“Look at it all,” I told them quietly, stepping over the smoldering fragments of a gun placement. “But then forget it. Because we will have to do it all again.” All this fire and blood had bought us only a kilometer and a half of ground, and the Romanians still had eighteen divisions to our four.
That was the battle, and I fought in it, and when I read accounts of it, I could remember the broader strokes. But Tatarka would forever be bound up for me not in a battle, but in a girl named Maria.
“The Kabachenko homestead.” Captain Sergienko’s thumb marked it out on the map. “Overlooking the road from Ovidiopolye to Odessa, not far from the railway tracks, used as a command post by the enemy machine-gun battalion. They’ve abandoned it for now. You and your squad”—nodding at me—“take two hundred cartridges each, hold it as long as you can.” He went on to divvy up the other advance posts, and I went to prepare my informally grouped squad. I was a sergeant now, and of the fourteen men I’d been given to train, I’d cut four. Of the ten left, I had eight decent shooters, and two who might make real snipers.
They were singing as they swung along behind me toward the Kabachenko homestead—“Merry Wind,” from the Vaynshtok film The Children of Captain Grant. “Never saw that one,” I remarked to Kostia, who was padding along in his usual place at my elbow, and he gave me his silent smile. He was my partner now, and he was rarely more than an arm’s length away from me, but I still knew nothing about him except that he’d come from Irkutsk and now had a tally of thirty-six. He didn’t boast of his numbers or his kills any more than I did—that, even more than his sharp eyes and wolf-prowl tread, was what told me I’d chosen my partner well. War highlights the true essence of every person, and as little as I knew about Kostia, I knew his essence was bedrock.
The homestead was single-storied with a red-tiled roof, an orchard spreading beyond up a gentle slope. Secure that slope and we could keep a watch on the road, fire on any who advanced . . . My squad split around the burnt-out wreck of an enemy truck and overturned motorbike, an armored transport with a torn track. The woman who answered my knock at the door looked fifty, erect and bitter-eyed in a gray headscarf. “I don’t often see soldiers in the command of a woman,” she answered my greeting stiffly. “Serafima Nikanorovna. Come in.” She must have known we’d have to come in and avail ourselves of her stores regardless of whether she invited us or not, but she made a rigid little gesture of welcome anyway. “Of course you may share what we have.”
What they’d had, before the fascists came, was one of those beautiful little farms you see all over the countryside: a cozy farmhouse with a husband and wife, sons and daughter, all tending the vegetable garden, the chicken coop, and the pigpen. Then the enemy had come, and they’d rifled the vegetables, rounded up the chickens, and slaughtered the pigs. As for the family, the two sons had been beaten black and blue, the father had an arm in a clumsy sling, and the daughter was sitting wrapped in shawls beside the window, staring vacantly at the field behind the homestead. One of my men approached her with a friendly bow—the young ox named Fyodor Sedykh who had first challenged me, and the next best shot I had after Kostia—but she shrank away with a wordless cry. Fyodor, a nice boy and not too bright, withdrew with a puzzled look as the girl’s mother gave him a sharp glance.
“Our military units all withdrew from this area in September.” Serafima’s voice was hard as she slapped down a plate of sauerkraut and salted pickles. “They left us to the mercy of the fascists. I made my Maria hide behind the pigpen, but the invaders found her anyway. My Maria, who used to dream of going to Odessa and becoming an actress in films. They—” The girl’s mother broke off abruptly, looking at me with furious eyes. “Four of them. Four. Where were you then, Comrade Sergeant?”
I wanted to tell her the war wasn’t lost; that it was just beginning. I wanted to tell her we had been holding the line at Odessa for over two months; that thousands of invaders had died trying to take the Black Sea steppes. But the words crumbled to dust on my tongue. I stood and let her harangue me as long as she wanted, and when she was done, I crossed to the window where seventeen-year-old Maria sat with her eyes like fields of ash. She’d shrunk from Fyodor, but she let me kneel beside her.