by Amber Lough
“Yes,” he said, and then he was gone.
I grunted and was echoed by hundreds of other women as we all fought to keep ourselves off the ground. I heard a collapse followed by a groan of disappointment, but most of us managed.
“Thirty-eight!” Sergeant Bochkareva called out. I popped my arms up until they were straight and allowed my knees to bend a little, relieving the strain on my lower back. Now that I was up off the ground, I could look around. Little more than half of us were left. As we fell, the trainers brought us out of formation and lined us up against the wall. The expressions of the women there were a mixture of relief and embarrassment.
I had done push-ups before, but Sergeant Bochkareva twisted this into a game of agony, in which we felt every muscle, from our ears down to our toes, burning.
“Down!” she ordered. I sank, tightening my muscles in my stomach so that I didn’t collapse. My ears were ringing, but I could still hear her. “One of the hardest things we had to put up with at the front was muscle fatigue. When you carry your kit for days, marching over fields of mud and ice, you will get tired. Your body will say ‘This is enough!’ ” She paused. “Thirty-nine.”
I pushed up. The woman next to me didn’t get up. Her elbows wobbled a moment before she sank. She moaned in relief, lying flat on her stomach, until Sergeant Brusilov tapped her shoulder.
Sergeant Bochkareva paced before us. Her eyes flickered toward the women walking away. “It is only pain, and it will be gone as soon as you quit. But you cannot quit yet. Your body must be trained to endure fatigue. You must be able to carry your own weight, your own kit, and your own rifle. Just like the men. Down!”
I could not do this any longer. My arms felt as though they were ripping apart, and my back was a rack of pain. Sergeant Bochkareva’s voice carried across the field.
“You must be strong! Most men can do fifty push-ups, easily. Forty!”
I tried to push my body up, but my arms had nothing left to burn. I made it halfway before I fell and my face hit the dirt. Sergeant Brusilov tapped my shoulder almost instantly. He must have known it was my time and had been hovering there, waiting. I crawled up to my knees, brushed the dirt off my face, and watched the rest of the women continue. Sergeant Brusilov pointed to the wall, and if my face wasn’t already red with exhaustion it would redden now with shame.
“You had thirty-nine,” he said. “A good number.”
I nodded, more to acknowledge him than to agree. If most men could do fifty, then thirty-nine wasn’t anything to crow over. I stepped over the legs of the others and reached the wall, where I sat and tucked my knees up to my chest. There, while my body buzzed with the sudden absence of torture, I watched the remainder. How could they push on? How were they not as expired as I?
“We were in retreat,” Bochkareva continued her tale. “We’d been fighting for most of the day when the call was made. Half my platoon lay flat out in the mud, and as I ran to the back, I heard them calling to me.” She cleared her throat and circled the remaining recruits. “Down.”
The women went down, and I watched as exhaustion took them like a disease. Ten more surrendered and were herded over to where I sat, each of them one push-up stronger than me. “I couldn’t run back and ignore them! So I picked up my nearest comrade and carried him on my shoulder while the Germans shot at me from behind. Forty-one!”
The women grunted and groaned, but they pushed their shoulders and hips up off the ground.
Bochkareva stopped pacing. “I went back and got as many as I could, and each step I took could have been my last. I was afraid and my body screamed at me to stop. It was too hard. They were too heavy, and I had been fighting for too long. I needed to rest.” She pounded her chest with a fist. “But I could not let them die just because I was tired!”
Shame crawled along the wall as slick as a serpent, and those of us who felt it shifted on the balls of our feet. The knowledge that I might fail, that I might be too petrified to help when my sisters-in-arms needed me most coiled in my stomach. The recruit beside me, a girl about my age named Kosik, shrugged ever so slightly.
“I wasn’t just tired,” she whispered. “I couldn’t do it any longer. My arms didn’t work.”
I squeezed the muscles of my upper arms. I wanted to agree with her. I wanted to say that I’d pushed my body as far as it could go, but there had been a moment when I made the decision to quit. It had been a choice. “I could have.” I looked away, but not before catching the doubt in her watery-blue eyes.
“When the time comes, you’ll be strong enough,” she said.
I thought of the day the Cossacks charged us in the street, when everyone thought I was standing tall and brave, but I had instead been frozen in fear. When we were at the front and the moment of truth came, would I be a Valkyrie running at the enemy, or would I stand frozen in the mud, my heart in my mouth, unable to breathe?
I slumped deeper into the wall, keeping an eye on Sergeant Brusilov. He escorted half a dozen women, and only three remained on the ground. One was Korlova, a Ukrainian woman who’d shown incredible strength. One was Muravyeva, a young woman with a fierce curl to her lips. Her body shook with the stress she was putting on it, but she did not give up. The third woman was Dubrovskaya, the girl I’d run with on our first day of training. She didn’t have an ounce of fat on her, and despite her frail frame, was able to hold her body low to the ground without any obvious strain. She must have grown up in the circus.
Sergeant Bochkareva stopped in front of Muravyeva. “These women will be the ones to save you. Trust in their strength.” Then she crouched down between them. “Get up.”
