5
In the claustrophobic darkness, the first thing I became aware of was the moaning, the lonely terror of a body in pain. It came, I realized, from directly above me. A man’s voice, though fragile and petulant as a child’s. And then I recognized the odor. I’d smelled it back in Odessa, in the bombed-out buildings of Sevastopol, in all those places where they hadn’t a chance to bury the dead. The rankness of corruption, the foul stench of flesh gone bad. It surrounded me in the darkness, made me almost want to retch.
I felt groggy, my thoughts sluggish and disoriented, my head aching dully. I glanced at my right arm, seemingly frozen from shoulder to wrist. A strange and heavy armor appeared to cover it. It seemed to glow in the darkness, white as a bone left exposed to the sun. With my free hand I reached over and touched the surface, which had a pleasing smoothness to it. As I moved my free arm I became aware of the long, slender snake whose fangs were sunk into the back of my left hand. Curious, I followed the snake to where its tail was attached to a bag dangling over my bunk. The movement brought about a stabbing pain low in my belly. I tried to lie still, hoping it would go away. As I lay there, I slowly became aware of another sensation—a feeling of being in motion, moving, gliding through the darkness. It was an unsettling sensation, like that of falling in a dream.
“Oaaah,” came the moaning again. I heard someone pound the bunk above me with a fist. “For Christ’s sakes, I can’t take it anymore,” he called out.
From somewhere else in the darkness another voice cursed back: “Shut the hell up.”
“F*ck you.”
“We’re all in pain. If you don’t shut up, I’ll come over there and wring your goddamned neck.”
With that, the man in the bunk above me quieted down for a while.
Slowly coming to, I glanced around the narrow, cavelike room, with its low ceiling and concave walls, which seemed to press inward. As my eyesight adjusted to the darkness, I could make out double bunks lining each side of it, with only a small space dividing the upper and lower rows. Bodies lay on the bunks. I saw an arm draped loosely over the edge, a pale leg drawn up, the white incandescent glow of dressings. The armor on my arm, I realized, was merely a cast; the snake in my hand an IV. Occasionally someone coughed or groaned, while others snored. The man above me leaned over the side of the bunk, only the outline of his shaggy head visible.
“Ssp. Are you awake?” he whispered.
“Yes,” I replied.
“Did they give you your meds yet?”
I had to think for a moment. “I don’t know,” I told him.
“My leg is killing me. Do you hear me, you bastards?” he cried out again.
“I’m warning you,” came the other voice once more.
Besides the ache in my belly, there was a faint ringing in my ears, like frozen leaves making a tinkling sound in the winter wind. Things slowly, grudgingly returned to me. Every time I woke it was like this. I had to start from scratch, put what had happened back in place again—my memory like a large, complicated jigsaw puzzle I’d worked hard to piece together, only to find it scattered on waking. I remembered climbing through the sewer with Zoya. Finding the little girl down there. Shooting the Germans in the trench and finally getting the sniper. Then running and being thrown by the explosion. Lying on the ground, unable to move, the piece of blue sky hanging overhead. Clutching the grenade, waiting for the Germans to come. And then, right before I lost consciousness, thinking of my daughter. I remembered all that. The rest since then was just loose bits and pieces scattered in my head. Coming to for a few minutes, occasionally seeing the strangely familiar face of someone leaning over me, adjusting the IV, the cries and moans of those around me. Then more darkness and that odd sense of movement, of slipping through space and time.
“Christ, how do they expect me to stand this,” the man hollered again.
After a time someone did come by to check on us. A small, thin man, he carried an electric torch in one hand, while in the other he had a metal box with supplies—dressings and bandages, syringes and vials of medicine.
“It’s about time,” the man in the bunk above me cried.
“Stop your bellyaching,” the small man told him. His voice was one I’d heard before, but I couldn’t make out his face behind the bright light of the torch. The medic checked the man’s vitals, then drew him a shot of something from a small vial. “There,” he said. “That should shut you up for a while.”
Soon the man did quiet down, and in short order he was snoring lightly.
Then the medic squatted beside my bunk.
“How are you feeling, Sergeant?” he asked.
And then it came to me. “Yuri?” I replied. It was Yuri Sokur, our medic.
“That’s right.”
