by Amber Lough
“Holy Sister of War,” said Masha when we walked inside. “This is worse than the barracks in Petrograd.”
Two long benches lined the walls. Other than that, the building was empty. Not a chair, not a table, nothing. I gulped, and then let the women behind us come in. Their expressions said everything I was feeling.
“Pick a spot, head to toe,” I said to them. “It’s better than pitching tents. At least we’ll be dry.” Then I studied the rafters, just in case. There were a few suspicious spots, but it hadn’t looked like rain outside. We might get lucky.
Once we’d unloaded our gear, Avilova sent a detail with Bochkareva to procure some food, as all we’d brought were bags of dry kasha and some tins of herring. On the way here I’d noticed that the fields were either picked clean or trampled, but I had hope there’d be something fresh.
They came back with a bag of sprouting potatoes and three handfuls of radishes, and after two days on a train it felt like a feast. By the time the sun lowered on the horizon, we had eaten enough to make it through the night. We sprawled in the grass and dirt, none of us wanting to go back into the empty barracks, despite the swarming flies outside. When night fell, we reluctantly returned to the rickety building. I laid out my greatcoat on the bench and tried not to roll off onto the floor. Masha slept at my feet.
“Ladies!” a man shouted from outside half an hour later. “Come on out!”
Bochkareva’s low voice cut through the darkness. “Don’t respond. Don’t leave your beds.”
“Beds,” one of the women chuckled. I almost did too.
“Hey! Lady soldiers! We want to see you out of uniform!”
“Go shove a rifle up your ass!” responded Bochkareva, loud enough for those outside to hear.
Then the banging started. They pounded on the door so hard it bowed inward. We slid along our benches to the farthest end of the room.
All of us but Bochkareva. She jumped up from her spot, pulled her pistol out of its holster, and threw open the door just as a volley of rocks smashed the front windows. Men started reaching in through the window, trying to grab at whatever part of a woman they could get.
“Leave my troops alone!” Bochkareva shouted. She cocked the pistol. “Pavlova, get your rifle.”
Swallowing down my alarm, I pulled my rifle from its spot under the bench and ran to her side. She glanced at me and nodded.
“Load it and aim.”
I rammed the magazine in, stepped into the doorway, and took aim at the nearest man. His tunic hung loose over his trousers, which were falling out of his boots. He smirked at me. I pulled the bolt back, felt the first bullet slide into position, and set the bolt back.
Click.
“Hey now.” He raised his hands. “We’re all on the same side.”
“If any of them move any closer, shoot that one,” Bochkareva said. “I have authority from Colonel Zakrezhevskii to protect my troops, and if it means shooting some bastards at midnight, then so be it.”
Avilova appeared at my side with her rifle and aimed at another man. “I like shooting bastards,” she said, a bit louder than necessary. “It’s good practice.”
The men moved backward, slipping into the shadows cast by our lantern. Out of the side of her mouth, Bochkareva told us to stay put, then went back inside.
“Are we staying here all night?” Avilova asked after a moment.
I would have shrugged if that wouldn’t have altered my aim. “I doubt it. Even these men have to sleep.”
A minute later, Bochkareva came back outside dressed in full uniform. She was tying on extra cartridges to her belt while holding the pistol with a few fingers. It rolled forward with the weight of the grip. “You two, stand guard for thirty minutes. After that, each of you will choose one soldier from your platoon to take your place, and so on till morning.”
“Where are you going?” I asked her.
“To the Colonel.”
She was gone before I had could tell her that might not be a good idea, although she wouldn’t have listened to me anyway.
“The Colonel isn’t going to like getting woken up,” Avilova said. She lowered her rifle and stood beside it, the perfect image of a nighttime sentry. I followed suit, stationing myself at the opposite side of the door. In the glow of the lantern, we looked like angels of death. Or maybe demons.
“I don’t think they’ll wake him up just for her,” I said. “She’ll get as far as his aide, and then she’ll be turned away. She’ll be back before we wake up our relief.”
