I made a quick escape when the assembly was dismissed. Somehow I knew Alexei would be looking for me—he’d have lined me up like a trick shot the moment he saw me step forward to make my speech—and I made a bolt into some tangled brush at the side of the makeshift parade ground. “Mila?” His voice floated over the air, the voice that still had the power to make my teeth grit, and I sank down noiselessly against a toppled tree. I’d outwait him, sit here until he got tired of the game and went back to his battalion. After so many stakeouts I could outwait Father Time, much less an irksome husband.
I didn’t dare smoke until I saw Alexei’s fair head move away. Lighting up and inhaling gratefully, I remembered what a prig I’d been when I came to the front, turning my nose up with a sniffy I don’t smoke. I looked back on that woman—the library researcher, the graduate student, the aspiring historian—and barely knew her. I’d been nearly six months now in the school of war.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen a woman smoke a pipe,” Kitsenko said behind me. I could have told him I preferred to be alone, but if I was sitting with my company commander, my husband couldn’t hunker down if he found me, so I didn’t object when Kostia’s friend leaned against the tree at my side. It had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with his shoulders.
“Where’d you get that?” he asked, nodding at the pipe in my hand as he took out a pack of cigarettes.
“Vartanov. He gave it to me after our first sortie.” It was an old Turkish pipe carved of pear root, with an amber mouthpiece—a beautiful thing, clearly the last object of value he possessed. I preferred cigarettes, but he’d offered it with such fierce, tremulous pride, I knew better than to give it back. It was a decoration earned and won; I’d take it over Machine Gunner Onilova’s Order of the Red Banner any day. “I’m trying to learn how to pack it, so I can at least use it where he can see.”
“Isn’t that shag tobacco a bit strong?” Kitsenko lit up a Kazbek cigarette.
“I’ve got used to it.”
“It’s funny,” Kitsenko said, exhaling smoke into the frosty sky. “Good-looking women usually don’t smoke pipes.”
“In other words, I must be ugly and unusual.” I said it with a grin, because I was feeling anything but ugly right now. In fact I was feeling delightfully feminine for the first time in months. Maybe since we’d first laid eyes on each other, flirting at the banya’s door.
“The fact that you’re unusual is well known to the entire 54th by now.” Kitsenko blew a smoke ring. “The question of looks, well, that’s complex. Ideals are dictated by time, fashion, custom. For me”—he looked at me very seriously—“I’ve never met a prettier hedge.”
I couldn’t help it; I burst out laughing. He punched the air as though he’d won a victory lap.
“Why are you trying so hard with me?” I asked, still laughing, giving up on the pipe. “There may not be many women in the regiment, but there are enough. And they’re all softer targets than me.”
“Less interesting targets.”
“Why?” I took the cigarette he offered. “Do you have some romantic idea about snipers? Felling the woman who’s felled more than two hundred men?” I was starting to encounter this notion among some of the more idiotic young officers. Some vaguely articulated notion that a woman who had killed so many in cold blood had to be, I don’t know, hot under her knapsack?
“That’s the thing.” Kitsenko surveyed me, thoughtful. “A woman sniper with two hundred marks in her tally—it conjures up a very specific image. And you . . .”
“I match your imaginings?”
“Not in the slightest. I pictured someone a bit like Kostia’s half sister. I met her last year when I visited him in Irkutsk; no idea how I survived the experience. You’ll have to get Kostia to tell you about his complicated family history, but his father didn’t exactly marry his mother. The old man lives out on Lake Baikal with a pack of Kostia’s half brothers and sisters, one of whom came to Irkutsk for flight school—”