The three rose from the ground, moving slowly. They’d pushed themselves as far as they could go. Unlike me, they hadn’t given up. It showed in their determined, dazed faces.
Dubrovskaya caught my eyes and smiled, weakly. It stabbed at me. I’d disappointed her.
—
June 8, 1917
I woke up gulping for air, and my heart raced as if I’d been sprinting. The room was still and silent but for a few snores and the rapid beating of my heart. As quietly as I could, I pulled the blanket back and let the heat steam off my stomach and my legs. Then I noticed the draft.
The window was open.
Someone had propped it ajar with a can of shoe polish. It was only a crack, but it was enough to let the wind in and rustle the curtain. Filtered light slithered across the room and draped over the ends of my toes, leaving pockets of shadow in the blanket folds.
I groaned, because if we left it open all night, we’d be covered in dew by morning. With aching muscles, I rolled off the bench and headed for the window. There was an empty spot where a uniform factory girl usually slept. She was either in the toilet or had gone out the window, because there was no trace of her in the room. I would’ve spotted her white-blonde hair glowing like a lantern.
Slowly, I pulled back the curtain and looked out onto the street. A few people stumbled along the sidewalk, propping each other up. There was no trace of the missing girl, but across the street and plastered to a boarded-up window was a sign that set my heart to racing again.
It was just a little red star above the stenciled words “Carry for the People.” To anyone else in the barracks, it was just an annoying sign the socialists probably put up. To me, it was a call.
I gripped the windowsill and cursed the stars above. I knew they were there, even if I couldn’t see them through the haze of streetlights and summer dusk. I’d left that world, but it had followed me here.
Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe the sign was there for someone else. I couldn’t be the only friend of the Bolsheviks in the battalion. But even as I tried to deny it, I knew it was for me.
I wouldn’t go. It didn’t matter if Sergei himself serenaded me from the street below. I was in the army now. Whatever he needed, he could get it somewhere else. Plenty of other girls had useful social connections he could use to his advantage.
Before I realize
d what I was doing, I was tying on my boots.
I slid the window up high enough to slip out, climbed down using the mortar between the bricks as footholds, and jumped the last meter to the ground. My entire body felt like I’d been run over by a trolley, but it was just sore muscles from the day’s training.
I landed softly in the dirt behind a rose bush and took a moment to check I hadn’t left a trail of footprints on the wall. The light was fading, but only because the sun was behind the building. The street was cast in shadow, and the edges were soft in that tricky way dusk has of making us believe we’re walking through a veil. The single streetlamp lit the corner like a spot onstage.
With another look at the red star, I walked briskly down the sidewalk, taking on a man’s gait and keeping to the darkest patches. My uniform would draw attention, as would my lack of comrades-in-arms. And then, naturally, anyone would notice I was not a man if they looked closely enough.
There was a crack in the shadows, and I jumped.
Sergei stepped up from behind a cart. His eyes blinked at me, catching the last glimmer of light. They were the only things about him that I could differentiate from the surrounding shadow.
“You came.” His voice was gruffer than usual.
“I shouldn’t have.”
I ground my boots into the dirt and watched him, waiting for him to make the first move. After a moment, he sighed and came closer. He smelled of tea and printers’ ink, and the scent whirled around me, teasing me with the life I used to live.
“You’ve cut your hair,” I said. It was shorn close on the sides, but was longer on top than mine.
“As have you.”
I rubbed at the back of my head and felt the hairs prickle my palm. “It’s the latest fashion.”
He didn’t laugh. Instead, he shoved his fists into his pockets, as though he was afraid to touch me. “I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“My comrades haven’t forgotten you. They’ve found out where you are now and what you’re doing.”
“I wonder how,” I said dryly, though he looked offended that I would suspect him. “Why do they care? I was just a courier.”
“No, you weren’t. You were an informant.”
“One of hundreds, I’m sure. And I’m finished now.”
He shook his head. “I’ve been asked to talk to you, on behalf of the party leadership.”
“If this is going to be another lecture about the senselessness of contributing to the war effort—”
Sergei cut me off. “The battalion can’t go to the front. It needs to fail, Katya. We need you to make certain it fails.”
“So they’re asking for sabotage.” I crossed my arms. “I can’t do that.”
“It has to be done.”
I held his gaze. “I owe the Bolsheviks nothing.”
“The revolution is bigger than either of us, Katya. You can’t deny that the world is changing. Don’t you want it to go in the right direction?”
“Yes. But I can’t sabotage my battalion!”
His eyes widened. “Keep your voice down.”
I glared at him. “The Bolsheviks will have to find some other way to end the war.” I turned to go, but Sergei moved to stand in front of me.
“Look, all you have to do is find a way to keep the women off the train. You can stay here as a battalion. You can be ‘protectors of Petrograd’ if you like. Just don’t go to the front.”
“Get out of my way, Sergei Fyodorovich.”
“If you keep the women’s battalion in Petrograd, you’ll be saving lives. Not just the lives of these women, but of anyone who might die if this hopeless war drags on.’”
“What about the lives that have already been spent?” I nearly spat the words out.
“We can’t do anything about that past. All we can do is shape the future.”
“It isn’t hopeless. I’m betting my life on it.”