We stood in silence for a moment before Avilova asked, “Did you ever come out here before? To visit your father?”
I snorted. “There’s no way he’d have let me, even if I’d had the papers. And I knew it would have been a waste of time. He’s too busy.”
Avilova smirked. “I thought about trying it once, about a year ago. I was engaged to a doctor, and he told me there was a town where we could meet. I had it all planned out and was ready to get the tickets when the notice came.”
She said it so casually that I almost didn’t register it. “They shot a doctor?”
“It was a fever.”
I’d been focused on munitions for so long, I’d forgotten the other ways people die in war. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked down, digging the toe of her boot into the dirt. “It was a long time ago. Just a year, but also a lifetime. Do you know that Anna Akhmatova poem? The one that goes ‘We aged a hundred years and this descended in just one hour’? That’s what it feels like.”
I didn’t know the poem, but I wanted to.
“Wouldn’t marriage have tied your suffragist plans into a knot?” I asked.
“Not marriage to him,” she said softly. “It’s odd, because a year ago I was ready to say my vows to him. Now, I’ve said them to Russia.”
We were silent for a while, and then I asked, “I wonder what sort of Russia we’ll go home to.”
“It keeps changing, doesn’t it? But it’s all for the better. I believe that.”
“Are you a socialist?”
“Most days. The socialists understand equality better than anyone else. But I think Lenin’s a pompous ass.”
I laughed. “Have you ever seen Lenin speak?”
“Once. That’s all I could bear.” We grinned at each other in the dark.
Another half hour went by and Bochkareva still had not returned. I couldn’t stop yawning. We each chose a woman to replace us and settled into our spots. It turned out sleeping on planks of wood in Petrograd had been good training for the front.
In the morning, we found Bochkareva snoring on the bench. One of her eyes was swollen shut and her lip was split, but she was otherwise unhurt.
“What happened?” Alsu asked. Bochkareva smiled in her sleep.
“I think whatever she did worked,” said Masha.
—
July 5, 1917
The week had gone by slowly. It rained often, which forced us to stay inside our meager quarters. The women fought like cornered dogs for the driest spots on the benches, but whenever a male soldier approached during meals, they were sisters-in-arms once again. When it wasn’t raining, we drilled in full view of the male soldiers, who grew accustomed to our presence. The Colonel came to watch once and commended us, telling Bochkareva he’d never seen such a disciplined group of soldiers. The verbal abuses waned, and there were fewer and fewer physical attacks.
On the fifth night, Bochkareva relieved us of sentry duty.
“We have guards posted all around the encampment. The men know now it’s not worth the risk to attack you again. Get some sleep. We’ll be seeing action in a few days.”
I made every member of my platoon lay her kit out. We divided up parts of each tent among six women. These would later roll up inside our greatcoats. For now, we needed our coats to sleep on. When we were cleaning the rifles, the smell of gun oil was so thick we had to take down the covers we’d placed over the broken windows to freshen the air.
<
br /> Before I curled up for the night on my bench, I set my rifle beside the front door so that I could fall asleep with my eyes on it. Yellow light from the outside lamp filtered in through the thin weave of our makeshift curtains and lit a long strip along the edge of my bayonet.
—
The mud was knee-deep. A rifle in one hand and a Viking sword in the other. An arm sprouted from my back with a handful of grenades. The edge of a ruined field. I stepped out of the muck, pulled out my feet. I had chicken legs like Baba-Yaga. Ferocious, terrible, proud of it. Men hid in the trees. Shouting, telling me to lie down, to pull up my skirt, to run back home. I threw a grenade, blowing them to pieces. But the men did not leave. I threw all of my grenades. Then there was only one man left. He had two heads—one was Papa and the other was Maxim. “Go home! Be a peace-loving woman!” I raised the sword at Maxim’s head. “Katyusha,” he whispered. “I’m already dead.”
No.
The door creaked shut.
