“You never used to spend much time at the range. What made you want to get so good at it?” I pushed out a note of grudging admiration for his marksmanship. “You’re a surgeon; you know what happens to muscles and organs when they take a bullet. You used to tell me about patching wounds like that.”
“Soon there will be war, don’t you know that?” Reloading the Melkashka. “When that day comes, they’ll need a gun in every hand.”
“Not yours.” As long as I could remember, my father had been shaking his head and saying, One day there will be war, but it hadn’t happened yet. “If war comes, you won’t be a soldier.”
My husband frowned. “You think I’m not capable?”
“I mean a surgeon like you is too valuable to waste on the front line,” I said quickly, recognizing my mistake. I hadn’t lived with Alexei in so long, I’d forgotten how to flatter his pride. “You’ll be running a battlefield hospital, not pulling a trigger on command like a blind monkey.”
His frown disappeared, and he raised the rifle. “A man sees chances in war, Mila. Chances he doesn’t get in ordinary life. I intend to be ready.”
He fired off another shot, not quite hitting the bull’s-eye. “Good shot, Papa,” Slavka said breathlessly, running back up.
Alexei ruffled his hair. Two young girls at the back were watching, winding their curls around their fingers, and maybe my husband saw their admiration, because he squatted down beside his son and said, “Let me show you.”
That was the very first thing he’d said to me. To little Mila Belova, just past her fifteenth birthday and careening happily through a drafty dance hall, entranced by the music and the laughter and the violet dress swirling about my legs. I was dancing with a girlfriend, both of us eyeing the boys showing off across the room, and then the song changed to something slower, more formal . . . and a toweringly tall man with fair hair pulled me neatly away from my girlfriend and into the curve of his arm, saying, “Let me show you . . .” Later he spread his coat on the grass outside the dance hall for me to sit and told me he meant to be a great man someday. I’ll make the name Pavlichenko resound from Moscow to Vladivostok. He’d grinned to show he was joking, but I knew he wasn’t. Not really.
I can see it now, I’d replied, laughing. Alexei Pavlichenko, Hero of the Soviet Union! He burned bright with ambition, so bright he’d dazzled me. Looking at him now in the winter dimness of the shooting range, remembering how he’d taken my hand soon afterward and guided it as he whispered Let me show you something else . . . well. I could still admire the fire of ambition in him, much as I disliked him, but I couldn’t feel even a flicker of the old bedazzlement.
“No, no,” Alexei was telling Slavka, impatience lacing his voice. “Don’t let the butt sag, sock it back against the shoulder—”
“He’s too little,” I said quietly. “He can’t reach.”
“He’s seven years old, he can hold a rifle like a man—”
“He’s five.”
“Head up, Slavka, don’t be a baby. Don’t cringe!” he snapped.
“Sorry, Papa.” My son was struggling to support the heavy birch stock, trying so hard to please this golden father he hardly ever saw. “Like this?”
Alexei laughed. “Look at you, jumpy as a rabbit.” He put his finger over Slavka’s chubby one on the trigger, pulling. My son flinched at the report, and Alexei laughed again. “You’re not scared of a little bang, are you?”
“That’s enough.” I took the rifle away, pulling Slavka against my side. “Alexei, Slavka and I are going now. And if I set another appointment to finalize the divorce, kindly be there.”
I spoke too curtly. I should have been soft, said Please be there or Won’t you be there? The cautious wordsmithing of a woman stepping lightly around a man who has the upper hand, and might use it to lash out—no poet ever agonized over the crafting of a sentence more carefully.