I wrote Slavka back in a firm hand, stopping now and then to wipe my eyes. Darling morzhik, I will help you learn all about trees and plants. Your mamochka is never too busy for you, even at the front! Enclosed please find a leaf clipping from a pear tree: see the oval leaves, the pattern of the veining? Now you’ll know it again when you see it. It belongs to the scientific classification of . . . I paused, not sure what kind of scientific classification this type of pear tree was, but I was going to find out. I might be hundreds of kilometers away from my son, but I’d make him feel like his mama was still watching.
I sealed the letter and the leaf inside with a kiss, and then wrote another to my family. And this one told them I’d become a sniper-soldier and that I planned to take down a thousand Germans and then return home with pride. Somehow I had to be the woman who wrote both kinds of letters and did not fail at either. The mother and the sniper both, succeeding at both.
“GOOD TO SEE you back with us,” Captain Sergienko greeted me when I finally located the command post near a half-destroyed village. Nearly two weeks after I’d been shipped out with the other wounded, I’d cajoled Lena into getting me released and cadged a lift on a truck headed for the Kuyalnik and Bolshoi Ajalyk estuaries. Another half day to find the command post in the mess of dugouts, carts, trucks, and shattered buildings that comprised the front line, but here was my captain with his familiar gray face, looking three-quarters dead as opposed to only halfway there.