Beautiful Assassin Read online

  “You have yourself a nasty wound,” he told me as he cleaned and began stitching the cut.

  “Just a scratch,” I replied.

  “Scratch nothing. You could have a fractured skull for all I know.”

  “Ouch,” I cried as he roughly drew the sutures through my scalp, as if to make his point.

  “This big killer of Germans, afraid of a little needle?” he teased. “You need to take better care of yourself.”

  “I did what I had to.”

  “This makes, what, the fourth time you’ve been wounded?”

  I shrugged.

  The first two injuries I received were minor shrapnel wounds. The other, a bullet to my thigh, was more serious. It came during the evacuation of Odessa. My unit was pulling back toward the harbor. I was running for cover to a bombed-out building when a round ripped through my thigh. I would have bled to death if Zoya hadn’t tied a tourniquet around the wound and pulled me to safety.

  “Even a cat has only nine lives, Sergeant,” Yuri warned me.

  “That kraut needed to be stopped.”

  “Does the captain know about your wound?”

  I shook my head.

  “If he got wind of it, he’d probably have you shipped off to a field hospital just to be on the safe side. They don’t want anything to happen to their star.”

  He said this not out of jealousy or sarcasm, but out of concern.

  “I’m just doing my duty,” I replied. “But you won’t tell him, will you?”

  Yuri paused and came around so he could look me in the eye. “You have done the one thing that we’ve not been able to do to those kraut bastards.”

  “And what is that?”

  “You have pricked their Aryan pride. A woman has humbled the mighty Reich. And you’ve given us something to be proud of. So take care of yourself, Sergeant. We need you to stay alive.”

  That night, we sat listening as the Germans made their usual bombing sorties over the city. Sometimes fifteen hundred a night, the steady drone of their planes like a horde of angry bees. Even from this distance the explosions made the ground quake. Occasionally one of their big thousand-kilo bombs would strike close enough that the dirt above us was shaken loose and fell upon our heads. And yet, we’d almost gotten used to it. Some soldiers occupied themselves cleaning their weapons, others with making tea or playing cards or darning socks. A few wrote letters or read mail by the frail lantern light.

  A short distance away, a sergeant we called the Wild Boar and a few of his friends were passing around a bottle of vodka and talking about the Brits and Americans. They were debating when our supposed “allies” were going to open up a second front we’d all heard so much about. They used the disparaging term Amerikosy for the Americans, whom we thought of as spoiled capitalists fearful of the Germans. Occasionally we’d see the things the Amerikosy sent us through lend-lease—canned meats and radios, tires and trucks, barbed wire and guns and ammo. Most of us just wanted to know when the capitalists were actually going to get their hands dirty, when they were going to fight and die as we Soviets had been doing by the tens of thousands since the war began the previous year.

  “What need have we for those capitalist dogs?” boasted Drubich, a bony man with gray skin and the large, flat eyes of a carp. He was one of the Wild Boar’s cronies, a boot-licking sycophant. A cowardly man in battle, he liked to boast when the bullets weren’t flying. “To hell with those bastards.”

  “I think we can use all the help we can get,” replied another soldier named Nurylbayev, a dark-complected man who spoke with a Kazakh accent.

  “Fuck the Yanks. And the Brits too,” added Drubich. “By the time they get their britches on we’ll have the krauts running back to Berlin. Ain’t that right, Sergeant?” he said, looking over at the Wild Boar.

  The sergeant only grunted. He was staring at Zoya, I noticed. She sat on the floor a few feet away, cleaning her machine gun.

  “But they are supposed to be our allies,” said Nurylbayev. “Why are we doing all the fighting, while they get to sit on their asses?”

  “The Brits are too busy drinking their fucking tea,” Drubich said, pretending he was sipping from a cup, his little finger raised in an attitude of high society. “And the Americans with their cricket.”

  “The British play cricket, you ignorant bastard,” explained Nurylbayev. “In America they play baseball.”

  “And how the hell would you know?”

  “I had a cousin who moved to Boston. He wrote me about the Boston Red Stockings baseball team.”

  “Red Stockings?” joked Drubich, sipping vodka from the bottle. “I didn’t know they had Communists over there.”

