“Stop squirming, milaya, your feet are like blocks of ice. How were you able to find out his name and rank?” Massaging my tingling toes.
“His soldier’s book.” The sniper’s body had plummeted from the bridge to the ravine below like a falling star; Kostia had covered me with his own rifle as I slipped and slithered down the brush-choked gully to search the corpse for usable intelligence. “It said he’d fought in Poland, Belgium, and France, and that he served as a sniper instructor in Berlin. He had 215 kills,” I said, thinking of that cold-stippled, rosy-cheeked face on the dead man lying among the frost-white reeds.
“What’s that grimace for?” Lyonya’s hands worked up to my calves, knotted and aching.
“I don’t like looking at their faces afterward,” I admitted.
“Lady Death is human after all.” Lyonya smiled. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell the brass.”
I snorted. “The colonel of the 79th? He assumed Kostia made the shot. Looked right past me and asked how he’d done it.”
“Turn around, let me at those shoulders . . .”
I turned, groaning again as Lyonya’s strong thumbs began digging circles beside my neck, carefully avoiding my still-healing shrapnel wound. “You never saw a man look more embarrassed than that colonel when Kostia jerked a thumb at me. Fell over himself asking, How is it this Hitlerite has two decorations and you have none, Comrade Senior Sergeant Pavlichenko? Then it was Dromin’s turn to look embarrassed. Ouch!”
“Two days in a sniper’s nest chewing dry tea at negative thirty degrees Celsius, and you grouse at a shoulder rub?” Lyonya pressed a kiss between my shoulder blades, letting his mouth stay there a long moment. “I was terrified for you, milaya,” he said quietly. “I’d rather fight a hundred Hitlerites with bayonets than pace the dugout wondering if some blasted sniper instructor with a copy of Mein Kampf over his heart is going to make you his two hundred and sixteenth.”
I felt my shoulders tense. “Lyonya . . . I won’t give it up if that’s what—”
“No. I’m not asking that.” He turned me so we sat face-to-face. I already knew his face so well: the broad, high cheekbones; the clear blue eyes; the mouth that quirked on one side. No quirk now. “Just—be cautious.”
“I can’t be cautious,” I said honestly. “Caution makes you miss. You can be cautious or you can be good, and I’m very good.”
“You are good, you little killer.” He pulled me into his chest, rubbing my arms, which were still prickled with the bone-deep cold of two days in that trench. “The world is about to know it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think Dromin’s days of sitting on your achievements are done. You”—Lyonya kissed the tip of my nose—“are about to become famous.”
Chapter 18
My memoir, the official version: I was congratulated by General Petrov in the matter of the sniper duel, and he told me he hoped I would not rest on my victories but would continue to crush the foes of our socialist homeland. He also informed me that an account of the sniper duel would be broadcast throughout the Sevastopol defense district, and I would have my picture taken for some combat leaflets. I was pleased to comply, in the name of inspiring our brave soldiers of the Soviet Union.
My memoir, the unofficial version: Combat leaflets? For the love of Lenin.
I DON’T KNOW why anyone wants to become famous. It’s utterly maddening. First the visit from the senior political officer, and then hordes of press, each visit more annoying than the last.
From the chirpy photographer of the coastal army newspaper For the Motherland: “You’re very photogenic, Comrade Senior Sergeant. Try a smile—”