Dark Benediction

VENGEANCE FOR NIKOLAI

The distant thunder of the artillery was only faintly audible in the dugout. The girl sat quietly picking at her hands while the colonel spoke. She was only a slip of a girl, all breast and eyes, but there was an intensity about her that made her unmistakably beautiful, and the colonel kept glancing at her sidelong as if his eyes refused to share the impersonal manner of his speech. The light of a single bare bulb glistened in her dark hair and made dark shadows under deep jade eyes already shadowed by weeping. She was listening intently or not at all. She had just lost her child.

“They will not kill you, grazhdanka, if you can get safely past the lines,” said the colonel. He paced slowly in the dugout, his boot heels clicking pleasantly on the concrete while he sucked at a long cigaret holder and milked his thumbs behind his back in solemn thought. “These Americans, you have heard about their women? No, they will not kill you, unless by accident in passing the lines. They may do other things to you—forgive me!—it is war.” He stopped pacing, straddled her shadow, and looked down at her with paternal pity. “Come, you have said nothing, nothing at all. I feel like a swine for asking it of you, but there is no other hope of heating back this attack. And I am ordered to ask you. Do you understand?”

She looked up. Light filled her eyes and danced in them with the moist glittering of a fresh grief already an ancient grief old as Man. “They killed my Nikolai,” she said softly. “Why do you speak to me so? What can it mean? The bombardment—I know nothing—I cannot think of it. Why do you torment me?”

The colonel betrayed no impatience with her, although he had gone over it twice before. “This morning you tried to leap off the bridge. It is such a shame to die without purpose, dushka. I offer you a purpose. Do you love the Fatherland?”

“I am not a Party member, Tovarish Polkovnik.”

“I did not ask if you love the Party, my dear. However, you should say ‘parties,’ now that we are tolerating those accursed Menshevist deviationists again. Bah! They even name members of the Gorodskoi Soviets these days. We are becoming a two party republic. How sickening! Where are the old warrior Bolsheviks? It makes one weep…. But that is not the question. I asked if you love the Fatherland.”

She gave a hesitant nod.

“Then think of the Fatherland, think of vengeance for Nikolai. Would you trade your life for that? I know you would. You were ready to fling it away.”

She stirred a little; her mind seemed to re-enter the room. “This Ami Gyenyeral. Why do you wish him dead?”

“He is the genius behind this assault, my child. Who would have thought the Americans would have chosen such an unlikely place for an invasion? And the manner of it! They parachuted an army ninety miles inland, instead of assaulting the fortified coastline: He committed half a million troops to deliberate encirclement. Do you understand what this means? If they had been unable to drive to the coast, they would have been cut off, and the war would very likely be over. With our victory. As it was, the coast defenders panicked. The airborne army swept to the sea to capture their beachhead without need of a landing by sea, and now there are two million enemy troops on our soil, and we are in full retreat. Flight is a better word. General Rufus MacAmsward gambled his country’s entire future on one operation, and he won. If he had lost, they would likely have shot him. Such a man is necessarily mad. A megalomaniac, an evil genius.

Oh, I admire him very much! He reminds me of one of their earlier generals, thirty years ago. But that was before their Fascism, before their Blue Shirts.”

“And if he is killed?”

The colonel sighed. He seemed to listen for a time to the distant shellfire. “We are all a little superstitious in wartime,” he said at last. “Perhaps we attach too much significance to this one man. But they have no other generals like him. He will be replaced by a competent man. We would rather fight competent men than fight an unpredictable devil. He keeps his own counsels, that is so. We know he does not rely heavily upon his staff. His will rules the operation. He accepts intelligence but not advice. If he is struck dead—well, we shall see.”

“And I am to kill him. It seems unthinkable. Now do you know I can?”

The colonel waved a sheaf of papers. “Only a woman can get to him. We have his character clearly defined. Here is his psychoanalytic biography. We have photostats of medical records taken from Washington. We have interviews with his ex-wife and his mother. Our psychologists have studied every inch of him. Here, I’ll read you—but no, it is very dry, full of psychiatric jargon. I’ll boil it down.

“MacAmsward is a champion of the purity of womanhood, and yet he is a vile old lecher. He is at once a baby and an old man. He will kneel and kiss your hand—yes, really. He is a worshipper of womanhood. He will court you, convert you, pay you homage, and then expect you to—forgive me—to take him to bed. He could not possibly make advances on you uninvited, but he expects you—as a goddess rewarding a worshipper—to make advances on him. He will be your abject servant, but with courtly dignity. His life is full of breast symbols. He clucks in his sleep. He has visited every volcano in the world. He collects anatomical photographs; his women have all been bosomy brunettes. He is still in what the Freudians call the oral stage of emotional development—emotionally a two-year-old. I know Freud is bad politics, but for the Ami, it is sometimes so.”

