Beautiful Assassin by Michael C. White Page A

matter after such a terrible thing as this war? Kolya and I had been good friends, we would be good friends again. We would comfort each other. I would read my poetry to him, and we would listen to the music student Kovalevsky’s cello strains floating upward into our apartment (though, of course, all that was gone, our apartment building, all of Kiev). We would take long walks along the river, both of us secretly imagining Masha holding our hands, our love for her and our shared pain over her absence binding us together as love never had. At night, I pictured Kolya and I clutching each other like a pair of frightened children, until we fell asleep. For each, the presence of the other would soften loss, would help us to forget all the death that we’d seen, all the death we’d caused. I’d promised myself that I would remain loyal to him and his soothing love would sustain us both. Perhaps, I told myself, I hadn’t really known how to love before the war. Perhaps whatever I’d thought was missing from our life together then would somehow seem inconsequential after all of this. And perhaps, as Zoya said, some night we would come together in our terrible loneliness and need, and begin another life.

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    I f you are to understand me, why I did what I did during the war and later, you should have some idea of who I was before, so that you can know in what ways the fighting changed me, made me the sort of person who could kill with such dispassionate ease.
    Though I was raised as an only child, my parents did have another baby before I came along, a son named Mikhail. Still in a crib, he went to sleep one night and, as my mother put it, “God decided he was needed in heaven.” In one corner of our home she’d erected a small shrine to him—a pair of his baby shoes, a blanket from his crib, a lock of his hair, a single photograph showing a pretty, dark-haired boy who bore a striking resemblance to me. Though I never knew him, I sometimes resented my brother for leaving behind an unspoken sadness that pervaded my childhood, that hung palpably over our family. I could sense his ghost, the presence missing from the dinner table with the extra plate my mother always set out, could feel it in my mother when she tucked me in at night, her possessiveness, the fear that it would happen again. How my father looked at me with a barely concealed expression of displeasure. And I felt too, as all those who have lost siblings, the oppressive weight of responsibility that sits on those left behind—not to disappoint one’s parents, not to cause them any further pain, to live, not one’s own life, but that of the dead sibling.
    My father’s work for the kolkhoz, the government’s farm collectivizationprogram, caused us to move many times when I was growing up. We lived all over the Ukraine, in small villages and large cities. I was always having to get used to a new home, a new town, new schoolmates. I never felt a part of anything, never felt I had a home in any conventional sense of that word. And there were many Ukrainians who hated apparatchiks like my father, whom they felt were responsible for taking away their lands, dividing up their farms among the peasants, for the famine that eventually swept over the land like a plague. That and the fact that my father’s government position permitted us to enjoy a certain status and financial security that most of our fellow Ukrainians did not—all of this only caused our family to be even more isolated and, in many cases, despised. We usually had a car, always a modest but pleasant home, plenty to eat—this at a time when most families were crammed into a single room or small apartment and had to stand in long lines with food vouchers to get a loaf of bread or a few potatoes. And in my native Ukraine, tens of thousands were starving during the Holomodor, when there were dead bodies in the alleys and scattered across the countryside like so many grains of wheat left after the