Beautiful Assassin Read online

  Suddenly I shared her fear: to die without ever having truly loved. What a waste of a life, I thought.

  “You will live to find out what love is about.”

  Then she stared at the picture again. “May I ask you a question, Tat’yana? If it’s not of too personal a nature.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “What is it like to, you know…be with a man?”

  I glanced over at her, smiled. “That would all depend, I suppose.”

  “On what?”

  “The man.”

  “My mother told me that it hurts the first time,” she stated.

  “A little perhaps. Not too much.”

  “How do you know what…to do?”

  Here she could kill men so coldly, and yet she’d never been with one. Was I any more experienced, though, at her age? I thought of my own wedding night. Kolya and I were both virgins. Nervous, I lay there in my nightgown waiting for him to make the first move. Then when he did, there was an awkward fumbling of cloth and hands, a frantic pushing and shoving, a last grunting and shudder by my new husband. It was over before I knew what had happened. That was my first time. I had expected more, but life never gives you what you expect, and the trick is to learn to accept what you get. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

  “When the time comes,” I explained, “your heart will guide you.”

  “Did it with you?”

  Sometimes it is better to lie. “Of course.”

  Before handing the picture back, Zoya glanced at it again.

  “Is that your daughter?”

  I nodded.

  “How old was she there?”

  “Two.” Then I shared with her the pet name I used to call Masha by: moy krolik. My little rabbit.

  She touched my shoulder with her hand. “When this is over, you will go home and you and your husband will have many more children.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “No, you will. We must all have large families.”

  I shrugged. I couldn’t imagine bringing another child into this grotesque world. It hardly seemed right or fair. And yet, another part of me knew it was exactly what we needed to do. I knew that we must all have children, lots and lots of children, not to forget those who had died but to begin anew. To rebuild our country. To rebuild ourselves. And deep down I knew that I secretly hoped I would have another child, that I would feel life growing in me again, filling the vast hole the war had torn in me. It was a thought that both saddened me and gave me a strange glimmer of hope. There would be plenty of time, when the war was over, for me to consider being a mother again. But now I had to harden myself and be a soldier still. I could not yet think of bringing forth another life. I could concern myself only with the taking of it.

  “I will pray for your mother,” I said to her.

  “Thank you. And I will pray for your husband.”

  “And after the war, you must come to Kiev and visit us.”

  “I don’t like big cities. Too many people.”

  “But you’ll make an exception for me, won’t you?”

  She smiled and said, “Well, all right.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t turn you into a city girl.”

  “We should try to get some sleep,” Zoya said. “We have to be up in a few hours.”

  “You go on. I’ll be in soon.”

  The truth was I wasn’t tired. My body was exhausted, but my mind rambled on. After fifteen or sixteen hours hunkered down in a sniper’s nest, concentrating on killing, most nights as soon as I closed my eyes, I slept a dreamless, leaden sleep, like someone drunk on strong gorilka. Even the nightly bombardment by the Luftwaffe or our own howling Katyushas didn’t keep me up. Tonight though, was one of those nights when my mind seemed to drone dully with random thoughts like a bottle filled with horseflies.

  I took out my journal and turned on my electric torch. I opened the small notebook and read a poem I’d begun earlier:

  A naïve girl I left for war

  In a filthy railroad car

  With men grasping guns,

  Grunting and swearing,

  The world turned upside down

  All my hopes undone.

  I had hundreds of such snippets of poetry. Scattered lines, isolated verses. I’d managed to finish only a handful. The more I killed, it seemed, the less I could write. It was as if killing sapped me of my muse, robbed me of my inspiration. Or perhaps it was that killing had become my new poetry, the new expression of my imagination.

  Below the poem was the entry of my last kill.

  26 May 1942. Number 288. Taken three kilometers northeast of Sevastopol. One shot to the chest. Recovered a Mauser in good working order. Witnessed by Z. Kovshova.