The colonel stopped. There was a sudden tremor in the earth. The colonel lurched, lost his balance. The floor heaved him against the wall. The girl sat still, hands in her lap, face very white. The air shock followed the earth shock, but the thunder clap was muted by six feet of concrete and steel. The ceiling leaked dust.

“Tactical A-missile,” the colonel hissed. “Another of them! If they keep it up, they’ll drive us to use Lucifer. This is a mad dog war. Neither side uses the H-bomb, but in the end one side or the other will have to use it. If the Kremlin sees certain defeat, we’ll use it. So would Washington. If you’re being murdered, you might as well take your killer with you if you can. Bah! It is a madness. I, Porphiry Grigoryevich, am as mad as the rest. Listen to me, Marya Dmitriyevna, I met you an hour ago, and now I am madly in love with you, do you hear? Look at you! Only a day after a bomb fragment dashed the life out of your baby, your bosom still swelled with unclaimed milk and dumb grief, and yet I dare stand here and say I am in love with you, and in another breath ask you to go and kill yourself by killing an Ami general! Ah, ah! What insane apes we are! Forget the Ami general. Let us both desert, let us run away to Africa together, to Africa where apes are simpler. There! I’ve made you cry. What a brute is Phorphiry, what a brute!”

The girl breathed in gasps. “Please, Tovarish Polkovnik! Please say nothing more! I will go and do what you ask, if it is possible.”

“I only ask it, dushka, I cannot command it. I advise you to refuse.”

“I will go and kill him. Tell me how! There is a plan? There must be a plan. How shall I pass the lines? How shall I get to him? What is the weapon? How can I kill him?”

“The weapon, you mean? The medical officer will explain that. Of course, you’ll be too thoroughly searched to get even a stickpin past the lines. They often use fluoroscopy, so you couldn’t even swallow a weapon and get it past them. But there’s a way, there’s a way—I’ll let the vrach explain it. I can only tell you how to get captured, and how to get taken to MacAmsward after your capture. As for the rest of it, you will be directed by post-hypnotic suggestion. Tell me, you were an officer in the Woman’s Defense Corps, the home guard, were you not?”

“Yes, but when Nikki was born, they asked for my resignation.”

“Yes, of course, but the enemy needn’t find out you’re inactive. You have your uniform still?… Good! Wear it. Your former company is in action right now. You will join them briefly.”

“And be captured?”

“Yes. Bring nothing but your ID tags. We shall supply the rest. You will carry in your pocket a certain memorandum addressed to all home guard unit commanders. It is in a code the Ami have already broken: It contains the phrase: ‘Tactical bacteriological weapons immediately in use.’ Nothing else of any importance. It is enough. It will drive them frantic. They will question you. Since you know nothing, they can torture nothing out of you.

“In another pocket, you will be carrying a book of love poetry. Tucked in the book will be a photograph of General Rufus MacAmsward, plus two or three religious ikons. Their Intelligence will certainly send the memorandum to MacAmsward; both sides are that nervous about germ weapons. It is most probably that they will send him the book and the picture—for reasons both humorous and practical. The rest will take care of itself. MacAmsward is all ego. Do you understand?”

She nodded. Porphiry Grigoryevich reached for the phone.

“Now I am going to call the surgeon,” he said. “He will give you several injections. Eventually, the injections will be fatal, but for some weeks, you will feel nothing from them. Post-hypnotic urges will direct you. If your plan works, you will not kill MacAmsward in the literal sense. Literally, he will kill himself. If the plan fails, you’ll kill him another way if you can. You were an actress. I believe?”

“For a time. I never got to the Bolshoi.”

“But excellent! His mother was an actress. You speak English. You are beautiful, and full of grief. It is enough. You are the one. But do you really love the Fatherland enough to carry it out?”

Her eyes burned. “I hate the killers of my son!” she whispered.

The colonel cleared his throat. “Yes, of course. Very well, Marya Dmitriyevna, it is death I am giving you. But you will be sung in our legends for a thousand years. And by the way—” He cocked his head and looked at her oddly. “I believe I really do love you, dushka.”

With that, he picked up the phone.

Strange exhilaration surged within her as she crawled through the brush along the crest of the flood embankment, crawled hastily, panting and perspiring under a smoky sun in a dusty sky while Ami fighters strafed the opposite bank of the river where her company was retreating. The last of the Russ troops had crossed, or were killed in crossing. The terrain along the bank where she crawled was now the enemy’s. There was no lull in the din of battle, and the ugly belching of artillery mingled with the sound of the planes to batter the senses with a merciless avalanche of noise; but the Ami infantry and mechanized divisions had paused for regrouping at the river. It would be a smart business for the Americans to plunge on across the river at once before the Russians could reorganize and prepare to defend it, but perhaps they could not. The assault had carried the Ami forces four hundred miles inland, and it had to stop somewhere and wait for the supply lines to catch up. Marya’s guess—and it was the educated guess of a former officer—was that the Ami would bridge the river immediately under air cover and send mechanized killer-strikes across to harass the retreating Russ without involving infantry in an attempt to occupy territory beyond the river.

