The Diamond Eye

by Kate Quinn

“Watch her out there,” my lover said. “Watch her for me.” “Always,” my partner said, and there was a moment of silence I interrupted with a cough.

How is it this Hitlerite has two decorations and you have none, Comrade Senior Sergeant Pavlichenko?

My lover and my partner were no help. Lyonya was laughing so hard he could barely stand; Kostia had to hold him up, eyes dancing. I shot them both a filthy look as the cameraman fiddled with his camera.

“Eyes on our bushes,” I ordered. Last night in Lyonya’s dugout, Vartanov and Kostia and I had crammed in to make six decoy bushes, wiring long juniper branches together in bunches. We look like brides making garlands, Lyonya remarked, pitching in to help, but with more khaki. Kostia fired back with You’re the ugliest bride I ever saw, Kitsenko, and I’d plunked myself down between them before they could start trying to arm-wrestle among the bushes, scolding You two! as Lyonya kissed my neck and Kostia lobbed a juniper frond at me. Lyonya had hugged me goodbye on the dugout steps at three in the morning when I set out, then more formally returned my salute when we stepped into the open. It was always like that: the minute we put a toe over the dugout threshold we were no longer lovers. We were regimental comrades who gave each other a formal farewell and a call of “Good hunting.”

“Two forty-two.” I went on tiptoe in my combat boots to kiss him. “Being in love is good for my shooting. I swear, every bullet zings along the right trajectory when I know I’m coming home to you . . .” “For the love of Lenin, woman, did you just say you loved me as you tallied your dead? Classic Mila Pavlichenko.” He kissed me back, and I nearly puddled down into my boots.

“History lives all around,” I concluded happily after Mila the student came out of hibernation with a really-quite-curtailed lecture on the works of Amandus Adamson and his influence on the Russian Art Nouveau style. “You can breathe it in on every street corner.

“Life with you is going to mean trudging through a great many museums, isn’t it?” Lyonya complained. “—the factory exhibits! Did you know the lathe operators association has a special—” “Yes, yes, I will take you to the damned museum . . .”

“You half crushed me,” I started to say, smiling, and then I saw the pallor on Lyonya’s broad, handsome face. Saw the red wetness soaking his right shoulder, saw that something was wrong—terribly, horrendously wrong—with his right arm hanging limp inside its sleeve. Then my entire rib cage felt like it was collapsing on itself as I rose and caught sight of the red ruin of my lover’s back. Splinter wounds, driving deep through tunic and undershirt to the flesh below as he wrapped his body around me, to protect me. “Listen to that brass section,” he said, trying to smile, and then he toppled slowly sideways into the earth.

I tried. I tried so hard, but the only sound I could squeeze out was a strangled sob. I just lay shaking against Lyonya’s shoulder. Kostia sat down on the other side of the cot, his eyes like black holes burned in snow, and I saw the same helplessness in his carved face. We were snipers; the world of silence and darkness was where we lived. This terrible place of bright lights and loud voices had us both flailing.

I took Lyonya’s hand between my own, kissed his papery cheek. “We’re getting married,” I whispered. “Remember?” He didn’t move, didn’t smile, didn’t speak. Death kept on breathing at my shoulder. “I got the divorce. I can marry you now.” Anything I could say to keep him here, keep him with me. “We can marry now. I’ll marry you tomorrow.” I kept saying it long after he was gone.

Bullshit, thought the marksman. He knew women who could shoot: backwoods wives who filled their family soup pots with whatever they could bag; society belles who enjoyed a little gossipy target practice before a three-martini lunch; sporty girls who lined their rooms with competition ribbons for marksmanship. But he did not believe a woman could shoot 309 men—and if she did, she’d be in handcuffs or a straitjacket. No woman could shoot 309 men and be capable of sipping tea with the First Lady, cool as a cucumber.

And how wrong he is . . .

“An accurate bullet fired by a sniper like me, Mrs. Roosevelt, is no more than a response to an enemy. My husband lost his life at Sevastopol before my eyes. He died in my arms. As far as I am concerned, any Hitlerite I see through my telescopic sights is the one who killed him.”

For just one instant, the marksman wondered: What if she actually is everything they say she is?

