Sniper's Honor(16)

A memory came to mind.

Her husband used to tease her. “If only people would see beyond all that ridiculous beauty,” he would say, “they might understand what a decent person you actually are. I’m so glad I did! It wasn’t easy, but somehow I managed.”

She thought: If he could see me now, all rigged up like a babushka! What a hoot he’d have!

And then she remembered: Dimitri was gone.

“Brace yourselves,” one of the boys yelled back through the door, and she felt the plane begin to skid in the air as it lost altitude fast.

Outside, as the craft dipped beneath a certain altitude, the quality of darkness changed; it became a darkness without depth or texture, and she realized it meant they were not above the mountains but within them, in some twisty valley with the mountaintops above. Across from her, the lieutenant colonel’s face had gone from pasty white to deathly white, and his jaw clenched so tightly she feared he’d shatter his molars. Then the plane hit—or crashed horizontally, might be a better description—with such force that lights in her brain fired in the shock of vibration. It bounced, stuck again, and then seemed fully committed to the earth, rolling capriciously along, every shock transferred from the landing gear to the airframe to her body.

The plane ran out of energy and slowed to a halt. The door was pried open, and amid a wash of cold air and the smell of pines, hands reached in to help her out. Only then did the lieutenant colonel seem to come out of his trance. As she was pulled by him, he grabbed her by the arm and whispered fiercely into her ear, “Don’t fail, Petrova. Not like at Kursk.”

Kursk! They knew.

But then she was out of the plane, into another century. Men with beards, their bulky bodies crisscrossed with ammunition bandoliers, their tommy guns hanging across their chests, swarmed everywhere. Potato-masher grenades were stuck in every belt and boot, and their holsters dragged under the full weight of pistols that ran from ancient revolvers to Mausers and Lugers, to say nothing of Toks, all of them dangling and clanking and glinting in the torchlight. Also: bayonets, daggers, hunting and fighting knives, some almost swords, recumbent on straps, additionally adangle. Every man and every woman—there were several—had at least three weapons. They seemed happy because they lived on the edge of violence, each a part of its culture, a celebrant of its values, a survivor of its whimsy.

As she stood on shaky legs, on earth once again, hands reached to touch her, not sexually but as if in wonder.

“Die weisse Hexe,” came the call, the whisper, and all crowded close to see the famous sniper of Stalingrad, as known for her beauty as for her skill. Her hat came off and her hair tumbled free. She shook it, partly because her head was hot and itchy, partly because it was a gesture copied from the movies. It cascaded and, lit by torchlight, seemed to shiver; so blond, so silken, so dense. Her eyes narrowed and she turned to three-quarters profile to confront them and the weapon of her beauty hit them hard; they stumbled back. A man approached.

“I am Bak,” he said. “Welcome, Petrova. We are here to serve you in any way.”

Bak was the Ukrainian soldier who’d risen to partisan command by virtue of cunning and organizational ability. He had become totally a creature of forest ambuscade and slow night crawl. He was a general but mistrusted by Moscow, a man to watch, a man to fear.

The issue would always be: After the great victory, would he throw his forces against or to Stalin? Was he Nationalist or Communist? If the former, he could well earn nine lead grams from an NKVD agent’s pistol instead of a hero’s medal. So he carried himself with a certain doomed grace. The fallen lines of his face, she thought, seemed to say: This will end badly.

“I am honored, General.”

“Call me Bak. It’s enough. The ‘general’ is bullshit, that’s all.” He turned and yelled, “All right, get this crate turned around so it can get out of here and take this NKVD prick back to his bath.”

The men crowded to the tail of the light plane and managed to rotate it on its landing gear to face the wind while, at the same time, standing clear of the two whirling props. Petrova could see the white faces of the two young pilots behind their control panel, crouched over their steering mechanism, waiting as the plane was resituated. When that happened, they nodded, and the guerrillas faded back. The pitch of the engine rose to a shriek as one pushed a throttle, spitting flecks of grass and debris in the air as well as the stench of acceleration, and the plane began to move forward. With less cargo by the weight of a woman, it dipped, then rose and soon vanished.

“Petrova, come, we have a wagon.”