She fell flat and hugged the earth as machine gun fire traversed the ridge. A tracer hit rock a yard from her head, spraying her with dust, and sang like a snapped wire as it shot off to the south. The spray of bullets travelled on along the ridge. She moved ahead again.

The danger was unreal. It was all part of an explosive symphony. She had the manna. She could not be harmed. Nothing but vengeance lay ahead. She had only to crawl on.

Was it the drug that made her think like that? Was there an euphoric mixed in the injections? She had felt nothing like this during the raids. During the raids there was only fear, and the struggle to remember whether she had left the teapot boiling while the bombs blew off.

Macbeth. Once she had played Lady Macbeth upon the Moscow stage. How did it go? The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements. Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me, from crown to toe, top-full of direst cruelty!

But that wasn’t quite it. That wasn’t quite what she felt. It was a new power that dwelt in her bosom. It was something else.

Her guard uniform was caked with mud, and the insignia was torn loose from her collar. The earth scuffed her knees and the brush scratched her arms. She kept falling flat to avoid the raking fire of her own machine guns. And yet it was necessary that she stay on the ridge and appear to be seeking a way across the river.

She was too intent upon watching the other side to notice the sergeant. She crawled over a corpse and nearly fell in the foxhole with him. She had been crawling along with her pistol in hand, and the first she saw of the sergeant was his boot. It stamped down on her gun hand. He jammed the muzzle of a tommy-gun against the side of her throat.

“Drop it, sister! Voyennoplyennvi!”

She gasped in pain—her hand—and stared up at him with wide eyes. A lank young Ami with curly hair and a quid of tobacco in one cheek.

“Moya rooka—my hand!”

He kept his boot heel on the gun, but let her get her hand free. “Get down in here!”

She rolled into the hole. He kicked the gun toward the river.

“Hey, Cap!” he yelled over his shoulder. “I got a guest. One of the commissar’s ladies.” Then to the girl: “Before I kill you, what are you doing on this side of the river, spy?”

“Most chyeryez ryekoo…”

“I don’t speak it. No savvy. Ya nye govoryu…”

Marya was suddenly terrified. He was lean and young and pale with an unwelcome fear that would easily allow him to fire a burst into her body at close range. The Ami forces had been taking no prisoners during the running battle. The papers called them sub-human beasts because of it, but Marya was sufficiently a soldier to know that prisoners of war were a luxury for an army with stretchy logistic problems, and often the luxury could not be afforded. One Russian lieutenant had brought his men to the Ami under a while flag, and the Ami captain had shot him in the face and ordered his platoon to pick off the others with rifle fire as they tried to flee. In a sense, it was retaliatory. The Russians had taken no prisoners during the Ami airborne landings, and she had seen seen Ami airmen herded together and machine-gunned. She hated it. But as an officer, she knew there were times of necessity.

“Please don’t shoot,” she said in English. “I give up. I can’t get across the river anyway.”

“What are you doing on this side?” he demanded.

“My company was retreating across the bridge. I was the last to start across. Your artillery hit the bridge. The jets finished it off with their rockets.” She had to shout to be heard above the roar of battle. She pointed down the river. “I was trying to make it down to the ford. Down there you can wade across.”

It was all true. The sergeant thought it over.

“Hey, Cap!” he yelled again. “Didn’t you hear me? What’ll I do with her?”

If there was an answer, it was drowned by shellfire. “Undress!” the sergeant barked.

“What?”

“I said to take off your clothes. And no tricks. Strip to the skin.”

She went sick inside. So now it started, did it? Well, let it come! For the Fatherland! For Nikolai. She began unbuttoning her blouse. She did not look at the Ami sergeant. Once he whistled softly. When she had finished undressing, she looked up defiantly. His face had changed. He moistened his lips and swore softly under his breath. He crossed himself and edged away. Deep within her, something smiled. He was only a boy.

“Well, what are you cursing about?” she asked tonelessly.

“If I didn’t think you would I mean I wish this gun if I had time I’d but you’d stab me in the back but when I think about what they’ll do to you back there…”

“Jeezis!” he said fervently, wagging his head and rolling his quid into the other cheek. “Put the underwear and the blouse back on, roll up the rest of it, and start crawling down the slope. Aim for that slit trench down there. I’ll be right behind you.”

“She’s quite a little dish, incidentally,” the Ami captain was saying on the field telephone. “Are we shooting prisoners now, or are we sending them back… Yeah?” He listened for awhile. A mortar shell came screaming down nearby and they all sat down in the trench and opened their mouths to save eardrums. “To who?” he said when it was over. “Slim? Oh, to you… Yeah, that’s right, a photograph of Old Brass Butt in person. I can’t read the other stuff. It’s in Russky…. Just a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece and looked up at the sergeant. “Where’s the rest of your squad, Sarge?”

