A long silence as my partner rolled a stem of grass between his fingers. “I believe in books,” he said finally.
“Just books?”
“Books—and friends.”
“But you’re a loner like me.” Fyodor and the others were always wrestling and joking in a pack like friendly dogs, but Kostia could usually be found by himself, reading or tending his rifle in his own patch of silence. I was the same way. I liked company, I liked to laugh, but after a point I needed solitude.
“We’re loners,” Kostia said. “But we have friends who would die for us. And we’d die for them.”
I wondered what merry Sofya was doing right now back in Odessa, or prickly Vika. “I don’t think my friends from before the war would know me anymore.” Mila the library researcher was a long way from Mila the soldier.
“You’d start talking about Bogdan Khmelnitsky.” A smile gleamed briefly in Kostia’s shadowed face. “Then they’d know you.”
I laughed, picking up the jug of home brew. At supper that night, we’d drunk it out of cut-glass goblets Serafima had proudly taken out from a chest that had somehow escaped the German raid. Now I swigged directly from the jug and coughed. “I swear this is tank fuel.”
“Give it over.” Kostia took a long swallow, looking back up at the slow dance of stars. “What do you believe in, Mila?”
I thought about that, feeling the burn of rough liquor in my throat. “Knowledge, to light the path for humankind,” I said at last. “And this”—patting my rifle—“to protect humankind when we lose that path.”
“You lead us down the path,” Kostia said, “I’ll have your back.”
THE 1ST BATTALION had driven the enemy out of Tatarka, but my squad and I found ourselves in the thick of the fighting when we rejoined the ranks, flung headlong against three enemy battalions by the railway line. Bombs were falling like summer rain all around our trench; half-deafened and half-blinded, I was struggling with my rifle’s dust-fouled bolt when something sang very close to my ear, a silver chime of warning. And suddenly I couldn’t see; blood was ribboning down my face, sewing my left eye closed, sliding over my lips. I tasted copper and salt.
Just need one eye to shoot, I thought sluggishly, still tugging at my fouled bolt. The blood kept coming, and I wasn’t hearing anything at all out of my left ear. Dimly, I watched my hands drop the rifle and fumble for the first-aid kit at my belt; I managed to clap a wad of bandaging to my face but winding it round my head seemed impossible. If this din would let up, this dust—I couldn’t see—
“Mila.” Kostia’s voice, very calm. “Look at me.” My partner pressed what was apparently a cut in my hair above the forehead; pain went through me in a bolt. He wound the bandage around my head, and I wanted to joke: You’ve had my back—now you have my head! But everything around me was sinking into fog. And for the second time, I woke up in a hospital cot.
“Want a souvenir, sleepyhead?” Lena dropped a blackened piece of jagged-edged metal into my hand. “That’s what sliced your scalp open.”
I looked down at the mortar splinter, hardly bigger than a matchstick. A little lower and it would have gone through my eye socket—I’d be one of the hundred and fifty of my regiment who would never leave Tatarka.
“Who’s gone?” I asked Lena, folding my fingers around the splinter. “Who died this time, while I was unconscious?”
She lit a cigarette, gaunt and gray-faced after what I could only imagine were frantic, endless hours tending the nonstop flood of wounded. “Private Bazarbayev took a bullet to the heart.”
One of my sniper trainees. He hadn’t been very good, but he’d tried—how hard he’d tried. I felt the metal splinter’s sharp edges dig into my palm as my fingers tightened. “Who else?”