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The Assassins Gallery Liberation Road Last Citadel Scorched
Earth The End of War War of the Rats Souls to Keep |
Tania opened the door wide to look at her caller more closely. "Where are you from, again?" she asked. "America. New York. I'm a journalist with The New York Times. It's a newspaper. One of the biggest in the world." She looked down at the man's shoes. They were of rich brown leather. His overcoat was pressed and clean, with sharp lines in the pleats like the blades of a plow. In his hand was a briefcase of black heavy grained leather. An American. Tania had never met one, had only seen them on news reports. He looked wealthy. He spoke again while Tania stood just inside her apartment rubbing her chin. "I'm doing a story on the battle of Stalingrad. This year is the battle's twenty-fifth anniversary." As if to drive his point home better, perhaps to wedge himself past her indifference blocking the doorway, he added, "It was a great victory for the Russian people. For Communism." Tania laughed. "Oh, I was never much of a Communist." She turned aside in the doorway, like a gate on a hinge, to let the American reporter into her apartment. "Come in. I'll get tea." Tania turned her back to her visitor. She did not seat him; there was a choice of only two places to sit in her front room, unless the clean smelling man from America wanted to lie across the day bed beneath the windows. She lit the gas flame on the stove with a match and moved the samovar above it. Her kitchen took up half of the small front room, with a line of white appliances and cupboards along the east wall opposite the front door. Beside the refrigerator was the door to her lone bedroom. "Cream?" she called, her back to the American. "Yes. Please. A little sugar, also." "Your Russian is good." she said, taking a spoon up out of the sink. "Thank you. I've been stationed here in Moscow for eight years, since 1960." Tania stood facing the stove. Behind her, she heard the American open his briefcase with two clicks, then close it. He removed his overcoat with a rustle of excellent material. "Just throw your coat on the day bed." she called. The water on the bottom of the samovar jiggled. This was hot enough for her. She did not like her tea too strong; boiling the water drew too much strength out of the tea leaves. Her stomach rejected the acids. Tania poured the water. She added cream and sugar for the American. She placed the cups and some biscuits onto a painted tin tray and swung herself around toward the other half of the front room. The American had sat in the chair she preferred for herself. He spread out on the table a yellow lined pad and ballpoint pen, and a sheaf of scribbled notes. "Thank you, Madam Chernova." he said, lifting the teacup from the tray. Tania sat in the second chair. She sipped her tea once, making a slurping sound. What does the American think of that, she wondered? I drink my tea like a man. Living alone too long, that's what does it. You forget to be a lady. He began. "I'd like to ask you a few questions about Stalingrad, if I may. But first, why did you say a few minutes ago you were never much of a Communist?" Tania eyed the stranger. He is not a spy, she determined. Why would the KGB send a spy to talk to me, anyway? I'm just a broken apart aging woman, forty-six years old now, mattering to no one. I teach spelling and penmanship to eight-year olds five days a week at School Number 857. It's a quiet livlihood, once the children are made to understand discipline. I make my twenty rubles a month. I spend them on bread and fruit, sometimes meat, vodka, vegetables from the market around the corner which spills out onto the sidewalk in warm weather with artists's booths and cheap jewelry. My stomach can't take tomatoes; I buy blander things like lettuce and eggplant. I go to the Crimea in August to a rented dacha with my sisters, one a dance teacher in downtown Minsk, still living in the old neighborhood, the other a shop clerk outside the city, married to a soldier. After the Great Patriotic War I went back to Minsk, but only for a month. I could not live there with the memories, the memories like an occupation army inside of me. So, as one of Stalin's warriors, I was rewarded with a stamp in my internal visa to allow me to live in Moscow. I was given my teaching position and here I live my life. What does the government want with me now? Is this man CIA, then? I can't help him, I know nothing. I have no interest in the world, especially in what the Communists are doing. The government in the Soviet Union is simply what it is, nothing you can do about it like the weather, the spire at Moscow State University, the lake and giant ferris wheel at Gorki, Lenin sleeping his pale, guarded sleep in the middle of Red Square, the news flooding in on the television about the crazy Americans in Viet Nam meddling there when they couldn't even pull the Germans off our backs in Stalingrad. I don't have the power anymore. No power at all. Once it was in my hands, in my body. Now, I can't straighten up somedays for the pain in my abdomen, the bits of me missing, sliced out to keep me alive. I don't have children, can't have them, the doctors told me. My back hurts all the time, my bones are growing brittle; that's what happens when you have surgical menopause at age twenty-one. I have been cut open and stuffed back in, then closed up not the same as I was. My organs are a snake pit of scars, they tell me. Twenty-five years ago, I had power. Absolute. Life and death. Some beauty. And love. At Stalingrad, I never wanted to be a woman, unless I was in the Hare's arms. Everyday since then, I have wanted to a woman, and cannot be. Tania looked at the American. He is a journalist, she decided, only because she did not care what he was. She brought the teacup out of her lap, near her lips. It smelled good, like oranges. It was a fine tea, bought by a friend for her at a currency shop as a gift. "As to why I have never paid much attention to the Communists, I can only say they are not going to go away, so why worry about them. Besides, I'm Byelorussian. We never cared much for Stalin's policies. I think we were more European in our ways. As for the battle of Stalingrad, the Communists were at times very