The sergeant swallowed solemnly. “I lost all my men except Price and Vittorio, sir. They were wounded and went to the rear.”

“Damn! Well, they’re sending up replacements tonight; and we’re all going back for a breather, as soon as they get here. So you might as well march her on back yourself.” He glanced thoughtfully at the girl. “Good God!” he murmured.

Marya was surrounded by several officers. They were all looking at her hungrily. She thought quickly.

“You have searched me,” she said cooly. “Would you gentlemen allow me to put on my skirt? I have submitted to capture. As an officer, I expect…”

“Look, lady, what you expect doesn’t matter a damn!” snapped a lieutenant. “You’re a prisoner of war, and you’re lucky to be alive. Besides, you are now about to have the high privilege of lying down with six…”

“Quiet, Sam!” grunted the captain. “We can’t do it. Lady, put on the rest of your clothes and get going.”

“Why?” the lieutenant yelled. “That damned sergeant is going to…”

“Shut up! Can’t you see she’s no peasant? Christ, man, this war doesn’t make you all swine, does it? Sergeant, trade that Chicago typewriter for a forty-five, and take her back to Major Kline for interrogation. Don’t touch her, you hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain scribbled an order in his notebook, tore out the page, and handed it to the sergeant. “You can probably hitch a ride on the chow wagon part of the way. It’s going to get dark pretty soon, so keep a leash on her. If anybody starts a gang rape, blow his guts out.” He grinned ruefully. “If we are going to pass it up ourselves, by damn, I want to make sure nobody else does it.” He glanced at the Russian girl and reddened. “My apologies, lieutenant. We’re not really bastards. We’re just a long way from home. After we wipe of this Red Disease (he spat out the words like bites of tainted meat) you’ll see we’re not so bad. I hope you’ll be treated like an officer and a gentlewoman, even if you are a commie.” He bowed slightly and offered the first salute.

“But I’m not—well, thank you, Captain,” she said, and returned the salute….

They sat spraddle-legged in the back of the truck as it bounced along the shell-pocked road. The guns had fallen silent, but the sky was full of Ami squadrons jetting toward the sunset. Pilotless planes and rocket missiles painted swift vapor trails across the heavens, and the sun colored there with blood. She breathed easier now, and she was very tired. The Ami sergeant sat across from her and kept his gun trained on her and appeared very ill-at-ease. He blushed several times for no apparent cause. She tried to shut him out of her consciousness and think of nothing. He was a doggy sort of a pup, and she disliked him. The Ami were all doggy pups. She had met them before. There was something of the spaniel in them.

Nikolai, Nikolai, my breasts ache for you, and they burst with your milk, and I must drain them before I die of it. My baby, my bodykins, my flesh torn from my flesh, my baby, my pain, my Nikki Andreyevich, come milk me—but no, now it is death, and we can he one again. How wretched it is to ache with milk and mourn you…

“Why are you crying?” the sergeant grunted after awhile.

“You killed my baby.”

“I what?”

“Your bombers. They killed my baby. Only yesterday.”

“Damnation! So that’s why you’re—” He looked at her blouse and reddened again.

She glanced down at herself. She was leaking a little, and the pressure was maddening. So that’s what he was blushing about!

There was a crushed paper cup in the back of the truck. She picked it up and unfolded it, then glanced doubtfully at the sergeant. He was looking at her in a kind of mournful anguish.

“Do you mind if I turn my back?” she asked.

“Hell’s bells!” he said softly, and put away his gun.

“Give me your word you won’t jump out, and I won’t even look. This war gives me a sick knot in the gut.” He stood up and leaned over the back of the cab, watching the road a head and not looking at her, although he kept one hand on his holster and one boot heel on the hem of her skirt.

Marya tried to dislike him a little less than before. When she was finished, she threw out the cup and buttoned her blouse again. “Thank you, sergeant, you can turn around now.”

He sat down and began talking about his family and how much he hated the war. Marya sat with her eyes closed and her head tilted back in the wind and tried not to listen.

“Say, how can you have a baby and be in the army?” he asked after a time.

“Not the army. The home guard. Everybody’s in the home guard. Please, won’t you just be quiet awhile?”

“Oh. Well. Sure, I guess.”

Once they bailed out of the truck and lay flat in the ditch while two Russian jets screamed over at low altitude, but the jets were headed elsewhere and did not strafe the road. They climbed back in the truck and rolled on. They stopped at two road blocks for MP shakedowns before the truck pulled up at a supply dump. It was pitch dark.

The sergeant vaulted out of the truck. “This is as far as we ride,” he told her. “We’ll have to walk the rest of the way. It’s dark as the devil, and we’re only allowed a penlight.” He flashed it in her face. “It would be a good chance for you to try to break for it. I hate to do this to you, sis, but put your hands together behind your back.”