“I pray you’re right, because you’re betting more than just your own life.”
His words followed me all the way back to the barracks and wrapped around me tighter than my portyanki. They strangled me till dawn.
—
June 10, 1917
Lieutenant Ornilov took us to the armory to retrieve our weapons. After lining us up outside the building, he called us in, column by column. I was one of the first to enter. A sergeant with a mustache that more than made up for his stature nodded his head at Lieutenant Ornilov.
“Ready, are they?” he asked.
“They don’t have the time not to be,” growled Ornilov.
Inside, we were enveloped by a cool, dark interior. It smelled of iron, candle wax, and grease. I had always imagined the armory to be divided into rooms, like the cells of a prison, but instead of prisoners each cell would be stocked with a particular type of weapon. There would be a cell with rifles, one for grenades, one for knives . . .
But this was nothing like I’d imagined. It was a great open hall lined with shelves. The weapons were piled or stacked according to type, and in the back corner was a smaller door, made of steel, with a sign declaring it full of explosive powder. My fingers, still yellowed from the TNT, itched whenever I looked at that door.
The sergeant went to a wide rack against the back wall and gestured at a collection of rifles. “Take one and go to the table over there. Write down its serial number in the book and get back outside.”
The rifles were filthy, coated in dried mud. The bayonets were still attached, but not all of them were complete. The leather straps were cracked, and some had broken buckles.
I glanced back at the sergeant. “Are these—”
“I said grab one and go sign the book!” He pulled at his mustache. “I know they’re a disaster, but this is all we’ve got. You should be glad you’re getting any weapon at all. The last platoon had to go on without!”
I fingered the rifles. Beneath the first layer, I found one without too much dirt or rust, and it had all its components. I picked it up while the women behind me swarmed at the remaining rifles.
“You know what they were told?” he asked me.
“No, sergeant.” I paused on my way to the logbook.
“They were told to pick a rifle off the first dead soldier they come across, Russian or German. We don’t have any more to hand out.” He laughed. “But of course we had some set aside for the women.”
I rushed to the table, found the book and pencil, and signed my name. It took me a moment to pinpoint where the serial number was inscribed, but I found it on the receiver, near the bolt: 703552. I scratched it into the logbook and stepped aside so the woman behind me could do the same. She took a while to find the serial number, so I ended up showing everyone where it was located. One of the recruits had to scrape away a thick coating of grease with her thumbnail. When we were finished, I led them back out into the sun.
It was another hour before we’d each received a weapon and been taught how to carry it on our shoulders while marching. The rifle was heavier than I’d expected, and it slipped in my hand a few times when I went to raise it onto my shoulder. Some of the women dropped theirs and were met with shouts from the sergeant.
“Don’t drop my weapons! As dirty as they are now, they’re good enough for battle. Get them clean and keep them that way. Think of them as you would a baby. Hell, some of you have babies somewhere, so you know what it’s like. These are cavalry rifles, chosen for you because they’re two kilos lighter than the regular M-91s. Your rifle is your weapon and your shield. Keep it clean, don’t drop it, and bring it back in one piece.” Then he saluted Lieutenant Ornilov and slunk back into his armory.
When he was gone, the lieutenant snapped around to face us. He called us to attention and shouted, “Right shoulder, arms!”
It was a mess. We weren’t in unison, and someone nearly dropped her rifle, but eventually we got them in the right place.
—
June 14, 1917
“Recruit Pavlova,” Se
rgeant Bochkareva said. We were in a classroom with our rifles spread across the desks before us, and Sergeant Bochkareva had been going over the parts of the rifle.
I glanced up. “Yes, Sergeant?”
“What is the serial number of your piece?” I peered at my bolt, but her hand reached out and covered it. “You should have memorized it by now.”
“I only looked at it twice.” Memorizing random numbers was not one of my greater talents.
“Then you should pay more attention to the lesson than to that blank space on the table. And for the rest of you, it is important that you know those numbers by heart, because in the heat of battle, you’ll want to make sure you have your own rifle in your hands. A poorly kept rifle could backfire in your face. You can’t trust any but your own.” She paused and licked her thumb, which she then used to wipe the dirt off the inscription on my receiver. I stared at the spit-cleaned numbers, now shiny, trying to brand them into my brain.
703552.
I would never forget again.
Sergeant Bochkareva held up a bucket full of leather bags. “These are your rifle kits. I had them brought over this morning from the armory.” One of the recruits walked around with the bucket and tossed each of us one of the kit bags. They landed with a dull thud.
Some of the women were picking at their weapons, scratching at the wooden stock with delicate, light strokes. One recruit looked like she was afraid to touch it or it’d go off. I slid open the latch of the steel plate on the buttstock and reached inside to find the cleaning rod. I pulled it out, screwed the separate pieces together, and then opened the kit bag to take out the oil bottle and a rag.
The bottle was flat and round, and the inside was divided into two compartments with separate screw-on caps. One side of the bottle held the cleaning solution, and the other held oil. As a child, I used to play with bottles like these. We kept a few in the kitchen, until I tried to convince my mother that we could use them for the oil and vinegar; the next day, they were gone.