Sniper's Honor(6)

“I agree,” he said. “I used a bolt-action.”

“She said she had fifty-nine targets eliminated. How many did you have?”

“Fifty-eight,” said Swagger.

The old lady laughed.

“She says that is a very good answer even if she bets you’re lying to be polite.”

“Tell her I’d never lie to a lady as sharp-eyed as she is. And I wouldn’t gamble against her, neither. She’d get everything but my undershorts.”

Again she laughed.

“She says you remind her of her first commanding officer. He was a wonderful man, very funny, very brave. Dead in Bagration. A great loss.”

Swagger knew Bagration was the Russian offensive against Army Group Center in mid-1944, north of the Pripet Marshes, that drove the Germans out of Belarus.

“I’ve lost many, too,” he said. “If you haven’t lost, it’s hard to understand how far the pain goes and how long it lasts.”

She nodded, touched his hand.

“In that war,” he said, “women were very brave.”

“We were fighting to survive. Everybody had to fight. Even beautiful girls, who might normally marry a commissar or a doctor, they had to fight.”

“I’m sure all the woman snipers were beautiful.”

“That’s the story, at any rate. Myself, I was always a plain girl. I had no expectations and so no disappointments. I married a plain man and had plain children. All turned out well. Beauty, it can be a curse. Too much light is on the beautiful, too many are watching. Belayavedma was cursed that way.”

She began to chatter on about this Belayavedma and Reilly lost the thread.

“Bob, go to Petrova,” she said in English.

“Ma’am, we want to remember all those valiant girls, especially one of them. My friend here wants to write her story. We believe she was killed. Beautiful girl, according to the picture. Ludmilla ‘Mili’ Petrova. Does that mean anything?”

The old woman stirred, shook her head. She was clearly disturbed.

“The names, they come and go. No, no Mili, no Petrova. I do remember a Ludmilla,” and from there she launched into a long story of the other Ludmilla, the not-Mili Ludmilla, and Reilly struggled to stay with her and couldn’t and soon was saying to Bob in quiet English, “I’m completely lost now. I thought we were in Belarus, but suddenly it’s the Baltics.”

And on it went for another couple of hours, with Reilly and Swagger feeding her eager eye-cues and judging when to laugh by the tone and timing in her voice. Names came and went, stories mingled, battles were transposed. Reilly tried to keep up but couldn’t stay with it. But she heard more and more about this Belayavedma, who seemed to have come from nowhere.

She disappeared after being sent to Moscow, the story went, and it was a third- or fourth-hand story, as Slusskya had never seen Belayavedma herself.

“If she was as beautiful as I hear,” the old lady said, “a plain girl like me, I would have remembered it the rest of my life. But no, she was gone before I even became active.”

“Do you have a year?” asked Reilly.

“It’s all run together. My memory, it’s like I got hit in head by the bullet, not the German colonel. I can’t even—” She paused as some old thought poked her. “I don’t know why. Somewhere I heard someone say they sent Belayavedma to Ukraine and she never came back.”

“When you say ‘they’—”

“Bosses. The bosses ruin everything. We would have won the war fine without the bosses.”

She told a long story about hiding in the trees while thousands of young infantrymen walked across a field into German fire and were cut down like hay. The boss kept sending them, row after row after row. At the end of the day, the field was strewn with bodies, all those fine young men wasted by this boss who wanted to impress his boss.

She shook her head. “I am very tired now, my friends. Slusskya must sleep. It is not your fault, but I had forgotten all those young men, and now I remember them. I need to sleep again.”

A nurse had been standing by and intervened to wheel Slusskya out, but not before she kissed each of them and grasped their hands with her firm old talons.

They watched as she was pushed up the ramp and disappeared behind the doors of the bleak institution.



* * *



It didn’t happen right away. These things can’t be scheduled. But somewhere in Reilly’s mind the fog lifted and a shaft of light revealed that which was clear but not yet clear. They were in The Washington Post’s Chevy, driving back from their chat with the old sniper, trying not to get hit by moguls in Ferraris, when it broke through.