Beautiful Assassin by Michael C. White Page B

canvas door of the bunker and out into the night.
    I looked over at Zoya.
    “Remember what I told you about him,” I said.
    “I know,” Zoya replied. “But I was hungry.”
    At this, I recalled the chocolate I’d taken off the German. I removed it from my pocket and tossed it to her. “Here.”
    Zoya got up and came over and sat down beside me. “We’ll share it,” she said.
    She was a small woman, with thin wrists and the delicate bones of a sparrow. She was pretty in a peasant sort of way, with a broad, heart-shaped face and the high cheekbones and hooded eyes of a Kalmyk. Though she cursed and fought like a hardened veteran, she was still just a girl, naïve and unworldly, especially when it came to men.
    “How is your head, Sergeant?” she asked me.
    “Not so bad,” I lied, touching the bandage. “What’s the news from home?”
    She nodded thoughtfully. “I received word from Maksim that our mother was still the same. The doctor doesn’t know if she will recover. My brother blames me for her falling ill.”
    “How was it your fault?”
    She shrugged. “He is angry that he had to stay and take care of her. Help out with the little ones. While I get to go and fight.”
    “You’re the oldest. You don’t have a family of your own. It was your duty.”
    “He thought my duty was to stay home. That as the eldest boy, it should have been he that went off to fight for the Motherland.”
    “But your brother is only fourteen.”
    “Not even. It doesn’t matter though. He still thinks a girl’s place is in the home.”
    “Ach,” I scoffed. “Too many men think like that.” I glanced around the bunker. The air raid had stopped, and that unnatural glasslike stillness had taken over as it always did after their bombing runs, where it seemed that every noise had been sucked away, leaving the earth with the feel of an empty cathedral.
    “Let’s get some air,” I said, shoving my journal into my pocket. I wanted to be able to talk freely.
    Outside we made our way along the trench for a while, passing a sentry. It was Corporal Nurylbayev, a tall, potbellied man with bowed legs.
    “Evening, Sergeant,” he said. Nodding toward the west, he added, “Looks like the krauts hit something.”
    The usually darkened city below us burned brightly. A tire plant near the wharf was engulfed in flames, sending up dense plumes of tar-black smoke. A sweet, chemical stench was already wafting up into the surrounding hills, one that made your stomach retch.
    We picked a private spot and sat down, our backs against the dirt walls of the trench. I took out my pack of cigarettes and offered one to Zoya. That was another change the war had produced in me. When I was single, I’d have the occasional cigarette, mostly as an affectation. At university I used to wear a beret and smoke brown Turkish cigarettes,and think myself quite the bohemian, a kind of wild-spirited Akhmatova. After Masha was born, I put aside my bohemian ways and stopped. Now it was something I did without thinking, something I needed as one does air or food. This despite the fact that most of the cigarettes we got were ersatz tobacco, made from chicory or dried potato peels or roots.
    The evening was warm, oddly quiet, not a breeze stirring.
    “Too many of them still think that all we are good for is to cook and clean and make babies. Like that pig Gasdanov. What we do in this war will change things, Zoya.”
    “Do you really think so?”
    “Assuredly. We will show them women can do anything we set our minds to.”
    “Including killing?” she said uncertainly.
    “Yes, even that. You have heard of Anka?” I asked.
    She was the famous machine-gunner who’d fought with the great patriot Chapayev in the civil war after the revolution. Over the years her story had grown into mythic proportions. Whoever she’d been in reality, she’d long ago crossed over into legend. But it was a myth a young girl could latch on to and hold as a model of