He hopes she will be, not only because he wants his second front in Europe—and has been facing opposition to it given our setbacks in the Pacific—but because he has a most unusual liking for useful women. He collects us, and what a varied constellation of females we are. The shy, awkward wife he turned so efficiently into his eyes and ears . . . his impervious secretary Missy LeHand, who could organize that second front as efficiently as she organizes everything else in the White House . . . his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, the iron hand behind his New Deal, who dispatches strong men reeling from cabinet meetings . . . Franklin’s women. He collects us, admires us, hones us, and then he does not hesitate to use us up, burning through us body and soul until we flame out. If some part of us rises up in silent protest at such treatment—as it does sometimes in me, for things between us are not always easy—then it dies unspoken when we see that he burns himself up no less ruthlessly. We would all die for him, because he is killing himself for all of us.

But Lyonya was my husband in every way but law, and I knew I’d call him that until the day I died.

“He was good at making friends,” Kostia concluded quietly. “I never was. But that didn’t matter, because I had him.” We’d been passing Kostia’s flask of vodka back and forth as he talked. I took another swallow, gazing at the row of graves. Lyonya’s was still heaped up, the earth black and tumbled, but it would soon be just another mound of drying earth topped by a forlorn fading star. I didn’t have any flowers, so I took a heel of bread from my canvas gas-mask bag and crumbled it over the earth so the Sevastopol sparrows would circle and sing here. For my golden front-line husband. Kostia poured a stream of vodka over the grave. “Rest in peace, brother.”

We clambered up to the bakery roof where Fyodor Sedykh had wedged himself behind a chimney to pick off more spotters, Kostia pulling me up through the hole in the bombed-out roof as I called out, “Fyodor?” But my huge lumbering ox of a junior sergeant was beyond answering; an air strike had hit the roof, toppled the chimney, and pinned him in a welter of shattered beams and broken bricks. The whole lower half of his face was gone, but his eyes begged. Kostia and I went to him, either side of that big, hopelessly broken body, and Kostia took Fyodor’s hands and murmured the question we all knew to ask, if a day like this ever came. Fyodor nodded, writhing, eyes not leaving mine, and I nodded back. “Hero of the Soviet Union Fyodor Sedykh,” I rasped, “the honor has been mine—” And I fired a single, merciful shot.

No time to shout a warning to my partner. No time to shelter myself. No time.

No, not Lena, not Lena.

I didn’t know if he’d left it with me as a farewell when I was carried off the battlefield for the last time, or if he’d died back there and some well-meaning orderly tucked it among my things as a memento. I didn’t know, and maybe I never would know. My partner. I doubled over weeping, clutching the book, as the submarine slid through the alien waters toward a safety I didn’t want, away from a death I would have welcomed, abandoning everyone I loved.

“Valiant,” I echoed. Kostia’s quiet stoicism, Vartanov’s bitter endurance, Lena’s humor under fire—they were the valiant ones.

No, I nearly shouted, I don’t have a man. I go to sleep every night aching for Lyonya, and I think I always will.

I wondered if that part was supposed to happen before or after I told him he was a prosy hack and he told me I was a rabid Ukrainian bitch.

Mila, I’m alive. Last evacuation out of Sevastopol, shattered knee. Recuperated in hospital ward in Krasnodar; about to be shipped to Moscow military district for reassignment. Where are you? —Kostia “Are you all right?” My mother’s hand flew to my forehead. “You look so strange—” “I’m all right, Mama.” I looked up from my partner’s letter with a smile that felt like it stretched all the way down to my toes. “You just brought me the first good news I’ve had in months.”

Kostia alive. My partner, my shadow, my other half. Some dark bottomless ache in me eased, as though one of my legs had gone to sleep and now blood was flowing back through it, prickling me with the painful yet welcome sensation that it was still there and whole. Kostia, alive.

“Is she really a sniper?” “No.”

Whatever you need to tell urself

Hit four hundred on your tally, little boy, I thought the first time I met Pchelintsev’s superior gaze in Moscow. Then you can look down your nose at me.

And a lump rose in my throat as I saw Kostia take his place quietly before the table.

Because if I was going halfway around the world with the possibility of new enemies in front of me and the certainty of at least one old enemy behind me, I wanted my partner at my back.

I’d rather be dressed as a bush with my Three Line in hand.

