“Too fucking right, Mila Pavlichenko. You know how long it’s been since I’ve visited a proper banya?” Lena shimmied out of her uniform like a snakeskin, flopping down naked on the long wooden bench. “You’re welcome.”
The warm baritone of the man we’d ejected came floating through the door. “You ladies just came off the Gildendorf attack?”
“This morning,” I called back, stretching out on the bench opposite Lena. The attack had been done by noon, the enemy driven out from Gildendorf and the Ilyichevka state farm, where my company had been happily settling themselves when I came limping in using my rifle as a crutch. Stripped out of my clothes, I could now see the huge black bruise covering my entire flank.
“I can’t believe you fell out of a damned tree,” Lena scolded, closing her eyes.
“I still pulled off my shot.” I parked my Finnish combat knife within arm’s reach—not that I believed I’d need it, but only an idiot would strip naked in a camp full of men and not have a weapon at hand. Sweat was already running freely down my face in the dark, enclosed space.
The baritone voice through the door again: “Are you the woman sniper who took out the entire machine-gun nest?”
“Four shots.” Quite a bit of preparation had gone into those four shots: a day to reconnoiter the site, then a morning wedging into a maple tree with a clear line of fire over the Gildendorf cemetery to the road—but the result was one dead adjutant, two dead machine gunners, and one final armor-piercing bullet through the breech of the MG 34 to render it useless before my regiment advanced down the road. “They were using telescopic sights—the entire day before, our boys couldn’t so much as wiggle a finger without seeing it shot off.” I’d seen three men from my company go down, boys I’d traded jokes and smiles with over evening mess tins.
“How many is it now on your tally?” Lena asked after a half hour’s silence, rolling her neck.
I massaged my shooting hand, reflexively checking that the post-shooting tremors had worked themselves out. September was more than half over; fighting was continuous and my nights had been busy. “Officially, forty-six.” I still disliked that question. I didn’t want to count the dead; I didn’t do this for bragging rights. It was simply a job I had to do. And I was doing it. Suddenly the heat felt stifling, and I sat up. “Let’s sluice off.”
In the village where I was born, my family always went to the banya together: my parents and sister and me all sitting in the steam, then everyone racing out to plunge whooping into the icy stream—or if the stream was frozen, the nearest snowbank. No snow here yet, and I wasn’t plunging into any stream naked with an entire regiment around, so Lena and I rinsed off in the bolted changing room with pails of icy water. The man outside called through the door again, just as Lena upended a bucket over my head.
“Not to lurk around your bath, ladies, but one of the corporals just came by and left a rather nice pile of gifts for L. M. Pavlichenko.”
“Gifts?” I sluiced icy water off my steaming skin, shivering. The good kind of shivering, the banya’s magic where hot met cold and sweat met ice, and your flesh remembered it was violently, beautifully alive. Buried in the dust and blood of the front, making do with tepid washes out of a basin, I hadn’t realized how much I’d needed this. I gave my head a shake, feeling the dust and dried blood stream out to puddle at my feet.
“Don’t think that’s getting you in here, lover boy,” Lena shouted through the door, turning around so I could upend a pail over her in turn. “This door’s staying shut till we’re dressed—”
“I guess you don’t want this nice cake of bath soap, then. I can certainly—”
“Give me that!” Lena wrenched the door open, just far enough for a big brown hand to pass the soap through.
“Quite a motley assortment here,” he continued as the door closed again. “Another bar of soap, a little flask of scent, a pear from the farm’s orchard . . . the note says: From the men of 2nd Company.”