“You made it out?”
“By the skin of my teeth,” he joked. “And how’s our famous patient doing?”
“My stomach hurts.”
He nodded. “You had yourself a very serious injury, Sergeant.”
He took my pulse and listened to my heart, then fiddled with the IV.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked, pointing toward the bunk above me.
“Lost a foot. Now the leg’s going bad,” Yuri explained with the practiced callousness of those who’d seen a lot of suffering. He sniffed. “Can’t you smell it? Let’s have a look at you, Sergeant.”
He carefully lifted the bandage on my stomach and inspected my wound, an ugly, jagged T that ran from just to the right of my navel down to the line of my pubic bone, then at right angles across my lower belly. On either side of the wound, the skin was bruised a dark wine color and puckered from the many stitches. There was crusted blood along the length of it. And it smelled too.
“This will hurt a little,” he explained as he cleaned the wound with carbolic acid.
He was right—it did hurt. But not a little. I winced as he worked. “Jesus!”
“Sorry. I can give you something for the pain.”
“Where are we?” I asked as he readied a syringe.
“In the Black Sea.”
“How long have I been here?”
“Three days. Maybe four.”
He explained how I was transferred to the sub with a group of wounded from a makeshift field hospital in Sevastopol. Now we were headed for the Caucasus.
“I think I recall asking you all this before.”
“That’s all right,” he said, smiling good-naturedly. “You’ve been in and out.”
He started to rub alcohol on my arm. Before he would shoot me up with morphine, I said, “Wait. How did I get out?”
“I don’t know. All hell broke loose those last few days. I was pulled out to help with the wounded on the sub.”
I tried to sit up, but he stopped me. “Easy. You don’t want to open your wound.”
“What happened to the rest of our unit?”
“Gone,” was all he said.
“Gone? Did anyone get out?”
“Cheburko,” he said.
“That’s it. What of Corporal Kovshova?”
He shrugged. “I only know that the Germans took the city.”
“How many were they able to evacuate?”
“A handful.”
“Out of a hundred thousand troops!” I exclaimed. “What of the rest?”
Yuri shook his head. “You were one of the last to be evacuated. Count yourself lucky.”
At this, I felt a great sadness settle over me. I thought of Zoya, of Captain Petrenko, of the others in my unit. All those with whom I’d fought and suffered and endured that hellhole for nine months—gone.
“My things?” I said. “I had a case with some pictures. Personal effects.”
“I don’t know about any of that.”
Then I remembered the girl we’d found in the sewer.
“There was a little girl we came upon in the sewer. She returned with Corporal Kovshova. Do you know what happened to her?”
Yuri shook his head. I closed my eyes to keep from crying.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of, Sergeant,” he offered.
“I should be back there with them,” I said.
“What good would that do anyone?” Then, trying to cheer me, Yuri said, “You have made the entire nation very proud of you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The name Tat’yana Levchenko is on everyone’s lips. Wait.” Yuri held up a finger and hurried off. He returned in a moment carrying a copy of Krasny Chernomorets, the newspaper of the Black Sea Fleet. “See,” he said, shining his torch on the front page. There was my picture. The headline read, “Woman Sniper Reaches 300 Fascist Kills.”
“You are a national hero,” Yuri exclaimed.
I’d forgotten about all that, my goal of reaching three hundred kills. At one time such an accomplishment would have made me proud. Now it didn’t matter in the least. In fact, it seemed mere vanity. What I had done was meaningless, knowing that my comrades were prisoners, or worse. That Zoya was gone. And then I wondered how they’d arrived at that 300 figure. I’d talked to no one, and there had been no witnesses to my last dozen kills. Where had they got it? Probably, I thought, just made it up out of whole cloth, the way the Soviet propaganda usually did.
“When I am an old man,” Yuri said, “I will tell my grandchildren that I knew the great sniper, Tat’yana Levchenko.”
Then he rubbed my arm with alcohol and slid the needle into my flesh. I felt the prick, followed by the cool, intoxicating rush of the morphine. Soon I was drifting on a warm wave in a bright green sea. I dreamed of starfish and mermaids.
