“You’re retreating?” she said, sounding stunned.
“Withdrawing to a place of better strength,” I said, repeating the official line, hating it.
“Retreating.” Her voice flattened out. “Abandoning Odessa.”
“At least I’m fighting,” I flared. “Didn’t you dancers get evacuated to safety? Must be nice to be a Bolshoi-trained demi-soloist.” I knew I was being unfair, but her contempt stung me.
“I’ve quit the ballet. My brother, I—” Vika drew an unsteady breath. “Grigory’s dead. He didn’t even make it two months in the tank corps.”
Her twin, her dance partner, her other half. “I’m sorry,” I said, regretting my sharpness.
“Sofya’s dead too. A stray bomb.”
“Sofya?” I whispered, feeling my stomach wrench.
“She wanted to be a teacher,” Vika said tonelessly. “She had all these didactic little studies on group play that were going to encourage cooperation in the four-to-seven age group. Who kills someone like that, Mila? A teacher? Or a boy like my brother, who could dance the Bluebird variation like an angel?”
“Fascists,” I said. Fascists had now killed half the little quartet who’d been sitting at the Pushkin Street café that afternoon war broke out. I’d thought the rage banked in my stomach had subsided to ash, but it turned over in a flicker of renewed heat as I saw Vika’s bleak eyes.
My column was starting to move; the blockage with the artillery carts had been cleared. “Take care,” I told her awkwardly. “Can’t let the invaders stop the Dragonfly from dancing. Or was it the Nightingale? The Star?”
“Does it matter? No one needs dragonflies and stars now. What we need is killers.” She gave a bleak smile. “At least we have you.”
The dancer turned and walked up the shattered street, head erect, toes turned out, and I continued my retreat toward the sea.
The port looked like Babylon before the fall: army trucks swarming everywhere, tractor units pulling howitzers and tanks, thousands upon thousands of soldiers. The water was choked with ships from the steamer service and the Black Sea Fleet; in the pitch-dark I shuffled up the gangplank of the Zhan Zhores, which loomed before me like a long black wall rising sheer above the quay. The heaving mass of wounded funneled below, down to the crew mess room. I sat clutching my pack and fighting waves of dizziness as the tugs began leading the vessel away from the wharf, the ship shuddering like a whale lumbering toward the open sea. Through the porthole I saw leaping flickers of red and gold—Odessa’s huge portside warehouses were aflame. Deliberate, to leave nothing to the fascists, or an accident with the gas cans? Either way, no one was rushing to put the fires out. There was no one left; everyone who could leave Odessa was abandoning her. My last sight of the city where I’d enlisted as a soldier was to watch it going up in flames as I slunk away over the Black Sea.
My rage rose, and rose, and rose.
“Comrade,” the third mate scolded, seeing me take out my cigarettes in shaking hands. “No smoking down here.”
“Then tell me where,” I snarled. The mess room already smelled of sweat and nervousness, the air loud with shouts and the shuffle of boots. My skin crawled, crying out for solitude.
“Quarterdeck, at the stern.”
“Quarterdeck? What’s that? How do you have a quarter of a deck?” He began some deeply technical answer; I exhaled the last of my patience. “Tell me. Where. I can smoke.”
He saw the look on my face. “The back of the ship, at the top.”
I fought my way through the crowd out of the mess room, continuing above deck to the smoking area. Sailors and medical orderlies stood in clusters, smoke curling upward. We weren’t just leaving Odessa, I thought—we were leaving Gildendorf, the Kabachenko homestead, Tatarka; the battlefields that had turned me into what I was now. Whatever that was. Sergeant Pavlichenko, as I heard every day? The woman sniper, as General Petrov had called me? Lady Death, as Lena called me? I shook the names away on the wind, squinting over the dark ocean toward where Odessa was vanishing like a mirage.