He kissed me again, so hard the tea nearly went flying, and then he swung out whistling. “Sixteen pages in triplicate,” I muttered, but I couldn’t stop smiling. In the face of Lyonya’s jokes, Alexei and our strung-out legal status didn’t seem like such a mountain. And even if it took another few months to wrangle the divorce, I had Lyonya here and now. It had been only a few days, but I’d already grown addicted to sleeping beside the solid warmth of his body, the arms that wrapped me up when I blew in cold and snowy from a night huddled in a sniper’s trench, the pot of water he always had ready on the potbelly stove for me to wash my chilled face and aching hands.
“Can I kill these wretches, Comrade Senior Sergeant?” old Vartanov grumbled as I came to join my platoon. He waved at the handful of new recruits he was teaching to fieldstrip their SVT-40 rifles. “Worthless, every one of them. Younger than new butter.”
I surveyed the new men, looking for the resentful gleam in the eye that meant trouble, but they all seemed either cowed or awed at the sight of me. “You used to be younger than new butter, remember.”
“When I was that young and dim, Russia still had a czar.”
“Well, things have improved since then.”
“Have they?” Vartanov wondered.
“Of course they have!”
He tugged at his ragged beard. “I don’t know, Comrade Senior Sergeant. The little men are still out here taking the bullets while the big men sit safe and dry. That doesn’t change no matter who’s in charge.”
“Shut up, Vartanov.” I headed him off before he could slide into one of his patriotic Ukrainian moods and start making not-too-veiled anti-Soviet jabs. “Again,” I called to the new recruits, and had the old ranger strip the Sveta as I called out the stages. “Detach the ten-cartridge box . . . Remove the breech cover . . . See how he releases the catch and puts his weapon down with sights upward? Then push the cover forward—left hand, there . . .” Patiently I walked them through it. “Again, on your own. You’ll be able to do this in the dark soon enough.”
“Not very soon,” Vartanov muttered as they fumbled back into motion. “You tell that commander of yours to get us some better recruits.”
I waited to see if the mention of Lyonya would come with a leer or a wink, but it didn’t. I’d been bracing for mockery or obscene jokes, dreading the moment I’d hear jeers from my platoon—I’d guarded my reputation for so long, been so careful not to cross that line—but so far, my men seemed to be taking it in stride.
As if reading my mind, Vartanov said, “The boys feel like they can rest easy now you’ve got an officer in your bedroll, Lyudmila Mikhailovna.”
“It’s not their business, Comrade Corporal,” I said coolly. But I couldn’t deny I was relieved. Maybe this could all be managed without fuss, after all. If anything, I seemed to be getting fewer impudent looks or flirtatious remarks than I was used to.
“Having a young woman walk around a war zone without knowing who she belongs to, that unsettles the lads.” Vartanov was surely the only man in my platoon who’d dare be so blunt with me, but age had its privileges, even on the front lines. “You settled it, now they can settle down.”
For the love of Lenin, I thought. Men. “Again,” I called to the new boys with their Svetas. Away they went, fumble, fumble, fumble.
“Kostia’s back, by the way,” Vartanov added, wincing as he saw a breech cover drop off a Sveta into the grass.
“Kostia?” I hadn’t seen my partner since his last visit to the hospital—the morning after coming back from Lyonya’s quarters for the first time, smiling and floating and undeniably kiss-flushed, I’d found my new rifle propped up in the dugout where I usually slept, polished to a diamond gleam, with a note in Kostia’s small square writing. Yours, it said simply. And then Fyodor told me my partner had put in for a little of his long-overdue leave now that the German assault had finally tailed off, and had headed into Sevastopol as though an entire Panzer division was on his tail.