I unholstered my pistol, feeling Kostia tense again, but I only folded Lyonya’s limp hand over it and then enclosed both between my own. It wasn’t my Three Line, but it still knew the same song. “You’re going to make it,” I whispered, my eyes blurring. “And then I’ll down another hundred Nazis just for the one who fired that mortar at you.”
I squeezed his hand, but there was no answering squeeze. No flicker in the vacant face. Throat choked, I put my pistol on the nightstand and crawled onto the cot beside him, my head on his shoulder. I’d lain like that so many nights . . . no. Not so many. It had been only three months since we came together. Not enough time. Surely we were going to have more time. He would make it.
“He might wake,” the nurse said, sounding flat. “You could try reading to him, speaking to him.”
I tried. I tried so hard, but the only sound I could squeeze out was a strangled sob. I just lay shaking against Lyonya’s shoulder. Kostia sat down on the other side of the cot, his eyes like black holes burned in snow, and I saw the same helplessness in his carved face. We were snipers; the world of silence and darkness was where we lived. This terrible place of bright lights and loud voices had us both flailing.
Seeing I still couldn’t speak, Kostia reached into his pack and took out his battered, bloodstained War and Peace. His voice was hoarse as he began to read, translating the English edition to Russian. “ ‘Vera,’ she said to her oldest daughter, who was clearly not a favorite, ‘how can you have so little tact? Don’t you see you aren’t wanted here?’ ”
Kostia kept reading as the nurse faded away and my tears began to slide. You aren’t wanted here, I told death, breathing faint and inexorable over my shoulder. You were supposed to take me. Not him.
Death didn’t care. He stood at my shoulder, implacable, immovable, as the hours of day slipped into night, as Kostia read and read and read, as Lyonya sometimes stirred in delirium and opened blind, blank eyes, and sometimes lay still as a headstone. Once he turned his head in my direction—I thought perhaps he smiled at me. Kostia stopped then, so hoarse his voice was almost gone.
I took Lyonya’s hand between my own, kissed his papery cheek. “We’re getting married,” I whispered. “Remember?” He didn’t move, didn’t smile, didn’t speak. Death kept on breathing at my shoulder. “I got the divorce. I can marry you now.” Anything I could say to keep him here, keep him with me. “We can marry now. I’ll marry you tomorrow.”
I kept saying it long after he was gone.
The Soviet Delegation:
Day 1
August 27, 1942
Washington, D.C.
Chapter 20
The White House welcome breakfast was almost over. Teacups were being drained, smears of maple syrup were being mopped up, the buzz of chatter through the small dining room was dying away. The marksman was swirling the dregs of his coffee and laying silent plans when someone finally got up the courage to ask the girl sniper what everyone had been thinking since the moment she arrived.
“Mrs. Pavlichenko, I’m simply ravenous with curiosity . . . Is it true you are a . . . a sharpshooter? That you’ve, um, well”—no one wanted to say the word killed—“dispatched 309 enemies?”
The whole table fell silent then, and every American eye went to Lyudmila Pavlichenko. Some were disapproving, some disbelieving, all were curious. The marksman sat back in his chair, every bit as curious to see how she would reply.
The Russian girl’s neat, pretty face showed no sign of annoyance. She turned a polite smile across the table and said through the interpreter, “Yes, it’s quite true.”
Bullshit, thought the marksman. He knew women who could shoot: backwoods wives who filled their family soup pots with whatever they could bag; society belles who enjoyed a little gossipy target practice before a three-martini lunch; sporty girls who lined their rooms with competition ribbons for marksmanship. But he did not believe a woman could shoot 309 men—and if she did, she’d be in handcuffs or a straitjacket. No woman could shoot 309 men and be capable of sipping tea with the First Lady, cool as a cucumber.