  A few laughed at his joke.

  “Gimme that,” grunted the Wild Boar, wrenching the bottle away from Drubich while he was still drinking, so that some of it spilled down onto his pants. “It’s that goddamned Jew-loving Roosevelt. He only cares about the Jews anyway. As long as they’re making money from the war, they could give a shit about who’s winning. Hitler had that part right. Too bad he didn’t finish the fucking job before he took us on.”

  As he said this, the Wild Boar glanced over at me. Of course, I thought. Like the rest, he’d heard the rumor that I was a Jew. Because I had the dark hair and eyes of a Gypsy. Most of all, I guess because I killed the krauts with such cold intensity, such that only a Jew could have for the Nazis.

  “Still, the capitalists ought to be fighting with us,” replied Nurylbayev. “Not hiding like frightened children.”

  “Fuck ’em,” added the Wild Boar. “Besides, when we get to Berlin, that’ll leave more pretty fräuleins for the rest of us.”

  “That’s right,” said Drubich, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic.

  I’d heard such talk before. How we were taking the brunt of the Wehrmacht while the Americans hung back, testing the waters of war with their big toe in North Africa. My own feeling was that we needed help, the sooner the better. We all knew that America was a big and wealthy country, one that could well afford to build bombers and tanks and battleships, a country that had plenty of young men to fight, soft and well-fed pampered boys who played baseball and watched moving picture shows and drove big automobiles. Yet in truth, all that I knew about America came from what I’d read—how it was a lazy and decadent land filled with lazy and decadent people. That and what a former teacher of mine, Madame Rudneva, had told me about it.

  From his rucksack, the Wild Boar took out a large sausage, hacked off a piece with his knife, jabbed it with the point, and stuck it into his mouth. His real name was Ilya Gasdanov, but behind his back everyone called him the Wild Boar. Partly because he was thickset with a coarse beard that covered most of his face, and because he had small feral eyes and a broad, upturned nose that resembled the snout of a pig. But mostly we called him that because he acted like some wild beast—in the way he ate, the way he fought, the way he treated the soldiers under his command, especially the way he treated the women soldiers. He was always in possession of such rare delicacies as sausage. He had connections, knew people in the black market who could get whatever you wanted, at least for the right price—real cigarettes, German schnapps, Black Sea caviar, even silk stockings, which he would dangle like bait in front of the dozen or so women in the company.

  “Would you care for a piece, Corporal?” he said to Zoya. She had the Degtyaryov spread out in pieces on a section of canvas in front of her. With the pan off, she was loading it with copper-plated 7.62 mm cartridges, her movements nimble and precise, and I could just imagine how, before the war, her hands would have worked using a needle and thread to darn a sock or hem a dress. In front of her too lay a letter she’d gotten during mail call. I’d watched her as she read it, saw whatever news it brought from home fill her eyes with that familiar distant longing that such letters always bring. Even good news tended to make one sad, because you were away from those you loved. She glanced up at the Wild Boar, then across at me. I sat with my b
ack to the earthen wall of the bunker, working on a poem in my journal, a small leather-bound notebook I kept in my pocket. I guess I still clung to the notion that I was a poet. Before the war I had dreamed of being the next Akhmatova. Now I wrote just to occupy my time, to keep my sanity.

  “You are far too skinny, Corporal,” the Wild Boar said. “How are you going to kill those fucking krauts if you don’t keep up your strength?” With his knife, he hacked off another large chunk of sausage, speared it with the point, and shoved it into the hairy cavity that was his mouth. The weapon, a dagger he’d taken off a dead SS officer, was a delicate-looking thing with a fancy engraved handle, something that resembled an expensive letter opener. “Uhm,” he said, making an exaggerated show of the pleasure it gave him. His lips smacked as he chewed and his throat made the guttural sounds of a dog eating. He cut another piece and extended it on the end of the dagger toward Zoya. “Have some. Don’t be shy, little one.”

  At first she shook her head.

  “Go on. Take it. There’s plenty more where that came from.” He smiled at her. “Think of it as a reward for your good work today, comrade.”