She submitted to having her wrists bound with telephone wire. She walked ahead of him down the ditch while he pointed the way with the feeble light and held one end of the wire.

“I’d sure hate to shoot you, so please don’t try anything.”

She stumbled once and felt the wire jerk taut.

“You’ve cut off the circulation; do you want to cut off the hands?” she snapped. “How much farther do we have to go?”

The sergeant seemed very remorseful. “Stop a minute. I want to think. It’s about four miles.” He fell silent.

They stood in the ditch while a column of tanks thundered past toward the front. There was no traffic going the other way.

“Well?” she asked after awhile.

“I was just thinking about the three Russky women they captured on a night patrol awhile back. And what they did to them at interrogation.”

“Go on.”

“Well, it’s the Blue Shirt boys that make it ugly, not so much the army officers. It’s the political heel snappers you’ve got to watch out for. They see red and hate Russky. Listen, it would be a lot safer for you if I took you in after daylight, instead of at night. During the day there’s sometimes a Red Cross fellow hanging around, and everybody’s mostly sober. If you tell everything you know, then they won’t be so rough on you.”

“Well?

“There’s some deserted gun emplacements just up the hill here, and an old command post. I guess I could stay awake until dawn.”

She paused, wondered whether to trust him. No, she shouldn’t. But even so, he would be easier to handle than half a dozen drunken officers.

“All right, Ami, but if you don’t take wires off, your medics will have to amputate my hands.”

They climbed the hill, crawled through splintered logs and burned timbers, and found the command post underground. Half the roof was caved in, and the place smelled of death and cartridge casings, but there was a canvas cot and a gasoline lantern that still had some fuel in it. After he had freed her wrists, she sat on the cot and rubbed the numbness out of her hands while he opened a K-ration and shared it with her. He watched her rather wistfully while she ate.

“It’s too bad you’re on the wrong side of this war,” he said. “You’re okay, as Russkies go. How come you’re fighting for the commies?”

She paused, then reached down and picked up a handful of dirt from the floor, kneaded it, and showed it to him, while she nibbled cheese.

“Ami, this had the blood of my ancestors in it. This ground is mine. Now it has the blood of my baby in it; don’t speak to me of sides, or leaders, or politics.” She held the soil out to him. “Here, look at it. But don’t touch. It’s mine. No, when I think about it, go ahead and touch. Feel it, smell it, taste a little of it the way a peasant would to see if it’s ripe for planting. I’ll even give you a handful of it to take home and mix with your own. It’s mine to give. It’s also mine to fight for.” She spoke calmly and watched him with deep jade eyes. She kept working the dirt in her hand and offering it to him. “Here! This is Russia. See how it crumbles? It’s what they’ll bury you in. Here, take it.” She tossed it at him. He grunted angrily and leaped to his feet to brush himself off.

Marya went on eating cheese. “Do you want an argument, Ami?” she asked, chewing hungrily while she talked. “You will get awfully dirty, if you do. I have a simple mind. I can only keep tossing handfuls of Russia at you to answer your ponderous questions.”

He did an unprecedented thing. He sat down on the floor and began—well, almost sobbing. His shoulders heaved convulsively for a moment. Marya stopped eating cheese and stared at him in amazement. He put his arms across his knees and rolled his forehead on them. When he looked up, his face was blank as a frightened child’s.

“God, I want to go home!” he croaked.

Marya put down the K-ration and went to bend over him. She pulled his head back with a handful of his hair and kissed him. Then she went to lie down on the cot and turned her face to the wall.

“Thanks, Sergeant,” she said. “I hope they don’t bury you in it after all.”

When she awoke, the lantern was out. She could see him bending over her, silhouetted against the stars through the torn roof. She stifled a shriek.

“Take your hands away!”

He took them away at once and made a choking sound. His silhouette vanished. She heard him stumbling among the broken timbers, making his way outside. She lay there thinking for awhile, thoughts without words. After a few minutes, she called out.

“Sergeant? Sergeant!”

There was no answer. She started up and kicked something that clattered. She went down on her knees and felt for it in the dark. Finally she found it. It was his gun.

“Sergeant.”

After awhile he came stumbling back. “Yes?” he asked softly.

“Come here.”

His silhouette blotted the patch of stars again. She felt for his holster and shoved the gun back in it.

“Thanks, Ami, but they would shoot you for that.”

“I could say you grabbed it and ran.”

“Sit down, Ami.”

Obediently he sat.

“Now give me your hands again,” she said, then, whispering: “No, please! Not there! Not there.”

The last thing would be vengeance and death, but the next to the last thing was something else. And it was clearly in violation of the captain’s orders.

It was the heating of the old man that aroused her fury. They dragged him out of the bunker being used by Major Kline for questionings, and they beat him about the head with a piece of hydraulic hose. “They” were immaculately tailored Blue Shirts of the Americanist Party, and “he” was an elderly Russian major of near retirement age. Two of them held his arms while the third kicked him to his knees and whipped him with the hose.