Except for once when we surfaced and were dive-bombed by German planes, the trip across the Black Sea was uneventful. Yet I was hardly aware of the passage of time, spending most of my days dozing fitfully in an unsettled world of shifting darkness. What sleep I did manage was continually interrupted by the cries of the wounded around me or by my own pain, which sometimes seemed like a large hand grabbing me around the belly and shaking me to consciousness. Yuri would then stop by and give me another shot of morphine, and I would sink back down into that darkness again. However, as I started to improve a bit, from somewhere he scrounged up a frayed copy of Eugene Onegin, hoping a book would prove a healthy distraction for me. Yet the story of the dilettante Onegin and the strange relationship he had with his beloved, ironically a woman named Tat’yana, held little interest for me now. My mind wandered, and the ringing in my ears distracted me. I felt depressed, filled with black thoughts. At odd moments, I found myself weeping. Through all the months of fighting, I’d never felt this way. The momentum of war, the simple acts of fighting, of surviving each day—those things had kept at bay what I was feeling now. But now I wept inconsolably—for my lost comrades, for Zoya and Captain Petrenko. For the little girl Raisa. For my parents. Most of all, I wept for my daughter. I guess because of the war I hadn’t had a chance to properly mourn her passing. The hatred—and perhaps too my guilt—had so filled me that there wasn’t room for anything else. Now in the darkness of my bunk, I felt her death as if it had happened only yesterday. I couldn’t get the image of those last few moments of her life out of my head. Her calling to me, running toward me. The bullets tearing into her tiny body. How I had watched the spot that was her grave fade into the anonymous vastness of the countryside. Suddenly, I just felt so terribly sad.
Some of the wounded as well as a number of the sailors stopped by my bunk to see how I was doing. They treated me deferentially, as if I were someone famous. One of the wounded was Cheburko, the young sniper from my unit. With a mop handle, he hobbled about on one leg. He pulled up a stool beside my bunk and sat down.
“How are you feeling, Sergeant?” he asked.
“A little better. You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette?”
From his pocket he took out a pack and gave me one, then struck a match and lit it for me.
“Would you know what happened to Second Company?”
He shook his head.
“It was crazy. We ran out of ammo and were fighting the krauts with bayonets.”
“How did you manage to get out?” I asked.
He shrugged, glancing down at his missing leg. From his coat pocket, Cheburko took out a small flask and handed it to me. I took a sip of watered-down vodka and handed the flask back to him. The vodka didn’t even burn the throat going down, it was so weak. “Za zdorov’ye,” I said.
“Za zdorov’ye,” he said, taking a sip. “To a lot of good soldiers.” He glanced over his shoulder, then whispered, “Good soldiers stayed and died while those f*cking officers took to their heels. An entire army gone like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.
Cheburko looked down at his missing leg, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was actually gone, as if it might still reappear and he’d be whole again. “I guess it’s a small price to pay. Now I can go home to my family. How about you?”
“I don’t know. As soon as I’m well enough, I’d like to get back to my unit.”
“There is no unit, Sergeant. They’re all gone.”
We reached port finally, a small town on the Georgian coast. As I was carried off the sub, I saw sunlight for the first time in weeks. An even stranger sight accosted me—a landscape that hadn’t yet been touched by war. The town’s streets weren’t pockmarked with craters and the buildings were unscathed. Along with the other wounded soldiers, I was loaded onto a rickety twin engine Yakovlev transport plane and flown over the mountains to a hospital in the Azerbaijan city of Baku.
There I was treated like royalty. I had a sunny room to myself, with a window that looked out at the Caspian Sea. Instead of the ground, I slept between clean sheets on a soft featherbed with a pillow in place of a backpack. A tall, awkward nurse with a toothy grin would come by and give me a bath, then wash and comb my hair. And each morning she brought me an enormous breakfast of hot tea with cream and sugar, salami and goat cheese, eggs and oat porridge, vareniki and dovag. The irony was that while I’d been so hungry during the fighting, now when I could eat to my heart’s content I didn’t have much of an appetite. The nurse would cajole me with, “Eat! Eat!” She would even go so far as to pick up a spoon and try to force-feed me, as if I were a finicky baby.
A good-looking, dark-skinned doctor would stop by to check on me.
“How are we feeling?” he asked.
“Tired.”
