Redemption: Supernatural Time-Traveling Romance with Sci-fi and Metaphysics (28 page)

He notices her watching him and
clears his throat. “So,” he says, “what about you? Where did you get this medal
for courage?” He reaches out and taps a finger on the medal Elena is wearing.
An unexpected thrill of excitement passes through her as his hand brushes
against her breast.

“Oh, this?” she says. “I got it
here in Yartsevo. After we escaped from the Germans at Smolensk, we eventually
circled our way round to this town. By then the Nazis had already settled it,
so we took it back from them!”

“Really? You fought here?”

“Yes. And it was a hot fight,
too. As you can see…” Their journey across the town has brought them to an area
where the devastation of warfare is only too evident. Although all the bodies
have been taken away, the ground is still littered with rubble and other debris
and here and there the lantern reveals dark patches, where the dead and dying
once lay. Together, hand-in-hand, they pick their way through the ruins,
looking around at the devastation that has become an all-too-common site.

Eventually Konstantin breaks the
heavy silence. “I heard that Stalin invited some of the top British officers,
Montgomery and guys like that, to come here and observe how bravely the Red
Army fought. Is it true?”

“Yes. And they came at just the
right time, thanks to Rokossovsky. It was under his excellent leadership that
we took back the town. Those Nazi bastards didn’t have a chance once he stepped
in to sort things out!” She smiles as she thinks of Rokossovsky, whom she has
grown to admire and even idolize during her time in Russia. He reminds her of “The
Eagle”, Prince Pyotr Bagration, one of the great generals of the Imperial Russian
Army who fought against Napoleon. Like Rokossovsky, Bagration was hugely
popular with the people. “After Yartsevo was taken back, the British signed an
agreement with us to provide material aid in our fight against the Germans.”

“Rokossovsky!” Konstantin
breathes out the name as though he, too, is in awe of him. “He is surely one of
the best officers we’ve ever had! And to secure the aid of the British, too. That’s
amazing. Did you get to see any of the English bigwigs?”

“Unfortunately not. But then,
they didn’t come here for public relations and I was far too busy fighting like
a damn lion!”

Konstantin stops and turns to
face her, his eyes wide.

Careful, Helen
, she thinks, resisting
the urge to close her eyes and relish the feel of his touch.
This guy is no mere foot soldier! I need to
be careful, even with such a lovely man as this.

But Konstantin smiles, reaching
up to her forehead to adjust a strand of hair that has slipped out from beneath
her cap. “And I bet you were a very pretty lion, too, full of fury with your
flying yellow mane and your icy blue eyes. I wish I’d been there to see it!”
Elena smiles as she closes her eyes, enjoying the feel of his fingers on her
skin. “You poor girl,” he says, still gently touching her hair. “You’re
supposed to play with children, not guns.” As his fingers brush against her
temples and down to caress her neck, she feels dizzy to be so close to her
dream man. She gives in and closes her eyes, longing to be lost for a moment,
to fly up and away from this endless war. She feels him drawing closer, his
voice almost a whisper. “Lena. You are so beautiful.” The desire to get closer
to him, to kiss him, is almost overwhelming. “Oh Lena, what will tomorrow bring
for us?”

“Who can say?” she says
breathlessly, her arms wrapping around his neck gently, enjoying this wonderful
closeness and giving him a chance to kiss her deeply, properly.

I want to love him,
she thinks, her
body singing with desire.

“Are we going to have a chance to
meet again, Kostya?” she whispers, stroking his dark hair.

He reaches up a hand to twine his
fingers into hers. “I’d love to.”

“Look.” She points towards the
horizon where the sun is just beginning to cast a dim glow.

He draws close, clutching her to
his chest. “Yes, a new day is coming. And we have to move out towards the
southwest.”

“Really?” She cannot hide the
shock in her voice. “When do you have to leave?”

“This morning.”

“This morning?” she says, feeling
a stab of pain in her heart at the thought of him leaving.

He nods sadly. “I’m afraid so.
Can I write to you a letter, Lena?”

~

“Lena!”

She bursts awake, confused for a
moment before she remembers where she is. In her dream she was back on the farm
with her family in Arizona, bathing beneath the warm, summer sun. They were all
together
—
her father, her mother and her dear grandma, leaning on her walking
stick and smiling toothlessly, wishing
she
was going away to see the land of her birth.

“Lena!” The voice comes again,
snapping her out of the reverie. It is closer this time and, a moment later,
Katya hurries into the room. “Lena, have you heard the news?”

Elena rubs the tiredness from her
eyes and peers at her friend. “I don’t know,” she says. “What news?”

“The Japanese have invaded
America. They’ve bombed Pearl Harbor.”