“Just a little spanking, commie, to learn you how to recite for teacher, see?”

“Whip the bejeezis out of him.”

“Fill him with gasoline and stick a wick in his mouth.”

“Give it to him!”

They were very methodical about it, like men handling an unruly circus animal. Marya stood in line with a dozen other prisoners, waiting her turn to be interrogated. It was nine in the morning, and the sun was evaporating the last of the dew on the tents in the camp. The sergeant had gone into the bunker to report to Major Kline and present the articles her captors had taken from her person. He had been gone ten minutes. When he came out, the Blue Shirts were still, whipping the prisoner. The old man had fainted.

“He’s faking.”

“Wake him up with it, Mac. Teach him.”

The sergeant walked straight toward her but gave no sign of recognition. He did not look toward the whistle and slap of the hose, although his face seemed slightly pale. He drew his gun in approaching the prisoners and a guard stepped into his path.

“Halt! You can’t…”

“Major Kline’s orders, Corporal. He’ll see Marya Dmitriyevna Lisitsa next. Right now. I’m to show her in.” The guard turned blankly to look at the prisoners. “That one,” said the sergeant.

“The girl? Okay, you! Shagom marsh!”

She stepped out of line and went with the sergeant, who took her arm and hissed, “Make it easy on yourself,” out of the corner of his mouth. Neither looked at the other.

It was dark in the bunker, but she could make out a fat little major behind the desk. He had a poker expression and a small moustache. He kept drumming his fingers on the desk and spoke in comic grunts.

“So this is the wench,” he muttered at the sergeant. He stared at Marya for a moment, then thundered: “Attention! Hit a brace! Has nobody taught you how to salute?”

Her fury congealed into a cold knot. She ignored the command and refused to answer in his own language. “Ya nye govoryu po Angliiskil” she snapped.

“I thought you said she spoke English,” he grunted at the sergeant. “I thought you said you’d talked to her.”

She felt the sergeant’s fingers tighten on her arm. He hesitated. She heard him swallow. Then he said, “Yes sir, I did. Through an interpreter.”

Bless you, little sergeant! she thought, not daring to look her thanks at him.

“Hoy, McCoy!” the major bellowed toward the door.

The man who came in was not McCoy, but one of the Americanist Blue Shirts. He gave the major a cross-breasted Americanist salute and barked the slogan: “Ameh’ca F’ust!”

“America First,” echoed the major without vigor and without returning the political salute. “What is it now?”

“I regrets to repoaht, suh, that the cuhnel is dead of a heaht condition, and can’t answeh moa questions.”

“I told you to loosen him up, not kill him. Damn! Well, no help for it. Get him out. That’s all, Purvis, that’s all.”

“Ameh’ca Fust!”

“Yeah.”

The Blue Shirt smacked his heels, whirled, and hiked out. The interpreter came in.

“McCoy, I hate this job. Well, there she is. Take a gander. She’s the one with the bacteriological memo and the snap of MacAmsward. I’m scared to touch it. They’ll want this one higher up. Look at her. A fine piece, eh?”

“Distinctly, sir,” said McCoy, who looked legal and regal and private-school-polished.

“Yes, well, let’s begin. Sergeant, wait outside till we’re through.”

She was suddenly standing alone with them, eyes bright with fury.

“Why did you begin using bacteriological weapons?” Kline barked.

The interpreter repeated the question in Russian. The question was a silly beginning. No one had yet made official accusations of germ warfare. She answered with a crisp sentence, causing the interpreter to make a long face.

“She says they are using such weapons because they dislike us, sir.”

The major coughed behind his hand. “Tell her what will happen to her if she does that again. Let’s start over.” He squinted at her. “Name?”

“Imya?” echoed McCoy.

“Marya Dmitriyevna.”

“Familiya?”

“Lisitsa.”

“It means ‘fox’, sir. Possibly a lie.”

“Well, Marya Dmitriyevna Fox, what’s your rank?”

“V kakoin vy chinye?” snapped McCoy.

“Starshii Lyeityenant,” said the girl.

“Senior lieutenant, sir.”

“You see, girl? It’s all straight from Geneva. Name, rank, serial number, that’s all. You can trust us…. Ask her if she’s with Intelligence.”

“Razvye’dyvatyelnaya sluzhba?”

“Nyet!”

“Nyet, eh? How many divisions are ready at the front?”

“Skol’ko na frontye divizii?”

“Ya nye pomnyu!”

“She says she doesn’t remember.”

“Who is your battalion commander, Lisitsa?”

“Kto komandir va’shyevo baralyona?”

“Ya nye pomnyu!”

“She says she doesn’t remember.”

“Doesn’t, eh? Tell her I know she’s a spy, and we’ll shoot her at once.”

