How often has he said that, drumming his lean fingers on the arm of his chair, eyes bright and ravenous to understand, to absorb, to learn? Often I tell him entirely more than he wants to hear, and he becomes annoyed about my persistence in the matter of my pet causes, but that has never stopped him from asking for my descriptions or me from giving them.
So I watch the Soviets over the breakfast table, compiling impressions for my husband even as I think of a thousand other things that will demand my attention the moment I am released from this room （the column I need to finish, the letter to Hick, the planned banquet for the National League of Women Voters, following up with the fund for Polish relief . . . ）。 Our Russian friends are dignified, grave, conscious of making a good impression—yet under the dignity I sense fragility. The Soviets did not only send students for my international conference, and they did not send granite-hard Soviet supermen, either. They sent war-weary veterans who have suffered. Look at us, they are saying with every move and every gesture. We eat bacon and pancakes with the same delight you do; we laugh at the same jokes you do; we plan and hope and dream just like you do . . . and we’re being bled dry by Hitler’s tanks and bombs and planes. See us as the allies you call us. Help us.
That is the real purpose of their visit, of course. To make us understand how much they need aid, how much they need a second front . . .
And there are those here in Washington who will do anything—anything at all—to stop Franklin from giving it to them.
Nine Months Ago
December 1941
The Sevastopol front, USSR
Mila
Chapter 16
My memoir, the official version: Being a woman in the army has its difficulties. In male company one must be strict: no flirting, no teasing, no games, not ever.
My memoir, the unofficial version: Well. About that . . .
“STOP,” I WHEEZED, wiping at my eyes. “My stitches are killing me.”
Kostia and Lyonya paid absolutely no attention. They were fighting a mock duel up and down the ward, brandishing rolls of bandaging for sabers and bedpans for shields. “Yield, you cur!” Lyonya shouted with some Errol Flynn sweeps of the bandage roll—something told me he’d managed to sneak a look at a forbidden Western film reel or two. The entire ward was cheering: patients calling encouragement from their cots, Lena and the other orderlies staggering with mirth in the doorway. I tried to catch my breath and went off in another fit of laughter. I couldn’t remember when I’d laughed so much.
Kostia and Lyonya couldn’t visit me more than every few days, but when they did, elaborate high jinks always seemed to ensue. Last time Kostia taught us some labyrinthine dice game with a set of caribou-bone dice carved from a buck he’d shot when he was nine, and Lyonya fleeced us both out of every ruble we had before we figured out he was cheating. The time before that I was in need of a blood transfusion, and Lena ran a line directly from Kostia’s elbow into mine while Lyonya told ghoulish stories about night-walking upyr who sucked blood to survive: “Mila, keep an eye out if you start growing fangs. Of course Kostia won’t be able to tell, not with those wolf incisors . . .”
And today—
“Disarmed, you villain!” One of Lyonya’s wild parries sent Kostia’s bedpan buckler flying, and my partner gave a ghastly scream as the bandage-roll sword plunged dramatically toward his gut. He folded up around it, collapsed across the foot of my cot, and writhed there for a while in some obliging death throes as Lyonya took a bow and the ward cheered. A month ago I’d have sworn my taciturn partner had no gift for horseplay; now I applauded his dramatic demise as loudly as anyone else.
“You’d better not be too dead,” I told him. “I still need a partner when I get out of here.”
“And I need to make sure you have a platoon to come back to.” Kostia looked at his watch, rolled upright, and retrieved his cap. “I should get back. Your rifle’s almost battlefield ready,” he added.