Partisan Years Pt. 02

Author's note: I intend to continue this series, for several further chapters, to its natural end, but I cannot promise you a specific publication cadence. Enjoy, N. Yakovlevna.

First Battle

The night Vladimir raped me, Heinrich Stauffen, his Baltic-German lieutenant, sabotaged a bridge on the Mogilev-Gomel rail line.

The next morning, German warplanes bombed an old location of the camp and Polizei units set out to hunt us.

We fled along pre-planned routes of retreat, but one-eyed Yuri's section ran into a Polizei patrol accompanied by several Nazis. The gun battle cost Yuri his life and alerted the Fascists to our presence. They tried to push our columns into close areas so they could shower us with artillery and mortar fire. We fought to break their encirclements.

From the afternoon of that day to dusk the following, the woods were full of crackling rifle fire, screaming mortar shells and the rumble of the Nazi motorcycle couriers on the dirt paths. The fights came so suddenly that there was no time for fear, only for flight and the dull taste of adrenaline in the back of my mouth.

At first, I could keep up easily enough, ignoring the ache between my legs and the loss of my dinner because I had so little to carry. But on the second day, one of Kiril's men was disemboweled by a shell. His guts shone purple in the ragged tatters of his peasant tunic, his blood pooled slow in the shattered stones around him, glistening in the heat of a dying summer.

"Yakovlevna," Kiril shouted from his post. "Get that gun and get his pack!"

I retrieved the rifle, a bolt action piece that predated the revolution, and his pack, which contained most of the section's meat ration. It took us all afternoon to fight from that hill to the opposite stream and a broader tract of forest, hours of crawling in the leaflitter and dragging two packs and a four foot rifle. Sweat soaked my shirt and jacket, and the pain of my injuries grew worse as I lost strength.

By the time we reached the shelter of the woods I'd re-entered the absent state I'd achieved when Vladimir fucked me: I could see everything, I was acting and moving, I was aware of my physical pain, but the world was distant, like images projected on the wall of a dark room. I staggered as though wounded.

My condition was so bad that when we encountered the other detachments in the woods Vladimir reproached Kiril.

"I told you, Commissar, but you did not listen!"

Kiril stared back at him with a look of naked hate.

But it was Heinrich's words that cut: "Maybe they're after her," he said. "Bad luck to have Jews when we're fighting these bastards. They're not Finns or Poles. They're out for blood. They can smell it, I tell you."

"She stays," Kiril said. "All the Jewish soldiers stay."

Heinrich spat, and I felt his eyes burrow into me.

Finally, during a pause in the shooting, Kiril redistributed the dead man's goods among the men. As we stood paused on the path, an uncontrollable tremor started in my legs and I shook so bad I could no longer stand. One of the Red Army fugitives grabbed me by the waist to keep me from falling.

"You're pale as death," he said to me.

"I've never been shot at before," I said.

"It's better when you do some shooting too," he said. He told me his name then, Lev Edelman, a Jew from Kiev. He offered his canteen and I drank a few gulps of it. He pushed a hunk of bread into my hand.

"I can't take food from another," I said.

"It's our food," he said. "You're one of us."

By nightfall, we'd evaded the Fascist cordon. But we kept moving, away from the Gomel front and the promise of the Red Army, deeper into the maelstrom of Byelorussia and the uncertainty of occupation. At last, in the deep black of a clouded night, the columns set camp, men slept almost where they stood.

That night I dreamt of my sweet Lazar, with his olive skin and dark eyes and his features as delicate as a prince's. But when he came to touch me, Vladimir burst into the dream-room, and Lazar's hands turned to the blackened rot of a corpse.

When I woke, the bruises on my wrists and thighs had reached their deepest blue and as we ate meager kasha under the gray dawn, I felt like crying.

A week passed. We moved further, dug in a stronger camp. Yuri's men were redistributed among the other detachments. News came that the Fascists had crossed the Dnieper. The fighting would rage for Kiev now. The summer heat peaked, then ebbed. And every night I was plagued by dreams of dying Lazar, and the crushing weight of my rapist.

My detachment was sent to raid a Polizei post for ammunition and basic medicine. During the raid, Lev and I and two others were detailed to requisition food from the village that hosted the post.

I proved adept, in part because I was undemanding. The old women trusted me, and the few men left were intimidated by a girl with a rifle. So began my career as a village liaison.