“It’ll take a while for you to regain your strength,” he said as he lifted my gown to inspect my belly.
For the first time in a long while, I felt the return of modesty, something I thought I’d lost forever. I was embarrassed as he nonchalantly poked and prodded my naked belly, had me sit up so he could listen to my heart. With my one good arm I tried to shield my breasts. I felt my cheeks redden.
As he took my pulse, I asked, “When can I rejoin my unit, Doctor?”
Ignoring my question, he took a light and looked into my ears. “How is the ringing?”
“Not bad,” I lied. The ringing had continued, though I’d almost gotten used to it. “But I will be able to fight again, won’t I?”
Then he said an odd thing to me. “Sometimes it takes a woman a while to adjust to such a change. Especially one as young as you.”
I stared at him, not fathoming what he was telling me. “What do you mean?”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“The wound you suffered was very severe. It damaged your reproductive organs. Infection set in. They had to do a hysterectomy on you.”
I still didn’t quite understand what he was saying to me. I stared at him dumbly, waiting for him to explain.
“You will not be able to have children. I’m sorry.”
Then he turned and left me there with my sudden barrenness. I felt like sobbing, wished for the soothing balm of tears, but for some reason I didn’t cry. Couldn’t cry. I placed my hand over my stomach, where my Masha had lived with me for nine months. I felt a gaping hole in the center of me, as if they’d not only taken my female parts but had also amputated my very soul. I thought of what Zoya had told me—of the imperative of having more children after the war, of replenishing the lives the Germans had stolen from us. The vague desire that I had flirted with over the past year, of having another child someday, that too was suddenly stolen from me.
For weeks I lay in my bed in a fog. I ate and slept and slowly recovered from my wounds, but all I can recall of that early period in the hospital was thinking how alone I was, with everything I’d once had now stolen from me. Not only my past, but my future too.
Then one day I awoke to see on my nightstand some cards and letters. They were from various dignitaries, important figures of state. There was even a note from President Kalinin, expressing the nation’s gratitude for my “heroic efforts in destroying the Hitlerites.” A number of important Party officials as well as military top brass stopped in to see me. One of my visitors was General Petrov, the commander of the forces at Sevastopol. He had a shiny bald head which resembled a pickled egg, and small dark eyes beneath gold pince-nez. On his chest was a cluster of bright medals. I thought how he and his staff had slipped out of the city, leaving behind tens of thousands of soldiers, sacrificial lambs to be fed to the German wolf. With him was a captain with the distinctive NKVD shoulder boards.
“It is a pleasure to finally meet you, Comrade Levchenko,” General Petrov said to me. “How are you feeling?”
“I am fine, sir,” I replied coolly.
“And they are treating you well?”
“Yes, sir.”
He made a perfunctory attempt at small talk before turning to the captain. The other handed a box to the general, who opened it, removed a medal.
“Tat’yana Aleksandrovna Levchenko,” he recited formally, “for your gallantry in fighting the fascist invaders of Sevastopol, on behalf of Secretary Stalin and the entire Soviet people, it is my great honor to present you with the Gold Star medal, honoring you as a Hero of the Soviet Union. Congratulations, Lieutenant,” Petrov said.
Then he placed the medal on the flimsy material of my hospital gown. After which, he stood at attention and saluted me. The award, I must confess, came as a surprise, as did the promotion to lieutenant. But more surprising was the fact that I really didn’t care about any of that now, the medals and honors, the number of Germans I had killed. Others in my unit had fought just as hard and as bravely as I. And so many had given their lives. In fact, it all felt hollow to me now. Just more empty propaganda from the big shots in the Kremlin. I thought of all the troops left behind in Sevastopol, abandoned by men like this Petrov, men who’d saved their own necks because they were too “important” to die for the Motherland. I told myself to let it go, that it would serve no point. Besides, I was a soldier, and it was not my place to question the decisions of my superiors. Still, I felt I couldn’t remain silent. I had to speak for the others who couldn’t speak for themselves.
“The soldiers left behind, sir,” I said.
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“What of them?”
The general nodded gravely.
“Yes, indeed. A terrible tragedy.”
“They felt betrayed, General.”
I saw my comment reflected in Petrov’s startled expression. He stared at me, his thin lips pursed, his eyes inflamed by such impudence.
