It was something people kept saying, over the next week. Vartanov said it, tugging his gray beard: The feet of a lynx and the luck of the devil! Fyodor said it, wringing my hands between his huge paws. The rest of my platoon said it when they managed to trek in on their off-hours, giving news from the front. “Don’t you say it,” I warned Kostia when he appeared. “Don’t you tell me how lucky I am.”
The corner of his mouth tilted, and he unslung a gleaming Mosin-Nagant from his shoulder. “Your new rifle. I insisted on a Three Line. They tried to stick you with a Sveta.”
“Who on earth thinks a rifle with a muzzle flash like a searchlight is a good weapon for a sniper?”
“That’s what I said.” He sat at the foot of my bed without another word, taking out his Finnish combat knife and needle file. I could see he’d already put considerable time into making it battle-ready. He’d watched me strip and oil my old rifle hundreds of times; he knew I’d removed the wood along the length of the handguard groove so that it no longer touched the barrel; he knew I preferred to insert padding between the receiver and the magazine; he knew I kept the tip of the gunstock filed down. I nearly wept, watching his hands work, and felt the words hovering at the tip of my tongue: When I get out of this bed and take that rifle up, I’m going to die.
But I couldn’t say it to Kostia; he was my partner, my shadow, the one who was supposed to keep me from dying. When my fate came for me, he was going to blame himself—so I let the words wither, letting myself sink instead into Kostia’s snow-soft silence whenever he visited my hospital cot, sliding in and out of a doze, feeling the comforting weight of the new Three Line’s barrel against my leg as he worked on it through each of his visits, patiently making it mine. When a leader has doubts about herself in wartime, even if she’s just a sergeant, she can’t reveal them to her men. I’d learned that, leading my platoon.
I shouldn’t reveal such doubts to my officers, either, but Kitsenko had a way of surprising things out of me.
“You’re not dying,” he said from the doorway on my sixth day in hospital, startling me as I frowned at a bowl of broth. “Have some chocolate,” he added, taking out a paper-wrapped bar as he came to sit on a too-low stool by my cot. “Proper Belgian stuff. One of my sergeants plucked it from the pack of a dead German lieutenant yesterday afternoon. I pulled rank unashamedly and stole it for you.”
I blinked, surprised to see him here. “The German attack, aren’t you—”
“The attack on the 54th eased yesterday. I’m free and easy until they come pulsing back at us like the maggots they are.” His face was grained and his uniform rumpled and splattered as though he’d come right from the front lines, but his smile was still cheerful as he looked down at me. “You’re not dying,” he repeated, unwrapping the chocolate for me.
“Why do you keep saying that?”
“Because when I was hauling you off the front lines, you wouldn’t believe me. Kept muttering, I’m dead, I’m dying. I thought I’d try to pound the truth into you now that you’re a bit more conscious. You’re not dying,” he finished, and broke a square off the bar.
I slipped it into my mouth. Belgian chocolate, the real stuff, not the chalky blocks of army chocolate I was used to. The sweetness in my mouth brought tears to my eyes. “Maybe this time didn’t kill me,” I found myself saying, almost inaudibly. “The next one will.”
I expected him to say something hearty: You’ll bag many more for the motherland, don’t you worry! Or perhaps I’d get a stern reprimand about defeatism. Instead he broke off another piece of chocolate and pushed it at me, asking, “How do you figure that?”
I chewed, swallowed. Tucked my ragged hair behind my ear. “They say the third wound kills you.”
“Who’s they, and who says they know everything?”
“You know what I mean.”