brave, as well as cruel. That is historical fact. But, they were not why I fought the sticks." "Sticks?" The American began taking notes on the crisp yellow note pad. "Germans. For a while, it was hard to view them as human." "Not for Stalin? Not for the Rodina?" "No." Tania paused. Why not speak, at last? she thought. I am fast disappearing into this spoiled body. Soon, there will be nothing left of Sergeant Tania Chernova. Tell this American, let him write it all down. Leave something behind you, Tania, do not pass through this life barren. They didn't cut everything out, you still have the memories. Knock the dust off them, now, before you sink out of sight. Let them come out. "The battle of Stalingrad," she said, as if beginning a chapter. "The truth? I liked it. It felt right to me. I had a talent for hatred." One of the passions, she thought. I had a talent for a few of them, when I had power. Tania set her teacup on the table. "First," she said, "let me ask you a question." The American set his pen across the pad. "Of course." "How did you find out about me?" The journalist blinked once. He smiled, laughing in a short wheezing burst of air through his nostrils. "You were a sniper, yes?" Tania thrilled to the word. Sniper. It was a name for her, a place in time. "Yes. I was. I was one of the Hares. You know of them?" "Yes, Madam, I do. And before that," he touched his notes on the table with the tip of his finger, as if to make them speak for him, to be certain he got it right, "you were a partisan." Yes. Who knows these things about me, she wondered? Who has told him to find me? "How do you know this?" "Why, Madam Chernova, I spoke just this week with Vasily Zaitsev." Tania drew in a breath that felt like ice. It froze in her throat, spreading out to the walls and grabbing on. She could not exhale. The American looked at her. He must have thought she was confused, or had forgotten. "The Hare, himself." he said. He is dead, Tania thought. He is dead. The American leaned forward in the chair. He reached his hand toward Tania's lap, but did not touch her. He said something in English she did not understand. Then, he caught himself, repeating in Russian, "Are you all right?" Vasily Zaitsev. Vasha. He is dead. Tania received a letter in the hospital during her recuperation in Krasnaya Sloboda, a sad note from Nikolay Kulikov. He wrote of Zaitsev's wounds late in the battle, suffered while taking prisoners out on the steppe. He was dead, Kulikov wrote. A Hero of the Soviet Union. The Order of Lenin. The Hare. Her lover. Killed by an artillery shell. Kulikov got the word from a soldier who was there when it happened. With the breath still trapped in her lungs, Tania whispered to the American, "You spoke with him?" The journalist smiled cheerily and laughed again. Like all the westerners she heard about, this one was trying to make something into a joke to help it on its way. "Yes, I spent several hours with him in Kiev last month. He lives there with his wife. He has two daughters. He's the director of an engineering school now. He gave me the names of several of the old snipers. A fellow named Chekov was the only one he knew was still alive. The others, I've been tracking them down mostly from the Pensioners lists and the Veterans Medical Committee. That's how I found you." Alive, Vasha is alive. Tania felt as if Zaitsev had just been dropped through her ceiling into her lap; the blow knocked the wind out of her. Sudden, so sudden. Death, she remembered, was this way; quick, an ambusher. Now, here is life, acting the same way. Tania pushed the air out from her throat in a cough. The squeeze hurt her abdomen. She wiped her mouth with her hand. "He is...um...he is well?" "Yes," the journalist still behaved as if he were telling her thrilling news, "quite well. He gave me a list of injuries he had. At Stalingrad, he was..." The American paused, referring again to his notes. "...he was temporarily blinded by a blast too close to his eyes. Some minor damage, but he said he recovered so well that even with the injury, he could still work as a sniper. He told me you were very instrumental in the original sniper movement in Stalingrad." Instrumental. Yes, an instrument, she thought. The American continued, stupid man. "Zaitsev fought all the way to Berlin with Chuikov in '45. In fact, he had quite a list of injuries. He didn't want to tell me, but his wife went on and on for him. Stabbed in the heart, shrapnel punctures to his lungs, legs, right arm. She showed me a scrapbook about him, mostly local stories on him in the Kiev newspaper. But, miraculously enough, yes, he's fine." All the way to Berlin. All the way to Kiev in the Ukraine, to another woman, a family, to an engineer. All the way, he's gone, through his own wounds. Twenty-five years, he could not come find me. Yes, Vasha, you went all the way; you passed me along the road. He had been charmed in Stalingrad. His animal instincts kept him alive. Tania knew the Hare would never die; that's why she was so devastated at the evil news from Kulikov. Even as her body recovered from her wounds in the hospitals, her spirit had been split open with nothing to suture it. Zaitsev was dead. Something more had been cut out of her. Now, he is alive, in Kiev. Thanks to this American. They do that, the Americans. They breathe life into things, even though some of the things should stay dead. "I'm sorry, Madam Chernova." he said, "Did I say something wrong?" Tania lifted her teacup from the table. She looked into the cup, into the shallow mahogany depth. She sipped it, slurping again. It was too cool now to drink and savor. This was the problem with having to drink it tepid to begin with. "No. No, you didn't say anything wrong. Let me warm your tea up." Tania rose. She felt the twinge of bands in her stomach, the unseen scars she knew were wrapping around her insides. You should have another operation, a Veterans Council doctor told her two years ago, to remove some of the tissue. It might ease some of the pain. She thought of losing more trimmings of herself, of the body she had barely begun to use so long ago before it was ruined. Another operation, she thought, to take more of this body away from me. It might indeed ease some of the pain. |
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