Pyotr’s eyes widened. They had heard about Zaitsev from end to end of the Soviet Union. “This must be a special mission for you, not just sniping.”
Katya nodded. “Word came from Pavlov’s House. Do you know what I mean?”
“Of course. A building hereabouts, right in among the Germans, that Sergeant Pavlov and a few heroes have held since—the end of September, hasn’t it been?”
She forgave him repeating the obvious. He was hurt, bewildered, and oh, how young. “They maintain communication with us,” she explained. “Certain things they’ve noticed give reason to believe the enemy plans a major thrust into our end of town. No, I wasn’t told what things, no need for me to hear, but I was sent to watch from this point and report whatever I see.”
“And you happened to pass by when— Incredible luck for me.” Tears welled. “But my poor friends.”
“What happened?”
“Our squad went on patrol. My unit’s currently in a block of detached houses well south of Mamaev. We didn’t expect trouble, as quiet as it’s gotten.” Pyotr drew an uneven breath. “But all at once it was shooting and screaming and— My comrades dropped, right and left. I think I was the last one alive after ... a few minutes. And with this hand. What could I do but run?”
“How many Germans? Where did they come from? How were they equipped?”
“I c-couldn’t tell. Everything went too fast.” He sank his face into his left palm and shuddered. “Too terrible.”
She gnawed her lip, angry. “If you’re with the Sixty-Second, you’ve had months of combat experience. The enemy drove you back from—Ostrov, was it? All the way across the plain to here. And still you couldn’t pay attention to what was going on around you.”
He braced himself. “I can, can try to remember.”
“That’s better. Take your time. Unless something dislodges us first, we’ll be sitting where we are till we’ve seen what headquarters ought to know about. Whatever that may be.”
She checked the windows, came back, sat down again before him, took his good hand. Now that he was out of immediate danger, nature wanted him to sleep and sleep and sleep, but that couldn’t be- allowed. What he had suffered wasn’t overpoweringly severe, he was young and healthy, and when she spoke soothingly she saw how her femaleness helped rouse him.
Fragment by fragment, a half-coherent story emerged. It appeared the Germans had been reconnoitering. Their force was small, but superior to the Russian squad. Knowing themselves to be in hostile territory, they had kept totally alert and seen an opportunity to ambush Pyotr’s group. Yes, clearly they wanted prisoners to take back. Katya knew a grim hope that he was in fact the single survivor.
A scouting mission was a strong indication of a major attack hi the works. She wondered if she ought to consider that this information fulfilled her task, and return with it at once. Of course, when the squad failed to report, the officer who dispatched it would guess the truth; but that might not be for a considerable time. No, probably the story wasn’t worth as much as tile possibility of her gaining more important knowledge here.
Send Pyotr? If he didn’t make it, the Red Army wouldn’t have lost much. Unless he blundered into captivity. Could he hold out a while under torture, or would his broken body betray him into betraying her? It wasn’t a chance she wanted to take. Nor was it fair to him.
Helping him summon forth what his whole being cried out to forget—that wrought a curious intimacy. In the end, while they shared water and bread, he asked shyly, “Are you from hereabouts, Katya Borisovna?”
“No. Far to the southwest,” she answered.
“I thought so. You speak excellent Russian, but the accent— Though it isn’t quite Little Russian either, I think.”
“You’ve a sharp ear.” Impulse seized her. Why not? It was no secret. “I’m a Kazak.”
He started. Water spluttered from his lips. He wiped them, a clumsy, shaken gesture, and said, “A Cossack? But you, you’re well educated yourself, I can hear that, and—”
She laughed. “Come, now. We’re not a race of horse barbarians.”
“I know—”
“Our schooling is actually better than average. Or used to be.” The ray of mirth vanished behind winter clouds. “Before the Revolution, most of us were fanners, fishers, mer-“chants, traders who went far into Siberia. We did have our special institutions, yes, our special ways.” Low: “Our kind of freedom.”
That was why I drifted toward them after I ceased teaching embroidery at the cloister school in Kiev. That is why I have been with them and of them, almost from their beginnings, these four hundred years. A scrambling together of folk from Europe and Asia, down along the great rivers and over the unbounded steppes of the South, armed against Tatar and Turk, presently carrying war to those ancient foes. But mainly we were smallholders, we were a free people. Yes, women also, not as free as men but vastly more than they had come to be everywhere else. I was always a person in my own right, possessed of my own rights, and it was never very hard to start a new life in another tribe when I had been too long in one.
“I know. But— Forgive me,” Pyotr blurted. “Here you are, a Soviet soldier, a patriot. I heard that, well, that Cossacks have gone over to the fascists wholesale.”
“Some did,” Katya admitted starkly. “Not most. Believe me, not most. Not after what we saw.”
At first we had no knowledge. The commissars told us to flee. We stayed fast. They pleaded with us. They told us what horror Hitler wreaks wherever his hordes go. “Your newest lie,” we jeered. Then the German tanks rolled over our horizon, and we learned that for once the commissars had spoken truth. It didn’t happen only to us, either. The war threw me together with people from the whole Soviet Ukraine, not Cossacks, ordinary Little Russians, little people driven to such despair that they fight side by side with the Communists.
Even so, yes, true, thousands and thousands of men have joined the Germans as workers or soldiers. They see them as liberators.
“After all,” she went on hastily, “it’s in our tradition to resist invaders and rise against tyrants.”
The Lithuanians were far away, they mostly left us alone and were content with the name of overlords. But the Polish kings goaded us into revolt, over and over. Mazeppa welcomed the Great Russians in and was made a prince of the Ukraine, but soon he found himself in league with the Swedes, hoping they might set us free. We finally made our peace with the Tsars, their yoke was not unbearably heavy any more; but later the Bolsheviks took power.
Pyotr frowned. “I’ve read about those Cossack rebellions.”
Katya winced. Three centuries fell from her, and she stood again in her village when men—neighbors, friends, two sons of hers—galloped in after riding with Chmielnicki and shouted their boasts. Every Catholic or Uniate priest they or the serfs caught, they hanged in front of his altar alongside a pig and a Jew. “Barbaric times,” she said. “The Germans have no such excuse.”
“And the traitors have less yet.”
Traitors? Vasili the gentle blacksmith, Stefan the laugh-terful, Fyodor the fair who was a grandson of hers and didn’t know it— How many millions of dead there they seeking to avenge? The forgotten ones, the obliterated ones, but she remembered, she could still see starvation shrivel the flesh and dim the eyes, children of hers had died in her arms; Stalin’s creatures shot her man Mikhail, whom she loved as much as the ageless can love any mortal, shot him down like a dog when he tried to take for his family some of the grain they were shipping out in cram-full freight trains; he was lucky, though, he didn’t go on another kind of train, off to Siberia; she had met a few, a few, who came back; they had no teeth and spoke very little and worked like machines; and always you went in fear. Katya could not hold herself in. She must cry, “They had their reasons!”
Pyotr gaped at her. “What?” He rumbled through his mind. “Well, yes, kulaks.”
“Free farmers, whose land that they had from then- fathers was torn from them, and they herded onto kolkhozes like slaves.” Promptly: “That was how they felt, you understand.”
“I don’t mean the honest peasants,” he said. “I mean the kulaks, the rich landowners.”
“I never met any, and I traveled rather widely. Some were prosperous, yes, because they farmed wisely and worked hard.”
“Well, I—I don’t want to offend you, Katya, you of all people, but you can’t have traveled as much as you think. It was before your time, anyway.” Pyotr shook his head. “No doubt many of them meant well. But the old capitalist regime had blinded them. They resisted, they defied the law.”
“Until they were starved to death.”