We returned to camp at dawn with more than our target of grain and vegetables and meat, and were welcomed like Suvorov.

As a reward, we were allowed to sleep through two of the morning watches. I slept again in the evening and drew the second to last watch.

It was still dark when I woke and took my gun down to the perimeter to keep watch along one of the tracks towards our camp. When the next watchman, Lev Edelman, came to relieve me, a faint gray had crept into the sky and the birds were calling soft in the bushes.

Vladimir Sergeyivich waited by the entrance of the section dugout. He was in his shirtsleeve, white cotton rolled to the forearms, a foul smelling cigarette smoldered in his left hand. I struggled to control my breathing, I hadn't been alone with him since he'd taken my virginity, and the pain of that hour was still fresh in my bruised thighs and wrists.

"Come," he said, taking me by the wrist.

I pleaded fatigue.

"Everyone is tired," Vladimir said. "But I can't sleep for the thought of you." From another man, it might've been charming.

He led me away towards his personal dugout, a half-timber structure in the side of a low hill, primitive, but close and more finished than any of the section sleeping quarters.

"You did well," he said. "Even if you can't shoot worth a ruble."

"Thank you, Comrade."

My skin prickled with anxiety and my breathing was ragged, I knew he would take me and the fear of it set me on edge. The muscles of my right leg shook. I smoothed my hair.

He poured a bit of vodka into a tin cup and passed it to me.

"You've drank before?"

"I'm not some wilting teetotaller."

"Excuse my presumption," he said with an edge of irony. "College girl sophisticate."

I sipped the harsh liquor. It was cool from where he stored it, in the damp earth under his cot, which made it go down a bit smoother. After a couple sips numbed my lips, I gulped at it greedily. It wasn't enough to get me drunk, but it would warm me, get the worst of my fear over. Strange as it was, the thing I was most afraid of was that I would piss myself if he raped me again. It seemed too vulnerable, too intimate, like it would puncture any dissociative illusion I could cultivate. I felt childish thinking about it as he talked softly of the war and our operations. I prepared myself for him to move, playing with the tin cup in my hands, looking anywhere but in his eyes.

When he kissed me it was soft, rather than the demanding, insistent kiss of our first encounter. My mouth opened, half in surprise, and there was his tongue, slipping between my lips, caressing my own, tasteless in the glowing trail of the vodka.

Vladimir slid his hands from my face to my waist and held me the way a young man holds his desired in the first, chaste instance of a kiss. I still held the cup.

He knew he'd broken me.

That thought was evident and I burned with shame. Even as I wanted to summon the energy to fight or call out, I recalled how, on our first night, he'd said he wanted me to suck him off only, and the rape had been a punishment.

"A sip more," I said to him. "And we'll see what else I drink."

He slid his hand up my shirt and I felt his face work into a grin against my neck.

"Yes."

He poured me more vodka and I slugged it back and opened my shirt to him. It was so hot I was only wearing the outer soldier's tunic, my linen undershirt rolled inside my pack. The brush of his calloused palms along me made my hair stand on end and I was aware of every tiny shift of the air around us.

He ran one hand down and unbuckled my belt, slid inside my underwear. I was unprepared for the touch, still dry, and I sucked my breath sharp as he found my clit. It felt strange to be touched so unready. But he worked his finger in soft circles, as gradually, he pushed me up against the wall of his dugout.

His other hand worked at my breasts then, and he drew another hushed gasp when he bent his head away from mine and sucked a nipple into his mouth, flicking it with his tongue, grazing it with his teeth. His free hand grabbed my hair, pulled my head back so my chest was thrust forward. Then, the finger teasing my clit pushed against my entrance, the flesh there yielded slightly, a ghost of pain and humiliation haunted my response.

"You like it now," he said. "I thought it'd take more, slut."

But I didn't like his hand searching for entry, his mouth on my breast, my neck, at the edge of my hairline, his other hand controlling me like a marionette.

So I leaned forward, kissing him back, unbuttoning his tunic, kneeling slow, working my hands down to his belt as he wove both his hands into my hair. I fumbled with his belt and the buttons of his trousers for a moment, then drew them down.

He was hard already. I'd only taken him in my mouth at the depths of my debasement, when I had observed rather than experienced the reactions of my body. To suck him off voluntarily now seemed absurd. I brushed my lips across his tip, slowly worked his dick with my hands.

