I lowered my face toward the sprigs, inhaling winter, feeling suddenly short of breath again. He’s courting, Lena had said.
Yes, it appeared he was.
“What would you have done if I hadn’t agreed to dinner?” I asked, raising my face.
“Invited Kostia,” said Lyonya. “I’ve heard he’s a great lay.”
Laughter spluttered out of me, breaking the tension, and I let him pull out a stool for me at the makeshift table. “I’m starving.”
“Good, because you’re officially off duty tonight.”
“But—” I hadn’t seen my company yet, or my platoon, or been back to my usual dugout.
“You can wait till tomorrow night to go stalking back into no-man’s-land, Comrade Senior Sergeant.” Lyonya forestalled my objections, spooning meat stew onto my plate. “Tonight you’ll eat well and get a good night’s sleep, orders from your company commander. And that’s the last thing I’m saying as your company commander tonight.”
“Why is that?” I dug into the feast.
“When I propose marriage after dinner,” Lyonya explained, “I’d prefer the offer not be overlaid with any sense of obligation, coming from a lieutenant to a sergeant. Vodka, my one and only?” he offered as I choked on a mouthful of stew.
“You can’t be serious.” I managed to swallow the chunk in my mouth, which was more gristle than stew meat. A dinner invitation and flowers were one thing; I knew he was hoping to romance me into his bedroll, but— “You’re proposing marriage?”
“No,” he said, pouring vodka for us both. “I’ll do that later, on a full stomach.”
“You’re teasing,” I decided.
He looked across the table through the lamplight. “You dazzle me,” he said.
My hand stole up to my chopped, stick-dry hair. “You’ve known me six weeks.”
“You dazzled me within six seconds, Mila.”
I knocked back my vodka, chasing it with a bite of black bread and salami. “It’s too soon. I’ve only known you—”
“Then say no. I’m still going to ask. Later,” he added, swallowing his own portion of stew down. “Right now I’m nervous. Most fellows feel nervous at this point, but I feel fairly certain I’m the only fellow in history proposing marriage to a woman who has personally dispatched over two hundred men.”
I laughed again, despite myself. “How do you always do that?”
“Propose marriage to homicidally gifted women?”
“Make me laugh.”
“I display a distressing tendency to levity and bourgeois sentimentalism, or so my Komsomol leader told me, growing up. I will never rise high in the Party unless I strive for objectivity in my personal relations, rather than mirth.”
“Clearly a hopeless case.”
“At thirty-six? Utterly.”
I smiled, relaxing despite myself, vodka unfurling in my stomach. I couldn’t remember the last time dinner had been taken for pleasure, with conversation and leisure in mind, rather than a simple refueling exercise between bouts of dealing death. “Tell me something, Lyonya.” Deciding on a change of subject, something a little less weighty than marriage proposals and kill counts. “As an officer, would you have any idea where I could get access to a typewriter here at the front?”
“A typewriter?” He addressed the winter bouquet on the table. “Give a woman a romantic dinner; she wants a typewriter . . .”
“I want to retype my dissertation. It has blood all over it—”