And I? What was I waiting for? I was not unhappy with our arrangement, or at least I told myself this over and over, knowing that one can convince oneself of almost anything. Besides, when I compared my lot with that of my fellow Ukrainians, so many of whom were suffering terribly, who were starving by the tens of thousands or being shipped off to gulags, what right did I, with my bourgeois romanticism, have to complain in such a world? No, I’d made my bed, so to speak, and now had to lie in it.
Yet just when you think you have life figured out and can see it all the way to the grave, something happens to surprise and amaze you. In my case, it was two things. The first was Mariya, who came like a glorious ray of morning sunlight after a night of bad dreams. Kolya and I had talked vaguely of having a family, someday, “down the road.” He wanted children more than I, but I knew it was something expected of me. After all, every good Soviet wife was called upon to produce children, healthy workers for the state. But there was my poetry, my studies to think about. And secretly, I wasn’t sure if I wanted children, not yet, perhaps not ever. I had seen what the loss of a child did to my parents. Besides, I guess I looked upon children as a kind of period to the end of my sentence, a final gesture that would forever lock me in the life I was trapped in. But how wrong I was! As soon as Masha, as we came to call her, entered my body and my soul, she became my entire existence, my joy, my passion, my poetry. I loved her with the unconditional love I hadn’t been able to find with Kolya. As I’ve said, I could almost tell the moment she entered my body. That warmish summer day, I was lying on the bed, the breeze lifting the curtains, and suddenly that tiny presence attached itself deep inside me, swelling me with life. From that moment on, my moy krolik—my little rabbit—completely captivated me, stole my heart and ran off with it. Both of ours. I remember Kolya had been away for a few weeks working on a bridge project near Zaporozh’ye. When he came home that night, I excitedly threw my arms around him and told him the good news. “We’re going to have a baby, Kolya,” I cried. He looked stunned. I wasn’t sure if it was more due to the news itself or to the way in which I’d reacted to it.
Our daughter turned out to be blond like him, to have his thin, soft hair and blue-gray eyes. We put her cradle in what had been my study. After I nursed her, she would fall asleep in my arms, her rose-petal mouth pressed against my breast.
“Isn’t she just the most perfect thing, Kolya?” I would say.
“She looks just like you,” he would reply.
Kolya made a wonderful father. He was kind and loving, patient and gentle, and watching him with her, I felt this newfound tenderness toward him, found myself drawn closer to him, the way parents, even those not in love, will sometimes be brought closer because of their mutual love for a child. I would watch with bemused adoration as he swept her up and placed her on his shoulders, and carried her squealing with laughter about the apartment. She formed that missing link between us, a link that held us fast together.
When Masha would grasp my hair with her chubby pink fingers, I felt my heart so swollen with love, I thought it would burst into a thousand tiny pieces. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I would get up from bed and go into her room and lean down, close enough to make sure I could hear her breathing, that fear no doubt inspired by the example of my mother’s loss of her firstborn. I loved the smell of her, of her hair and skin, the sweet hoppy fragrance of her breath after she’d taken suck. The way her eyes would dart beneath her closed lids, as if watching butterflies in her sleep. I would whisper into her ear “My sweet love” and “My little rabbit.” When I was at school, I would take her to my mother’s. Later, when she could walk, she’d scurry up the path from my parents’ front door and throw her arms around my neck, crying, “Mama,” as if she’d not seen me for ages. It was the most precious of feelings. My chest would ache with love, a love I could never have imagined before. I came to realize that what I had lost by marrying, I had more than gained with the gift of my daughter. I was happy at long last, prepared—no, eager—to spend the rest of my days like this.
But then the second change came into my life.
22 June 1941
It fell like a fiery comet from the sky, scorching everything in its path, obliterating everything. It was the day that monster from Berlin invaded my country. We were walking in the park, the three of us. A warm, bright summer day, the sun gleaming off the buildings, the smell of roses in the air. That’s when a boy came running by, yelling that Germany had invaded. We couldn’t believe it. Just two years earlier, Molotov had signed a nonaggression treaty between our two countries. War had been averted, we all thought. When we got back to our apartment, we heard the foreign minister on the radio saying that we’d been attacked by Germany and that a state of war existed between our countries. Later we heard the pleas of Bishop Sergey, one of the few clergy who hadn’t been arrested or executed by Stalin, asking for all to help fight the invaders. We were shocked and dismayed, though in hindsight it should not have surprised anyone. Not just because of what Germany had been doing—the military buildup along our borders, the Nazi rhetoric that had openly called for Lebensraum, the need for the land of the Untermensch for their superior race—but also because of our own country’s complicity. The treaty with Hitler, permitting us to chop up Poland and the Baltic states as if they were pieces of meat, was a deal we’d cut with the devil himself. Then there were Stalin’s own purges, which had liquidated most of the military’s top brass, replacing them with sycophants and incompetents. But now all that didn’t matter. Our country was under attack. We were all Soviets, all patriots united against our common foe.