In Minsk I'd heard girls talk about sucking dick, their words both jocular and mystifying, how their jaws hurt or how much they loved the taste, the sound of a man's moans. I opened my mouth, slid the tip in, remembering how scared I'd been the first night, the taste of my blood mixed with his cum when I'd cleaned him off.

An image flitted through my head then of biting down so hard he could never hurt me again, but it vanished as quickly as it appeared.

He tasted revolting at first, his flesh too long enclosed at the height of summer, viciously alive. I slid him back until he was two-thirds inside my mouth, and let my jaw and breathing adjust. It took a great act of will to calm the fluttering of my stomach and take the final few centimeters.

He looked down at me, his green eyes fierce with lust as his hands knotted into my hair.

"Your hair," he said. "It's as dark as the grave." I almost laughed around him. I drew back, working my mouth along the shaft, teasing him with my tongue. I grasped him by the base with one hand, slipped it down to cup his balls as I moved up.

"Stop," he said.

I paused.

"Pull your pants down."

I slid him out of my mouth.

"I want to watch you touch yourself."

I nodded, slipped my trousers down, then kneeled again and took him back between my lips. Though the taste of him still turned my stomach, the weight and heat of his dick in my mouth stirred something in me, and as I slipped one finger between my lips I found myself wet.

"Fuck yourself," he said, his voice a low growl. It was hard to balance, so I shifted from kneeling to squatting and he made a noise of desire when he glimpsed my cunt, and his weight pressed forward again. His tip pressed into the back of my throat. I opened my jaw wider, brought my left hand up and moved it along the base of his shaft in time with the motion of my head.

He sighed, looked up to the roof of the dugout, arching his hips into me. I drew two of my fingers over my clit then slid them both back into my pussy to the first knuckle. Despite the cock in my mouth I half managed a moan and he looked back down at me, ardent desire in his eyes.

He moved his hips more and more until it was more like he was fucking my throat than I was sucking his dick. His hands moved my head along his shaft. It was hard to time my breath to this motion and I found it overwhelming as I strained to open my mouth ever wider, to restrain my urge to gag, and to hold myself still. He looked into my eyes.

"Play with your clit," he said with the voice he used to order men on dangerous patrols.

My hand moved automatically, and jolting pleasure built in the straining muscles of my thighs and low down in my stomach. For the first time, the thought of him inside of me felt attractive and I slid my fingers in, up to the second knuckle, then to their deepest, finding my cunt wet and open for the ghost of his penis. My face flushed with shame and pleasure, I slipped my fingers back out to my clit, moaning around him now, again and again.

That sent him over the edge and with a great thrust of his hips he shoved into me all the way, pressing my head against the wall behind. I felt his whole body tighten and the first wash of his cum hit my throat, more filling back along his shaft, up on my tongue. He pulled out, his body shuddering again, and fresh jets of his cum struck my face. That surprise and the animal lust in his breath and moans and the quick slip of my fingers from cunt to clit and back pushed me into an orgasm and I fell back against the wall, gasping as my legs shook and my fingers searched deeper inside of me.

I hadn't swallowed his cum, not all of it, it sat on my tongue and I gathered it there, remembering one of the Minsk girls who said her man always liked to see it in her mouth. Vladimir bent, grabbing my throat with his hand, and pressed his mouth to mine savagely, his tongue all over mine.

He broke the kiss and wiped his mouth, then took a slug of vodka.

"You did well," he said.

I laughed this time, because it felt so absurd to be squatting there in a forest dugout with a man's cum on my face and the last traces of orgasm radiating along my nerves.

"Better than last time?"

He shook his head. "Nothing compares to having a girl under you."

He ordered me out and I went down to the stream. Dawn had seized the sky in all its glory, red and purple to the east where the front lay, a bruised blue to the west over the vast Pripet marshes. There are no dawns as beautiful as those first autumn dawns in Russia, and I was so mesmerized I forgot to hide my face.

I heard a man moving on the path and looked. Heinrich Stauffen locked eyes with me, and I was suddenly conscious of the cum drying on my face and in my hair.

The Telegram

I could feel Heinrich's jealousy emanating all through the day, alongside a detached disgust from Kiril. But where Kiril seemed to suppress his awareness of my relationship with the commander, Heinrich stoked his own jealousy, letting it build.

