Free Beautiful Assassin by Michael C. White

were away from those you loved. She glanced up at the Wild Boar, then across at me. I sat with my back to the earthen wall of the bunker, working on a poem in my journal, a small leather-bound notebook I kept in my pocket. I guess I still clung to the notion that I was a poet. Before the war I had dreamed of being the next Akhmatova. Now I wrote just to occupy my time, to keep my sanity.
    “You are far too skinny, Corporal,” the Wild Boar said. “How are you going to kill those fucking krauts if you don’t keep up your strength?” With his knife, he hacked off another large chunk of sausage, speared it with the point, and shoved it into the hairy cavity that was his mouth. The weapon, a dagger he’d taken off a dead SS officer, was a delicate-looking thing with a fancy engraved handle, something that resembled an expensive letter opener. “Uhm,” he said, making an exaggerated show of the pleasure it gave him. His lips smacked as he chewed and his throat made the guttural sounds of a dog eating. He cut another piece and extended it on the end of the dagger toward Zoya. “Have some. Don’t be shy, little one.”
    At first she shook her head.
    “Go on. Take it. There’s plenty more where that came from.” He smiled at her. “Think of it as a reward for your good work today, comrade.”
    “For getting that kraut,” chipped in Drubich.
    Hesitantly, she reached out and accepted the proffered piece of meat.
    “ Spasibo, ” she said as she tore hungrily into it.
    “Is good, no?”
    She looked over and met my gaze, then turned away, embarrassed.
    I went back to my journal. Each day I wrote something in it: random thoughts, observations, lines of a poem I never quite seemed to finish. It also served as my kill log, where I kept the official record of the men I dispatched as a sniper. Ironic, I knew, that between the same covers I both wrote poetry and recorded the number of Germans I shot. Creation and destruction in one book. My journal, though, was one of the few places that was private, a thing I didn’t have to share with anyone else. And it was the one part of my old life that I hadn’t lost, the one part of me that had remained constant. I sometimes felt that privacy was the worst casualty of war. I don’t mean by this personal modesty. The year of fighting had nearly purged me of that. Although it had been awkward at first, I’d long since ceased to worry about bathing or changing clothes or attending to personal needs in front of a company of mostly men. And they hardly batted an eye at seeing a woman pull her trousers down, squat, and relieve herself. The war had made modesty a luxury no one could afford. No, for me at least, it had to do with the absence of any privacy of mind, the time and silence to be alone with one’s thoughts, without being interrupted or pestered, without having to listen to a hundred other people jabbering or laughing, eating or farting, or snoring in their sleep. I missed the quiet evenings alone with a book, doing research in the musty-smelling stacks of the university library, sitting by myself along the river and working on a poem, allowing one line to open up an entire sonnet I hadn’t even known dwelled within me.
    “And what about the sergeant?” the Wild Boar asked, as if he could read my thoughts and wished to disrupt them on purpose. “Would she care for a piece of my sausage?”
    I looked up from my journal. “No,” I said flatly, then returned to my writing.
    Despite already having eaten the watery gruel, the stale hunk of black bread, and the meager piece of dried meat or salted fish we all were given for our evening meal, I was still hungry. I was always hungry, as were we all, having been reduced to half rations since the Germans had tightened the noose around the city. All that is, except for the COs and commissars and the Party’s blue hats—those feared political officers—and those like the Wild Boar who knew how to take care of themselves. With the