And if Germans overran the motherland and subjected everyone I loved to live under a swastika, I’d never see it.
I was discharged in a steel-gray twilight a few days into the new year. Buttoning up my uniform, I saw how it hung loose on me, and in the sliver of mirror I could see how grained and ashy my skin had grown. “You look pretty,” Alexei said from just behind me. “Do you have much of a scar?”
“You’re losing your touch, Alexei.” I arranged my cap over my hair, feeling the puckered ridge on my scalp from my last trip to the hospital battalion. “Telling a woman she looks pretty while bringing up her scars.”
“At least this one doesn’t show, under that uniform.” He came a step closer. “You could show me, you know. Later, maybe. After dinner.”
“The scars under my uniform are none of your business. You are never, ever, going to see them.” I made a point of not stepping away from him. Alexei had done that so often when we were married; moved just a hair too close so I felt the urge to back up. I was done backing up. “If you’ll excuse me, Comrade Lieutenant.” Turning away from the mirror.
“I’m trying to compliment you, kroshka.” His hand dropped to my arm; he sounded irked. When Alexei Pavlichenko exerted himself for a woman, he expected his efforts to be greeted with smiles. “Can’t you appreciate that?”
“And I have invaders to target.” Yanking away. “Can’t you appreciate that?”
He laughed, the indulgent sound raking my ears. “Mila, really. You should—”
“Be going? Yes.” I straightened my collar, lifting my chin. “I don’t want your compliments. I don’t want your dinner invitations. I don’t want anything from you at all.”
“You want that blond lieutenant instead?” Alexei asked, conversational. “Maybe I should give him a few tips. How to handle the girl sniper . . . it’s been a while, but I still remember what makes you writhe and moan.”
Rage made me light-headed as I strode off down the corridor with its harsh-flickering lights. Around the corner I had to stop and steady myself against the wall, shoulder throbbing. Beating the rage into submission didn’t help; the wound kept beating in a pulse of pain I felt right down to my feet. It really wasn’t done healing. If this had been peacetime, I’d have been given another week in bed, but if it had been peacetime, I wouldn’t need it. The second German assault had been pushed back, at the cost of 23,000 dead, wounded, or missing . . . but there would be another soon enough. I stood there mentally framing my husband’s smirking face with imaginary telescopic sights as he chuckled and said, Just teasing, Mila!—now that would be a shot I wouldn’t miss. I mentally pulled that trigger until the dizziness of rage passed. Then I made my way aboveground from the dugout medical center.
As I shaded my eyes in the fading winter light, I saw a mud-
splattered official car pulled up by the entrance. Lyonya leaned against it, reading a battered Gorky novel. “I thought I’d drive you back to 1st Battalion’s lines,” he said when he saw me. “Have dinner with me when we get there?”
And I shoved Alexei’s jeering voice out of my head and said simply, “I’d like that.”
EVEN A COMPANY commander doesn’t get much in the way of living quarters on the front line. Lyonya had a private dugout like a tiny cellar, earth walls and packed dirt floor and three layers of logs overhead for a ceiling he had to stoop under . . . and when I saw how he’d made it ready, all that came out of me was a quiet “Oh.”
“It’s not much,” he said anxiously, hovering at the entrance. He’d knocked a table together out of rough planks and covered it with a canvas drape for a tablecloth; the battery-powered lamp showed dinner laid out on tin plates—the kind of front-line feast that meant a week’s worth of bartering and trading of favors had taken place. Black bread and hard salami, a can of meat stew, soft-cooked potatoes in a mess tin, vodka . . . In the middle was a 45mm shell case he’d turned into a vase, crammed with green fronds of juniper and sprays of maple twigs glowing with red-gold leaves. “I thought you could send them to your son later—I know you collect leaves and flowers for him.”