“Yes, but it’s how they say it—that still tells me something.” He nudged me. “So why did you enlist?”
“For Comrade Stalin and the motherland,” I intoned.
He gave me a serious look, waiting. I hesitated.
“For my son.” That I admitted it surprised me. Hardly anyone outside my platoon knew I had a son. I didn’t talk about Slavka; couldn’t talk about him. It felt like I was soiling him, bringing his name into this reeking world of death and mud and gunsmoke. “If I don’t fight, he won’t have a world to grow up in.”
Kitsenko tapped ash off his cigarette. “Do you have a picture?”
I pulled it out, surprising myself again. “My Slavka.” A formal photo taken when he was seven, sitting upright with his favorite wooden boat clutched in his hands, dark hair brushed sleek. “He looks nothing like that now,” I said softly. “So much taller, getting gawky . . . at least he was when I last saw him. Who knows how much he’s changed by now?” If I was killed here—and more often these days, I thought when I was killed here—I’d never learn the answer to that question.
If Lieutenant Kitsenko had attempted to put his arm around me then, I would have bristled and snarled like a badger. He just gazed at the photograph, pretending not to notice me fighting for self-control. “A beautiful boy,” he said, handing the photograph back when I had my face straightened out. “He looks like you.”
“I . . .” Another fight to push the tears back as I tucked my son’s picture back into my breast pocket. “I promised him I’d think about him every day. But days go by when I don’t think of him at all. Does that make me a bad mother? Even—” I had to stop, breathing unsteadily. “Even when I’m collecting leaves and flowers to send him in my letters, I don’t think about him. I can’t think about him, not here. He doesn’t belong here. So I put him away in a locked room in my mind, and I seal it off.”
“You do what you have to. We all do.” Kitsenko cocked his head down at me. “How old is he?”
“Nine.” I could see Kitsenko doing the math. “I was very young when he was born, yes.” Hearing my voice grow brittle as I dashed at my eyes. “Too young.”
“I couldn’t help notice a Lieutenant Pavlichenko in the receiving line for a decoration.” My company commander exhaled smoke. “Your former husband?”
I didn’t answer, not wanting to get into the complicated history of the divorce that never quite happened. I just took a long, savage draw of smoke down into my lungs. We leaned against the tree side by side until the last of the voices faded in the distance, the last of the cars drove away, and then Kitsenko tossed his cigarette butt down and ground it out. “I’ll give you a lift back.”
“I’ll make my own way.” If Kostia rode back with his company commander, everyone would know they were friends when rank wasn’t in the way. If I rode back with my company commander, everyone would assume he was sleeping with me.
“I’ll drop you off two hundred meters from camp so you can walk in alone,” he said, reading my mind perfectly.
I hesitated. “Thank you.”
His cheeks creased. “About that kiss—”
“You’re not getting a kiss!”
“Is that a wager? Remember, I used to be a bookie.”
“You’ll have to catch me off guard, and I’m never off guard.”
“I’m patient. You can’t always have that rubber tube in your ear.”
“Sneaking up on a trained sniper to steal anything she doesn’t want to give you seems quite a stupid idea to me.” I saluted. “Good luck with that, Comrade Lieutenant.”