  I needed only twelve more to reach my personal goal of three hundred. I couldn’t say why exactly this arbitrary number was important to me. Still, I couldn’t deny its significance. No male sniper had that many, and no female Soviet sniper had reached a third that number. I preferred to tell myself that I was doing it for noble reasons, began to believe what the newspapers and the Party propaganda had said about me—that I was a hero, that I was doing it for my country, for the Soviet people, giving them something to lift up their hearts in these dark days of retreat and humiliation, death and defeat. Even for my fellow women. I liked to think how young girls would see my picture in Pravda or Izvestiya and say to themselves, If Tat’yana Levchenko could do this, perhaps I could, too. My work, like that of the thousands of other women just like me in this war, was a bold and defiant act of liberation for our sex. To show not only the Germans but also our own Soviet men that we were their equal. But killing is never an answer to anything, and even when it is necessary, it is never something noble, never something to be admired. For all my fancy talk to Zoya of fighting to liberate women, my own reason was far more simple and selfish—hatred. Yes. I killed simply because I hated the Germans. Hated them for what they’d done to my country, to my loved ones, to me. And once I’d started to kill, to give in to that hatred, I found I was no better than the Germans. I enjoyed it, took a perverse pride in my skill at killing. I wasn’t satisfied with just being a good sniper. I wanted to be the best, the very best sniper in the entire Soviet Army. I wanted the Germans to hear my name and tremble at it. I guess I thought that if I killed enough, that if I were, as Macbeth said, “in blood stepp’d in so far,” then I would be able to let the hatred and rage and need for revenge go, and acquire some measure of peace.

  Sometimes, though, it seemed that hatred was the only solid thing inside me, the only thing that propped me up and kept me going. Every other emotion seemed to have dried up in my breast. All the death, all the unimaginable suffering I’d seen or been a party to—all of this had numbed me, had made my heart like a piece of polished stone, smooth and impenetrable. Once, passing a bombed-out building in Odessa, I caught a glimpse of this woman staring out at me. I paused, struck by the likeness of her to someone I’d once known. But this woman was older, with a stiffening of the flesh around the mouth, sunken cheeks, the haggard look in the eyes of one who’d gazed upon some terrible thing. I was captivated, even more so when I realized I was looking in a broken mirror at myself. Before the war, I had been an attractive woman, or so I was told. Young, filled with, as my mother used to say, silly romantic notions, an aspiring poet. And now I was…what? A cold-blooded killer. I felt myself changed in ways I could hardly even fathom. Was I the same woman who had given suck to my little girl? Who had so loved the feel of her mouth against my breast, the smell of her skin, the sound of her voice? What had become of her? Sometimes I wondered if all the killing, all the death and bloodshed, had altered something so fundamental in me that when the war was over, I could never return to the person I’d been. Could I ever go back to enjoying such simple pleasures as a cup of tea in the evening, reading a book, a Sunday afternoon stroll along the Dnieper? Above all, in that other world after the war was over, when the dead were buried and the guns silenced, when the blood had h
ad a chance to seep deeply into the stained earth, would love even be possible again? Could I love another ever again?

  Still, now and then, the meaning of those numbers in my journal would creep into my consciousness. The numbers would become more than the immutable facts of war. I thought of the German sniper again. How he’d stared at me, gripped my wrist so desperately, as if to keep himself among the living. Who was Senta? I wondered. What was he trying to tell me? Was it his wife? A girlfriend? What if it were his daughter? I had brought life into the world, had loved and nurtured it, and knew what it was to lose it. I knew that those I killed, like the one today, had wives and sweethearts and, yes, even children, had dreams of returning home to family someday. If now and then a momentary tremor of remorse did begin to flower in me, I would normally resist the temptation to feel any humanity for those I dispatched. I’d only have to conjure the sweet face of my darling child. That usually was enough to stanch any misplaced sympathy.

  I got out the solitary letter I’d received from Kolya. From handling, it was dog-eared and brittle as an old leaf. It was just a few lines, the only word I’d had from him since we’d parted at the railroad station. It had come eight months earlier, and there had been nothing since, despite the fact that I must have written a dozen letters to him. I felt I was throwing my words into a storm, that they were scattered and cast away. We’d heard that the mails were sporadic along the entire front, but especially in the north at Leningrad where his Twenty-third Army had been sent. Kolya’s normally careful and precise handwriting was messy, as if written under duress, in a wobbling freight car or as bombs fell from the skies.

