“Every man should know how to shoot,” I could hear Alexei telling our son as I came closer. He was showing Slavka how to hold a rifle far too large for him, and his voice had that expansive cadence I remembered so well. There was nothing my husband liked better than explaining things to people who knew less than him. “Though inborn abilities are required to be a true expert, of course.”
“What kind of abilities, Papa?” Slavka was round-eyed, looking up at this golden stranger he hardly knew. A man who had walked out of his life without a backward glance when he was just six weeks old.
“Patience. A good eye. A steady hand, and a precise feel for the tool in your grip. That’s why your papa’s such a good shot—he has a surgeon’s touch.” Alexei flashed a smile downward, and Slavka’s eyes got even rounder. “Now you try—”
“Slavka,” I called, striding down the firing line, careful to keep behind the shooters. “Give that rifle back. You’re too young to be handling weapons that large.”
Slavka started guiltily, but Alexei didn’t look surprised to see me or my thunderous face. “Hello there,” he said easily, brushing a lock of fair hair off his tall forehead. He loomed a head above me: thirty-six, lean and golden, his teeth showing white in his easy smile. “You’re looking lovely, kroshka.”
I didn’t bother asking him not to call me that—he already knew it made my hackles rise. For about one week during our marriage I had found it adorable when he called me his bread crumb—“Because you’re such a little bit of a thing, Mila!”—but it hadn’t taken me long to realize a crumb was something that could be flicked away into a dustbin. A piece of trash.
“You shouldn’t have taken Slavka out without me,” I said instead, as evenly as possible. The pulse of fear was still beating through me, even at the sight of my boy safe and sound. I didn’t really think Alexei would try to steal our son away from me, but such things weren’t unheard of. At the factory where I’d worked when Slavka was a baby, one of the lathe operators had wept and raged when her former husband swooped their daughter out of school and took her off to Leningrad without any warning. She never got the girl back; her husband had too many Party friends in his pocket. These things happened.
“Relax, Mila.” Alexei’s smile broadened, and that was when the fear in my stomach started curling into anger. He knew I’d been afraid; he knew, and he rather enjoyed it. “Who’s going to teach a boy to shoot if his father doesn’t do it?”
“I know how to shoot, I can—”
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” Another amused glance. “You’re here now. Here to spoil the fun!”
I saw him throw a wink over my head to some friend behind me. Women! that wink said. Always spoiling a man’s fun, am I right? I busied myself pulling off my gloves and disentangling myself from my winter coat, aware I was the only woman standing on the firing line. Females stood at the back, applauding when their brothers or boyfriends or husbands sank a shot. From Lenin on down, Soviet men have always talked a good game about women standing shoulder to shoulder with their men in every field society had to offer, but when it came to children being tended, dishes being scrubbed, or applause being given, I had always observed that it was still female hands doing most of the tending, scrubbing, and clapping. Not that I questioned such a thing overly much: it was simply the way of the world, and always had been.
“Mamochka?” Slavka looked up at me anxiously.
“Give that weapon back, please,” I said quietly, brushing a hand over his hair to make it plain I wasn’t angry at him. “You’re too little for a rifle that size.”
“No, he’s not,” Alexei scoffed, taking the weapon. “Baby him like that and you’ll never make a man of him. Watch me load, Slavka . . .”
Alexei’s hands moved swiftly, loading the TOZ-8. It was his hands I’d noticed first, when I saw him at that dance—a surgeon’s hands, long-fingered and precise, working with absolute skill and focus. What, you can’t say no when a tall blond man smiles at you? my mother scolded when she learned I was pregnant—but it wasn’t Alexei Pavlichenko’s height or his charm or even his hands that had drawn me into his arms. It was his skill, his focus, his drive—so different from the boys my age, all horseplay and careless talk. Alexei hadn’t been a boy, he’d been a man over thirty who knew what he wanted—and what he wanted, he trained for; aimed for; got. I’d seen that in him that first night, young and laughing as I was in my flimsy violet dress. Barely fifteen years old.