“I do not know who it was designed by, and I have a feeling there’s nothing in the world that will stop you from telling me,” Lyonya said, wrapping his arms around me from behind and resting his chin on top of my head as I chattered, waving at the monument.
“History lives all around,” I concluded happily after Mila the student came out of hibernation with a really-quite-curtailed lecture on the works of Amandus Adamson and his influence on the Russian Art Nouveau style. “You can breathe it in on every street corner. Can we go to the museum on Frunze Street? One of the women at the conference told me there’s a special historical exhibit. The first siege of 1854 through the revolution—”
“Life with you is going to mean trudging through a great many museums, isn’t it?” Lyonya complained.
“—the factory exhibits! Did you know the lathe operators association has a special—”
“Yes, yes, I will take you to the damned museum . . .”
I WAS STILL thinking about the museum the next morning, after we’d returned to the front line. That evening I’d get back to my usual nocturnal habits, but for today I could wake up with the sun and wander outside in the spring sunshine to enjoy my breakfast like any ordinary soldier. Yawning, pondering the exhibit on Sevastopol’s role in the revolution and wondering if there were parallels I could draw to my dissertation topic, I took my cup of lukewarm coffee and joined Lyonya, who was already sitting on a fallen log with his mess tin, teasing Kostia.
“My father does not transform into a wolf by the light of the moon,” Kostia was saying as he sewed down a loop of shaggy netting on his camouflage smock. “You met him once, and you’re convinced he’s a bodark?”
“I swear he had incisors that lengthened whenever he smiled, and so did that sister of yours.”
“Half sister—”
“The wolf half. Your family is all feral, you Siberian miscreant—”
They kept ribbing each other as I sat down on the log. Lyonya draped an absent-minded arm around my shoulders—You soft southern boys wouldn’t last a day on the Siberian taiga, Lyonya—I should order you to take your boots off, Kostia, I’ll bet we’ll find wolf claws instead of toes—and I stole a wedge of black bread off Lyonya’s mess tin, scattering crumbs for the Sevastopol sparrows. They hopped around my boots, twittering and pecking, utterly unafraid. How could such tiny, fragile things have no fear at all?
“Ah, the morning chamber music,” Lyonya remarked as the usual scattering of long-range German artillery fire began. “Will it be Brahms or Wagner today?” We listened to the first shells explode, far in the rear. “Wagner,” Lyonya decided as the second salvo appeared to fall short. “I’m definitely hearing the timpani come in.”
I was laughing, Kostia was laughing, Lyonya was laughing as he gave my shoulders a squeeze and said, “How’d you sleep, milaya? You’re not tired, are you?” and then a shell from the third German salvo exploded directly at our backs.
The three of us hit the ground, arms around heads. Lyonya’s arm dragged me down beneath him as splinters and shrapnel tore the air. My ears rang, and I coughed as I was crushed between the hard earth and Lyonya’s heavy chest. I unlaced my fingers from around my head and looked up when the din cleared.
“Mila?” Kostia was doing the same, looking around. He had a shrapnel cut on his forehead streaming blood, but he was already rising. Lyonya uncurled from around me with a groan, pulling to a sitting position against the log, and I crawled clear with my ears still buzzing.
“You half crushed me,” I started to say, smiling, and then I saw the pallor on Lyonya’s broad, handsome face. Saw the red wetness soaking his right shoulder, saw that something was wrong—terribly, horrendously wrong—with his right arm hanging limp inside its sleeve. Then my entire rib cage felt like it was collapsing on itself as I rose and caught sight of the red ruin of my lover’s back.