“A formal public address?” I’d said, highly dubious. “I shoot people from long distances away, doing my best never to be seen, and they want me to stand in front of a packed audience hall under glaring lights and give a speech? I mean, I’ll try, but—”
“Shut up, Mila, you’ll be brilliant,” said Lyonya.
“The brass haven’t thought this through at all. What if I fall on my face? What’s that going to do for morale among female activists in the defense of Sevastopol?”
“The brass never think anything through, and you’re not going to fall on your face. You shoot Iron Cross sharpshooters through the eye socket for a living; don’t tell me you’re afraid of a little public speaking.”
“Not a bit,” I lied. And here I was in the regimental commander’s car, wearing a uniform skirt and stockings for the first time in eight months, nervously flicking through my talking points, which were looking stupider by the minute.
“You’re the girl sniper, aren’t you?” Onilova continued, looking mildly interested. “Don’t tell me you have notes? Goodness, I haven’t needed notes in ages. Don’t read off your page, that’s fatal. And don’t hunch at the rostrum—”
She went on rat-a-tat-tatting like her machine gun, all the way from the front lines into Sevastopol, as I chewed my lip and picked at my stockings, which both sagged and itched. I should have been drinking in the sights of the city as the car rolled through its heart—it had been so long since I’d seen houses, spires, anything that wasn’t olive-drab and made of metal and canvas—but I was too nervous. A whirl through the Teachers’ House, where the conference was being held, and then suddenly I was in a hall full of women. Machine Gunner Onilova was carried off at once by a crowd of eager fans, but I stood staring. I hadn’t seen so many women in one place in months: blue dresses and rosy blouses, long braids swaying against bony hips . . . and like drab spots among the finery, the severe uniform tunics of the servicewomen like me. Narrow-eyed lynxes in a crowd of gentle house cats.
Or maybe not so gentle, I thought, seeing the fierceness on the civilian women’s faces as they gathered to sit. They were carrying on life in the middle of a siege, after all—they knew what the cost would be if the city fell. After some official droning from the brass, it was women getting up to speak, one after the other, and suddenly I was riveted. Some had notes like me; others extemporized as they told their stories. A yellow-kerchiefed woman taught a classroom full of children in a bomb shelter every day; a stout apple-cheeked matriarch put in twelve-hour shifts stamping out hand grenades. A woman who had lost her left arm in a bombing raid had still stayed in the city to work—she met her quota every day, she said fiercely, because it was her part to play in fighting the enemy. Her empty left sleeve was pinned to her dress like a decoration, worn as proudly as Onilova’s Order of the Red Banner. I was supposed to follow her with a dry account of Nazis wiped out in Crimean forests?
When it came time to get up and address them, I had tears in my eyes. I crumpled my talking points in my hand and heard myself saying, “The thing you have to know in your bones is that you can never miss. Not ever, not in war, not in civilian life, or that mistake will be your downfall.”
And I spoke from the heart.
“How did that go?” Lyonya asked when I returned.
“Dreadfully,” I admitted. “I fumbled. I backtracked. I hemmed and hawed a great deal. But they gave me a round of applause anyway, and told me to kill a Hitlerite apiece in their name, and I promised I would. So I must have done something right.” I began peeling gratefully out of the parade uniform, looking forward to my padded trousers and camouflage smock.
“You have the best legs on the front line,” Lyonya admired, watching me carefully roll down my stockings.
“That is an unbacked supposition. How can you possibly know I have the best legs at the front without extensive gathering of further data?”