“What?” she sits up, suddenly
wide awake.

“It’s in Hawaii,” Katya adds
helpfully.

“I know where Pearl Harbor is. Is
it true? What happened?”

“Word just came through. A load
of Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor. Which means the Unites States and
Britain have now declared war on Japan!”

“That’s insane!” she says, hardly
able to believe it. “They attack the U.S.? That’s suicide!”

“And that’s not all. Rokossovsky
says that since Germany is allied with Japan, Hitler might declare war on the
United States. He can’t risk upsetting another important ally!”

Elena struggles not to give
herself away to Katya, but she suddenly recalls a conversation with her instructor
about the possibility of an attack on U.S. soil by the Germans, some crazy
scheme to create a plane that will leave the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Leave the Earth’s atmosphere?”
she had asked. “Is that even possible?”

Her instructor had nodded. “Theoretically,
yes, it is. And Hitler’s got some of his top scientists and engineers on the
case. If anyone can make it happen, they can.”

“But why? Why would the Germans
want to bomb us?”

“Well, it’s not
us
particularly that the Nazis are after,”
said the instructor, straightening the pencils on his desk absentmindedly. “They’re
specifically looking to bomb the Jews, and Hitler claims that the epicenter of
the Jewish capitalist conspiracy is in New York.”

Helen was both shocked and
fascinated by this idea. “And how’s this… space plane supposed to work?”

“Well, apparently it is supposed
to be able to hold its position above the atmosphere as the planet rotates
beneath it. It doesn’t need much fuel because the Earth does all the work. It
just sits there and waits for New York to roll round, and then drops its
payload!”

Helen was skeptical about the
idea at the time. It had sounded crazy. But now, she is worried. The sooner she
can get in touch with her U.S. contacts the better. She gets a grip on herself
and simply raises her eyebrows.

“Thanks for telling me, Katya,”
she says. “This is good news for us.”

“You bet it is! Once the
Americans get stuck in from the west, the Nazis will have to pull out of Russia
to defend themselves. This could be the lucky break we’ve been waiting for!”

Still excited, Katya rushes back
out of the room, and Elena listens for a moment as she shares the news with
other women in the barrack.

I guess there’s no point worrying about everyone back home
, she thinks as she heaves herself out of bed and snatches up her
uniform.
At least I’m in a position where
I can make a difference. Here, in the strange country of my grandmother, I can
fight for my homeland. It makes me feel good and proud of myself. I made the
right decision to come out here
.

Kharkov, Ukraine. March 1943

Chapter Twenty-six

E
lena looks up at a sharp rapping on the dormitory door.

“Yes?” she calls and smiles as
her friend, Katya, enters the room. “Is it nearly time?”

“The Captain reckons they’ll be
here in forty minutes or so.” She pauses, giving Elena a meaningful look. “Well?
Aren’t you going to get ready? You haven’t seen him in ages!”

“What do you mean? I
am
ready.” With the piece of paper held
between her fingers, she gestures to herself dramatically and says with a smile,
“Are you saying I don’t look beautiful?”

“Hah. As if! Well, some of us
need a bit more time to get ourselves presentable.” Katya gestures to herself
and Elena sees what she means. Her light hair, which was long when Elena first
met her, has been cut short by someone who clearly wasn’t skilled at
hairdressing. And though Elena has grown to enjoy her friend’s twisted sense of
humor during their time together, and even her tendency to panic at the
slightest provocation, she could not call Katya pretty. Her nose is slightly
too long, her eyes just a little too far apart and she has a large, brown
birthmark on her forehead. “Fair point!” says Elena with a wink. “You’d better
get to work.”

“Very funny! Meet you out front
in fifteen minutes.” And with that she disappears, the door swinging slowly
closed behind her.

Elena looks back at the paper she
is holding, torn at the edges and spattered with old mud
—
her first letter from Konstantin. The second lies across her lap.

Only two
, she thinks.
Two! In all the months since I last saw him,
since we walked the moonlit streets of Yartsevo together. It seems almost a
lifetime ago! Several lifetimes even. So many of those I’ve got to know since I
came to Russia have died, killed in this endless, vicious fighting. Fighting that
has kept us so far apart. And all I have are these two letters. They didn’t
have much information worth passing on to my U.S. contacts, but then these are
really meant for my eyes only.

It had only been days after their
first meeting when Elena began the twenty-five day march south to the Ukrainian
city of Kharkov, which the Nazis had seized the previous year. On the journey,
Elena became increasingly aware of the change in the season. The ice had long
since melted away, replaced by the first flowers pushing their way up to the
sunlight, and all around the land was turning from the grey of winter to the
green flush of spring. It seemed strange to think of warfare when life was
bursting out all around. Meanwhile, Konstantin had been whisked away with his
tank division and swept up in the counterattack to force the Germans out of
Russia before turning southeast to defend the city of Stalingrad.