Then, a few nights later, when Vladimir was out in the field with some of his men collecting recruits from several villages, I learned the extent of Heinrich's lust and hatred.

It happened like this: during the hours when there was nothing to do, I read, sometimes to myself, sometimes aloud. Any newspapers we had, any poetry, Lev's books, books Kiril looted from a dacha the Germans sacked and left unburnt. The men of the section liked to hear my voice, it reminded them of a simple domestic life. None of them, save Lev, cared much for me in the daytime. But by the light of an oil lamp some of the men, barely out of high school and sometimes younger, would practically beg for a chapter of Tolstoy.

Then one night, when Heinrich was officer of the watch, I began to doze after reading to some of the men. The section was all asleep save Lev, whose sleep was troubled by dreams of cannon fire, and Kiril, who was encoding political dispatches for the courier.

The courier arrived, and the sound of his conversation with Heinrich before the command dugout stirred me awake.

I was exhausted from digging, marching, patrolling, helping the peasants with the harvest in exchange for a few kilos of wheat, but I had to piss before I could sleep.

I made my way to the latrine, rubbing my eyes against sleep, cognizant of the voices.

"Thank you," I heard Heinrich say. "Any news from Kiev?"

"No," a Russian voice answered. "Did you encode your dispatches properly this time?"

Then I passed out of earshot.

On the way back from the latrine, one of Heinrich's men stopped me.

"The Lieutenant said there's a telegram for you in the coded messages the party got through the lines."

"A telegram? Who from?" My heart was going like mad.

"Don't know, go see, go see."

Still full of sleep, but now excited, I raced for the command post, forgetting my fear of Heinrich.

"There's a telegram for me?"

"Yes, Natalia Yakovlevna," he said. He had a formal manner and his Russian was thick with German. Many men in the unit were polyglots. In those days you had to know more than one tongue, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, German, Polish.

"Give it to me," I said.

"It's encoded. I can't give you the cipher."

I shrank down, deflated.

"Well who is it from?"

He shrugged, motioned towards the inner chamber of the command post.

"I'll read it to you as I decode it."

I nodded, followed him in. I began to suspect something when he shut the door behind us, but that could've been a security precaution, and I figured if he wanted to hurt me he'd take the chance to do so openly.

In retrospect, even in the moment, I understood that I was being foolish, but I was surrounded by armed men, soldiers, ex-prisoners, workers whose factories and homes had been destroyed, villagers who had only known one stretch of the good earth and land reform and now faced this life of armed struggle, of flight and terror. I wanted so badly to believe I still had some path back to the days before the war that I would've believed anything, even that it was a personal telegram from Stalin or Marshal Voroshilov.

He slit one of the envelopes, opened the codex book and scanned both for a long, silent moment.

"From Moscow, dated September 1st, 1941 Natasha," he said.

My heart fluttered, only someone who knew me would use that name. The state, the party, they'd use my last or my patronymic. Only someone I thought was dead would have the nerve to call me so intimately, like Lazar or my father, or my sisters. Not only must one of them yet live but they'd made it past the lines!

"I am aware of the arrangement with Captain Masovka that maintains you in your post. Stop," he said.

And all my happiness curdled. I resisted what this meant, the ploy, the trick. It seemed too cruel.

"You may think that one man is enough. But I do not agree."

I jumped from the seat and lunged for the door, but he was a half pace closer and he slammed into me.

"Not so fast, Little Miss Komsomol," he said.

"Why?" I said, anger rising in me. "Why such a ruse?"

"Because I'm tired of your fucking arrogance," he said, crushing me against the wall of the dugout. I was dressed only in my trousers and the loose shirt I wore under my tunic. His forearm was in my throat, his other hand working my trousers open.

"Walking around with your nose in the air like you aren't a whore who plays at soldier. I was in the Latvian rifles in the revolution," he said. "I saw what the Whites did to women like you. What we should still do. All this equality, this blurring of man and woman, that's what made us weak, your Kollontai and Krupskaya. Forget the Jews in London stealing from all of Europe. The rot was right here."

Terror, raw, animal terror seized me, and a hatred for him like I'd never felt for anyone, not even Vladimir. I spit in his face. He threw me into the table with all his strength and I caught myself on it.