I woke with a start, gasping for breath. Maxim and Papa’s faces faded into the dream while I took stock of where I was. I was at the front. I was on the bench, and had my rifle by my—it was gone.
The spot by the door was empty. I rolled off the bench and felt along the floorboards, hoping it had only fallen over. But there was nothing there. I scratched at the darkness beneath my bench but only found my kit. The others were all asleep, and so I tiptoed around the room, trying to count the rifles lined up bayonet-to-butt in the weak yellow light. All accounted for. Except for mine.
Wedged into the doorframe at chest height was a bit of thick fabric. It was about the size of a playing card. I felt the embroidery and recognized it as a unit emblem, but I couldn’t read it until I pushed it behind the makeshift curtain.
Tenth Army, Ninth Artillery Brigade.
My father’s company.
—
July 6, 1917
My boots were damp. I had jammed my feet into them and the portyanki bunched unevenly, but it didn’t matter now.
Bochkareva slept on the other side of the room, flat on her back. I gulped and made my way to her, each step like walking on glass. Someone had stolen my rifle, and it was my responsibility. My fault.
Half a meter from the bench, I snapped my heels together. “Sub-Lieutenant Bochkareva,” I whispered.
Her eyes flicked open. “Pavlova. What’s wrong?”
“Requesting permission to take an hour off.” I gulped. “My rifle was just stolen.”
She sat up, fluid as a jaguar. “You let someone steal your rifle?”
It didn’t matter that I had been asleep. It was stupid to have left it by the door.
“Yes, Sub-Lieutenant.”
She stood. There was a whoosh, and then her fist made contact with my jaw.
“Your rifle is your life, Pavlova! You gave it away!” she hissed. A few women began stirring on the benches, roused by the sound of our voices. “Muravyeva! Get over here.”
Muravyeva stumbled over and fell into attention beside me. I looked down and saw she wore knit stockings over already-wrapped portyanki.
“Private Pavlova is temporarily relieved of duty. You are now Acting Leader of Third Platoon.”
Muravyeva’s breath hitched. “Yes, Sub-Lieutenant.”
“Now get back to your bunk.”
Muravyeva gave me a wide-eyed look before whirling around and climbing back onto the bench. Bochkareva sat back. “Go retrieve your rifle. Be back before the morning meal.”
I nodded.
“But first,” she said, and she fumbled with a pile of clean polishing cloths from beneath her spot on the bench. Then she unscrewed her canteen and dabbed at the cloth. “Here.” She held it out to me.
The cloth was cool against my jaw.
—
I decided not to take the lantern.
Without my rifle, I was unburdened in the worst way. After a month of carrying it everywhere I went and a week needing it for personal protection, I felt naked.
It was a long kilometer to the Ninth Artillery encampment, along a farm road and through the woods. I walked in the grassy strip down the middle to avoid the worst of the mud, aware that I was alone. Bochkareva hadn’t told me to bring anyone, which felt like a test. Out here, alone on the road and surrounded by flattened fields, I was as exposed as a lone tree in a lightning storm.
The dark woods lay spread out ahead, and I raced toward them. They could hold all sorts of monsters, but at least there I would not be out in the open, easy prey. My feet pounded the road, my chest heaved, and just as my lungs started to burn, I reached cover.
The pines were thick enough that nothing but needles and seedlings grew along the forest floor. The army, perhaps both armies, had walked a clear, wide path through the woods, and I kept to the edge, ready to jump behind a tree.
I’d been dreaming I was Baba-Yaga, the witch who ate the hearts of maidens. Those stories flashed in my mind, a screen of color and movement over the reality of a dark, empty wood. Hair by hair, my neck tickled and I wiped at it. I had been dreaming I was her, not her victim.
The forest should be afraid of me, I thought. After that the trees were no longer quite so dark, the cracking and shuffling sounds of moving creatures not so frightening. I was the monster creeping through the night woods.
