Surely.
SEVASTOPOL. I CAME to the white city with my red hands and my battered heart, and I stood in wonder. It wasn’t even a quarter of the size of bustling, cosmopolitan Odessa, but its public gardens and lanes of red-gold trees were still untouched by war. The stone walls of the ancient twin forts guarding the entrance to the main bay hadn’t yet been pocked by German mortars; the blue dome of St. Vladimir’s Cathedral gleamed whole and pristine. People strolled the streets after work, went to public baths, bought tickets to see Tractor Drivers or Minin and Pozharsky at the local cinemas. A beautiful city—and one I quickly tired of, because I couldn’t get out of it.
First I was ordered to recuperate with the medical battalion until my scalp wound healed. Then to my exasperation, I couldn’t find a single officer who could tell me where my regiment had gone. “You can’t just lose an entire regiment,” I protested to a harried-looking staff officer. “Did you lose the whole coastal army as well?”
“That is defeatist talk,” he said stiffly. “Don’t you have friends in high places, Pavlichenko? Go talk to them.” But October was over by the time Major General Petrov arrived in Sevastopol along with his staff at the coastal defense command post, and more days yet before I could obtain even a three-minute meeting.
“Greetings, Lyudmila Mikhailovna.” He was doing about eight things at once, white dust of the Crimean roads still frosting his general’s stars, but he smiled through the pince-nez perched on his nose. “How are you feeling?”
I was yearning for Kostia and my squad like a missing limb, but that wasn’t what he was asking. “Fully recovered, Comrade Major General.” My stitches were out, and my hair was already growing back over the shaved area around the scar. If I placed my cap carefully, you’d never know it was there.
“So, are we going to beat the Nazis in Sevastopol?”
“Absolutely, Comrade Major General.”
“I’m making you a senior sergeant, and I want you commanding a sniper platoon when you rejoin your regiment. Which is”—
followed by some murmuring from an aide—“somewhere on the road between Yalta and Gurzuf. See the staff headquarters for your documents, and the quartermaster for winter gear.” He hesitated. “Make sure you get a pistol.”
“I have my rifle, Comrade Major General—”
“Get a Tula-Tokarev for close quarters. Eight shots. Seven for the enemy, if they come on you by surprise. The last one . . .” His face was suddenly stony. “It’s the Hitlerites we’re fighting now, not the Romanians. Germans don’t take snipers prisoner; they shoot them on sight. And for the women . . .”
Better not to be taken alive. The unspoken words hung in the air like drops of ice. Was that what awaited me in Sevastopol—death at my own hand, to avoid gang rape and execution? Even with my tally of one hundred and eighty-seven dead enemies behind me, a thread of fear wormed through my stomach. I’d done all my shooting in flat steppes where visibility was excellent, and my targets had been thickly bunched, easily flustered Romanian soldiers. This was the Crimea, a dense wooded country full of secrets, and my targets were Hitlerites. Highly trained Germans captained by fanatical officers drilled into hatred of anyone who didn’t belong to their master race. Who shot or starved captured Russian soldiers in their prisoner-of-war camps rather than treat them like the British or French soldiers. Who would rape a woman to death if they caught her alive, just for the sin of stepping outside Kinder, Kirche, Küche to kill an enemy who had invaded her country.
I swallowed, saluting. “I’ll make sure I’m never without a pistol from now on, Comrade Major General.”
Nearly another week before I could rejoin my regiment in the Mekenzi Hills—the third defense sector, lying between the Belbek and Chornaya Rivers, more than twenty kilometers outside Sevastopol. I made my way first by truck in a group of new arrivals, then on foot as they dropped me at a nest of dugouts and thickly forested paths, asking directions from the rushing soldiers around me. I was longing to see Sergienko’s familiar lugubrious face and tease him about how if he got any grayer he’d look embalmed, but I got a shock at the command post.