Partisan Years Pt. 05

I held it. The piece was light, even loaded, less than three pounds. The weight of a premature child. I thought about the identical weapon Heinrich had forced down my throat in the bare cold before the code room. How I'd pissed myself with terror then.

All the possible ends flashed before my eyes, Heinrich inside me again, Vladimir, others.

Now that he'd let four of the rank and file have me would they all take me in common. I'd go back to be a brood bitch for them, a thing of no worth to be had and discarded until I was pregnant again, assuming I could even bargain a doctor into breaking the law. Rape, that's what waited for me, that was my bright shining future. And after the war what would become of me, if we won, if I lived. Would one of them take me for wife, force me to bear his little brats and iron his buttoned shirts until I was fat and sullen and cowed and age came for me at last, or a swollen liver from the bottle.

One flash, that's all it would take to liberate me from that future. At three hundred and thirty five meters per second I wouldn't even feel the shot as it passed through my skull and into the roof of the garret. Maybe it would go fast enough to punch a hole in the roof, a tiny hole, and maybe the weak gleam of the candle flame would show through and the Fascist bombers would see it somehow, and bury them all, Tigran and Heinrich, the four others, Lev and Faithful Alyosha and the doctor.

But that wouldn't matter. What would matter is that I'd be gone. No more pain, no more dreams of rape, no more days of gray shame, no ache in the leg where the shrapnel had nearly broken me, no thin kasha gruel or begging to be treated like something other than a doll. Honor. I could do it myself. As easy as swallowing a slug of vodka.

As easy as a glass of water.

I felt the cool metal in my mouth before I was even aware of my hand moving, heard the click of the hammer next.

Close your eyes, Natasha, close your eyes and breathe. A light trigger pull, relax into it. Now. Papa and Mama, Shoshana, Rosa, Joseph, none of them big enough, really, to understand why the Germans had put them up against the wall of the barn at the back of the village.

Had they felt it? The lead coming a thousand meters a second, faster even than sound, coming to cut them down before men could fuck them. But the ghastly German beasts took girls as young as ten. Had they? Would I know when I crossed to them? Or was it blankness, a vast nothing of inanimate molecules rotting in the dirt, entropy and maggots.

My fingers were wet. The room was full of noise, snuffling, low, like a sick person trying hard to breathe against something. It was me crying, my tears. I knew that.

Breathe, Natasha, just one finger.

A soft knock at the door, a gentle push at the handle. Lev's voice.

"Little sister."

How he'd come and why, he never told me.

Then his big hands on mine, the cool pressure of the gun's muzzle on the roof of my mouth easing. The click of the hammer as he lowered it without firing after he'd turned the barrel aside.

"I just want it to stop," I said to him.

He threw the gun into the corner and pulled me onto his shoulder, his hand at the back of my head.

"I know," he said. "I know."

And I wept like a child into the side of his neck until there was nothing left inside me.

The doctor was rubbing sleep from her eyes when Ayosha brought her to the door. She was a short woman, broad framed but gaunt, early forties, old enough that she'd been practicing well before the abortion ban. She had a leather case for the instruments of her trade.

"Give us some privacy," she yawned at Alyosha, who nodded, and Lev who sat on the table where Tigran had fucked me. "And a pot of coffee." She shut the door, then spoke through it. "And knock before you come."

She introduced herself, a doctor drawn into military service during the Finnish war, before that a family doctor, daughter of a Tajik and a Russian. Khadijah.

"You wanted to see me for a delicate matter," she said when we were alone.

I nodded. It took a long while to get the words to spill out of me, because I'd kept them penned in my chest so long. "I'm pregnant," I said. "Ten or eleven weeks. Just starting to show. They'll kill me if I go back with child."

She said nothing for a long moment. Then, "I should examine you."

"Take my word," I said, feeling Tigran's cum still inside me.

"Do you want my help?" She said. I nodded. "Then strip."

As I did, she covered her mouth. The bruises on my wrists visible, then my thighs. "The father?"

I shook my head. "The one who did this is the German who came with us," I said. "And the men. Five of them, all told"

"When?" Then removed the hand from over her mouth.