  “For getting that kraut,” chipped in Drubich.

  Hesitantly, she reached out and accepted the proffered piece of meat.

  “Spasibo,” she said as she tore hungrily into it.

  “Is good, no?”

  She looked over and met my gaze, then turned away, embarrassed.

  I went back to my journal. Each day I wrote something in it: random thoughts, observations, lines of a poem I never quite seemed to finish. It also served as my kill log, where I kept the official record of the men I dispatched as a sniper. Ironic, I knew, that between the same covers I both wrote poetry and recorded the number of Germans I shot. Creation and destruction in one book. My journal, though, was one of the few places that was private, a thing I didn’t have to share with anyone else. And it was the one part of my old life that I hadn’t lost, the one part of me that had remained constant. I sometimes felt that privacy was the worst casualty of war. I don’t mean by this personal modesty. The year of fighting had nearly purged me of that. Although it had been awkward at first, I’d long since ceased to worry about bathing or changing clothes or attending to personal needs in front of a company of mostly men. And they hardly batted an eye at seeing a woman pull her trousers down, squat, and relieve herself. The war had made modesty a luxury no one could afford. No, for me at least, it had to do with the absence of any privacy of mind, the time and silence to be alone with one’s thoughts, without being interrupted or pestered, without having to listen to a hundred other people jabbering or laughing, eating or farting, or snoring in their sleep. I missed the quiet evenings alone with a book, doing research in the musty-smelling stacks of the university library, sitting by myself along the river and working on a poem, allowing one line to open up an entire sonnet I hadn’t even known dwelled within me.

  “And what about the sergeant?” the Wild Boar asked, as if he could read my thoughts and wished to disrupt them on purpose. “Would she care for a piece of my sausage?”

  I looked up from my journal. “No,” I said flatly, then returned to my writing.

  Despite already having eaten the watery gruel, the stale hunk of black bread, and the meager piece of dried meat or salted fish we all were given for our evening meal, I was still hungry. I was always hungry, as were we all, having been reduced to half rations since the Germans had tightened the noose around the city. All that is, except for the COs and commissars and the Party’s blue hats—those feared political officers—and those like the Wild Boar who knew how to take care of themselves. With the revolution, we were all supposed to be equal. But the war only proved what we all knew already—that a select few got plenty while the rest got the scraps. It was just like before the revolution, only now we called it communism.

  Though my stomach growled from hunger, I wasn’t about to accept food from the Wild Boar. I didn’t like him, found him repulsive. The Wild Boar was old school, a battle-hardened career soldier who’d been in the czar’s army and didn’t think they should let women fight. He thought we “shlyukhi”—cunts—as I’d heard him refer to us, just got in the way and were bad for morale. To him, a woman belonged in the kitchen or the bedroom, not the battlefield.

  Early in the war, there had been many such men, men who didn’t accept the notion of having women on the front lines. They felt defending the Motherland, killing Germans, was a man’s job. I could still recall my experience at the recruiting station where I’d gone to enlist, in a small village west of Kharkov. My face haggard and hair a mess, my dress still covered in blood. I stopped by a farmer’s water trough and asked if I could clean up. The woman there kindly gave me a bar of soap and some rags. I cleaned up, washed my face, tried to look presentable. From a wild cherry tree beside the road, I picked a couple of cherries, crushed them between my fingers, and rubbed their juice into my cheeks. I didn’t want to give the appearance of being pale and weak. I wanted to show them I was healthy, that I was strong and capable of fighting.

  The country was in utter chaos, with thousands fleeing eastward before the fascists and their “lightning war” machine. There were long lines at the recruiting office, which was set up in an abandoned factory. I noticed one or two other women, not many. They’d just begun the call-up for women to fight, the very fact suggesting just how desperate the situation had become. A couple of men whistled at me, and they spoke in those leering undertones that men do in the presence of a woman they find desirable. I hardly felt desirable. I hardly felt like a woman even. More simply a vessel filled with anger, with hatred and the compulsion to do violence, so filled with it I thought I would burst. When I finally reached the front of the line, there were two officers seated behind a table. They looked me up and down, traded smiles.