And now we finally had a moment alone, and we were pointing out lines of fire to each other for imaginary duels. Snipers, I imagined Lyonya hooting, you’re all just a bucket of laughs! A bolt of agonized longing went through me like a bullet. Without Lyonya, how would I ever remember how to laugh?

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Roosevelt.” I looked at the cocktail party inside, drawing a steadying breath. “When I take aim at something, I do not miss.”

You’ll like Lyudmila Pavlichenko, my note to Franklin reads. And she has given me one of my ideas.

One day in Washington, and I was already watching my back.

My family will be the only ones to remember my name when I’m gone, and that’s enough for me.”

Kostia’s hands came down on either side of my waist. He bent his head, setting his mouth against the puckered skin of the scar, and stood there for a long year of a moment. “Wear it,” he murmured into my skin. The kiss started at the blade of my shoulder and finished over my spine at the scar’s tailing end. “Wear it with pride.” I stood utterly still, pinned in place, until I heard the quiet click of the door signaling he was gone.

The truth: The students from Bombay University nearly came to blows with the British Oxford contingent over the so-called Indian Question, and the only reason I didn’t start swinging alongside the young man in the turban shouting, “We’ll win independence eventually, you colonial curs!” was because Krasavchenko threatened to have me exiled to the Arctic Circle.

Unexpectedly Kostia spoke up, his voice quiet over the muffled tread of our shoes on expensive carpet. “That’s a man to follow into shellfire.” “He makes me think . . .” I paused, trying to find the words. “I might only be a student here, but I don’t have to be useless. If one man like him can tow his nation single-handedly through a worldwide economic depression and then a worldwide war, I can learn to give speeches without feeling like a deer caught in klieg lights, can’t I?”

“I asked Lyonya—” My voice caught on his name; I swallowed hard. “I asked how someone like me who shoots people from a distance, trying never to be seen, is somehow stuck under bright lights in front of a packed crowd, giving a speech.” “And he said?” “‘Shut up, Mila, you’ll be brilliant.’” “He was right.” Kostia looked at me squarely. “You’ll always be brilliant.”

Kostia smiled. Not with his mouth, but folded into the corners of his eyes, where only I could see it. I couldn’t resist a smile back, the strange chaos of conflicting emotions warring in my stomach again. Ease and awkwardness, tenderness and confusion, wariness and—

“You’ll have my back?” “From here to Stalingrad.”

“Number 310 on my tally is going to be you,” I promised Kostia in a whisper as we moved off through the thronged Baltimore reception room. “Because I’m going to shoot you in the back as soon as we are sent to Stalingrad after coming home from this circus.” “Lady Midnight, I’m always the one at your back.” We traded quick smiles. We weren’t uncomfortable with each other, but we were aware; we were making conversation rather than slipping in and out of comfortable silence, and I heard myself saying brightly, “Are you coming to Hyde Park? If Alexei inveigled his way along, surely you can.”

There are a lot of things you didn’t get a chance to know about me, milaya. And now I never would.

The famous Lady Death and her sniper partner, Lyonya hooted fondly as Kostia and I floundered and splashed. May I present the deadliest shots in Sevastopol!

My partner reached for my hand under the water and pulled it against his chest, then he bent his head and kissed me. He tasted like iron and rain, his other hand tangling briefly in my hair, and I felt the sniper-calluses of his trigger hand against my scarred neck before he pulled away. “You already know,” he said. “What I feel for you.” I did know. I’d known a long time.

“I reminded myself that you must do the thing you think you cannot do,” she said simply. “Always. And generally you find out you can do it, after all.”

“And clearly made you into a brave soldier, but a frightened woman.” The First Lady laid down her needle, looking at me with those piercing eyes. “Everyone fails, Lyudmila. I’ve failed. My husband has failed—you think all his New Deal proposals were dazzling successes? He has proposed initiatives that have fallen flat; he has espoused positions for which he has rightly been condemned; he has hosts of enemies who would happily see him dead.” A shadow crossed her face at that. “He has failed at more than most men ever try . . . but better that than not to try at all.”

“Because in my home, women are respected not just as females but as individuals.”

I began to apologize, side-slipping into Russian, but he burst out laughing. So did Eleanor. And then so did I.

“America fights prejudice abroad but tolerates it at home.