Not courting gifts, simply the kind of small luxuries given in wartime as a thank-you. My eyes pricked as I lathered up the cake of soap. My job now was to take lives—I sometimes forgot that I was also saving them. My company had been able to march up that road today without being mowed down by machine-gun fire, because of four shots fired by my hand. I’d forgotten that for a moment, but the men hadn’t. Their rough, simple thank-you felt better than the suds lathering my skin.
“You must be one of the civilian guides,” I called through the door to the man outside, soaping my hair. “Do you know what’s happening in the rest of the eastern sector?”
He gave me the results of the attack as I finished washing my hair. “My company is south a ways from Gildendorf,” he finished. “What’s a name like Gildendorf doing so near Odessa, anyway?”
I smiled, rinsing off. “That’s very interesting, actually—”
“You’ll be sorry you asked,” Lena groaned, stealing my soap.
“I found out the town was settled eighty years or so ago by German settlers—hence the Teutonic influence. You can see it in the local nomenclature on their gravestones,” I added, brightening at the bit of historical trivia I’d managed to glean.
“Gravestones?” The baritone voice now sounded bemused. “When were you sightseeing cemeteries in between taking out machine-gun nests?”
“When I was reconnoitering the best position to fire. I’ve been reading Combat in Finland; you know in the Karelian forests, the Finnish snipers did target shooting from trees? Very interesting. It’s why they got the nickname cuckoos—”
“You’re the one who’s cuckoo.” Lena pitched my shirt at me, and I pulled it over my scrubbed, glowing skin.
“—so I found a graveyard,” I went on over her, still talking through the door. It had been so long since Mila the student had had a chance to emerge from her cave, instead of Mila the sniper （when I was fighting） or Mila the mother （when I was writing letters home）。 “Germans, I tell you, those settlers couldn’t even dig graves without putting them all in fanatically straight lines like rulers. I staked out with my rifle in the tree, right over the tombstone of Bürgermeister Wilhelm Schmidt, who died in 1899—”
“Would that explain this fetching outfit piled at the door?” Definitely laughter in the baritone voice now. “I’ve seen camouflage before, but this stuff . . .”
“I worked all night on that!” Bits of netting and brown sackcloth and old green uniform material, cut painstakingly into ribbons and sewn down all over my jacket—I’d remembered my lessons from the scarred instructor, who used to disappear into a meadow in a pair of unspeakable yellow-green hooded overalls sewn with leaves, and challenge the class to spot him. We’d give up after an hour, eyes aching, and he’d invariably pop up from a bush three feet away, smirking. I hadn’t had a chance to use my camouflage skills on the steppe, since there was hardly anything to camouflage into, but the wooded areas around Gildendorf had given me trees and foliage to hide among. “And you shouldn’t laugh at it, because I got the machine-gun nest.”
“Then she fell out of the tree,” Lena called through the door.
“Nine meters.” I buttoned up my shirt, yanked my trousers and belt into place. “Right on the tombstone of Bürgermeister Wilhelm Schmidt, died 1899.”
“Next time you read a book that tells you to climb trees dressed like a Finnish cuckoo,” Lena said, “don’t assume you can fly like one.”
I made a face and swung out of the bathhouse, carrying my boots. Leaning up against the banya wall was my pack with my hat, the little packet of wolfberry leaves I hadn’t been too busy to pick for Slavka, and my rifle, twined in maple leaves and vines to disguise her sharp clean lines. I slung her over my shoulder, then looked up at the man I’d been chatting with through a door. He’d shrugged into dilapidated boots, old trousers, and an even older shirt missing a button at the throat, and he looked about thirty-five in contrast to all the uniformed boys of nineteen and twenty. Definitely one of the local civilians drafted as army scouts.