"Last night," my voice broke. "Before that, the Captain too, he's the father. I had a man. I. I didn't want to. The German sodomized me. They've raped me, I don't know, eight, nine times."

The doctor let the words hang heavy in the air for a minute. Her face had changed from exhaustion to anger. How many other girls had she seen like this. How many still bleeding? Or how many trying hard to hide their pregnancies while they searched for a doctor who would take a few rubles, even one who worked for the NKVD. How many girls had she patched up after guards raped them?

I was impressed that she still had the capacity for anger, for it had begun to waver in me, replaced by the terrible black cloud I'd felt with the revolver in my hand.

"You want to go back?" She said, after a while.

"I'm a partisan. My family are dead. My fiance. I have no one, save in my section," I said. "They wouldn't have me in the army. And. And if I stay here, I have to have it."

She nodded. "By law."

"I can't," I said. I tried to say more, but she crossed to me. She put her hands, firm and smooth and long fingered, on either side of my face. It was a warm touch. A friendly touch. I could see in her eyes that she knew what I wanted to say.

I could not bear this child. Even if it was the condition of my survival, even if it got me away from those men and their crushing desires and the roar of the cannons. It was not a child, not to me, it was a parasite, a hateful thing forced on me that I would never be capable of loving or even feeding. The mere thought of it as a being, not as the fleshy shrapnel I'd told myself it was, filled me with terror for the future. Before me lay one path, work in a factory or a coding section or at a switchboard, pregnancy, the agony of the birthing bed, then a black nothingness as the thing wailed at me and asked and glowered at me with its father's eyes in its soft skull and his blood in its veins.

I would lay on the rail tracks with the beast sooner than bring it into this world and live forever with its mark upon my body and my heart.

The other path before me was curettage, a return to the front, war in the snow. Sex, yes, rape yes, but freedom of a sort.

"It will be safer if there's a paper trail," she whispered. "For some sort of surgery. I have men I trust. I have done it for others. We will put you under, it's painful to cut it out otherwise."

"A ball passed through my calf," I said. "The wound isn't closed. It festers still."

"Show me," she said.

I showed her.

"Then there isn't a moment to waste."

A knock came at the door. I started getting dressed, pulled the trousers up, the tunic on. The doctor stood for a minute in deep silence. Then, when I was dressed, she called out.

"Enter."

It was Alyosha with a pot of coffee.

"None for her," she said. "She needs a surgical procedure as soon as possible. On the wounded leg. Go and wake Vanya and the two nurses I brought with me from Arkhangelsk."

"Why not the duty ones?"

"Look at her," she said. "You think those two brutes should touch a thing so delicate?"

Alyosha nodded, set the coffee down, regarded me.

"When did you eat last," the doctor asked.

"Dinner," I said. "More than a day ago."

"Good."

There followed the slow rush of medical procedure, Khadijah marching me along with her hand patting the nape of my neck. Tears of relief coming. Voices, people around me, getting undressed, getting washed, getting ready, electric lights above me in the surgical theater they used half the time to fix men, and half the time to break them. Then a last moment when Khadijah and I were alone.

"Is there one you trust?"

"The Jew," I said. "Lev."

"It will be easier if there's someone who knows what has happened to you."

"Then tell him."

Then they came with the anesthetic and the world went to black and sweet nothing.

Pure winter sun poured through the windows. There was a weight by my feet. Something tight over me, sheets folded under the corner of a proper mattress. It was like Minsk again, one of my roommates sitting there to tell me how her man didn't respond to her telegrams. Only it wasn't Olga at my feet, but the dark eyes of the doctor.

"It worked," she said. "You're free."

I could feel something different in my body, something missing, like a burden lifted. My tits were still sensitive, my belly still felt too large. In time that would go.

"Thank you," I said. "I'll try not to let it happen again."

"Poor thing," she said. Her voice was low, there were others nearby, separated by screens, moaning with fever or wounds.

"Where are we?"

"Just the ward in this NKVD compound," she said. "Partisans come in for debrief and to get radios and they fall ill. Going from the front to peace can do that."

