When they passed through the wide double doors to the entry hall, the sniper stood up, and it was not a miracle.
Swallowing her disappointment, Mia met her with a warm handshake. “Major Pavlichenko, how nice to see you again. Um… what brings you to Yalta?”
“A little vacation. I’ve been training snipers without rest for six months at Saratov but developed some back problems, so my commander has granted me a few days’ rest in a warm place.” She smiled. “I know the Crimea. I was one of those who liberated Sebastopol.” She tilted her head westward in the general direction of that city.
“So, you went out for a short walk and ended up here in Yalta. And how did you manage to get past security? The hotel is supposed to be blocked off.”
Pavlichenko chuckled. “I assure you, it is. It so happens that I am a friend of one of the generals accompanying Marshal Stalin. He invited me to visit him, but then I learned that Mr. Hopkins was here and remembered you were his assistant.” She held out her hand. “Glad to see you made it back home.”
“Thanks to you. I would have expressed my gratitude for your motorcycle intervention sooner but assumed any message to you would have been compromising.”
“Very perceptive. So, how’s the shoulder?” They strolled slowly along the ornate corridor but paid little attention to it.
“Much better, thank you, though I don’t think I could aim a rifle again.”
“Aim a…? Oh, yes, I forgot. You were with a sniper unit for a while. You are quite an amazing woman.”
“Not as amazing as you, Major. Or the women I fought with in the 109th.”
“I understand. One develops real loyalties to one’s comrades. It’s wrenching to the soul when they fall in battle.”
“I lost much of my unit, though one of them…” She hesitated, not knowing if she dared to ask yet another lifesaving favor.
Pavlichenko waited, eyebrows raised. “One of them…?”
“Alexia Vassilievna Mazarova,” she blurted. “She saved my life. I was shot, and she left her post to carry me to a medical station. For that they arrested her. First she was in a penal battalion, and then she was transferred to a camp in Vyatlag for attempted desertion.”
Pavlichenko frowned. “I believe I met her somewhere on the front. But a labor camp is an unusual punishment for a desertion.”
“Well, it’s a long and complicated story. I was wondering, could you help me get a letter to her? Just a brief message so she knows someone cares about her?”
Pavlichenko shook her head. “Some camps allow letters and parcels, and some do not. Unfortunately, if the authorities say no communication, I have no more ability to penetrate that wall than you do. All I can do is advise you to take heart. The war will be over soon. Our troops are already in Germany. Afterward, your government can make an appeal through the Central Committee to contact her, maybe even to shorten her sentence.” Pavlichenko offered simultaneously a smile of encouragement and a shrug.
They continued down the corridor for a few minutes without speaking. “Do you remember our conversation about Dostoyevsky when we first met?” Mia asked.
Pavlichenko clasped her hands behind her back as they paced. “Yes, though I still can’t fathom why he interests you.”
“Well, one of his characters makes a virtue of submission, of insisting that a person should offer love, a kiss, as it were, to the world no matter what evil is visited upon him.”
The major laughed in a sudden burst of derision. “Well, with 309 dead Germans behind me, you can imagine my opinion of submission.”
“But what about submission to the state? How is that different?”
“Submission to the state is done in the belief that the state is the collective will of the people. Dostoyevsky’s submission involves only the individual, a privilege of the comfortable intellectual who cares about his personal salvation more than for the suffering masses.”
She glanced down at her watch. “Oh, it’s twelve o’clock. I promised General Kruglov to meet him for lunch. It has been a pleasure to talk with you again, Miss Kramer, and I hope you find your friend, Alexia Vassilievna.”
They embraced lightly, and Mia hurried back to her room, arriving only a few minutes before Hopkins knocked at her door.
“Good that you’re in. Can you take some dictation right now? I want to set it all down before I forget.” He was already inside and seated on the one chair in the room.
“Of course.” She readied her fountain pen and notebook.
“The long delay of the Western allies in entering Europe has allowed the Soviets…” So he recounted for some fifteen minutes, but soon his voice grew hoarse. His almost-transparent skin and blue lips revealed how much the talks had taken out of him, and he seemed to be at the end of his strength.
“Please type that up as soon as you can, with carbon copies,” he said, coughing into his handkerchief. “I’m going to have a rest now. The president will have a private conversation with Stalin at two o’clock this afternoon in the blue suite, before the final press photos. I’d like you to be there, as a standby, in case the president needs another interpreter or messenger.”
“Yes, of course,” she said anxiously as he slouched toward the door and let himself out.
Mia arrived at the Blue Suite just before four, but as she feared, Hopkins had not made it. President Roosevelt greeted her as his assistant brought him down the corridor, but reaching the suite, he dismissed the man and rolled himself inside. Stalin was already inside with the single interpreter who was allowed.
What was so critical, she wondered, that excluded Churchill and all the president’s military staff and advisors? Could it have something to do with the mysterious Great Weapon the US was developing and everyone was whispering about?
Whatever the subject, the president emerged after an hour, and the leaders and their entourages collected before the main portal of the palace.
The three heads of state sat together much the same as they had done at Tehran, only this time they wore winter clothing. As the press snapped away and their flashbulbs popped, various officers wandered in and out of the frame behind them.
Mia knew most of the names of those in the American and British entourages, fewer in the Russian group, but had no trouble recognizing Molotov. He studiously avoided looking in her direction, but it no longer mattered; the power they once had over each other was gone.
What concerned her was that Stalin, in his military greatcoat, seemed gleeful, while Churchill glowered, and President Roosevelt huddled haggard and frail inside his cape.
All the while she watched the three leaders posing for the press, the thought of Alexia haunted her. What was life like in a Russian labor camp in the dead of winter?
Chapter Twenty-seven
November 1944
Alexia stepped down from the prison train at the Vyatlag station and stood with the other new prisoners. Numb and docile, she still had not come to terms with her conviction for treason and the court’s sentence of death. It had scarcely made a difference when the leader of the troika had “by the generosity of the state” commuted the sentence to twenty-five years at hard labor.
Treason. Twenty-five years. Enemy of the people. She struggled to understand the downward spiral that had begun with a decision to leave the honor guard and fight actively for the homeland. Was Father Zosima right, that violence begets violence?
Vyatlag, colony 14, was assigned to forestry, and learning that, she was at first relieved. But now she saw she should not have been. It was bitter cold, and the colony where she would be put to work consisted of a row of wooden buildings, too few buildings to house all the prisoners. Where were they? And what were the strange-looking mounds in the field behind the buildings?