  My Dearest Love

  I miss you and my darling Masha dearly. I long to see you both again. Keep yourself safe, my dearest.

  Yours, Kolya

  Sometimes even, during quiet moments like these after a long, hard day of battle, I’d try convince myself that what I felt for Kolya was, indeed, love, at least a form of love, that the war had somehow distorted everything, twisted my feelings all about, drained me of my ability to feel anything. Or sometimes I wondered, what was love anyway? Hadn’t my mother warned me about my silly romantic notions, that love didn’t put a roof over your head or comfort you in old age? What would its absence really matter after such a terrible thing as this war? Kolya and I had been good friends, we would be good friends again. We would comfort each other. I would read my poetry to him, and we would listen to the music student Kovalevsky’s cello strains floating upward into our apartment (though, of course, all that was gone, our apartment building, all of Kiev). We would take long walks along the river, both of us secretly imagining Masha holding our hands, our love for her and our shared pain over her absence binding us together as love never had. At night, I pictured Kolya and I clutching each other like a pair of frightened children, until we fell asleep. For each, the presence of the other would soften loss, would help us to forget all the death that we’d seen, all the death we’d caused. I’d promised myself that I would remain loyal to him and his soothing love would sustain us both. Perhaps, I told myself, I hadn’t really known how to love before the war. Perhaps whatever I’d thought was missing from our life together then would somehow seem inconsequential after all of this. And perhaps, as Zoya said, some night we would come together in our terrible loneliness and need, and begin another life.

  3

  If you are to understand me, why I did what I did during the war and later, you should have some idea of who I was before, so that you can know in what ways the fighting changed me, made me the sort of person who could kill with such dispassionate ease.

  Though I was raised as an only child, my parents did have another baby before I came along, a son named Mikhail. Still in a crib, he went to sleep one night and, as my mother put it, “God decided he was needed in heaven.” In one corner of our home she’d erected a small shrine to him—a pair of his baby shoes, a blanket from his crib, a lock of his hair, a single photograph showing a pretty, dark-haired boy who bore a striking resemblance to me. Though I never knew him, I sometimes resented my brother for leaving behind an unspoken sadness that pervaded my childhood, that hung palpably over our family. I could sense his ghost, the presence missing from the dinner table with the extra plate my mother always set out, could feel it in my mother when she tucked me in at night, her possessiveness, the fear that it would happen again. How my father looked at me with a barely concealed expression of displeasure. And I felt too, as all those who have lost siblings, the oppressive weight of responsibility that sits on those left behind—not to disappoint one’s parents, not to cause them any further pain, to live, not one’s own life, but that of the dead sibling.

  My father’s work for the kolkhoz, the government’s farm collectivization program, caused us to move many times when I was growing up. We lived all over the Ukraine, in small villages and large cities. I was always having to get used to a new home, a new town, new schoolmates. I never felt a part of anything, never felt I had a home in any conventional sense of that word. And there were many Ukrainians who hated apparatchiks like my father, whom they felt were responsible for taking away their lands, dividing up their farms among the peasants, for the famine that eventually swept over the land like a plague. That and the fact that my father’s government position permitted us to enjoy a certain status and financial security that most of our fellow Ukrainians did not—all of this only caused our family to be even more isolated and, in many cases, despised. We usually had a car, always a modest but pleasant home, plenty to eat—this at a time when most families were crammed into a single room or small apartment and had to stand in long lines with food vouchers to get a loaf of bread or a few potatoes. And in my native Ukraine, tens of thousands were starving during the Holomodor, when there were dead bodies in the alleys and scattered across the countryside like so many grains of wheat left after the harvest.

