She looked up.
A sliver of moon hung in the sky, posed like a sickle at the top of its arch, but then the smoke blotted out the stars.
From behind them, a scream ended in a gurgle. The thump of helicopter blades drowned out the reply of gunfire. Great waves of smoke rolled in, glowing a steady orange laced with bursts of yellow as someone worked a flamethrower. Another throb of screams. A man dashed past them, clothes on fire. He took a bullet in the back, stumbled, fell, and kept burning.
Boris dodged right to avoid him, never slowing his heavy-booted run. She bounced in his arms, a jumble of limbs. The fresh gash bisecting his face leaked a steady stream of blood, which trickled down his face and dropped from his chin like tears. They splashed against her unearthly pale hands.
A memory welled up: A little girl in a red dress. Grandfather in his military splendor leaning down to tweak her nose. "You look lovely in red, little one," he said.
Boris raised her to the lip of the helicopter's door. Other arms closed around her. Frantic voices—afraid but controlled.
The space around her filled with bodies, and then she felt the tug of thwarted gravity as they lifted into the air.
Dimly, Balalaika knew this was her rescue.
The helicopter pitched and shook. Someone to her left vomited, and the scent made her sick, too. She lacked the strength to turn her head. The bile on her fresh burns felt worse than kiss of the propane torch that had carved them into her.
Voices reached her.
"She doesn't remember?" Chaikin, her liuetenant, asked.
"Not the worst of it. She said that she remembers when the enemy took her, and then waking up here," Boris said.
Their shadows swayed on the canvas wall of the medic tent. She could see them out of the corner of her good eye. Also to her left, the faithful drip of her IV pushed saline into her veins. The right side of her was a wash of white, all gauze and draped sheets.
Chaikin sighed. "Thank God for small blessings. We will take what favors we can, eh?"
Boris may have nodded. The shifting shadows were too hard to read.
Balalaika closed her eyes. Time flowed like sand around her.
It was so hard to keep track of the days.
Eventually, Boris returned to his chair by her cot. He was there whenever she awoke, her silent sentry. The black line of sutures marching like ants across his face bespoke his unfailing loyalty. He took that wound for her. He would bear the scar for the rest of his life.
When he had asked what she could remember, she looked into his face and told him what he needed to hear.
No, she didn't have any memories of her rescue. Not the horrible ride on the helicopter. Not the stench of her own seared flesh.
But of course, she remembered. What had she ever done to deserve to forget? Balalaika had all of it there, fixed, in her brain.
She remembered the moment that the medics had stripped her to assess the damage. Her uniform was in shreds after what her captors had done to her, so Boris had used his own jacket to cover her during the rescue. Perhaps he meant to protect her modesty; perhaps he wanted to keep the swirling dirt from her wounds. Whatever his reason, he had wrapped her up and pressed the fabric into her burns as he carried her out of the bloody cell. It hadn't hurt at the time, but when the medics removed the fabric, large swatches of her skin went with it.
Nothing that Balalaika had ever endured- not the pliers or the blade, not the agony of the propane torch in the crook of her throat, not the weight of her mistakes or the horror of her memories, nothing- compared to the sudden, ripping loss of acres of her skin.
She would not tell him that truth.
Sofiya would have. Sofiya had believed in ideals like truth and honor so Sofiya had gone away to war, but Sofiya did not come back.
In her place, Balalaika lied without hestitation.
It was the weirdness of fate that Sofiya had sought so hard to prove her existence. Olympic gold around her neck, line of war medals, things that no man could take from her. She tried and tried to make the world recognize her.
And now everyone knew Balalaika.
The burns qualified her for medical discharge but she still had a use in Afghanistan, so the paperwork delayed and faltered in the process. They pumped her with painkillers, dressed her in a fresh-pressed uniform, and sent her into the fray again because Balalaika was legend. The Soviet troops saw her as a hero, her Desantniki worshipped her as a goddess, and their enemies feared her as a demon.
One glimpse of her golden hair gave the troops renewed faith in victory and sent the Mujahideen running in terror.
Balalaika the Indestructible.
She of the half-face.
Balalaika the Brave.
She the child-killer.
Russia, personified.
She could not fight, of course. The drugs left her too woozy to aim, even if she had the strength to shoulder a weapon. Her abilities were a non-issue. They only needed her to be seen. Propped up like a puppet in her crisp uniform, fresh blood leaking into her bandages, Balalaika hated the spoils of her blinding ambitions.
Once, she caught herself say aloud, "I want to go home."
As soon as she said it, Balalaika felt like a fool. She had no home, had nothing of the sort since Grandfather died, but the edges of her vast continents of burns foamed with pus. Fever made her shiver even in the heat of day. Maybe, she thought, she was asking to die.
The next morning, there was a man in Boris's chair.
"The rumors say that you saved one of them," he said. "A child."
Balalaika squinted through the glint of artificial light ricocheting off the polished military bars and shiny buttons on his jacket.
During her failed raid across the border, Balalaika had grabbed the sole survivor, an Afghan child, and shoved the little girl onto the last working helicopter with the rest of her wounded men.
Her mouth tasted like sand when she answered.
"I did not kill one of many," she said. "Is that your definition of saving?"
The general laughed, low and gentle. "I see your grandfather's spirit lives in you still, even though he is gone. We were friends once, him and I."
Balalaika chose silence.
The general's smile faded. "In another war, your little indiscretion would have been nothing, but not now. What would happen if the soldiers knew their Balalaika was a Afghan sympathizer? What if they found out that she had mercy?" He rose and put on his hat. "I will do what I can for you, but I am afraid it isn't much. You have made enemies here. Your kind always does."