She looks down at his first
letter. Its unfolded page so familiar to her, its words almost committed to
memory. She picks it up and reads it once again.

 
“Lenochka,” it begins, and Elena smiles at his cute, special
name for her. “Lenochka, my little bluet. Words can hardly describe just how
much I miss you, my darling. My heart burns for you. My body yearns for you. My
every waking thought is of you, and at night I drift into the darkness
imagining falling into your gentle embrace. Not that there is much time for
sleep here! But at least I don’t have to spend my nights in the tank anymore.
We abandoned them shortly after getting to Stalingrad, since tanks are pretty
useless for city-based warfare. The Germans found that out the hard way, when
they tried to barge their way in using their puny Panzers. We’ve got some guys
here who are a crack shot with a bottle of incendiary mixture
—
what the Finn’s call the “Molotov Cocktail”
—
and a decent number of them make quick work of a Nazi tank! Wish
you could have seen it, though no doubt you’ve witnessed plenty of destruction on
your end.”

Elena sighs, thinking back to the
carnage she has seen since they last met. Their first attempt to liberate
Kharkov had been nothing short of a disaster. After months of preparation and a
promising start, the Luftwaffe had muscled in and pummeled the Soviet forces
resulting in casualties of over a quarter of a million.
You bet I’ve witnessed plenty of destruction,
she thinks, with a
sad shake of her head.
Enough for a
thousand lifetimes. How I’ve survived is a mystery to me!
She looks back at
the page and continues to read Konstantin’s precise, Cyrillic script.

“Oh, Lenochka, my love. You would
not believe the state of Stalingrad now. It’s unrecognizable. It’s been so
badly devastated by the bombing, fires and constant fighting. I remember it
before the war, such a beautiful place, a city full of promise and prosperity,
with luxurious gardens and bright fountains, great theaters and music halls. I
remember coming to hear an orchestral performance with my parents. We had
dinner together in a popular little bistro overlooking the Volga, with live music
and the best fish for kilometers around. A happy evening. Well, I found the
bistro again last week. There’s hardly anything left of the place. It’s just an
empty shell with no music or laughter or life.” Elena stops again, this time to
blink away a tear. Although this is not her own land, and there has been no
warfare on American soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, it is still truly
heart-breaking to see the devastation the fighting has caused this country.

“It’s day one hundred and twenty
eight,” Konstantin’s letter continues, “and though we are getting help from the
locals, it is mostly teenagers, but they know every part of this area
—
how and where to go, which place is which, even if the damn
buildings aren’t there anymore. These bastard Nazis are making us fight for
every inch of land here. There are even some buildings with different floors
occupied by different sides, like some bizarre German-Russian sandwich, you
wouldn’t believe it, my darling! Still, it means the Nazi airplanes have pulled
out as they don’t want to risk bombing their own troops. So, it’s hardcore
fighting, man to man, face to face and the Germans soon learned we’ve got guts!
Most of the European countries; France, Belgium, Denmark; they all fell in a couple
of weeks, so I heard. Well, not us! We’re still getting warm food twice a day
and have plenty of ammunition. We’re going to win soon for sure. I hope this
letter finds you well, dear Lenochka. Yours, in love, Kostya.”

My Kostya! So brave.
Elena smiles
again as she carefully folds the letter up and places it back on the bed before
picking up the second, still lying open on her knee. This one was sent not long
after the first and Elena had received it by the time the Soviet army had begun
their final offensive against the Germans in Kharkov, early the previous month.
She shudders as she thinks back to those days, the massive amounts of
causalities and the strain of living in constant fear of death. She wasn’t as
scared as she thought she would be though.
Pretty
brave yourself, Helen.
she thinks as she begins to read the letter.

“What a day it’s been, my love!
One of the luckiest days we’ve had so far. My team was given an operation to
carry out. It was supposed to be hot, going up against a heavily defended
outpost, but we won almost without any losses. We just strolled in and took
them out! You’ll never guess why. Mice! Seriously, mice. They’d been nibbling
away at the electric wire inside the German’s reserve Panzers and put the whole
stack out of commission. You should have seen the look on the Nazis’ faces when
they realized. Don’t mess with the Russians, even the mice fight for us!”

Elena chuckles, remembering a
similar situation in Kharkov when the Soviet troops had finally broken through
the enemy lines. Rats! No doubt they had been attracted by the hordes of bodies
the Germans had left hanging from balconies around the city, but they had soon
found their food supplies too and reduced them to a stinking mess. The Nazis,
trapped inside by the Red Army, had been forced to eat it all the same.
No worse than their sausages,
she
thinks, her nose wrinkling in disgust at the thought.
In fact, probably a step up!
She drops her eyes back to
Konstantin’s letter.