The trees thinned and the path opened to a field. A city’s worth of tents, crates of artillery shells, and the thin, wispy trails coming from iron cooking wagons filled the expanse. The sky glowed, spreading over the field in waves of rose and purple. And between the sky and the tents rose a bare flagpole erected beside a tiny wooden house wagon. The commander’s quarters.
I’d always imagined my father’s camp as something more substantial than this. He hadn’t mentioned having to sleep like a circus performer. How had they all survived like this, winter after winter?
The answer was, of course, not all survived.
Surveying the camp, I realized it would be impossible to search all the tents or confront the men about my rifle. There was only one way to find it. Unfortunately, it rubbed my pride raw.
Throwing back my shoulders, I called out to the nearest tent.
“Ninth Artillery!”
Someone inside scrambled, and one of the men who’d been clustered near the cooking wagons trotted over. He paused when he saw me, his hand going to the rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Who’s there?”
“Private Pavlova, from the Battalion of Death.”
The man released his rifle and sauntered closer. “What do you want?”
“I need to speak with Colonel Pavlov.”
He was close enough for me to see his features now. He wore a thick mustache and he hunched forward, bent at the mid-back. “It’s early. What do you need to see him for?”
My stomach tightened into a knot. For days, I had known I would end up coming here somehow. I would have to see him, face him, and hear his sharp, breaking words.
“A private matter.” When he still appeared skeptical, I gritted my teeth and added, “He’s my father.”
The soldier looked me over and nodded.
He led me around the tents, waving off questions from his comrades. Halfway to the wagon, the soldier saluted a second lieutenant who was carrying a tray of tea.
“Sir, this girl—uh, soldier—wants to speak with the colonel. She says he’s her father.”
The lieutenant halted. “Really? Are you Ekaterina Viktorovna?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you over the years. Come with me.”
So my father had spoken of me to his attaché, just as he’d written to me of this lieutenant. It felt oddly circular, and I wondered at the words, the descriptions, that had been passed between us all.
The lieutenant pointed at the wagon with the tea tray. “Does he know you’re coming?”
“No.”
“This is going to be the most interesting thing to happen all summer.”
We wa
lked over to the wagon. He climbed the two steps to the door and knocked.
“Come in,” my father called, and his voice carried all my memories of him. Holding hands at marching parades, the black knight in chess swiping my white rook, and this growling voice of war merged into a shadow that was both familiar and foreign.
The lieutenant ducked inside. “Sir, you have a visitor.”
I scraped the mud off my boots on a nearby rock and climbed the steps to join him. There wasn’t much space inside the wagon. My father sat on a cane chair between a mattress and a table, which held the tea tray and two lit candles. Dark circles hung from my father’s washed-out blue eyes, but his uniform was impeccable. His mustache was no longer the rough gray of my childhood, but drained of color, as white as bones.
Before the lieutenant could introduce me, I saluted. “Colonel Pavlov.”
His teacup rattled on the saucer. “Ekaterina?”
The look on his face was almost worth the cost of losing my rifle. He quickly recovered, but it was enough. His normally serene facade had cracked, something I hadn’t seen since my mother left.
“Lieutenant Sarkovsky, that will be all.”
The lieutenant gave me an encouraging smile as he stepped back out into the fresh air. When the door shut behind him, the candle flames flickered.
I stole a glance at the wall behind my father. A calendar hung from a nail, and beside that was a framed family photo. I didn’t have to look long to know every detail, because the copy was in the dining room at home. I was fourteen, still in braids. Maxim’s shoulders were thin. Babushka was gripping the front of her blouse like it was trying to fly open. And my father’s eyes were calm, proud, and eternal.
“Hello, Papa.”
“Do you have permission to visit?” he asked. He set his teacup on the tray and brushed off his chest, wiping away nonexistent crumbs.
“My commander knows I’m here.” I gulped.
“You completed your training.” It wasn’t a question. “Successfully, I heard.”
“So did you,” I said before I could think better of it.
