“Yes, looks like it.” A silence fell between them. Rita consulted her watch.
“And what about—?” Ulya caught her eyes.
“They beat us.”
“So I thought.” Ulya restrained herself from asking Rita what was up for her. As though reading her mind again, Rita said, “I have my own assignment. Yours is to lie low. In all cases, your contact person will keep the same password.” She pointed at the order in Ulya’s hand. “Destroy it.”
Ulya took a lighter from her, clicked, and watched flames catch. She held the scrap of paper until she could feel her fingers singeing.
“You’ll find everything necessary to subsist in the house while going to pick mushrooms.” A sad smile flashed on Rita’s face. “With your special education, you don’t need me to show you how to unearth them. And I should hurry up.” She took her backpack, gave Ulya a quick hug, and stepped to the doorway. “Stay alive.” The night swallowed her, letting Ulya stand still on the threshold, pondering.
All the pieces of the puzzle came together. Rita’s well-planned wedding was to bring Ulya closer to the place from where they could smuggle her to Germany. The fancy clothing was indeed intended for her.
Ulya picked up a flashlight and under the safety of the night, headed to the dugout. Inside, it smelled different from when Rita took her there two weeks earlier. In some boxes she found a stack of food supply: canned stewed meat, vegetable preserves, tins of condensed milk. There were German biscuits and bread sealed in a transparent plastic with the year of baking as far back as 1938, large bars made of Ersatz honey and butter, bars of chocolate, cigarettes and matches. It took her a long moment to figure out that a cigarette lighter hid a tiny secret camera.
A flush of adrenalin tingled in her body while in other boxes, she discovered a Nagant wrapped in oilpaper, a Tokarev TT-33, fully loaded—eight bullets, 7.62; Parabellum and the latest Walther with silencer, small as a toy, about fifteen centimeters long, easy to conceal. She weighed it in her hand, clicked the safety catch on and off. Her finger tightened around the trigger. There were rounds and rounds of ammunition in separate boxes, all marked. Seven M-34 hand grenades were wrapped in a sackcloth and stored on their own.
I’m supplied for months in case our army doesn’t stop them—she called them they because though German herself, she rejected even the idea of identifying herself with the invaders.
A sapper shovel and pickaxe leaning against the earth wall drew her attention. On a whim, a decision came. That was what she needed now. She climbed out, taking them up with her.
The earth radiated the days’ moderate heat. Ragged clouds moved from the west, promising rain. They occasionally separated, revealing the moon that provided enough glow to avoid using the flashlight. Some trees, or at least their trunks, had a human form so a person standing in front of it would not be visible. Ulya halted to listen but heard only the sound of insects and the hiss of the breeze in the treetops.
She headed to the conifer tree. From there, she took twenty steps to the peculiarly entwined birches and, after looking around and finding a perfect spot with her eyes, took ten steps to an alder, the only one among the surrounding aspen trees. She put her shovel to work and the sand and clay soil succumbed to its pressure with only the cluster of roots slowing her tempo. By the time the morning flickered in the east, she’d finished constructing a much smaller dugout. Its close proximity to the old one, in case it was discovered, would most probably divert the interlopers from searching the immediate surroundings. Ulya moved one metal box from the old dugout and stacked it with the most important items. Her emergency reserves. As she straightened, fat droplets fell on her face and the next minute, it was pouring, hiding her intrusion into the serenity of the soil.
After a short, exhausted sleep, she observed the surroundings from her look-out post to see some neighbors busy digging in their vegetable gardens, burying trunks in the pits.
24
Natasha
July 8, 1941
The German bombardment continued, the humming of explosions coming nearer and nearer. The Soviet troops fought back on the outskirts of the city.
I can’t. I just can’t. Natasha opened her eyes. Even that made her moan. The last five days had been a sequence of unbearable exhaustion. For fourteen hours a day, the workers labored to load the trucks with equipment, which then were driven to the railroad station.
Perhaps only an opportunity to see Sergey Vladimirovich gave her strength to make herself get up every morning and, after a quick wash and a piece of bread and butter, which she ingested with a glass of milk, hurry to the plant. These days, she hardly saw her aunt. Like thousands of other Vitebsk residents, she had been called up for digging anti-tank trenches around the city.
The first days of shock had turned into days of hysterical fear and panic. The city rumbled day and night, vehicles and the train of horse-driven carts with people and all possible house staff moved without stopping. To the east. To the east. Like an Exodus.
There were black holes and craters from bombs everywhere, and the military trucks and refugees shared the roads and the pedestrian walkways.
Everyone kept glancing into the sky, watching out for German bombers. At the shrill whine of bombs, people climbed over the sides of trucks or carts. “Take cover!” “Disperse!” Those on foot had the advantage: without losing a moment’s breath, they ran to hide in the wrecks.
By this time, the city was severely demolished. Not as much by the German onslaught, but for the most part by executing Stalin’s decree of leaving behind a desert for the enemy.
The Sovinformburo communiques recounted hard battles with the enemy on all fronts. The panic-stricken rumors doubled the horror of the situation. Stories of German