“As I write this, I am sitting by
a nice, warm fire, fresh from a swim in the bathhouse, which was another
outpost we managed to seize today. I’m enjoying the brief respite and the
chance just to sit and dream about you, my beautiful Lenochka. I wonder how you
are doing, my darling. Is everything okay with you? If only I heard just a
single word from you. I miss you so much. After the war, when our great land is
once again at peace, we shall come here together. I want you to feel the power
of the great Volga river and promenade through the streets of Stalingrad. It
may be little more than a pile of rubble now, like one of those echoes of
ancient Greece and Rome I’ve heard about, but unlike those ruins, Stalingrad
will be rebuilt even better than it was before! Soon, I will see you and hold
you close. Until then, I am still your Kostya, with love.”

Elena smiles, a dreamy look
creeping slowly across her face.
Today’s
the day! Today I shall see my beloved Kostya. Today we will be together!

“Are you coming or what?” Katya’s
voice startles her and Elena realizes her friend’s face is peering around the
door. “Have you even moved?”

“Not really,” she says, easing
herself up from her bed and placing the letters carefully into a small shelf.
She turns and looks up at her friend with a mischievous smile. “I’ll be doing
my
moving tonight!”

The two women hurry off to join
the crowd waiting to greet the soldiers of Konstantin’s regiment. As the men
head into the city, looking weary from their long journey, the people wave and
cheer, having heard of the great victory at Stalingrad.

“Amazing, isn’t it!” says Elena,
shouting to be heard about the noise of the crowd.

Katya glances at her, still
waving. “What is?”

“That these men, our boys,
surrounded and captured over ninety thousand Germans.”

“I know. That’s Zhukov for you.
The man’s a military genius.”

Elena frowns at this, not being a
fan of the Soviet general. “Rokossovsky, you mean, surely?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” says Elena, whose
hard work gathering information to pass on to her U.S. contacts near Moscow has
given her a clear idea of who the truly great commanders are in the Red Army.
She keeps waving, searching the faces of the approaching soldiers for the one
she most wants to see. “Say, when do you think they’ll be settled in and ready
for visitors?”

“As soon as they can, I reckon!”
Katya replies, smoothing her hair back into place as it is caught by a stray
gust of wind. “They’ll be keen to get welcomed
properly
!”

Sure enough, barely an hour after
they walk through the city gates, looking a little less tired after shrugging
off their packs and having a quick wash in the river, the heroes of Stalingrad
come out to play. Katya and Elena stand in what is left of the main plaza,
trying not to think about the bodies they had to cut down from the overhanging
balconies.

“Can you see him anywhere?” asks
Elena, peering at the faces around her.

“Konstantin? No. But I see a
poor, lonely-looking piece of muscle over there who appears to need a little
local care. See you!” With a quick wave back at her friend, Katya hurries off
and is swallowed immediately by the crowd.

“That’s just great!” says Elena,
shaking her head.

“What’s great?” Her heart leaps
at the familiar sound of the man’s voice.

“Kostya!” she shouts, throwing
her arms around Konstantin’s neck and planting a kiss firmly on his lips.

Eventually he comes up for air. “It’s
great to see you too, my love.”

“Come on,” she says, grabbing his
hand and leading him away from the square. “Let’s go somewhere a bit more
private!”

He holds her back. “Might I
suggest my place? I’ve got something I want to show you!”

At first, the couple strolls in
an almost leisurely fashion, hand gripping hand, arm brushing against arm. But
before long, that blissful little contact begins to burn a longing in them that
quickens their step, a desire to be away from the noisy streets and watchful
eyes, to be together, alone. Their pace increases to a quick walk, a trot and
finally to running along the street, still clutching each other’s hand,
laughing in delight at being together again.

Back in his barracks, Konstantin
slips a record onto a gramophone, and Elena listens to it in amazement. It’s
the first music she has heard since coming to Kharkov.

“Kostya, it’s fantastic! Where on
earth did you manage to get a gramophone around here?”

“I brought this little beauty
with me from Stalingrad! A company of snipers gave it to me after my division
helped them hold back a troop of Nazis for a week.”

“Really?” she stares at him in
amazement. “And what were they doing with such a machine?”

“Oh, they used it to play Russian
music so they could wind up the Germans. Imagine it. Here they are, piled high
thanks to Hitler’s insane ambitions, hungry, unwashed, frozen half to death and
being picked off one by one by our snipers. And on top of all this they’re
treated to a constant barrage of chirpy Russian songs. Genius!”