Beautiful Assassin by Michael C. White

emotion seemed to have dried up in my breast. All the death, all the unimaginable suffering I’d seen or been a party to—all of this had numbed me, had made my heart like a piece of polished stone, smooth and impenetrable. Once, passing a bombed-out building in Odessa, I caught a glimpse of this woman staring out at me. I paused, struck by the likeness of her to someone I’d once known. But this woman was older, with a stiffening of the flesh around the mouth, sunken cheeks, the haggard look in the eyes of one who’d gazed upon some terrible thing. I was captivated, even more so when I realized I was looking in a broken mirror at myself . Before the war, I had been an attractive woman, or so I was told. Young, filled with, as my mother used to say, silly romantic notions, an aspiring poet. And now I was…what? A cold-blooded killer. I felt myself changed in ways I could hardly even fathom. Was I the same woman who had given suck to my little girl? Who had so loved the feel of her mouth against my breast, the smell of her skin, the sound of her voice? What had become of her ? Sometimes I wondered if all the killing, all the death and bloodshed, had altered something so fundamental in me that when the war was over, I could never return to the person I’d been. Could I ever go back to enjoying such simple pleasures as a cup of tea in the evening, reading a book, a Sunday afternoon stroll along the Dnieper? Above all, in that other world after the war was over, when the dead were buried and the guns silenced, when the blood had had a chance to seep deeply into the stained earth, would love even be possible again? Could I love another ever again?
    Still, now and then, the meaning of those numbers in my journal would creep into my consciousness. The numbers would become more than the immutable facts of war. I thought of the German sniper again. How he’d stared at me, gripped my wrist so desperately, as if to keep himself among the living. Who was Senta? I wondered. What was he trying to tell me? Was it his wife? A girlfriend? What if it were his daughter? I had brought life into the world, had loved and nurtured it, and knew what it was to lose it. I knew that those I killed, like the one today, had wives and sweethearts and, yes, even children, had dreams of returning home to family someday. If now and then a momentary tremor of remorse did begin to flower in me, I would normally resist the temptation to feel any humanity for those I dispatched. I’d only have to conjure the sweet face of my darling child. That usually was enough to stanch any misplaced sympathy.
    I got out the solitary letter I’d received from Kolya. From handling, it was dog-eared and brittle as an old leaf. It was just a few lines, the only word I’d had from him since we’d parted at the railroad station. It had come eight months earlier, and there had been nothing since, despite the fact that I must have written a dozen letters to him. I felt I was throwing my words into a storm, that they were scattered and cast away. We’d heard that the mails were sporadic along the entire front, but especially in the north at Leningrad where his Twenty-third Army had been sent. Kolya’s normally careful and precise handwriting was messy, as if written under duress, in a wobbling freight car or as bombs fell from the skies.
    My Dearest Love
    I miss you and my darling Masha dearly. I long to see you both again. Keep yourself safe, my dearest.
    Yours, Kolya
    Sometimes even, during quiet moments like these after a long, hard day of battle, I’d try convince myself that what I felt for Kolya was, indeed, love, at least a form of love, that the war had somehow distorted everything, twisted my feelings all about, drained me of my ability to feel anything . Or sometimes I wondered, what was love anyway? Hadn’t my mother warned me about my silly romantic notions, that love didn’t put a roof over your head or comfort you in old age? What would its absence really