The interpreter repeated the threat in Russian. The girl folded her arms and stared contempt at the major. “You’re to stand at attention!”

“Smirno!”

She kept her arms folded and stood as she had been standing. The major drew his forty-five and worked the slide.

“Tell her that I am the sixteenth bastard grandson of Mickey Spillane and blowing holes in ladies’ bellies is my heritage and my hobby.”

The interpreter repeated it. Marya snorted three words she had learned from a fisherman.

“I think she called you a castrate, sir.”

The major lifted the automatic and took casual aim. Something in his manner caused the girl to go white. She closed her eyes and murmured something reverent in favor of the Fatherland.

The gun jumped in Kline’s hand. The crash brought a yell from the sergeant outside the bunker. The bullet hit concrete out the doorway and screamed off on a skyward ricochet. The girl bent over and grabbed at the front of her skirt. There was a bullet hole in front and in back where the slug had passed between her thighs. She cursed softly and fanned the skirt.

“Tell her I am a terrible marksman, but will do better next time,” chuckled Kline. “Good thing the light shows through that skirt, eh, McCoy—or I might have burned the ‘tender demesnes.’ There! Is she still cursing me?”

“Fluently, sir.”

“I must have burned her little white hide. Give her a second to cool off, then ask what division she’s from.”

“Kakovo vy polka?”

“Ya nye pomnyu!”

“She has a very poor memory, sir.”

The major sighed and inspected his nails. They were grubby. “Tell her,” he muttered, “that I think I’ll have her assigned to C company as its official prostitute after our psychosurgeons make her a nymphomaniac.”

McCoy translated. Marya spat. The major wrote.

“Have you been in any battles, woman?” he grunted. “V kakikh srazhyeniyakh vy oochast’vovali?”

“Ya nye pomnyu!”

“She says—”

“Yeah, I know. It was a silly question.” He handed the interpreter her file. “Give these to the sergeant and have him take her up to Purvis. I haven’t the heart to whip information out of a woman. Slim’s queer; he loves it.” He paused, looking her over. “I don’t know whether to feel sorry for her, or for Purvis. That’s all, McCoy.”

The sergeant led her to the Blue Shirts’ tent. “Listen,” he whispered. “I’ll sneak a call to the Red Cross.” He appeared very worried in her behalf.

The pain lasted for several hours. She lay on a cot somewhere while a nurse and a Red Cross girl took blood samples and smears. They kept giving each other grim little glances across the cot while they ministered to her.

“We’ll see that the ones who did it to you are tried,” the Red Cross worker told her in bad Russian.

“I speak English,” Marya muttered, although she had never admitted it to her interrogators, not even to Purvis.

“You’ll be all right. But why don’t you cry?”

But she could only cry for Nikolai now, and even that would be over soon. She lay there for two days and waited.

After that, there was General MacAmsward, and a politer form of questioning. The answers, though, were still the same.

“Ya nye pomnyu!”

What quality or quantity can it be, laughably godlike, transubstantially apelike, that abides in the flesh of brutes and makes them men? For General MacAmsward was indeed a man, although he wished to be only a soldier.

There are militarists who love the Fatherland, and militarists who love the Motherland, and the difference between them is as distinct as the difference between the drinkers of bourbon and the drinkers of rye. There are the neo-Prussian zombies in jackboots who stifle their souls to make themselves machines of the Fatherland, but MacAmsward was not one of them. MacAmsward was a Motherland man, and Mother was never much interested in machines. Mother raised babies into champions, and a champion is mightier than the State; never is he a tool of the State. So it was with Rufus MacAmsward, evil genius by sworn word of Porphiry Grigoryevich.

Consider a towering vision of Michael the Archangel carrying a swagger stick. Fresh from the holy wars of Heaven he comes, striding past the rows of white gloved orderlies standing at saber salute, their haloes (M-1, official nimbus) studded with brass spikes. The archangel’s headgear is a trifle rakish, crusted with gold laurel and dented by a dervish devil’s bullet. He ignores the thrones and dominations, but smiles democratically at a lowly cherub and pauses to inquire after the health of his grandmother.

Grandmother is greatly improved.

Immensely reassured, General MacAmsward strides into his quarters and hangs up his hat. The room is in darkness except for the light from a metal wall lamp that casts its glare around the great chair and upon the girl who sits in the great chair at the far end of the room. The girl is toying with a goblet of wine, and her dark hair coils in thick masses about her silk-clad shoulders. The silk came by virtue of the negligence of the general’s ex-wife in forgetting to pack. The great chair came as a prize of war, having been taken from a Soviet People’s Court where it is no longer needed. It is massive as an episcopal throne—a fitting seat for an archangel—and it is placed on a low dais at the head of a long table flanked by lesser chairs. The room is used for staff conference, and none would dare to sit in the great chair except the general—or, of course, a lovely grief-stung maiden.