  “Yes?” one of them said. He was a skinny man with a red face scarred by smallpox. He used a matchbook to pick at his teeth.

  “I wish to sign up to fight,” I explained.

  “To fight?” he said with a laugh.

  “Yes. For a combat unit.”

  “What do you think war is, pretty girl? A dance?” He and the other officer chuckled at this.

  “I want to fight,” I repeated.

  “We have openings for nurses. If you want to be a nurse, I can get you in.”

  “I am trained as a marksman.”

  “Marksman!” he said in a mocking tone.

  From my pocket I took out the certificate I’d received from the Osoviakhim, the paramilitary shooting club that my father had had me join back in Kiev when I was a girl. I had qualified as a marksman with a Mosin-Nagant rifle. At one hundred yards without a scope, I could put five shots within a five-centimeter pattern. I had won competitions throughout the Ukraine. I was a quite a good marksman.

  “See,” I said, presenting the certificate to him.

  He gave it a cursory inspection and tossed it back across the table at me. “I told you, we need nurses.”

  “But you see there, I am good with a rifle.”

  “Do you think shooting Germans is like shooting targets, pretty girl?” he huffed at me. “Come here,” he instructed, waving me to approach him. I hesitated, then leaned down toward him. “Closer,” he said. “I won’t bite.” I leaned still closer. When I was close enough that I could smell the leeks on his breath, he aimed his finger at my face and went bang loudly enough that it startled me. I jumped backward, almost into the man behind me. Both officers laughed again, as did a few of the others standing in line. I felt like a fool, felt my face grow hot, the familiar burning sensation beginning again at the corners of my eyes, as it had for so many days past. But I was not about to let the idiot get the better of me. So I squinted hard, tightening the flesh around my eyes. I think it was then that the change in me really began, when I became something other than just another victim of the Nazis. You see, our Motherland had rapidly become a nation of grieving mothers, so much grief and mourni
ng and heartache that it hung in the air, palpable as smoke, choking the lungs.

  “I want to enlist in a fighting unit,” I said firmly, struggling to control my voice.

  “Don’t be silly. Consider becoming a nurse.”

  “I don’t want to be a nurse. I want to shoot Germans.”

  “Go home. Killing’s a man’s job,” the red-faced officer exclaimed. Glancing past me he said, “Next.”

  But I didn’t budge. I stood there, staring down at him. At that moment, I hated the red-faced officer almost as much as I did the Germans.

  “You’re right,” I said, and then, despite my best efforts, I felt sudden hot tears pushing out of the corners of my eyes. But they were tears of vengeance, of a mother’s love, fierce and irrepressible, tears that could singe anything they touched. Staring down at the officer I pointed a finger at him, all of my sadness turning to rage, boiling up in my breast. “Yes. Killing is a man’s job,” I cried. From the pocket of my dress I got out the leather case in which I had all of my worldly possessions. I removed the picture of my daughter and Kolya, my husband, and laid it on the table before them. “That’s my little girl,” I said, pointing at Masha. “I want to kill those Germans for her. If I have to, I will join the partisans and fight with them. But I will fight. Do you understand me? One way or another, I will fight.”

  I had spoken loud enough that those behind me heard what I’d said. A few started to grumble. One voice said, “Let her fight.” I turned and looked at the men behind me. Then another called out, “Yeah, give her a chance.” And another: “We need every fighter we can get.”

  Finally, sensing the tide turning against him, the red-faced officer relented. “Fill this out and come back tomorrow,” he said, thrusting a form at me. “Just remember, when you are getting your pretty ass shot at, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  In the Red Army we women had to prove ourselves, not once but over and over. If a man was afraid, if he cried or recoiled from the horrors of war, it was viewed as a momentary failing, something he could overcome with willpower or determination, or experience, or by a gun placed to the back of his head. But such a thing from a woman only proved what they already knew, that she was by nature weak, not cut out for war, for killing. We women had to push those natural emotions that all soldiers have deep down inside us. We had to deny not only our womanhood but also our common humanity. We had to be cold and remorseless. We couldn’t cry, couldn’t show fear or sympathy or tenderness. We had to become as cold and heartless as those Germans we fought against.