Kolya and I talked things over. He said he wanted to enlist straightaway, that the Motherland needed every available body to fight the fascists. That day he went down to the recruiting office and signed up, and the next day, Masha and I accompanied him to the station where he was to board a train heading north, to Leningrad he’d been told. The station was utter chaos. Thousands of new recruits and their loved ones had gathered there, hugging and crying, exchanging packages and saying their good-byes. Over the loudspeaker an announcement was made that the Germans had crossed the Dvina River and were pushing toward Leningrad.
“We must stop these fascist bastards,” Kolya said to me. I found it surprising because he hardly ever cursed, and never in front of Masha.
I took his face in my hands and said, “You listen to me, Nikolai. You be careful. Don’t be a hero.”
“You will move in with your parents?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“I love you, Tanyusha,” he said.
“And I love you too,” I replied.
I hugged him tightly to me, not wanting to let him go. I felt closer to him at that moment than I ever had. A tenderness, the sort, I suppose, one would feel for a brother going off to war. He kissed Masha, then, taking my face in his long, slender hands, he said to me, “Don’t let anything happen to my girls.”
His girls? I thought. The expression would come to haunt me. He was entrusting our safety and our love to me. I would come to feel as if I had betrayed him. Was I his girl? And hadn’t I let something happen to Masha? He boarded the train with the other soldiers and waved as it pulled out of the station.
“Wave good-bye to your father,” I told Masha.
“Where’s tato going?” she asked.
“To fight the Germans,” I replied.
“Why?”
How do you explain to a child the reason why adults kill one another? How would I ever have been able to tell her of all the men I aligned in my sights and sent to their deaths?
“Because he loves us.”
“Will he come back?”
“Of course,” I said.
As we walked home I told myself over and over that Kolya was a good man and that I would remain loyal to him, that I would love no other and that I would be waiting for him when he came home. But I saw through this flimsy pretense. In my heart I held the blackest of secrets, a maggot devouring
my soul. Some part of me hoped that he wouldn’t come back. Yes, it’s true. I thought that if he died in the war, I could grieve for him publicly, honor him by wearing widow’s weeds for a year. But then I would be free from my cage, free to live my own life as I chose, and not that which others had chosen for me or to which I had with cowardice surrendered. Only later would I understand the harsh wisdom of being cautious of what you wish for.
4
During those long, terrible months at Sevastopol, the lone joy I had was the occasional dream of Masha. It was as if because I tried so hard to banish her from my waking mind, like any child she craved her mother’s attention and would come rushing up to me as soon as I fell asleep. “Mama,” she would cry. And how could I deny her. In one dream we were on holiday at the seashore. I was sitting on warm sand, gazing out at her playing along the water’s edge. She would follow the breaking waves, fleeing from them like a sandpiper as they chased her up the shore, squealing and laughing with delight. She scampered about, her wet, lithe body filled with a magical energy. Even in the dream I carried with me that vulnerability a mother has with her always, as if she is holding a small candle against a strong wind, fearing that sooner or later its flame would be extinguished. I called to her, “Come, my little rabbit.”
“Sergeant.”
A hand roused me roughly from sleep.
“Masha?” I mumbled.
“Sergeant, it’s me,” came Zoya’s voice. “Time to get up.”
I sat up, the sun and water suddenly vanishing, replaced by the murky dankness of the bunker. Masha’s face turned into that of Zoya’s. She squatted next to me, holding a lantern. Rubbing my eyes, I asked, “What time is it?”
“Three hundred hours, Sergeant. Would you like some tea?”
“Please.”
Zoya headed over to the far side of the bunker where someone was boiling water over a small gas stove. She returned in a moment and handed me a metal cup.
“Here,” she said.
As the steam rose up before me, I could still smell Masha’s wet hair. Sweet, like rose petals just beginning to rot.
Zoya pursed her lips. “We have a little time yet.” Then leaning toward me, she whispered apologetically, “I’ve gotten my monthly. I have to go change.”
I took another sip of tea, a substance as unappealing as bathwater but which at least warmed the belly. We had an hour before we had to be in position, two hours before sunrise. Rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I glanced around at my comrades sprawled on the bunker’s floor. The Second, dubbed the Shock Company because of its reputation for toughness in battle, was made up mostly of young troops, nineteen, twenty, with a few older veterans like Gasdanov and Captain Petrenko, who was in his mid-thirties, and Yuri Sokur, the medic. At twenty-five, I was one of the senior ones. We came primarily from the Ukraine, but there were some replacements mixed in from as far away as Stalingrad and Yakutsky in Siberia, and from all walks of life—teachers and students, factory workers and scientists, tailors and shoemakers, miners and peasants. There was even a concert pianist, a young man named Nasreddinov, who had played all over Europe before the war. There were about a dozen women in our company. A machine gunner, a radioman, several riflemen, a mortar team. We used to have a medic named Yana Marianenko, a good-natured girl who always had a pleasant smile on her face. But she’d crawled out into no-man’s-land to tend to a wounded soldier, and that’s when the King of Death picked her off with a shot to the head. Zoya and I were the only female sniper team in the Second.