"How long was I out?"

"We put you under at dawn, it's been about 24 hours," she said. "You needed sleep."

Then I saw a dark shadow by her shoulder. It was Lev. The bruising on his face was deep black now, and his knuckles had scabbed over.

"Natasha," he said. I could tell from his voice that he knew everything. I wanted to cry again. My Lev, my solid Lev.

I said his name and he came over, put his hand to the back of my neck, pressed his forehead to mine. He stayed like that for a long moment. Then he pulled back from me. His face bore the strain of holding it all in.

"We're going to beat them," I said to him. "All of them."

A few hours later I was up and walking, still sore. Alyosha brought me through to the mess hall for lunch. Scores of political officers and partisans and soldiers ate under the bright lights pouring through into a single room that had once been a cavernous bourgeois apartment. The walls were gone now, but brick and steel columns remained.

After food they brought us to a dry room where they trained us in assembling, disassembling and care of the hardy radios we were to port back across the lines, each with a few assigned pieces. The instructor was a captain.

"The Radio binds the people under the German heel to the Motherland," he said. "With this device we can wage war as one."

The instructions in radio use continued until dinner. Rather than retire afterwards, Alyosha sent for me. I followed his courier and found him in a cramped office in the basement, an electric light burning. The desk was piled with papers and dossiers.

"Natalia Yakovlevna," he said.

"Alexey Fyodorovich."

"I'm sorry for what Tigran did to you," he said. "I don't care what Lavrentiy does in his palace, it's wrong."

My face was lit red with shame.

"Worse when it's your commander," he said. "Or another officer. Sometimes I wonder why we didn't shoot more of them during the terror. If Dzherzhinsky had only lived then things might've been different."

"Yes sir," I said. For in my heart I still loved the Red Felix, maybe more than any of the other old Bolsheviks now. More than Stalin or Voroshilov or Molotov. He was the terror of the bourgeoisie, not the butcher of his brothers, a reluctant killer. I'd heard he forbade the barbarous tortures that were common in the Cheka in his day. After what I'd seen, the slaughter of thousands of bourgeois agents and counter-revolutionaries seemed only just.

"Do you want revenge on the men who hurt you?"

I nodded.

"Sit down, Natalia Yakovlevna," Alyosha said.

"Some men play multiple sides," he said. "But one day their hearts pull them one way, regardless of what their principles or handlers want, and it can become necessary to drag them back from the brink of treason. Or to push them over."

I nodded, a grim, cool excitement starting in my breast.

"Heinrich," I said. "He does his reconnaissance by himself. He has his networks. But he hates Russia. When he s-sodomized me he said the war would wipe us red scum away. He's a noble, through and through."

"Has he asked you to join his work yet?"

"No."

"What are you willing to endure for revenge?"

"Anything," I said.

He held out a paper to me.

"Read this."

I read it. It was a letter in Heinrich's hand, a report to the NKVD. He was a double agent, for us it seemed, turned in 1935, used for everything from buying coal mining equipment to ensnaring traitorous Red Army officers. But his work was sloppy now, the balance of chickenfeed he gave to the Germans in return for good intelligence from their side was no longer satisfactory.

"His handler on the other side has a proclivity," Alyosha said.

I looked up.

"I said anything."

We were in Moscow for a week after, training with submachine guns and radios, code books and hand grenades. In the evenings I worked with Alyosha, learning a basic tradecraft.

When we crossed back through an undermanned section of the lines each of us carried a submachine gun, a sack of grenades, a piece of the radio, and as much ammunition as we could bear on the frigid march, sledges with more for the long trek home.

Alyosha came with us, along with a handful of other NKVD men, but bound for Minsk where there were works to sabotage, spies to recruit, and traitors to hunt. In time, I came to know him as the greatest Russian soldier of his age, though all his work was done in secret. Much later, when he died, disgraced and anonymous, some essential Soviet thing died with him.

I had a passphrase I could use on the radio that would alert his team that I needed to meet. And I bore a new secret, a desperate, kindling hope within me.