The girl stares at him from out of two pools of shadow. Her head is slightly inclined and the downlight catches only the tip of her nose. The general pauses with his hand on his hat. He turns slowly away from the hat rack, brings himself slowly to attention, and gives her a solemn salute. It is a tribute to beauty. She acknowledges it with a nod. The general advances and sits in the simple chair at the far end of the long table. The general sighs with fervor, as if he had not breathed since entering the door. His eyes have not left her face. The girl puts down the glass.

“I have come to kill you,” she said. “I have come to nurse you to death with the milk of a murdered child.”

The general winced. She had said it three times before, once for each day she had resided in his house. And for the third time, the general ignored it.

“I have seen to it, my child,” he told her gravely. “Captain Purvis faces court martial in the morning. I have directed it. I have directed too that you be repatriated forthwith, if it is your wish, for this is only common justice after what that monster has done to you. Now however let me implore you to remain with us and quit the forces of godlessness until the war is won and you can return to your home in peace.”

Marya watched his shadowy figure at the far end of the table. He was like Raleigh at the court of Beth, at once mighty and humble. Again she felt the surge of exhilaration, as when she had crawled along the ridge at the river, ducking machine gun fire. It was the voice of Macbeth’s wife whispering within her: Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature’s mischief! It was the power of death in her bosom, where once had been the power of life.

She arose slowly and leaned on the table to stare at him fiercely. “Murderer of my child!” she hissed.

“May God in His mercy—”

“Murderer of my child!”

“Marya Dmitriyevna, it is my deepest sorrow.” He sat watching her gravely and seemed to lose none of his lofty composure. “I can say nothing to comfort you. It is impossible. It is my deepest sorrow.”

“There is something you can do.”

“Then it is done. Tell me quickly.”

“Come here.” She stepped from the table to the edge of the dais and beckoned. “Come to me here. I have secrets to whisper to the killer of my son. Come.”

He came and stood down from her so that their faces were at the same level. She could see now that there was real pain in his eyes. Good! Let it be. She must make him understand. Be must know perfectly well that she was going to kill him. And he must know how. The necessity of knowing was not by any command of Porphiry’s; it was a must that she had created within herself. She was smiling now, and there was a new quickness in her gestures.

“Look at me, high killer. I cannot show you the broken body of my son. I can show you no token or relic. It is all buried in a mass grave.” Swiftly she opened the silk robe. “Look at me instead. See? How swollen I am again. Yes, here! A token after all. A single drop. Look, it is his, it is Nikolai’s.”

MacAmsward went white. He stood like a man hypnotized.

“See? To nourish life, but now to nourish death. Your death, high killer. But more! My son was conceived in love, and you have killed him, and now I come to you. You will give me another, you see. Now we shall conceive him in hate, you and I, and you’ll die of the death in my bosom. Come, make hate to me, killer.”

His jaw trembled. He took her shoulders and ran his hands down her arms and closed them over hers.

“Your hands are ice,” he whispered, and leaned forward to kiss a bare spot just below her throat, and somehow she was certain that he understood. It was a preconscious understanding, but it was there. And still he bent over her.

Come, thick night, and pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen knife see not the wound it makes…

Of course the general had been intellectually convinced that it was entirely a figure of speech.

The toxin’s work was quickly done. A bacterial toxin, swiftly lethal to the non-immunized, slowly lethal to Marya who could pass it out in her milk as it formed. The general slept for half an hour and woke up with a raging fever. She sat by the window and watched him die. He tried to shout, but his throat was constricted. He got out of bed, took two steps, and fell. He tried to crawl toward the door. He fell flat again. His face was crimson.

The telephone rang.

Someone knocked at the door.

The ringing stopped and the knocking went away. She watched him breathe. He tried to speak, but she turned her back to him and looked out the window at the shell-pocked countryside. Russia, Nikolai, and even the Ami sergeant who had wanted to go home, it was for them that she listened to his gasping. She lit one of his American cigarets and found it very enjoyable. The phone was ringing furiously again. It kept on ringing.

The gasping stopped. Someone was hammering on the door and shouting. She stood enjoying the cigaret and watching the crows flocking in a newly planted field. The earth was rich and black here, the same soil she had tossed at the Ami sergeant. It belonged to her, this soil. Soon she would belong to it. With Nikolai, and maybe the Ami sergeant.

The door crashed loose from its hinges. Three Blue Shirts burst in and stopped. They looked at the body on the floor. They looked at Marya.

“What has happened here?”

The Russian girl laughed. Their expressions were quite comical. One of them raised his gun. He pulled the trigger six times.

“Come… Nikki Andreyevich… come…”

One of them went over and nudged her with his boot, but she was already dead. She had beaten them. She had beaten them all.

The American newspapers printed the truth. They said that General MacAmsward had died of poisoned milk. But that was all they said. The whole truth was only sung in Russian legend for the next one thousand years.

_{1957 (also published in 1957 as The Song of Marya)}