I tossed the rest of my tea on the ground and stood, my head almost touching the timbers of the low-ceilinged roof of the bunker. It was now a couple of days after I had killed the King of Death. I gathered up my things—a canteen of water, enough to last me the sixteen hours I’d remain in my sniper cell, some cheese and hard bread and a tin of kippered herrings I’d taken off a Romanian I’d shot several days earlier, and stuffed it all into my rucksack. I threw on my camouflage poncho and then checked the clip of my Tokarev pistol before sliding it into my holster. I grabbed a couple extra magazines for my rifle and the two grenades snipers always carried—one for the Germans, the other for myself and Zoya if it came to that. We’d been trained not to be taken prisoner. The Germans were especially brutal on captured Soviet snipers, more so even with females. Months earlier we’d counterattacked just outside a small village north of Odessa. Hanging from a tree were the mutilated remains of a young woman, a sign dangling from her neck: Flintenwieb. Gun-woman. She’d been stripped naked, her breasts cut off by the filthy bastards. That’s why the second grenade.
Finally, I threw the strap of my rifle over my shoulder and headed for the door, stepping carefully over the sleeping forms on the floor. Outside the bunker, I shivered in the cool, sharp morning air, though I actually welcomed the change from the fetid atmosphere belowground. Above, the predawn sky was speckled with stars like fragments of mica in dark rock. At different points along the trench sentries stood watch behind the breastworks, facing north and east toward the German entrenchments below in the valley, in some places only a kilometer away. Nearby, Captain Petrenko sat on an empty ammo case, smoking a cigarette and talking with Zoya, who was squatting and arranging things in her pack.
“Good morning, Comrade,” he said to me. “And how many will you get today?”
“That all depends, Captain,” I said.
“On what?”
“On how foolishly the Fritzes behave.”
The captain chuckled. He was a lean, muscular man, with a dusky complexion, broad face, and high cheekbones. Before the war he had been a chemist back in a factory in his native Georgia. I liked and respected Captain Petrenko. Soft-spoken, a man who never lost his temper or his composure, never complained, though he was a brave fighter and a good but cautious leader. He kept to himself, never shared much about his personal life. He wouldn’t order his troops to do something he himself wouldn’t do. And he refused to wantonly sacrifice their lives, unlike some of the field commanders who would do anything to curry favor with the higher-ups. Each death of one of his troops affected the captain deeply, and every time he had to write a pokhoronka letter home to the family of one of his soldiers, he would agonize over it. He not only supported my promotion to sergeant but had put my name in for the Order of the Red Banner.
“There’s talk of another big push for the city,” Captain Petrenko said to us.
“We’ve heard that before,” I replied.
“There may be something to it this time.”
“What have you heard?”
“That they’ve called up two more divisions. One armored,” said Petrenko, taking a long drag on his cigarette.
“More big rumors.”
“Not this time. Roskov said they captured a German officer. The NKVD boys got him to talk, the poor bastard.”
I’d seen firsthand the chekisty’s methods of interrogating German prisoners. Back in Odessa, I’d had to report to the CO’s headquarters once. Off in a corner of the room, they had a German soldier tied to a chair. He was a bloody mess, his wrists tied to the arms of the chair. Then I noticed several bloody hunks of what looked like sausages on the floor beneath him. They turned out to be his fingers, which had been hacked off, the pieces strewn about the floor like offal in a butcher’s shop. His mouth had a gag stuffed in it, and his head was encircled by a belt and held immobile from behind by one of the two chekisty conducting the interrogation.
“This time,” said Petrenko, “it looks as if the Germans are coming at us.”
“We still have the navy to fend them off,” I said. The Soviet Black Sea Fleet lay just twenty kilometers off the coast. It was their big guns that had largely been responsible for keeping the Germans at bay for the nine-month siege. Nonetheless, we were under no illusions. Von Manstein, the German commander, had nine full-strength divisions, plus three more Romanian divisions as well as heavy artillery and tanks. He had us completely surrounded, our backs to the sea. And we knew that Stalin had alrea
dy written us off. We were fighting simply to give the Red Army elsewhere, in Stalingrad and Moscow, time to regroup, to establish defenses. We knew that Sevastopol was doomed, the army there merely cannon fodder to slow the German advance and to draw needed troops and matériel from other more important fronts. We knew this and yet we tried to believe it wasn’t true.
“Sergeant,” Captain Petrenko said to me, “you be careful out there. Anything happens to you, Roskov will have my neck.”
“And here I thought you were just worried about my safety,” I said.
“I’ll make sure she’s safe, Captain,” Zoya offered.
“If those bastards didn’t want anything to happen to her, then they should’ve pulled her from the front,” Petrenko added.
“They want it both ways,” Zoya said.
“Then they should’ve put her in some cushy desk job back in Moscow.”
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