“It was a very difficult decision, Lieutenant,” he replied curtly.
I hesitated, wondering how far I could go. How far I dare go. Yet then I thought of Captain Petrenko, Zoya, the others left behind.
“You betrayed us, sir.”
“That will be—” began the captain harshly, but General Petrov stayed him with a hand.
Petrov turned toward me, his eyes softening.
“In war,” he explained, “unpleasant decisions have to be made. Sometimes a battle must be lost in order for the war to be won.” Then he reached out and took my left hand in both of his. “I understand how you feel, Lieutenant. Believe me, they are all on my conscience. Before I go,” he said, “is there anything I can do for you, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir, there is. A soldier in my company, Corporal Zoya Kovshova. We were a sniper team. This medal is as much hers as it is mine. We were separated in the last days of Sevastopol. If it is possible, I would like to find out what became of her?”
General Petrov turned to the captain, who wrote something in a little notebook. “I shall look into it,” Petrov said to me.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Anything else, Lieutenant?” said Petrov, glancing at his watch.
“One more thing, sir. My husband, Nikolai. I have had no word from him for nearly a year. He was sent to Leningrad.”
“I’ll have Captain Meretskov here look into it. The people of the Soviet Union are grateful to you, Lieutenant. You have been a tremendous inspiration to all of us.”
My recovery went slowly. The ringing in my ears lessened to a low drone, and the wound in my belly had healed enough to permit me to get up and walk a little. But I was exhausted after just a few steps. When I took a bath, I was startled by both the bright pink scar that slashed over my belly and by the weight I’d lost. My ribs stuck out, and my normally well-toned arms were thin. My face too had become gaunt, my eyes dull and sunken. Still, each day I pushed myself a little harder, walking farther up and down the corridors. I forced myself to eat despite having no appetite, hoping to get back to the front sooner—that was the one thing that inspired me, kept me going. Whenever I met the doctor, I’d ask when I could return to the war. He would always say something vague like, “Soon, soon.”
I read books whose titles I couldn’t remember, met people who came in to see the Hero of the Soviet Union but whose names and faces I quickly forgot. I wrote to Kolya, at first long, rambling letters talking fondly, nostalgically of our days in Kiev, a city that no longer existed, about a life that no longer existed either, letters I knew had little chance of finding their way to him. But then I began to write more truthfully, more honestly, of how I felt. Of how I’d always felt. Perhaps knowing that the letters would never reach him permitted me at last to be honest, knowing they were more for myself than for him. Perhaps too it had something to do with the fact that I could never have children, that if I returned to my marriage it would just be the two of us, forever. Without even the possibility of children to soften the loneliness that would enclose the two of us like a cell. I no longer felt as I had when I thought I was going to die. One’s feelings are exaggerated, distorted at such extreme moments. I loved Kolya, but it was the love one has for a dear friend, for a brother. Not for a husband. And while I didn’t say it in my letters—that would be too cruel—I knew now that if we were able to survive the war and meet again, that I would leave him. As much for his sake as mine. He deserved to have someone love him as much as he loved me. And I deserved to be honest with myself, to live a life I wanted and not one that others wanted for me. Writing truthfully of my feelings, I felt a heavy weight lifted from my shoulders.
As I walked along the corridors, I saw many of the other wounded, some much worse than I—soldiers missing limbs, others badly burned or in wheelchairs, some paralyzed and confined to bed. I befriended one young soldier who had been blinded in the fighting at Odessa, a private named Polyakov. His face and hands were terribly disfigured from burns. It was hard to look at him at first. He resembled a shriveled-up old man with a mummy’s leathery face. I would sit by his bedside and read to him. When I finished reading, he would say, “Please. If you wouldn’t mind, just a little more, Comrade.” I knew it was mostly that he didn’t want to be alone. So I’d read a few more pages.
“Does it look so bad?” he asked me once. “You can tell me the truth.”
“No,” I lied.
“Before the war I had a fiancée. Zhenya was a pretty girl. All the young men in my village wanted to court her.” He paused for a moment, staring off with his sightless eyes. “I wonder if she will still want me now.”
“Of course she will,” I said to him. “You have sacrificed much for the country. What girl wouldn’t want to marry someone like that?”