  My father was a Russian, an educated and urbane man, handsome and remote in a nineteenth-century sort of way, with his high collar and pince-nez, his dark, wavy hair and bushy mustaches. An atheist, he came from a well-to-do family in St. Petersburg before the revolution, though he’d taken an active part in the brave new world after the overthrow of the czar, even fighting with the Reds against the Whites in the civil war. A distant and reserved man whose capability for love, I think, was forever stunted by the death of his son, a man who seemed reluctant to allow himself to get close to another child. And yet, in his own way he tried to be a good father to his one surviving child, and I suppose he loved me in his own fashion. At night I remember him reading Turgenev or Gogol to me, or some Pushkin (it was from him that I developed my love of poetry). He took me to the opera and the symphony. He would listen to Mozart in the evening as he smoked his pipe, though later, after the German invasion, he would smash all of his “Nazi music,” as he put it. He taught me to play chess and to swim in the sea. To throw a javelin and run the hurdles. (Later, it would be he who instructed me on how to shoot a gun.) Sometimes he would relate to me stories from his experiences in the civil war, fighting with the famous Chapayev, the sweet odor of his pipe intoxicating. While the peasant in my mother believed in the need to feed the people, she was naturally suspect of abstractions, both fearful of and bitter toward the government. My father, on the other hand, looked upon the Party as a benevolent if sometimes necessarily stern parent that wouldn’t spare the rod because of its love of its children. He had placed his complete faith in socialism. It was his god, his religion, his heaven on earth.

  I could recall at night, my parents sitting at the kitchen table, bickering about the government. My mother calling Stalin that ublyudok—mongrel dog—though she would always, as did most citizens even in the privacy of their own homes, instinctively lower her voice when saying something the least critical about the government, fearful that neighbors would overhear and inform on her. She detested Stalin and his cronies, feared and hated the chekisty, the dreaded secret police that came and took people away in the m
iddle of the night. And she blamed the Holomodor directly on him, on his paranoid fear of and hatred for Ukrainian independence. On the other hand, my father took the position that the famine was merely an ugly rumor spread by traitors and reactionaries, or, if some few had actually starved, blaming it on drought or those selfish kulaks. For my father, the blame for any and all of communism’s ills was never laid at the doorstep of Stalin himself, who was, in my father’s eyes, the country’s savior, pure of heart and beyond reproach, nor on the Communist system itself. And he had tried to indoctrinate his daughter with the same dialectical fervor. As I grew older, though, and saw for myself the glaring inequalities and hypocrisies, the failings and atrocities of our system, and later the grotesque circus that was Stalin’s show trials, I couldn’t help but question the government and its leaders, the twisted means to arrive at their perfect ends. But I never questioned my love of country or of my countrymen, which was also something I learned from my father. He instilled in me an undying love of my homeland, a love for which I would gladly give my life.

  My mother was as different from him as night is from day. A Ukrainian, she came from a poor family of farmers, and she never shook her fear of poverty. A simple woman, with broad hips and a sturdy peasant body, she was always saving kopeks in a tin can she kept in her bureau for a rainy day, using milk long after it had gone bad, watering down the soups she made, patching and repatching clothes. Like many Ukrainians, she was shaped by necessity, fashioned by the memory of actual hunger, something I myself had never experienced. And yet she strove hard to make whatever house we stayed in feel like home. We’d hardly get settled in when she would be busy cleaning and scrubbing, making curtains for the windows and putting out our few possessions, including setting up the small memorial in the corner to my brother. I remember her making nachynka and golubtsy, her hands smelling of onions and cornmeal. I loved her hands, blunt, the nails broken, hands fashioned for work, but they were, nonetheless, gentle and loving; I remember them combing my hair or wiping the tears from my eyes when I’d scraped a knee. She tried to establish routines, to forcibly nurture a family life even in the most barren of places. For Christmas, she would place the kolach bread on the table with candles and dishes of salt and honey, and she’d dip the bread in each and repeat the prayer about Christ’s coming—Khristos rozhdayetsya. This despite the government’s view on celebrating such a bourgeois holiday. She was a good mother, whose loss of a child, unlike that of my father, only made her love me all the more fiercely, all the more protectively.