Besides, I recalled that edged, possessive glint in Alexei’s eyes as he looked at me. Not wanting me himself, but not really wanting anyone else to have me, either.
Maybe it would be no bad thing if I knew how to defend myself better than I did now. Knew how to defend my son.
“He said I was a baby,” Slavka burst out. “I’m not a baby!”
My heart squeezed and I hugged him tight. “No, you aren’t.” You’re not a baby; your father is a bastard. But we don’t need him, you and me. My son had me, and I would give him everything. An apartment of our own someday; a wall of bookshelves; a future. I didn’t need my name to resound forever like Alexei dreamed of doing; I didn’t need fame or greatness. I just wanted to give my son the life he deserved.
So no more mistakes, that flinty internal voice said. And I promised myself: Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
Chapter 2
Silence, please.” A human saber of a man with a scar on his brow and two St. George Crosses glittering on his chest came striding into the courtyard before the Osoaviakhim marksmanship school, surveying the double line of students arrayed in our new blue tunics. He allowed the stillness to stretch until a few flecks of snow came down from the steely sky, until we were shifting uneasily in our boots, then spoke again in a voice like a rifle shot. “I have heard that you all shoot quite well. But a good marksman is still not a sniper.”
For the love of Lenin, I thought, borrowing my father’s frequent exhortation whenever my sister and I plagued him. I wasn’t here to be a sniper, I was here to take the advanced marksmanship course and get my badge. Prove myself worthy of being my son’s father as well as his mother. I glanced down at the schedule requirements I’d been handed when I showed up this morning for my first day: twenty hours of political classes, fourteen hours of parade ground drill, two hundred twenty hours of firearms training, sixty hours of tactics . . . it all looked reassuringly academic, which soothed me. I was a history student—I preferred it when action and violence were strictly confined to the pages of a book.
But now the scarred instructor pacing up and down was talking about snipers.
“Um—” The girl next to me—there were only three females in this class—raised her hand. “I’m not here to be a sniper. I’m here so I can join higher-level competitions, qualify for USSR Master of Sport.”
“In peacetime you will shoot targets in competitions,” the instructor said calmly. “But one day there will be war, and you will trade wooden targets for enemy hearts.”
Another one like my father, always shaking his head and saying, When there is war. Oddly, it relaxed me: I was already very used to men who taught every skill through a lens of how it might be useful in wartime, but the girl who had asked the question looked chastened. She put her hand down, and the instructor continued speaking, eyes raking the double line of students. “A sniper is more than a marksman. A sniper is a patient hunter—he takes a single shot, and if he misses, he may pay for it with his life.”
That was when I felt myself straightening. Did all these courses and hours of study really boil down to something as simple as Don’t miss?
Well. That I understood.
“I do not waste instruction on idiots or hooligans,” the instructor went on, snow crunching under his boots. “If in one month you have not convinced me that you can acquire the skills and cunning required of a sniper, you will be dismissed from the course.”
I stood up even straighter. Because I knew right then and there that if he sent anyone home, it wouldn’t be me.
DON’T MISS.
Two years of firearms coursework and drilling squeezed in around my university classes: I’d put in two hours at Kiev University’s Basic Archaeology and Ethnography lecture, then struggle into my blue tunic for two hours of Wednesday-night practice assembling and disassembling the Mosin-Nagant army rifle （“Called what, Lyudmila Mikhailovna?” “The Three Line, Comrade Instructor.”）。 I’d go straight from a Komsomol meeting at which we indignantly discussed the German bombing of Guernica in Spain, then put in three hours on the Emelyanov telescope sight （“Break it down for me, Lyudmila Mikhailovna.” “It’s 274 millimeters with a weight of 598 grams, two regulating drums . . .”）。 Two years, and all the courses and drilling—the memorization of ballistics tables, the practice hours learning the Simonov model and the Tokarev model versus the Melkashka and the Three Line—all boiled down to one thing.