“But the war has changed me. I’m not the same person she knew.”
“On the outside perhaps.”
“I feel different too. Do you feel different inside, Lieutenant?”
“I suppose, a little. But it’s the times that we live in. We’re still the same people. When it is over, everything will go back to being the way it was.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Of course,” I replied.
Later, as I lay in bed staring out at the sea, I thought of what I’d told the young private. How everything would go back to the way it had been. A lie, I knew. I wasn’t the same person anymore. I was as different from that woman as the burned man was from his former self. And I knew neither of us could go back to those former selves.
One day a soldier showed up in my room, carrying a burlap sack over his shoulder.
“You are Tat’yana Levchenko, no?” he asked.
“I am.”
He dropped the sack on my nightstand. “This is for you,” he said and left.
Inside, I found a pile of mail. Hundreds of letters, all addressed to me. I took out a letter, opened it, began to read.
Dear Lieutenant Levchenko,
I am fifteen years old. My family was killed at Korelitsy. My parents, three brothers and sister. I managed to escape and fled into the woods, where I joined the partisans. Hearing of your daring exploits against those monsters has given me new hope. Get well for all of us.
Sincere regards,
Lyudmila Bershankaya
I picked out another, this one in a thick brown envelope that had some heft to it. When I opened it, something solid and heavy fell onto my lap. I picked it up. It was a 7.62 mm bullet. On the side of the shell casing was written, FOR FRITZ.
Dear Tat’yana Levchenko,
I want to personally thank you for every German you have sent to hell. My son was captured at Kharkov and I have not heard from him since. I have been working in a munitions factory in Voronezh. With each bullet I make I say a little prayer that it finds the heart of an invader. I send you one that I would be honored for you to use in your glorious work. May God bless you and keep you safe.
Yours truly,
Nadezhda Sebrova
I read another and then another. They praised or thanked me. They spoke of my courage. They told me how proud they were of me. They said how much my bravery had inspired them, given them hope. Many offered prayers for my speedy recovery. A few sent photos of loved ones who’d died. Others enclosed small gifts, sweets or cigarettes or tinned food. In one there was a rosary. In several I found articles cut out of newspapers, articles about me. As I read them, I found tears welling up in my eyes.
Over the next few weeks I received piles of such letters, from all over the Soviet Union. Each day I would read some. They were mostly from women, mothers and grandmothers, daughters and sisters. But there were also a few from men. One man wrote a poem to me, expressing his undying love. A father sent a picture of his little daughter who said she wanted to grow up to be like Lieutenant Levchenko and kill Germans. I could read only so many before being overcome with emotion. Hearing of my countrymen’s losses, of the deaths of loved ones, of their pain and suffering, of the fragile hopes they’d fastened to me—I found it nearly overwhelming. But at the same time, the letters also buoyed my spirits. I felt both proud and humbled. The depression I’d felt since being wounded began to leave me. Slowly I started to feel better, to regain my strength. Now I wanted only to get well so that I could rejoin the fight. So I could fulfill everything they’d said about me.
One day after I’d been there for almost a month, I was returning to my room after having read to the burned soldier. Standing at the window looking out was a small woman in uniform, her back to me.
“May I help—” I began, but I froze when the woman turned toward me. “Zoya!”
We rushed to greet each other and hugged fiercely. When I winced from my still tender wound, Zoya said, “I’m so sorry. Are you all right?”
“Don’t worry. Come, sit.”
We sat on the bed and held hands, and alternately cried tears of joy and hugged each other and giggled like a couple of schoolgirls.
“I heard you received the Gold Star,” she offered.
“Yes.”
“Such an honor,” she said, squeezing my hand. “I am so proud of you.”
“You deserve it as much as I.”
“Nonsense. You did the shooting. I just served them up to you.”
We laughed at that.
“I still can’t believe my eyes,” I said. “I thought you were dead.”
“The last I saw of you I thought the same thing.”
“So it was you? Who saved me.”
Zoya nodded, smiling modestly.
“How? What happened?”