He left her alone with the sound of the wind pulling at the corners of her little room. Balalaika thought about the only Russian man in Afghanistan who had the ego to stand against her. Major Lavrenti Sarychin, the putrid Buzzard of Kabul. She had beaten him two fractured ribs into him and then blackmailed him for making a forced pass at her. She still felt his fish-wharf breath on her neck.
The discharge processed quickly. Two weeks later, Balalaika was transferred to a veteran hospital in Volgograd. Her military career ended without announcement or fanfare and somewhat less than honorably.
If Sarychin had spread his nasty rumors to destroy her, then he was a fool. The hospital lacked for much, but it had more than any field med tent in Afghanistan. The transfer saved her life. Her burns had turned with infection. She needed antibiotics and weeks of quiet rest in a sterile room.
Because of the transfer, Balalaika lived.
That bastard.
After two months in the Volgogard hospital, the doctors stopped allowing her painkillers.
Balalaika knew that she was an addict. The doctors called drug dependence a necessary evil, given the nature and extent of her wounds, but she didn't know everything beyond the pain that that the drugs had been keeping at bay. Desires. Regret. Remorse. Self-doubt. All of these feelings had been present but dormant during her time on opium and, later, morphine. Without chemical intervention, her emotions returned in force, and she discovered that she no longer knew how to keep them tamped down.
She cried. Oh, how she cried. For the first week, she wept like a mad woman. She cried in front of nurses, doctors, orderlies. She couldn't stop, and she feared one of her men would visit and witness the wreckage of her pride.
But none of them came that week. Her only visitor was a young, blonde woman. She stood in the doorway of the room, never entering. When she turned her head, Balalaika saw a mass of ugly scar tissue across her face.
It was like looking into a broken mirror.
Whoever she was, the woman did not speak, and she did not stay.
Balalaika did not have many visitors, really. Most of her days were as quiet and still as a lake of ice.
Lieutenant Piotr Chaikin, with his ruin of a hand, was at the the same hospital for the first month. He filled her room with chatter about dice and blackjack circles until he was released. Balalaika did not ask about his debts. He would not have told her, even if she did, and she had no authority to lecture him. After all, she had staked the sum of her futures on a single bet of military glory and lost.
Menshoff came by a few times, but he never knew what to say. He brought vodka and drank most of it himself before he left.
Yevgeny made the most awkward of appearances with a clutch of wilting daisies. He did not raise his eyes from his shoelaces, stayed for fewer than ten minutes even though he had made the long trip from Moscow for the sole purpose of seeing her, and did not come again.
Boris came the most frequently. Balalaika minded his company the least, perhaps because he had a habit of coming while she was asleep. She only heard about most of his visits through offhand comments from the nurses. On Sundays, he came while she was awake with a newspaper and a brown bag of baked sweets. They talked about the news and ate. She had an appetite for so few things, but the tea cookies melted in her mouth, all of that sugar falling to nothing. They did not speak of the past or the future.
Boris was the only one who came to meet her on the day of her release from the hospital. He paid for their cab fare to the train station where she would start her long journey to Leningrad. Her uncle had arranged for her to start a job there. A secretary. No one in her family could stomach her presence, so her uncle's sudden interest in her welfare wasn't a kindness. It was his way of keeping her off his doorstep. Even so, Balalaika had no choice but to take it. She had no money and few friends left.
Before he left her, Boris handed her a man's military coat, neatly folded into a square.
"He was a good man," he said.
The weight of it surprised her, and the softness. This coat had belonged to Sokolov. She could tell from the minute nick in the collar and the dented top button. She had spent every day for two years with him, his shoulder matched by hers. Of course, she knew it was his. Balalaika let the folds fall out and swung it around her shoulders.
"Thank you," she said.
"Good-bye, Kapitan," Boris said and saluted.
Without thinking, she returned the gesture.
He smiled at her, a grim tight smile which she did not mirror.
The train was delayed. Balalaika did not care one way or the other. Sokolov's coat kept her warm enough, but the crowds in the train station made her fingers twitch. She found a bench that let her keep her back to a wall and spent hours scanning the shifting tide of faces.
The blonde woman with the scarred face drifted through the sea of strangers. Balalaika thought it was a coicidence, but after her fourth pass, that theory died.
The bench creaked in relief as she left her post.
The woman was easy to track. Balalaika caught her near the water fountain. She did not look surprised.
"Do I know you?" Balalaika asked.
The woman shook her head.
"What do you want with me, then?"
"Someone poured acid on me while I slept," she said. There was a sing-song lilt in her delicate voice. "Then, they dressed me in a man's uniform and brought me to the battles. I didn't understand. I was a clerk. A secretary, really. For Major Sarychin. But then..."
Balalaika did not need to hear the rest of the woman's story. The image of Balalaika still had use in Afghanistan, but Sarychin wanted her gone. All he needed was to plant rumors and offer up a replacement.
That bastard.
"You have my apologies," Balalaika said.
The woman smiled a little. "I wanted to see the famous Balalaika. You are much taller than I am. Beside the hair, I don't think we look a thing alike."
"The scars," Balalaika said.
"Of course." The woman shifted. When she spoke again, her voice was nothing more than an echo. "What happened to the one who burned you?"
"I made him eat the torch," Balalaika said.
The woman nodded. "I envy you."
And then she was gone, another figure flowing from the station onto the cold streets.
On the train, Balalaika wrapped herself in a dead man's coat and watched the grey landscape slip away.
If there was a reason that she was still alive, she couldn't see it. But brave men had suffered to rescue her. Good men had died to carry out her orders. She would not disgrace their sacrifice with something as selfish as suicide.
It wasn't much of a reason to live, but it was something.
