“Is this going somewhere, Comrade Lieutenant?” I asked, out to sea.
“Bear with me. So Kostia and I bumped into this half sister Nina in Irkutsk; he barely knew her himself, but he introduced me. That girl just about gave me nightmares. Little feral thing with eyes like razors, practically picking her teeth with a human bone, absolutely capable of tearing your throat out with her bare hands. That,” Kitsenko concluded, “is the kind of woman you imagine when you hear the words woman sniper with two hundred kills. Some wild thing from the Siberian wastes with icy eyes and no more conscience than a wolf.”
“What leads you to conclude that?” I tilted my head. “Why imagine that’s what a woman sniper would be—cold, unemotional, savage? You don’t know me or any other woman sniper, so what makes you think we have to be a certain way? Look a certain way?”
“It’s just surprising to meet a woman with two hundred lives to her name and find a history student with the world’s most boring dissertation in her pack and the softest brown eyes ever to paint crosshairs on a man’s heart.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, except that my own heart was thumping in a way it usually didn’t bother to do unless I was just back from a hunt. “How do you know anything about my dissertation?” I finally managed to say. “For your information, it is not at all boring.”
“Your dissertation is famous throughout the entire company, Sergeant. Brave men leap into live fire zones when they see you haul it out. Soldiers with the Order of Lenin falter and grow pale—”
“Insulting my dissertation, now that’s a sure way into a woman’s bedroll!”
His smile quirked. “Did you miss the bit about your eyes?”
“Even if you have very pretty compliments about my eyes, I’m not interested in being anyone’s front-line fling. For all I know, you’ve got a wife at home, or a fiancée, or a whole string of would-be-either.”
“I’m not seeing any other hedges at the moment, on my honor. I’m a very monogamous sort of shrub.”
“They all say that.”
“I suppose they do,” he admitted.
“Then sometimes if you say no, they threaten to demote you.”
“I won’t do that, Lyudmila. If you say no from now until the war’s end, I won’t do that.” He cocked his head. “You’ve really been threatened with demotion if you didn’t—”
“Of course I have.” Twice, in fact. I’d been less concerned with being demoted and more concerned about being raped by my own officers if I continued to say no. Such things happened. Lena patched those women up afterward in the hospital battalion, but of course no report was ever made.
“With your record, you should have been standing up with that little machine gunner getting an Order of the Red Banner of your own, not fending off demotion from your own officers.” For the first time since I’d met him, this lighthearted lieutenant looked angry. It took the form of a cloud with him, as though rain gusts had rolled behind those blue eyes and broad high cheekbones and crystallized into a storm front. “I’ll put your name up. With a tally like
yours—”
I shrugged, drawing deep on the cigarette. “I’ll take any decoration I’ve earned, but that’s not why I do it.”
“Why do you do it, then?”
“Really, now. Would you ask any of the men that?”
“I would, and I do,” he said, surprising me. “I ask all new men why they volunteered, if they did. I want to know who the patriots are, who are the fanatics are, who the desperate are . . .”
“But they’ll all say the same thing. I do it for Comrade Stalin and the motherland.”