“When I returned with the girl, the Germans had already overrun our position. Our troops were retreating down to the harbor under heavy fire. There was no sense trying to help, especially since the girl was with me, so we stayed in the sewer. I headed back to see if I could help you. I found you lying there. The girl and I pulled you into the sewer. We dragged you until we heard friendly voices. The last I saw of you they were bringing you to a field hospital.”
I hugged her again. “Once more I have you to thank for my life, little mother.”
“Look,” Zoya said, pointing to her shoulder. I hadn’t noticed the three red stripes of an NCO. “For saving your neck, they promoted me to sergeant. How about that?”
“That’s wonderful,” I cried. “Tell me, how on earth did you find me?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I was in Sumgait. They’d flown some of us there from Sevastopol. A blue hat came up to me and said I was to get on a plane at once and come. So here I am.”
“What happened to our company?” I asked.
Zoya harrumphed in her usual fashion. “Only a few of us got out. Ivanchuk. Cheburko. The medic, what’s his name? Yuri. The rest were either killed or taken prisoner.”
“The captain?”
Zoya shook her head. “He stayed behind, fighting to the last.”
I was almost afraid to ask. “And the little girl?”
“Raisa was evacuated with us.”
“Thank God,” I said.
“Yes, thank God,” Zoya said, crossing herself. “They put her on a ship bound for Canada.”
“Canada?”
“Yes. With other orphans from the Crimea.”
I was pleased to learn not only that Raisa had survived but also that someone would take care of her, love her. She would become the woman my own Masha could not.
Just then the aid came in with my noon meal.
“Would you join me, Zoya?” I asked.
“No, you go ahead and eat. You need it. My goodness, you’re skin and bones.”
“Ach. They feed me so much I’ll be fat as a pig,” I said, puffing out my cheeks. Zoya laughed. “There’s enough for two. Come, we’ll share.”
As we ate, we talked about what had happened to each other over the past several weeks. We spoke of Zoya’s family, and she asked if I’d heard anything from my husband. I told her I hadn’t. I didn’t tell her the extent of my wounds, the fact that I would never have children. I guess I didn’t want to blunt our joy. Zoya looked different to me. In the short time we’d been apart she no longer had the features of a girl. Perhaps it had been happening all along and I had just now noticed it. But the soft fullness of her face had become angular. Her cheeks were more prominent, and her mouth had the cynical edge to it of one hardened by experience. The change saddened me a little. When Zoya had first come to the unit she was hardly more than a fresh-faced girl.
She told me that her new unit was going to be shipped out soon.
“Do you know where?” I asked.
“Word has it we’re headed for Stalingrad. Let’s hope it doesn’t end like Odessa or Sevastopol.”
“I wish I were coming with you.”
“You’re crazy, you know that,” Zoya said, glancing around the room. “They should make sure your head wasn’t injured.”
We both laughed again. A sausage remained on the plate, and Zoya looked down at it, then at me.
“Go ahead,” I said. “I’m full.”
She picked it up and began eating it.
“Besides,” said Zoya, “you’re famous now. They can’t risk losing you.”
“How long can you stay?”
“Not long, I’m afraid. I have to be back on the plane tonight.”
“Remember your promise?” I told her.
“What promise?”
“You said you would come and visit me when this is over.”
“Of course,” she said, glancing away.
We both suspected, I think, that it would never happen. The war had brought us as close as sisters, had us sharing a foxhole and food and danger, had us killing men we didn’t know, and when it was over we would go back to our separate lives. It saddened me to think that I would never see Zoya again. We sat there, looking out the window toward the sea.
“Oh,” she said, fumbling in her pocket. “I have something that is yours.”
She took out a small leather case that I recognized immediately.
“Dear God!” I cried. It was the case that held my personal effects, my wedding band, the only picture I had of Kolya and Masha, the lock of her hair.
“I wanted to hold on to it for you,” she said. “I didn’t want it getting lost. And then we were separated.”
“Thank you, Zoya.”
I opened it, looked at the picture of my daughter and Kolya, and began to cry.
Zoya put her arm around me. “It’s all right, Tat’yana.”
We talked for a long while. When it was time for her to leave, we hugged once again, and she headed for the door. But she stopped and turned toward me.
“You take care of yourself, Tat’yana,” she said. “Allow yourself to be happy.”
“Yes, little mother. I will.”
“Good-bye.”